Battleangel | Personal

Sadly it’s time for hardware upgrades again. Bad decisions, changing needs and new realizations have forced me to speed up some expected hardware changes. Here are the main issues:

1. Acutely need more storage. And at the same time I’m tired of devoting 90W+ to a (noisy) SFF computer doing nothing but handling torrents all day. Also, SFF case can’t handle more drives. Not keen on more external USB drives because of power consumption (relative to what they accomplish) and limited usefulness.
2. Faster work station boot drive operation.
3. That bloody ATI 2900 Pro graphic card.
4. Portable media with wireless 802.11n network connectivity (long term).
5. Remote administration, torrent remote control (long term).

Likely solutions:

1. NAS. Synology DS209 or equivalent.
2. SSD. Intel X25 or equivalent / RAM upgrade
3. New DX11 card. ATI 58×0 or equivalent.
4. (Theoretical) Popcorn Hour-like device or suitable (and presently nonexistant) laptop?
5. (Theoretical) Smart phone.

(1) NAS devices are probably the biggest eye-opener in a very long time. I always thought they were dumb external hard drives with Ethernet (at least in the consumer price range). But it turns out I wasn’t keeping up with the times, and a NAS nowadays is in fact a super efficient, super compact Linux computer. The point being that it can run pretty much everything out of the box, and if you’re not satisfied you can install a long range of new features. So basically I could have a small RAID and JBOD setup, at 10-25W (hopefully around 16W with two green disks), running Transmission or rtorrent. Nonstop. If one just looks at the price for the NAS enclosure, it would literally pay for itself in terms of energy consumption over a couple of years. One slight snag though is that I don’t have gigabit network (and only cat 5e cables in the walls) so I wont be able to take full advantage of a gigabit NAS. That is up to a factor six in terms of real world transfer speeds that I’m missing out on (10MB/s vs 60MB/s). I’m perfectly happy with my latest D-link router though, the 635, so flat out replacing it in favor of the 655 would be painful. I’m thinking I should take a crossover extension cable and connect these computers directly to see how much of a limit cat 5e really is.

(2) When I looked over my storage needs I also realized I had been wrong about SSD technology. It seems to have matured to a point where it is borderline usable. Though far, far from affordable. Aside from price (you get an 80GB price for the same price as 2000GB non-SSD drive), and dodgy firmwares, the biggest issue is availability. My current Samsung SpinPoint T166 HD501LJ feels slow, even though it shouldn’t be, especially compared to the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 that I have in my MediaPC. Or perhaps it’s something else. But I have to start somewhere. I need to upgrade regardless and SSDs are suddenly an option. Another concern is whether I will have to scrap my Truecrypt solution. I thought it would be great as an SSD is faster, and much neater to encrypt and decrypt. But apparently their are fundamental issues with the way SSDs are made, and also the fabled TRIM command that may make SSDs unsuitable for system encryption. Also, moving torrent downloads to a NAS also precludes any hope of running torrent downloads on an encrypted volume. At least with the sort of limited CPU that is in today’s NASes. Any sort of encryption on a NAS would have to be in a volume that is both written and read by an external computer.

And now, with Windows 7 x64 being borderline usable, one can also consider moving to 4 GB RAM and beyond. That has been a thorn in my side for a very long time.

(3) My current graphic card, the infamous 2900 Pro, has also been a constant thorn in my side. I have to accept that it was a poor choice, even if there wasn’t a hell of a lot to choose from as I migrated from AGP to PCI-E. I’ve been running this card for two years, but with the advent of DX11, I finally have a somewhat better reason to upgrade. Mainly, this decision isn’t just about performance though. I don’t push for very high resolutions and usually play at my desktop setting of 1280×960. With some tweaks, most games have been fine with that. Even though it of course precludes me from ever moving to a typical LCD resolution. No, the 2900 Pro weak spot is in fact in fan noise, heat, and energy consumption. I recorded a little bit of video to illustrate my point:

The fan makes up most of the background noise, even when the card is idle. And that still only gives me a pathetic 54C core temp. Gaming forces the fan to speed up and temps go well above 80C, sometimes approaching 90C under specific loads. So, the cooling is inadequate. I already knew that. And I did try to find an aftermarket cooler back in the day. I gave up, and now that the cards is outdated there are no longer any cooling solutions available. And besides, why would you spend $40 on a two year old card. It would be more cost effective to buy a new budget card. The final straw was when I compared power consumption with current generation cards. The 2900 Pro typically has a 70-133W range (idle-"max") in normal operations. Other benchmarks could probably stress the card higher. That is even higher than the 4870 which typically shows 65-130W. The same method applied by Xbitlabs to the new 5870 would give a 15-107W range. And that is the world’s fastest single core card. A more modest DX10 card like the 4770 would draw 17-50W. Its DX11 replacement, the 5770 shows 14-61W. All of the above are faster than the 2900 Pro obviously. So I’m considering whether or not to go with a premium model like the 5870 or a more modest 5770 or 5850. Anything is better than this and my ears are gonna thank me. It’s a question of price of course. And availability. I’ll be looking for a 5850 in a couple of weeks.

(4) As for portable media, it will take at least another generation of laptops for batteries to mature, both in capacity and lifespan. And for HD capability, 802.11n as well HDMI to trickle down to the entire lineup.

While "popcorn" devices are here today, they have traditionally been buggy, limited and expensive. They offer a streamlined interface at a price. I’d rather launch movies from a command line if it meant more flexibility and less fluff.

(5) Smart phones are also no big deal currently. Still waiting for those to mature as well. And prices to drop. The idea of course is to resurrect torrent remote control operations, like I used to have it set up with WAP. Those days are unfortunately gone and no one supports WAP anymore. Symbian S60v5 and Android would both be acceptable platforms. The former is of course a lot more affordable. I’m currently following the firmware developments for the Nokia 5800. A rumored future major upgrade to this more or less deprecated phone could make it a prime candidate as inventories are emptied.