Ahhh… just had a nice talk with my Lab Manager and PI from the DNA sequencing lab today, it’s great to know that they’re watching out for me even though I’m going to be leaving for a new job… I went in to talk about the plans for their computer systems once I’m gone, but they wouldn’t let me go so easily! I told them about my plans to go to Taiwan if I can’t find a job, so they’re trying to find me one in San Diego to get me to stick around longer and train a mini-me freshman or sophomore who can help out with the CCDNASEQ servers.
On my home systems, I have some great new software that I’ve been trying and want to tell you guys about! But first, I want to talk about some hardware – I just installed a gigantic RAID 5 array made up of 4 320GB disks for a total of 894GB of usable space. It can survive one disk failure without the system going down, but I would have to replace the drive before a second one fails or else I would lose data. I’m not one to move all my data to new hardware without testing it, so I’m doing a full disk encryption using Truecrypt. It’s projected to take a total of 12 hours to completely overwrite the entire 894GB, hopefully everything will be A-OK in the morning.
So, on to the new software. Like all software I recommend on this blog, this software is 100% free (ad supported).
- Dataram RAMDisk
- This is the best Free RAMDisk software available for Windows
- Compatible with XP,Vista,7, 32bit and 64bit editions
- Allows you to have up to 4GB RAMDisk to make your internet cache super fast (10X faster than your hard drive)
- Since your browser only saves to your RAMDisk, wear on your HDD is reduced, making it less likely that it’ll die and bring your data along with it.
- NewsGator FeedDemon
- This is the best Free Desktop RSS Reader available for Windows
- The key here is that it allows you to prefetch the images for all your unread items.
- Just set it to prefetch and come back in 10 minutes, combined with the use of a RAMDisk, that means NO WAITING to scroll through your subscribed feeds.
- I hate waiting for images to load, even 250ms is really noticeable, and thats about how long it takes for each additional HTTP request! Prefetch FTW.
- I used to be a hardcore Google Reader user, this feature alone is what caused me to switch.