Slashdot Mirror

Windows, no, why would you want to install Windows on a 32GB SSD?
Linux, yes.
Friendly guide: https://www.servethehome.com/g...
Google instructions: https://www.chromium.org/a/chr...

Many flavours of Linux run on it.
Here's the latest Ubuntu https://www.servethehome.com/g...

Not only is the bootloader unlockable, it's also opensource.
You're not restricted in any way with what you can do with the hardware. You just won't get any more automatic Chrome OS updates.
coreboot source: https://chromium.googlesource....
uboot source: https://chromium.googlesource....

Name another laptop manufacturer with entirely open source boot code.

It's not locked, so they can't unlock it. You just need to boot into developer mode and turn off OS verification.

They also tell you how to install Linux
https://www.chromium.org/a/chr...

Here's an guide to install Ubuntu 18
https://www.servethehome.com/g...

The other day you had a submission about a RAID enclosure. You didn't say how many drives, or talk about budget. I used some large ones, 12-16 bay.

Enclosures are very simple devices. It's a metal case, a power supply, connectors, and optionally a SAS expander card. So there's not a WHOLE lot of room for one to be that much better than another.

These are a great value. With the right card and firmware, they handle large drives.
https://www.servethehome.com/s...

If you don't want to buy pre-owned stuff off eBay, check out the Rackable Systems web site, or for a more prestigious brand, Supermicro. Supermicro makes some really nice storage.

If you use RAID 5, make sure it's set to check / re-sync the RAID weekly and your email address is set correctly to be notified of RAID and SMART errors. You want to be notified when one drive starts having errors.

Now on to my question for you, since you seem to have some experience with PICs, and specifically their DS line. I want to build a pretty simple circuit around a dsPIC33FJ128MC802. I wonder where I might be able to get a little help. Maybe you have an idea of who I could talk to.

That part is designed for motor control applications. It has two Quadrature Encoding Interfaces (QEI) which are used to read the position of a rotary encoder. It has several pwm outputs to control brushed DC motors, through a transistor or H bridge. So I want a pretty simple circuit - read my two encoders to find the position of my motors, then send pwm signals through the h-bridge to move them. Hook the encoders to the QEI inputs, the PWM output to the h-bridge, power and ground, and we're good to go, right?

My experience tells me that a naÃve implementation like that works for several milliseconds, until the magic smoke comes out. Some pins need to be connected to ground via a diode to protect against whatever, some others need to be connected to vcc via a resistor because gobblygook, and these other two pins need to be connected to each via a diode and a capacitor to protect it from whatever. That's the stuff I don't know or understand.

If that didn't make sense, let me try an analogy. A transistor allows a larger current to flow based on a much smaller current, so it works as an amplifier. Naively, we could think if you connect headphones across a transistor and a low-power input to the gate, you've just made an audio amplifier. Actual audio amplifiers, the very simple ones, have about 20 parts. The transistor does the amplifying, and 19 other parts make sure the transistor doesn't melt, or otherwise behave very badly. I'm at the stage where when I want to amplify a signal I can select an appropriately rated transistor, but other than controlling gain with a pot I don't know what those other 19 components are for.

Any ideas where I could get some help designing / building a basic circuit around a dsPIC33FJ128MC802? I know I want to connect the rotary encoders to inputs, the h-bridge to pwm out, and a serial or CAN bus interface. All the auxiliary components to make it start up and run without catching fire or cancelling my car insurance is what I need help with.

" I suspect the flops/watt will be a LOT better than the Xeon system you pointed out."

Not according to real-world tests of these chips: https://www.servethehome.com/c...

There's a long-held assumption that anything with the word "ARM" on it must be energy efficient because reasons. Well this isn't a smartphone SoC.

Most manufacturers now make barebones servers specifically designed to cram in GPUs. Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure all offer virtual servers with multiple dedicated GPU's as well. Yes, your run of the mill server is still headless with an ASpeed IPMI but you can get absolutely crazy with GPU server platforms.

High performance shared storage arrays based on SSDs typically need as many PCIe lanes as they can get. In fact, many use PCIe switches to allow more devices to be connected. See this article for an example of where high performance storage is going.

Also quite a few lanes need to be dedicated to high speed network adapters. Modern servers often have at least 2 NICs that run anywhere from 10 GBps up to 100 GBps each.

The other thing high numbers of lanes is used for is compute servers with large number of GPUs to provide high floating point performance (typically using GPUs optimized for floating point use - not quite the same as consumer GPUs used for graphics.)

Yes, there are PCIe cards with 4 m.2 slots (e.g. https://www.servethehome.com/the-dell-4x-m-2-pcie-x16-version-of-the-hp-z-turbo-quad-pro/).
And there are plenty of rack servers with internal PCIe switches for up to 24 U.2 (2.5") devices.

By the way, that session dump can cost several GB of write operations a day. If you have an SSD, this alone could be shaving months or years off it's operation time.

https://www.servethehome.com/f...

http://www.servethehome.com/in...

http://hackaday.com/2010/03/31...

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/14...

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/18...

http://www.extremetech.com/com...

https://www.avforums.com/threa...

Most any WiFi firmware artificially limits the radio -> http://www.qsl.net/kb9mwr/proj...

http://www.ilounge.com/index.p...

Whoa, your car has hidden features? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Extra cores on your CPU? No way! http://www.bit-tech.net/hardwa...

Cripple phone features? Oh noes! https://www.techdirt.com/artic... https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

More than one HAM radio have been found to be subject to software tweaking for improvements in scan speed and frequencies covered.-> https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Got a RAID card? Some of them can be crossflashed to gain features BTW. Or you can pay thousands to the manufacturer for some features (*cough*PERC*cough*) http://www.servethehome.com/ib...

Gains can be had by flashing custom firmware to your DVD\BD RW drives but I didn't feel like spending any time past a cursory search to find this. http://binflash.cdfreaks.com/ http://www.rpc1.org/viewtopic.... http://dvrflash.rpc1.org/

Firmware being used in external HDD has also been found to be crippled vs a standard drive, this didn't used to always be the case....

Here's one that's just an upgrade with features the manufacturer didn't include (see also ANY Jailbreaking post ever)

http://lifehacker.com/find-out...
http://lifehacker.com/5942229/...
http://www.digitaltrends.com/p...

Oh look, your camera now supports RAW? Thought that was only for pro cameras not P&S pocket models...

I could go on and on with examples but suffice it to say yeah it DOES happen and it happens fairly often. It happens most often with system that have a full OS, often Linux, where a firmware flash can give you all sorts of features (OpenWRT or Tomato anyone?) but it also happens in cameras, lab bench tools, TVs, stereos, and just about anything else that is driven by software. Want more turbo boost in your car? Software baby! Want that printer to register an empty toner cartridge sooner? No problem!

Tired now, think I've made my point?

According to this: http://www.servethehome.com/as... we can conclude that the 10GE silicon is on the motherboard.

The peak transfer rate for the mini-SAS interface is 3Gbs (3 Gigabits, not bytes, per second) this is an absolute maximum of 375 MB/sec.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Have a look at this review, for example.

Each mini-SAS cable provides four lanes of SAS (3 Gbit/s), SAS2 (6 Gbit/s), or SAS3 (12 Gbit/s), depending on the HBA in use. That equates to 12 Gbit/s, 24 Gbit/s or 48 Gbit/s per cable. Also, with SAS2 being out since 2009, it's pretty hard to even find a SAS1 card anymore.

People like to go around chanting "We're #1!"

Soon the winner-takes-all market dynamics turns #1 into an 800lb gorilla, which does what gorillas do, until their once-proud fan base begins to feel the grip tighten to eye-popping intensity, whereupon the parade degenerates into a comic spectacle from the Ministry of Silly Walks.

The parade veterans dress in uncool loose shorts forever after, and express a lot less enthusiasm about chanting "We're #1!" but every generation has to learn for itself, so the cycle repeats.

I've come to realize that loyalty is a tricky business. If one puts any stock in the maxim that absolute power corrupts absolutely, it's hard not to view loyalty as sowing the seeds of destruction. I'm pretty happy in most markets if I can align myself with a viable #2, and almost ecstatic if I can align myself with a viable #3 (with any hope of midterm survival). In the early days of ATI/Nvidia I tended to buy Matrox. Matrox had fewer frames, but sharper pixels. Of course, that couldn't last.

I used to support AMD for the same reason. But now we have AMD Opteron 3200 Series [slashcode mdash fuckup] Where did they go?. You can't even read an AMD press release with any confidence the product exists. There are limits to rooting for the underdog. I continue to prefer OpenCL even through CUDA probably has an edge in stability. Whatever happens to AMD, I hope OpenCL doesn't end up owned by Oracle.

Chrome is now better than FF for many tasks. But I continue to use FF because the day FF dies off, Chrome will immediately begin to suck donkey balls where it suits Google. Google+ will be bundled into the browser experience in much the same way the IE was bundled into Windows. No, your honour, we can't remove Google+. It's a design pillar.

Samsung so far seems to have relative immunity to whatever got into the Sony water supply. Phones will remain a contested space for a while yet. The Koreans as a culture seem less attracted to DRM and more attracted to price fixing.

We'd all be a lot better off with less bandwagon effect. When I imagine the movie made about Jobs in the style of Gandhi, my version would probably begin with the line "As far back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be the band leader."

you can buy a 20 or 24 bay case for around $300-$400 US, e.g. Norco RPC-4020 or RPC-4224. Takes up to a full size EEB 12"x13" motherboard and 20 or 24 3.5" hot-swap SAS/SATA drives. Can take a standard power supply or there are redundant dual power supplies available.

http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=RPC-4020
http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=RPC-4224

The 24 port version has a nice option to replace the internal fan bracket (which supports 4 x 80mm fans) with a bracket that supports 3 x 120mm fans. Much quieter for a home environment. Dunno if the RPC-4020 has a similar option. You *WILL* want to replace all of the supplied fans with third-party silent fans. http://www.silentpcreview.com/ is a good place to start researching this.

Even if you're only planning to have 10 or less drives right now, the extra bays are useful if/when you need to replace or upgrade existing drives. You won't have to juggle drives in and out of bays just to replace them. or have a drive hanging outside the case for a few hours while the data is copied.

For extra SATA ports, there are several models of LSI 9211 and similar HBA adaptors providing SAS/SATA 6Gpbs, PCI-e 8x slot. RRP is around $350 for 8 port models but you can find them cheaper on ebay, and several manufacturers (e.g. the IBM M1015) have significantly cheaper rebadged models. A SAS card allows you to use either or both SAS and SATA drives, and also allows you to use SAS expanders (to attach more drives to the one card - SATA has something similar called "port multipliers" but it's a crappy substitute only good for destroying your data). Unless you don't have enough PCI-e 8x slots in your m/b, though, you're better off just buying more 8 port cards.

They're just "dumb" HBAs offering only RAID-0, RAID-1, and JBOD....but that's exactly what you want for software raid or btrfs or ZFS so why pay extra for RAID-5 in the card that you're never going to use.

The LSI 1068 based cards are even cheaper, but they only support SAS/SATA 3Gbps. Doesn't matter much for current hard disks, but you'll need a few 6Gbps ports on the motherboard if you want to use SSD drives (e.g. for caching.)

here's a good starting point: http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10

see also http://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?19-LSI-RAID-Controller-HBA-Equivalency-Mapping

For the file system, I very strongly recommend ZFS On Linux (the native kernel implementation, not the ZFS-Fuse module). http://zfsonlinux.org/ - gives you raid-like features, disk/volume management, compression, de-duping, snapshots, ssd caching and more. all data is checksummed too so it can detect errors (and automatically repair them from redundant info on the RAID1/5-like volumes).

The Ubuntu PPA compiles easily on debian (you only have to change one dependancy from zfs-grub to grub in the debian/control file) - it's about 10 minutes work, and most of that is waiting for the packages to compile.

ZFS will give you software-raid like capabilities - superior equivs to RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5/6 and combinations of them, plus multiple optional hot and cold spares. "superior" because the redundancy is on the file/data level, not at the block level, and each block of each file is checksummed. Plus you can use one or more fast devices like an SSD for automatic read caching of frequently access data (ZFS cache or L2ARC), and for a write-intent log (ZFS ZIL) for buffering random-writes to an SSD before writing them to the main drives. This ZIL eliminates the final advantage that hardware raid cards had

I am currently doing something similar. I decided to go with a sas controller. http://www.servethehome.com/intel-sasuc8i-lsi-lsi-sas3081er-lsi-1068e-based-raid-controller-review/ this will get me 8 drives now, plus ability to add in the sas expander and easily go to 24 drives and more. Im in a case that can do 8 internal drives (plus a 4 in 3 if i choose) for now, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146075 and will probably move to a norco case when i need to expand. something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219038 as far as fileformats, i say go with what works for you. handbrake and mkv do well for me. server software, i am currently trying to decide between ubuntu/centos or freenas. freenas will let me run from a flashdrive, the others will be easy to do bittorrent, LAMP stack, and run GUI and use file server to actually play movies to the tv. went with a gigabyte mobo and an i3, so it can decode even a 10gb movie and keep up on the bitrate just fine. it mostly just comes down to personal choice at this point, both would work well. just please consider staying away from the windows home server stuff, to many quirks for me. mobo/cpu ram. is a matter of choice. a 6 core phenom in a server chassis in the garage with proper ventilation should do just fine. or an i3/i5. although a friend of mine has windows 7 on computer near his tv, and he says handbrake refuses to work with the i3. but it worked fine when i had it with ubuntu ymmv. at that point it is just a matter how much do you want to spend, how long to wait for the recodes. unles you wanted to spend with abandon, then maybe a supermicro mobo with ipmi or something like a dell and a DRAC card "might" be worth it, since it might live in a closet or garage.

I've had Maxtor drives (pre-Seagate buyout) that lasted for many years. I've seen a few fail, but no more often than most other drives.

Seagate is crap, always has been. Almost every single Seagate I've owned has had problems ranging from stiction to bad sectors to sudden death.

Toshiba is another brand I'll stay far away from. Both Toshiba drives I've ever owned died in less than one year without any warning signs and Toshiba's customer service wasn't very helpful about getting them replaced. Toshiba, in general, produces some of the worst products I've ever seen with overheating laptops and failing consumer appliances (ie microwave ovens, televisions, VCRs).

Western Digital drives are pretty good. I've owned several of them and they all lasted at least five years without issue.

Hitachi drives are at least as good as the WD drives and can usually be expected to work fine for at least five years.

Right now, I would say Samsung makes the best hard drives on the market. Long lasting and reliable. In fact, I still have a nine year old Spinpoint that is just now starting to exhibit the "whine of death", but is still working.

I found this article to be interesting. It's by no means scientific, but it does give an idea of how happy customers of the different hard drive brands are with their purchases.