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Tempted by an ultrabook

My Macbook Pro dates back to 2006... it was the first generation of Macbook to feature an Intel CPU. It still works well, but since it's based on an Intel Core Duo CPU, which doesn't support 64-bit instructions, Apple has decided to drop support from Mac OS X Lion... not too nice for people who supported Apple when it went from IBM G5 CPUs over to Intel.

So to make a long story short, I am thinking of exchanging my laptop for a new one. I am quite tempted by an Ultrabook, but I'd rather wait for an Ivy Bridge ultrabook, so I'll have to wait a few month still.

Ivy Bridge has a slightly improved version of Intel's integrated graphics, so I'm hoping it will be at least somewhat capable graphically.

We'll see in a few weeks what interesting machines come out.

/hardware | Posted at 20:55 | permanent link

The HP Proliant Microserver

I have mentioned before the HP Proliant Microserver, about which one can find information here.

I have purchased one of those and I am not successfully running it under FreeBSD 9.0 as a server on my LAN. Quite useful, quite well built, I am fairly pleased with my purchase! This must be from the old Compaq crew at HP, they've always made good servers :-) (Hey, how long has it been since Mary McDowell has left HP? Must be getting close to 10 years now... one of my preferred Compaq executives! My my, how time flies!)

/hardware | Posted at 21:47 | permanent link

A microserver for FreeNAS

Food for thought: I've been thinking of rolling my own FreeBSD-based replacement for my old Linksys NSLU2 NAS devices on my home network, based on my recently purchased Soekris net6501 server. However, I have just found a very nice little device on the internet, the HP ProLiant MicroServer which seems quite nice: 4 SATA drives, a dial-core 1.5GHz AMD processor, up to 8 GB of memory in 2 simple DDR3 DIMM slots, 1 Gigabit Ethernet port, and a rather small footprint.

The datasheet is available here.

It is 275-300 EUR (before VAT) on the French HP site. That's less than a net6501. Hmmm.
There are a few models available, and I guess the idea would be to buy one with as little disk space as possible, because disks prices usually fall so quickly that by the time vendors ship NAS boxes to end customers, the prices are already out of whack with the market (Le Zap's rule of procurement: insofar as possible, bandwidth and disk space should be bought at the last minute on the spot market). With at least 4GB RAM, it would be about 400 EUR after VAT... should I just buy one for experimentation? it would be perfect for FreeNAS.

/hardware | Posted at 15:21 | permanent link

Upgrading an OCZ Onyx SSD drive

A while ago, maybe 2 years, maybe 18 months, I bought an OCZ Onyx 32GB SSD drive to put in my Soekris net5501 server under FreeBSD. The idea was that since that machine doesn't get lots of writes, it would benefit heat-wise and speed-wise from having a SSD drive rather than a regular 2.5" laptop drive (which always seem to fail after about 2-4 years of continuous operation).

Well, I have been quite disappointed, because after only a few months of operations, the Onyx started developing a number of read errors and bad sectors. I restored from backups a few times, but eventually it got so bad that I went back to a simple laptop drive for greater reliability.

When I bought a new PC recently, I remembered my Onyx and tried to use it to accelerated my disk accesses through intel's Rapid Storage caching Technology. Well, that didn't work at all because it developed read errors within 24 hours, and so I gave up on that idea and ordered a small Intel drive to use as a cache in my system (which seems to work fine).

Now, being somewhat stubborn, I surfed the web and found that OCZ had a firmware update for my 32GB Onyx drive (upgrade to 1.7)... so I upgraded the firmware to 1.7, and now the drive is in a very strange state: not only does it report that it has a capacity of 128GB (which is quite strange), but also I cannot seem to pqrtition/format it properly in Windows 7 or with the UBCD.

So, I guess I have reached the end of how much time I am willing to devote to this piece of junk, and send it into the recycle bin... truly one of the least positive hardware purchases I have ever made.

/hardware | Posted at 23:33 | permanent link