The Power and the Pain

[elfs]

Wow, when Omaha gets cool she gets way cool. While the initial frustrations with the now motherboard she bought for my computer were substantial, it is now a power tool of great proportion. Last night while hacking around in my junk box I found a card and said, "Hey, what's this?"

It's an IEEE1394 interface card. I'm not sure where it came from. I remember Shaterri gave me a handful of cards once upon a time when he was cleaning out his closets in preparation for moving down to California. I managed to find the cable for our old video camera too. After installing the card and rebuilding my kernel (a serious pain in the neck task because neither the sound nor the video card drivers are in the build, meaning I have to install them by hand at the end of every major rebuild), I plugged it all together and watched as I transferred down seven minutes of Kouryou-chan when she was just a few months old.

Seven minutes of film at double television resolution requires nine gigabytes of diskspace!

Here's hoping that after running it through the mpeg compression routines it's a lot smaller! It would be neat to have VCD collections of our family albums; there are plenty of DVD players out there that understand the VCD format.

Except (and here's the "pain" part)-- my CD-R/W, which was so faithful under the old system, has burned three coasters in a row. I'm getting distraught. I'm hoping that it was a combination of the disk type (a cheap pheno brand) and the fact that I was foolishly running X and lots of other things during the burn. I mean, I had to bail out of X when I had a P2-266 to get a reliable burn, but I'm running an Athlon/2700 now!

It's an old 2x burner, a Yamaha brand that Y doesn't even supply the drivers for anymore. I'm hoping it hasn't died on me. The other (more terrifying) possibility is that with all of the cards in the box, including the GForce4, and five drives, I'm straining the 350 watt power supply into unreliable territory.

I started a burn before I left for work this morning-- Maxcell disks, inittab 3, no X. If that doesn't work, I'll try one last time with the speed dropped to 1x. After that... *sigh*. Dunno.

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The initimitable technoshaman asked us what music we like that nobody would suspect us of liking. Okay, well, I'm going to confess: Lawrence Welk. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, right here on our stage, with the champagne bubbles and the elegant dancers and the too-right tuxedo. My uncle used to watch it for hours and for some reason the world of Welk was so different from where I was living that it had a mysterious, compelling quality to it.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

The problem is probably buffer underruns. No matter how fast your system is, if its busy for long enough for the burner to run out of buffer, and it's an old drive without BurnProof or some similar tech, it's going to burn a coaster. It's possible that adding the low latency and such patches to your kernel would help. On the other hand, a burner with BurnProof will never have this problem, and can be gotten for about $40. (all new drives come with some such tech, it's just a matter of making sure it'll work with cdrecord/cdrdao).

Oh, and having run such a system (more drives, actually, unless you mean 5 hard drives) on a 300W P/S, I can say that you're probably not straining it.