My setup 20080614 update

posted on 12:00 PM on Saturday 14 June 2008

A lot of the stuff have either been retired or they have failed. The PSC1350 printer has been replaced with a HP Photosmart C6180 which is a network AIO. The C6180 has fax capabilities and it has certainly been very useful. It being networked means that scanned documents can be send to any Windows or Mac machine. Pretty neat.

The HP Color Laserjet 2550 has died on us. Pretty upset about it since it was really expensive when we brought it and it has only been 3 years. Seeing that some old Laserjet 4s are still around and kicking, we would have thought that the 2550 would have lasted a fair bit longer. What am I to do with those toners :-( When we got a Brother HL-4050 to replace that and boy is it good to have a built-in duplexer. And the prints look pretty good. Driver installation was also a breeze compared to the HP ones. Certainly changed my views on Brother for laser printers.

The home server has been completely replaced by a spanking new one running Ubuntu 8.04. The mainboard is an Abit IP35Pro which is based on the Intel P35 chipset with ICH9R so I get 6 SATA and 2 PATA connectors. The processor is now a Q6600 and it is paired with 2GB of RAM. Graphics is handled by a cheap Nvidia GeForce 7300 SE. The Coolermaster Elite 330 was a bit too small for the large number of drives. Harddisk temperatures were reaching over 50°C. Way too high. So forked out the cash for what I believed to be the first of the many Coolermaster Stacker, STC-T01. The case has 11 5.25" drive bays at the front which can be converted for use with harddisk using a 3 to 4 converter. The plus point of this is that the converted comes with a 120mm fan to help cool the harddisk. And with 11 bays, I can put in 12 harddrives in 9 bays with 2 bays for optical drives.

Right now, it is stuffed with 7 harddrives and 1 optical. This has required the use of the ITE8212 which is working well under Ubuntu 8.04 to connect one of the PATA drives. I have one last SATA port on the mainboard and 3 more PATA connections left.

• 3 x 500GB Western Digital WD5000AAKS-65YGA0

• 1 x 200GB Maxtor 6L200P0

• 1 x 300GB Seagate ST3300622A

• 1 x 250GB Maxtor 6L250R0

• 1 x 120GB Maxtor 6Y120M0

• 1 x DVD Writer LG DVDRAM GH20NS10

There are also 2 external harddisk in 3.5" casings attached to the server via Firewire in a chain configuration.

• 1 x 160GB Western Digital WD1600JB-00GVA0

• 1 x 160GB Maxtor 6Y160P0

The power supply is now an AcBel M8 Power 670 which is my first modular power supply and it is certainly neat :-) And it should provide enough power to the drives.

The Windows machine has also been completed changed. It is currently using a E8400, has 2GB of RAM, using a MSI K7N Platinum (Nvidia 750i chipset) mainboard, a Nvidia 8800GT and a Antec 550W power supply. I use it mainly for gaming and it is good. It is currently housed in the old Coolermaster Elite 330 that the server was previously using.

My wife has gotten herself another tablet laptop, a HP TX1220. In addition to her workplace laptop, she has in all, 3 laptops. It is cluttering up her table big time. Speaking of table, we finally got a table from Ikea to be her work space.

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