Well it finally arrived. First the German shipping company got confused about where it was supposed to go, then it got held up in customs, then Canada Post sent it to the wrong place….

But it’s finally here. We’ve only got a few, so if you want one of these, better move fast!

This was actually filmed over 5 weeks ago before the rain season took hold of Vancouver. Recently the weather’s been lousy enough that I don’t even think I would have wanted to film this outside…

I’m very proud of this Tech Tips because it marks a continuation of our success in keeping the episodes shorter, and also packing in more information. Check it out below.

I’d never heard of this company before, but their double sided tape comes highly recommended for attaching RAMsinks and other such things.

The good news is we brought it in. It arrived in a box that I was amazed survived the trip in the condition it did. The merchandise itself was undamaged though.

The bad news (if you’re not an avid PC modder) is that you have to buy it in 50m rolls. Yeah… 50m.

The other good news is that a 50m roll is not as expensive as you’d think. It’s only $25 and it’ll probably last most people a lifetime.

It’s a very weird picture. It’s me with my Extreme Game Face on. From Fragapalooza 2008. The image you’re about to see may shock you.

Well my WHS has finally been put to the test. I sat down to my computer to see this error message pop up

Intrigued, I opened up my WHS Connector Software to discover that the status for one of my Seagate 7200.10 500GB drives was “missing”.

I think that this whole experience could have been made more intuitive for the non-tech-heads that Microsoft is apparently targeting with this product, but without too much trouble I was able to get through the removal wizard.

The process took about 1.5 hours. In that time it was rebalancing the data that was replicated on the 500GB drive I removed and splitting it between the 320GB OS drive and the other 500GB drive that remained in the home server.

There wasn’t enough space for the server to duplicate all of the data on only two drives, so this error came up prompting me to add another hard drive. That was relatively simple, and shortly after I added the new drive, this error message went away.

All in all I’m very pleased. I lost some episodes of Numb3rs and a few old Disney movies that I had saved, but not replicated. Congrats to the Windows Home Server team for making this 500GB hard drive failure as simple as an RMA with no loss of important data!

Well based on my previous experience with eVGA motherboards (two of which I’m still using right now) and eVGA tech support, I can say with confidence that an eVGA engineered product is likely to be AT LEAST as good as what anyone else else puts out. Without further ado, here’s the press release:

EVGA is proud to show a sneak peak of a new motherboard based on the Intel(R) X58 Express Chipset, supporting the upcoming Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 processor. The EVGA X58 SLI FTW motherboard will feature 6 DIMMs of triple-channel DDR3 memory, and a board layout optimized for the enthusiast including 2-way and 3-way SLI support. EVGA VDroop control minimizes VDroop for the highest level of stability possible and EVGA E-LEET Tuning Utility gives you the power to Overclock at your fingertips. With these features and more, it is no wonder EVGA products currently hold the top 3DMark Vantage Performance Record! Product will be available in November 2008.

EVGA X58 SLI FTW Motherboard Features:

• Supports Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 Processors
• Intel(R) X58 Express Chipset with the ICH10R
• EVGA VDroop Control
• 100% Solid State Capacitors
• 6 DIMM triple-channel DDR3
• Enthusiast layout supporting 2-way, 3-way SLI and CrossFireX
• 10 SATA II 3.0GB/s ports (1 e-SATA)
• EVGA E-LEET Tuning Utility

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past couple of years working closely with the purchasing and marketing teams at NCIX, it’s that you should never spin something around the assumption that something will go wrong with your product/your server/whatever else.

It’s little things like instead of writing “Please go through your invoice carefully in case we missed something” compared to “The package should include all items listed on the invoice”. It’s subtle, but it makes a difference.

Sheesh.

Congratulations to hpo@_____.___ who won a $500 NCIX gift card!

The draw was done randomly by me and NCIX Greg from only about 400 entrants over the August/September period for the survey. Honestly it surprises me that more people don’t fill these things out. All you need to do is go to www.secure.ncix.com/survey and enter your invoice number for an in-store purchase to be eligible for this huge prize. The chances to win are great considering how few entries we sometimes get.

I couldn’t help noticing that all solid state drives are coming out in 2.5″ and smaller form factors, so it got me thinking that it’s only a matter of time before a high end gaming chassis is full of 2.5″ mounts rather than 3.5″ ones.

Obviously SSD isn’t quite there yet, but even 2.5″ magnetic drives seem to compare pretty favorably to 3.5″ desktop drives. They’re quieter, smaller (duh), and with the 7200RPM spindle speeds, the assumption is that the speed is pretty close. They also dump less heat into your precious case, which means less airflow is necessary and again less noise.

I managed to get my hands on a 160GB Seagate Momentus 7200.2 and a Samsung F1 750GB in a real David & Goliath battle. I’ve only run a couple benchmarks for now because I want to get into RAID performance, which I think is really important because as they’ve discovered in servers, you can fit several times more 2.5″ drives in the same space.

Seagate Momentus 7200.2 160GB 2.5″ “Notebook” Hard Drive

Samsung F1 750GB 7200RPM 3.5″ Desktop Hard Drive

I guess my results weren’t that impressive, but it’s important to notice that as far as the access times go, the drives were actually very close. That’s important for multi-tasking, as well as for quick access to small files. It’s not that often you’re actually going to need the full read and write bandwidth of your drive in a typical desktop scenario, but that obviously doesn’t apply to I/O intensive operations like video editing or systems with limited system RAM that are using the swap file all the time.

Hoping to do a follow up shortly with RAID-0 performance for the 2.5″ competitor.

So I spun my car on a highway exit the other night. To give you some context for the images below, I was travelling about 50km/h in the outside lane when suddenly I completely lost traction and drifted to the right. I geared down into first to slow myself down and get traction with the road, and was able to brake enough to keep the car from rolling into the barrier (as you can see, it was VERY close).

Thinking that the problem was mechanical (couldn’t see anything obvious, but hell, I’m no expert) I called up BCAA for a tow, and while I was explaining the problem to them, a truck a little bit further back on the turn spun out and did a 180 turn so he ended up facing the car behind him. That made me think it was not a problem with my car so I got in, gave it a shot, and sure enough my car is fine.

Goes to show how dangerous driving can be. If someone had been in the next lane over I would have hit them for sure….