Trials and tribulations with go faster stripes (Solid State Disks)

Background

I’ve been aware of Solid State Disks (SSDs) for quite a few years. It was 2007 when I built my first PC, but back then SSDs were hideously expensive, of the order 30 GB was over £100, possibly even £200! So reserved for the most affluent and enterprise environments. It wasn’t until about 2011 that I actually got my first SSD – so I want to take you on a little adventure to describe my experience of SSDs.

In order to provide an effective benchmark, I’ve used a piece of software called Crystal Disk Mark – a benchmark program used for testing the read/write speeds of drives. You can get Crystal Disk Mark from here : http://sourceforge.jp/projects/crystaldiskmark. Below are the results taken from a 280GB Western Digital SATA 2 hard disk drive in my test rig. You can use these numbers as a reference when comparing the performance of the SSDs.

Basic SATA drive performance

Test 1 - Sequential Read-Write

The first test is called the sequential Read and Write speeds. Particularly for SSDs, these should be taken with a pinch of salt however because this test was based upon writing (and reading) and single data block of 1 GB. When this is the case, it means that the SSD technology really becomes very efficient because the SSD firmware is writing/reading the data to one sector completely, moving on to the next adjacent sector completely etc. This is very efficient because you are writing to adjacent sectors and very often, SSDs are made up of banks of smaller memory, so you could be writing/read from two or more sectors simultaneously.

Test 2 - 512 KB Random

The second test is the 512 KB random read and write speeds. This means that 512KB is read/written from a sector before moving on to a random other sector.

Test 3 - 4 KB Random

The next test is the 4 KB random read and write speeds. The 4K is the same as the 512 KB test, but this time using only 4KB files. This works on the principle that actually there are a significant number of files that are very small (go look in your System32 folder in the Windows directory – full of dlls that are all quite small. So this test is trying to be more realistic (browsing the web type tasks) of demands placed on your “drive”.

Test 4 - 4K QD32

Finally the 4K 32-queue depth test

Popping my cherry – OCZ Agility 30 GB

My very first SSD was an OCZ Vertex 30GB drive. I bought this from Overclockers UK (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/) for, what was at the time expensive for me and the industry of about £70. So the price per gigabyte was almost £2.50! As always though, the higher capacities had a better price per gigabyte ratio. At the time, I couldn’t afford the more useful 120 GB drive that were about £2-300 in my wildest dreams, but I was thinking that I could use the SSD as a boot disk, so at the very least, Windows should be nice and snappy.

So I did exactly that, put a fresh install of Win7 64-bit on, and would you believe I had about 12-15 gigs left! woo-hoo! Yeah, I should make it clear, that was a completely fresh install. Better get Windows Update running and start getting drivers for graphics cards etc. Before I knew it I’m down to about 5 gig! OK that’s tight but bearable. What catches you out is all your other applications.
Bah! Don’t be stupid Chris, they are going on my second drive. Aye yes they are, but one notorious application would be Steam. And its notorious, but not because its Steam. Most games seem to want to install a new DirectX, some .NET frameworks etc. and before you know it – kerblam! The dreaded pop up “Your drive is getting full” arrives!

The theory of running just the OS on a 30 GB SSD is a grand one, but when you factor in the formatted capacity plus over-provisioning, plus your OS, plus the updates, plus the random junk you just can’t quantify. 30 GB is tighter than a ducks backside. I struggled on, but I was constantly aware of the drive capacity. I couldn't’ just “use” my PC – oh I’ll save those to my desktop and … nope drive got filled up doing that.

In terms of performance, the drive was great, I did notice a modest speed bump (I was using the most bottom of the range SSD and it was SATA 2) – things did feel a bit snappier, so I can certainly say the SSD helped, but 30 GB? I really CAN’T recommend it, the only time I was happy with it was when I went through a Linux phase and installed Ubuntu on my laptop with the 30 GB SSD. The whole OS was about 1 gig, OK updates are often and numerous but you won’t burn 50% of the drive on the OS! And given how lightweight Ubuntu is, it was flying along!!

Test Results

Note due to technical problems I have had to use information provided by a third-party.

OCZ Agility 3 results provided by Who Talking

Specifications

Bear in mind however, OCZ claim these specs (not all are a direct comparison due to lack of information)

• Up to 525 MB/s Sequential Read
• Up to 500 MB/s Sequential Write
• Up to 35k IOPS 4k Random Read
• Up to 35K IOPS 4k Random Write

More information available here.

Summary

We can see with no doubt that even this entry level SSD is lightening quick in comparison to the HDD.

Born-again virgin – OCZ Vertex Plus 60 GB

A year later and I had witnessed a massive boom in the uptake of SSDs. I also had a new job that paid well so I could afford a small luxury of an SSD. Again, from Overclockers I bough my OCZ Vertex Plus, this time a 60GB model after the stress of managing the 30 GB drive. The 30GB drive got shoved into the HTPC to run Windows XP and the 60 GB drive went straight into my gaming PC. First thing, format the drive, it came out at 55 GB, OK that's a 9% loss compared to as advertised thanks to the definition of a gigabyte plus over provisioning which is slightly above average.

Putting on Windows 7, I was chuffed to see that even after the PC was fully updated I still had about 25-30 gigs of space left.

Test Results

Performance-wise, running Crystal Mark netted me these speeds:

OCZ Vertex3 Results

Specifications

Bear in mind however, OCZ claim these specs (not all are a direct comparison due to lack of information)

• Up to 550 MB/s Sequential Read
• Up to 520 MB/s Sequential Write
• Up to 50k IOPS 4k Random Read
• Up to 60K IOPS 4k Random Write

Information available here.

Summary

The first row of numbers in the screenshot shows the Sequential Read and Write performance at 149.5 and 121.4 for the SSD vs. 53.56 and 52.73 for the HDD we can see that for reading data we are getting a 3x improvement and writing is about 2.5x.

We saw speeds of 124.1 and 117, so this shows that the random performance of the drive is still very high.

The next test,  we see 17.15 and 14.24 – this is an astonishing 20-50 times faster than a HDD! This comes down to the fact that with a hard drive, you are limited because you have to wait for the disk to rotate and the head to move across the platter, with an SSD, as you can see you get considerable more speed.

Third times a charm – Samsung 840 256 GB

This was actually a bit of an impulse buy, a friend was considering buying Windows 8, it was on offer for about £50 so was a reasonably good deal, he came out with the comment that “if I’m getting a new OS, I might as well get a new drive for it too”, I had planned to just install Windows on my normal hard drive, but when he said that it got me thinking.

So I brought up my favourite PC tech site – custom PC and they had just published an article summing up all the SSDs that were out at the moment, hmm I’m thinking divine intervention here. And I read the reviews and the Samsung 840 was on top. So i flicked over to Amazon, few taps and bang, I’m looking at the Samsung 840 256 GB for about £150.

At this point in my life, I was now well entrenched in a professional job so I’m feeling a bit more plush, so spending £150 on a PC upgrade is a bit of a stretch as I was saving for a house at the time, but doable I thought. In the end, I got it.

Samsung 840 256 GB SSD

Test Results

Performance wise, here are the results:

Specifications

Bear in mind however, Samsung claim these specs (not all are a direct comparison due to lack of information)

• Up to 540 MB/s Sequential Read
• Up to 330 MB/s Sequential Write
• Up to 98k IOPS 4k Random Read
• Up to 70K IOPS 4k Random Write

Information available here.

Summary

Looking at the results, at first we are very impressed – 250 MB/s read is astonishing, but that is less than half of the spec, so what is going on here? Well this is actually my fault because the drive was plugged into a SATA 2 port, none of my PCs are equipped with SATA 3 at the moment so I'm unable to give a full upper practical limit result.

Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB

This was actually a present from my partner. I, being a gentlemen, let her use my high-performance gaming PC whilst I used a workstation PC. The workstation PC has potential, its an Intel Xeon-based computer with fully buffered error-correcting memory. The memory is a bottle-neck for two reasons, firstly the PC only had 4 GB to start with, but also its relatively slow, its a rather meagre 400 MHz!

At the time we would play Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) together, the problem was it would take 30 minutes from the computer being turned on to the LOTRO launcher ready to launch the game (I had it start on startup). So if we wanted to play together, it mean't a little forward planning. As a result of my despair - I was purchased the Samsung 850 EVO SSD drive with a capacity of 250 GB.

After formatting the drive I was left with a healthy 232 GB, again, sounds like nearly 10% over-provisioning, but if you factor in that Samsung state a gigabyte as 1000 MB, rather than 1024, the drive is really a 244 GB, so provisioning is just 5% which is lean.

Samsung 850 EVO SSD

Test Results

Performance wise, here are the results:

Samsung 850 EVO SSD results

Specifications

Bear in mind however, Samsung claim these specs :

• Up to 540 MB/s Sequential Read
• Up to 520 MB/s Sequential Write
• Up to 97k IOPS 4k Random Read
• Up to 88K IOPS 4k Random Write

Information available here.

Summary

For the most part, my comments on the 840 are still valid.

It's interesting to see that in some areas there are some minor performance gains (sequential read / write and 4K read / write) but in almost all other areas there are some stonking gains (512K write, 4K QD 32 read / write) and in just one area there has been a loss (512K read). Ultimately what this says to me is a) the hardware around the SSD i.e. my motherboard is bottle necking and b) Samsung have put a lot of effort into making the SSD perform across a range of situations rather than a limited range (4K QD32 means that all those little files your operating system is using, will be executed far fasted)

Conclusion

Solid State Disks are amazing I love them to bits. There are even more things you can do to boost performance, you could use your motherboards RAID controller to RAID 0 two or more drives for blistering speeds that traditional, spinning platter drives can only imagine. Over the past 5 years, the price per gigabyte has dropped massively to the point that actually useful sized drives are reasonably priced. 60 GB drives which are the smallest capacity that I would recommend can be found for £50 which makes setting up a dual drive PC with the OS on the SSD and everything else on the HDD very viable. Depending on what you do with your computer, if its just web browsing and playing a handful of games, you could just get one SSD of reasonable capacity (128 GB if this is the case is the smallest I’d recommend).

In my most powerful PC, a HP xw8600 workstation, I have the Samsung 850 EVO 256 GB drive as the main OS drive and I do have some of my favourite, most heavily used games (Final Fantasy) and applications (MATLAB and Da Vinci Resolve) installed on it, there is also a traditional HDD that stores everything else however.

Maintaining and Expanding a RAID-5 Array

In my previous post I talked about my initial set up of Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS2011) onto my file server, I’d like to talk about a few key topics when it comes to RAID arrays : maintenance and array expansion / growth.

Maintenance

Looking after your RAID array is pretty much non-existent other than checking that you array is healthy. There are a couple of ways you could do this, firstly, the condition of drives themselves could be useful to know – you can get indication of drive health by examining the SMART data that is available. Applications such as speedfan can read the SMART data and make it easily viewable for you. Here is a preview of one of the drives SMART data in Speedfan :

SSD SMART Data

The second way that I know of is to type “compmgmt.msc” in the run / search command

Computer Management

And press enter to bring up the Computer Management tool, choose the Disk Management option under Storage on the left hand side – this is where the array was built from and you can get indications of its status here too. When you first create the RAID array, Windows needs to “synchronise” the drives. The reason for this is because RAID-5 uses an algorithm to split data across the four drives in a particular way… in basic speak the RAID-5 algorithm says “a bit of the data is on Disk 1, another bit is on Disk 2 and the final bit is on Disk 3, but just to check that the array hasn’t corrupted / drive failed perform a parity check – the parity data is held on Disk 4”. When you start with a brand new array your drives are theoretically empty. Windows will run over all the drives applying that algorithm so that they are “prepped and ready” for new data.

This building process can be very slow, but I did find that the array was available straight away, so I started dumping my data onto it – although that did slow down the array building process quite a bit.
Lets say a drive has failed in the array … how do you know? Well, so far, I haven’t found a way to make the server automatically report it via an email or a pop-up, so until I’ve set something up to do that, I need to check it manually every now and then. So in my situation, what I did was unplugged the SATA cable to a drive to simulate a failure … when I load up Computer Management :

Failed redundancy

You see that the RAID array drives have the status : failed redundancy. What this means is that the level of redundancy given to you by RAID-5 has been lost due to a drive failure – the beauty of RAID-5 is that you can lose any of the drives – it won’t matter, but lose a second drive before you have fixed the first and you've now started loosing data.

How do we deal with this? Well, we get ourselves a new hard drive and get it plugged in :

Adding a new drive

The very top drive is my replacement drive – its a 1 TB drive as opposed to a 500 GB drive but that doesn't matter, as long as the drive is the same size or bigger than the broken one all is fine.
Right click the drive and select “convert to Dynamic Disk”:

Dynamic disk

You are then greeted with a little pop-up box to ask you which drives you want to convert (you could have several, doing them all in one go will save time)

Drive conversion

You will then see the status of the drive change to “Dynamic Online” … once that appears you can “add” the drive to the RAID-5 array by right clicking any of the RAID-ed drives and clicking “repair volume” :

This brings up a window that asks which drive(s) do you want to add to the RAID array:

The drives will then start to resynchronise again – this wont take as long as when the drives were initially initialised in the RAID array because 3 out of the 4 drives contains prepared data so the process just needs to prepare the fourth drive.  Having said that, it still takes a few hours at least. Once it does finish, the array should return to the healthy state.

Windows will still have a record of the previous 500 GB drive however, so you want to remove that from its records by right clicking on the drive that says “missing” and choosing to remove it :

I had a pair of external hard drives laying around that I wasn't really using, they were 1 TB and 2 TB drives. So what I did was follow this process for replacing a failed drive with a new one. So two of my 500 GB drives are replaced with a 1 TB and 2 TB drive. The idea is to sell them to buy more 2 TB drives so that my entire array is filled with 2 TB drives – that's the dream! That will give me 6 TB of storage, which will certainly do for the foreseeable future!

Expanding the array

Adding new drives to an array to boost capacity follows the same process as above – physically add the drive to the PC, convert to dynamic, repair the volume to add the new drive and off you go!

The first section about repairing the array was something that I had struggled to get information on from my prowls of the internet, hopefully this will be useful for you out there!
Ciao for now!

My File Server

Background

I have talked about my initial set up of Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS2011) onto my file server PC, I thought I would give you a quick outline of it (read about my overview of WHS2011 here)

What I want it to do for me.

I have quite literally dozens of PCs in various states of repair and holding various files and useful information. I’m sick of using a pen drive to move stuff about and forever wondering, “which machine has that file again?”. So I want a central file store that I can access from any PC. Ultimately, I would love to be able to use something like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) so that I can access my data anywhere in the world. Why? Because I can!

So what is my server?

Well I should admit that I am a hoarder / slow upgrader. For one reason or another, I never seem to have much money to invest (ha is that really the right word to use?!) in computers. So I tend to get a lot second hand and a few generations old. So my server is quite literally old pieces that I had laying around from previous upgrades.

• CPU : E6700 Core2Duo
• RAM : 4 GB DDR2 800 MHz
• Motherboard : TBD
• OS Drive : Seagate 160 GB
• Data Drives : 4 off Samsung 500GB HDD
• PSU : Corsair
• GPU : 8800GTX

It is mounted in a 4U rack mount case (read about that here), I have a 42U rack in my garage (why? Because I could and it was cheap off eBay!) I want to get the rack populated with rack mount cases on sliding rails so that I can easily work on a PC.

The four 500 GB drives are set up in a RAID-5 array so that I have a good balance of fault tolerance (I can have a single drive fail and still not lose data) and capacity. The idea of a RAID array is also quite appealing – just one uber drive that is arguably of higher performance than any single one. Whats not to love? Its also a good convenience!

My file server chassis

The Gutz

Well thats me off for now!

4U Rack mount Case Review

Background

Today I am reviewing a 4U rack mount case that I purchased from Compubid2 (http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Compubid2-Computer-Supplies?_trksid=p2047675.l2563) on eBay for just £39.99.

Case walkaround

The case comes as standard as a matte black. First impression is that the case has been made reasonably sturdy, certainly the main body of the case is strong and made from 3-4mm steel, the top panel does feel thinner and does flex to the touch, however, cases of similar price (from Maplin) have been made from far thinner and flimsier material. Two very rugged handles either side of the front fascia provide a grip for pulling out of the rack.

Front view of the case

A sleek semi-opaque black Perspex panel makes up the majority of a key lockable security panel. On the far left of the front fascia are two USB ports. It would have been nice if these two had been behind the security panel to prevent malicious attack such as with key loggers, however the addition of front mounted USB ports is very welcome as rear access when mounted in a rack is all but limited, probably impossible in the vast majority of installations.

Also on the front fascia are vents, on the inside of the case good mountings are available for fans which I personally recommend to help create a draft through the case, as opposed to using roof mounted fans which simply push the air about inside the case.


The security panel is opened using one of the two provided keys, behind which can be found the 5.25 drives, the on/off, reset and keyboard lock switches. The USB ports of the far left are just USB 2.

Case with security panel open

At the rear of the case two thumb screws (removed) are all that is needed to remove the top panel.

Remove the thumb screws

With the top panel removed, we can first of all see that two 80mm fans come provided. If you look in the bottom right corner of the roof panel, you can see a point dent, the metal work is easy to deny. Inside, you are welcomed by a cavernous volume.  As you can see, I’ve managed to build a full ATX system inside and this was done comfortably. The 5.25” rack comes with spacers to allow 3.5” drives to be installed without trouble and up to 3 5.25” devices can be installed here.

For the remainder of the width of the case is a side mounted 3.5” rack for further drives.

Full ATX PC

Both the 5.25" drive bay and 3.5" drive bays are mounted to the chassis via a bolt with a 15 mm spring to provide insulation against shock (quite reasonable in a rack mount environment, I know I shove my cases in the rack).

Spring shocks

It should be noted that the 5.25" drive bay mounting comes with a 3.5" adapter that allows you to mount your HDDs horizontally, but it is a royal chore to do this however.The first step is to remove the drive bay from the chassis, undoing four bolts.

 One the bay is out the case (as shown above right). You then have to release the 3.5" adapter from this chassis with another four screws to release the U-shaped adapter (shown below):

 At this point you can now mount your drives in the bracket. Having had to do this the once, I'd never want to do again so I'd recommend installing hot-swap drives here.

One of my favourite features is the use of a cross brace bar across the width of the case. In most cases this is used for adding stiffness to the case, or in some cases, fans are suspended. This case has several adjustable risers that can be used to provide support to extension cards, in the picture below I’ve used them to brace my graphics card. Given that his case is going to be slid in and out of a rack and brutally handled, and with my experience in the past that graphics card are incredibly sensitive, this is a welcome addition.

Supports for graphics card

Thermal Testing

In order to test the thermals of this case I am using an AMD based system with a GTX260 graphics card. The exact details of the full equipment used are provided below:

• Power Supply : Antec VP350P
• Motherboard :
• Processor : AMD Athlon 64 3200+
• Hard drive : Fujitsu
• Graphics Card : XFX GTX 260 896 MB
• Operating System : Windows XP 32-bit SP2

Note: in some of the images above a 120 mm fan can be seen resting on the motherboard, this was removed for testing. Only the fans that came pre-installed in the case and those that came as part of the motherboard (in the cooler) and the graphics card (in the cooler).

In order to test the temperatures, the system is put under load using the Folding at Home (FAH) software. FAH is a scientific computing application that processes and analyses the behave of proteins for research for Stanford University. The application can be configured to use between 10 and 100% of available processing power on both the CPU and any graphics cards installed. Both the CPU and GPU will be loaded at 100% for maximum heat generation in the case.

Temperatures are recorded as reported by Speed Fan.

The FAH client was ran for 30 minutes in order to stabilise the system temperature. After this time, the temperature was recorded once per minute and then the results averaged and the temperature reported by Speed Fan recorded below:

Sensor	Reading 1	Reading 2	Reading 3	Average
CPU	75	75	75	75
GPU	82	82	82	82
Local	65	65	65	65

The problem that the fans have on the roof panel is that they don't actually move much air, especially since they are trying to draw through the holes in the roof panel. Consequently there is a poor airflow around the case. I tried just inserting a 120 mm at the front of the case to promote a draft and 10 degrees was pushed off the temperatures straight away. So I’d recommend moving the fans to push the air from front to back as opposed to through the roof. This demonstrates that the case doesn't have a major issue with hot hardware such as this, but a bit of effort is needed to set the fans up to promote the good cooling that is available.

Summary

Cooling – 10/30

The default configuration with the basic two 80 mm fans on the roof panel resulted in poor airflow, arguably producing more heat than they helped to dissipate! But when just a single 120 mm fan was placed at the very front the air flow was drastically improved and 5-10 degrees was shaved off the running temperatures. So whilst the case can tolerate hot hardware, which is quite likely if you are using equipment in a rack mount environment as part of a file server farm perhaps, it does take some extra investment in terms of time and most certainly money to get some high CFM fans that can just the air through the case. Flipping the 80 mm fans around to exhaust gas out of the case and using a pair of 120 mm fans to pull cool air in from the front should keep hardware running at far more respectable temperatures.

Features – 13/20

The locking security panel is a nice touch that adds a good dose of aesthetic pleasantries. The front mount USB ports are also a welcome sight. The single biggest feature has to be the adjustable braces on the cross bar, ideal for securing expansion cards such as graphics cards.

Design – 18/30

The general chassis, particularly internally is very sturdily made with think steel work, the handles are solid plastic and again feel sturdy and reassuring. The two thumb screws for removing the top panel are a welcome relief from cases requiring the removal of a dozen screws that secure the top panel down. The roof panel and front security panel all fitted well with no distortions and importantly the case conformed to the 19” rack standard meaning it can be bolted in.

The lack of a back plane means that cable routing is really non-existent unless you are able to trap cables under the motherboard perhaps. Ample drive bays both 5.25 and 3.5” are available meaning that this could work as a file server with numerous drives. The interior is cavernous and easy to work in.

Value for money – 15/20

For just under £40 you get a lot of case for your money, for the most part the case is rigid and well built with good metal work as the chassis and metal work to build onto. despite the top panel being slightly flimsy and easy to dent. The materials are good and the case is comfortably large but not excessively heavy.

Overall – 56%

Back to school

Back to school

In 2010 my employer offered me a budget for personal development and training, equivalent to £1300.

Fast forward to July 2012, I've spent £200 on some books (that I haven't used!) and I'm close to losing my budget if I don't spend it. I'm a personal believer in continuous technical development and I've also got over the stress of my BEng, so I'm in the mood that I could do a Master's degree.

I was supposed to be working in a communications area of the business so I took the obvious decision of finding a Communications MSc. About a month prior to starting the course work changed and the University also declared that they were not going to run the course on a part-time, long distance basis. Thanks Uni!

Doing some more digging I find a brilliant sounding course at Cranfield University called Military Electronic Systems Engineering at Cranfield University. So in October 2012 I did the first module of the course, Electromagnetic Propagation and Devices.

Fast forward a bit more to today, October 2013, I am back at Cranfield University studying the second module in the MESE MSc - Digital Signal Processing, Statistics and Analysis.

This year, I'm staying in the officers mess in Templar Hall.

The rooms are comfortable, with plenty of storage space but quite plain and basic. The rooms are large and spacious, the beds are "wide singles" or "narrow doubles" depending on how you look at it.

My bedroom - brilliant I think!

 

From my room, which is now Wi-Fi enabled thanks to a third party system. I've got a nice view of Kitchener Hall from my room too.

 

Kitchener Hall

Kitchener Hall

 

Wish me luck! 

A life of servitude : Windows Home Server 2011

I was recently given a copy of Windows Home Server 2011 (WHS2011). I have read on line that WHS2011 is getting quite a slating, but given that I didn’t pay a penny for it, I thought it would be worth at least trying out to see what its like. This article is a record of my experience so far.

Installation

Installing WHS2011 was an absolute doddle, just like you would expect with any Windows package, the installation feels much like Windows 7. I found that the initial step of loading the installation data from disc took a very long time in comparison to the normal Windows 7 installation, it took about 30 minutes just to progress from the “Press any key to boot from CD / DVD” to actually getting control of the installation. This is hardly a major issue really.

Once you have put in the initial settings - just let the installer do its thing, it again takes quite a while, a good hour I’d say. Again, this isn't a big issue.

First Start

Once WHS2011 is installed, you will eventually arrive at a log-on screen. When you do, just enter your log-on details. From the very first moment I logged on, I got the impression that having a desktop is an extra service that runs – from this point I start feeling like the server should really be running headless. I found that the first log on took a long time and felt very clumsy. But subsequent logins are far faster.

Updating

I am always in the habit of when I do a fresh install of Windows, I jump on Windows Update and start it getting its rafts of updates. I had 106 updates consisting of about 570 MB of data to be downloaded and installed. Unfortunately, I had to run to work at this point, so I had the what I thought was a brilliant idea of just letting the PC run while I was at work – it would clearly take a few hours and it can do all its restarts etc and then I would come home to a nicely updated machine. So later that day I came home and turned on the monitor to see the updater stuck at update 12 of 106 because it was installing Internet Explorer 9 and the IE9 installer has manual prompts – oh well, 12 hours of electricity completely wasted then …

Configuring the server

The Router

Setting up the server truly is a doddle! Setting up involved a few basic settings such as shares and even setting up your router to allow remote control (via RDP and the Dashboard) from other PCs. Now its at this point I had my first issue – I am using a BT Home Hub 3. Which claims to support UPnP (universal plug and play), all the settings in the configuration of the home hub say it does, but WHS2011 couldn't automatically configure it, so I had to manually set up port forwarding. This was slightly frustrating because I had to consult three different WHS2011 support pages for the ports that needed forward. No one of the support pages listed all the ports, so I found the first page and forwarded on the first port. Tested it, didn't work, did some more googling, got another port, got that forwarded, still wouldn't work, guess what I did next, MORE googling, got a new port to forward, got that forwarded and then it finally worked!! I had to tell the wizard that I would manually sort out my router. But I then used part 2 of the wizard to set up my domain. With a windows live account using home server you can choose a domain with the .homeserver.com domain host.

Hard Drives

In my server I have one drive that I use for the operating system (OS) and four more that I use for “data”. My dream has been to get these four drives in to a RAID-5 array. Why RAID-5? I feel it offers the best balance of redundancy (I can have a single drive fail out of four and the array will still continue to work – although in a degraded state), and cost (I've got four drives, I effectively lose one to redundancy, so my array is 75% efficient).

Windows makes this really easy to set up, first you need four drives ideally of all the same capacity (well you can use different capacities, but the array configures itself based on the smallest drive), and get them fully formatted and clean. So in your Computer Management window you should see your OS drive, plus four blank “unallocated” drives.

Right click on the unallocated region of any of the “to be RAID-ed” drives, right click “New RAID-5 Volume”.

You then get a window appear which is basically listing all the available drives on the left, and wants you to move the drives to the right that you want to be a part of the RAID-5 array. Just pick the ones you want, move them over and click next.

The next screen then asks you what size you want the array to be. It will default to 3 times the smallest drive capacity. If you had a 20 GB, 40 GB, 60 GB and 80 GB drive, your array capacity would have a maximum limit of just 60 GB. You might for some reason what to use less than the full RAID-5 capacity (maybe you want a “backup” partition that is logically separate for instance). Make your choice and click continue …

Eventually you will get to the end of the wizard and it will congratulate you on building the array. Now a boring step – you need to wait while windows “configures” the array. This involves Windows running the RAID-5 algorithm to get the drives set up to receive data. My array consisted of 4 500 GB drives, quite small by 2013 standards, but the array still took the majority of two days to build, while this is happening, the Computer Management tool will say that the drives are “syncing”.


In the wonderful world of the Internet, you experience time different, and after glancing at the above picture, you have transported yourself forward two days (don’t worry, only two days forward in my life!) and you have a fully configured array! Windows will report that the array is healthy.

One thing I did, that probably slowed down the syncing process was I started moving my data onto the array. I put about 500 GB of data (videos, pictures etc.), I am convinced this slowed down the process because despite plugging the USB2 external drive straight into the server PC, I was writing to the array at a blazing 3.7 MB/s ! If you were to just abandon your PC I'm sure it would take far less time (using the same capacity).

Conclusion

Setting up the RAID array and getting the shares set up is about 90% of the short-term functionality of my server, so by this point I was extremely pleased with my progress! I will write up more about my server for those that are interested.
Take care!

The Future is E!

In my very first blog post, I announced that one of my hobbies is anything related to technology (computer technology). I am very much a lover of the idea of integrating computer technology into the home. It has been talked about for years about homes becoming more digitised and “e” but it is taking off very slowly, I think there are a couple of main drivers behind this. The main one I believe is infrastructure.

For an e-home to function, there needs to be a good infrastructure to support it. What do I mean by this, well my idea is that homes basically need a smaller version of the technology that enterprises have in their corporate networks. Looking at your average (my) home. I can see bits and pieces of technology making advances, for instance, mobile devices such as laptops, phones, e-readers, tablets and consoles to name just a few are all getting more and more hungry for information, almost universally in the form of internet access. And all this data is supposed to be piped through your BT home hub? Aye right that will work well! It might be for me living on my own, but when you start getting to your average family – mum, dad, two, three or four kids and each person has their own set of electronic devices – you are really starting to hit a data flow problem.

So my first point is that the physical infrastructure needs to exist. So my idea is an effective network consisting of a core spine of ultra-high data-rate networking with branches to allow connectivity into that spine.

On the same theme as enterprise infrastructure, the infrastructure needs to support the actual management of data. One problem that I have in my house is that all my devices (I have a laptop and two desktops represent 90% of my work) have different “scraps” of data across them and it can be frustrating when I can’t remember which PC has a piece of data on it that I need. So what I want, and what I believe homes need is a data management system. In my mind, even a small family home needs a centralised data archive that anyone, anywhere in the home and ideally anywhere in the world can access.

As an example, if you look at Windows 7 onwards, you can set up what is known as a HomeGroup. It is basically a limited file sharing system between PCs. You can read data from very specific directories (My Documents for instance), and have access to some of the other PCs facilities too, such as printers. Which is very good. But the limitations of it are quickly apparent.

Further building on the management of data, there are two sub-themes in this. Data redundancy and data backup. These are subtly different problems to be solved and I will do this after I first try to define them:

• Data Redundancy, in the event of a limited amount of failure of equipment and / or problems I am still able to access my data
• Data Backup, in the event that my data is corrupted, I am able to restore the data from historical archives.

I believe that the e-home needs to have data stored centrally that has a direct link into the infrastructure for easy and rapid data access. But even more important is to address the two bullet points above: you need to have some resistance to failures / problems so that data isn't lost easily. But you also need to address the situation that if you do lose data, you can recover it (mostly typically).
One way I've seen this kind of addressed is the use of Cloud Storage solutions by providers such as Dropbox and SkyDrive. They look after most of the above mentioned issues to some degree or another.

In a very round-a-bout type way I've tried to introduce some of the areas that appeal to me and that I will talk about more in the future.

That's all for now folks. Ciao for now!

Micro PC build

A New PC .. but not for me! :(

My mother-in-law has a tiny (and rightly impressive) Mac Mini as her main computer and has used this for many years with general satisfaction. However, there is only so much processing power you can squeeze into a chassis no bigger than a ready-meal and after 10 years, she now finds it laggy playing games and unable to enjoy the latest releases at high quality.

Wendy's current computer - Mac Mini 1st Generation

As such she has been pining for an upgrade for a while and I offered my services to build one for her. This blog article is just a quick one showing what we did.

Requirements Specification

Being a Systems Engineer, I just felt impulsed to write a requirement spec. Did I write it down? No, but this is what I thought Wendy needed after talking with her about her ideal PC. 

1. It must be compact, full-size towers (ATX) are far too large [REQ01]
2. It must be quiet - hurricanes of fans are not an option [REQ02]
3. It must be power efficient [REQ03]
4. It must be powerful - a slightly subjective requirement! Further discussion revealed:
1. The Graphics Card must be powerful enough to be able to play games at the current level of quality (low graphics)  [REQ04]
2. The Graphics Card should be powerful enough to be able to play games at high quality (desirable requirement) [REQ05]
3. Boot-up time must be less than 1 minute (current experience with the Mac Mini) [REQ06]
4. No particular memory requirements other than it has to be able to play games [REQ07]

Design Ideas

OK so there we have seven requirements, here's my thought process going from requirements to design:

[REQ01] - Compact

She's familiar with the Mac Mini and loves how small it is, so ideally wanted to find a case of similar size. Overall the objective was to minimise the case size. I did stumble across a case that looks very very similar to the Mac Mini case. The problem I had with it straight away was it required a PSU of size "SFX" - what the bugger does that mean? My interpretation : bloody small with very limited options. I didn't like the idea of limited options. So had to continue looking.

[REQ02] - Quiet

I really wanted to try and use all-in-one watercoolers on the CPU to keep it quiet.

[REQ03] - Power Efficient

It must be power efficient

[REQ04] & [REQ05]- Graphics

The Graphics Card must be powerful enough to be able to play games at the current level of quality (low graphics)
The Graphics Card should be powerful enough to be able to play games at high quality (desirable requirement)

I know from experience that even my archaic GTX 260 and GTX 460 cards in my PCs are more than beasty enough for games like the Sims 4. So I had pretty much any choice of modern cards that suited both the space volume restrictions and met the budget.

[REQ06] - Quick

Boot-up time must be less than 1 minute (current experience with the Mac Mini)

[REQ07] - Memory

No particular memory requirements other than it has to be able to play games

We are going to need a bigger boat ... I mean box

So after a few hours on Scan.co.uk and Ebuyer.co.uk buttons were pressed and the debit card burned, a rather impressive two days later parcels arrived!

Unpacking

I have to confess, I left work early (3pm to be precise after being there for just 6 hours!) so that I could come home to start the build. I had been tracking the parcels online using the respective courier services so I knew they had made it.

RAM

First up is the Random Access Memory, or RAM. I've learned that your choice of RAM will be one of the two major features that will limit (or not) your overall performance. RAM is a bit like scrap-paper for doing your homework. If you have an A4 piece of scrap paper then you can write out lots easily, however if you only have a piece of paper the size of a stamp, then you can only write a little at a time and you will spend lots of time rubbing out what you've done so you can then do the next bit. That's much the same scenario for a computer, have a large volume of RAM will enable your computer to make lots of calculations simultaneously.

Now I knew from my motherboard specification that the memory controller supports Dual-Channel memory operations. What on earth is that? In practice this means that it uses two RAM "cards" at the same time for an improved data-throughput. Now I know I want to maximise performance so I want to take advantage of this, so I want to put two RAM "cards" in rather than just one large one. 

The next question is what speed of RAM do I want? Ideally, the faster the better.

Using the scrap-paper analgy again.

Imagine you are using a nice Parker ball-point pen. The pen will glide across the paper no problem so you can just write as fast as your brain can think and your hand can write. This is going to be quick to write out everything to get to the answer.

Now imagine you are using a quill and ink, every now and then you need to dip the quill back in the ink pot so you can carry on writing - you will eventually get to the answer, but your hardware choice has resulted in it taking much longer compared to the ball-point pen.

Finally how much RAM do I want? MOAR!! Mwahaha. *composes oneself* the operating system, Windows in this case, is going to munch the best part of 2 GB by itself before you start using any applications. Wendy likes to play The Sims, which also burns up a few GB on its own, so we are very easily needing a MINIMUM of 4 GB. Purely because I've not factored in multi-tasking and application means we should double it to 8 GB. You can buy 8 GB memory kits, so it makes sense to go for that. But I know that Wendy won't want to buy a whole new PC for quite a while, so to future proof it I decided to go for the next level up which is 16 GB.

The very last factor is brand. Should that be a factor? I think it should, some brands are better than others. One of my favourite brands for RAM is Corsair.

Corsair XMS3 16 GB RAM Kit

CPU Cooling

Working inside a tiny chassis compared to my usual ATX and XL-ATX cases means that I had to be careful about how large the cooler was. It is important to keep the CPU cool, but I also had an envelope to fit it in. After scrolling through the options I settled on this. It is a very low profile cooler and by a brand that I knew offered good and very quiet performance.

Scythe Kozuti CPU Cooler

Power Supply

Ah the power supply - an area of much contention for PC builders. The PSU is responsible for converting the mains power (230 Volts, changing at 50 Hz of Alternating Current) to what the PC actually needs. Fundamentally this is typically 3.3 V for the CPU, 5-7 V for drives and 12 V for peripherals such as graphics cards.

The main question is how much do I need? There are a few PSU calculators available online that will work out what you need and recommend a PSU size once I had worked out what parts I was planning on using the calculators said I need about 350-400 W. Now I chose a PSU of 550 W. Firstly because whilst a 400 W one was available, the next one was the 500 W. But I also wanted some headroom because I knew I would be upgrading the PC in the future to have more powerful components. I also wanted to factor in that a good PSU will last decades, so to support it I wanted additional power head room.

The next factor is efficiency. The only PSUs you want to even consider will have an efficiency branding known as "80PLUS". This means that they are at least 80% efficient. Now 80% is pretty poor, the other 20% of the energy is lost as heat (by the PSU). That's a lot of energy! Buying a more efficient PSU does cost more, but it can work out that they will save money in the long run.

I knew this was a key feature, so I tried to find the best I could.

Finally, because I was working inside a tiny case, I wanted to have a modular (or at least partially-modular), this again restricted my options further. That's why I've got a PSU that's probably a bit overkill

EVGA Supernova 550 GS Power Supply.

Motherboard

The choice of motherboard was important. I personally believe that the motherboard is one area to truly invest in out of all of the parts (other than the PSU) because its the backbone to your PC. Frustratingly there was actually very little choice when looking at the mini-ATX boards. They were either £70 area, or £300. For a tiny board I think £300 is stupid (an XL-ATX with lots of features I might consider £300 for!), it was also out of budget. MSI is another very good brand so the choice was simple here.

Graphics Card

The graphics card was another key feature of this computer. The size constraints were the driving force here, I had to choose a card that was no bigger than a dual-slot card. It also needed to be quiet, so the large heat-sink was a must.

Once I had limited the scope to cards that would fit, it was then getting the best I could for the money available.

An Nvidia-based GTX 750.

Processor

Storage

Optical Disk Drive

Chassis

The case that I settled on in the end is a Coolermaster CM130.

The Build

First things first ... stripping down the chassis so that I can start getting bits in.

Stripped down case

I was really impressed with installing the Optical Disk Drive. The front cover of the case pops off to let you slide it in the bay. The bay itself is tool-less. 

Tool-less 5.25 inch bay

The SSD gets mounted on the side panel wall (which in itself is removable).

Now its a game of 3D-tetris

Turning my Samsung Galaxy S2 into a micro computer

Introduction

I've got Samsung Galaxy S2 (SGS2) as my phone, yes it's old, but at the moment I can't justify signing up for a contract to get something new when my money could be better spent. I think that my SGS2 is a brilliantly capable phone, certainly does everything I need it to do, the only criticisms I can make of it is performance (it does struggle with new, more demanding apps and when there is a few running. I've noticed that apps being updated really hurts performance to the point that the phone locks up for a second or two); and the screen size.

Ironically, I can't do anything about the performance but I can sort out my screen size issue. For me, I've got big-finger-itis. Also known as a fat thumb. So whilst icons are a usable size and I don't have an issue, using the screen for detailed work like filling in text boxes is a struggle. Also looking at a little screen compared to a 21 inch monitor is a pain.

This article talks about how I'm experimenting with how I can make my SGS2 a bit more usable.

Viewing

There's two aspects I'm looking at, firstly using the screen in terms of seeing it easily, and secondly interfacing with the phone. I'll be looking at the visualisation issue now.

A consortium of members consisting of Samsung, Nokia and others have worked in collaboration to produce a standard known as MHL. MHL is an interface that allows you to export what you see on your screen out as a HDMI signal. You can then use a HDMI cable to display this on your monitor or TV.

The first step is to get the HDMI signal from the phone. This is done using the HDTV Adapter.

I looked on eBay and Amazon for these and found hundreds in the £5-10 band. When I read the reviews it was extremely mixed. Not just one or two bad ones but every third one had a grumble.

So I looked for the official Samsung one, when I discovered an RRP of £34.99 I started to change my mind, but I was very lucky and found an official Samsung adapter on eBay for £5.99 - so I snatched that up and I already had a HDMI cable and the monitor I wanted to use available.

Samsung HDTV Adapter

The official Samsung HDTV Adapter arrives in a nice compact package. There is only the one component to this, nothing complicated to get it working.

Samsung individual packaging.

The SGS2 uses MHL v1.0 which means that the HDTV adapter requires a power supply. The really frustrating issue is that the current supplied by a normal USB 2 port isn't enough. You will need a mains plug. 

The micro USB lead plugs straight into your phone, power the plugs in to a micro USB port adjacent to the flying lead. Then you connect your HDMI cable into the other end of the adapter and your TV.

You don't need to install any apps or perform and configuration, upon connecting the HDMI cable to your TV and, if necessary, switching your TV to the correct input source you will result and you seeing your phone screen projected on your TV.

Phone screen projected onto the monitor via MHL.

At the start of the article I talked about how I wanted to make my SGS2 more usable as a mobile work platform. All of the testing and learning so far has been conducted on my TV in the living room.  The next step is to start using this to assist my work, so I packed the setup in my bag and took it to work with me.

Real world use

Arriving at work I was feeling rather excited about hooking up my phone to my screen so that I could use it to display information such as my calendar. That's when I ran into my first obstacle : between my monitors in my dual-screen setup I have every single connection option (DisplayPort, DVI, VGA etc) EXCEPT HDMI!

Looking at the array of connectors, one jumped out at me : DVI.

DVI Connector on the back of my monitor

My first thought was I would be able to use a HDMI-DVI adapter to act as an interface between the HDMI output of the adapter and the DVI socket on my monitor.

HDMI-DVI Adaptor

Feeling optimistic with the adapter in hand I got everything hooked up but I was greeted with a blank screen. It turns out the the MHL adapter can't drive the signal through the adapter which is slightly disappointing.

Return to home

Coming home I was very disappointed, I had hoped to be able to use my phone as a mobile workstation while at work (when on my break of course!), despite this I was determined to try and make this work.

The first thing I noticed was that whilst the phone screen was on my monitor, it only filled the middle of the screen. 

It turned out to be a simple fix, simply turning the phone onto its side means that the image would be adjusted to fill the screen.

Now that I have connectivity from the phone to the screen, I do have to try hard to not think that my monitor is now a touch screen! Ideally I could do with a stand that would keep the phone in the landscape position. Despite this I have found it useful having things like Inbox by Gmail and Google Calendar open - it worked especially well on my dual screen setup in my bedroom which is great for multi-tasking and now that I've virtually completed a migration to using Google I ensure that my Google account is fully sync'ed across all my devices.

In my follow up post to this, I will go into more detail about interfacing with the phone and the now, larger and improved display to further improve my productivity.

Ciao for now!