Formatting hard drives

This morning my new hard drives from ebuyer finally arrived (they were supposed to have arrived by Wednesday).

On the drive label it had 3 jumper settings:

• Jumpered pins 1 and 2 enables SSC (Speed Spectrum Clocking)
• Jumpered pins 3 and 4 enables PUIS (Power Up In Standby)
• Jumpered pins 5 and 6 enables 1.5GB PHY

So I did some googling to try and see what these settings actually mean/do.

As far as I could work out, it seems that 1.5GB PHY means the drive will run in SATA 1 mode (1.5Gb/s) instead of SATA 2 (3Gb/s).

It seems that SSC is to do with electrical interference, and should not be turned on.

PUIS means the drive doesn't spin up as soon as power is required, but rather waits until it is needed before spinning up.

I put one of the drives in my SATA hotswap bay, and it's now formatting, which will take absolutely ages. Then I need to copy all my pictures to it, which again will take ages, then I need to do it all again with the other drive. After that I can swap the current 1TB drive in the PC with one of the 1.5TB drives (I think I'll use one of the Western Digital drives I got today since they are 'Green' instead of the Seagate drive I got a few months ago).

Then I'll need to format the 1TB drive that I've just removed, and backup my non-picture files to it, and then do the same to my current 1TB backup drive. Then I need to remove all the non picture files and folders from my current 1.5TB backup drive. And of course, for all this I'll need to create new Synkron backup files for each drive.

So it will take a long time, but I'll end up with: 1TB of storage for non-photos and 2 1TB backup drives; 1.5TB of storage for photos and 2 1.5TB backup drives. The benefit of having 2 backups of everything means that if your drive dies, and then your backup drive dies, you still have another backup.

This situation is very unlikely, but given the amount of time I've put into all the files stored on my PC, it's a relatively cheap insurance policy.

I checked my email, which took quite a while, then spent the rest of the morning working on a privacy policy for my pog website.

After lunch I watched part of a 'Me too!' episode, then I went on Animal Crossing. I checked my email and then carried on working on my privacy policy.

I finished getting most of the privacy policy done, and then saw that someone had replied to my question about showing a breakdown of requests returning 301 in awstats. About 16.20 the first of my two new hard drives had finally finished formatting, so I removed it and started formatting the other new drive.

For getting a breakdown of requests returning a 301 HTTP Status Code, it was suggested that I follow the awstats HTTP Error Drilldown Functionality guide. After following that I had a 301 section in my awstats report, but it was empty.

After some messing about I found that to get the section populated with data I had to delete the current awstats files for the domain/website in question, and then run an update for the site from the command line.

In the evening I mostly played on Wii Sports Resort, I'm still stuck on the Reverse Castle level of the Kendo Challenge (or whatever it's called). It's 22.15 now, and my 2nd new hard drive has just finished formatting. So I'll have to do the actual backups to the drives tomorrow.

The weather today started off with blue skies but quite quickly got cloudy, and rained a bit. Most of the day the sky was full of big dark clouds, but not actually raining, and often the sun would be shining through breaks in the clouds. It was very windy, which made it quite cold. There was a nice sunset.

Food
Breakfast: Toasted teacake with Flora buttery; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Mature cheddar cheese with sliced raddish and little gem lettuce sandwich; 2x Plums; 3x Strawberries; Chocolate wafer biscuit; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Battered fish portion; chips; peas; salt; ground black pepper; vinegar. Pudding was plum crumble with spleenvap. Coffee.