There's FreeNAS.
There are still Western Digital offerings and, although I haven't researched them, Blackmagic has a couple of different NAS from 8TB up to 320TB.
There are still Western Digital offerings and, although I haven't researched them, Blackmagic has a couple of different NAS from 8TB up to 320TB.
Now TrueNAS after they moved from FreeBSD base to a Linux Base.
Messing with old harddrives, the harddrive of my P-II 400 was on its way out, so I have a few more PATA drives, checked them all out, so far I've found two Quantum Viking II drives, they're ultra wide SCSI drives, I do have the right controllers for those but before I can dig them and the right cables out it would be halfway next week... yes, putting stuff away in a safe place has its downside..., the really old ones, IDE between 40MB and 13GB, hoped the Seagate 10GB drive in that pile would still function but so far computers don't recognize it so bummer, the 8GB and 13GB drives are Seagate U series drives with the rubber protection strapped around them, need to look if these still work, I can't remember using those in any machine previously.
Next stop three 20GB drives, two Maxtors and one Western digital, the WD and one of the Maxtors I have tested, the WD has niggles so I need to see what's the deal with that, one of the Maxtor drives same thing, not sure what the palaver is about so I was left with one 20GB Maxtor, it works, have installed Win2K onto it, no problems according to the S.M.A.R.T. data it is fine but it is one of those drives that makes strange noises, the other Maxtor doesn't but the one inside the machine.. I've thrown a bunch of test programs at it and it is fine, also quite fast for the age but it keeps making strange noises..
Next stop three 20GB drives, two Maxtors and one Western digital, the WD and one of the Maxtors I have tested, the WD has niggles so I need to see what's the deal with that, one of the Maxtor drives same thing, not sure what the palaver is about so I was left with one 20GB Maxtor, it works, have installed Win2K onto it, no problems according to the S.M.A.R.T. data it is fine but it is one of those drives that makes strange noises, the other Maxtor doesn't but the one inside the machine.. I've thrown a bunch of test programs at it and it is fine, also quite fast for the age but it keeps making strange noises..
Oooh I remember fiddling and farting with ide cables .. What a blessing the modern age is
Never had much problems with the old flatcables, just takes some planning and lining up and later on there were rounded cables which were really great, also two devices per cable instead of one device in case of the currently used SATA, only two cables needed for harddrive(s) and the opticals, not that you use optical drives much nowadays though..
What do you mean? Some of us still like to watch movies or blurays on the computer every now and then, before I got my TV and separate player the PC was the only place I watched stuff.
What's a bluray?
I hope you're joking
=D
And any older software, though of course, there's external USB optical drives if needed.
I probably still use my optical drives on the PC most days of the week, even with Steam/streaming etc.
Now, sure, but in ten years, Kids won't know the difference between a Blueray and a Laser Disk.
Hey in 10 years what if Laserdisks make a comeback just like Vinyl has?
Most new computers I've seen do not have optical drives anymore, only some business machines still have them and then mostly slimline drives, consumer machines usually have a glass front with idiotic RGB (blaaargh) fans.. doesn't pull in much air either so most are rather roasty for the hardware inside, also full mesh fronts are used so you still see the idiotic RGB crap but actually have airflow.
Old analog tech for vinyl was easy to store and mothball, same with the equipment for cassettes, also, vinyl and cassettes never entirely left production, they became niche products so the actual factories still remained operating.
Laserdisk won't make a comeback like those formats, they did not remain in production and the last LD player went out of production in 2009 so it will linger on a for a while and then probably disappear slowly.
Old analog tech for vinyl was easy to store and mothball, same with the equipment for cassettes, also, vinyl and cassettes never entirely left production, they became niche products so the actual factories still remained operating.
Laserdisk won't make a comeback like those formats, they did not remain in production and the last LD player went out of production in 2009 so it will linger on a for a while and then probably disappear slowly.
Just out of curiosity, I've been playing around with some of the online pc designers and, I'd agree, most of the cases that they give you the option of don't have the ability to use (internal) optical drives. As for laptops, forget even that percentage that have an optical nowadays.
Never been one for having coloured fans/LED lights all through the case either. I just like good airflow as I've yet to try liquid cooling on any.
Laptop designs usually revolve around the wish to be as flat as possible so they sacrifice the optical drives and usually also good cooling so after three nano seconds at anything more stressing than running idle the damn thing starts to throttle already...
Desktop replacements and gaming laptops are better with cooling but I doubt they'll have optical drives either.. I'd buy a USB optical drive just to be sure, not everyone has the luxury of having a pile of old computers standing around like I have.
Desktop replacements and gaming laptops are better with cooling but I doubt they'll have optical drives either.. I'd buy a USB optical drive just to be sure, not everyone has the luxury of having a pile of old computers standing around like I have.
Yeah I discovered that when I bought my new laptop last year. It's too thin for an internal optical drive but has a fan for cooling but still a bit over 1 kilo due to most of the weight being the battery. Under normal conditions I get around 6 hours use. I solved the optical problem with two LG slimline slot drives for movies with one set for region 4 and one set for region 1 and just swap them as needed, if I use them.
I have seen laptops with internal dvd drives but they are a bit more chunky due to that and the performance is underwhelming, and screen resolution is usually around 1366 x 768 which for 2022 is quite bad.
RGB is everywhere dude it's in ram sticks, power supplies, fans. It is very hard to avoid unless you search for the parts you need and 2021 that's what I did when I built my last and final PC. I looked for non RGB fans and found some Corsair models I liked with rubber vibration dampers, there's not a single smidge of RGB anywhere in my setup and that's fine I don't desire it or need it.
Likewise. My limit at the moment to putting all the pieces into a working computer is lack of cases
I now we've stuck some of the older HD's in enclosures to use as USB drives, though some of them are way too small anymore. (Perhaps I could do the same with the opticals, but it might be cheaper to buy just an external at this point). I have one spare slimline optical and a few of the older bulkier ones to play with
My DT does need an upgrade as it's getting long in the tooth for some of the games I've bought.
My laptop is also pushing ten or eleven years at this point, but just stuck an SSD in and it's made a great increase in speed. (That still has a blu-ray drive in it though)
Spent New Year's day watching a series of youtube videos on the restoration of a late 70s/early 80s mini computer that a guy in Texas bought. Took him abou 18 months with lots of headaches along the way with the biggest issues being the mass storage - CDC Hawks that had one fixed platter and 1 removable and relied on air pressure to float the drive heads otherwise .....
It's possible to resurrect the drive by taking the platter from the removable and mounting it in the fixed but the operating system was challenge and
He also has CDC hard disk drive - an 8" Finch (seem to have thing for bird names). Interesting the hard disk is run from a card called a FfC - which runs also run floppy drive so I guess from a time before we had separate controllers for spinning rust. Uses a 50pin cable but pre-dates SCSI but could be SASI (thanks wiki).
The guy doing the restoration believes they didn't replace the air filters while it being used in a very smokey environment until one day.
It still saw nearly 20 years of service though.
Haven't heard mention if it was a S/100 (definitely not VME - too early and the cards are too small) bus but the cage used for system boards looks very similar to one I've seen in a series of videos were a guy is rebuilding a Fairlight CMI. Possible a standard cage that different vendors could use and tweak to their own needs.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnw98JPyObn0wJFdbcRDP7LMz8Aw2T97V
It's possible to resurrect the drive by taking the platter from the removable and mounting it in the fixed but the operating system was challenge and
He also has CDC hard disk drive - an 8" Finch (seem to have thing for bird names). Interesting the hard disk is run from a card called a FfC - which runs also run floppy drive so I guess from a time before we had separate controllers for spinning rust. Uses a 50pin cable but pre-dates SCSI but could be SASI (thanks wiki).
The guy doing the restoration believes they didn't replace the air filters while it being used in a very smokey environment until one day.
It still saw nearly 20 years of service though.
Haven't heard mention if it was a S/100 (definitely not VME - too early and the cards are too small) bus but the cage used for system boards looks very similar to one I've seen in a series of videos were a guy is rebuilding a Fairlight CMI. Possible a standard cage that different vendors could use and tweak to their own needs.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnw98JPyObn0wJFdbcRDP7LMz8Aw2T97V
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You know that everyone is rather not amused at the current level of powerdraw and heat of modern high end graphics cards?
So, been reinstalling one of my old retro machines, it's a Medion prebuild machine, it's a Pentium 4 at 2.66Ghz with 2GB RAM, runs Windows XP and it is doing fine, except the graphics card.. it originally came with the AGP 8X version of the Geforce 4200ti, lovely card but it has one of those irritating small and VERY broken coolers, a few days ago it coughed out the last remains of its bearings so that was that for the card, will need to find an aftermarker thingy for it one day or MacGuyver something myself...
Found a Geforce 6800 in my pile of cards, never used it before, it came with a Zalman aftermarket cooler, so it is rather fast, it was at that time rather high end and WTF!? That thing gets hot! So in the last 20 years not much actually has changed..
So, been reinstalling one of my old retro machines, it's a Medion prebuild machine, it's a Pentium 4 at 2.66Ghz with 2GB RAM, runs Windows XP and it is doing fine, except the graphics card.. it originally came with the AGP 8X version of the Geforce 4200ti, lovely card but it has one of those irritating small and VERY broken coolers, a few days ago it coughed out the last remains of its bearings so that was that for the card, will need to find an aftermarker thingy for it one day or MacGuyver something myself...
Found a Geforce 6800 in my pile of cards, never used it before, it came with a Zalman aftermarket cooler, so it is rather fast, it was at that time rather high end and WTF!? That thing gets hot! So in the last 20 years not much actually has changed..
Yeah, modern computers operate way above the Landauer limit.
SSDs get heavier the more they are filled.. Fascinating
