Re: [gentoo-user] Rearranging hard drives and data.

[David Haller <gentoo@dhaller.de>]

Hello,

On Sat, 19 Dec 2020, antlists wrote:
>On 19/12/2020 18:49, David Haller wrote:
>> -dnh, the MoBo though is quite a fine piece with 8 SATA + 2 eSATA
>>      ports onboard:)  I'm gonna miss eSATA in newer HW:(  Hot-plug
>>      almost like USB but full SATA feature set and speed (e.g. SMART).
>
>Buy add-in sata cards. The ones I've been looking at are two-port cards, with
>two internal and two external (jumper-selected) connectors.

I already got one. Yes, I'd pitch MoBo w/many SATA vs. MoBo w/fewer
SATA plus AddIn, but PCI(e) slots are also limited and >=2 port cards
get expensive rather quick, say a card with >= 4 internal and
_extra_[0] 1-2 eSATA ... So, I'll rather have a MoBo with lots of SATA
+ addin than MoBo plus tons of addin cards...

My MoBo has the AMD 710 "Southbridge" with 6 int. SATA2/3G [1] ports,
a MV9128 with 2 int. SATA3/6G ports and a JMB362 with 2 ext. eSATA2/3G
ports. Try to find _anything_ even remotely resembling that (with any
SATA rev) ;) My guess is, with most MoBos you'd need two 4-port addin
cards even for that. And my MoBo was not even expensive, just ~80 EUR
in 04/2010. BTW: GA-770TA-UD3, hosting a AMD Athlon II X2 250 for then
~65 EUR :) Still running as champs :))

Again: find me a MoBo + Addin Card(s) Combo with: >= 9 internal SATA
ports, >=1 eSATA ports (dedicated, not switched with one of the
internal ones!). An IDE port would be a nice extra.

Were it not for gentoo and large stuff needing 6+ hours to compile,
the occasional reencoding of a video[3], and some fucking websites
which take ages to load (which was one reason for me to update 10
years ago from my then Athlon 500[2])... *ELIDED* those *ELIDED*
webdevs *ELIDED* - sideways - *ELIDED* that *ELIDED* *ELIDED* so
called webpages that gobble CPU as if there's no tomorrow! And
*ELIDED* I know, I built webpages that (besides larger pictures) load
snappy over a 4kB/56kBit/s modem in fractions of a second (no wonder,
being typically <0.5KB in size and no JS or other crud, there's a lot
you can fit in 1 KB :).

What was I saying, ahh, yes: ... I'd not even consider upgrading.

Well, more RAM would be nice by now, what with those *ELIDED* browsers
and *ELIDED* Java-Apps gobbling RAM as if there's TiBs of it for
free... *ARGHHHH*&&RAS*()#@*{!@_)(@I*CONNECTION RESET BY BEER*

-dnh

[0] i.e. working in parallel to the internal ports

[1] SATA2 was still normal then

[2] yep, the original, slowest Athlon ever sold, sufficed for me for
    many many years, along with an even older Matrox Mystique (the
    original 150MHz RAMDAC but as the beefy 4MB SGRAM version)

[3] BTW: it's astonishing how inefficient some streamed videos are
    encoded, just today I crunched down one from 2.9GiB to about
    639MiB. Albeit, I scaled down from 720p to 576p, but do the maths.

    I regularly get to <50% of the size of the original without any
    scaling, and all without any visible loss (x264 with crf=23:nr=750,
    that codec-internal noise reduction alone can get you ~10% less
    size ;) Well, it's what you get when you don't know about codecs
    or you just run HW-encoders at defaults, I guess...

-- 
"That time in Seattle... was a nightmare.  I came out of it dead broke,
without a house, without anything except a girlfriend and a knowledge of
UNIX."  "Well, that's something," Avi says.  "Normally those two are
mutually exclusive."                    --Neal Stephenson, "Cryptonomicon"