bgelfand

"How does understanding the correlation, of lack thereof, of these SMART stats help us? Let’s say, a drive reported a SMART 5 raw value of 10 and SMART 197 raw value of 20. From that we could conclude the drive is deteriorating and should be scheduled for replacement. Whereas, if the same drive had SMART 197 raw value of 5 and a SMART 198 raw value of 20 and no other errors, we might hold off on replacing the drive awaiting more data, such as the frequency of the errors occurring."

Hi Alan, Of course they have backups. They have drives that fail without warning. They have to be able to recover the data, either from backups or by rebuilding the RAID array. I am sure they compress the backup data so your 12 TB may take less the 12 TB in the backup. Many Cloud datacenters keep mirror copies in diverse geographical locations. That caused problems for Amazon and Microsoft when the stored data from EU countries in the US given the difference in data storage laws between the US and the EU.

See my link in the original post about SMART. That is one way they tell and take proactive measures. If the drive fails, they restore from their backups.

@mike Data is written to HDD in sectors. The old standard was a 15-byte header consisting of gap, sync, and address mark, followed by 512 bytes of data, followed by 50-bytes of error correction code for a total of 577-bytes per sector. By 2011 with larger disks, the original sector had been replaced by Advanced Format with the same 15-byte header, followed by 100-bytes of error correction code for a total sector size of 4211 bytes. The old sector had an efficiency 0f 88.7% data to overhead while the Advanced Format had and efficiency of 97.3% Both formats had error correction codes as part of the sector. The header and error correction codes are used by the disk controller, which is part of the disk (on the printed circuit board on the bottom of the disk drive), to ensure the data is valid - not corrupt. The user and the operating system see only the data and not the header and ECC in normal operation. LINK: Disk sector - Wikipedia LINK: Advanced Format - Wikipedia Can error correction codes fail? Yes, they can, but it is a very, very rare event. Nothing is ever 100% assured. Just ask Heisenberg :) If you or your program write "bad (invalid) data to the disk, no error correction code will save you. That is why there are backups, preferably several generations of backups.

Since we have quite a long discussion going on here about backups, I thought these links to Backblaze might prove illuminating. Backblaze provides cloud storage, and business and personal backup service. For the past several years they have been posting stories about their experience with disk failures. Since they have over 200,000disks online, they have a large enough set to have valid statistics. Of course, Backblaze uses Enterprise disks as well as Consumer disks LINK: Hard Drive Life Expectancy (backblaze.com) LINK: What SMART Hard Disk Errors Actually Tell Us (backblaze.com) LINK: A Look at How Backblaze Buys Petabytes of Hard Drive Storage Enjoy some reading.

If you look closely at most of those breaches, most of them were caused by misconfiguration by the companies renting the time/instances, not AWS or Azure itself, at least the ones I have read about. Although I have read of unauthorized access via misconfiguration, I have never read of loss of data if the user does his part. The problems occur when users rent instances and then run faulty software or do not know how to configure backups. They would have the same problems in their own datacenters.

If you use a large provider, like Amazon Web Service, Google, or Microsoft Azure, you should be very safe.They keep data for some very large corporation, which have large legal department. If they lost data for Vanguard, or Fidelity, they would be sued into oblivion The bad publicity would ruin them. If you use "Dingbat" Backup, you get what you pay for and you deserve what you get.

Thank you for the reply, Allen. In our "Time of COVID", the image of a person in hazmat/PPE taking something from people going by. or going into a venue, could be almost anything. Street performer never occurred to me.

I think you will find the Sunday in "Sunday Streets" refers to the day the thread is started, not the day the images are taken. In other words, the thread is a weekly thread that starts on Sunday, the images may be taken any day and do not have to be current, but should be a street scene.

I suspect that dealers are trying to clear the shelves of older NVMe PCIe 3 and slower PCIe 4 drives as the newer NVMe PCIe 5 drives are about to be released using newer NAND chips. Micron has released their new 232-layer NAND chips (and I though the 176-layer coupled with the Phison E18 controller was fast.) LINK: Micron’s 232 Layer NAND Now Shipping: 1Tbit, 6-Plane Dies With 50% More I/O Bandwidth (anandtech.com) And writing of Phison, they wiil release/have released to certain SSD manufacturers their new E26 controller LINK: PHISON Electronics Corp. - PCIe And of course, Samsung and SKHynix are also about to release competing products. It should be and interesting fall and winter for new products as both Intel and AMD release new processors that support PCIe 5.

I saw this in the original issue of Popular Photography. I have been a long-time subscriber. For those who do not read the fine print (look under the fixed picture insert bottom right), this was published in the APRIL 2005 issue - the April's Fool issue. If you did not "get it", do not feel too bad. If I remember correctly, a few months later Popular Photography published several letters from irate readers (who did not recognize the original photo for what it was) decrying the changes made.

OK, Allen, what is it? It looks like a man in a hazmat suit either giving out something (samples?) or collecting samples? And where is it?

To the contrary, Mike. A good advertisement has skin, almost, to perfection, today, especially if it is for clothing or beauty products. The minor imperfection is placed, sometimes artificially, to accentuate the perfection. The portraits that you see with many skin wrinkles, usually but not exclusively, are of men. But either of men or women, they are usually done for art. They are not the portraits that family keep on thier desks at work or in the house.

Since we are discussing backups, I would like to add, don' forget to backup other important files and programs. I make offsite backups on a monthly basis of not only my images (I have far less than you, Shun) and all the files in my Documents folder which include financial files such as Quicken and tax returns as well as a full home inventory. The home inventory contains entries for all my software with the activation codes. There is also a fifteen-page document/checklist for restoring my computer system. Software is also backuped. These go in my safe deposit box (because they contain financial files), I would not want to have a fire and walk through the rubble with the insurance adjuster and say, "You see that big lump of charcoal? That is my computer with the full home inventory. Those small lumps next to it are my backups!"

Nice soft shot. It is reminiscent of the old portrait technique of shooting through a sheer silk or nylon stocking to soften a portrait and remove skin wrinkles.

If I read your reply correctly, you are writing that for like capacity and like NAND (3-bit NAND to 3-bit NAND) the SATA interface SSD is MORE expensive than the NVMe SSD. That is not what I am seeing at most reputable dealers. in fact, it is the opposite; NVMe is more expensive than the SATA equivalent. The price difference is getting smaller, but it is there. Of course, I am looking at U.S. dealers and you are probably looking at UK/European dealers.

Joe, you are comparing apples to oranges when you try to draw conclusions about NAS (Network Address Storage which is connected to the computer by ethernet, and for the home usually 1 Gb (giga-bit not gigabyte) ethernet or perhaps via USB 3.1 (5 gigabit) or 3.1 Gen 2 (10 gigabit) based upon comparison to storage media connected to the motherboard using SATA (6 Gb) and NVMe PCIe3 (3940 GB for 4 channels). The limiting factor for an ethernet connected NAS will be the speed of the ethernet connection, unless Mary has 2.5 Gb or faster ethernet installed. A USB 3 Gen 1 connected NAS might just saturate a SATA SSD, depending upon the RAID configuration selected and again depending upon RAID configuration a USB3 Gen 2 link probably would saturate the SSD. But remember USB 2.1 Gen 2 is has some connection length limitations, unless you have active (read expensive) cables.

Joe, Have you been stealing the ruby out of the navel of any fat little idols or raiding any tombs lately.? From the above litany, I can only conclude that you are cursed. :)

I reread the Nature Forum rules. There is nothing that says the images have to be current. For those who use Lightroom and have keywords associated with their images, now would be a great time to go back and find those forgotten gems to post

The Art Department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ has a large collection of Ansel Adams prints, negatives, his darkroom notes, and annotated test prints. If you are ever in Tucson, I recommend you take a look. Adams did a large amount of "Post Processing", in the darkroom, of course. He was seldom satisfied with what he "got right", or didn't, in the camera. In fact, if he "got it right in the camera", he never would have written his book, The Print. Or it would have been a much, much shorter book. ;)

I do not know if you intended it, but several of the rock formations look like animals, too. The brown formation the bear is walking toward looks like the head and shoulder of a very large bear hiding behind a boulder. The darker formation, above it looks like the head of a huge animal looking down. Top right looks like a bison head, while center right looks like a huge lizard crawling down the rock. Intentional or not, well done.

As others have written, temperature does affect the development time of prints. Which leads to a "trick' or technique I learned, a long, long time ago. If you want to slightly burn an area of a print, develop it halfway, then take it out of the developer, place it on a support (an upside-down tray would work), bring your mouth close to the area you want to burn and breath on the area you want to burn. Your breath raises the temperature of the developer locally on the print, the developer works faster and thus burns the area. Then replace the print in the developer and continue to develop the entire print by inspection. The farther your lips are from the print the larger the area covered, the less intense the burn, and the greater the feathering of the effect. The effect is subtle, but it is there.

Yes, it does. If you have a limited supply, your distribution channels get them first. They need to make money. If you do not give them priority, you will find they will not stock them when you have a fully sufficient supply; they will give priority to the manufacturers that supported them. It is the same reason Nikon USA will never underprice Best Buy or BH or... at least they will never sell for less than MSRP (unless it is a sale, and the retailers also get the discount).

Amazon (US) itself does not have any Z9 cameras for sale. A "seller" on Amazon, Gave, whoever they may be, list two Renewed bodies for sale at $6339.95 (US). I think I'll take a pass on this one.

That does not necessarily follow. I do not know if it is easy to convert a line making camera bodies to one making lenses. I would think, at minimum, the workers would require considerably different skill and training. The machinery would be different, too. There is very little glass grinding on the camera body line. It is more likely they would convert lines making F-mount lenses to Z-mount lenses and discontinue production of one or more F-mount lenses.