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Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Bvckup 2 is in open beta !

« Last post by apankrat on May 07, 2018, 09:43 AM »

Should be resolved now. Updated version is available from https://bvckup2.com/get

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Bvckup 2 is in open beta !

« Last post by apankrat on May 07, 2018, 05:53 AM »

Looking into it, stand by...

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Bvckup 2 is in open beta !

« Last post by apankrat on May 06, 2018, 08:48 AM »

Bump. New release is out, R79. Notable changes:

1. Brand new copying module called the ultra copier:

Faster bulk copying - details
Faster delta copying - details
Resumable copying and fast error recovery - details

2. Automatic retrying for transient, network-related failures (details).

3. New look for the progress bar. Obviously, a very important change.

While at it, here's 5 years worth of all prior re-styling takes - https://bvckup2.com/wip/18042018

---

Complete change log is over at changes/release-79

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Disk IO Monitor

« Last post by apankrat on April 15, 2018, 09:02 AM »

Very interesting utility, could be handy for quick reads on a server where diskperf counters are off by default.
-Stoic Joker (April 12, 2018, 07:07 AM)

It displays stats collected by disk perf counters

Drive letter selection would be nice to have for that even if it's only a command line option.

You can change to another drive by clicking on "Disk C". Just make sure you are running 0.9.3 or newer.

Official Announcements / Re: Fundraiser 2018 Discounts and Giveaways Discussion Thread

« Last post by apankrat on April 11, 2018, 08:52 AM »

My optimizer program ran for 5+ hours in its search for the best assignment of prizes to maximize happiness.
-mouser (April 11, 2018, 07:55 AM)

I wonder who got stuck with the lowest happiness score... :)

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Disk IO Monitor

« Last post by apankrat on April 11, 2018, 06:32 AM »

Hi fellas,

Would you just look at this thing I made yesterday?

As you've probably guessed from the post title it's a real-time disk IO monitor. Not hard to do by any means, but what makes it interesting is how it visualizes the data.

In short - when it draws a vertical bar to display a byte count, it factors the value into megabytes, kilobytes and bytes and then displays each of these separately, in their own dedicated "band".
In long - see here for an explanation how to read this graph and why it's done that way to begin with.

If you feel like playing with it, there's a dev build - https://bvckup2.com/files/io-monitor.exe.

70 KB, no dependencies, just save somewhere and run.

~~It is hard-coded to monitor C:\ at 500ms sampling rate for now.~~

It defaults to monitoring C:\, but another drive can be selected by clicking on "Disk C:".
The sampling rate is still fixed at 500ms.
And, no, you can't resize the window yet either :)

Have a look, let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Alex

General Software Discussion / Re: Idea: File note

« Last post by apankrat on December 18, 2017, 07:00 AM »

Gentlemen, have you considered using NTFS Alternate Data Streams to store the notes?
This would automatically solve an issue of notes retention when files are renamed or copied.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Timestamp Clamper - for hammering file/folder timestamps into a reasonable range

« Last post by apankrat on October 09, 2017, 05:33 AM »

Boy, that's fast!!!
-Curt (October 06, 2017, 03:23 PM)

^+1
a tenth of a second!
-cranioscopical (October 02, 2017, 07:02 AM)

Gentlemen, it merely means that you have well-warmed up file system caches :)

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Timestamp Clamper - for hammering file/folder timestamps into a reasonable range

« Last post by apankrat on October 02, 2017, 07:22 AM »

ps. this qualifies as a NANY release (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=44276.0)
-mouser (October 02, 2017, 07:05 AM)

Haha... excellent :)

I've been meaning to make a NANY release for years now. Started on a LAN chat for the 15/16 cycle, got about 50% way through, but then the routine got me, so it's been sitting on a shelf since then. The UI had some bright moments to it though (https://dribbble.com/apankrat/projects/333232-Lancaster), so I'm still planning to finish it at some point.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Timestamp Clamper - for hammering file/folder timestamps into a reasonable range

« Last post by apankrat on October 02, 2017, 02:56 AM »

Hi fellas,

Long time, no post. I thought I'd show a little weekend hack of mine -

This is a tool for when you need to replicate files from A to B, but some files have timestamps so far in the past or in the future that they aren't supported by the B's file system. Think, for example, copying from NTFS to FAT and looking at a file that somehow got created in the early 17th century.

No, don't look at me. It turns out to be a common issue with the photographer kind as older cameras did weird things with timestamps. Like leaving them at all zeroes, which translated to whatever the earliest date/time supported by the storage file system was. So there's lots of photos around dating back to Jan 01, 1970 and some such.

In any case:

Uses parallel file system scanner, so it's rather fast.
Simple UI with in-place error feedback.
Drop-down list with predefined ranges for common file systems.
Preview / live mode.
Copy-pastable log, with full error reporting and summary stats.

Homepage: https://pipemetrics....om/timestamp-clamper ...sort of
Download: https://bvckup2.com/...imestamp-clamper.exe -- 85 KB, no installation needed, no dependencies

Any comments or suggestions - I'm all ears.

Cheers,
Alex

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Can I get some opinions on this -- CCSIO Benchmark?

« Last post by apankrat on January 22, 2017, 03:55 AM »

Everything failed during/after the test. Share settings didn't change, ACL on files/folder didn't change, yet it wasn't possible to write anything anymore.
-Shades (January 21, 2017, 11:39 PM)

Interesting. During the test the IO is fully saturated, but the system should recover immediately after it. Also, testing shouldn't trash existing IO cache, at least in theory. When it uses cached reading/writing, it specifies so-called "sequential" access, which should, according to Microsoft, cause Cache Manager to aggressively recycle cache pages for the file in question. It should still do some caching, but as the app moves to from one file chunk to the next, Cache Manager should reuse the cache page for the latter.

Must say that the software looks great and is responsive.

Thanks, very kind :)

Still, that doesn't remedy the fact regarding the boring results my system is capable of generating, so I won't bore you with those.

I think it's still be interesting to look at what an older drive IO profile is like.
I have a couple of ancient refurbished SAS drives with lots of mileage on them, will be torturing them a bit next week.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Can I get some opinions on this -- CCSIO Benchmark?

« Last post by apankrat on January 22, 2017, 03:44 AM »

Screenshots don't seem to work very well on my Windows 10 system:
-Deozaan (January 22, 2017, 12:17 AM)

Whoops, thanks. It was an issue with bmp-to-png conversion on the server side. Fixed now.

That 10x write speed boost in the buffered mode though... W10 is being very lazy with cache flushing. I'll add a UI option for force-flushing write cache after each test and an option to run each test longer. I know that the former brings w. performance right down to the unbuffered / read levels.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Can I get some opinions on this -- CCSIO Benchmark?

« Last post by apankrat on January 21, 2017, 04:14 PM »

> Give me a day.

That worked out to be a pretty long day.

1. Added an option for viewing a complete text report and saving it. Will be adding an option of loading and viewing these next.

2. Added an option for Quick and Extended tests. Press Alt to show the top menu.

3. Added an option for sharing screenshots.

The output is an Imgur-style page with just the image, e.g. https://ccsiobench.com/s/mpFja.png

If you got some interesting devices, let's compare some screenshots, shall we?

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Can I get some opinions on this -- CCSIO Benchmark?

« Last post by apankrat on January 16, 2017, 01:38 PM »

I'd very much love that, thanks.

Give me a day. I'm adding a screenshot sharing option.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Can I get some opinions on this -- CCSIO Benchmark?

« Last post by apankrat on January 16, 2017, 01:17 PM »

Evidently, I can't

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Can I get some opinions on this -- CCSIO Benchmark?

« Last post by apankrat on January 06, 2017, 11:20 AM »

Hi fellas,

I'd like to get your esteemed opinions on my little Xmas side project - https://ccsiobench.com

CCSIO stands for Cold-Cache Sequential IO

It's a little benchmark that tries to find the best way read/write large files at a given location, be it a local volume, a virtual mount or a remote share

You basically tell it "C:\Foo" and it tells you "Max read speed is 2144.3 MBps if using 8 x 2MB buffers in direct IO mode."

The way it works is that it goes through a list of (io-buffer-size, io-buffer-count, io-mode) combinations, measures bulk throughput for each and tallies up the results.

Homepage has exact benchmark description and there's a longer, more technical description over at Fundamentals of Fast Bulk IO page.

The back story of this is that I've been building myself a machine and considered various ways to settle in - with a VM, with a portable USB drive, with a TrueCrypt container, etc. - and, being a mature adult that I am, wanted to check what performance penalties I'd be looking at for each option. I found some benchmarking apps (CrystalDiskMark, HDTune Pro, etc), but all of them required manually changing the buffer size/count between the runs and none of them allowed testing with different IO modes. So as per usual I just did a teenage eye-roll and wrote what I wanted. You know the drill.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Bvckup 2 is in open beta !

« Last post by apankrat on December 15, 2016, 06:03 AM »

wondering if you still considering this idea?
-tomos (December 14, 2016, 04:52 AM)

Yes, it's still on the plans. It's just gets too damn long sometimes to get from an idea to having time to properly execute it. I'm thinking we need another 6 months to get v2 feature complete, which includes adding SMART diagnostics, backup verification and several UI features. After that, we'll see what to do next.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on April 06, 2016, 08:47 AM »

Got a Samsung NVMe 128Gig NVMe stick. Damn. It is sooo tiny.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on April 02, 2016, 05:36 PM »

Drive shows as an SSD, but Vendor, Health, Temperature, and SMART Data are all blank, and serial number is all zeros.
-Stoic Joker (April 02, 2016, 07:33 AM)

Got the log, thanks. The vendor info is trivial to fix, but the rest requires some effort. Apparently NVMe SSDs don't implement regular SMART interface, but rather their own (in a form of Admin Query Log command). What's even more exciting is that it appears to be vendor-specific, so what works for Intel NVMes won't work for Samsungs and vice versa. I'll try and procure a couple of drives to play with and will go from there. Just bear with me.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on April 01, 2016, 04:29 AM »

Did I forget to mention I created a Restore point before reinstalling the drivers
-4wd (March 31, 2016, 10:51 PM)

I believe you did

Got your log, thanks. It is a case of a buggy driver. There's an IOCTL succinctly called IOCTL_USB_GET_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX which returns this bunch of data and in your case the request succeeded, but the data blob was all zeroes. It looks like AMedia devs had a stub in place but forgot to actually implement it. In that blob there's ConnectionStatus field, which too was at 0, which in turn happens to be a valid value for USB 1.1.

In any case, this is now detected and the UI will display current mode as unknown.

BTW, "Diskovery has stopped working" if it has no internet connectivity to send the report.

Whoops. Fixed now and 0.9.0.8 is out -

Adds vendor detection for M4-xxx Crucial drives, ADATA and HGTS drives
Adds a couple of new SSD SMART attributes
Now shows logical volumes that don't have physical extents, e.g. TrueCrypt and RamDisk mounts
Log viewing defaults to Notepad now unless Ctrl is held down, in which case it will use default ".log" viewer

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on March 31, 2016, 04:16 PM »

It's an expected behavior, at least at the moment. Diskovery will ignore volumes that don't have at least one partition extent (and TC volumes don't).

Should it list these? It probably should, shouldn't it?

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on March 31, 2016, 07:41 AM »

Never mind, I thought I'd reinstall the drivers for the motherboard and guess what ... now it also says USB 3.0 $:-\$
-4wd (March 31, 2016, 06:59 AM)

Ah, wait. No, no, no. Damn. Such an excellent chance to fix up the app not to display "USB 1.1", because that made no sense. And now that nice little chance is no more... /whelp

---

In unrelated news - a new version (0.9.0.7) is out. Grab it here.

Improved SSD detection, added vendor detection for Samsung, Transcend, Crucial, Liteon and few others, added descriptions of several SSD-specific SMART attributes.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on March 31, 2016, 02:29 AM »

Had a chance to try it now, really nice work (as usual ).
-Jibz (March 31, 2016, 01:03 AM)

A keyboard, a monitor and a good mono font is all one needs

One thing I noticed; Under Logical volumes there are my usual drives, and one listed as just [Serial]. When I click it, there is no information about what this volume is used for as far as I can tell.

But if I click the physical storage device it is on, and expand the partition table, it says "Windows RE (Recovery Environment)" under Type. I think this information would be helpful in the page for the Logical volume.

Noted. The thing is that "Windows RE (Recovery Environment)" is a partition type.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on March 31, 2016, 02:13 AM »

It's identifying a PNY flash drive as USB 3.0 but saying it's in mode USB 1.1 - (currently writing to it at >18MB/s).

Addendum: This looks like it might be controller related - two different USB 3.0 Host controllers on my computer:
Onboard ASMedia controller using latest ASMedia driver shows USB 1.1.
PCIe Renesas controller using Microsoft Windows 10 drivers shows as USB 3.0.
-4wd (March 30, 2016, 08:59 PM)

Hmm... can I have a log, please? There's an option for that in the app's menu. Just put a little note in the remarks that it's from 4wd.
I'd like to see if it's something that can be parsed out of IOCTL_USB_GET_xxx responses.

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Diskovery

« Last post by apankrat on March 30, 2016, 05:50 PM »

Sent log from within the program...I hope it went where it was supposed to..
-Stoic Joker (March 30, 2016, 03:04 PM)

Got it, thanks. Very useful. I was unaware that there's a separate bus type for NVMe drives. Added now, so your Samsung should show up as SSD.

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