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I'll start by showing you my daily-driver's case. Yup; that's the biggest, baddest, beast of 4-5 years ago; the Cooler Master Cosmos II. It will take an EATX sized motherboard and has room for something like 14 drives. It weighs about 60lbs...empty. The fact is; I love cases. All different kinds of cases. Like some people love cars, women, wine, guns, whatever. I love computer cases. I think they're interesting and sometimes beautiful. The Cosmos is a case-in-point... sorry, couldn't help myself. I've kept it at bay for some time after getting the Cosmos, but there are certain ones out there that punch my buttons!
This is one of them! The Corsair Graphite 380T. I've loved it since the first time I saw it. The only thing I didn't love about it was the $140 price. I love that it looks like an Igloo cooler...
I love that it's kinda oversized for a Mini-ITX case! Shouldn't be a surprise coming from somebody who uses a Cosmos.... right?
It can hold 2, 3.5" drives, and 2, 2.5" ones as well. There's space for 2, 120mm, 1, 140mm or 1 200mm fan in the front of the unit. It'll take a 240mm double water-cooler on one side and a 120mm one n the back. The graphics card can be up to 290mm. So, I forgive that it's a little chunky. As you can see; both side and the front pop off. It's just unique, and I love that I bought it for $50 on Craigslist! I don't have any idea what I'm going to build into this thing yet.
While, I'm in the process of baring by soul on this topic, I'll just throw out there that there's another case that I'd buy on sight. That's the Cooler Master XB/XB Evo, from their "HAF" (high air flow) line.
Yes, it's a little unusual as well. It's a cube style case that can be used as an open, test-bench with the side and top removed! I'd buy this one in a heartbeat as well if I came across one around $50! Are there any others that causes my addiction shakes to come on?
The Thermaltake V1 (Mini-ITX) and V21 (Micro-ATX) cases. I like cubes, especially ones that can be configured and reconfigured any way you want.
Fractal Design Node 804 (Micro-ATX), and 304 (Mini-ITX). Getting the impression I really like cubes? They're space efficient. Just look at the 3 (!) drive carriers that can each hold 2, 3.5" HDDs! Can we say, home server!?!
The Silverstone ML-08B-H; Mini-ITX why wouldn't you love it. It has a handle..... !
.....and the Thermaltake DH-202 HTPC case with a 7" touch display for obvious reasons. Oh, there are way more. Some for their build quality, others for their exquisite materials and even some just because they're interesting, but I'd better quit before I get carried away!
Sometimes, all manner of otherwise unrelated items cross each others' paths, stars align just right and fortune smiles on us mere mortals (or Frugal Propellerheads).
Some of you might remember that a few weeks ago, I posted about my "other" hobby, that of woodworking. As you might imagine, I approach all my hobbies the same way..... with a plan to upgrade over time and to be ready to use opportunities as they present themselves. A few years ago, I got to the point in my woodworking where my wife bought me a little table saw for Christmas. It was one of those $100 Christmas specials that you see stacked in the aisles of Walmarts all over the nation as we approach the holiday season. It was a little Black and Decker and over the course of the next couple of years, it did it's share of work. But as you can imagine, they aren't really a serious tool. The fence never would align correctly, and it was severely underpowered. They're really a $40 circular saw mounted upside-down on an aluminum table with a plastic base. I'm not even going to bother to depict it here. So, after a few items constructed, I was ready to graduate to a more substantial machine. Where-upon, I fell for the Ryobi BT3000 that you see above. Let's just say that it's a gadgeteer's table saw. If you want to look it up, you'll see that it can be set up to do lots of things, ranging from being a router table to having an on-board sliding miter table. My issue with it was that, I never used any of those features and it turned out to not hold settings very well!
So, here we go..... I had sold the Black and Decker for around $60, then added money earned for computer work etc. to buy the Ryobi for about $250. I did add a kit to it which cost me about $80, so I had $330 invested in it. A few weeks ago, I sold it for $300 and started looking for table saws on Craigslist.
I learned that among others brands and models, various versions of the venerable Craftsman 113.xxxx table saw could be had for anywhere from $75 to $200 depending on age, general condition and of course; seller's situation. Let me go ahead and explain my plan here. These are the next level up in table saws. The main feature that separates them from ones like mine is the cast iron top. These lend stability and tend to be very hard wearing, so they last forever. There's virtually no difference between a 60's version from an 80's version. Of course, there are other table saws out there of this style, but these are legendary.
...... then there were these. The Delta 36-725, "10" Contractor's Saw" selling at your local Lowe's for $599. I kept finding reasons to go by there and then swing by hardware and stare at it.... trying hard to dream up scenarios where I could come up with the $300 difference between what I had and what I needed to buy it. It was like something out of the movie "Christmas Story"! And just when I had resigned myself to refurbishing an old Craftsman, it came up in conversation with my buddy the science teacher, that he had one of these and it was just a magical as I had envisioned...... drat.....double drat!!! And throw in a dang-nabbit for good measure! To make it worse; various needs arose around that time and I spent about $140 of what I had for a number of unexpected eventualities (which I expected to get back). Let's all say DRAT again! Oh, it actually gets worse, so bear with me on this....!
In the meantime; I found a CL ad for a Rigid TS3650 for $325 in Dallas. A similar saw to the aforementioned Delta, but had an inferior fence, plus it was older. I managed to talk the guy down to $300, however, he had very tight time restrictions and I was going to be out of town that Saturday for an academic competition. So I arranged to get it from him between 2:30 and 3:30 that Sunday, not knowing that my son's swim meet wasn't just Saturday....... it was going to be that Sunday as well from 1:30 to 3:30. Yup.... no saw. The guy wouldn't budge on a meet time. It was just as well, since I was going to have to ask my wife for a loan from our actual bank account anyway to make up the difference.
Then, magic happened....
..... or more specifically, ThinkPad magic. After having my son's old ThinkPad X220 on Craigslist for several weeks without much interest, a buyer appeared out of nowhere and wanted to buy it rather quickly...... for the $165 asking price. Which as it turns out came to $325 total of cash in hand. But wait: there's more magic. A week or so before that, I had found one of these Delta Table saws list for $500 literally "in my backyard", or in Poetry, Texas which is a few miles up the road. Then, about the middle of the week before Thanksgiving, the guy dropped the price to the magical $325. So, I texted and found that he did indeed have that saw still and yes, he was selling at $325, AND yes he would be happy to meet me at my house with the saw since I was leaving town that day to go to Eastern Oklahoma! Oh yeah; and all this was happening while the other guy who wanted the ThinkPad was driving down from about an hour away to buy it.... Whew!
What about the "Vinegar" part? The saw came looking about like this. It had gotten rained on which you can imagine wasn't great for cast iron. Plus, it was missing some bolts for the fence rails. After a trip to Ace Hardware for bolts and Google/Youtube for info, I bought some 3m Green pads and went to work on it with, first some WD40, then the vinegar. Apparently, vinegar reacts with rust and gets turned into this kind of slurry that can then be scrubbed loose and wiped away. After that an application of old fashion Johnson paste wax to combat the moist air of East Texas, and it looks pretty much like the ad picture above! Sure, it's scratched up a bit, but most importantly, it cost me the $325 that I had and that's a good thing.
This is one of the most common scenarios in today's middle-class America; that of the old family PC gift. There are literally scores of machine like this sitting in the closets, attics and garages of suburbia. They can be HP, Dell, Acer..... the brand matters little. They are very much like this one; 2, 3 maybe 4 generations old. They are consumer machines that sell by brand recognition and whichever is shinier/cooler looking than the others on the shelves of Best Buy and Walmart. These aren't bad machine, they're just limited and in today's world of 5th, 6th generation "Core" computers, they are basically "on their last legs". However, this is what one of my students brought in today. So lets take a look at it and see what we can do with it.
At the center of this machine is the LGA-775 and in it sits the Intel Core2Quad Q6600. This motherboard engenders some givens.
Four sockets that take DDR2 memory of 667Mhz spec. As typical of memory from this era, there's a chipset limitation of 8Gb total. It also means a full complement of 6 SATA sockets. Along with the obvious limitations, there are also some opportunities as well.
What about the most important part; the graphics sub-system? This machine came equipped with the nVidia GeForce 8500GT. For that day and age, it wasn't "bad" equipment. Far from it! But for today, it's barely adequate to run YouTube videos, but certainly not games of today. So.... what to do?
I would do this, in the following order:
- I'd start with the drive situation; buying as much SSD as my budget will allow. That'd probably something in the 256Gb range. Not huge, but big enough to hold a reload of the OS and the important software.This will do more than anything to make the machine run like something much newer.
- Then, I'd move on to this; a new graphics card. I'd do something along the lines of the nVidia GTX650, or an AMD equivalent. Something giving modern graphics ability, but not requiring additional power.
That's it. Really...... that's all I'd do. The machine already has 4Gb of RAM in it (occupying all it's memory sockets), so in order to add more, it would require losing at least 2Gb. I'll probably advise my student to not bother with the RAM unless he has extra money or happens to come across a great deal on 8Gb of DDR2 memory. It's really a pretty easy case. The hard part will be to save up his money to do a true full-on build!
This is my favorite time of year..... when the days get cooler, shorter and the nights get chilly and longer. I can run the systems in my office as much as I want and it only serves to warm up the house! It's that time of year when we spend more time inside and hang around our electronic hearths. There's more time to plan/build systems and 'cus there's less time expended on the yard!
We also start thinking about what we can ask for, for Christmas as well. My Computer Club students are thinking about parts that they can ask for to upgrade their systems or actually build a system. The frantic aspect of the Fall such as the beginning of school and football season is over. Everyone is in a bit of a routine now and know when they can carve out time to work on their hobbies.
For me, it means that there'll be days during Thanksgiving week and Christmas break where I can work on and in my workshop. I have a list of things that need to get built. The unspoken thing down here in Texas is that there is a limited times that these things can happen. Other than time commitments, the main limitation is the extreme heat! If you think that we could get up early or stay up late to avoid that, you've evidently never spent time here in the eastern half of our lovely state where the "H" word have nothing to do with the devil. It's all about the humidity! We actually look forward to the heat of the day to get rid of the oppressive humidity (and I don't even live in Houston)!
On the other hand, our houses don't look like this from December to March either. So, that's when we can do what we want out in the garages. If you've never done it, you should come down to Texas between November and January. The weather is absolutely spectacular, with temps ranging from mid-50s to mid-70s! Plus it tends to be dry, so virtually no snow or ice. If you've never taken your family to NASA in Houston; that would be the time. Want to go to Six Flags Over Texas, River Walk in San Antonio, Big Bend..... come on down!
So, let's take a look at some of things on my docket. One of my Computer Club students wants to do a build on the Mini-ITX form-factor. While all that is pretty straight-forward these days, we still have to deal with costs. I've helped out a number of students in the past by donating various of my old parts to their efforts and this will be no exception. While looking at Mini-ITX cases during a planning session, she decided that she like the Cooler Master Elite 120 in white. I do happen to have the black version which sits in "the closet of doom", so we'll make that into a 2-in-1 project, where we'll paint out the case as well. Some of you might remember a previous student build from a couple of years ago where we transformed an older Alienware case by doing a faux carbon fiber look on it. While that one was just huge, this one will be the opposite!
Another project in progress is the conversion of a Dell PowerEdge SC440 from an old "enterprise" box to a home machine. I have another student who is in that process which will be an excellent "case study" for Linux, FreeNAS use.
Along those same line, we'll also be doing "case studies" on the stack of about 25 ThinkPad R60s that we have down in the "Batcave". These were some of our school district's old teacher computers that we were given. They're of course quite long in the tooth these days, but are also from the Core/Core2 Duo generation so can run relatively modern OS's. These should be fun machines for the kids to take home and play with! I'm certain that, like the others, this will turn into a post of it's own. Are all my projects having to do with the students?
Here's my project! It's kind of a big one. I need to clean out, streamline, update, organize; whatever you want to call it. This is the winter that I need to get myself ready to move forward. Before, I can do that, I have to "un-hook the trailer" from a psychological sense. There'll MUCH more to come on this topic as it progresses.
I was up late last night (I really struggle with time changes), and while working on a few random things like getting my son's old X220 ready for sale, something appeared. OK, I was actually trying to find the X220 drive bay cover and while doing that, I was feeling around to see what was on one of the shelves of my workbench. And out comes this!
I had thought that I'd sold all the random X6x gen machines and parts! Yet, there it was; an X61 sitting on it's matching dock! I kept racking my brain for it's history while I pulled it in and check out whether it even worked. My thought process was rudely interrupted by a sequence of beeps telling me that it either didn't like the RAM, or there was none. A little screwdriver work, followed by some digging in the spare RAM box, and I was rewarded with a POST, followed by a message that it didn't have an OS. That'd be because, it didn't have a drive in it.... More parts box scrounging, which led to me reorganizing my entire stock of 2.5" hard drives..... told you I have trouble with time changes! After that detour, which led to another detour to put a Western Digital Blue 750Gb drive into my son's "new" laptop for "mass storage" purposes..... I came up with an Intel 80Gb, mSATA SSD in the weird 3.3v/1.8" form that I had sitting around. I had, had a number of them at one time because that's what the X300/X301 called for and since they are neither capacious or work in most machines which aren't ThinkPads, they've been collection dust. I'll do a separate post some time on those weird little drives. But in any case, since this was indeed a ThinkPad, and was in need of some sort of drive, I slipped it into a 2.5" adapter and put it in the X61. I invested another 45 minutes of sleep time into slapping an operating system on it to make sure it worked, then went to bed.
The light of day found the hard part rattling around in my head. What exactly does one do with a 8/9 year old laptop? So, let's look at the points of the argument and see what the issues are, OK? It's CPU is a Core 2 Duo T7100, which comes with integrated graphics as well. These are not good things. Not only does it not run current graphics well, it runs hot as well. In fact, this little guy is famous/infamous for running hot! The screen is XGA (1024 x 768). It's not that I'm a widescreen guy or anything, but this low resolution makes most web content which have stuff off to the side creates a scrolling issue! Oh yeah; and lots of that content is in Flash which bogs down older machines like this. Those are pretty big negatives! Are there positives as well?
You can see that, in comparison to a more "normal" sized machine, the X61 is small.... and light, like under 4lbs of light with the BIG, 9-cell battery! That gets really close to 3lbs when you can locate the 6-cell "ghost-battery". Did I mention that I have 2 of those? I think only one still works, but still.......
After, all that scrutiny, what have I come up with? I think it'd make a great later-day "netbook". Something that a person who writes.... oh, say a Blogger, could just throw in a bag and use as a travel partner. Where most things are sync'd to the Cloud and you wouldn't sweat if it got "jacked". Oh, no, no..... I don't mean me! I don't travel anywhere near as often as I used to, and I don't get paid to blog, so it's not a fit for me. However, it'd be perfect for somebody like that though!
This picture of C17s at "final assembly" in Long Beach is appropriate for my "Globemaster" server build. It seems to have taken forever! It started out as a build based on the Supermicro "X7" generation motherboard. These were LGA771, Xeon boards that were contemporaries of the early "Core" processors. So yeah; it's a bit older. To make a long story short, I never did get that board up and running correctly, so I decided to jump forward.
Forward to the X9 generation. That's LGA1155 and Intel C202/204 chipset, which on the desktop side took the Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors. These are for much smaller processors as compared to the X7 that I had started with. There's only 4 RAM slots and one processor socket, but it's got what I need. My board is a very commonly available X9SCL. I chose this board, because it's cheap (about $50) and commonly available. It also can take regular i3 cpus and DDR3 RAM. But I have higher aspirations than that!
I want to use ECC memory (which is recommended for FreeNAS), so I also needed to use a Xeon processor as well. Of course, me, being me; I want this thing to be as low powered as I can. Although there are 12 Xeons that will work for this board, I want one of the 2 low powered versions. The E3-1220L (20w), or E3-1260L (45w). That's versus the 80 or 95w that the regular E3 gen processors normally run! Since the E3-1260L is almost impossible to find, I settled for the E3-1220L that I found for about $110 out of China on eBay. Although it only runs at about 2.2Ghz vs. the regular ones which range from 3.1 all the way up to 3.6Ghz, I figured that a file server would be fine with the lower speed.
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It turns out that, that part was easy. The hard part was finding the correct memory to work with the board and processor! First of all, it needed to be ECC, and that's along with the correct type, speed, etc. For servers, it's complex. Finding DDR3 that ECC wasn't very hard. Finding it that's "unbuffered" that's also in a halfway decent density was the issue! The board maxes out at 32Gb, which means 4 modules of 8Gb each. I can't really afford that at the moment, but I can do 2 modules for 16Gb. What I'm probably going to end up doing is to pick up 8Gb in 4 modules here locally. I hate to do it that way since at least 2 will end up being pitched at some point down the road when I want to upgrade. But I can get myself going at $25 vs. trying to find the ghost memory and having the machine wait for who knows how much longer!
When the Computer Club met this week, we had a little deviation. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about it. This week, at our regular meeting time, during which we've been planning a Mini-ITX gaming build, most of the students were tied up with other activities. However, the one student who did show up is currently, my most advanced having built his own machine among other experiences. Therefore, what he wanted to learn about was the "next stage".... dabbling in servers to work with Plex, transcoding, etc. Conveniently, I have such a beast just sitting around in our computer room, a cast-off from a commercial client; a Dell PowerEdge SC440.
Granted, it's really not much of a server. Machines such as these occupied the low-end of the market back in 2006, which is why it was surplus and had been sitting in a corner of our workroom for the last year and a half! However, it turned out to be perfect for a 16 year-old looking for something to learn on. What is it? Well.... it's from the Core/Core 2 Duo generation built around an LGA-775 and Intel's 3000 chipset. That give's it the ability to run relatively modern operating systems, yet is old enough to have a wealth of cheap hardware available.
If you'll look at the SC440 motherboard, what do we see? For one, it's a full-on server board.... but cut down on features to some degree. No SCSI or SAS controller. One CPU socket. But critically, it does have the ability to take Xeon processors, and ECC RAM. There are also 3 PCIe (x8, x4, x1) and 2 32-bit PCI expansion slots. This gives the machine great latitude to accessing a WIDE variety of cards to do just about anything the owner might want for cheap. It's main weakness?
If you look closely at this image, you'll see that there are just 2 dedicated bays for 3.5" hard disk drives. However, there are 2, 5.25" optical drive bays which can be made use of, plus a 3.5" "floppy" bay, which could be used as well. Although, there are only 4 SATA headers on the MB, it seems unlikely that someone would need more with this box!
I must say though, that for a baby sys-admin looking to learn; I couldn't think of a more ideal machine. Although, it's hard to tell from pictures, this thing is solid steel! He's not going to break it! It can take serious hardware. Software for the most part is free, ranging from the ubiquitous Ubuntu, to FreeNAS to more obscure distros. Upgrade parts are cheap! And best of all..... it's free!
