The State of Solid State

The Fall (as in season), of 2011 will be recorded as the fall of the hard disk drive (otherwise known as HDD) in the annals of computing history. "Neck-deep" flooding in the Bang Pa-In, Thailand brought the vast majority of world production to a screeching halt and doubled the price of drives within a space of days. Why do you care?

From 1956, when IBM (yes, that IBM), introduced them as the secondary (there was a time when Floppy was king) point of storage for computers, these things have become increasingly dominant in the industry as our society has become increasingly digitized. In that day and age, virtually all computers were mainframes and most off-line mass storage as done on tape. Remember those old movies showing the "computer room" with banks of cabinets and big reels of tape spinning?

At MIT where a lot of this type of technology was developed, virtually no one was even allowed into these rooms. If you wanted to run a program, you had to hand it over to one of the "priest" (swear to Jobs, that's what they called them) and those guys would run the "stack" and you'd get a green-sheeted print-out. My first job in college was at Texas A&M in the Teague building doing card punch for a professor and running the resulting program! I guess I was an Aggie Priest! Anyway, as things progress from the 70's into the 80's, computers got the big "packs", removable hard drives in a cake carrier size..... just like the picture above. We had a "mini-computer" at my first job after college which used these things.

At that job, I generally worked on an IBM PC AT. It was a 286 and had the then crazy expensive and extravagantly sized 60Mb hard drive in it! My boss at that cotton company was a little technology crazy and spent a lot of money on such things, so we had the AT, an XT, AND a Compaq Portable. You remember, the clone with a folding keyboard when closed up looked remarkably like a Singer sewing machine ready for travel!

So, is this post about old storage mediums? No: as close as that is to my heart (I know, it's a weird unexplainable thing), that isn't the case. I've recently gotten to the point where my little computer side-business is even starting to go in this direction. The last three machines I sold were equipped with SSDs instead of traditional hard drives. When Joe-blow on the street is opting for it instead of the older, more capacious, and cheaper mechanical drives, then it's time must have arrived.

 

What brought this on all of a sudden? Well....yesterday, I took my last system with a mechanical boot drive "off-line". Our home server built in this Silverstone PS07 case, with the Asus E350-M1pro (AMD APU 350 Brazos chip), had a 500Gb Seagate Momentus XT in it. Yes, I know; it's a "hybrid" drive, but the NAND part of it was just a big cache and didn't really function as an actual SSD. It's being replaced by a 160Gb, Intel 320. It got me to thinking.

It's been a long road, from 2011 till now. It started with this little drive. It's all I could afford at the time, 64Gb Mushkin Callisto in the 1st Blackbird build. Over the course of the last 3 years, that machine has gotten 128Gb, and 256Gb SSDs; with the most recent rebuild I installed my very first SATA-III drive. A 240Gb Sandisk Extreme. That changeover didn't just change Blackbird; it's 256Gb Samsung SSD went into my wife's T500, the temporary 128Gb SSD went into the Viking HTPC replacing a 64Gb Samsung. This last weekend, I just upgraded our living room HTPC to a 128Gb SSD as well. Last month, my personal X301 got an Intel 320, 160Gb that has a TRIM function to replace the older Samsung 128Gb drive that did not. As you can see here, this isn't "1st Generation" replacement, I'm now in the 2G with bigger, faster drives displacing older, slower and smaller drives.

It's undeniable that SSDs was faster, but they were way expensive. So what happened? It wasn't quite this dramatic, but we are back to the top now. In 2011, the floods in Thailand didn't just drive up the price of hard drives, it changed the landscape of computer storage overall. In years past, the industry would have just borne the brunt of the high costs caused by the shrunken supply and then return to normal when the factories came back on line. However, in this case; there was an alternative in the budding SSD industry. Solid State Drive manufacturer's response to the "disaster" was to aggressively ramp up production while cutting prices to penetrate the market. Basically, every 9 to 12 months, the capacity of drives would double at the same price-point.

As the capacity was rising and the prices were dropping on SSDs, we can add the arrival of the "Cloud". This perfect storm (no pun intended) of technologies is spelling the end of the mechanical hard drive in it's traditional role. What has now happened is that in many cases, the SSD have taken over as boot, or only drive with commonly found capacities of 480Gb and beyond. Yes, they are still expensive compared to the spinning platters, which is why you often see the boot drive/storage drive (SSD/HDD) combination. 

Why am I writing about this now? It's that there's a "sea change" out there. You can feel it. SSDs are now the accepted norm for users who want performance. As I pointed out earlier; the last 3 laptops that I sold; one a Dell Latitude E6400, the other two ThinkPads, T61 and T500 all went out with 64Gb SSDs. What makes this remarkable is that I deal in value. My clients want something that will run well for as little as they can pay for it. However, they know the difference between a "cheap" consumer machine from Wal-Buy (my word), and something made well that should last. They also want performance if they don't have to pay too much for it. I offered all of them the machines with a regular HDD, but offered them all an alternative of a small 64Gb SSD for $50 more. After seeing a machine with an SSD run, they all chose less capacity, but better performance, despite the additional $50. These were "regular guys", not gamers, or Tech Gurus. Their use of them is from daily working computer to sit by the recliner check email/web-surfer. They just want their machines to be snappy!

Back in 2008, when the ThinkPad X300 was introduced, the thing that set it apart wasn't the thinness (the MacBook Air was slightly thinner AND beat it to market), it wasn't the uncommon at the time, Hi-Res LED lit screen. It wasn't even the still not standard, ridiculously slim 7mm optical drive that the MBA didn't have.....still doesn't. If you blow that picture up; it's item "N", the 64Gb SSD! The X300 was the lone machine on the market at that time that only came with an SSD! Now 5/6 years down the road, it's a tide that is beginning to wash away the HDD dominance. Ironically, the old hard disk drive has be relegated back to it's original role......that of secondary storage.

Propellerhead Gear: HTPC Upgrade

The home theater PC (HTPC) in my main A/V system is built in an Ahanix D-Vine case. Originally, it had some pretty pedestrian parts in it although the bones were good. Over time though, it got the Intel E8400 "Wolfdale" CPU processor from the original Blackbird, along with 8Gb of RAM, and it was decently powerful for what it was asked to do. Much like Japanese car manufacturers, I like to do a mid-generation facelift before any major rebuild. And as the small HTPC is already on "2nd Gen Core" platform and now the main workstation is on an "Ivy Bridge" i5, changes need to be made to this old girl. 

Originally, my only idea was to upgrade it's small 64Gb Mushkin Callista SSD to something bigger. It was going to be part of the "cascade", taking the 128Gb Samsung from the interim workstation build, but I came upon this 120Gb, OCZ Vertex 2 a few weeks ago. And since this SSD was an odd 3.5", vs. the normal 2.5", it couldn't ever go into a notebook, so into the HTPC it went. 

The other change ended up being this: a 500Gb/7200rpm Hitachi 5K drive which replaced the 500Gb/7200rpm, Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 that was in there. You might be asking yourself, why did he do that? Well, other than my long-running bias against Seagate drives, that particular Seagate is PATA. And with my FreeNAS box having a Promise dual IDE controller and only 3 drives to fill it out.....I needed/wanted a fourth PATA drive to fill it out. So I picked up a used 500Gb SATA drive to go into the HTPC and moved it's old drive.

And of course, with the new drives, comes a new load for Window. As much of a pain in the behind that it is, there's nothing like a fresh Windows load to make a machine run fast. Although this little side-trek didn't take any parts from the Blackbird rebuild directly, it was effected by it peripherally. What happened to the old 64Gb Mushkin SSD? It went into a client machine and therefore fulfilled a purpose as well as defrayed the cost of the upgrade. I charged the buyer $50 to upgrade to the SSD from a mechanical drive, and the 120Gb OCZ SSD cost me $60. So I guess upgrade that doubled the size of my boot drive costs me $10 and some time to reload the OS.

Anything else come out of this little upgrade? Well.....now that you mention it..... While I was researching, I came across this Thermaltake DH-202 HTPC case. I've always found the D-Vine a little lacking in front-panel access and info, and this case has not only lots of controls, but also a 7" display so if I'm just doing something; say doing Windows updates, I can do it right from the machine vs. having to turn on the whole rig. Or if I'm just trying to stream some music from the server. Just sayin'.......
 

Propellerhead Gear: Cascade of Parts

When the "Blackbird" went in for refitting (at least that's what they call it in the Navy), it cut loose a stream of parts. For us poor working stiffs, we don't just put them out in a warehouse, or the deserts of Arizona. No, we look at good stuff laying around and decide how they will be of greatest value to us. As for the Core 2 Quad Q9550 "Yorkfield", it's going on the auction block....literally. Apparently, they still fetch somewhere around $100 on eBay so that's where it's going to go to knock down the cost of the upgrade even further! The other stuff, not as much. Although, I've found that the price of RAM is now pretty darned good, it's worth more to me to keep the 8Gb (4 x 2Gb) that was in that machine for use, than to sell it at the somewhere between $40 and $60 that it sells for, although, they do free me up to sell the 2 sticks of 4Gb that they free up (explanation a little later). 

As for the graphics card, it's my intention to whip up a little something in the oven! It was on-and-off glitchy, giving artifacts and sometimes would completely freeze up the computer. This usually means that the processor onboard is having some issue, and given that it's an ATI Radeon HD 6770 vs. an nVidia; that probably means a problem with the BGA solder joints vs. something internal. So, I'm going to take the plastics off of it and bake it in the oven to see if I can get that fixed. 

What about the motherboard? Some of you might remember that I have another Cooler Master Centurion case. In this case, it's the "5", not the newer "590" that's home to the Blackbird. You might even remember me at some point talking about it being a XP box, so that I'll have something to look at when one of my clients who still uses that OS calls with some issue. Also, it houses my wife's sewing machine software which is only XP compatible. The other night, while the new Blackbird load was doing updates, I moved her software over to my "loaner" laptop which runs XP for the same reason. This eliminated the need to have an XP desktop, since I could just pull the ThinkPad Z60t out as needed. Of course, this left me with a perfectly good case with nothing to do....... what to do? Co-incidentally, I also have a stack of good PATA drives (3, 160Gb, and 1, 500Gb). I know, it just makes 980Gb, but hey, a terabyte here, a terabyte there..... 

ACTUALLY, what I've decided to do with all that is to try out  FreeNAS! TA-DA! 

And so is born the Spartan, named after the C27J that originated as a possible replacement for the C130 Hercules. Remember my old file server.....the Hercules? It's been promoted to the Spectre these days, but see the connection? Anyway, it's my intention to take those drives stuff them into the Centurion 5 case.

......combine all that with the old board out of the Blackbird, and see if I can learn a thing or two about FreeNAS. Despite the lack of onboard video which would have been optimal, it does have 2 Ethernet ports which make it a good candidate for server duty. On top of which, the 8Gb of RAM give it the resources necessary to run ZFS if I decide to go that direction. I'll also reuse the one good Patriot PS-100 SSD out of the WHS 2011 server as it's boot disk. So, another "cascaded" part meets here to become part of my file server testbed.  

The "Cascade"

 

When I use the term cascade, I'm sure most people envision something like this, or at most a high waterfall. Generally something peaceful and beautiful. Actually, what I meant by the word is nothing of the sort. I'm sure others in managing IT have used the concept, if not the word, but in my application; I invented it for my own use...."back in the day." The Y2K days, when I was working my first real IT job at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I was a departmental IT guy, but I was the guy. There was no one else. I had a boss, but she mostly worked on the application end of the software that ran our departmental functions. For hardware, or software support, I was it. We had roughly 60-70 computers that I was responsible for in our area. They ranged from regular desktops, to laptops, to servers. Since I was it (my job title was Area Coordinator for IT), I also handled digital cameras, PDAs, Printers, setup and maintenance. I had 1 student who worked for me. My one minion was a long-haired Mac lover. We had no Macs! Since we were a lone department at a public university, we didn't have a ton of money, we had some, just not a lot. Every year, I could buy anywhere from 10 to 20 machines, which basically calculates to me being able to replace them all on a 3 to 4 year cycle.

Although we weren't exactly a cube-farm, everybody used computers. From the department head who was a university Vice President, to front desk workers of the various building who were students. Some like my buddy Scott was the graphics professional who needed LOTS of power, others, like the aforementioned "desks" just needed to access records. Some like, the big boss (who was a New Yawker), needed to look good while he sat behind his big desk, in his big chair. After sitting down and looking at what I needed to do (machine-wise), and comparing that with what I could do budget-wise, I realized the corporate way of doing things where I put everybody on a cycle and got a new machine every so many years isn't going to work very well. We just didn't have the resources to do that.....eg. buy dozens/hundred of computers every year. So I came up with "the Cascade".

What I had to do was to go around and figure out what everybody does on a computer. How they use it, where they use it, what software they run, yada, yada, yada. Then, I had to figure out how much computer they needed and if there were any other considerations. For instance, my immediate boss needed lots of computer. She got into our databases, and the server software that the department ran on, on a daily basis. The graphics guy needed lots of computing power as well for obvious reasons. The other "executive" type people ranging from the "Big Boss", needed to do the routine office type stuff and didn't need the latest greatest, and so on down to the folks that just needed to access the "front-end" of one of the applications. Once I got that handled (it took a while), I had to break everyone down into groups that fit generalized categories of PCs relative to their capabilities in easily configurable buying specs, and make sure there weren't too many different models to support well. I didn't want to make the mistake of my predessor who had 5 different brands of computers, which God only knows how many different models!

 

I bought 2 brands: Dell for the desktops, IBM for notebooks. Within those 2 brands, I had maybe 2, sometimes 3 models during any given buying cycle. There were sometimes small variations within the specific models such as a bigger screen for some particular worker who was looking at giant spreadsheets all the time, or more powerful/dual processors for the graphics guy, who also got extra/giant hard drives. Actually, his stuff was almost always special because of what he did. I can't even begin to tell you how much of a difference this made in everything from setup to support, by my second year. Of course, I only spent a little over 2 years there, but this was the testing ground for my IT ideas.

.....But what about the others? Oh yeah, them, the proletariat. I almost forgot.... It's actually they who allowed me to conceived of the cascade. I realized pretty quickly that by virtue of what they did on their PCs, there were some folks who didn't need to have a new $2000 machine every 2, 3 years, or actually.....ever. Some like a the cadre of administrative assistants, only ever looked up certain data, and wrote memos. Their computers were glorified word processors. Then there were even some workers who only occasionally did things on their machines. Maybe an hour or two a day at most, but they needed a machine to complete those tasks. Therein lies the function of the cascade. If I could eliminate them from the new machine "cycle", then I could use my finite pot of budgetary funds each year, to speed up the cycle so that my high-end users got new machines! I would just take their old ones, and push them down to the next level, or whichever level that the specification of machine was appropriate for their job. In the end, they didn't really care, because they still got "new" machines every 2 or 3 years and that kept them for having to use the antiquated 486s that didn't pass the Y2K utilities!

What did that do for me? It caused me to do more work! If you think about it a little bit. This meant that not only did I have to set up just the number I bought that year; I had to reload all the ones that they displaced for someone else, and maybe do the same to the machines at the next level as well! Holy Cats!!! It's financially efficient, but it almost tripled my workload! At UIC, that wasn't so bad, but when I moved on to the Texas Tech University Libraries with the 700+ PC (and Macs) that were my responsibility, it was daunting. However, I did it. Every spring when the orders would arrive, and through the summers when we did the bulk of our update work, I was stressed. Over a period of several weeks, I'd have to refer to my cascade spreadsheet to make sure we got the correct PCs to the correct workers.

What does all that have to do with a home propellerhead like me? Well; when I pulled the old guts out of the "old" Blackbird, I started a cascade! You see, in our house, my desktop workstation is at the top of the food chain. It has the most powerful, the biggest, and the fastest of everything. It's parts are more advanced than every other computer in the house. I'm sure you can see where this is going. Over the course of the next several weeks, the various parts taken from the Blackbird are going to replace parts in maybe 3 other machines! So stay tuned; we've only scratched the surface!

Propellerhead Gear: Blackbird Mk II, Part Deux

Yesterday was "Skunkworks" day. If you aren't up on aerospace lore, it's the highly secret Lockheed design and construction facility outside of LA. This place goes back to Howard Hughes and his work for the government during WWII..... and also where the SR71 "Blackbird" was birthed.

Beginning last Thursday (good timing huh?), the last of the stuff for the Blackbird rebuild started coming in; the Intel i5 3450S processor and the Kingwin FPX-004 Front Panel, cardreaderUSB3.0portsfancontrollercasetemperaturereadoutmicheadphone-thing. Oh yeah, the X300 screen, but that's a different story. Confronting me was; Thursday night, one child going to a "real" basketball game with her team, and the other child's Open House/Music Program. Then Friday night in the lovely village of Crandall with Soccer and overlapping Valentines dinner-date with my very patient wife who happens to teach there, which caused me to get home at 10:30, so no build. Saturday, I had kids' basketball, pretty much all day, cleaning the garage, spraying the yard for weeds and pulling the stack of old computer parts I promised to another ThinkPad Forum member....so yeah, wiped out. Then Sunday, of course there was church then grading two stacks of essays from my Advance Placement World History class. However in between the two sets of papers, I took a break by pulling and starting to disassemble Blackbird. Then finish grading the second set of papers. However I got nothing else done since it was now time for my son and I to go see "Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit", which I highly recommend for all you aging Tom Clancy readers out there.

After dinner at Wendy's (son's choice), it was time for........ no, not The Little Mermaid!?! Nope, that's there, because that's where mom and daughter had gone, about the time we got home! Slick planning huh? I took the boy to the late afternoon movie so that when we got home, the mother-daughter event was just starting in downtown Dallas! Two plus hours of solitude, otherwise known as SKUNKWORKS TIME!!!

Now, finally, I got the chance to put the "new" parts back into the old case. I moved all the drives to their new location since I was putting the new "avionics" (Kingwin Superpanel) into the top bay of the case. I had already swapped out the new (Sandisk Extreme) 240Gb SSD in the drive cage, so that went in as well. The Z77 board was bigger than the old one so I installed new stand-offs. Then it was board-time; the CPU got cleaned and went in, then I tackled the big CoolerMaster 212 EVO heatsink/cooler and let me tell ya, it's a huge chunk of copper and alluminum! The Corsair RAM went in next, then the board was installed. It was now time to connect ALL the many cables, followed by the cards. After that, comes the part that I hate. Crawling under the desk to connect all the various peripherals, in positions that make it hard to see and uncomfortable to be in.

I was rewarded by.....this.....a black screen, and the computer going through repeated loops of trying to P.O.S.T. I tried all kinds of stuff. Usually, a "black screen" is a sign of bad or loose memory. Not this time. Then I remembered that this board had a 2 digital diagnostic panel on the MB, which emphatically said "15". The manual said that 15, was Pre-memory Northbridge Startup. WHAT THE!!!! Off to Google, which said all kinds of things that didn't make sense until the end of the 3rd article I looked at which talked about a backside short on the motherboard. A-Ha, I said! I had noticed that it looked like the backplate of the 212 might have been touching the MB tray. One disassembly/couple of layers of electrical tape/reassembly later, the machine booted normally.

 

 And I got to see that wonder of modern computing....the UEFI! From here the load proceeded as normal, except much, much faster. I felt like some sort of Geek-Spy-Superhero who had just saved the world/western civilization by hacking into a secured computer system. OK, that was the Jack Ryan character from the movie, but still......

We are now in "test flight" time. Which basically means loading basic software, updates, and more updates. Then I started getting some errors on a few utilities I use. After more Googling, I learned that if you use a machine with UEFI, and GPT instead of MBR, you'll run into the problem I did (whatever the &^%^$#% all that stuff means). Anyway, the fix, is to repair or reload after having preformatted the drive before the Windows load occurs! Of course that means, 2 hours of work wiped out! In the mean time, the wife and child came home which as good timing since was a little frustrated and needed a break!

 

11 O'Clock, back to work and magically everything loads as it should. A couple of M$ updates rounds later, it's off to bed at 2:55 AM. Yeah, the sides are off. The cables are all over the place. My office looks like craziness happened there and I haven't gotten monitor 2 working right, but hey; that's why we crash-dummies get paid the big bucks, right? If there's a cautionary tale in all this; it's to never so a build without another fully working computer beside you which is hooked up to the Internet! In the end; the cat got to play in the boxes, and that machine? It's seriously faaaaast!

Watch Out for Falling Objects!

Sometimes things (obvious things) just come falling out of the sky and they hit you square on the head! Last week, it happened to me. I don't even really remember what I was looking for, but I ran across an X300 ThinkPad. It was listed "For Repair, As Is", with a cracked screen, no hard drive or cover, and no A/C adapter, but with 2 batteries. Fully working otherwise! I'm not even certain what the guy wanted for it, but there was a "make offer" button on it, so I figured..... what the heck? I offered $45..... and he took it!

Let's be clear here: a working X300 for $45 ($55 after shipping). Came with 2 (1 OEM, 1 Aftermarket) batteries which routinely sell for $40 ea on eBay. Turns out, after I messaged him asking about the drive cover, he not only found it, but agreed to include an A/C adapter that he was also able to find. OK, I get that I have an X301 that I just upgraded to, but here was a functioning unit that I knew for a fact was worth more than twice the price in parts alone! On top of that, I have one more 1.8" 64Gb SSD sitting around somewhere, and although I knew the unusual WXGA+ LED screen was expensive, I figured I'd be OK to wait for a good deal on one. 

After a little bit of research on said screen, things didn't look very good. I was seeing prices ranging from a low of $175 to a high of over $300! This screen is different than most others. When the X300 was released in February of 2008, it sported one of the very few LED lit screens, and at 13.3" (unusual size), with a high resolution of 1440 x 900..... we'll just say that not a lot of companies rushed out there to adopt it. In my mind, I thought: hey, at least I got a couple of batteries and a power adapter out of this deal, and prepared to leave it sitting on a shelf for a while. 

Apparently, things were not through falling on me. The computer came, I examined it, and sure enough, there were 2 good batteries (about $60 worth since one was not OEM), there was 4Gb of RAM in the sockets (another $40 worth), and an A/C adapter (worth maybe $25). At this point, the value to me was already at $125. Then I checked that the machine did indeed work, so let's just say the parts value would be a conservative $125, making this things value at around $250. But you know me. Can't leave good enough alone. So, over the course of the next several days, I'd periodically scan eBay for a screen or a dead X300 with a good screen. I even considered giving/trading it to my friend Kym who has a severely "bowed" (don't ask, but I'll just say it involved UPS) X300. He could swap in his screen and be in good shape. Then something small fell on me. I saw a screen that the guy wanted $115. A little quick math puts a working X300 at $170. That's not too bad! But I decided to look around a little more. That's when the "big object" fell out of the sky and smacked me! A listing for a "working pull" screen for $59, with my friend, the "Make Offer" button! It had an issue in that there was a little "bloom" in the lower left corner, where the backlight is a little out of whack. It looks like somebody is shining a tiny flashlight from the corner into the screen. It's about a quarter of an inch long. After picking myself up out of the floor, I made an offer.... for $50. I got confirmation in about 5 minutes that he took it! 

The screen came today, and I got it out of the box, and swapped into the X300 in record time. I'd say that I got it done in about 10 minutes. We had my son's school program to go to, so I didn't get to finish till just a little while ago. It did take me a little while to realize that the original 64Gb Samsung SSD from my old X300 was still in the daughter's dead X61! I pulled it out, simply plugged it straight into the "new" computer and it booted! It didn't like it, and wanted to know if that's what I really wanted to do, but sure enough, it when right on through the boot after I told it yes! It was a rough start up, but it worked. Now, I'm getting updates done since, as you can imagine, the drivers are a mess. The total comes to $105.

Sometimes, it better to be lucky than to be good!

Propellerhead Gear: Blackbird Mk II

I love my computer, I really do. However, it's time for the old girl to go in for an overhaul. In this case (literally), I'm going to rip the old guts out and start over. Not that the "Yorkfield", Core 2 Quad isn't doing it's job. It's just time. In Frugal Propellerhead-speak, that means that the cost of a significant upgrade has dropped to the point where I can do it inexpensively.

You might remember a few ramblings about gathering parts for this build that began with this; a Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H motherboard that I picked up locally for $60. It got RMA'd back to Gigabyte for a broken PCI-e slot and came back as a replacement. The socket 1155 and Z77 chipset on this board allows me to install i Series, 2nd and 3rd generation CPUs in it, more commonly known as "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge". Being a mid-line board, it gives me lots of nice features that are common at a $200 pricepoint. This 2 generation jump will allow me to go, not only a whole new series of CPUs, but also SATA II to III yielding a doubling of the critical throughput on storage, and the jump from USB 2.0 to 3.0 which is huge as well. Of course, there are other areas of upgrade like the jump to DDR3 and UEFI BIOS. 

One of the first things I had to get sorted out was storage. I had an OEM Samsung 256Gb SSD in Blackbird, and although, the capacity was fine for me, the SATA II interface was not. Which led to a series of machinations that produced this drive...... the Sandisk Extreme, 240Gb SSD that was in my wife's T61. Last month, when I upgraded her to a ThinkPad T500, it started a chain of events that would give me the correct drive without costing anything. First of all, I had bought a Dell E6500 for a client who wanted a 1Tb mechanical drive in it. The Dell, came equipped with a Samsung 128Gb SSD. That drive went into my desktop, which gave me it's 256Gb SSD that went into my wife's "new" T500. The T61 which had the nicer nVidia graphics went to my son replacing his T61 with Intel graphics. His SSD went into mom's old machine. His machine got a 80Gb mechanical drive and sold off. All that work yielded me a free 240Gb, Sandisk Extreme SATA III drive for free! Actually, that's not completely accurate. The sale of that T61 actually made me money on the whole thing, but I'm not going to bother trying to compute what the actual net profit ended up being out of all that; let's just say that it didn't cost anything.

In the last post I talked about mining Craigslist and this was one of the products. A pair of Corsair XMS3 DDR3/1600 RAM for $50, bought from the same guy that I got the motherboard from, so I also have the added benefit that of knowing it'll work on that board. The configuration will fit my philosophy on RAM. Which is: 

•  Adequate (4Gb) is not enough.
• When a major upgrade happens. Keeps the same amount for that OS, but cut the number of modules in half. I have 8Gb in 4 modules, so I need to drop down to 2.
• Leave yourself room to upgrade. The point above gives me 2 empty slots for future upgrades.
• Buy mid-line from a reputable manufacturer. For Corsair right now, that'd be XMS vs. the uber-expensive Vengence line. You still get lifetime warranty but half the cost. 

At this point, my Blackbird upgrade is up to $110. 

Now, I'm in the "home stretch", and just need a processor so I can start building. This turned out to be the most time consuming part of the whole process. Originally, I had thought I'd get my brother's old 2390T that he replaced in one of his computers. Unfortunately, he recently has taken a new position in Taiwan and hasn't been home to sent it to me. On top of that, it's the world's only non-Quad Core i5. I'm not really thinking I want to take a step backwards at this point. However, the concept of using a low-TDP (Termal Design Power) processor was intriguing. My current C2Q 9550 has a TDP of 95 which isn't too bad, and the typical Ivy Bridge chip is around 77 TDP is even better. When you look at Intel's list of 22nm processors (Ivy Bridge), you see lots of "S" spec chips that have a TDP of 65, with the current "T" spec chips down at 45 TDP. I'm all for that! If you've ever been in my south-facing office in the summer, you would be too!

This led to LOTS of contemplation and sleepless nights. Power vs. Efficiency? I knew I could get a really nice processor that would do everything that I wanted between $150 and $175. I had just done a machine with an i5 2500K, "Sandy Bridge" chip and it was flat-out, FAST. In the end, I knew that I didn't need, "nose-bleed" speeds; I just don't do that much "high-end" stuff. So I focused on "S" spec, Ivy Bridge chips. I started out looking at the commonly seen 3330S, then realized that the faster, yet just as cool models costs about the same. I even looked at the 3450P with the disabled GPU and all the way up to the current 3570S which sells for around $160. After reading reviews and benchmarks till my eyes crossed, I decided that the few percentage points between the chips weren't worth the $25-35 to me. Maybe it'd be different if I was a gamer, or did a lot of video editing, but then, I'd be looking at i7s, right? The other thing that I found out was that the "S" spec chips are generally sold to big OEMs....the Dells and HPs of the world. They use them in the "small form-factor" desktops that are sold by the thousands to corporations. When they are replaced, these machines are almost never sold off as whole computers, but are commonly "parted-out"/recycled. This means that there are lots of these chips appearing on the "secondary" markets (read eBay) as the first of these machines are being pulled at the 2 and 3 year mark. All that means: just be patient and wait for the right deal to drop in your lap. On Sunday, I caught a 3450S that sold to me at $133 with Free Shipping. That puts me at $243 and I'm starting to make plans to build.

One more thing. I'll have to admit, it's a bit of an extravagance. Although, it's just a $40 extravagance. This is a Kingwin FPX-004. I always wanted one of these, since the first time I saw one a number of years ago. A full (5.25") bay multi-function panel. This one has a card reader (one less thing on my desk), 2 fan controller with temp/rpm readout, eSATA, mic/headphone jacks, AND most importantly, USB 3.0 ports. That was my rationale. The new MB has a USB 3.0 head, so I really would like to be able to connect those devices without crawling under my desk. The final total? $283 for a total upgrade to Ivy Bridge. 

So, a week from now, the old Cooler Master Centurion 590 case will be completely new machine inside. Do I loose anything? The new board doesn't have an IDE header, so the Fujitsu 640Mb, Magneto Optical drive will probably bow out. But this thing is going to be one FAST AND COOL CAT.