Actually if you look they do call out model numbers and even talk about which ones they won't touch and I find this VERY interesting and informative! As it happens my 30TB of space happens to contain a mix of both "reliable" and "unreliable" drives according to their testing. I run a mix of sizes from 1.5TB to 3TB using unRAID and as drives fill up they get upgraded. I have a few 1.5s that they call out as being trash (ST31500341AS) and an EARS drive of that size that should probably go ASAP since they are well into their second if not third year of use. I actually happen to be running a parity check right now and once I got past the 1.5 drives speeds increased a great deal. Once past the 2TB models things got even better so the 3TB drives appear to be much better performers. Naturally they list the ST3000DM001 as having a 10% failure rate too so I'm not exactly doing handstands! The replacement drives are all that model and I've been playing with them in another system to try and come up with something better for my needs than unRAID and so far nothing has come out much better so into the array I guess they will go here shortly.

My hat's off to Backblaze for publishing this and letting consumers know who's got decent drives and putting feet to the fire those that don't!

And I may have spoken too soon, I think I see a Linux TeamViewer too! Okay, sorry LogMeIn but this just sealed the deal - I can manage my home desktop and the VMs on my ESX server all from one product. I no longer have top bring up Vsphere to get to my Linux VMs, way way better. Why LogMeIn never created a Linux client is beyond me but they sure just lost a bunch of folks by making them look elsewhere!

I just switched to TeamViewer, thankfully they too have an IOS application and are almost as easy to use as LogMeIn was - time will tell just how well it works when I'm on travel and want to access my home machines. I have in the past turned MANY people on to LogMeIn so that they may help out family members who's computers need occasional maintenance and who aren't local, at least one or two of them recommended the product to their companies for remote access on a paying basis. That will obviously no longer be the case moving forward and I think that this is a huge mistake by LogMeIn. They obviously believe that many people are using their service so heavily they cannot switch - surprise that's NOT the case as I just easily switched. I still like the product LogMeIn provided but this really felt like a betrayal and with the short notice I'm having to scramble a bit and i'm sure many others are even worse off. Why would I trust this company in the future after this? what's to stop them from taking my money and then deciding to bump prices like my cable company? No thanks, plenty of other solutions and I'm happy that this time I'm not rolling my own because sure as heck there's no way to try and get friend's who support their parents to do that. I tried using UltraVNC once upon a time for this and it was a disaster! At least Ultra is cross platform but right now I carry an IOS device and I've found no good client for that.

He probably can, what he can't do is sell that to normal folks cheap...

Police? There in minutes when seconds count - if you're lucky. What thieves don't want is attention. People looking, people noting license tags, people calling the cops. If an alarm sounds in my home the very last thing I'm thinking is going to save me is the police but I will have been warned of trouble. Screw monitoring, I want NOISE and I want LIGHT! If you were a thief would you be robbing the home with the motion sensed lights and alarm warnings or the dark home with no signs or intrusion detection? Low hanging fruit is what scum look for.

Watch the video I linked - he tests several bulbs for power, heat, RF, and for light output. I think he may disassemble them at the end too but I ran out of time to watch earlier. There ARE good bulbs out there and he found at least one brighter than an equal incandescent as I recall...

I still have a small number of CFL around. I hate them and I really hate that when I flip the switch I can see a lag before I have light but they do work. I have a small number of outside lights that are CFL too and I too leave them on. Flipping them on and off is a PITA, seems to shorten their life, and the cold gets to them as well. I had a timer on the front porch lights but it's apparently died so they simply stay on - the replacement timer refused to work and with the old timer they flickered even when off :-( I will replace the front lights with LED this next time around, the back light will be awhile but the light out there only draws 10watts so I'm not as worried. Many of my neighbors don't even seem to use lights and it gets VERY dark here without them so I've got plenty of lights with the floods being motion triggered.

Closer to $10 but sure for something you'll never have to replace why not?

You aren't looking at the same LED I am then. I've got some 60watt Cree bulbs and ended up having to go back for some 40 watt bulbs because they were too bright! All of the Phillips bulbs with the phosphor in them I have are also nice and bright, I love them! I've yet to try and 100watt replacements other than my flood lights but so far the floods provide more light than I need so I'm happy. Those 60watt Cree bulbs use about 12watts BTW.

All you have to do is look at the luman rating of the bulb to see what you're getting. There's a guy on YouTube who tests bulbs too who can give you additional insight as well. Here's one of them -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-m5Nu6N5-g

Bingo! They were flashed to be dumb controllers. If they fail I won't have some weird striping and odd weird file system to try and recover. unRAID uses ReiserFS so if need be I can yank a drive and slap it into another machine to recover it. I trust the software RAID like FreeNAS much more so than I do a used SAS card I got off of FleaBay nice and cheap :-) I'll admit I'm interested in higher speed storage and may build something to play with in the near future but my needs aren't so great that it's required. The ESXi server really did help me consolidate things down and get some junk off of my desktop I no longer need to run.

Heat is the bane of LED, they overheat and then they go POP! I don't know just how cold you could make them before they aren't happy but they do produce heat so they ought to be able to brighten up fairly quickly if the cold dimmed them. Auto manufacturers are moving to them bigtime, that and lasers for headlights. They're more reliable for sure unless solder joints or power supply go bad.

Yes, I was agreeing with you :-)

Wow aren't you the entitled little prick? These guys are working their asses off well over a normal work week full of hours to try and fulfill a larger than predicted volume of demand doing physical work and THIS is your attitude? This doesn't sound to me like the guy is sucking at his job but rather being asked to do a good bit more than should be expected. It's a Christmas holiday, a time for people to be together with loved ones, and you're angry at people who gave that up to deliver packages for everyone else? Don't you get that it's not about gifts? Be happy you have someone to spend it with who will surely understand if something is late due to circumstances you don't control. Just wow....

Check your tracking info on the precious package that has you so excited. As others have pointed out, when you make the order companies print out a shipping label which produces a tracking number - even if they don't HAVE the item. It now shows up as being tracked but has often never left their premises and may not even be in stock. I see this nearly every time I order from NewEgg for instance. Then after a day or so (maybe because I never spend the extra for their "rush" processing) the thing shows up on a truck on it's way. I won't be surprised if your's has yet to show up on a truck and is instead just a label awaiting stock to go out.

That does sound like volume to me. It went on a delivery truck along with a zillion other packages and the guy simply couldn't make it to all of the stops before he was forced to end his day - so it was returned to go out the next day on another delivery truck. Does that not sound like a volume issue?

I too ordered some things late and I had no great expectation they would arrive despite my promised date. To my surprise they did manage to show up and except for one package that's supposed to show up today (and was predicted that way too) all went well. I think overall these guys did an awesome job and while I understand for some it could be pretty frustrating were it not for these services we wouldn't have ANY expectation of being able to shop so late. Heaven forbid we're all forced to go back to the hell that is a mall just days before Christmas! :-O

On my server? I have 3 SAS cards. Two of them are passed through to a VM along with a USB bridge so that it can see it's license key and run it's NAS software just as if it was on a standalone machine. That software is unRAID and it works well for mass storage that need not be fast and saves power by sleeping drives when not in use. Been using it for years on standalone hardware with a cat and dog collection of drives totaling about 30TB..

The 3rd SAS card is passed through to another VM running FreeNAS. FreeNAS is higher performance and can do iSCSI, ZFS, and other things. Currently I have a few drives hooked to it providing an NFS mount to the ESXi software for VM storage. It's also SMB shared for easy access.

The system boots from a USB stick into ESXi and a small SSD provides storage for the PLOP boot disk for unRAID (long story) and for FreeNAS. I also store some ISO on it for easy access. I may setup some additional storage to play with iSCSI on something I can afford to wipe and may do some ZFS on FreeNAS or OpenSolaris sometime soon - still deciding. Currently the ESXi server runs multipe Linux, Turn-key Linux, and one Win7 VM. I've gotten OSX to boot on it but the mods made the whole thing quirky and I gave up on that one.

Hardware passthru is normally used for things like USB, RAID cards, weird peripherals via ports etc. but some do use video cards for some reason like say a VM for password cracking. I think some people load multiple cards for central video distribution too via various VM but I've never tried it.

Hope that helps :-)