Computerus

[Thad]

Could have just as well used that USB 2.0 dock, because I'm getting about a 1GB/h copy speed.

For all that smartctl is reporting all the disks are healthy, it's sure acting like a hard drive is dying. Takes forever to mount after I boot, copies files really slowly, and even operations like pvs (to list physical volumes arranged into logical volumes) take minutes to run instead of being instantaneous.

I'm not going to be surprised if I end up with a bunch of missing or corrupted data. Of course everything on it was either backed up somewhere else or inessential, but, like, I may have to re-download a bunch of videos.

[Thad]

Checked progress this morning, saw it had only copied about 42GB over ~16 hours.

Clearly this was not working. I tried to kill the cp process; it wouldn't stop, even with a kill -9, which is consistent with the kind of "I am having a great deal of trouble reading disks" symptoms I've been having.

I tried to shut down, but it hung there -- again, consistent with being unable to cleanly unmount a disk. I waited awhile then hard powered off, then pushed on all the SATA connections just in case.

Working much better after booting back up again. The array mounted quickly, this time I tried rsync -avxHAX and not only is that working but it's copied about as much data in the last 10 minutes as it did from yesterday afternoon through this morning.

Seems pretty clear that whatever corrected the issue wasn't any one thing but some combination of things, but at any rate it looks to be working for the moment and I hope it continues to.

[Thad]

rsync -avxHAX

Yeah, that don't seem right. My guess is the -H flag is incompatible with the -a flag, because I ended up with a buttload of duplicate files that should have been hardlinks.

[Thad]

...doesn't appear to be an rsync problem; ls -li is showing identical files that don't point to the same inode. I suspect something wrong with Sonarr, Btrfs, or both.

The whole hardlink thing Sonarr defaults to isn't a great idea in the first place, but I can worry about that another time; for now this should at least help me Band-Aid the issue so I can copy everything to the new HDD.

[Thad]

rsync definitely not working right; it keeps wanting to re-copy files that have already been copied, even though they're very clearly the same files (file attributes & checksums match).

I'm inclined to just chalk it up to Btrfs being terrible. Which is the whole reason I'm copying everything off these drives (even the ones that are still good) in the first place, instead of just adding the new drive to the array and rebalancing. This way even if I decide to keep the 3 drives that haven't given me warning messages as part of the array, I can ditch Btrfs and just use lvm to m the lv.

[JD]

Perhaps it's using file dates to determine what to copy. It's plausible that for some reason it's not updating the file date correctly when it copies. You can add the -c to use checksum instead of date. Alternatively, you may need -t or -a to preserve the date of the copied file.

[Thad]

Yeah, I've been using -a and the dates are correct, but good suggestion.

I could go one more round and use the -c flag but I don't think I'm going to. The file sizes are correct, I'm reasonably confident that everything copied correctly despite what the -n output keeps telling me, and none of this shit is essential; it's movies and TV shows I could re-download if I lost them and photos that I've already got synced across multiple devices and a backup drive.

I'm running one last long smart check on the drive that's intermittently reported issues (it's currently showing healthy but it's occasionally shown that it's failing, and most recently a short check told me there was an electrical failure) and then I'm probably going to remove that one drive, swap in the new one, reformat the other three, and add them to the vg/lv that the new one is in.

And then decide whether the intermittently-erroring one is in bad enough shape that I should toss it on the recycle pile, or good enough shape that I can hang onto it to use for an emulation box or something else nonessential.

[Silversong]

I got funds for a new windows laptop. What's The Best One for $800 - $1k? I might mostly use it for streaming on discord, playing Steam, using photoshop and Google docs, watching videos. I want it to last a while and not mysteriously break for no reason, but maybe money can't buy that.

Do you have to get new windows now? Is it bad? Does it play nicely with windows 11 if I want to do work on both?

Related, does anybody want a windows laptop that is unable to download files from the internet, despite a windows reinstall? It's less than two years old, I'd have to look up specs.

[hngkong]

I got funds for a new windows laptop. What's The Best One for $800 - $1k? I might mostly use it for streaming on discord, playing Steam, using photoshop and Google docs, watching videos. I want it to last a while and not mysteriously break for no reason, but maybe money can't buy that.

Do you have to get new windows now? Is it bad? Does it play nicely with windows 11 if I want to do work on both?

Related, does anybody want a windows laptop that is unable to download files from the internet, despite a windows reinstall? It's less than two years old, I'd have to look up specs.

Honest to god, I want to see what is going on with the laptop so bad.

But the new Windows is 11 and it's been fine for me. As for a recommendation, I'll pass on that for someone else to recommend.

[Thad]

gPodder's hosed my library enough times that I need to start looking for a new podcast app.

Main thing I need is for it to sync my library to a USB stick. And, y'know, not periodically crash and delete everything on said USB stick so that I have to re-copy it all.

[beatbandito]

My pc has taken a brobdingnagian ol dump. My knowledge has completely atrophied, so I'm not even sure I know what to check at this point, nevermind what's good. My budget is even sub-premade right now, so I'm hoping things have developed enough that a stock desktop will more-or-less perform as well as my old tower. These options seem like my best bet, at the higher end of my budget. If anyone has opinions on them (including "these are all going to underperformed") I would appreciate it. Hoping at least one of my ssds will still be working to move over, so I'm not quite worried about storage space.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-envy-desktop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-1tb-ssd-black/6532244.p?skuId=6532244

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-pavilion-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-16gb-memory-1tb-ssd-natural-silver/6477687.p?skuId=6477687

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-desktop-amd-ryzen-5-12gb-memory-512gb-ssd-dark-black/6516373.p?skuId=6516373

[Thad]

They've all got integrated graphics, so if you're looking at gaming you'll want to add a discrete graphics card at some point. (At a glance I think there's probably room for a full-height card in that case, but depth could be a problem; if you can find some photos of what it looks like opened up or comments from people who've added graphics cards, that might be a good idea.) Onboard AMD graphics are going to be better than onboard Intel graphics.

If you can find out whether the included RAM is one stick or two, that's useful information in case you need to upgrade later. 16GB is probably plenty (and 12GB might be), but there are only two RAM slots, so if that memory comes spread across two sticks then you're losing half of it if you ever upgrade.

[beatbandito]

Oh hey, that's how bad I've gotten at this. I didn't even notice they were integrated. I saw amd and assumed separate gpus. That would definitely explain why they're all so much less expensive than expected. I guess "gamer" pcs means gpus, not just led fans.

[sei]

My pc has taken a brobdingnagian ol dump. My knowledge has completely atrophied, so I'm not even sure I know what to check at this point, nevermind what's good. My budget is even sub-premade right now, so I'm hoping things have developed enough that a stock desktop will more-or-less perform as well as my old tower. These options seem like my best bet, at the higher end of my budget. If anyone has opinions on them (including "these are all going to underperformed") I would appreciate it. Hoping at least one of my ssds will still be working to move over, so I'm not quite worried about storage space.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-envy-desktop-intel-core-i7-16gb-memory-1tb-ssd-black/6532244.p?skuId=6532244

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-pavilion-desktop-amd-ryzen-7-16gb-memory-1tb-ssd-natural-silver/6477687.p?skuId=6477687

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-desktop-amd-ryzen-5-12gb-memory-512gb-ssd-dark-black/6516373.p?skuId=6516373

Odd question, but have you considered narrowing what part of your PC is fucked and just replacing the busted parts?

If you decide to build something new, you can watch for deals on slickdeals and see if anything shows up in your price range, but I'm not expecting to see discreet graphics sub 700, and you're probably going to be looking at video cards the equivalent of 3060/4050 if you're lucky, at that price point.

Also read the deals closely. The $500 "Gigabyte Project Stealth 500 DIY Kit: Aorus Elite Z690" thing on there is a set of mobo + case+ gpu, not a full build with CPU, PSU, RAM, and storage.

Also, if your budget sucks, you may be able to find a used PC somewhere like FB marketplace, craigslist, offerup, etc.

[beatbandito]

That is absolutely the correct option. But it comes down to me frankly being addicted to having a PC in a very direct anxiety-reducing way. I ended up going with an HP Omen 25L for the best balance of overall good parts that would be expensive to replace, like the GPU. And bad parts that aren't, like the psu. It's still not nearly the value I could have gotten rebuilding a PC. Waiting for shipping, never mind deals, was going to drive me insane, and I didn't even know for sure where the issue was on the existing PC. It would be nice to keep working on it to just replace one part and have it ready as a backup, at least. But I don't want to think about this new one breaking down soon enough for it to end up being of value.

[Mongrel]

For a while, I've been having occasional very hard crashes (not CTD, actual reboots at random - does not appear to be linked to performance) and the tricky thing is they're not very frequent.



In an effort to begin to look at a possible cause, I'm running HWMonitor, which is what Starr's used for a while. However, it's kind of annoying - I would like it to run all the time in the background, on startup, which isn't hard to do of course, but out of an excess of caution it's always asking for permission before running.

Also, I wanted to move it to the right-hand notification tray (Win 10, BTW) so it's not muddling my taskbar, but for some reason when I go Taskbar Settings > Select which Icons Appear on the Taskbar the damn thing is never listed (whether it's pinned or not). So...

- Is there a program I could be using for this you guys might recommend over HWMonitor?
- Additional logging options I should be using, perhaps native to Win 10?
- At least anyone have any solutions to the minor but annoying issues described above? Searching for Windows issue fixes for anything other than the most common shit is obviously nightmarish these days.

[Mongrel]

Really seems to be CPU heat-related but I'm not sure exactly how, as I've reattached the heatsink about as well as I possibly can (I had to do this multiple times, so I at least know It's getting a very nice connection with the fresh paste).

It's an AMD Ryzen9 5900X. Idle temps are in the 40C range, which they were before and gaming temps start in the low-mid 60's which is a bit less than previously (both are the normal range for this CPU, which runs a bit hotter than most), but it seems like I'm still hitting spikes over time where it goes into the 80s or even hitting 90. The problem is now random hard failures multiple times per day while gaming unless I closely monitor heat. Nothing else is even coming close to that temp.

Stress tests and such that I've run don't seem to indicate the CPU is damaged in any way (yet), so I'm kind of befuddled. Starr and I built our comps simultaneously, using identical parts, and her operates in a similar range but doesn't quite hit the same peaks as mine under high load.

Not really sure what to look at from here. I need a better failure log as HWMonitor has no logging function and is just a standalone .exe which operates in isolation each time you load it. Going to try advancing the fan speed BIOS setting so they start ramping at a lower threshold (it has preset profiles for this, so I don't need to manually fiddle with things).

[Mazian]

With those symptoms, I would suspect the PSU first. The CPU should be perfectly fine at 90°C, and will throttle itself down to stay within acceptable temperatures.

[Mongrel]

Hmmm, unfortunately I don't have a multimeter or anything that would get in-depth about fine readings from a PSU. Of course there's the paperclip jumper test (which always sort of amazes and amuses me that "stick a fork in the socket to see if it's on" is a really a thing with PSUs), but that's just to tell you if it's dead or not, not whether it's slowly failing under load.

[Upthorn]

I had those symptoms a couple years back and it was my PSU, so that's one data point.