Or it could totally back-fire.

This knife cuts both ways... Yesterday I spent $300 at Best Buy because of "showroom"ing I did on Amazon (products, reviews), youtube (reviews, and video suggestions pointing me at other products oddly enough), and various google results. I planned on going to Target next, but Best Buy had both the items I was interested in.

I bought it at the store for one primary reason: I wanted it on Sunday, not Wednesday. (Note "wanted" not "needed").

I also bought it for a secondary reason: the product in question is audio speakers and I was worried that my primary choice would not have the audio quality I hoped for. At the store I was able to listen to them, determined that indeed I didn't like how they sounded, so I got my second choice. I could have done this all over the Internet, but that would have meant that it would have taken a week to resolve, with ordering, returning, ordering second choice. While I was there I bought a bag that I had also found online and just had not yet ordered, and a cable I needed to go with the speakers.

I'll admit that I mostly shop online. I've come to hate going into the store. Seems like about half the time I go in looking for something specific beyond the "staples", I find out they don't have it period or don't have it in stock. Then I feel like I've wasted gas and (more importantly to me) time hauling ass to the location to not end up getting something. For almost everything I get, I can wait a couple of days to receive it.

Shopping online has many compelling benefits, price is sometimes one of them, but often not THAT much of one. I also get to choose among, everything in the world versus the 2 or 3 choices I may get in a local store. I get to easily see what other people are saying about the different choices, I definitely don't get that in a store. I get to shop whenever is convenient for me, I'd guess that half of what I buy online I buy outside of the hours of 10am-9pm; I can buy it and be done with it rather than queue up a trip to the store to buy it later. Also, I don't have to spend 30+ minutes plus gas driving out to the store, or 10+ minutes if I'm already driving by the store.

Personally, I think the retailers should leverage their locations to get me my shit faster. I almost never buy from Target, Wal-Mart, or Best Buy online. Usually it's Amazon or New Egg. Now, if I could buy something online, and have them have a deal with UPS or have their own couriers bring it by my house the next day, that would be compelling to me. Their brick-and-mortar becomes a mini distribution center, and the products come bulk/freight to the local stores, then use UPS/FedEx/TargetExpress for the "last mile".

I call this "click-and-brick". :-)

Forget it, the original poster already said they tried this on writing. If she can't go into something and immediately have it be "worth my time", ... not interested!

Sorry to break it to you, but if you have no experience and no reputation and no references, chances are you are going to make no money. If you aren't willing to take some no money jobs to get reputation and experience and references, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Well, it *IS* a big deal, but only for people who are using the same password on dreamhost and other services. Obviously, people shouldn't do that, for reasons that are now obvious, but people do. Whoever got this password list is likely to start looking at facebook and other sites for accounts with similar names and use any passwords they can crack from this database.

The compromise is sometimes not the obvious one... For example, I had an account on a service that was recently compromised, and that account had a special e-mail address associated with it that was whitelisted. The password on that account was a strong password, and wasn't shared with another service, but it didn't take long before I started getting all sorts of spam to my inbox that used that e-mail address to get around my anti-spam filters...

>YCombinator wants to kill Hollywood.

Yeah, get in line...

Security and reliability are processes, they are not something you can do once and then forget about. So, yes, I would say that having regular audits are a useful thing. As far as whether these specific standards are useful, the facility we have most of our servers in we have been in since before their SAS 70 audit, and their procedures were good before, but there's a noticeable improvement after. Things like a man-trap with a live security person comparing you with your on-file photo before you enter the raised floor, 2-factor auth on all doors rather than just on the key doors, maintenance lock-outs displayed more prominently, EPOs installed (not a benefit to me, but they did put alarmed doors around the EPOs to prevent the common problems).

As far as it being "based on self-defined standards", I'm ok with that. I'm ok with the requirement being that they *HAVE* standards for certain things rather than dictating what exactly those standards are. One size does not fit all, but having standards for what you do, I have found in my own business, improves quality.

The most obvious issue is the lack of availability, but even if you have time to wait there is a serious problem that is likely to sour your interest in the Transformer Prime: Locked boot-loader. Until someone breaks it or the key gets leaked, it's uncertain whether you would be able to install your own OS on it. It looks like a great tablet/netbook, and I was real hot to buy one, with the idea of possibly being able to install a full Linux on it and use it as more of a lightweight netbook with 18 hours of battery.

Nono, the cards I'm using have 8 discrete SATA ports on them. See the photo on the URL that I pasted in my original comment.

The cards I'm using are all fairly old at this point, they weren't exactly the latest stuff in 2008 when I put together my storage server. They had a really good reputation then though. The SIlicon Image controllers I really don't remember, but the model number 3114 sticks in my head, they were 4 port PCI cards.

The cards I had just worked. Maybe you're talking different cards, I'm pretty sure mine are SATA not SAS (check the part number for more details). I got them originally because they were one of the few chipsets supported by OpenSolaris, and they were apparently the chipsets used in the Sun "Thumper" boxes, but I moved away from the Solaris kernel and found they worked great under Linux as well. Perhaps you have a defective card? I've got maybe 6 of these cards and have been really, really happy with them.

I also played with the Silicon Image cards, and they worked great as well. They're a lot less expensive, but only supported PCI, not PCI-X, and I wanted the extra bandwidth. During RAID rebuilds or verifies, I'm getting 250MB/sec or so, so the extra bandwidth is nice.

Sorry I couldn't offer more help.

I almost mentioned this in my previous post, but didn't. As you suggest, I have great backups, so if the RAID-Z/RAID-5 fails during the rebuild, it's not a huge issue, I just need to drive an hour away to pull down all the data.

In the case of the 1% per hour rebuild, that is actually a work machine with RAID-Z2 (ZFS equivalent of RAID-6). Having that extra safety net of still having the ability for another drive to fail was very nice when I was mucking about with the array.

For home, would I use RAID-6/RAID-Z2? Probably not. But that's because I really, truly have great backups. The other poster talking about using unRAID and how if a drive dies then he only loses the data on that drive, I was thinking "where are your backups"? If you're just storing rips of your CDs or movies, and you're ok with spending the time to re-rip, I guess that's ok. However, I'm storing original content there, I don't want that to go away.

I wrote about the latest storage server I built back in 2008, and a lot of my thoughts at the time are written up in http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/ultimatestorage2008/

However, to answer a few of your questions...

External disc enclosures? Avoid them like the plague. My initial experience with the 5 bay eSATA enclosures was pretty good -- sometimes it wouldn't pick up the external drives, but usually I could get it to find them after some tweaking, rebooting, etc... I ended up getting 3 of them, the AMS DS-2350S, which at the time were well reviewed, etc... I have since pulled all 3 of them out of active use and have them just sitting around. I don't know exactly the mode of the failures, but eventually after replacing some with others, I finally put them in internal SATA enclosures, which have been very reliable (I used these Supermicro CSE-M35T-1.

Also note that eSATA connectors don't really hold on that well. If anything, they're not as robust as internal SATA connectors, despite being outside the case where they can get banged around.

If I were to do it over again, I'd probably stick with the case I started with, with 5 internal 3.5" bays, and 3 front 5.25" bays, and put the Supermicro in there. I'd also probably go with fewer big drives rather than more smaller drives like I did previously (even though at the time the drives were free, I had them from another project).

As far as running it in the garage, don't even think it, unless your garage is not where you store your cars. I have some computers that I've run in the garage for the last 9 months, and they are filthy, I've had a lot of fan failures, lots of dust, insects, and random other crap. I put mine in our furnace room, which has enough extra space.

As far as using a server case? Hard to see the payback there unless you have a cabinet. Most server cases are HUGE, heavy, and expensive. A 3U case with 12 drive bays likely costs $500, plus you usually have to deal with special form-factor power supplies, expect to spend another $200 on one of those. I wouldn't do it, and I have a 3U 12-bay Chenbro case just sitting at my office that I could re-purpose.

As far as the file-system, I selected ZFS (via zfs-fuse under Linux) and I've been VERY happy with it. The primary benefit is that it checksums *ALL* data and can recover from some types of corruption or at least alert about corruption if it can't correct it. So, if you are storing photos or home videos that you may not be accessing very often, that's good peace of mind to have, I know in 10 years I won't go to look at some photographs I've taken and find they were silently corrupted. Of course, you could get similar benefits by saving off a database of file checksums and checking and alerting if they are bad. Really the only downside of ZFS that I've seen is that if you need to do a RAID rebuild it is a seek-heavy task rather than just streaming. I have a 8x2TB drive array that I'm currently rebuilding (drive failure, at work), and it's 33% done after 31 hours. A normal RAID-5 array would have rebuilt that in what, 10? The system is idle except for the rebuild.

If you care about the data going into it, make sure you checksum and verify the files regularly.

The 8 port PCI SATA card I got is fantastic, it's a Supermicro with the Marvel chipset and is very well supported (even supported by Nexenta).

Finally, all this data is encrypted, so if someone were to burgle us I only have to worry about them getting the hardware, I don't have to worry about them now having scanned bills and other documents and other personal and private data, etc... This is why I'm running ZFS in Linux, it gave me encryption plus ZFS (not available otherwise in 2008), as well as being an OS I'm very familiar with.

As far as OS, I am personally running CentOS on my system because that means I can install and set it up and then forget about it for quite a few years, except for regularly running "yum update". Debian should be fine, but you will get/have to track upstream changes more frequently.