Alex Hopmann’s Blog

As I typically do this time of year its is time for “Winter PC Cleaning”. This is the time of year when I often end up looking at which machines around the house I need to upgrade, which to replace with new machines, and which machines to reinstall Windows to get rid of the cruft that tends to build up over time.

On that last point, its unfortunate that its necessary but it really does seem like a good thing to do. It isn’t as bad as it was in the old days when your system really got slower and slower and progressively less stable if you didn’t clean it up. But as improved as it has been the last couple of years, there is still plenty stuff you install that makes various hooks into the Windows Explorer, into your codec list, and all over the place and without starting from scratch now and then. In the past I’ve felt like I had do to this every year with my main machines, but I guess its a mark of progress that I’ve survived for a whole 2 years without worrying about it.

Two years ago I built my new workstation using top of the line parts of the day. At the time a 3ghz (overclocked to 3.66-4ghz) quad-core CPU with 4GB RAM was pretty much top of the line (unless you went to the server-class Xeon chips in which case you could use two quad-core CPUs for 8…) It is an interesting benchmark of the state of progress in the industry that while the shiny new Core i7 machines are indeed faster, they aren’t enough so that I’m really eager to build out a whole new system right away.

Still there have been a couple of things that have been annoying me. My home workstation was still running Windows Vista and while I’ve been increasingly using a Win7 VM on it, having used Windows 7 at work for a long time now I’ve been eager to upgrade it. The other biggest concerns were that the main disk has been feeling really slow. Its one of the expensive faster “Raptor” drives, but its not that much faster and combined with the fact that I’ve been running 32-bit Vista which sure seems to page a ton, and that the drive is so noisy you really hear it when its seeking all over the place, it has felt like a real dog.

So given that I’m moving up to Windows 7, I bought myself two key upgrades- more RAM to take the system to 8GB (which with the 64-bit install of Windows 7 I plan should work nicely) and a SSD for my boot drive. NewEgg was nice enough to have a screaming black-friday deal on the 80GB X25Mg2 drive for $219 (down from the usual $279 or so) which was enough for me to pick one of those up right away. I kind of wish I’d bought two so I had one for my laptop, but I’m not quite going there yet.

The other big plan is to install Windows 7 in a VHD so that I’ve got more flexibility to backup my OS image. I found some instructions here although I’m not worried about the dual-boot thing. I know some friends who are using dual-boot to have separate partitions for non-released stuff (beta versions of Office and other stuff) but I just run those in VMs and don’t mess with different base OS images.

There was one big trick missing from the instructions for VHD install. When I went to setup Windows and selected the VHD disk it told me that the given partition was not supported for boot. Turns out that the “Next” button was enabled after all and the install worked just fine, so that warning just needed to be ignored.

So hopefully that should do it for now. I suspect it will be time to upgrade my video card (currently an ATI 3870) in a few months, although I’m really hoping that they will come out with some that support 4-6 outputs on a single card (which is the rumor). Those of course might need new connectors (DisplayPort) so the scary part might be waiting on a new generation of displays. Since large multi-touch displays should also become practical sometime in the next year, I’ll be waiting on those for sure before I upgrade anything.

One interesting twist- when I was doing my table I was mostly thinking of SATA in terms of the high capacity 3.5″ drives, where you can get a 1TB drive for ~$90 and a 1.5TB drive for $120. So that is actually $.08/GB (which I rounded up to $.1). But a very interesting in-between solution is to go with the commodity 7200RPM 2.5″ drives. The fancy 10k/15k RPM SAS drives are always worse performance/$, but a $60 250GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ drive gives you pretty much the same IOPS. Plus I’ve seen 2U server designs that can fit more than 25 in a single box (as compared to ~8-10 max 3.5″ drives).

So if you aren’t trying to maximize capacity in a 2U unit you can either do-
10×1.5TB 3.5″ drives, 15TB storage, 750 IOPS, $1200, 0.625 IOPS/$
or
25×250GB 2.5″ drives, 6.2TB storage, 1875 IOPS, $1500 1.25 IOPS/$

Which represents twice the performance/$ at a cost of less than half the capacity/$. But again, if you weren’t going to be able to use that capacity anyway, its a great trade-off.

Alternatively in the same price range you could get two of those SSDs if you data-set is really small-
2×64GB SSDs, .13TB storage, 6600 IOPS, $1400 4.7 IOPS/$

So the SSD performance/$ is still better, but the capacity is so small that its unlikely to work for many applications.

I keep meaning to post more about what is going on at work, but that always seems like so much effort to get it right. In any case I got a new printer, which is fun. I’m a fan of the multifunction printers, by which I mean ones that can scan and print in the same unit- fax I don’t really care about and I suppose in theory I could “copy” but I never do.

My old printer was a Dell All In One 962. Dell was practically giving these away free a few years ago and frankly it has done a decent job. But as with most cheap mechanical devices it has started being more and more flaky, plus the software never really worked right with Vista and so the older scan to PDF (with OCR) function hasn’t been working right which has sucked.

Looking at reviews of other printers I noticed that Canon overall seems to get good marks and I was pretty excited to see a couple of models that support duplex printing and scanning. The worst part is that it was very very difficult to tell what the difference was between models, but I ended up getting the slightly more expensive one at just less than $300. In today’s printer market where the printers are almost free and they gouge you on ink, that is a fortune.

My first impression was that the footprint of this thing was huge- much bigger than I expected. It fits in the spot where my old printer was, but only by bulging out onto my desk an extra 6″ and getting a little in the way. I suspect this might have to do with various protrusions that are used to flip the paper for the duplex stuff. Setting it up I noticed a cool feature that old printers didn’t have- the print head unit is replaceable- one of the big problems with my old Dell is that over time the print head has gotten gross so being able to replace it is a nice thing (even if at close to $50 it costs as much as many printers).

The ink is also in individual reservoirs for each color. Again, this gives you potential savings since you don’t have to replace the whole thing the first time one runs out, but it also means there are 6 different things to replace at $15 each. It also has this “clear ink” which frankly I don’t get. This review of the MX7600 explains that clear ink is used to coat normal pages so they work as well as special inkjet paper so we will see.

The setup was both of a bit of a pain and kind of cool. It does a self-calibration step that takes 10 minutes and failed the first time, but basically prints some stuff and uses some optics to make sure it worked right automatically. Still, it did work on the second try and I was off to software setup. The software setup took forever and a half and installed 300mb+ of crap on my machine and required a reboot, none of which are cool. I’m using the printer connected to the network but it doesn’t just work as a normal Windows network printer- you have to hook it up the first time on USB + Ethernet and then you can ditch the USB. Still it requires their software install on every computer that wants to print (unless you use a computer as a server which isn’t really the point of a network printer in the first place).

Printing seemed slow but the quality was fine, and what do you expect for an inkjet. Scanning seemed much faster and the software is much nicer than the old stuff from Dell. Duplex scanning from the paper-feeder rocks, and they have a great mode where it shows the scanned pages and lets you easily rearrange / collect them before combining them in a PDF.

Overall looks pretty good so far..

Early benchmarks on the new Core i7 server chips (Xeon 5570) show it running about 35% faster on SAP benchmarks than same clock speed 54xx series chips. This could be a really interesting factor in designing our data centers for the Sharepoint Grid services- its always nice to take advantage of the latest hardware trends when you can.

The only possible catch- part of the boost is the new hyperthreading support so an 2×4 core system has 16 threads. Lots of software has problems scaling cleanly with more threads, and I’m interested in seeing how well SharePoint does.

John writes that “If i was starting a company, why wouldn’t I equip everyone with these and ask them to use google docs and other cloud services? Massive cost savings relative to the old way of doing things.”.

These mini-laptops are cool, but I don’t think this is the scenario where they are going to work. They are tiny- that could be great for some people that are highly mobile, but for normal knowledge worker stuff they are going to be pretty painful. Small screen, small keyboard, The base Dell Mini starts at $350, but I suspect that the 512MB version is going to be pretty painful for cloud computing- browsers are pretty taxing apps, so lets call it $375. The Inspiron 1525 by contrast starts at $499 but with a real 15″ screen, normal keyboard and Windows. The discount sites often have similar laptops listed on sale for $399, so the mini laptop thing vs. low-end full laptop is pretty much a wash when it comes to cost.

I think John’s main point is probably that whether the base thing comes with linux or Windows, the main app is likely the browser and you can do amazingly well now with cloud-based computing and very limited local resources. In general I agree although its interesting to read Chris Devore’s experiences trying to go all cloud-computing and his more recent post about it not working out so well yet. This isn’t to say that it couldn’t work well for some situations but going 100% cloud ends up having some difficult implications that its hard to appreciate until you actually try it.

I’ve now worked with a number of startups that have most of their infrastructure cloud-based (GMail, Google Docs, Skype chat-rooms, Basecamp, etc) and compared to setting up all the typical office infrastructure this stuff is great. But it doesn’t replace the kinds of things where having some local software can be very nice, and its also made any network connectivity issues especially painful. Both Judy’s book and DeepRockDrive had occasional network outages in the office and when there were network problems people rapidly were 100% unable to get any work done. Bandwidth even becomes an issue- at DeepRockDrive we ended up with an office network with really poor bandwidth and when someone was trying to make a VOIP phone-call they would often have to ask the rest of the office to not use the Internet for a period of time.

All these things will improve with time, although fixing the network reliability issue will be the toughest nut to crack.

Building a silent PC- you failed!

On Friday I finally got all the bits together for me new home RAID array. This one is a Sans Digital TR4M 4-space ESATA enclosure plus 4 Western Digital GP 1TB drives. Building it as Raid5 it looks like the total capacity will be 2.8TB (as the computer measures it, not as the drive companies market it).

I started it formatting, skipping the “quick format” option. That was over 24 hours ago and its at 36% right now. Which points out one of the biggest problems with large drive arrays (or any kind of large storage)- if you aren’t careful managing it can be a total mess. This does make me a bit happy that I decided to go with just the 4-drive array rather than holding out for a full 8- the bigger one would be even more of a mess to manage at times.

For my media-PC I purchased a silent video card. Gigabyte makes the SilentPipe series for several of the Nvidia models and it seemed like a good idea to be able to get a card with decent graphical power (not top, but at the time it was better than any of the other cards I had) and no noise.

The catch is that when building a Media PC you need to keep in mind the overall system. The SilentPipe GF8600GTS has two problems- first of all its form factor is kind of big- the cooling fins stick about a half inch over the normal height of a PCI-express card. In a full sized case this would be fine but in the Zalman media-case I have there is only the exact room for full height cards and the extra half inch means the top of the case doesn’t really fit right.

The second issue is heat. The card runs correctly, but overall it does run pretty hot and since its not blowing the hot air outside the case itself it places extra heat load on the rest of the system + relies on the existing case fans to create air moment through its fins and out its vent. I suspect this results in my overall case fans running higher more of the time, so in the end I fear that I’m actually running a more noisy system for trying to use a silent video card. Instead of adding one relatively slow running video card fan I’m pushing the main fans faster and higher RPMs create a lot more noise.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about problems trying to get my SSD drive working in my laptop. Since then I’ve done some experimentation and figured out the issues.

Initially I bought a RiData 32GB CF card (266x speed) and a SYBA SY-SATA2CF CF to SATA Adapter. It wasn’t working (would hang in Windows setup or boot) but I couldn’t tell which component was at fault. Since then I noticed that Sans Digital has the CS2T CF adapter which is shaped like a 2.5″ drive and accepts two CF cards. Its a lot more expensive than the Syba adapter ($99 vs. $18), but it works and $18 isn’t a bargain for a card that I just couldn’t get work right.

Having the Sans Digital be shaped like a normal drive is also a huge help. With laptops you often need to insert the thing way back into the case and they all pretty much assume the standard drive form factor. The Syba was a big pain to get in but the Sans Digital fits into my Dell laptop easily. Once I could tell it worked I bought a second RiData 32GB card and was able to just insert it and expand my volume in Windows- Presto! 64GB SSD drive for $290. It runs Vista great and I’ve installed Voyager (flight planning software) so I should be able to use it in the airplane.

I should mention that I’ve bought several products from Sans Digital so far- I’ve also gotten both of their 4-drive SATA external enclosures, the USB TR4U and the eSATA TR4M. Both work great and are inexpensive and easy to manage ways to add massive storage to your computers.

The hard drive in my Dell laptop started acting poorly so I’m trying to replace it with a solid state drive. Being too cheap to go spend $600 on an “off the shelf” SSD I’m trying to make one using a CF->SATA adapter and a 32GB CF card. Total cost $160.

The only catch is it doesn’t work so far. The Vista install dies part way through “uncompressing files”. Same with XP. At this point I’m wondering if the problem is my CF card (RiDATA 32GB 233X) or the adapter?

Any thoughts? Anyone get this working? There is a really cool looking adapter that lets you use 3 CF cards, but its $180 and its only from geekstuff4u where the shipping to the US is another $45. I can’t find that part from any US place.