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Life & Hardware Updates

I’ve finished my Dell internship with the Linux OS Engineering group (which was amazing) by driving 21 hours from Austin back to Cleveland. I’ve got a week off and then I head back to Purdue.

One of the projects I took on over my little vacation was setting up RAID1 (mirroring) on my existing six-year-old storage drive. I don’t do any backup at all so I decided RAID1 would be a good blanket solution. To mirror my existing data, I had the current hard drive and a new one. I made the new one into a RAID device and then copied all my data to it. Then, I added the original drive into the RAID array so that mdadm would mirror all my data back onto it. Unfortunately, mdadm was hitting bad sectors of the new hard drive, which I bought secondhand from a friend, so the mirroring just kept failing.

Fixing the RAID problem would mean investing in a new hard drive with the deprecated IDE protocol. That, along with other motherboard problems (ex: USB doesn’t work anymore) makes any future investment in my current desktop more expensive than just buying a new computer. I decided to buy a new computer.

Using my Dell Employee Discount, I bought a refurbished Dimension E521 AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ (2.1 GHz). With all my discounts, my computer ended up being less than an 8gig iPod! My old home-brew desktop lasted me six years. I hope this new Dell will do the same.

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  • http://saiyr.blogspot.com/ Daniel Tang

    What are the rest of the specs for the computer? If I could get a dual core computer for under $250 I’d so hit that…:(

  • http://lukehoersten.com/ Luke Hoersten
    • Dimension E521 Small Mini-Tower: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ (2.1 GHz)
    • 1 GB DDR2 SDRAM 677MHz (2 DIMMs)
    • 16X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability
    • 160 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
    • 13 in 1 Media Card Reader

    I basically camped out on the outlet site to get this deal.

  • http://saiyr.blogspot.com/ Daniel Tang

    What are the rest of the specs for the computer? If I could get a dual core computer for under $250 I’d so hit that…:(

  • http://lukehoersten.com/ Luke Hoersten

    <ul>
    <li>Dimension E521 Small Mini-Tower: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ (2.1 GHz)</li>
    <li>1 GB DDR2 SDRAM 677MHz (2 DIMMs)</li>
    <li>16X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability</li>
    <li>160 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)</li>
    <li>13 in 1 Media Card Reader</li>
    </ul>

    I basically camped out on the outlet site to get this deal.