Thank you! 🙏

Housing construction isn’t funded by existing housing investment. It’s generally funded by debt. Private or public, just like any other capital intensive endeavor. And debt isn’t created by lending people’s savings but by creating new money. By public or private lenders. (Private lenders create money too.) The only thing that is really needed ahead of time is labor, equipment and materials available. Financial capital is created on demand to mobilize those real resources.

Marxists believe Socialism is what Capitalism is necessarily leading to because decentralized markets form centralized monopolist syndicates with complex internal planning

Jesus fucking Christ, I was just talking to a friend about how big corporations with hundreds of thousands of employees resemble centrally planned economies, and how consolidations creates them all around us and the only thing stopping them from becoming fewer is the attempts of some governments that haven’t been regulatory-captured yet to stop it. But regulatory-capture increases with wealth accumulation so if you keep running the system, it tends to total central planning. I haven’t read Marx and neither has he.

On a separate but related point - what stops the system from being somewhat disrupted by labor in a way that redistributes huge amounts of the accumulated wealth, restoring the regulatory regime in favor of labor and restarting the cycle from that point, then repeat. In other words, what’s stopping it from doing a depression-FDR-redistribution every 100 years? I can absolutely see the inevitable end without labor intervention but to my current brain it seems possible to maintain it with. Is this wrong in some obvious way?

Your PC is an unused server.

Well it’s not the government doing this it’s private insurance companies. You’re free to shop around or start your own insurance company. This makes me feel much better about gatekeeping healthcare. 🦅🇺🇸

Huh, interesting. I had no idea. Well I don’t need it to be anywhere faster than 100M. USB2 can definitely do that. Closer to 200M. With that said, the latency is more important if you’re gonna do anything like Steam Link.

Found the GNOME developer.

Ads? I thought the Shield didn’t have any…

It’s a Chromecast with Google TV (CCwGTV) wich itself is a dongle. It’s connected to a Plugable USB-C PD hub - another dongle. The white bit sticking to the left from the hub is a TP-Link UE300 Ethernet adapter - yet another dongle. Finally there’s an SD card inserted in the Plugable hub as well as an HDMI coupler hooked to the other end of the CCwGTV which allows connecting an HDMI cable to it.

I’ve been thinking about Shield TV but I hear it’s not great with updates.

I think the board has reached the end of the road. 😅

Iiinteresting. I’m on the larger AB350-Gaming 3 and it’s got REV: 1.0 printed on it. No problems with the 5950X so far. 🤐 Either sheer luck or there could have been updated units before they officially changed the rev marking.

On paper it should support it. I’m assuming it’s the ASRock AB350M. With a certain BIOS version of course. What’s wrong with it?

B350 isn’t a very fast chipset to begin with

For sure.

I’m willing to bet the CPU in such a motherboard isn’t exactly current-gen either.

Reasonable bet, but it’s a Ryzen 9 5950X with 64GB of RAM. I’m pretty proud of how far I’ve managed to stretch this board. 😆 At this point I’m waiting for blown caps, but the case temp is pretty low so it may end up trucking along for surprisingly long time.

Are you sure you’re even running at PCIe 3.0 speeds too?

So given the CPU, it should be PCIe 3.0, but that doesn’t remove any of the queues/scheduling suspicions for the chipset.

I’m now replicating data out of this pool and the read load looks perfectly balanced. Bandwidth’s fine too. I think I have no choice but to benchmark the disks individually outside of ZFS once I’m done with this operation in order to figure out whether any show problems. If not, they’ll go in the spares bin.

I put the low IOPS disk in a good USB 3 enclosure, hooked to an on-CPU USB controller. Now things are flipped:

                                        capacity     operations     bandwidth 
pool                                  alloc   free   read  write   read  write
------------------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
storage-volume-backup                 12.6T  3.74T      0    563      0   293M
  mirror-0                            12.6T  3.74T      0    563      0   293M
    wwn-0x5000c500e8736faf                -      -      0    406      0   146M
    wwn-0x5000c500e8737337                -      -      0    156      0   146M

You might be right about the link problem.

Looking at the B350 diagram, the whole chipset is hooked via PCIe 3.0 x4 link to the CPU. The other pool (the source) is hooked via USB controller on the chipset. The SATA controller is also on the chipset so it also shares the chipset-CPU link. I’m pretty sure I’m also using all the PCIe links the chipset provides for SSDs. So that’s 4GB/s total for the whole chipset. Now I’m probably not saturating the whole link, in this particular workload, but perhaps there’s might be another related bottleneck.

Turns out the on-CPU SATA controller isn’t available when the NVMe slot is used. 🫢 Swapped SATA ports, no diff. Put the low IOPS disk in a good USB 3 enclosure, hooked to an on-CPU USB controller. Now things are flipped:

                                        capacity     operations     bandwidth 
pool                                  alloc   free   read  write   read  write
------------------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
storage-volume-backup                 12.6T  3.74T      0    563      0   293M
  mirror-0                            12.6T  3.74T      0    563      0   293M
    wwn-0x5000c500e8736faf                -      -      0    406      0   146M
    wwn-0x5000c500e8737337                -      -      0    156      0   146M

Interesting. SMART looks pristine on both drives. Brand new drives - Exos X22. Doesn’t mean there isn’t an impending problem of course. I might try shuffling the links to see if that changes the behaviour on the suggestions of the other comment. Both are currently hooked to an AMD B350 chipset SATA controller. There are two ports that should be hooked to the on-CPU SATA controller. I imagine the two SATA controllers don’t share bandwidth. I’ll try putting one disk on the on-CPU controller.

Don’t let be called a hypocrite - give $5. 😆

• Lenovo ThinkCentre / Dell OptiPlex USFF machine like the M710q.
• Secondary NVMe or SATA SSD for a RAID1 mirror
  • Use LVMRAID for this. It uses mdraid underneath but it’s easier to manage
• External USB disks for storage
  • WD Elements generally work well when well ventilated
  • OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad has a very well implemented USB path and has been problem-free in my testing
• Debian / Ubuntu LTS
• ZFS for the disk storage
• Backups may require a second copy or similar of this setup so keep that in mind when thinking about the storage space and cost

Here’s a visual inspiration:

Yes, yes I would use ZFS if I had only one file on my disk.