KnightAR's Blog

Free Drive Recovery? Fix for Failed SD15 Seagate ST3500320AS Drives

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:03:14 -0400

Everyone knows that hard drive failures are a depressing thing to deal with especially if you have data on the drive that is valuable and irreplaceable, even more so if the said hard drive has a failure due to a bad firmware. 18 months ago I had built a system for a friend that included a 500 GB Seagate (ST3500320AS) drive that had the SD15 firmware and at the time I did not know about the SD15 firmware bug … heck, no one knew since the bug was too new. Last week I got a call from my friend saying that there is something wrong with his computer. I went over there thinking it was a simple issue but the drive would no longer be detected by the bios but still had power and was spinning up like usual. The SD15 Firmware issue is where the bios would no longer detect your drive and would prevent you from upgrading or accessing the drive with your computer or any external hard drive case.

After some quick research about the SD15 issue and a little one on one chat with a Seagate Representative I found out that Seagate now provides the ability to get a free data recovery from their recovery company i365. After a few questions such as asking me if the drive still spins and if I hear noise coming from the drive when I turn the computer on, they gave me a case # and a phone number to call. During the simple process of filling out an online form on the i365 website I found out that not only are they doing the recovery for free they also ship and package the drive for free if you ship it from a UPS Store. It’s awesome because I didn’t have any packaging at my house at the time and I didn’t want to go though the trouble of having to buy it myself.

After filling out the form I went ahead and called an i365 Representative to ask them about their recovery process and he told me that they fix the problem itself by upgrading the firmware on the drive to get it operational again. This is fine since the drive has a 5 year warranty and I’ve already told my friend to back up anything important on some other media. I received an email from i365 stating that they confirmed the SD15 issue and that they have made a full backup of the drive to protect against any drive shipment issues (damage, lost, etc.) and they will be shipping the drive shortly. I got the drive a little over a week after I shipped the drive and still had my friends computer at the house. I popped in the drive and booted it and it went right into windows with no problem, issue fixed! I know some other techies would know how to upgrade a firmware with some extra gadgets that you would buy but for people like me that don't know how and wouldn't want to have a chance of screwing anything up this is great way of doing it.

A little note for readers with an identical problem, Make sure to contact Seagate directly on this issue because i365 requires a customer reference number from Seagate in order to provide the free recovery. Tell them it’s a firmware issue and exactly what the problem you’re having. I’m not sure if this will fix the problem of the 0 MB drive issue I’ve heard about on the same firmware’s but if you do find out please let me know.

I think Seagate is doing a wonderful job dealing with the firmware issue that has had so much negative talk during the last few months. I now know that if any firmware issue plagues my drive I’m sure Seagate can help me out with this free recovery service, at least until the drive goes out of warranty.

TokyoTosho.com Search Addon for Ubiquity

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:22:26 -0400

TokyoTosho.com Search Addon for Ubiquity

I made a TokoTosho search addon for Ubiquity, that lets you search Tokyotosho for torrents.

Don't know what Ubiquity is? Click Here, or View This Video.

Syntax for tokyotosho (or tokyo):

tokyotosho text from Category

Examples:

tokyotosho Hitman Reborn from Anime
tokyotosho Hitman Reborn from Music
tokyotosho Hitman Reborn from Drama
tokyotosho Hitman Reborn from Music-Videos

or Select some text from the browser and type:
tokyotosho

(Note: If you have Ubiquity installed you should see a dialog show up that asks if you want to subscribe to a Ubiquity command.)

Enjoy!

Command updated on 9/5/2008

Mod_Magnet is running!

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:12:57 -0400

My test results on my dev server were impressive, but not as impressive as the crazy results as the live server! Not only did the live server show better results, but it quintuple the results! The amount of fetches was 5.60 times the amount that the rest results showed me! Here are the results:

181715 fetches, 100 max parallel, 1.28963e+09 bytes, in 60 seconds
7097 mean bytes/connection
3028.58 fetches/sec, 2.14939e+07 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.0565064 mean, 2.177 max, 0.02 min
msecs/first-response: 32.9524 mean, 118.958 max, 2.591 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 181715

The main issue I did have is that Lua 5.1.3 was incompatible with Luasockets 2.0.2. It changed a function that Luasockets required to function so it was giving me a bunch of problems. Basically 5.1.3 changed the function luaL_openlib so we had to change the source code once again so it uses the new luaL_register function. Here is the patch if you've already patched the source from my previous blog post, use this one if your haven't patched your source code at all.

Here is the error you will see when you have this issue:

Lua 5.1.3 Copyright (C) 1994-2008 Lua.org, PUC-Rio
> socket = require("socket"
error loading module 'socket.core' from file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/socket/core.so':
/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/socket/core.so: undefined symbol: luaL_openlib
stack traceback:
[C]: ?
[C]: in function 'require'
/usr/local/share/lua/5.1/socket.lua:13: in main chunk
[C]: in function 'require'
stdin:1: in main chunk
[C]: ?
>

Lighttpd is working very well now with mod_magnet and memcache to a point that I will probably use this method in other places around the site when I see it necessarily. I will be developing more lua scripts for other parts of the site so the site can be optimized to its full potential.

I've discovered mod_magnet

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:32:39 -0400

This week I was searching for a way to speed up our thumbnails on Artician. Since we use Memcached, I thought that it would be nice to have lighttpd directly connect to Memcache to get the data it needs to serve a thumbnail, this is where mod_magnet comes in. Mod_Magnet is a extension for lighty that allows you to run external scripts, such as a programming language called Lua. I happed to stumble onto a script that was on the lighttpd site that lets you connect to Memcached. The only issues was the dependencies that it required was broken, so I decided to fix it myself (Here is the patch for luasockets 2.0.2 to allow for Lighttpd to use it with mod_magnet).

Since the bug was fixed, I went ahead and started to develop a way for me to serve our thumbnails without having lighty connect to our backend, and at the same time removing the overhead of php and mysql, and the extra memcache queries that comes with them. The results were EXTREMELY amazing!, The following is the http_load output for the current setup:

2805 fetches, 100 max parallel, 1.99071e+07 bytes, in 60.0036 seconds
7097 mean bytes/connection
46.7472 fetches/sec, 331765 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.101082 mean, 6.496 max, 0.021 min
msecs/first-response: 2088.75 mean, 28270.8 max, 356.035 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 2805

The follow is on the new setup, See the almost 500 fetches/sec increase, it increased the total fetches to the server by over 29,000 requests!!! Thats a amazing over 10,000% increase in performance!

32435 fetches, 100 max parallel, 2.0188e+08 bytes, in 60 seconds
6224.13 mean bytes/connection
540.583 fetches/sec, 3.36466e+06 bytes/sec
msecs/connect: 0.117936 mean, 4.387 max, 0.018 min
msecs/first-response: 152.281 mean, 8063.29 max, 2.408 min
HTTP response codes:
code 200 -- 32435

(note that I am using another server for this test and development for the real results may differ, but I'm sure there wont be much of a difference.)

Great amazing results that I hope I can implement soon.

Building a computer has never been so easy

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 01:17:16 -0400

This week I went ahead and started building my friends new gaming system for him, which was a pretty cool thing since I've never built a decent high end gaming system before. Here are the hardware: - Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - XFX MB-N780-ISH9 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI Intel Motherboard - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80570E8500 - ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler - G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1000 (PC2 8000) - Thermaltake W0116RU 750W Power Supply - ASUS EAH4870/HTDI/512M Radeon HD 4870 512MB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Video Card (HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported) - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 32MB Buffer Hard Drive I've over-clocked the CPU from a 3.16ghz to a 4.06ghz running at 50c idle and 53-54c on high load. My friend is on his way home to test it out. The entire system (not including rebates) cost him $1,281.54 and everything was bought off of Newegg.com. Here are some pictures of the system:

Artician Media Cache

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:38:05 -0500

I've went though and did some reading up on Cache, and noticed that PHP required you to output the "304 Not Modified" header when the content was not changed. Upon further reading and research I've noticed that Apache outputs a "ETag" which is basically a "Info" code saying "This is what content I have". I've did some testing and have implemented ETags for the entire media section of the site. You'll notice faster load speeds when it comes to refreshing pages with media on them. If you also have firebug, if you enable it on a image, you'll notice a header "Artician: Image Not Modified" when it sends the "304 Not Modified".

Firefox 3 Beta gets memory fixes

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:30:35 -0500

Source: http://developer.mozilla.org/devnews/

Memory usage: Over 300 individual memory leaks have been plugged, and a new XPCOM cycle collector completely eliminates many more. Deveopers are continuing to work on optimizing memory use (by releasing cached objects more quickly) and reducing fragmentation. Beta 2 includes over 30 more memory leak fixes, and 11 improvements to our memory footprint.

I'm so glad

Working on Customization Wizard

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 22:25:25 -0400

I've been working on the customization wizard for the site profiles, and making nice progress. Eric wanted an opinion on the wizard, and I went ahead and made the profile wizard very dynamic. Actually still working on it still. ^-^

hmm

Creative Network - Geo Locator

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 12:55:39 -0400

After a few hours of learning the Google Maps API and having found a nice Javascript API Extention, We've made very nice progress with the Geo Locator, Check it out.

Blog Control Panel Finished

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 04:10:54 -0400

I've finished the blog control panel. You may now add/edit/remove blog entries.