I was one of the parent volunteers at the one I worked with. My child attended that school for 10 years so I know about keeping the cost down. The admin at my daughters former school kept complaining about the new stuff coming out and trying to keep up with it. She was a Novell admin and had disabled TCP/IP and was only using the original Novell networking for network communication until she was actually forced to allow external Internet access for the teachers. The teachers complained about her refusal to update any software until there was a hardware refresh (due to a failure of the original hardware). I stayed out of the computer stuff after a conversation with the school admin where she told me she hated that she could not get the school to pay for her to take Novell classes. This was about 2004 or 5. I did the handyman stuff instead. I was also on the schools board for 3 years so I got to hear a lot of the talk and saw some of the budgets. The parents would always approve more money if it went to the teachers or was something the teachers lobbied the parents for but the administration could not get a penny. Kind of funny to see what should happen but so rarely does happen when you get to public schools. Jon From: listse...@rccs.org To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 14:23:51 +0000
Yes, we small private school employees are in a different class. It really is a labor of love for all that work here. I had volunteered here for over 15 years but was looking for a change from my other office job, and last year decided to work here full-time. I still do consulting on the side, so that helps with my income. I wouldn’t say I’m 10 years behind the curve, maybe just a year or two… :) Before I started here full-time, different teachers would fill the on-site IT role and only call me if they had an issue they couldn’t address. I would stop by in the evenings or on the weekends to help out. My way of thinking is that every dollar I can save can go towards teachers’ salaries and keeping tuition low. From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Jon Harris Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 7:06 PM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? He also said he worked for a small private school which means no money for capital out lays and he may be lucky to keep his job for next year....MAYBE. Last one of those I worked with (note not for) refused to even consider purchase of hardware unless it was broken beyond repair. Their IT admin was about 10 years behind the curve and that was why she had the job...that and it was a second income for the house so they could get away with paying way below the then going rate. Jon From: ken.corne...@kimball.com To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Date: Tue, 21 May 2013 10:22:32 -0400 Subject: RE: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? They aren’t, but it was stated that pulling the workstations out was very undesirable. From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Jonathan Link Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 9:54 AM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? How are they going to be cheaper than $50 per disk? On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Ken Cornetet <ken.corne...@kimball.com> wrote: Have you considered solid state drives? -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 9:28 AM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I'm paying much less than that per drive. I really won't have to do much except swap out the drives once this is set up. I work for a small private school and make MUCH less than $100K. This will be a summertime project when kids and teachers are gone and I will have some spare time. I do agree that at my previous office job we would have never considered this and would have just purchased the most expensive drives available. (Of course we had 20% of those fail too...) I REALLY don't want to have to pull these workstations once they are mounted, so I'm willing to do this to try to better guarantee the reliability of the new drives. -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Ken Schaefer Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 8:55 PM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I'm still with Brian on this. Newegg seems to sell 1TB 7200 RPM drives for ~$70. How much are you saving per drive? $20? (i.e. paying $50) $50 x 100 = $5000. Say three times as many of these fail versus retail (6% vs 2%) then you're talking about 4% of $5000 or $200. How much is your time worth, given you're going to spend xyz hours setting this test up and running it? If my engineer was costing me $100K/year, I wouldn't want them spending time on something like this - surely there'd be more valuable things they could be doing. Cheers Ken -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve Sent: Tuesday, 21 May 2013 7:09 AM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I have a couple of reasons for doing this: 1. These are "bulk" drives, not retail, so I don't trust them as much. I really want to return as many as possible right off the bat, any that might have failed in the first month or two. The price difference between these and retail (or even Newegg) makes this well worth my while, especially since we are purchasing 100. 2. 30 of these are going into our computer lab, where we are very tight for space. We had special flush mounts made so that our Optiplex 745's hang off the back of our tables (not folding tables), saving a lot of desk space. Because of this(and for other reasons), the tables need to screwed to the floor, and some have their backs to the wall, which means everything must be pulled out to get the PC out of the mount. This setup has worked extremely well for us for 1.5 years, and I haven't had to pull out a single PC yet. 3. I'd like to use this same setup in the future to test my server drives before I put them into production. 4. Something else I'm thinking about that I'll elaborate on later... Our current drives are 5-6 year old 80GB and benchmarked at about 50MBps read/write. My new 1TB 7200rpm test drives benched over 100MBps. The difference is noticeable with our aging hardware. We will also be adding RAM, upgrading to Win7, etc. I did the math and we are spending 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of buying new PCs. I will buy a few spare 745's or 755's(they are dirt cheap) in case any die. -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of Brian Desmond Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 2:54 PM To: ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com Subject: [NTSysADM] RE: What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? Is the cost to do this exercise lower than just replacing saying six failed hard drives (given a 5 to 7 percent failure rate) over the next three years? I've never heard of anyone do this - it seems like an awful lot of work for a return I'm having trouble quantifying. Thanks, Brian Desmond br...@briandesmond.com w – 312.625.1438 | c – 312.731.3132 -----Original Message----- From: listsad...@lists.myitforum.com [mailto:listsad...@lists.myitforum.com] On Behalf Of listserve Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 11:55 AM To: 'ntsysadm@lists.myitforum.com' Subject: [NTSysADM] What's the best app to torture test new hard drives? I'm going to be ordering about 100 hard drives in the next month or so to upgrade our desktops over the summer. I'd like to be able to put 10(or more) of these at a time in 2 enclosures(5-bays each) I have and run thorough surface scans on them before installing them. (30 of them are going into workstations that are mounted in a computer lab where the drives will be more difficult to remove later) I've used Spinrite for years, and actually got it running in several VMs under hyper-v, using pass-through disks. This works well because I can scan multiple drives at once, which really is necessary since one scan alone can take 50 hours. Spinrite just doesn't get the SMART data while in a VM, but I can do that in the host with a different app. I'm also a little concerned that write-caching in the host could interfere with the accuracy of the surface scan, but have no way to know since this is an unsupported configuration for that app. Do you guys know of any other apps out there similar to Spinrite, that I can hopefully run in the host instead of inside a VM? My main requirement is that I be able to scan multiple disks at once. Any other thoughts on this? Better way to approach it altogether? Thanks, Mike
