I was less active this year and unfortunately couldn't keep any of my promises. I still have quite lot of readers of my eComStation 2 installation article. It is quite surprising as I don't think that I'm the only one who described an installation process of this operating system. Unfortunately, I didn't use it much and I decided not to upgrade to new version. Because of this I am leaving usage review for somebody else (at least for now). However, I hope somebody found that article interesting and maybe even useful.
I was less active on collecting CPUs recently however I had some new additions and photos. Not everything is on my gallery but sooner or later I'll put photos of all my CPUs. Some new additions will include Kendall Square Research cpu set, HP Alpha 21364 1300 MHz, some PowerPC, MIPS, Zilog Z380 and other items. You already can find new CPUs from last big update in march such unfinished HyperSPARC, VIA Nano Quad Core ES, Intel C8008, HP PA-RISC 8700 3AA2-3105, Hitachi SH-3 and SH-4 and others. Probably it is not that "epic" as last update but still was interesting and with lots of unusual items. I am not going to expand my collection in such pace as earlier but I still looking for some items like intergraph or fairchild clipper, at&t hobbit and some rare items. My focus is still to have several new architectures before I feel more or less completed my original aim to have all major CPU architectures in my collection.
This year wasn't very interesting in hardware too. My jetway jnc-81 died this summer. Jetway replaced it with JNC-84E-LF. It is quite similar board but it has newer amd 785G+SB750 chipset (compared to 780G+SB700) whose main feature is updated graphics. It also uses AMI BIOS instead of Award and supports more AMD CPU models (though I still use Athlon II X2 235E). I removed my 750GB WD disk and use only NAS server for data. One NAS server green WD 1.5GB hard drive died but I replaced both disks with Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB. Read performance nicely surprised me. It is SATA 3 disk so it might be even faster on new interface as it seems that it hits the boundary on the first part of the benchmark. It is five platter disk so it might not be the best disk for NAS but 3TB should be enough for a very long time for me. I just hope they won't fail anytime soon. I've made a service to report S.M.A.R.T. data to ensure some early detection this time.
The last but not the least I've upgraded my mother's computer. It features Asus M5A99X motherboard and 8GB DDR3 RAM now (1600Mhz by specifications, but works only as 1333MHz because Phenom doesn't support faster speeds, at least like I understood). It replaced old Asus M2A-VM HDMI motherboard with 4GB DDR2 RAM. Motherboard has modern UEFI bios and it also successfully unlocked my Phenom II X2 555 to quad core. Now folding@home is almost twice faster because of this two additional cores. Graphics card remained the same NVIDIA Geforce 450GTS but even it seems a little bit faster at folding. There is one caveat that it consumes almost 300W of energy because of folding (I would use about 120W on idle). Electricity will become more pricey next year so I am thinking to stop or limit gpu or cpu folding but it depends on situation. It still uses about 200W if only GPU or CPU active.
More or less it is everything this year. I don't have any specific plans for next year but I think I'll have some changes too. I hope to replace my old HP PSC-2355 multifunction printer/scanner device. My NAS server hardware can be upgraded too but it is not a priority. It will be more a software year probably. I hope for NetBSD 6 release finally. It looks quite promising for me. Though I use Fedora Linux 16 as main system currently and it probably will be the one for some time. Maybe Haiku and other partially hobby systems will be used more often too as they progress. I'll keep upgrading NetBSD on DEC Alpha system though I still wasn't successful to load X server on it. Finally, I'll keep testing for some OSes and software on my VIA VT-310DP.
I don't know if I'll update my main computer. There are always lots of interesting thoughts what I want to have and to use. Jetway JNC-84 wasn't so friendly with my systems as JNC-81so there is a possibility that I'll change platform but it is not a priority too. I still quite satisfied with current performance.
So that is everything I want to share for now. Till the next time.
I was less active on collecting CPUs recently however I had some new additions and photos. Not everything is on my gallery but sooner or later I'll put photos of all my CPUs. Some new additions will include Kendall Square Research cpu set, HP Alpha 21364 1300 MHz, some PowerPC, MIPS, Zilog Z380 and other items. You already can find new CPUs from last big update in march such unfinished HyperSPARC, VIA Nano Quad Core ES, Intel C8008, HP PA-RISC 8700 3AA2-3105, Hitachi SH-3 and SH-4 and others. Probably it is not that "epic" as last update but still was interesting and with lots of unusual items. I am not going to expand my collection in such pace as earlier but I still looking for some items like intergraph or fairchild clipper, at&t hobbit and some rare items. My focus is still to have several new architectures before I feel more or less completed my original aim to have all major CPU architectures in my collection.
This year wasn't very interesting in hardware too. My jetway jnc-81 died this summer. Jetway replaced it with JNC-84E-LF. It is quite similar board but it has newer amd 785G+SB750 chipset (compared to 780G+SB700) whose main feature is updated graphics. It also uses AMI BIOS instead of Award and supports more AMD CPU models (though I still use Athlon II X2 235E). I removed my 750GB WD disk and use only NAS server for data. One NAS server green WD 1.5GB hard drive died but I replaced both disks with Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 3TB. Read performance nicely surprised me. It is SATA 3 disk so it might be even faster on new interface as it seems that it hits the boundary on the first part of the benchmark. It is five platter disk so it might not be the best disk for NAS but 3TB should be enough for a very long time for me. I just hope they won't fail anytime soon. I've made a service to report S.M.A.R.T. data to ensure some early detection this time.
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| Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 read/write benchmark |
More or less it is everything this year. I don't have any specific plans for next year but I think I'll have some changes too. I hope to replace my old HP PSC-2355 multifunction printer/scanner device. My NAS server hardware can be upgraded too but it is not a priority. It will be more a software year probably. I hope for NetBSD 6 release finally. It looks quite promising for me. Though I use Fedora Linux 16 as main system currently and it probably will be the one for some time. Maybe Haiku and other partially hobby systems will be used more often too as they progress. I'll keep upgrading NetBSD on DEC Alpha system though I still wasn't successful to load X server on it. Finally, I'll keep testing for some OSes and software on my VIA VT-310DP.
I don't know if I'll update my main computer. There are always lots of interesting thoughts what I want to have and to use. Jetway JNC-84 wasn't so friendly with my systems as JNC-81so there is a possibility that I'll change platform but it is not a priority too. I still quite satisfied with current performance.
So that is everything I want to share for now. Till the next time.
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