Top 10 List of Week 09

1. BIOS
   I’ve heard the term BIOS all my life, but this is the first time I actually learned what it is. This page nicely explains what’s the uses of BIOS and how it works. It might be boring and texty, but it works well and it works pretty well.

2. Apa itu UEFI
   A page about what UEFI is, which is one of the important BIOS(es) in every computer. This page covers what’s important about UEFI. I rarely open Indonesian links (especially because my Google search results are set to English) so this is my first one. Not very surprisingly it’s more easy to understand, obviously because of the language lol.

3. What is systemd?
   What I learned from this page is that systemd is an initialization system and service manager for Linux, or something. I’ve looked at many pages about systemd and all of them seemed so complicated, until I found this page. It has easy enough explanation to understand and also additional information I need to know about system md.

4. systemd Tips and Tricks
   Following the previous link, this one is about some important and handy tips and tricks about systemd. I got this link from a friend, and needless to say this is one of my absolute fave links for this week because of how to the point it is. It also provides a cheatsheet in picture format! I always like handy cheatsheets.

5. What to Do When Your Hard Drive Fails
   When I saw the hard disk failure rate graph in this week’s OS slide, I had no idea what it is even about. Turns out it’s a pretty big thing and I need to brace myself for the day my hard disk fails (hope this will never happen). Anyway this nice page is just like any other computer tutorial page out there, explaining what to do. Other than that, it also explains how and why it can happen, which apparently is because the OS might be damaged.

6. 2021 Q1 Hard Drive Failure Rates
   Turns out failing hard drives is a very common and big thing. How I never knew before I don’t really know, but this page is a pretty wild ride since I never expected it to be this serious. What I find interesting (and also new) is the fact that how HDD is compared to SSD and it seems SSD is better, as in there are MUCH less SSDs failing than HDDs. Which, yes, I agree very much.

7. What is network-attached storage?
   One of the storage management systems mentioned in the OS slide is network-attached storage or shortened as NAS. I learned from this page is that NAS gives networks a single access point for storage. I also learend that the files transffered on NAS can be formatted into 3 options, which are NFS (Network File System), Server Message Blocks (SMB), and Apple Filling Protocol (AFP). This page explains about the hardware, software, and protocols for NAS, along with illustrations.

8. What a slacker learned from building Linux from Scratch…
   I was insane tired and failing on doing LFS, so I looked up for experiences of people doing LFS. Then there’s this forum post of some dude telling their (a slacker’s) experience. The writer said that yes, it can be tiring for a slacker, but it’s useful if I want to learn about GNU/Linux. In the future, I might be more serious about Linux to be like this slacker.

9. RAID
   Finally, a Geeks for Geeks link! This time it’s about RAID, or Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks. I learnt from here that RAID is a technique to use a combination of multiple disks (instead of just one) to increase performace or data redundancy. There’re examples and explanations as of why this technique works, too, classic GFG style.

10. All the common RAID levels explained easily by an idiot
    A (surprisingly) entertaning computer science video! What a surprise. Apparantly RAID has many, many levels and my head got hot for a bit when I thought I have to learn all of them one by one. This video helped me though, in a pretty nice way. The youtuber seems interested and eager enough to teach the viewers, and the examples and illustration is pretty nice. Turns out what’s different of all of them is how the disks are handled.