Ambient Irony

Friday, April 05

Daily News Stuff 5 April 2019

All Day Does Not Include 6:49 AM Edition

Tech News

Intel does not want customers using Optane memory. (AnandTech)

The cheapest model in the new Xeon lineup is $213. It's kind of slow, but hey, $213.

The cheapest model supporting Optane memory is $9119. (Unless I'm misreading the price list, which is entirely possible.)
Microsoft says okay, fine, don't update, see if we care. (PC Perspective)

They'll still force-feed you security patches and reboot your computer at an inconvenient time at least once a month, but you can at least delay the feature updates.
Google shut down its new AI ethices advisory board after it turned out that Google's employees are mostly insane. (Tech Crunch)
WCCFTech is 15 years old today unless it isn't. (WCCFTech)
93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs.
A dual socket AMD Rome system will have three and possibly four times the bandwidth of Intel's competing Platinum 9200 systems. (Serve the Home)

If your motherboard and devices support PCIe 4.0, anyway. Otherwise the gain is only 60-100%.
This asshole is always wrong. (ZDNet)

I'll get back to that on the weekend.
Pixy's Third Law of Software Development: Windows developer tools expand until they include a complete Linux installation. Sometimes two.

Disclaimer: There is no 6:49 AM.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:47 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 217 words, total size 3 kb.

1 What (if anything) do you think of Synology for a home NAS? I don't want to go crazy on it but I'm growing past the point of wanting to mess around with carrying flash drives and USB hard drives from one machine to another when I want to move files around. The Wirecutter recommends the DS218+, a 2-disk enclosure that costs about $350 before adding disks, and I was thinking of dropping in a couple of 2- or 4-TB drives (I think the device normally uses RAID mirroring). I've been reading up on FreeNAS too but at this point in time I think it might be overkill (maybe someday I'll want to run a media server and a DB server as well, but not today or probably not even this year. Right now my goal is "networked file server" and "fairly low power usage".

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2019 01:27 AM (Iwkd4)

2 I've had the 918+ for almost a year now, which is very similar hardware with four drive bays, and I'm quite happy with it. In addition to its functionality as a file server (which includes automated backups of several machines), I've got several Docker containers running on it (database, source control, etc).

We've also got one at the office as a Time Machine destination for multiple Macs, and it's been trouble-free.

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, April 06 2019 02:08 AM (ZlYZd)

3 I've had Synology boxes for years now. My current box is an 1815+ that's more then met my needs for about 3 years and I had a 411 before that. They're relatively easy and straight forward with a ton of features. They can also serve as a media server and other light-weight (ie home/SOHO) uses when you're ready to experiment.

One thing I do recommend is don't skimp on storage space. Once you move to a more permanent storage solution, you'll find that you'll delete less and save more. Also, don't forget a backup strategy as a lot of the cheep backup providers won't support NASes unless you pay for more expensive services. Losing a few TB of data can get quite painful.

Posted by: stargazera5 at Saturday, April 06 2019 02:45 AM (jl9eJ)

4 The thing is--and before I go further I understand the concept of "buying more than you currently need"--the 918+ is about twice as much as the 218+ and while I could conceivably want to host local database or web server(s) or whatever at some point, I don't know if a Celeron and up to 6/8GB of RAM would be enough--at that point it might make more sense to run FreeNAS with even more RAM and a low-end Xeon or something. (Admittedly I'm almost certainly never going to run an MRP or anything like that so maybe I'm overthinking it. My current thoughts are "a Progress database of 2-5GB run locally for testing so I don't have to access the work database that's on the other end of a VPN on the other end of the country and a 10Mb link. Data-centric applications suck at those speeds.)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 06 2019 07:34 AM (Iwkd4)

5 I pulled the trigger on a 218+ last night. Just need to get a couple of drives for it--probably just motor on down to Micro Center at lunch or something and get a pair of 4TB WD Reds or something.
Sometimes I love living in a major city, too. Can't find a Synology on a store shelf, just WD My Cloud and Buffalo stuff with 2-core ARM CPUs, but I could order this for $18 around midnight Sunday and have it "guaranteed by Tuesday 8pm". Probably show up by noon (or be a day late) based on prior experience.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, April 09 2019 12:30 AM (Iwkd4)

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