The professional blog of Christopher Randel

PC updates, and a few fun problems

So after about a month and a half, and ~15 days of real usage, my Intel X25-E SSD first produced smart errors, then worked intermittantly, then eventually failed.

Some of the warning signs of my X25-E failing were:

• Coming back to my computer, to find it unresponsive.
• Event logs recored write delays and write errors for the SSD device
• SSD disappears from AHCI BIOS screen randomly
• SSD failing SMART checks in BIOS [though my SMART checking programs in windows didn't think anything was wrong. How odd.]

So I’ve replaced this 32GB system drive with….. 2×1TB Western Digital Black drives, running RAID-1. 99$ per from dell. They are actually suprisingly fast, too. Bootup and application use feels good. I’ve got my page file and anti-virus running on my I-RAM, and other apps running from my Acard 9010B [itunes, foxit, wc3, fallout3, chrome, firefox, etc]. I have my 640GB black drive running itunes library and steam games.

I’ve done this like this so that I can try and eliminate bottlenecks with applications loading up. Now that I’ve been used to an SSD [stuff finishing loading before you release your mouse button] it’s a little trying to go back, but I feel pretty good about it. I’ve used the “Mount drive as empty folder” feature in windows to keep my number of drive letters down; I had to have the I-ram as a seperate letter for the page file, but everything else is hidden nicely.

Sorry, this is all pretty boring to you.

One more thing with printing in OS X. Apparently the latest update [10.5.7] has caused some problems for certain people running into an error while trying to add printers.

Running into something like

“Type the name and password of a user in the “lpadmin” group to allow…..”?

Take a read here and run this console command, which seems to restore the admin group to be able to do things owned by lpadmin. Worked slick as heck here.