https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/ Random stuff that one might find useful 2021-05-02T17:39:28+02:00 Stéphane Lesimple https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/ Jekyll © 2021 Stéphane Lesimple /blog/assets/img/favicons/favicon.ico /blog/assets/img/favicons/favicon-96x96.png 2021-05-01T18:23:11+02:00 2021-05-01T18:23:11+02:00 https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/repairing-a-faulty-hp-storageworks-ultrium-460-tape-drive/ Stéphane Lesimple

Two weeks after buying a used (and untested) device, and declaring it DOA, I went and found another SCSI drive, as at that point I had the proper HBA and cables. I was lucky enough to stumble upon the external version of the drive I bought previously. Second drive: external HP StorageWorks Ultrium 460 LTO-2 The external drive is more massive than the internal one, which can be seen on the...

2021-04-30T15:13:42+02:00 2021-04-30T15:13:42+02:00 https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/buying-a-used-tape-drive-what-you-need-to-know/ Stéphane Lesimple

Tape drives are sexy I’ve been curious about tape drives since a few years, as I find somehow fascinating the apparently weird combo of magnetic tape from the analog era storing digital data with state-of-the-art error-correction algorithms. However, these drives are exclusively enterprise-grade products with an entry price of around 3000$-5000$ give or take (which is WAY too expensive for ...

2019-01-27T17:48:22+01:00 2019-01-27T17:48:22+01:00 https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/assessing-hard-drive-healthiness-through-read-speed/ Stéphane Lesimple

Introduction At home I have a bunch of hard drives scattered through a bunch of machines. Most of them are monitored through SMART, with weekly short SMART self-tests and monthly long SMART self-tests. Of course, I receive an e-mail should anything go wrong during those tests, should any SMART attribute value change at any moment, or any SATA link coughing in the kernel log buffer. If you have...

2015-07-05T17:44:07+02:00 2015-07-05T17:44:07+02:00 https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/installing-proprietary-amd-catalyst-driver-under-fedora-22/ Stéphane Lesimple

Installing the proprietary ATI AMD Catalyst driver is a bit tricky under Fedora 22 because the currently available driver, identified as revision 15.5 on their website, but actually versioned 15.101.1001 as far at the fglrx driver version is concerned, is just not compatible with the Xorg version of Fedora 22. Driver will install fine, but you’ll get a nice black screen on reboot. One working ...

2013-04-01T00:21:57+02:00 2013-04-01T00:21:57+02:00 https://stephane.lesimple.fr/blog/how-ocz-vertex-2-and-ocz-petrol-ssd-successfully-killed-my-data-twice/ Stéphane Lesimple

Short story of my Vertex 2’s short life Several months ago, I wanted to give a little speedup to my aging laptop. It also seemed a perfect time to give a first try to the SSDs everybody had been talking about. All in all, the OCZ Vertex 2 seemed like a good choice: the Vertex 3 was just out, so the Vertex 2 price was going down and making it almost affordable. On that faithful day of 25th S...