Misc stuff - comment spam update, Seagate, and video acceleration repo

So, I enabled akismet, and it seems to be on top of the comment spam. I also disabled login with anything but OpenID, just to keep things simple. Let me know if you have any trouble logging in or posting comments.

Hard drives can be an emotive topic among those who have to deal with a lot of the things. Personally, I almost always buy Seagate. It's a very anecdotal field, and those who use industrial quantities of the things (Google) will tell you all manufacturers are pretty much alike, but personally I've had far fewer problems with Seagate than anyone else. And when you do have problems - one disk of the RAID-5 array in my HTPC that stores all my media has been dropped from the array three times due to unrecoverable errors now, so I'm going to RMA the thing - they have a great return process. You feed it the drive's serial number and model number (both of which you can get from SMART) and it tells you whether it's still in warranty and gives you all the warranty details. For $20 they'll send the replacement drive in two days, advance of you returning the old one and include a box and pre-paid shipping label for returning the old one, which is frankly a great deal since it costs about that much to buy a box and shipping yourself, plus the hassle of doing it. The process is very simple and trusts you - it doesn't ask you a bunch of stupid questions designed to prove it's not really broken and it's All Your Fault. A very pleasant experience, or as pleasant as dealing with RMAs can be. Thanks, Seagate.

I updated my video acceleration repository again yesterday. The update to libva in the last repository update was broken - even though it was labelled sds7, it still contained sds5. D'oh. Thanks to Bernard Johnson for pointing that out, in Bugzilla. I have now updated it properly, to sds8 (which came out in the mean time).

Comments

Luis Villa wrote on 2009-11-26 07:14:
I think that point about hard drives (assume they are going to fail at about the same rate, so buy based on return policies rather than totally anecdotal perceptions of failure rate) is probably the most sane thing I've ever heard anyone say on the subject. I'm sold :)