Category Archives: Hardware
How Intel’s SSD Toolbox Optimizer (TRIM) feature works
There is a never-ending supply of people who don’t understand what TRIM is (or as it’s called per ATA specification, DATA SET MANAGEMENT) and how it’s used at the OS level.
Instructions for building TomatoUSB Toastman RT-N firmwares
Back in September/October I had the “pleasure” of dealing with trying to build TomatoUSB (specifically Toastman’s RT-N releases) on a Linux system I have (thank god for VMware Workstation!). I was given all sorts of reference materials from folks on … Continue reading
Hard disk drive heights and polypropylene storage containers
Given how many hard disks I tend to have, I recently decided to purchase some anti-static polypropylene foam containers to store my drives. Common retail outlets (Amazon and others) were selling these containers (which would hold between 10 and 24 … Continue reading
Examining the WD10EFRX
Today I received a WD10EFRX, otherwise known as the 1TB model of Western Digital’s new Caviar Red drives… The colour red, for me, is associated with two things: stop/halt signs and blood — two things which should definitely not be … Continue reading
Asus Xonar DG driver bugs on XP
EDIT: Interestingly enough — and I did report this to Asus — this issue went away after a system reboot. The nature of the problem still implies a driver-level bug, but why a reboot would fix it is still unknown. … Continue reading
WD30EZRX and aggressive head parking
For many years Western Digital has been flip-flopping their stance on the issue with aggressive (and excessive) parking of the drive’s heads, especially in the case of their Green series drives (including their “Enterprise” drives with the “-GP” suffix). WD … Continue reading
WD Sentinel DX4000 — unacceptable power design
Update: It appears Western Digital has indirectly responded to my blog post, stating that the concerns over disk power draw on system power-up are incorrect. They state that the disks are spun up individually, with 2 second intervals between each … Continue reading
Sporadic shutdown adventure — finale
It’s been a while since I’ve written about this issue. Folks might have concluded that re-imaging (reinstalling the OS) my machine fixed the problem. Well, it didn’t. Things worked for about 4-5 days, or so I thought. Then suddenly one … Continue reading
Sporadic shutdown adventure — day 2
Day 2 of my super-happy-fun-time adventure with PC hardware. The new PSU hasn’t arrived yet, but as previously stated I did go about rebuilding the system to some degree (sans hardware replacements). More specifically, the following things were performed:
Sporadic shutdown adventure — day 1
Starting yesterday, my main workstation at home has begun to suffer from random power loss (abrupt system shutdown). The system “reboots” (powers back up) on its own due to my BIOS configuration having a power-on setting of “Last State”. I … Continue reading
GV-N560OC-1GI hardware failure
Back in January I posted a review of Gigabyte’s latest GTX 560 Ti card. My opinions of the card have not changed during the past 4 months, and even now have not changed. Sadly, however, starting sometime this week my … Continue reading
How not to repair hard disks
In my search for some information about hard disk manufacturing processes, I came across this absolute beauty and had a good laugh. I think one of these days I might have to mimic the above while doing SMART analysis and … Continue reading
Gigabyte GTX 560 Ti (GV-N560OC-1GI) vs. 9800GT review
Note: Folks reading the below review may also want to read my entry titled GV-N560OC-1GI hardware failure, where the same card after ~3-4 months of occasional gaming (6-7 hours a week) experienced artefacts as a result of GDDR5 RAM that … Continue reading
FreeBSD and ZFS — hot-swapping SATA disks with AHCI
There’s been a large discussion on freebsd-stable@ as of late regarding how to hot-swap SATA hard disks on FreeBSD which are part of a ZFS pool. I wanted to take the opportunity to demonstrate how this works on real server-class … Continue reading
Another reason not to run DD-WRT
Embarrassing is an understatement. Open-source firmware vuln exposes wireless routers Open-source firmware flaw exposes wireless routers – DD-WRT http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/35742/info Tomato users are not affected. No idea regarding HyperWRT or Thibor. Sebastian Gottschall’s statement, “consider that this exploit was released without … Continue reading
