Posts tagged pc hardware

Just got unifi-ed

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When Telekom Malaysia (TM) announced their Fiber to the home broadband initiative, I was rather excited as broadband speeds in Malaysia have stagnated over the past couple of years. Initially when I jumped on to the DSL bandwagon in 2001 with a paltry (by today’s standard) speed of 384kbps down and 128kbps up. It was a big improvement over any 33.6 or even 56kbps modems of the day. Fast forward 10 years and internet speeds have doubled or tripled many times in neighboring countries and all we’re stuck with is 2mbps DSL. 4mbps is available but few areas could even qualify with the poor quality of cabling or exchange equipment. My home couldn’t even get past 1.8mbps due to the distance from the exchange.

It took TM about a year plus to reach my backwater housing area. The good thing is many others have sacrificed their effort and time to enable TM to iron out the kinks in the system and to improve the roll-out, delivery and implementation service. After all, there are thousands and hundreds of thousands of homes to install.

The good is that they no longer need eight guys to install like for my parents home, a year back. The bad is that they still are not coordinated with their contact center and appointment scheduling system. It still takes an entire day but most of it will be spent waiting and waiting or cleaning up. If you’re lucky, everything goes well after install otherwise, you’ll end up waiting for new modems, BTUs, and more technicians.

For me, the install was a breeze. Minus the five hours waiting for the installers to show up. When the appointment time said 9:30am to 2:30pm, I assumed the install will complete within that window rather than start at 2:45pm! Anyway, my install was through the ceiling so all was needed was a hole drilled through the outside wall to get into the ceiling, pull the fiber and drop it into my central cable drop. My home, fortunately for the TM installers, had a central cable drop where all ethernet, phone, cable TV, etc are laid down so drilling through the wall took the longest time. The Brits build houses to last in the 60s.

Fortunately for the installers, I also provided the ceiling light and ladder otherwise they would have come to grief with such a miserable ladder of theirs. Also to their benefit, my entire house is wired with CAT5e (long story why it’s not CAT6) so again, the rest of the setup was a breeze. Plug the Fiber BTU here, LAN to WAN port, IP TV out to Port 2 (next to my TV), Phone out to Phone Distribution panel and viola, IP TV works, we got internet and the rooms have phone lines! Hallelujah!

Since I had a Cisco VPN Router & SPI firewall going, I wanted to junk the crappy DLINK DIR615 that came with the package. The router has caused grief to many users due to it running custom firmware, lack of security (all wide open settings), poor wireless and network performance, and more. The problem with using your own router is that the incoming network has three VLANs and if you didn’t care about the IP-TV, you can go ahead. I paid for all services so I damn well want the access.

Solution was simply replace the DIR615 with a VLAN bridge. I used a MikroTik RB250 for this purpose. If anyone wants a pre-configured RB250, drop me an email. I have the RouterBoard Rb750GS as well but for the moment, I wanted to continue using my Cisco router.

Here’s the TM Fiber Broadband Termination unit (BTU)

The crappy D-Link DIR615 which was quickly replaced…

My Cisco VPN and IPS/IDS Firewall

The Huawei IP TV Set-top box (STB). Still a bit laggy when watching internet streaming content

The awesome MikroTik RB250 VLAN Bridge.

I really need to fix my cabling mess! For now, Yellow is WAN link, white is Internal network, Blue is POE, green is for Voice and now Red for IPTV.

 So how does it perform? The good is that it works pretty much as it is advertised. No complaints until the service starts going down or becomes unreliable but overall, my satisfaction is high. Minus the setup, installation part of course. Your mileage may vary and depending on your home and where you want certain components, i.e. IPTV, Wireless, phone, etc, the process might cost you a fair bit and be more trouble than in my case.

Moving to a Mac

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Oh great, this is another PC to Mac convert writing … NOT.

I’m still a PC guy. For the desktop anyways. Windows works well for me and I’ve not had any malware, virus, crash, blue-screen, you name it in the past ten years – okay, I admit once due to nVidia’s vista 64-bit driver. That was when 64-bit was new anyways. Of course I’ve hardware failures such as hard drives but nothing extraordinary.

Recently, I acquired a MacBook Pro and have been loving the mobile experience. I’ve no challenges using both a Mac and Windows system and I use my PC desktop frequently. For laptops however, I find overall a MacBook Pro provides better experience and usability. Let me define those two in specific areas.

When going mobile, you need to pay attention to details. Things like power cords, connectors and the like. I love the fact the MacBook power cords have two plugs – one long and one that turns the brick into a wall wart. Simple and practical. Another plus, the cable is usually extra long and easily coiled if you don’t need more length. Just simple. Screen brightness and keyboard back light brightness are also another. Good screen laptops are hard to find and my only gripe here is that I can’t get a 13″ matte screen MacBook. Otherwise, I like that I can adjust both brightness easily and quickly. Heat vents are my new pet peeve. Don’t you hate sitting in tropical weather with the airconditioner at full power and to have sweaty hands? That’s because that silly laptop has to vent heat to the right (or left). I’m right handed and I don’t have that problem with a MacBook.

Battery life is amazing on the 2.7Ghz 13″ MacBook Pro. I went 6 hours without problems. No extra batteries, slices or bulkier add-ons. I could have gotten seven hours if I was spending less time in Lightroom though but I think any portable device needs to have at least 6-hours of usage life. Don’t quote idle life – that’s utter crap. Finally, the touch-pad was glorious to use. Responsive and just lovely. I’m so used to inaccurate PC laptop touchpads so this is just bliss. Good enough that I actually could do most things without a mouse.

Would I swap my desktop to a Mac? Probably not at this time but if I need another portable computer, it’ll definitely be a MacBook Pro.

The SSD Swap

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A while back, my wife’s PC decided to throw up a couple of ATA errors. ATA errors are usually associated with disk issues so I took them very seriously. A series of disk checks reveal a couple of bad sectors. For me, a bad sector is a indicator to replace the disk ASAP. As this was the boot drive, my first priority is to update the backup image. I use Acronis TruImage to create backup images of my boot drives. Data drives are backed up to my NAS (1st level backup) which automatically replicates to my Storage Server that houses 6x2TB of disks.

After updating the image, and had chkdsk mark up the bad sectors, the problem went a away. Now this is a temporary solution as a bad sector usually indicates something is wrong or is going to go wrong on the disk. It usually never goes away. It’s like a tumor that even though you’ve beaten it into remission, it can always potentially rear its ugly head. Of course, if you cut the tumor out, it’s a different story. So, the analogy was to swap the drive.

I contemplated swapping with Seagate’s hybrid drive but decided to try out Corsair’s F60 SSD instead. It’s a Sandforce powered drive that’s been reviewed to be among the quickest at the time of writing. I went with 60Gb as it was an affordable size. SSDs are faster in larger sizes but any SSD will beat most mechanical disks anyway so…

The result, well, cold boot to usable desktop (i.e. I can launch Firefox or Photoshop) went down from about 119 seconds to about 31. This is Vista 64 by the way. Application launches went from 21 seconds down to 4 seconds for Photoshop CS4, Firefox takes about a second to pop out. Outlook took about 6 seconds (not too bad considering all the offline and email folders are on a mechanical disk).

Overall, definitely very, very snappy which is the main point about SSDs. It makes my other systems boot time feel like forever. Even shutdown times are under the five second mark.

Well, my next SSD upgrade will probably be a Sandforce 2 powered drive. I can’t wait!

NAS Purchasing Questions

Photography

Seems like after posting the NAS entries, I got a question from a friend trying to archive his photos as well as other data, i.e. media files, documents, backups, etc. So how do you decide which NAS to buy?

For everyone and anyone who asks me, I’ll always go with a dual-drive NAS. If you decide to go with a single drive NAS, you might as well go with USB disks like Seagate FreeAgents or WD Elements. So, basically you have to calculate how much storage you need. One area to start with is to see how much space you use in one year and how much that grows. My average storage needs (photos only) are about 600Gb/year. Chances are that won’t increase much unless I upgrade my cameras. I do budget a 10% increase. I do have other needs also so by the time I added everything in, it’s a large number.

Secondly, ask yourself f the NAS is your primary backup or not. If it is, it will need to be able to store all your backups. It’s good to take into account a 3-year plan so if you need 600Gb/year, then your NAS will be or must be able to grow to accomodate at least 2TB. This actually then dictates the size of your NAS. If it’s secondary storage (like in my case) where you have backups somewhere else (Hard drives, DVDs, BDs, etc) then the requirements are different. I wanted past 3-years of media (Photos & videos) on my NAS while my main backup stores everything. This required at least a capacity of 2.2TB at least which is why I went with a 4-drive unit. Most 2-drive NAS units max out at 2TB (2x2TB disks in mirrored/RAID1 config).

Finally, the next thing you need to consider is how fast you want to get the data off the NAS. I assume you’d be connecting at least via gigabit speeds. The specifications of the NAS play a part in the speed (excluding poor network speeds) aspect so normally I look at what CPU the NAS has along with the memory.

So what are my choices/recommendations?

Budget: DLink DNS-323
Cheaply priced (RM439/USD130), it’s the lowest cost 2-drive NAS I would buy myself.

I’ve only had experience with QNAP and Synology NAS units so that’s what I’ll stick with. You can go over to Smallnetbuilder and check their NAS reviews but not all are available locally in Malaysia. Here’s a handy performance chart for QNAP and Synology NASes.

Two-bay units:
Synology : DS210j or DS209
Qnap : TS-210 or TS-219

Two-bay units (higher performance):
Synology DS210+
Qnap TS-239 Pro II

Four-bay units:
Synology : DS410j
Qnap: TS-410 or TS-419P

Four-bay units (higher performance):
Synology : DS410
Qnap: TS-439 Pro II

note: this list above is from May 2010. If you need more space, you can consider the 5 and 6 bay models.

Disk Failure rate…

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After I mentioned on Facebook and Twitter about my recent Western Digital hard drive failure, someone asked me what are my other disk failures. So happens, I do keep records of my disk failures. So here goes, all the way from 2003.

2002 : Nov : Quantum Atlas 10k II QM318400TY-LW, 10,000rpm USCSI3. Some bad sectors, recovered from spare sectors.
2003 : June : Western Digital WD1200JB – 120GB PATA, 7200rpm. Disk crash after bad-sectors detected.
2004 : Oct : Western Digital WD2000BB – 200Gb PATA, 7200rpm, Bad-sectors, discontinued using
2005 : May : Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 (ST3160023AS) 160Gb SATA, Bad sectors, Warrantied, replacement retired.
2008 : May : Western Digital WD2500JD – 250GB SATA, 7200rpm. Bad sectors, retired
2008 : Aug : Western Digital WD5000AAKS – 500GB SATA, 7200rpm, Bad sectors. Replaced under warranty
2010: May : Western Digital WD5000AAKS – same drive above. Retired.

What drives do I have running on my desktops, server & NAS right now:

Hitachi Travelstar 5K100, 5400rpm, 100Gb, SATA (2.5″) – 1 drive
Seagate Barracude 7200.9, 7200rpm, 500Gb – 3 drives
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 7200rpm, 1TB – 5 drives
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, 7200rpm, 1TB – 2 drives
Seagate Momentus 5400.2, 100Gb, SATA (2.5″) – 1 drive
Samsung SpinPoint F3, 7200rpm, 1TB – 1 drive
Western Digital WD10EACS, 5400rpm, 1Tb – 1 drive
Western Digital WD5000AAKS , 7200rpm, 500Gb – 1 drive
Western Digital Raptor WD740, 10000rpm, 74Gb – 1 drive
Western Digital Raptor WD1500, 10000rpm, 150Gb – 1 drive

Guess what brand I’ll stick to for now?

QNAP TS-439 Pro unboxing and mini-review

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The big box

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll have noticed a few posts alluding to the search of some network storage to replace my 2-drive unit. I finally settled on the QNAP TS-439 Pro. Read the previous post about it or go to QNAP’s site to read more. Basically, I needed a compact, four-drive unit. Why four drives? It allows either two mirrored sets of disks (note: not necessarily RAID1) or RAID5 (with or without a spare). Going larger (5, 6 or 8 drive units) adds exponentially to the price but I wanted the use of the few 500Gb disks I have lying around. 500Gb is quite small but if I put them in a RAID5 set, I get 1TB (n-1). Later when I move some of my main storage disks to 1.5TB disks, I get another 500Gb to slot in as a spare drive (3x500Gb + 1 spare).

Other highlights for me were the hot-swap disk trays (lockable), multiple USB ports for printer sharing and dual-Gigabit LAN ports. The other stuff are frills. The dual gigabit Ethernet ports give you a fair bit of flexibility. You can configure two separate links for two separate networks, or some form of load-balancing, etc. Mine is configured for link aggregation group (LAG) mode. If you want to read more on that, which can get technical, Google for 802.3ad. In a nutshell, what LAG does is to create an aggregation group of network links that share the same speed and duplex settings. This requires a switch that supports LAG though and few consumer grade switches support it. The TS-439 Pro does have another option of using Adaptive load balancing. This bonds the network interfaces on the 439 and allows it to aggregate without any switch support. There’s a slight drop in performance but if you don’t have a switch that supports 802.3ad, it is the way to go. Did I mention two links means redundancy?

Pretty basic and unassuming, low power, low heat and quiet.

My primary use is to serve as my iTunes and media server (uPNP/TwonkyMedia), download stuff (BitTorrent), IP camera recorder, and a common file store to use between my PCs and notebooks in the house. My plan is to copy my photos there from camera, then once they’re sort of done (processing, etc), they can be moved to my File Server (which has 6x1Tb) in a RAID1+0 config. I’ve used jperf to do some testing to check the LAN bandwidth/switch speeds and for the TS-439, some regular file transfer timings.

First off, my gigabit LAN between Win Server 2003 R2 (dual-core Athlon, 6x1TB, 3Gb RAM, single link, the onboard NIC is died earlier this year so I’m running an Intel Gigabit CT off the PCIe x1 slot) and my Vista 64 SP2 client. I ran jperf over a few minutes with a five second interval. Min speed reported at 601,274Kbits/sec, max speed reported at 879,761Kbits/sec. Average the 30 readings and I get an average of 795,208Kbits/sec, or 776Mbits/sec or about 97Mbytes/sec. So let’s see how the 439 Pro transfers — remember, I have link aggregation on the TS-439.

1. Transfering 14,521Mbytes of photos. What I have is a mix of small and large files sizes. Large as in on average 26,912kb and small as in about 9kb (the XMP sidecar file). Transfer took about 320 seconds. 45.3MBytes/sec.

2. Transfering only the CR2 files took faster, clocking in about 261 seconds, or 55.5MBytes/sec.

3. Dual client access. Transfer a directory of photos and sidecar XMP files (12,672Mbytes and 11,760Mbytes). Start the transfer on client A then client B. Same target on NAS. Client A finished at 262 seconds. Client B finished at 302 seconds. Note that client B started transferring at roughly the 30 second mark of Client A. Average transfer speed is about 48.3Mbytes/sec for client A and 38.9Mbytes/sec for client B. Not too shabby considering both were hitting the NAS at the same time for about 87Mbytes/sec. Good enough for me.

Testing single disk setup

I’ve used it as a mapped drive for working on my photos and from Lightroom 3 beta 2 and Bridge CS4, the images feel very snappy. Not as quick of course compared to my local SATA drive but it’s not that obvious you’re working through a network. The lag on bridge in terms of refresh for example is noticeable only when you have three clients hitting the NAS but the fact is that its not terribly slow. My guess is that if Bridge refreshes my 800 photo directory on my local drive in 5 seconds, it takes about 8 or 9 on the NAS and perhaps 15+ seconds if you have multiple clients hitting F5 at the same time. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied. Maybe it’s time to look for dual-Gigabit port NICs for my client machines as well but I think the NAS will get faster when I up the RAM to 2Gb.

Fancy cover flow style admin interface

Overall, I’m pretty happy. It serves up my music to my iTunes, I can also listen to music/look at photos/watch movies on my Popcorn Hour C-200 via Twonkymedia server, record from all four of my IP cameras and work on a shared folder of photos. Not cheap but probably more cost effective to run than a standalone PC or server (if you factor in licensing, power, heat and noise). You can do other things with it as well though even thought I don’t such as running a Web or FTP server, etc.

If you want a more in-depth review, you can read it here.

Most administrative interfaces are web based now…