Eli and Screwdriver
Kris gave me a small powered screwdriver for our Anniversary (thanks Kris!) Eli took an interest in it so I got out an old hard drive and a few screws… he sat there the next 15 minutes screwing and unscrewing…
Intel DC S3500 vs S3700 as a ZIL SSD Device Benchmarks
I ran some benchmarks comparing the Intel DC S3500 vs the Intel DC S3700 when being used as a SLOG/ZIL (ZFS Intent Log). Both SSDs are what Intel considers datacenter class and they are both very reasonably priced compared to some of the other enterprise class offerings. Update: 2014-09-14 — I’ve done newer benchmarks on … Read more
Total Cost of Ownership for the Honda-CRV and Subaru-Outback
It’s that time a year again to report on the annual costs. I was a little behind this year so “2014” is from June 2, 2013 to June 30, 2014. In October of 2013 we acquired a 2003 Subaru Outback so I’ve started to track that as well. So far it’s looking like an average … Read more
Purple Screen of Death
Well, my ASRock C2750D4I Build has not been doing so hot… I woke-up one morning to find VMware crashed with a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death)… and then the next day it crashed again. Over the next few days I had several crashes, often after only an hour of uptime. Here’s a sampling of the … Read more
BaoFeng UV-5RA, UV-B5, UV-82, and Yaesu VX-6R Comparison
I’ve been very happy with the BaoFeng UV-5RA, but BaoFeng has released some newer models on the market so I thought it was time to take a look at the current offerings: of the new models it looked like the best new models were the UV-B5 (or nearly identical UV-B6), and UV-82, so here they are: … Read more
Best Quad Core Processors for SQL Server 2014 Enterprise
SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Licensing Efficiency on Four Cores Microsoft Core Licensing Microsoft pricing per core is $13,748 (your price may vary depending on your licensing program) per set of two cores, with a four core minimum per processor (a dual core counts as a four core so it doesn’t make sense to go with … Read more
GPU Mining with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti Overclocked
Energy Efficient and Quiet Trying to cut down on the noise and power usage of my old AMD Radeon 6870 (which uses about 130 Watts idle and 250 under load) I upgraded my GPU to the new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti (~$150 depending on model), I decided on MSI’s version which has a massive heatsync and dual … Read more
Moved to DigitalOcean
Yesterday I moved this site to DigitalOcean (referral link). I had been running on Verzion FiOS at Jeff’s house, but I think that little N54L was too overloaded. So I signed up for the cheapest DigitalOcean plan at $5/month and setup an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS server with Nginx. I put it in Google’s NYC data … Read more
NAS Server Build – ASRock C2750D4I & Silverstone DS380
The other day I got a little frustrated with my Gen 8 Microserver, I was trying to upgrade ESXi to 5.5 but the virtual media feature kept disconnecting in the middle of the install due to not having an ILO4 license–I actually bought an ILO4 enterprise license but I have no idea where I put … Read more