March 2010 Test Preparations

March 30, 2010

I’m having to deal with Prometric for testing a lot lately. I have to say that I like computer based tests a lot – they’re so much more comfortable than filling out scantrons. I used to always forget to bring a number 2 pencil to tests, now I don’t have to worry about anything, just show up. And all the instructions are on the computer so there’s no waiting for proctors to read out loud to everyone, that’s a big plus for me too.

I’m currently signed up for:
GRE ~ 2 days from now
MCTS 70-642 – Server 2008 Networking Configuration ~ in 1 week

Recently completed:
MCTS 93-640 – Server 2008 Active Directory Configuration ~ 2 weeks ago

The GRE was kind of a surprise, I wasn’t really planning to go to grad school until a couple weeks ago after talking to my Lab Manager and Primary Investigator about career options. They told me that our lab was applying for a big grant, to be finalized in 2012, that could possibly allow us to expand from the DNA sequencing lab we are now into a Bioinformatics Core for the entire UCSD Cancer Center. So they encouraged me to learn more about bioinformatics and come back to join them when the lab is expanded.

My dad was visiting last week and after some convincing I got him to sign me up for a GRE testing date. I was aiming for something in late April, but he said something about plugging my birthday into biorhythm website and finding that my intellectual component was good right now and I should take it right away… I don’t know if I believe in that kind of thing since it seems pretty much like fortune telling to me, but I’m happy to just get it out of the way. I’m not too worried about preparing anyways, since I’ve already been doing a lot of writing over the past few months, and I think my math is good enough that I can just do some quick prep book reading to get familiar with the question format and be pretty much ready to go.

For the Microsoft Tests, I’m still on the fence as to whether I should go for MCITP Server Administrator or MCITP Enterprise Administrator. For Server Administrator I would need to take only one more test vs two for Enterprise Administrator, but I like the material better for Enterprise and the job description sounds a lot better. Also if I don’t find a full Enterprise Administrator position, one of the two tests is for Windows 7 desktop configuration, which will let me work at a help desk or support job while getting ready for grad school.

Luckily the testing cost isn’t too much of an issue – after a bit of searching I found the Microsoft Student Voucher issuance webpage, where I can get vouchers that drop the price from $150 to just $60. All I have to do is enter my name and email, then bring my UCSD Student ID to the testing center. Super easy!

I also found out that the governator of California just started giving out free Microsoft Testing vouchers as part of the Elevate America program, which would save me an additional $60 ($150 for non students) by giving me a free Microsoft Certification test. Unfortunately, the voucher is only good for Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007, kind of lame since that is kind of a standard skill that I don’t think will help me too much as far as making me a more attractive job candidate goes.

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Update on my SiI 3114 SATA RAID5 array

March 22, 2010

Well, it’s been a week now since I setup the 4-disk RAID5 array using 16kb stripe size and writing with 64kb truecrypt cluster sizes. While the read performance was good, write performance was absolutely dismal.

I somewhat expected writes to be slow because of the parity calculations during RAID5 write operations, but the actual performance was far worse than I’m willing to tolerate. On a 2GB file, writes would start out at 40MB/s and then slow to a paltry 20MB/s after a minute or so. That was even after some setting improvements, because when I had a sub-optimal stripe size and cluster size combination, the same file would transfer at only 12MB/s. I would actually be OK with 20MB/s, but I found out that if I queued up a large amount of files to be written at once, it would cause the controller to crash after 50GB or so. TERRIBLE!
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Finding a balance between security, stability, and performance with a SiI 3114 RAID controller

March 16, 2010

I have a Silicon Image 3114 SATA RAID controller built into my Asus motherboard and I was trying to decide on the optimal stripe size for my 4-disk RAID 5 array. The problem I’m having is, there are a lot of articles online about the tradeoffs between large and small stripe sizes, but I haven’t found a completely clear guide yet that applies specifically to my situation. I found that most guides say that for larger files, a small stripe size is better, and for numerous small files, a large stripe size is better.

I’m not sure, but I would guess that for the large files, a small stripe size is better because it would give finer-grained streaming, more speed because the reads and writes are more similar in size to the 512 bytes of a typical disk sector. (I wonder how RAID 5 will perform on the upcoming 4kb sector disks) I am also guessing that for smaller files, a large stripe size would be better because it would reduce the amount of seeks needed if multiple files are retrieved at once due to the large stripe (the largest available on my controller was 128kb, thats a lot of text at once, if I was running a database).

The best guide I found for RAID 5 stripe sizing
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Latest News, as of March 16th

March 16, 2010

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).

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
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Can’t Wait to use Pivot to Explore My Data

March 6, 2010

Thought about this a lot but never saw any dataviz program like this before. Hans Rosling’s program was very informative, but based on relatively simple government data. Pivot is made to draw from much larger sets; it’s designed for making sense of the modern internet.

I like how Pivot will let me view information the way I want to view it – start off by viewing everything all at once, then drilling down in more detail after taking a look at trends and common qualities of large bins of data.

There’s so many things I want to use this for… I hope I can be diligent in my studies and eventually be a good enough programmer to develop something that will take advantage of Pivot’s capabilities. Even if I never get there, somebody out there is definitely going to be able to make an amazing tool out of this, I’ll just use theirs once they release it.

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