Hardware

Don’t buy a “desktop replacement” laptop

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Saving money , , , , , , ,

I found this oldie but goodie Lifehacker article: When two computers are cheaper than one. It advocates buying a cheap laptop and building a desktop PC to meet your computing needs.

I think it makes a lot of sense. A few weeks ago, a coworker asked me what the most I would be willing to pay for a laptop. I hesitated, thought for a while, and said you might be able to convince me to spend $600. “Wow,” he said. “I’m considering a $3,500 laptop.”

I wouldn’t. Read more

The wrong way to reboot a server

Dave Farquhar Hardware, War Stories , ,

In my day, I did plenty of hardware maintenance in the field. In fact, the only time one of my bosses ever saw me at work, I was swapping out failed memory in a server.

“How’d you know it needed to be done?” he asked.

“It told me.” That’s why I always loved HP Proliant servers. My boss looked confused at my answer but didn’t ask me to elaborate.

But not all of my field maintenance always went quite so smoothly. Read more

HP splits in two.

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , ,

Don’t you feel like trying something new
Don’t you feel like breaking out
Or breaking us in two
You don’t do the things that I do
You want to do things I can’t do
Always something breaking us in two –Joe Jackson

After years of buying up companies, HP is splitting up. While that’s probably more prudent that exiting the desktop PC business, which is another idea they flirted with in the past, it’s anyone’s guess how this is going to work out.

But it’s what all the cool kids are doing, so it’s what the investors want, and that means HP is going to do it. Read more

What to do when you have more open slots than drive bays

Dave Farquhar Hardware

Every once in a while you find something you weren’t looking for, then you wonder why you never thought of it before. That’s what I thought when I saw the Kingwin 2-Bay PCI adapter. It’s a bracket that slides into a couple of empty slots and gives you space to mount a pair of 2.5″ hard drives or SSDs.

It’s brilliant because almost any computer these days has empty slots because all of the essential stuff that used to be on plug-in boards comes integrated onto the motherboard these days. And if you put a micro ATX motherboard into a full ATX case like I often do, you have at least two empty slots that you couldn’t use even if you wanted to.

This is a brilliant way to get a couple of additional drive bays in a desktop computer, so I highly recommend it.

Someone else’s opinion on the best SSDs

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

Every once in a while I get a question about what SSD I recommend, since I’ve been buying them a long time. I always recommend the best price you can get on someone who makes their own memory chips, which means the cheapest drive you can get from Micron/Crucial, Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, or Sandisk.

Looks like someone else, in that same vein, recommends the Crucial MX100. The explanation why is good reading.

The clear and present danger lurking at the edge of your home network

Dave Farquhar DD-WRT, Hardware, security, Servers and Networking

In 2003, Dan Geer called the combination of Microsoft’s market dominance and the flimsy security of its products a threat to national security.

Today, he’s calling the security holes in consumer routers a threat to critical infrastructure.

These two things are related in more ways than being utterances from the same person. These routers were designed to protect flimsy PCs from the horrors lurking on the Internet. In 2003, they were arguably adequate. But since 2003, Microsoft operating systems have improved dramatically from a security standpoint while routers have stood still. Many of them are still running on the same outdated Linux kernels and userspaces, just on newer, faster hardware. These routers are now less secure than the computers they are supposed to protect. This isn’t a knock on Linux; Linux has improved in the last 11 years too, but router makers generally haven’t incorporated those improvements. So these routers are easy to attack, easy to use to build botnets, and the user will never be the wiser since they keep the devices until they break. The only good news here is that many of them break after a year or two, and that’s supposed to be bad news.

Sadly, these problems are all solvable.

Read more

PCs are dead! Tablets are hot! Tablets are dead! PCs are hot!

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , ,

In a shocking turn of events, PCs are now outselling tablets. Last year it was the opposite. What’s going on?

Priorities, that’s all. It’s the cycle of events in electronics. It’s happened before and it’s going to happen again as the market matures. Read more

Throttling the Raspberry Pi

Dave Farquhar Hardware , ,

If you run the Raspberry Pi as a small server, you may want to throttle the CPU when it’s not under load to save energy. Throttling the Raspberry Pi is easy and only requires changing a few settings in /boot/config.txt.

Here’s what I did with mine.

Read more

Hard drive longevity and you (or your business)

Dave Farquhar Hardware

I can’t believe I’ve never written about the Backblaze hard drive longevity study, but apparently I haven’t. At work we’re running up against the limitations of hard drives, so it’s good to know this kind of stuff.

Here’s what you need to know: Hard drives fail very early or very late. If a drive lasts more than a few days–which is why burning in new equipment is important–only 5% of them fail in their first 18 months. Then, for the next 18 months, only 1.5% fail. Golden years! At age 3, though, failure rates jump to 11.8% and stay there. So keeping hard drives much longer than 4 years is generally asking for trouble. 78% of drives live to age 4, but at that age the annual failure rate is very high.

This is Backblaze’s experience under specific and somewhat peculiar conditions, but it’s not far off at all from what I’ve observed.

Keep in mind this is the average. Every maker has made incredibly bad drives, and all of them who are left have made drives better than the average too. I don’t know why they go on hot and cold streaks, but they do, and they always have. That’s why some people think any given brand of drives are the best and others think the same brand are junk. With a little luck, you can buy one brand of drive and have all of them be spectacular, or with a little bad luck, buy different models of the same brand and have them all fail a day after the warranty expires. Read more

The difference an SSD makes

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , ,

Back in the spring I bought a used computer. My wife wanted one, and while I probably could have cobbled something together for her, I didn’t have any extra Windows 7 licenses. So I bought a home-built Pentium D-based machine with Windows 7 on it from an estate sale for $70. The Windows license is worth that, so it was like getting the hardware for free.

When I got the hardware home to really examine it, it turned out not to be quite as nice as I initially thought. It was a fairly early Socket 775 board, so it used DDR RAM and had an AGP slot, limiting its upgrade options. The system ran OK, but not great, and it was loud.

The hard drive was a 160 GB Western Digital IDE drive built in 2003. That’s an impressive run, but a drive that old isn’t a good choice for everyday use. It’s at the end of its life expectancy and it’s not going to be fast. This weekend I got around to replacing it with an SSD. Read more