Fortysomething Geek

Here is my weekend ghetto ESXi VM server. A 200ドル budget AMD laptop.


I have to convert a rather large physical server at home so I jury rig an unused laptop.

This laptop has no love whatsoever. It was a 200ドル special from Staples or Office depot that you find on Black Friday door buster sale. The household is pretty much a tablet household and we don't have much use for it and it has been sitting in the closet for well over a year.

The laptop is a HP DV6 Pavilion with an Athlon Turion P540 processor. I reckon it is a celeron speed based CPU. The thing it has going for it is 8GB RAM (ram is cheap) and an eSata port. Otherwise, it is a rather horrible (1366x768 resolution on a 15.4" screen, awful keyboard, and lousy trackpad).

I figure I can create a makeshift ESXI server to create a makeshift datastore that will eventually be migrated to a "real" server.

To my surprise, the laptop was perfect. I made a bootable ESXI usb stick that previously worked on another workstation and connected a SATA dock. To my surprise, everything works. With an ethernet crossover, I was able to make some backups and testing.






I was able to dock an undock drives easily. The drives then showed up on my production server automatically. I managed the whole session with my macbook and a cross-over cable.

In Conclusion, those cheap Walmart/Staple/Best Buy budget AMD laptops can come in handy when you need to improvise. I like the fact AMD doesn't gimp their virtualization features in their CPU. Unlike the cheap Intel Celerons/Atoms/I3s, some of the AMD offerings are quite nice.

I had to shuffle my current desktop;re-arrange monitors and I was reminded of an old subject : displayport/thunderbolt vs HDMI. This subject has been heated debate among tech friends.

This week, I am running full HD/1080p (1920x1080), WQHD (2560x1440) , and WQXGA (2560x1600) off an 27" iMac. I could run another WQHD(Apple 27" Cinema display) through daisy chaining if my desk had enough room to support it.

In short, I have a desktop of 7,040 x 4,120 pixels.


I posted earlier an image of the Retina Macbook Pro displaying 14 million pixels off four displays . That is pretty insane and not possible with HDMI.

HDMI connection is never a selling point for me. I don't know why it is ever a bragging point on new equipment. Sure, you can plug into your HDTV at home and in some conference rooms LCD TVs.However "most" laptops/computers with HDMI can only output a maximum resolution of 1920x1080 (HD). If you do more than watch videos in HD 16x9, HDMI in its shipping form is very limited.

When I shop for a new computer/graphics card, I always choose DisplayPort and mini-DisplayPort/mDP over HDMI. Thunderbolt use the same connector as mDP (mini-DisplayPort).

I hear if you advocate mDP or thunderbolt over HDMI that you are an Apple fanboy. The main argument is that mDP/Thunderbolt is considered proprietary or some silly notion that Apple has to do something different than the rest of the industry. This has been one of the major talking point against getting an Apple Macbook/Air.

Well, if it is considered proprietary, it allows me to drive multiple WQHD (2560x1440) or WQXGA (2560x1600) high resolution monitors. Heck, it allows me to at least drive one WQXGA 30" monitor.

Apple announced mDP in 2008 and has since licensed it for others to use (e.g. Lenovo Thinkpads X1/X230). Thunderbolt is an Intel invention and it is licensed to whoever (Lenovo/Acer/Dell) whats to use it. mDP/Thunderbolt is simply better for the needs of a computer user versus a person who is only interested in hooking up their notebooks to their living room TVs.

Sure, HDMI 1.4 promises to fix the resolution deficiency but the fact remains many monitors with WQHD (2560x1440) or WQXGA (2560x1600) handicap their HDMI input; meaning you will only get 1080p res on that nice Dell U2711 or U3011.

When more WQHD monitors support higher res through HDMI and when laptop manufactures clearly specify the max output resolution of their HDMI output, I might change my mind.

With companies now making ultrabooks, they should all embrace mDP/Thunderbolt.
I don't understand why companies like Asus ship laptops like the UX31E with mini-hdmi and mini-vga. You still need to carry an adapter/dongle for mini-hdmi/mini-vga so the argument about carrying an extra cable is moot. I'm more inclined to think Asus didn't want to spend any extra money on licensing which would even make their ultra portable even smaller with less ports.

With Displayport/mDP/Thunderbolt, you have dongles for VGA (those old conference room projectors), HDMI (for plasma/LCD TVs), and DVI/Dual-DVI for standard monitors. Heck, most cables only cost 3ドル-10ドル. Displayport even routes digital audio (just like HDMI) in revision 1.2. If you are going to be making presentations at client's conference room, you would most likely be carrying a HDMI cable already so the extra dongle adds little bulk for the few times you use it.

DisplayPort now allows you to daisy-chain monitors in their spec. Here is an excellent example with 2 displays daisy chained. Have in mind, these are two WQHD display running off a Macbook Air. Not even the top of the line Thinkpad W530 can do this (unless you use a docking station with certain configurations).

(source: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/06/new-macbooks-can-manage-many-many-monitors/)

So there you have it. I like to conclude with my earlier remark, when I am in the market for a new laptop/computer, I will always choose displayport/mDP/Thunderbolt over HDMI.

Since hard drive prices are still insanely high after the Thai floods, I have resorted to buying cheap external drives. I simply remove the drives from the enclosures and use them bare.


These drives cost around 110ドル-120 which are cheaper than their internal counterparts. I'm still flabergasted that external drives cost less than internal drives. Seagate now supposedly uses the 3TB ST3000DM001 7200 rpm drives in these enclosures.


The only downside is that you lose your warranty. With one year warranties on most drives, I am willing to take those risk for my personal archival needs. These will be great in a Drobo 5D I plan to get.

Striping two USB sticks was cool but I wanted to try it further with two fast SSDs.
As many people know, the Samsung 830s are fast, reliable and great SSDs. They make great candidates for a SSD based RAID.


In my search for a super fast consumer grade RAID solution, I figure I try USB 3.0 and see what happens next.

I did tests on both Mac OSX Mountain Lion and Ubuntu 12.04 (off a Gigabyte GA-H67N-USB3-B3 motherboard).

On the Mac. Making a stripe software raid-0 is pretty straightforward using Disk Utility.



In Ubuntu 12.04. Setup is almost as easy as the mac.





The results were not that great as the Thunderbolt solutions I've seen. In fact, I now think it is is more economical to get platter based spindle thunderbolt RAID drives instead of trying USB/eSATA with SSDs.

I'm getting 200 MB/s writes on both OSX/Linux and 200-300MB/s reads. Have in mind, these are blazing speeds if you only used to using regular HDDs. However, the results are unimpressive in a RAID-0 array.







In fact, I see no real speed gains striping two SSDs with USB 3.0. Single SSDs are just as fast.
Or simply, the USB 3.0 controllers are not up to speed with the fastest SSDs yet. This may explain why I haven't seen any interesting or worthwhile USB 3.0 RAID enclosures on the market.


I think I'm going to have to spend the cash on a Thunderbolt solution because eSATA and USB 3.0 is not cutting it for a DAS (Direct Attach Storage) solution.

What happens when you try to stripe two USB 3.0 sticks together in a RAID 0 on a 2012 Macbook with USB 3.0 support?


I decided to find out to see if there is any tangible benefit gains.


Here, I have two Patriot Supersonic Xpress 32GB USB 3.0 sticks for my test. I used Disk Utility to make a stripe set and had the set formatted HFS+. I ran Black Magic Disk Speed Test to see the before and after differences.



Single USB stick benchmark.


Striped Zero RAID benchmark.



In short, you will get twice the speed in RAID 0. Pretty cool!

I recently built a FreeNAS ZFS RAIDZ box for my personal backup archives. I wanted something elegant and low powered with the ability to run ZFS. FreeNAS is a NAS appliance built on FreeBSD. It supports the ability to run the ZFS filesystem and can be booted off a small flash storage like USB or Compact Flash.

I selected the following components:

• 6 X Hitachi 2TB 7200rpm Desktars 3.5 " drives
• ASUS E35M1-I Mini-ITX Motherboard with an AMD dual core E-350 and 8GB of RAM.
• LIAN LI Silver Aluminum PC-Q25A Mini case
• FreeNAS-8.2.0-RELEASE-p1-x64 (r11950)
• 8GB internal Patriot USB stick as OS boot

A few notes on my setup:
The ASUS E35M1 is a low voltage netbook AMD Fusion CPU (same one found in the Thinkpad X120E) and supports six SATA 3 6Gb/s ports. The LIAN LI PC-Q25 case can hold up to seven 3.5" hard drives. Five of those seven drives can be hot-swappable.

Here are some pictures of my build.The fit-n-finish on the LIAN LI is pretty impressive. The machined aluminium is well made. This case was clearly designed to be a HTPC or NAS box. It fits well in my Apple - Macintosh environment. Except for the logo up front, it is one slick looking piece of gear.



Picture below depicts drives loaded up. There are five hot-swappable bays. I had to put this to real world practice by taking out drives while the OS was running and without rebooting! The backplane is pretty interesting since it uses molex connectors for power.





With 8GB of ram, I have enough to run ZFS and RAIDZ; giving me roughly 9TB useable space.



After my build, I started to notice some degraded RAIDZ errors on my 3rd disk. Disk #3 seemed fine. I zeroed out the data and booted a different OS (Linux Mint) and copied files with no integrity issues. I tried the drive in different computers and everything checked out fine (S.M.A.R.T) and other scans. However ZFS zpool was giving me checksum errors. Well, it turned out to be a case of "silent data corruption." Linux Mint and Ubuntu did not see any problems but FreeNAS was able to give me a good heads up. It turned out to be a bad SATA cable. Once replaced, everything was fine.

In terms of performance:

Running a short DD benchmark,I was getting 263-268 Megabytes per second on the internal bus. This is pretty decent considering it is a RAIDZ disk array.

 [root@RAIDZ] /# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000 
 10000+0 records in 
 10000+0 records out 
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 74.518446 secs (281427232 bytes/sec) 
 [root@RAIDZ] /# 
 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/RAIDZ/test.dd bs=2048k count=10000 
 10000+0 records in 
 10000+0 records out 
 20971520000 bytes transferred in 76.008326 secs (275910826 bytes/sec) 
 [root@RAIDZ] /mnt/RAIDZ# 
 

In short,

268.3899230957 megabytes

263.1290683746 megabytes


Through the network, I was getting 60-80 MB/s. This may be due to the Realtek 8111E gigabit controller on-board or the fact I was testing during the middle of the day with 60 other people on the network. I was hoping to get closer to Gigabit's theoretical limit of 125 MB/s so I may experiment with a dual NIC Intel card in the future..

Looks like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon is going the Apple route.

Proprietary SSD and soldered RAM. Battery looks like it is a glued piece as well.

This will surely infuriate many Thinkpad loyalists.


Internal Picture of the X1 Carbon shows similarities to the Macbook Pro Retina.