my computers
I’m a nerd, and I own computers. Here they are:
Desktop System
- Intel Core i7 920 CPU (wiki, Intel.com)
- Asus P6-T Deluxe; Intel X58-based mainboard (product page)
- G.Skill 3x2Gb DDR3-1333Mhz @ 9-9-9-24 (3 modules, part #F3-10666CL9-2GBNQ)
- Western Digital WD1001FALS (1Tb, 7200RPM, 32Mb cache)
- Gainward nVidia GTX 285 1Gb (product page)
- BFG nVidia GTX 285 1Gb (product page)
- Asus Xonar DX (product page)
- Antec P182 enclosure (product review)
- CoolerMaster 850W PSU
- BenQ G2400WD 24″ display (1920×1200) (product page)
- Apple aluminium keyboard (product page)
- Razer DeathAdder (product page)
- Windows Vista 64-bit & Ubuntu 10.10
Miscellaneous stats: ~167W power draw during non-SLI gaming, 20799 3DMark Vantage, 16808 3DMark06.
Asus Zenbook UX31-DH72 (product page)
- Intel Core i7 2677M (1.80Ghz, 4Mb L2, 5GT/s DMI) (wiki, Intel.com)
- 4Gb DDR3-1333Mhz
- SanDisk 256Gb SATA3 SSD (product page)
- 13.3″ 16:9 HD+ (1600×900) LED Backlight
Being part of Intel’s “ultrabook” range of products which are Windows laptops designed to compete in the same space as the Apple Macbook Air, the laptop at its thickest point is only 18mm and tapers down to a thickness of around 6mm at its thinnest point. The trackpad is large, the keyboard is very thin and the weight is just over one kilogram. In short I couldn’t be happier with it: it’s everything a laptop should be. Small, portable, powerful and light.
Dell XPS M1330 (spare MythTV frontend) (images)
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 (2Ghz, 2Mb L2, 800Mhz FSB) (wiki, Intel.com)
- 4Gb DDR2-800Mhz
- Western Digital 5400RPM, 500Gb 2.5″ disk
- nVidia 8400M-GS 128Mb
- Asus Xonar U1 (product page)
- Ubuntu 10.10
Miscellaneous stats: ~29W power draw, poor battery life, will likely die in the next 8-10 months on account of the faulty manufacturing in the graphics chip. I am on my third mainboard, luckily it was last replaced a few weeks before expiration of the extended warranty, but that’s finished now. Next time it dies, I’ll need a new laptop.
Home Theatre PC
- Intel Pentium E5300 dual core (wiki, Intel.com)
- Asus P5PKL-AM/PS (product page)
- Corsair 2x2Gb DDR2-800Mhz
- Western Digital WD7500AACS (750Gb, 7200RPM, 16Mb cache)
- Zotac nVidia GeForce 9400GT 512Mb
- Antec Micro Fusion 350 HTPC case w/ LCD
- Antec “80 PLUS” 350W PSU
- Mythbuntu 10.04 LTS
More information regarding my HTPC (scroll down to ‘Oblong Cheese’)
Miscellaneous stats: 2x ‘Advanced’ hardware de-interlacing for 1080i streams without dropping frames (OneHD never looked so good).
Gateway
- Intel Atom D510 (wiki, Intel.com)
- 2Gb DDR2 800Mhz
- Point of View Intel NM10-based mainboard (Intel product page, mainboard page)
- LAN Ethernet: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
- WAN Ethernet (PPPoE bridge to Billion 7100 ADSL router): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT86C100A [Rhine]
- Wireless LAN: RaLink RT3090 Wireless 802.11n 1T/1R PCIe
- 2x 120mm (one fan for hard disks, one temperature-controlled exhaust fan), 1x 90mm PSU fan
- Antec Sonata II case (product page & Antec Neo ECO 400W PSU (product page)
- ClearOS 5.2 (based on CentOS 5.4, the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux)
The system was relatively inexpensive to build but has drastically improved network performance over my old setup of a Billion 7404VGPX router. WAN performance has improved: the small Billion router in bridge mode achieves a higher throughput of 14.5Mbit (previously 12-13Mbit) downstream with ADSL2+ and pings to local game servers have decreased by 20-40 milliseconds. I have retired the file server role of this system in favour of a dedicated solution running Solaris 11 Express and napp-it. This is due to the RAID0 array constantly failing, requiring a reboot. I am not yet sure if it was the disks or the controller causing this problem.
NAS/SAN
- HP Proliant MicroServer N36L (hp.com)
- AMD Athlon™ II NEO N36L (AMD.com, wiki)
- 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 ECC CL9 DIMM with Thermal Sensor (Kingston.com)
- AMD RS785E/SB820M system chipset with:
- Embedded AMD SATA controller with RAID 0, 1 and embedded AMD eSATA controller for connecting external storage devices via the eSATA connector in the rear of the server
- Embedded NC107i PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Server Adapter
- System disk: Seagate MOMENTUS5400.6 160GB 2.5 SATA (Seagate.com (pdf))
- Data disks: 5x Western Digital 2TB Green 64MB SATAII (wdc.com)
- Welland EZStor ME-751 Trayless HDD Rack (Welland.com)
- 150 Watts Non-Hot Plug, Non Redundant Power Supply
- Solaris 11 Express (Oracle.com)
My intended configuration was for five 3.5″ disks giving a total storage capacity of 7.5TB using mdadm RAID5 or Solaris zfs with a raidz1 pool. The four disk bays are populated and a fifth disk is installed in the 5.25″ bay using the hard disk caddy. The fifth disk is connected using a SATA<->eSATA cable to the exterior eSATA port. The system disk is connected to the internal SATA header designated for CDROM. By default this SATA port is limited to IDE compatability mode and is quite slow, so flashing a custom BIOS image is required to ‘unlock’ this port. The method of doing this has changed since I performed it so check this thread for the latest information on this. Solaris is difficult to install if you do not have a CDROM handy. You must use an existing Solaris system to create a bootable USB drive, or you can use this tool. Unfortunately I purchased the disks almost by default without much thought into how they might work with a ‘proper’ server operating system like Solaris. This meant that I was unaware the Western Digital Green disks would not perform at their best with zfs. These drives physically have 4096 bytes per sector, but report to the operating system that they are standard 512 bytes per sector. This works when you use them in a desktop system but plays havoc with advanced filesystems like zfs. Fortunately there is a workaround, detailed here where you can use a tool to manipulate the way zfs reads and writes.
After sorting all of the issues mentioned above, the system performs admirably for home use. The benchmarking tool in the napp-it software reports roughly 200Mb/sec read and writes to the pool, which is far and away enough to saturate a gigabit network link which in itself is great for home use. Solaris’ full support for Windows ACL-style permissions means that CIFS performance is just as good as ftp/nfs performance and also has a great degree of granularity in access control, so it is possible to have private home user directories requiring a login alongside public directories accessible without any kind of login at all.
