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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I have a dual NVMe USB3 caddy that’s smaller than most 2.5 HDD housings with currently 2 2TB drives, you can buy 4 and 8TB nvme drives these days too. I can throw that thing out a car and it won’t care.

    And the drives are easily swappable and so are the electronics in the casing.

    So no, 2.5" HDD’s still are an utterly dead end of technology.

    Especially with these and some other vendors, the USB interface is part of the drive (there’s no SATA port on them), so you can’t swap them or take them out for data recovery. They are HDD tech, which doesn’t do shocks or any other sort of roughhousing, they are slow as shit and use far more power than any NVMe drive.








  • They have a secondary motherboard that hosts the Slot CPUs, 4 single core P3 Xeons. I also have the Dell equivalent model but it has a bum mainboard.

    With those 90’s systems, to get Windows NT to use more than 1 core, you have to get the appropriate Windows version that actually supports them.

    Now you can simply upgrade from a 1 to a 32 core CPU and Windows and Linux will pick up the difference and run with it.

    In the NT 3.5 and 4 days, you actually had to either do a full reinstall or swap out several parts of the Kernel to get it to work.

    Downgrading took the same effort as a multicore windows Kernel ran really badly on a single core system.

    As for the Sun Fires, the two models I mentioned tend to be highly available on Ebay in the 100-200 range and are very different inside than an X86 system. You can go for 400 or higher series to get even more difference, but getting a complete one of those can be a challenge.

    And yes, the software used on some of these older systems was a challenge in itself, but they aren’t really special, they are pretty much like having different vendors RGB controller softwares on your system, a nuisance that you should try to get past.

    For instance, the IBM 5000 series raid cards were simply LSI cards with an IBM branded firmware.

    The first thing most people do is put the actual LSI firmware on them so they run decently.


  • Oh, I get it. But a baseline HP Proliant from that era is just an x86 system barely different from a desktop today but worse/slower/more power hungry in every respect.

    For history and “how things changed”, go for something like a Sun Fire system from the mid 2000’s (280R or V240 are relatively easy and cheap to get and are actually different) or a Proliant from the mid to late 90’s (I have a functioning Compaq Proliant 7000 which is HUGE and a puzzlebox inside).

    x86 computers haven’t changed much at all in the past 20 years and you need to go into the rarer models (like blade systems) to see an actual deviation from the basic PC alike form factor we’ve been using for the past 20 years and unique approaches to storage and performance.

    For self hosting, just use something more recent that falls within your priceclass (usually 5-6 years old becomes highly affordable). Even a Pi is going to trounce a system that old and actually has a different form factor.







  • This “smart” tv shite is getting so goddamn out of hand.

    In the past 3 months, my dads TV had to be replaced because the module that runs Google TV shite broke, causing the TV to get stuck with an error message on screen, this was more of an annoyance than a big issue, as you could still watch TV, just with the error message displaying.

    Then a few weeks after that it had to be replaced because at first I thought the backlight was dead (nothing but a feint glow on screen while having audio) as this happened even from a cold boot, but turned out that the Bravia module would run into a hung/frozen state right after it booted.

    So, ya think that would be it right?

    Nope, a good month after that, the TV would constantly log my parents out of Bravia, Google TV and any apps they had installed (indicating to me there was as storage issue).

    The store they got the thing from were sure they must be doing something wrong, so sent someone out who spent a good 4 hours repeatedly factory resetting the TV, relogging them in to then be surprised the issue was exactly as we described.

    So, 3 months, TV replaced 3 times, all due to issues with the goddamn Smart TV shite they shove into everything.

    And you have to know, here there’s nothing on cable or air you don’t have on digital, your internet provider gives you a decoder for digital TV and all your TV really needs to do is accept a HDMI signal and you should be set to watch whatever you want, as Netflix and some other streaming services are integrated into their decoder to begin with.

    But it’s almost impossible to find any TVs without several layers of this smart tv shite integrated into them.