Monthly Archives: September 2010

Beware of Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD Drives

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Meant to blog this a while back, but work has been keeping me busy. A friend of mine in the US, Joe Landman, runs a business making serious HPC storage gear and has found a rather disturbing problem with Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD drives. Here is how he describes it after Corsair went silent on him about this issue (ellipses are his):

We are experiencing about a 70% failure rate, within 3 months of acquisition. In many different chassis, in many different parts of the world, with many different power supplies, many different motherboards. This is a time correlated failure. I have never … ever … in 25+ years doing this stuff … ever … seen anything like this. Its either a really … really bad silicon error in a controller chip or a firmware bug … or some other crappy part.

It came right out of the blue and the failure mode is pretty scary:

Imagine for a moment, you have these in a RAID 1 configuration. And because of the the failure, the unit refuses to get past the POST section. So there you are, with a remote machine, say, I dunno, 6000 miles away from you, and an SSD, with a putative 100+ year MTBF fails, and fails in a way that stops POST. So the system on reboot, freezes at the drive detection phase.

Remember that with a 2 drive RAID1 mirror and a 70% failure rate (plus Murphy) you’re looking at a real risk of a double disk failure, which Joe has seen at some of his customers. He’s got a neat way to use a loopback device on a spinning disk as an extra member of the RAID1 set to at least have a copy of the data where it can be recovered from.

So tell your friends, just say “NO” to Corsair CMFSSD-32D1 SSD’s.

Archaeological Excavation in Little LaTrobe Street, Melbourne ? (Updated)

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Anyone know anything about this archaeological dig in progress in Little La Trobe Street in Melbourne, just opposite the RMIT Uni Bookshop ?

Archaeological dig at Little La Trobe Street, Melbourne

There’s no signage for it but they seem to be exposing the wall lines of old buildings in what was, until recently, a car park.

Update: Here’s the last photo I have before the rescue dig ended and they started clearing the site.

Archaeological dig resumed in Little LaTrobe Street

The Pope, Atheists, Nazis and Reality

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So on his official visit to the UK the Pope apparently said:

“we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society […] As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century“

Now compare that with some quotes from Hitler (who knew a thing or two about Nazi Germany) on atheism:

“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.“

“ We have put an end to denial of God and abuse of religion.“

“ National Socialism neither opposes the Church nor is it anti-religious, but on the contrary, it stands on the ground of a real Christianity.“

Finally this classic from the lead up to the Nazi-Vatican Concordat of 1933:

“Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.“

Doesn’t sound very atheistic to me..

Gluten Free, Dairy Free Parsley Sauce Recipe

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Tonight Donna and I cooked some fish and I thought I’d try my hand at making GFCF parsley sauce, never having made it before in any form. So a little bit of Googling got us some ideas and so we ended up making it like this:

  • Nuttelex margarine (reasonably lump)
  • 1 onion
  • bay leaf (fresh from the garden)
  • gluten free flour
  • rice milk (I think we used about 300ml)
  • Tofutti (dairy free soft soy cheese, about a desert spoon)
  • garlic salt
  • pepper
  • parsley (fresh from the garden, finely chopped)

Slice the onion then melt the margarine in a saucepan and lightly fry the onion. You are then meant to add the flour and mix it in but we forgot and added the rice milk first, so instead mixed the flour with some water in a cup to make a paste and then added it. Stir all the time. Add the tofutti and flavour with the garlic salt and the pepper. Keep stirring. Wait for it to start to bubble and add the finely chopped parsley. Stir more until ready. 🙂