Comments on: X-Plane 11.05, 11.10, and My Mostly Dead Hard Drive https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/ Developer resources for the X-Plane flight simulator Tue, 29 Aug 2017 02:21:12 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 By: Blackey Cole https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21445 Tue, 29 Aug 2017 02:21:12 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21445 I bought an external raid device from own/macsales iirc its holds 4 wd red 4tb drives in a raid 5 iirc put you have about 7 choices iirc of raid. it is faster than my Synology has plus much easier I connect through east on my cmp you using a iMac should be able to get a thunderbolt device which would be the fastest of the external drive protocols .. while it did run more than my two drive nas. something you might wish to look into.

]]> By: Ulrich https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21378 Tue, 22 Aug 2017 13:40:12 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21378 I also had a recent harddisk problem with an older 320GB WD 2.5″ disk: The disk had more than 10000 defective sectors, but not a single sector was remapped, and the S.M.A.R.T. status said the disk is healthy (even though any SMART selftest had failed)…
I can guess WD had no spare sectors in favor of squeezing out the maximum capacity from the platters.
My solution was to try to copy all my data off that disk to a newer one, and use a RAID for backup. Well, I decided to use a Drobo 5C with USB3, but now I discovered that a 1.8meter cable just works at Full Speed (about 40 MB/s).
In my desktop I have a RAID1 and I periodically perform smart selftests on the disks in addition to monitoring their SMART status (well, smartmontools does that for me automatically once configured).
Also, most data loss I ever had was due to my stupidity (like erasing the wrong directory or adding a partition at the end of a 18GB disk with Windows 98 (which put the partition right over existing ones; I realized after the other data were gone…).

]]> By: Ben Supnik https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21372 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 18:41:29 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21372 In reply to Roderick Bauer.

Hi Roderick,

Thanks for the info — I pinged support today and they told me the same thing about large file count…I’m not surprised at all, as large file count is also the biggest bottleneck in our installer, something we’ve worked around in the installer by better file batching into zip archives. Unfortunately, the large file count is sort of a cost of doing business a developer – unpacked GIT, source code, art files, it all adds up to a large file count. I appreciated the candid response from support though – it’s useful for planning purposes in the future.

(Even the NAS lives by these rules – backup of a machine with larger video and photo files went a lot faster than the loose collection of source code.)

Cloud Sync would be a fantastic option…as a developer, the cost of ANY background process while working is pretty irritating…better to let the NAS talk to the servers and leave my Macs alone.

Re: Core Storage, I was wondering about that…the particular symptom I saw was large numbers of “stuck” processes…from what I can tell (and it’s not real well documented) apparently there are still blocking states in the Kernel where interruption isn’t possible. My wild guess was that core storage has driver paths that don’t support interruption. The problem was that X-code would get stuck behind a big pile of other IO and I couldn’t even kill -9 and restart it.

]]> By: Roderick Bauer https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21370 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 16:43:20 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21370 Hi Ben. I am an enthusiastic X-Plane user and I work for Backblaze. I checked with the engineer who is responsible for creating the hard disk restores and sending them to customers. He told me that your restore is in the last stages of completing. He explained to me that while your restore is not huge, it contains a very high number of files (over 1.4 million), and more files means more time to copy from our data center to our restore servers and then to the USB HD. Once that happens, we run some verifications then encrypt the drive for shipment. Following that we will overnight the HD to you. I’ll stay on top of this and let you know if there are any issues that arise.
Another note: our engineer suggests that CoreStorage could add overhead managing the SSD/HHD that could possibly conflict with our backup processes on your computer. Your plan to move to Synology NAS could be a good idea as you could use CloudSync with our cloud object storage service Backblaze B2, and that will run its own process of indexing and uploading data to B2, meaning your computer would do less work to back up, only needing to back up its local drive(s). — Roderick Bauer, Content Director, Backblaze

]]> By: richard https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21369 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 15:37:36 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21369 In reply to Ben Supnik.

More or less when released xp 11.10 ? .
Xp11.05 r2 when relased ?

]]> By: Ben Supnik https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21368 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 15:04:35 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21368 In reply to Richard.

No, not this weekend.

]]> By: Richard https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21366 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 13:59:29 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21366 Hello Ben , when relased xp 11.10 ? . This weekend ?

]]> By: Bruno https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21365 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 12:26:28 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21365 Totally unrelated, but… have you guys checked out FSW’s trueSKY? I switched from FSX:SE to X-Plane 11 since trying the demo even before release, and I was part of the public betas.

One thing that disappoints in X-Plane is the weather engine and depiction. Admittedly, I put up with it merely because the physics and performance in X-Plane 11 are so superior to FSX:SE.

But seeing the new updates in FSW… I begin to wonder if they will be able to compete and maybe even take over X-Plane as my everyday sim.

I’d rather stay with X-Plane as the physics engine really makes a difference, but I can’t turn a blind eye to developments in other sims.

Cheers!!

]]> By: Rudy https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21361 Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:11:38 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21361 VR please 😉

]]> By: Ben Supnik https:/2017/08/x-plane-11-05-11-10-and-my-mostly-dead-hard-drive/#comment-21360 Sun, 20 Aug 2017 19:59:24 +0000 http://developer.x-plane.com/?p=7822#comment-21360 In reply to The respectful John.

You can’t…I _already_ have a PC dev machine. 🙂

I’m quit egalitarian here…I have dev setups based on OS X, Windows, and Linux, and all three annoy the hell out of me. 😉 😉

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