Search results

http://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/node-series/node-804 This case has a somewhat unusual drive cage arrangement (one in front of the other, so the rear cage gets warm air blown over it from the front one). I have had trouble finding information about airflow in this area of the...

I'm helping out a friend whose mom has an old PC that is showing symptoms that look like a dying video card. I'm trying to find a good cheap AGP card to try. Something in the $20-30 range sounds about right. Looking on eBay, I see a lot of Radeon 9550 and Geforce FX 5500s in that price range...

I'm not worried about it. PCIe SSDs are only just starting to enter the consumer market. The new MacBook Airs use them, for example, and Mushkin just announced one (no info on pricing though). The SSD market doesn't have huge barriers to entry like mechanical HD's do. I'm sure in time that...

Nice find mikehunt14! I ordered the magnetic one (couldn't see spending $20 on the other one). My case has a ventilation grille above the PCIe slot area, so what I might do is remove the magnets and just bolt it on through the grille holes. That way the fan should blow down over my two LSI...

Zalman used to make a bracket that screwed into the top of the PCIe slots, using the screws that hold the PCIe cards in place. This held a 90mm fan that you could swivel around and position over card slots, chipsets, or a passive CPU cooler. I don't think they make them anymore though. Antec...

One thing you might want to look into is using rubber o-rings to dampen the sound of your current board. http://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_detail&p=318 It's too bad they charge so much for them, especially since there are three styles to try out with different Shore...

Yeah, the Topres are more for when you want a quieter board with a light tactile feel. The switches barely make any noise at all. You mostly just hear the keys bottoming out. Some Cherry Blue boards, on the other hand, sound like someone went out of their way to make the board as loud as...

What this article is saying, in essence, is that ARM has commoditized the CPU into oblivion. In a few years, it won't even be worthwhile to hold an ARM license to make power-saving or performance tweaks. The margins will be so tiny that you will never get any ROI. This is good news for...

It kind of is, in the sense that all you had to do was tweak a few registry settings, as opposed to, say, binary patching some core .DLL. They just don't have a nice Control Panel widget to do it for you.

Same here. The only thing I was using it for lately was experimenting with Server 2008 as domain and dhcp server on my home network. I guess I'll should start learning about Samba domains in preparation for the switchover.

I'm pretty sure I've used motherboards that allowed you to set the hotswap behavior for each drive in the BIOS, so that the drive wouldn't show up as a removable device. I can't remember if my current (Asrock), or previous (Asus) board did this, but in either case they were fairly recent UEFI...

sub.mesa, I went ahead and tried ZoL on a new Debian 7 installation. zpool detected and imported my BSD raidz3 pool flawlessly. I'm doing a scrub right now just to give it a little exercise. So far, so good.

Does anyone know if ZoL will import a GPT-partitioned pool created on a recent version of FreeBSD (PC-BSD 9.0 in this case)? I know the various Solaris-based implementations don't like GPT partitions.

I think the PS2 lasted around 10 years, but even then it overlapped with the PS3. I agree that these analysts are mostly grifters though.

I don't know, but I bet a lot of it depends on whether it's a publicly-traded company or not.

Even if power and noise aren't a concern (as the OP mentioned), you are paying a considerable price premium for the black drives ($179 vs $109 at Newegg for WD 2TB black vs green, and the green has free shipping right now). Yes they do have a longer warranty, but that doesn't necessarily mean...

I've always read that NTFS is "fragmentation resistant" because of the way it allocates blocks for new files. It will still get fragmented over time though. Whether the fragmentation is enough to cause noticeable performance degradation is probably application dependent.

I would write that as "All cables that actually comply to SATA specifications are good for 6gbps". I have no doubt there are cheap junk cables out there that just barely work at 3 gig, and which would have unacceptable error rates at 6 gbps (even then you probably wouldn't notice much...

Ok thanks, I was under the impression that the "full" HDTune test did some kind of non-destructive read/write/read test that would force pending sectors to be reallocated, and the Quick test would do a read-only scan, but I could be mistaken (which would be a good thing in this case). I wasn't...

Hi all, I have a system composed of a 256GB Crucial M4 as the Windows boot drive, and 1TB WD black drive as the secondary/bulk storage drive. Recently, one of my SMART diagnostic tools (SpeedFan) has been reporting some pending sectors on the mechanical drive, so I decided to try running...

As I understand it, when Lexmark stopped making those keyboards, Unicomp literally bought the machines from them. So they are indeed pretty closely related. Absolutely. I was just mentioning Topre because I like them so much, but I don't generally advocate hard for them, because the prices...

For me that's actually a plus. Have two discrete sounds on something like a Cherry Blue keyboard drives me crazy after a while. I have an older Das board, and I find the snap-CLACK on every keypress more annoying than the single, lower-pitched, more spread out clunk of a spring. Just my...

Microcenter still seems to be running an unadvertised $50-off special on motherboard/CPU combos. I just today bought an i3-3225 ($129) + Asrock H77 miniITX board ($95) for $175 + $11 tax. Paid online and picked up in-store in Cambridge, MA. It's hard to beat that price unless you really...

Here's another option, taken from this thread: http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1038660039&postcount=25 InWin BP671, plus Seasonic 300W TFX PSU EDIT: Oops, never mind, that case only has a single-width GPU slot.

It's a bit on the large side, but the InWin BM639 is one. It uses a funky non-standard PSU form factor though. Actually, I think any case spec'ed to fit Mini-DTX motherboards should fit the bill.

Not a waste at all. In fact in most real world use cases, you will barely notice the difference between 3Gbps and 6Gbps.

By the way, prices *are* dropping. Maybe not as fast as we'd like, but at least in the segments I'm interested in, there's a downward trend. For example before the crisis 2TB "green" drives were down around $80 USD or sometimes as low as $60 on sale. Then they shot up to well over $200, IIRC...

Not necessarily. There is probably still a lot of pent-up demand in the market, so the factories would have to actually be running at higher than normal capacity to catch up and bring the prices back down.

Any opinions on the Atheros GbE chip on the GIgabyte vs Realtek 8111 on the Asrock? At least, the next Gigabyte model up uses Atheros, so I assume they probably use it on this lower-end one as well. Also the Gigabyte has a VIA 2021 sound chip vs Realtek on the Asrock. Again, not sure it matters.

I'm not an expert in PCB manufacturing, but as far as I know, unless it's a highly-activated (RA) rosin flux residue, it shouldn't be harmful for any reasonable service life of the board. I think water-based fluxes are the most common type in large scale manufacturing these days, so it should...

The old school ports are also way less troublesome if you have to use a KVM switch for any reason.

I don't know for sure, but as long as you're doing some writes to the drive, static data should get moved around and refreshed periodically as part of the normal wear leveling algorithms. Otherwise, if you had a drive that was 90% full of static data, the remaining 10% would get written over...

Personally I would just go ahead and manually 4K align them, especially if you are mixing Seagates and WD's. Even if the SmartAlign thing works great, the WD's don't have it anyway. From what little I've read about SmartAlign it tries to do some kind of caching or reordering to try to hide the...

I don't think TRIM is entirely instantaneous. The drive still has to run its garbage collection routines to actually act upon the information supplied by the TRIM command(s). I don't know enough about SSD firmware to say whether this step typically takes milliseconds or minutes. However even...

That's definitely an option. I could connect the PC directly to the monitor using the monitor's DVI input or even DisplayPort, and then connect audio to the receiver via SPDIF. However, I'm also using the receiver to switch between the HTPC and other components (game console, Blu-ray player)...

I currently have a Win7 HTPC/XBMC setup that is hooked to a 16:10 monitor through a Marantz NR1501 AV receiver. The PC is driving the monitor at 1920x1200. This mostly works well, except that I can occasionally see pixel shimmering in certain colors that appear to be somewhere around middle...

BlueAir makes a good, high-end air cleaner. I have a Blueair 203 in my bedroom and am impressed with the performance and build quality. The filters are expensive but last 6 months. From what I've read, the most efficient cleaners are the ones that use conventional HEPA filtration media. The...

I agree. I have largish hands too (about 8" from middle finger to wrist...is that some kind of standard measurement?) and I've found almost no correlation between the size of the mouse and comfort over the years. I currently have a g500, which is a good solid mouse, but I find that the the...

Thanks, I updated my post to fix the link.

Okay just to make this clear: Option 1: No Flash Works fine with OpenIndiana, Solaris Works fine with JBOD drives Requires installation of 9240 driver from LSI website May have had a problem with some ESXi installations but now this is fixed? (Confirmation?) Option 2: Flash to IT mode Works...