Tag Archives: eSata

eSata Working Nearly Perfectly, and Comments on Pages

The System Restore has worked fine getting my FireWire working from the previous problems I had. It still isn’t a proper hot-swappable eSata port, and I’ve no idea why (internet reports that it can be). However, HotSwap! is a neat app that can do it since the drive can be removed, just needs to have the cache cleared so there are no write errors. Just means I’ll have to be a bit careful not having it turn off without disconnecting it!

I’ve also had time this week to enable comments on all the pages on my site, and now they’re enabled by default on new ones I create. I’m inspired mainly by php.net’s impressive comments (well, I say impressive, they’re notable for being usually better at explaining things then the real documentation!). Might be useful in the future in any case.

Finally, my Gallery2 installation with WordPress WPG2 plugin is again messing up (note the two Gallery links in the left navigation) – ahhgg, but for a proper permanent link setup which actually worked so it was /gallery/v/XXX instead of /v/XXX links from thumbnails! This is a PITA, and I’ll have to sort it sometime, or replace Gallery2 and WPG2 – which won’t be a small task (meaning: re-uploading *everything*), but I think might be necessary (and would allow me to cull some of the less worthwhile pictures and setup better thumbnail sizes so not so much HDD space is used on my server account), or at least I need to hack it to work better.

I’m leaving it since I want to also investigate hacking WPG2 to do better thumbnail HTML/CSS – at the moment it sticks the image and link inside a

tag to get it to float, centre etc – while in the RSS feed, this pretty much goes out of whack since of course CSS isn’t loaded for it. Inlining some CSS into the tag would certainly help there.

eSata and Losing my FireWire

I’ve got 2 nice new eSata Verbatim 2TB RAID external hard drives (which I’ll set to RAID1 mirroring) for lots of game archive data, preservation stuff and website archives.

However, for some bizarre reason after messing around between eSata settings my FireWire ports have entirely stopped working. I want to use eSata since, when it was actually working (with my FireWire and USB drives), eSata was around 200MB/s read times, while USB was about 38MB/s read times. FireWire is a few megs better (although a different, and single drive) at 41MB/s, although now none of the FireWire things I plugin work. I gave up last night, sigh, technology!

Also, oddly, eSata now reports the drive as internal (I can’t make it disconnect by “Safely remove hardware”) despite it starting out as removable. I’m very confused, my motherboard does have a really dodgy implmentation of this though (JMicron controller, which can do simple RAID though eSata, which is probably part of the issue – it’s not “just” a hotswappable eSata port!).

Here’s to hoping that System Restore can set it right, something that I’m glad I’ve actually enabled just for this kind of situation. The BIOS settings are now back to what they should be, so I’m now going back in time to June 30th, 2009…wish me luck 😉 If it’s not this, I’ll double check my BIOS, which hasn’t got a lot of custom settings, and should, I hope, be possible to resolve.

~~~~wavey lines~~~~ wooooooo!