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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.

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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.

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Roses!

The rose bushes had an easier time this past winter than they did last year.

First roses of the season
First roses of the season

First roses of the season opened up this week, and there are a lot of them.

Lots of roses!
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Charleston Eats: Coastal Coffee Roasters

My favourite coffee bean dealer shop, Coastal Coffee Roasters, has grown quite a bit over the years, and has been offering tasty baked goods in the cafe part for a while now.

Stopped by today to grab some more coffee, and thought I’d grab one of their giant cinnamon rolls while I was there. These things are seriously huge, like the size of your head. They also had similarly sized scones today, but I’ll try those another day.

Giant cinnamon roll. The size of your head!

Here it is with a banana for scale.

Giant cinnamon roll. Banana for scale.
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20 years at work!

Today begins decade #3 at work. 20 years ago today, I started working here. To say that there’s been a lot of changes at work since I started would be a bit of an understatement.

I’ve gone from having everything all nice and contained within the main campus to now having multiple locations across the tri-county area with imaging equipment that I need to visit. The amount of imaging equipment I lay hands on has also gone up by about 3x since I started. It definitely keeps me busy, but doesn’t leave much time for working on other things like I used to have.

Lots of interesting things happening now, and there’s going to be a lot of new equipment arriving over the next few years: new hospital buildings, new clinic sites, new imaging technology. With any luck, we’ll be able to get a diagnostic imaging residency program started in the near future too.

Next few years should be an interesting time.