[OT] Was: totally satisfied :D

[Sean Kelly]

On Sep 18, 2012, at 1:28 AM, Nick Sabalausky <SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com> wrote:
> 
> One important thing to keep on mind (that I've learned from Tom's
> Hardware and Sharky Extreme) is that power supply manufacturer
> apparently lie about their wattages as a regular matter of course. Ie,
> if it says "X Watts", then you're never going to get it to even about
> 0.9*X without the stupid thing blowing up. So keep that in mind when
> shopping.

They are probably advertising their peak voltage. One of the most valuable lessons I've learned about electrical equipment is that everything is built with an intended usage pattern and if you exceed that the part will fail. The really frustrating thing is that it can be very hard to find a version of something rated for continuous use, and when you do, they're incredibly more expensive than the off the shelf version of that thing. I've gone through countless paper shredders because of this, and melted more than one popcorn popper (I roast my own coffee).

> Regarding HDDs, I've sworn I will *never* run a main system again
> without a GOOD always-on SMART monitor like Hard Disk Sentinel
> <http://www.hdsentinel.com/>. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I
> haven't switched my primary OS from Win to Linux yet, because I can't
> find a good Linux SMART monitor. (Manually running a CLI program
> - or writing a script to do it - doesn't even remotely count.) Oooh!
> Actually, now that I've looked up that link, it looks like they do
> have an early Linux version now. Awesome, I'm gonna have to try that
> out.

And I've learned that I will never again run a striped RAID off a mainboard controller, because when the mainboard dies you're SOL.