Sending my name off to Mars again, this time withe the Mars 2020 Rover.
Off to Mars again
Hard drive upgrades
One of the hard drives in my computer had been spitting out errors for a little while now, so over the weekend I revamped the storage in my computer. I’m also expecting the simulation work I’ll be doing for my PhD will require a decent amount of storage, so I picked up a couple 4 TB WD Blue hard drives from Newegg. They were a decent price, and brought my computer from a total of about 3 TB up to just over 10 TB of storage.
The failing drive (1 TB) got replaced, and I also took out an old 250 GB IDE drive that I was using as a place to temporarily dump files. That left a 1 TB drive, two 500 GB drives, and the 250 GB SSD.
After doing a bit of cable gymnastics in the case, the two new drives got installed and plugged in. Current configuration now has the SSD as the boot drive and root partition. I made the 1 TB drive my home directory, and decided to lump the 4 TB and 500 GB drives into a single LVM2 volume group for my primary storage. I considered a RAID 1 or 10 configuration, but with time and brain space constraints, a JBOD setup seemed like it would be easier. I might change my mind later on though.
If it turns out I need even more storage, the case still has one empty drive bay that I stick another drive into.
Almost PhD Candidate!
After four months of reviewing and studying the literature, writing, and reviewing lecture notes, I made it past my PhD qualifier exam! Now I can call myself almost a PhD candidate!
Taking the weekend off to take a bit of a break and get caught up on some computer maintenance tasks (swapping out some dying hard drives), and then back to work on the research.
Next step will be to figure out what software I want to use for my Monte Carlo simulations, plan out the simulations I want to run, and what data I need to collect.