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The PDC
which stands for Pico Data Centre. Or, alternatively, NAS 2025v1. Whatever. Naming schemes are fun, but it’s too easy to get carried away with them. It is intended to be a more portable variant of the MDC, taking most of the hardware from it and repackaging it inside a smaller enclosure. Why? Because I would…
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NASv5.1 or the MDC
Or perhaps I should call it NAS 2024v1.1, which is a bit more intuitive. And yes, I know that the post has literally been published in ’25Q1, but I’ve been somewhat preoccupied with other things lately. Chances are, by the time this comes out, it’s already been torn down and replaced with something else. This…
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Some fun with USB4 M.2 enclosures
I’ve been looking at USB4 M.2 enclosures, specifically ones with the ASM2464PD chipset to house an M.2 drive. My original plan was to use it for booting Windows, so I could keep the internal drive in my laptop partitioned entirely for Linux, but still plug in an extra drive if I needed Windows for the…
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Huawei HSSD-D5222 3.6TB SAS SSDs
This is yet another snippet on how to make some Huawei SSDs work in a normal computer, since by default these use 520-byte logical and 4160-byte physical sectors, which means they won’t be usable outside of Huawei’s own OceanStor devices. Yes, I know using parts from chinese manufacturers can be a controversioal topic, especially after…
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Cockpit nightmares
So, I’ve been using Cockpit to manage my servers remotely since I started using Fedora Server a couple years ago. It’s free, built-in and works really well. So what’s not to like? Ooops! That’s what’s not to like. I’ve had these internal errors happening for some time and I’ve realized that the updates stopped working.…
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The Allied Telesis x230-18GP inside
This is just a snippet, looking at the x230-18GP, or more accurately, taking it apart to look at its insides. It’s a lovely L3 switch that runs linux, has 16+2 ports and a 240W PoE budget for PoE and PoE+ devices. That’s 15W and 30W respectively. It uses around 20W in idle, which isn’t too…
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The Liqid LQD3000 SSD Teardown
This is a teardown and analysis of the Liquid LQD300, which is a HHHL PCIe add-on card. It claims to be an enterprise-grade drive, but is constructed in a way that would make me question that in some ways. As mentined above, we’re talking about a HHHL card, like a Samsung PM1735 or Intel’s P3/4xxx…
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What makes a good HTPC in 2024?
I was recently looking for a device that could play 4K video at 24fps and apparently finding such a device isn’t as simple as I thought. I would like something better than the built-in media player in my TV, but the list below should paint a better picture of that: That’s quite a list, especially…
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NASv5 on AMD Zen 3 “Cezanne”
After my latest NAS build, which was the v3, around two years ago (and there existed a v4, which was more of a temporary measure) v5 is the device that I’m currently using since Q1 of 2024. The main difference, aside from moving to an AMD-based platform, was making it all solid-state, meaning there are…
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The history of SSDs
This article has taken over four months to complete and required a considerable amount of time to write, as well as to ensure correctness and all the parts are intertwined as to give the reader a pleasant and fluid reading experience. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed typing it up.…