Emmanuel Computer Consulting, L.L.C. » Hardware

Anandtech Begins a Major Upgrade Project

Hescominsoon — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:01:16 +0000

They are jumping right into virtualization. Their biggest concern is they are hitting the limits of their colos power envelope before they start getting charged. They are going to reduce their server footprint by about half and hopefully save some power as well. I’ll be tracking this however feel free to watch form Anandtech directly.

AnandTech 2010 Server Upgrade: The CPUs – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

What to do with a major server donation

Hescominsoon — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 02:33:43 +0000

You can read about the donation here. I have three IBM x335′s on the way with dual p-4 xeon 2.8 ghz cpu’s, dual 36 gig 10k rpm SCSI drives with hardware raid 1, 4 gigs of ram, all the cables needed including ILO, and rails. All for the cost of shipping. Why am I posting about it here? I run the network at my church. This will be the first time I can start something like this from the ground up and document what I do, how I do it, and what hardware and software I do it with. I will also be able to show just how much free software can do and still integrate with an established Active Directory layout as well. It’s something for other potential NPO clients to be able to see what some creative thinking can accomplish for little or no cost…:) Stay tuned I’ve created a whole new category for this..:)

Power Management: Can Windows Mange power better now? Are new low power CPUs better?

Hescominsoon — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:40:03 +0000

5-10 years ago the answer was…yes to the first question as the second one didn’t apply. As I have been watching the evolution of hardware over the years things of course are more complex. In a nutshell going with a low power server(or maybe a desktop CPU for workstation users) actually harms performance more than any increased power. In fact with the newest CPU’s from Intel(AMD is a bit behind) running Windows in the “Balanced” power profile actually HURTS both power savings and significantly inhibits overall performance. One the desktop the roles are a bit reversed…the absolute power savings most likely would be worth the performance hit IF you aren’t worried about complex, real world tasks(like real time rendering, financial analysis..etc etc etc)).

Software can’t fix badly designed hardware

Hescominsoon — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:24:45 +0000

Apple for a while built great looking products that worked very well. Now that they have a rabid fan base their exterior beauty is hiding some nasty shortcomings. I remember a company that continues to get somewhat humbled by this kind of behavior in the past… Microsoft. For once I think Apple need to follow Microsoft.

Apple Support Confirms Software Won’t Fix iPhone 4 Antenna – Amazingly it won’t fix AT&T’s network, either – dslreports.com.

Apple shows it arrogance once again.

Hescominsoon — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:16:21 +0000

Apple is acting like Microsoft did before they got hit with all of their security bugs. I bet Apple is on it’s way down to. Unfortunately Apple’s arrogance will make BSD look bad when it’s Apple’s mis configurations that are to blame not the underlying OS.

SemiAccurate :: Apple’s respone to iPhone 4 antenna problems is unacceptable.

Faulty Capacitors: See, They Knew! – The Market Ticker ®

Hescominsoon — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 00:03:44 +0000

I had forgotten about this story until my wife told me she is now having to replace the caps on optiplexes because of this issue. I wrote it off then until i saw this post from Dell where they say the charge3s in the lawsuit are settled because all of their affected clients were “fixed”. Yeah right. My wife’s employer now has machines dropping about one a week due to this issue. I have advised her to get her employer’s higher-up including legal involved in this. Of course if the charges in this article is true then Dell(and most likely others) are in serious trouble. Here’s a link to a story on background on the whole mess.

Faulty Capacitors: See, They Knew! – The Market Ticker ®.

PERC S300 – Another FAKERAID card

Hescominsoon — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 12:20:05 +0000

PERC S300 – can it be made to work?.

I saw this on the Dell Linux mailing list. I did a bit of research and found this is a windows only FAKERAID product. What I mean by FAKERAID is the card fakes like it is a raid card but all of the work is done on the cpu. Because of this the driver is proprietary and in this case windows only. If you want a RAID card make sure it is really a hardware raid card. If you can’t spend that kind of money use the Linux built in RAID which is much more efficient than any FAKERAID. Windows also has software raid that’s quite a bit more efficient than this FAKERAID. If you read the pdf you’ll see that htis is actually a DESKTOP product(the h55 is a desktop chipset form Intel) so it really has no business in servers. PDF detailing the S Series is here.

Stay away from the HP ePrint series

Hescominsoon — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:25:26 +0000

Want to see those ink cartridges really disappear? Buy one of these printers. They’ll find your router..hook to the internet and then get “targeted” advertising sent to the printer which it will then print out.

HP’s ePrint printers, some of which will become available next month, are connected to the user’s home router, which means they will have an IP address. IP addresses can be used to identify an approximate area where the Web-connected device is located, opening the potential for targeted advertisements based on location.Ads can also be targeted based on a user’s behavior as well as the content, said Vyomesh Joshi, head of the HP’s Imaging and Printing Group. So if you visit a porn site we guess your printer will start spewing out hard copies for all to see.HP admits there needs to be rules on privacy. However there also needs to be rules for who pays for its expensive printer ink as it prints out adverts I don’t want on a printer I paid for. It is hard to see any company or individual going for this and we think that HP really needs its head examined.

via HP to turn your printer into an advertising machine – And you will pay for the expensive ink | TechEye.

SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Hescominsoon — Mon, 31 May 2010 00:02:59 +0000

SSD’s are so fast that if you use more than one SSD(which you have to for ANY RAID) you may just hit a wall due to the RAID controllers not being fast enough to keep up. What’s interesting is at one point they went to purely software RAID and saw the kind of speed increases they knew they should have been seeing. RAID cards used to be a bottleneck but they got much much faster than any magnetic drive or groups of magnetic drives could get to…now they are once again the bottleneck. I wonder how long it’s going to take for the RAID card manufacturers to catch up?

Here’s a three part article about SSD’s from an enterprise point of view. It’s a good series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. The author has other articles as well here, here, here.

SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

Hescominsoon — Sun, 30 May 2010 22:34:01 +0000

The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ – AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News.

I don’t know why I didn’t blog this last year. It’s becoming more and more relevant though as folks start diving into SSD’s without realizing the major differences between SSD’s and mechanical hard disks.