JMB363 2 Port PCI-E SATA II 2.0 RAID & 1 IDE 3.5″ to PCI Express Adapter Converter Card Expresscard (WHL #67)

Time-incorrect retro computing time! We’ve had a lot of computer-related stuff recently, but this one is an elegant mix of old, niche and Wan Hung Lo. It’s perfect.

First of all, what is it? It’s a PCI Express 1.0 x1 card with (according to Wikipedia) the only native PCIe to PATA and SATA interface chip there is, a JMicron JMB363. The “confidential” three-page datasheet floats around on the interwebs if you want to take a look. PCIe 1.0, AHCI and IDE compatible, HotPlug, NCQ, UDMA6 = ATA133 (1 port, so 2 devices), SATA2 (3 Gb/s and 2 ports, so 2 devices as well), RAID 0/1/0+1/JBOD functionality. […]

13th June 2021 14th June 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Kingston memory RMA packaging (#R9F1)

Okay, I admit, this is a cheap post this week. But Kingston asked for it.

After last week’s mail, I got two answers.
#1 from the RMA/tech support guy that I discussed the entire exchange procedure with.

Wir bedauern sehr, dass Sie den Ersatzartikel in einem solchen Zustand erhalten haben.
Das hätte nicht passieren dürfen.
Selbstverständlich werden wir Ihnen den Artikel umgehend ersetzen, denn verbogen sollte er auf keinen Fall verwendet werden.
Ich habe in dieser E-Mail die Kollegen der RMA Abteilung mit kopiert, denn nur dort kann etwas in dieser Sache unternommen werden.

[…]
30th May 2021 31st May 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Kingston memory RMA packaging (#R9)

We haven’t had a rant for over a year now and I just found the perfect topic to change that. Excellent! (change internal voice to Mr. Burns or Big Clive for maximum enjoyment)

A couple weeks ago one of the DDR3 DIMMs in my Fujitsu machine died. Not explosively or anything, and I probably even didn’t notice right away – I just ran low on free RAM and wondered why. The system uses 2x Kingston KVR16E11/8, so DDR3-ECC (non-Reg, just UDIMM), 8GB 2Rx8 1600 MHz CL11, but in 1Gx72 bit instead of 64 bit fashion, as it has that good ol’ parity chip. […]

16th May 2021 16th May 2021 By Bzzz In 1 Comment

Lenovo ThinkPad T400 R400 42X4861 Scharniere Left and why eBay is a POS (WHL #66)

Two weeks of repairs and tidying up the place – not much time for new content. Let’s use something canned instead – from a repair, of course.

My Thinkpad T400, which is still on the to-be-replaced list but no T25 Anniversary Edition or similar Frankenpad has showed up so far, recently experienced the second broken hinge. It was replaced like four to five years ago with a used part from the TP forum, when I thought it would be replaced entirely by the time this part would fail again. Well, it’s still in use as my main machine. […]

2nd May 2021 2nd May 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Quick Release Plate Camera Tripod 1.5×2″ Mount For Manfrotto 200PL-14 484RC2 (and modification for the Sony RX100M2) (WHL #65)

A ripoff product and some modifications to it this time.

In January I bought a used tripod set consisting of a Manfrotto 190 XPROB, a massively oversized 327 RC2 Joystick and a 200PL quick release plate (100 bucks plus delivery). While all of these are well made to a degree that I would totally buy them again, I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the quick release plate in combination with my Sony RX100M2 camera. Not sure if there are standards for camera mounts alignment and envelopes (so: “who to blame”), but the Sony does not align the UNC 20 1/4″ mounting thread with the optical axis, it touches the mounting plane with the focusing ring and even undercuts it with when swivelling the display. […]

18th April 2021 18th April 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Sensirion SGP30 and Bosch BME280 air sensors (WHL #64)

Small air sensor modules for today!

The Bosch BME280 has been in use on my ESP modules across the apartment since I discarded the unreliable DHT sensors, DHT22 in my case. It’s a combined temperature-pressure-humidity sensor, contrary to the much cheaper BMP280 or the predecessor BMP180, which lack the humidity part (pretty much vital indoors, while pressure is just a gimmick). They are sold in many similar versions, I’ve always picked the GY-BME280 module in 3.3V flavour (“GYBMEP”), as the sensor can be operated from 1.71V to 3.6V which is handy for different MCUs. […]

4th April 2021 4th April 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Convenient IBM x3650 server PSU power distribution board (#P35)

On the occasion of selling the second PSU from the long dismantled IBM x3650M1 machine (part of the stack shown in #P23), a direct result of eBay getting greedy and increasing their commission from 10% of the item price to 11% including postage (WTF?) plus 35 cents per item, I need to publish this real quick. I still do have access to powerful 12V supplies that can operate my lightbox setup to take photos of the things are usually operating the lightbox, but it would be pretty inconvenient to do so ;)

So here’s another piece of Open Hardware – a custom PSU board for said IBM power supply. […]

21st March 2021 22nd March 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Random thoughts on Supermicro Risers, LSI LBAs, power supplies, ZFS and other fun server things (#P34)

With the failed 450W SFX power supply separated into a regular post last week, now’s the time to waffle on about what happened besides that.

Well, Solaris 11.4 (evil developer/home use licensing, so no current service packs) still uses minimal ashift as default instead of a fixed value of 12. ashift is the exponent of the power of 2 that is used as smallest assignable portion of data, so basically sector size. “Old” default is 9, as 2^9 is the well known 512 byte sector size that most old hard disks had as both logical and physical size, and which they reported as such. […]

14th March 2021 15th March 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Fractal Design Integra series 450W SFX power supply oopsie (WHL #63)

Someone missed posting two weeks ago and didn’t make up for it yet. That guy was me and here’s a two-part random collection on why that happened, what fun things I spent time with instead, and why hacking hardware sometimes sucks (a little). I’ll classify this one as regular post due to the power supply teardown, and the other one as a project, should be up by next Sunday.

Well, when I started gathering photos a fortnight ago to make a new post, my ZFS upgrade project (more on that in a minute) was finally going smoothly after a rocky start when creating the new zpool. […]

7th March 2021 14th March 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment

Supermicro X9SRW-F Ivy Bridge EP compatibility comparison (#P33)

Some canned content for today – back when making the Supermicro 2011 board fit my needs (#P23,#P24), I stumbled upon the Ivy Bridge thing. Technically, the two rack servers that I got should both be compatible with the E5-2600 series (Sandy Bridge EP), as well as E5-2600v2 series (Ivy Bridge EP). The product website states that “BIOS version 3.0 or above is required” for this to work, and both boards run the most recent version (not that there’s so many versions to choose from). Both had a E5-2630L installed, so SB-EP. […]

7th February 2021 8th February 2021 By Bzzz In No Comment