I recently purchased an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD 240GB to perform some PostgreSQL DB performance profiling on a large (80GB) database for one of my clients. I paid a premium of $600 for only 240GB purely because I wanted an SSD that does > 520GB/s read/write. To ensure I do indeed attain those speeds, I ensured my Gigabyte motherboard supported SATA3 at 6Gbps. It is no use connecting an SSD that does > 300MB/s to a SATA2 port, as SATA2 is limited to 3Gbps which translates to 300MB/s if you keep in mind 20% overhead is spent on the 8b/10b encoding scheme.

It follows that I was shocked to learn that I only managed to get 340MB/s read and 240MB/s write from the SSD connected to the onboard SATA3 port, with a Core i7 950 CPU. That is the same than an entry level SSD, which would have cost a third of the price!

After some troubleshooting I found this article. It turns out the onboard SATA3 ports on my Gigabyte X58A-UD3R are driven by a Marvell 9128 controller, which - to put it elegantly - sucks. This controller sits on a PCIe 1x bus as far as I gathered. PCIe 1x has a bandwidth of 5Gbps, which translates to 400MB/s. In real life, the effective transfer rates were much lower.

I recently had another instance where mobile phones (Android) refused to connect to an Exchange 2003 server. Using https://www.testexchangeconnectivity.com/, it stopped at

The help at Microsoft was misleading because I have already followed those steps. In this case, the issue was resolved by removing the Host Header Value from the Default Web Site in IIS:

I recently had to find out whether a very large text file had any lines where the length (character count) of each line differed, as they needed to be identical. This will help:

cat file.txt | awk '{gsub(/[ \t]+$/,""); print length($0)}' | sort -u

I have read countless articles where people tell you how bad it is to:

• Use dictionary words in combination with symbols - like Helicopter123
• Phrases with dictionary words - like I Like To Eat Spunk
• Dictionary words with letters replaced by symbols - like P@ssw0rd
• Part of your personal details mangled with other characters - like Girls081975
• Not use all of the character classes lower, upper, digits and symbols - like some123
• Using repeats of constructs - like NotMyPassword!NotMyPassword

Their reasonings are: