Frozen Industries » hardware

failed hard drives

Nick — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 05:17:17 +0000

Keeping track of my drive failures, since April 2011.

Age (Months)	Purchased	Died	Model
18	2010-04	2011-10	1.5 TB Western Digital Green 64MB Cache 5400RPM
15	2010-04	2011-07	1.5 TB Western Digital Green 64MB Cache 5400RPM
26	2009-02	2011-04	1 TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B 16MB Cache 7200RPM

Find the Model Number of Your DVD Burner in Linux

Nick — Tue, 15 May 2007 03:32:21 +0000

$ cdrdao drive-info /dev/scd0

Cdrdao version 1.2.2 – (C) Andreas Mueller
SCSI interface library – (C) Joerg Schilling
Paranoia DAE library – (C) Monty

Check http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/drives.html#dt for current driver tables.

Using libscg version ‘ubuntu-0.8ubuntu1′

/dev/cdrw: LITE-ON DVDRW LH-20A1S Rev: 9L02
Using driver: Generic SCSI-3/MMC – Version 2.0 (options 0×0000)

Maximum reading speed: 8467 kB/s
Current reading speed: 8467 kB/s
Maximum writing speed: 8467 kB/s
Current writing speed: 8467 kB/s
BurnProof supported: yes
JustLink supported: no
JustSpeed supported: yes

The Coolest Piece of New Hardware at CeBIT 2007

Nick — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:18:18 +0000

Maybe I like it because it’s in my price range (unlike that 108″ LCD they keep showing off), but the new Antec Sonata III (pic) case looks like a stealth fighter compared to my aging Sonata I. I’ve grown tired of my current case, but it is quiet. This may get me to upgrade. Or I’ll go with the Antec Nine Hundred.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0GHz Socket AM2 Processor

Nick — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:11:07 +0000

Sweet.

My Life in Processors

Nick — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 06:12:31 +0000

Here’s my history of processors I’ve owned in my primary computer. This does not count second, third, or fourth computers, laptops, servers, media, or Seti/Distributed machines. Only computers which were used as my primary machine count.

IBM 486SLC2 66 MHz
Intel Pentium 166 MHz
Intel Pentium 2 266 MHz
Intel Celeron 300A 300 MHz @ 450 MHz
AMD Athlon 500 MHz
AMD Athlon 1000 MHz
AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1733 MHz
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1833 MHz
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0 GHz
AMD Opteron 165 1.8 GHz @ 2.2 GHz
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 GHz @ 3.0 GHz

Build a Usable Computer from Newegg for $375

Nick — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 20:06:02 +0000

Creating a system guide appears to be popular these days, with my favorite guides coming from Ars Technica, The Tech Report, and Anandtech. I thought I’d throw another guide on the net with the main focus being price, with usability and upgradability coming in a close second. Several notes about this guide, everything is from Newegg, because they have a great reputation and ship quickly. No refurbished/open box items are considered, and I have not actually build this machine, these are just parts which look like they would work well together.

Motherboard/Video/Sound/Network: ECS C51GM-M Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard – $60
Processor/Heatsink/Fan: AMD Sempron 64 2800+ Manila 1600MHz HT Socket AM2 Processor Model SDA2800CNBOX – Retail – $50
Memory: OCZ Value Series 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5400) Unbuffered System Memory Model OCZ26671024V – $69 (after $8 MIR)
Hard Drive: HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722516DLA380 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 8 MB Cache Hard Drive (3 Year Warranty) – $54
Optical Drive: NEC 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model ND-3550A – Retail – $36 (same price as OEM w/shipping)
Case/Power Supply: Antec NSK 4400 Black/Silver 0.8mm cold-rolled steel construction ATX Mini Tower Computer Case 380W Power Supply – $72

Total: $349 + $26 Shipping = $375 ( -$8 mail in rebate)

(read more below the fold to see the reasoning behind my choices)

Motherboard

This is the rug which really ties the system together. With integrated video, sound, and networking the system is ready to go. With 1x PCIe x16 and 2 PCI slots, these can all be upgraded at a future time. The AM2 socket and DDR2 memory is the latest AMD has to offer and will be around a while, unlike Socket A, 754, and 939, which has already been announced as discontinued. The AM2 socket is also nice in that it will accept processors from AMD’s lowest priced single core Sempron to high end dual core Althlon FX. This kind of flexibility is new with the new socket, and should be exploited. Several years from now, drop in a reasonably price Athlon X2 5200+ and have a whole new class of system.This

motherboard represents the lowest price AM2 socket of an NVIDIA chipset available at Newegg. For around $20 more, there are nicer motherboards to choose from, which offer the 6150 chipset, gigabit ethernet, and 4 dimm slots instead of two.

Processor

The Sempron 64 2800+ represents the lowest priced socket AM2 processor available. If there is extra money available for your system, upgrade this first. While it is an adequate processor, another $100 will get you a dual core Athlon X2 3600+, which is in an entirely different league of speed. Watch for dual core processor to continue dropping in price as they compete against Intel.

Memory

Memory choice here is flexible. I picked 1 GB of DDR2 667 for price and upgradablitiy . It is slighly less expensive than DDR2 800, and leaves one DIMM slot open, allowing for a future upgrade of a DIMM without needing to discard any current memory. Two DIMMs can substituted for slightly faster system speed at the same price, but there will be no free slots afterwards.

Hard Drive

Newegg has a nicely spec’d 160 GB SATA drive for a mere $54 (plus $6 shipping). For a few dollars more, pick your favorite brand of hard drive. Just remember to backup, because they all die eventually. While it is running, however, you’ll get SATA 3.0 Gbps transfers and 8 MB Cache, which make this a speedy economy drive. For less than double the price, the Seagate 7200.10 320 GB drive can be found on Newegg, which doubles the space, cache, and add the “perpendicular recording” buzzword to your system.

Optical Drive

I have several NEC 35xx series DVD burners, and they work well. It would be a great drive at twice the price.

Case/Power Supply

The power supply is a crucial part of any system, and is often overlooked. Lockups caused by bad power supplies are more than annoying, they’re almost impossible to troubleshoot. This is especially true if the system locks only once a week or month. At the worst, a bad power supply could permanently damage components. Antec has a great reputation for power supplies and cases, and this combination gives two great pieces at a price difficult to match for the same quality.

Neverending Hardware Issues when Creating a Backup Server

Nick — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 04:00:15 +0000

My first attempt at creating a backup server left me with a dead motherboard. I replaced the motherboard with an old but reliable socket A EPoX board I had been using in my HTPC. After booting and changing eth0 to eth1 in my network config, the server was ready to go. I started the backup and everything looked good. It ran overnight and got about 500 GB off the server. I then started copying about 250 GB of data from the server to another computer. After a couple hours of this, my server went offline, and I was left sitting at work wondering why. I was hoping for a power outage, but when I arrived back at home, I discovered only the networking on the file server had gone out, leaving thousands of these lines in dmesg:

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out

I’m not yet sure why my network card stopped working, Google or the Ubuntu forums should help, or I could just refer back to my pre-rma’d motherboard and remember that the Marvell skge network controller died on that motherboard completely, and move to other built in network card on the mobo, by NVIDIA. If all that fails, dropping some money on a quality Intel NIC will solve the problem. Unless the problem exists in my switch.

Update: Switching the the integrated NVIDIA network interface appears to have fixed this issue. Hooray for workarounds.

Another Dead Motherboard

Nick — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:30:49 +0000

It appears that my 1 GHz Athlon mobo died in the middle of building a backup server. This happened at the end of the entire build, while I was performing my first backup, and is going to force me to tear apart 3 machines in order to have working HTPC and Backup computers without buying anything extra. Looks like I’ll have an extra Antec Overture case with 380w PS. I’ll sell if anyone wants to make me a reasonable offer.

X2 Price Drops

Nick — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:23:20 +0000

Today AMD cut the prices of most all their consumer CPUs. The previous low-price leader went from $300 to $160 overnight, which is great for when I want a faster computer, but for now, I’m fine. My Opty 165 running @2.2 GHz is doing great, no stability or heat issues (actually ran the entire last month without the CPU fan because I forgot to plug it in), and it is still around the price I paid for it. If the quad cores come out before 2007 like the rumors say, that will be my next upgrade.

Nick Joins the Dual Core Crowd

Nick — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 04:38:14 +0000

Received my Opteron 165 and Scythe Ninja heatsink last night. It didn’t take long before my system was torn apart and the new parts were installed. Installation was straigtforward, but damn, that heatsink should not be advertising that it has easy to use clips.

So is there an improvement moving from a single-core 2.0 GHz chip to a dual core 1.8? I definitely saw it. The entire system feels smoother, and I can continue to use my system while performing heavy tasks. I’m sure I’d see even more improvements if I were compiling stuff in Gentoo, but for now, the ability to continue working as normal while playing with 4 GB ISO images, running Qemu, and burning stuff, makes it a great upgrade.

Next up in the performance upgrade pipeline is some DDR500 memory. With some simple overclocking this CPU can run like an FX60!