Category: proper hardware

NEW LSI 9300-16i 12Gbps SAS-3 PCIe x8 HBA P16 IT mode ZFS TrueNAS UNRAID (WHL #94)

Here’s a quick and simple one: Cooling advice for 16-port SAS cards.

The LSI 9300-16i cards have gotten surprisingly cheap over the past months. Dirt cheap, in fact. All-16 port SAS cards are traditionally pretty pricey, even though they are “just” two 8-port cards on one PCB. In the past 10, maybe 15 years, there was never a time when buying a 16-port card (used or new) was cheaper than buying two 8s. Sure, sometimes people needed a single-card solution (availability of PCIe slots, PCIe lanes, or space in general), but the usual recommendation for 16-bay chassis like my Supermicro 836 was always to buy 2×8 instead of 1×16. […]


JBC HDE soldering station repair/refurbishment (WHL #86)

Do you own one of those very expensive JBC soldering stations?
A damaged or defective one, maybe with a display (with salt water ingress) like this?

Or an abused case with pinky-sized holes and damaged inner wiring like this? (after a lot of cleaning!)

Or a smashed stand with dislocated tip holder (and several 3D printed replacements that all shattered like the original one after hard impacts on the floor) like this and this?

Or just a soldering iron with broken wiring near the moulded handle, caused by people ripping apart the bend relief and then folding it even tighter because they can…like this? […]


DOOGEE S98 PRO, again (WHL #82F1)

Told ya I was busy – 404, no content found (not even canned one).

Since having no phone is not an option, and porting everything to LineageOS (and back…some day) is also surprisingly difficult, I sold the Samsung Galaxy A3 2016 backup phone with said LOS overhaul on eBay (for decent money!) and got another Doogee S98 Pro. Return on Amazon was painless, and delivery of the new one from a Chinese seller with German warehouse was also a breeze. Let’s just hope I never have to return anything to this “nanchangkuachuodianzishangwuyouxiangongsi” dude in “pengtangzhenyingbinzhongdadao399haoguang heyuanzhuzhaiqu 1dong1danyuan 1204shi 330200 nanchangjiangxisheng nanchangxian” – is that even real, or a running joke of Chinese sellers on eBay? […]


DOOGEE S98 PRO Wärmebildkamera Outdoor Smartphone ohne Vertrag, 8GB+256GB, 48MP Dreifach-Rückfahrkamera (20MP IR Nachtsicht), IP68 Wasserdichtes Android 12 Handy, 6,3″ FHD+, Kabelloses Laden NFC GPS (WHL #82)

Just in – a very special combination of Expensive and Cheap – the Doogee S98 Pro.

Since changing jobs also means giving back the old company phone, the CAT S61, I needed to get something else. Buying a used S61 would be an option, buying a new S62 not so much (still using FLIR sensors – sensor great, software and licensing a disaster), and basically all of their competitors use FLIR as well. With three notable exceptions: (as far as I know!)
* InfiRay PX1 5G
* AGM Glory G1S
* Doogee S98 Pro (similar to the Blackview phones, the “Pro” part is important)

The InfiRay seems to be a phone made by the FLIR competitor itself, so that is an interesting concept – however, they’re not available or even EOL already, and there’s no used market either. […]


Fried Meilhaus ME-8200 Digital I/O card (WHL #75)

I can’t stand throwing away allegedly damaged stuff without proper diagnosis (or even working surplus items) at work. For today, I took home a pretty nice I/O card for final testing before sadly putting it in the bin. It’s a ME-8200B PCIe card from Meilhaus, a German test equipment specialist. It’s red (which makes it faster), and it retails for 680€ plus VAT at the moment, so certainly not something you’d throw away without second thought. However, due to our overpriced fancy standard clients at work, testing PCIe cards is basically impossible – you can’t do that inside those tiny cases, and I’d hate to completely disassemble one of those things (short cables to fit the envelope!), […]


AMD Radeon R9 380 to Radeon RX 560 upgrade/downgrade remarks (WHL #73)

Groan, computer hardware again, please spare us… :mad:

Well, in this day and age of mismanagement, “chip shortage” and even war in Europe, you get what you get and you don’t get upset. I scored a graphics card on eBay (aftermath of my Covid quarantine) and I need to get rid of the old one as quickly as possible. As insane as GPU prices are nowadays, I don’t think a card that was released in June 2015 (close to fucking seven years ago) and that has a current market value still equal/higher than what I paid for in 2018 will ever go up in price again, ever. […]


Samsung USB 3.1 Flash Drive BAR Plus MUF-256BE3/EU – further degradation(WHL #45F1)

Well here’s a first :lol:
I’m about to RMA a piece of hardware, and I needed performance data from when the thing was new. Probably got a screenshot from back then, but searching for it on a machine that is inconvenient to access…just search the interwebs instead. And so I did, and entered the Google image search, and found what I needed. Yeah, turns out I just found my very own website. :unsure:

So, here’s the culprit again:

It’s not used that often, currently holds 110GB of WSUS data and some deep learning test dataset, so almost half of the drive is empty and performance is getting worse. […]


The strange formatting of Oracle-branded HGST SSDs (WHL #71)

A little tale from the world of enterprise computing (again). Well, I needed something to do alongside filing my taxes, and I recently received a bunch of hardware, so there’s that.

I ordered, after long and unfruitful discussion and some eBay detour that also didn’t work because of, well, eBay, a couple of replacement hard disks of the spinning rust type, as well as SSDs to support them. The original ZFS RAID volume that kept *ALL* my data crashed via some obscure file system bug, and since I’m not a paying Oracle customer (not that they would help me out – everything is plastered with “restore from backup” notes), I finally migrated to Ubuntu and OpenZFS. […]


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. […]


Fujitsu Esprimo E920 D3222-A12 12V/11Vsb to ATX conversion (#P28)

Recent hardware acquisition: Parts of an Esprimo E920 system (board, CPU, RAM and power supply) for replacing my main desktop system, a good old FX-6300 with 970 chipset board.

Why would I post about this? Well, it’s not a drop-in replacement. DIY required, since those OEM things always have some custom oddities. In this case it’s two (and a half) of them:

  1. Power supply has no ATX mounting bracket
  2. Power supply and board are not -12V/3V3/5V/5Vsb/12V units but 11Vsb/12V only
  3. Board has no I/O shield, just fitting case cutouts

Note that there are datasheets of this very Fujitsu board out there that show a regular ATX connector with all the standard voltages required. […]