According to the stats, my previous post was one of the more popular on this site. This was in response to a question I was asking myself before building a NAS box at home. In looking at the components to use in building it, I came across another question. How does one fix the performance of ZFS on Western Digital’s green drives with model numbers ending in “EARS” (WD15EARS, WD20EARS, etc)? I’ve split this into sections, with a bold title, so readers can read the parts that are most interesting. I’ve described why WD changed their drives, why this is a problem, what the solutions are. Hope you enjoy this.
ZFS on different sized disks
Note: Following this is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t comfortable with partitioning, then don’t follow the steps here. I’ve read many posts on how to handle ZFS/Raid-Z on differently sized disks. The goal is to gain the most disk space availability while still retaining the redundancy of surviving a single disk failure. The posts I’ve read either would achieve the theoretical capacity, or be capable of expansion, but not both. I devised a way to get both at the same time, and it’s relatively simple.
Common Media Player Framework
About 3 weeks ago, Kevin (developer of NitoTV) and I decided it was a bit silly how we were each writing playback mechanisms on the AppleTV with little to no collaboration between us. So, we decided to write a Common Media Player Framework, which is licensed using LGPL.
Kevin sent me the code he used for DVD playback inside NitoTV as a place to start. I stripped it down to a smaller piece, and started the framework. After I had it doing basic playback, I worked on overlays to provide feedback to the user. Now, hitting up and down changes the overlays between normal, chapter view, audio/subtitle selection, and zoom.
Incorrect Podcast Order on my iPod
One of these days I will learn not to grab the latest and “greatest” software the moment it comes out. Yesterday, I upgraded my iTunes to version 9 and my iPod Touch’s firmware to 3.1.1. Then, I noticed that one of my podcasts was out of order, and furthermore, the release date was no longer showing up on the iPod itself. Strangely, only one podcast was having this issue.
I started to suspect that this was my fault, since this one podcast, Escape Pod was a podcast I was listening by going through its archives. I had written a program which downloads the archived episodes, and modifies the ID3 tags so iTunes will properly recognize the file as a podcast and insert it into its database as if it had downloaded it itself. Getting the release date working correctly was one of the harder points, so I figured that I still didn’t have it quite correct and the new iPod firmware was being more sensitive to it. I got even more annoyed by the fact that iTunes, after upgrading my iPod’s firmware, decided to trash the old firmware versions preventing me from ever downgrading.