2011 small summary

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.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 read/write benchmark

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.

Samsung HD160JJ to Seagate Momentus 7200.4

I decided to change my relatively old Samsung HD160JJ hdd disk (made in 2005) to the other one. I used it for my operating systems and kept it out of personal data as much as possible and I successfully used it in four absolutely different configurations for these five years. The main reason for the change was to free one 3.5'' HDD disk place above the CPU as I needed to change cpu fan to higher and quieter one (as I wrote earlier, I changed it to default AMD fan from Jetway very loud one but AMD fan broke and I was forced to return to Jetway one). So I was searching only for 2.5'' hdds. The second reason was even more appealing as I wished to have more modern and a little bit faster disk. It is not a secret that every generation has faster disks and they improved considerably during 5 years.

SSD is still out of reach for me so my first stop was a hybrid Seagate Momentus XT disk. However I decided to buy and new graphics card (GTS450), because of this I ended up with considerably cheaper classic Seagate Momentus 7200.4 2.5'' 250GB HDD. It won't give me a big boost in speed but in the end it still should be faster, consume less power and occupy less space in my mini-itx case and give better access to my CPU. At least, I was expecting that.

So, I made some tests with HD tune and HDtach to confirm my expectations. It turned out that Seagate had 40-50% faster transfer rate on average (but slower than my Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm hard drive), better results at write/read and sequential access, burst rate. However, random access time was better only with bigger files. Small files (less than 1MB) were a weak point for the Seagate hdd.

Seagate benchmark

Samsung benchmark

I didn't do real world tests except compared boot time for NetBSD and Fedora Linux 13. It wasn't much improvement but boot time reduced by second or two with both operating systems (I measured time from the start to login screen several times and results were the same constantly). Programs seemed to load a little bit faster (less than a second) too but I didn't know a good tool to calculate load time so it could be inaccurate decision. Besides, copy speed (big 2GB file) from my NAS server showed constant >85MB/s speed compared to 65MB/s to Samsung drive. However copy speed from WD Caviar GP in the same computer was almost at the same speed (probably WD limitation?). Copy speed from Seagate to Samsung was faster than from Samsung to Seagate (again it seems like Samsung limitation).

What is more I can say that Seagate 2.5'' hdd is virtually inaudible contrary to old Samsung which had a little clatter when it had worked. Finally Seagate reports about 5-9°C degrees less than Samsung (35°C vs 44°C on full load). I guess it uses less power too (it is 2.5'' and more modern hdd after all). 

Transition was made by dd tool in Fedora (I just cloned a disc). Everything went smoothly. All my systems booted as they should (I have 5 operating systems in my main computer currently). So I am quite happy with this upgrade as it lived up almost all my expectations. Nothing spectacular (you need ssd for that) but generally more or less better in almost all areas. I changed Jetway fan to Glacialtech  92mm one and the system is much quieter now. Only a 60mm case cooler is quite loud still (though I slowed down it a bit too). However, system becomes to hot without it.

Inside my computer

What about GTS450? I bought it for folding@home. It showed incredible results with 915, 925 points projects where it managed to gain 10000-13000ppd. However ppd reduced to ~6500 and ~8000 accordingly with 6811 and 6800 projects. Unfortunately I got only 6811projects recently. I loaded Starcraft II with it too. The game didn't show a message that my graphics card was to slow anymore :) and worked perfectly with max configurations on 1280x1024 resolution. It is a one of the cheapest Gigabyte models and it is inaudible at idle, however, becomes a little bit noisy when fan reaches 28-30% of the rotation speed on full load (it tries to keep 71°C temperature on full load).  

P.S. next eComStation review probably won't be until the end of this year. Sorry.

VT-310DP (VT8237R) and SATA II hard drive support mystery

As I wrote earlier I was planning to use my VT-310DP board for NAS server. It has an old VT8237R southbridge and support only SATA I mode and it can't recognize hard drive in SATA II mode automatically. In theory almost every SATA II hard drive in the market has an option to set 1.5Gbit/s performance (SATA I). Some of them use pins (WD, Seagate, Maxtor), other ones needs software solution (Samsung, Hitachi). However, this motherboard can't recognize many of them even if this mode is set. I have bought three Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB hard drives (SD1B and CC1G firmware). These drives used pins to set it to SATA I mode, however, VT-310DP didn't see them. The same problem I had with one Samsung 750GB hard drive (I used software solution to slow it down). However, this board recognized all WD drives with pin in it I had (current WD15EADS 1.5TB drive and older WD7500AACS 750GB GP). It also recognized an old Samsung HD160JJ with pin too. However, it didn't see newer 160 GB Samsung which hadn't pin and needed a software solution to slow down it (all current Samsung hard drives doesn't have a pin anymore). I have never tried Hitachi hard drives which uses software tool like Samsung too. I didn't find any clue about why some hard drives worked and other not too. Firstly I thought that a reason is software slow down and motherboard would recognize only hard drives with pins, however, seagate had denied this. I though that it might need spread spectrum enabled (some forum stated this), but WD hard drives worked with spread spectrum disabled. One thing is certain: hard drive has to work in SATA I mode but it is not enough...

So, if you have a motherboard with VT8237R southbridge and have problems with current hard drives I can only recommend Western Digital hard drives. They were only ones those worked as soon as I attached them (with pin, of course).