Hard Times

Posted on 8 August, 2010 by Matthias Scheler

I don’t have much luck with hard disks these days. One of the new hard disks in my server started reporting a lot of write errors after only a few days of service. I swapped its place with the other new hard disk to make sure it’s not a problem with either cabling or the motherboard but the problem remained. 🙁

Luckily I ordered the two new hard disks via Amazon who offer an excellent return service. They already sent me a replacement hard disk before I even shipped the broken one. Let’s hope this one works better.

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Game of the Month: Super Mario Galaxy 2

Posted on 31 July, 2010 by Matthias Scheler

Last month Nintendo released Super Mario Galaxy 2, the highly anticipated sequel of Super Mario Galaxy. As I greatly enjoyed playing the first game I had high expectations.

So the pivotal question is whether Super Mario Galaxy 2 is as good or even better than the first part:

  1. If you have played Super Mario Galaxy in the past the intro and the first two levels will look very familiar.
  2. The space ship which serves as the base of operations is a bit dull compared to Rosalina‘s observatory in the first game. And the Luma in charge of this space ship is somewhat annoying.
  3. Fortunately things get better from here. In the second Galaxy your character Mario encounter’s Yoshi, a tame dinosaur, which he can ride on. Riding on Yoshi provides the player with a lot of new abilities. Yoshi can jump higher, eat enemies or swallow projectiles and fire them back at your opponents. By eating different kind of berries or hot chillies Yoshi gets even more astonishing powers like floating or super speed.
  4. Mario himself can also acquire new powers e.g. by eating magic mushrooms. Among Mario’s extra powers are creating and walking on clouds, drilling holes or squashing his enemies by transforming into a rolling rock.
  5. The design of the levels is as brilliant as in the first part. Checkpoints are now clearly marked by Bowser flags which Mario needs to touch. Some of the levels are however frustratingly difficult. You frequently wish for more checkpoints or more time.

All in all Super Mario Galaxy 2 is fun to play just like Super Mario Galaxy. But it somehow doesn’t have the special touch to it that made the first part a real masterpiece. It is nevertheless one of the best Wii games I have ever played.

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Hard Measures

Posted on 31 July, 2010 by Matthias Scheler

Due to massive problems I had to replace two of the hard disks in my server in a hurry recently. As I had positive experience with Western Digital RAID Edition drives in the past I bought two RE4‑GP WD2002FYPS drives. Silke and I installed them earlier last week and our server is in a satisfactory state again.

A few afterthoughts on the whole affair:

  1. It is very disappointing that one of my server grade Seagate Barracuda ES.2 hard disks died within little over two years.
  2. The good news is that Seagate offer a five year warrantee on this model. I am therefore entitled to a replacement which I have requested via their website.
  3. Before you return a faulty hard disk to Seagate they however ask you to run SeaTools to get an error code. The quality of this tool is really impressive. You can download a bootable ISO image with a DOS version that doesn’t seem to work. I tried it to boot on both my HP Proliant ML110 G4 and on an old Pentium 4 PC but it hung after loading the main program. As a result I had to use the Windows version. This version of SeaTools has a charming Windows for Workgroups style user interface. But to be fair it got the job done in the end and confirmed that one my Barracuda hard disks was indeed broken.
  4. Seagate’s warranty serviced turned out to be very good. I shipped the broken hard disk, received the receipt acknowledgement on Tuesday and the new hard disk on Friday. The replacement hard disk is only a year old and looks brand new.
  5. Considering that only one of the disks was really broken I’m still a bit puzzled why the second hard disks initially showed problems as well. In a system using SATA with its point-to-point connections you would hope that disks don’t interfere with each other. But somehow they seem to do nevertheless which is not what you would hope for.

Anyway, I’m decided to give the two Seagate hard disks a try and installed them as the second RAID 1 in my server.

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