Posted 11/26/2008 at 10:42:08am

No, that would be the smell of the sheep droppings that windows users left behind.

Posted 11/12/2008 at 08:41:16pm

Seagate is investigating an issue where a small number of Barracuda 7200.11 (1.5TB SATA) hard drives randomly pause or hang for up to several seconds during certain write operations. This does not result in data loss nor does it impact the reliability of the drive but is an inconvenience to the user that we are working to resolve with an upgradeable firmware. We are therefore asking customers if they feel they are experiencing this issue to give our technical support department a call with any questions. Affected part number: 9JU138-300, 336 with firmware revisions SD15, SD17, or SD18. Support contact information: Technical Support in the USA: 1.800.SEAGATE (1.800.732.4283) Technical Support in Canada: 1.405.324.4700 Other regions please go to our support web page: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/

Posted 11/06/2008 at 01:22:30am

That scenario is very plausible.  Windows 7 is undergoing some pretty significant changes on the IO front to better handle SSD drives.  As well the version of NTFS is a newer version which as of yet not been extensively tested.  You also have to contend with the possiblity of system controller drivers not being enhanced/fixed to accomodate those changes and the "blacklist" for some drive features may not be all there yet. This has happened before on even a finalized released version of OS's where the drivers were not updated soon enough resulting in data loss.  These chances get even higher when you start adding raids and features such as NCQ to the mix.  The danger of data loss is very, very, very real.

Posted 10/07/2008 at 01:26:08am

"AHCI is supported only by Intel and ATI at this point and not by Nvidia."

 How old is this article?  FYI, Nvidia's boards DO support AHCI (At least the AMD 7 series).  ATI on the other hand has an extremely spotty record with their AHCI implementation ranging from data corruption, disappearing drives, NCQ issues and only 32-bit mode support.

Posted 09/27/2008 at 01:00:04pm

According to AMD, you will be able to use AM3 processors in a AM2+ board as the AM3 proc has both DDR3 and DDR2 support.  What you will not be able to do is use a AM2 Processor in a AM3 motherboard simply because of the fact that the AM2 Processor does not have DDR3 support.

Posted 09/26/2008 at 03:55:41pm

FreeBSD is not linux.

Posted 09/24/2008 at 09:29:08am

Prety much anything that does media encoding, database, rendering of course, compression, encryption, fft's, webserving, etc. Ranging from 5 -30% increase in performance.

Posted 09/23/2008 at 07:30:48pm

#5 is so wrong, linux users have been reaping the benifits of 64 bit computing for years where it shows realworld performance gains.  It would more appropriate if you listed 5 as Windows 64 as that pseudo 64-bit OS doesn't have any real 64-bit apps for it. Hell half of it is still 32-bit.