Four Drives Enter, two Drives ... Well they're fine, read on

Very much like my prior post I've come to turn on the wall mounted server, which is no longer on a wall... only to find the ZFS pool is degraded.  Two drives are AWOL.

They are plugged in, the cables are checked and good, the power is good.... But for two to just vanish is a mystery, they're nice new WD Green SSD's.

And you can see the disks are added to my pool by ID, so it makes no difference which SATA port I plug them into.

I've got six SATA ports on this Motherboard, in three banks of two.  I wondered if the two other banks (as the boot and first mirror in the pool were in the first bank/pair) had gone bad, so many reboots later and checking, no it seems just these two drives are outta there.

I'm going to remove them and come back to this once I have a firm back up of the data.

Here they are.  So I bought these in June, they're marked March 2020.  My plan is, take the data off of the surviving drive in the pool, then sacrifice of of these two to the fdisk gods and see what it does.....  

There we are, that's one of the two in my SATA to USB caddy and... It's fine... Shows itself as very little use, it admittedly is a ZFS formatted drive, but the SMART information is all normal, so I'm thinking....

I'm thinking maybe the PSU on that wall mounted server is doing strange things.  Once moment, I'm going to try that hunch by removing the SATA power from the detected single drive and putting it in the other of these two I have laying here.

YES!... Right, so the disks are good, but the SATA power is on the wonk.  This is a horrid cheap PSU, so maybe time for a replacement.

Time Expectations in WoW Classic?

With the news today of EA reducing by 75% the time it will take in Star Wars Battlefront 2 to unlock a hero character, can we expect to see modern gamers head into WoW Classic and start complaining?

(c)2017 Electonic Arts

Lets just recap though, World of Warcraft, vanilla, people played a character to level 60 in about 4 days played, that's about 96 hours played.

EA's plight, and collapse into pandering, happened with a played time of around 40, that's less than half... Reducing it by 75% that now makes a hero in SW:BF2 in 10 hours.

10 hours for Vanilla WoW was not enough, and this is where my first concerns with WoW Classic come about, firstly, will Blizzard be forced to pander down to newer gamers whom most certainly want action & reaction, risk and reward.  They certainly don't deal in patience nor RNG.

My second concern comes that this is a big issue, and perhaps Blizzard will side step it, by simple nerfing the amount of time to level, or perhaps increasing the rate of XP gain, as arguably since Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Litch King, the business model for WOW has been to push players to level cap as fast as possible and explore repetitive tasks in that area.

The way of thinking Blizzard have entertained (no pun intended) since I stopped playing was daily's, and find a group, find a raid, tokens, faster reward for input, but with exponential damage, health and other stats making that power-wonder factor... Fast rewards, I said during my appearance on "Shut Up We're Talking" that this was where things would be going.

Rinse and repeat.  That is all I've seen delivered, it's certainly all I've heard explained.  Should I name drop "Garrisons"?

All this said however, we must remember, that there will be a huge influx of tourists to WoW Classic, toe dabblers, so what could the population of regulars; the hardcore; who settle there expect?  These are the things we don't know and as you can tell by this post, we can only speculate about.

Power Nap

Power nap, so through one thing and another, I've not been sleeping well in the evenings, this has been cutting into family life and of course game time... but its also why I've gotten a few mid-night gaming sessions in.

However, today I think my body is ready to just throw in the towel and let me sleep tonight... I'm not going to get home until at least 19:30 and I'm clearly not going to get to bed much before 22:00... But I hope I sleep right through.

What I have just done is take a power nap, I clocked out and went to my car, it was freezing cold, but I set the seat back and closed my eyes, 10 minutes... and boom I'm back in, the shiver of sleep which was creeping over me has been put at bay, lets hope it holds off.

I don't know how good or bad doing a power nap like that is, I hear tell of a kind of sleep pattern were people get into sleeping for like 10 minutes every 3 hours, and they massivly improve their productivity?  I think certain online gamers I know/knew must have done this, the amount of time they spent raiding and grinding.