Reviews

Review: Intel SS4200-E NAS

Wayne Hartman — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 00:21:44 GMT

I have been looking for a NAS for a long time, so when Newegg had a deal on the Intel Entry Storage System SS4200-E NAS Server, I jumped right on it. Selling itself with four internal SATA connections, two external eSATA ports and USB up the yin-yang, I thought this would be a good buy for my purposes. My primary intention was to create a 6TB (yes, terabyte) array where I could have all my ripped DVD, Blu-Ray, music and computer backups but still have plenty of space to grow into. To cut to the chase, I have had nothing but disappointment.

First off, you can only do configurations of two or four drives in RAID. What this means is you can do a simple mirror (RAID 1) with two drives, or a mirrored-stripe (0+1) or parity (RAID 5) with four drives. Those other eSATA ports? Just stand alone and cannot participate in the RAID array. This was disheartening because it dropped the maximum array size from 6TB to 4.5TB (using 1.5TB drives). What's worse, though, is that the eSATA ports would not recognize my orphaned 1.5TB drive plugged into it. After SSHing into it, I could see that the drive was mounted, but the web interface and SAMBA would not share it out. Plugging in a spare 500GB showed up just fine.

Security controls are very coarse grained. It's sad that this is running on Linux, but the web interface only does simple read/write/deny permissions. This device purports to support Active Directory integration, but it only supports up to Windows Server 2003. After digging into see what version of SAMBA it is running, I found bugs that were fixed in the next minor release that allowed joining to a Windows 2008 or 2008 R2 domain. Too bad the device does not make it easy on you to do the simple upgrade.

If those issues were tolerable, the actual performance of the machine was certainly not. While reads could almost saturate my gigabit network (which was very cool to see!), writes were woefully slow. When not doing anything but a dedicated write, maximum speeds topped out at about 20MBps (~160Mbps). Since this is primarily a machine for streaming media content, that wasn't too much a concern, however if I were streaming a Blu-Ray movie or even a DVD on the device while trying to write to it, the experience would become completely untenable. The movie would get really choppy and then outright fail. This was a completely unacceptable outcome, given I was transferring small photos to the device. Watching the CPU get maxed out for writes shows that this has a weak software RAID controller, which tax the CPU beyond usability. Granted, since this an x86 platform, you can upgrade the CPU and memory on the device, but I would opine that throwing incremental hardware upgrades would only produce marginal results. These dreadful results were experienced on both RAID 5 and 0+1 configurations. All in all the experience could have been greatly enhanced if the device would enable some sort of QoS so that streamed media received greater CPU priority, even if that meant that writes were slower.

I could have learned to deal with some of the other feature drawbacks this device has, but given its performance (or lack thereof) I cannot recommend this device for any storage need.

Hands On The iPhone 3GS

Wayne Hartman — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:12:28 GMT

Despite the modest turn out at Apple and AT&T stores for its release, looks like the iPhone 3GS is just as hot as last year's model, selling over one million units over the weekend.

I too picked one up and it didn't fail to impress. Speed has definitely been on tap as I instantly noticed that it loaded apps in seconds that typically took several seconds to load. The speed here seems a bit clichéd (especially if you've been reading other reviews saying the same) but is well worth the $100 difference between last year's 8GB model currently running only $99.

But what have I liked most? Web browsing. Surfing the web was cool at first with both the iPhone and iPod Touch, but when you got to chunky sites with huge discussion threads like Slashdot, things really got to be a pain when the Safari browser would slow to a crawl or outright crash. Doubling the memory and CPU clock speed definitely helps with this use case and it has not disappointed at all. Copy/paste make the experience even more manageable, especially when used to clear large amounts of text from a text area.

I used the iPhone all weekend and did not notice a single oily smudge on the device. Compared to a friend's previous generation phone, mine retained its nice clean mirror finish.

So, anything to dislike? I'm not sure if my device is messed up or there is a lot of interference, but the GPS is woefully inaccurate. I've attempted to get an accurate reading by disabling the 3G and WiFi connection on my iPhone, but I've had its reading put me as much as six miles away from my present location.

Video taking hasn't impressed me much, either, but I'll admit I haven't actually downloaded it onto a computer yet. The resulting video looks 'smudgy' and the audio didn't seem very loud on the iPhone itself, so I'll have to do more investigation on what it looks like from another computer.

All in all I'm very happy with the device and it was totally worth the wait. UPDATE 16:18: I'm going to chalk up the GPS problems to interference at my house. I took the iPhone out for a spin and noticed near flawless tracking once I had left my home. Time to do some investigation...

Initial Take On iPhone 3GS

Wayne Hartman — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:38:51 GMT

Today was pretty exciting as far as Apple news goes with the announcement of the release of Mac OS X 10.6 'Snow Leopard', new MacBooks, MacBook Air price reductions, iPhone OS 3.0, and yes, the iPhone 3GS. Most rumors actually turned out to be correct, such as MMS, a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, tethering, magnometer, and video recording. Some that didn't pan out were the new matte finish (instead of a glossy back), but the most happed for, but more far-fetched non-event was the forward facing video lens. Others that I didn't find anywhere on the rumor sites included the Voice Control feature. Gizmodo posted a hands-on review of that feature and found it easily befuddled by background noise. It's forgivable because I'm not sure how much I will use that feature anyway.

Why is this finally going to be model I buy into? Hands down its the speed. One of the things I find irritating about the iPhone's little brother, the iPod Touch, is that it takes an enormous amount of processing power to render some sites I frequent, such as Slashdot. Their discussion threads can take an aweful amount of time to load, and in some instances, cause Safari to outright crash. With some more muscle under the hood, I should be able to run through text and javascript heavy sites that make previous versions of the Apple software want to cry.

More than that though are the staples of desktop computing: copy and paste. This is another realm where I'd do more mobile blogging if I could easily copy/paste links and quotes into my blogging platform. This will make things much easier to do.

On top of that, throw in the three megapixel camera and I feel like I have a replacement for my point and shoot camera. My three year old destroyed our DSLR substitute by trying to mash the lens back into the body of the two hundred dollar camera. With no external parts to do so, making the iPhone 3GS the new small portable camera makes a natural fit.

In the end I think this was a great, if not incremental refresh to an already good product, and with with this announcement they've found a new customer who has run out of excuses. June 19th, here we come.

Windows 7: What Vista Should Have Been

Wayne Hartman — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:24:20 GMT

I installed the first release candidate for Windows 7 this afternoon. I was pretty impressed. Install is pretty easy, setup a snap, and the operating itself seems to have the polish one expects out of product that has over a twenty year history. The biggest thing, however, is it is much more responsive when playing games than its predecessor, Windows Vista, ever had.

The UI, too, has gotten quite a rework. From the new task bar to a few new eye-candy tweaks, Windows 7 is worthy of an upgrade from Windows XP. Except on thing--why upgrade? XP works fine for me, does everything I need it to do, and is quite a bit less of a hassle in regard to reinstallation and reactivation issues. All the software I use (and still being published) don't require an upgrade. It's as if the software development side hasn't really bought into anything post-XP as well. Games are still backward compatible with DirectX 9 (latest version available on XP), so it's not as if I'm missing out on the gaming scene by not switching.

But then again, there's this: if I purchase a prebuilt computer with an OEM copy of Windows 7, I don't see any reason to wipe it and load XP on. Coming from me, that's saying a lot, considering what an anti-Vista pundit I've become. In the end, taking Windows 7 for a drive only reinforces the sentiment I've had since the initial beta, that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been all along.

Mac Mini: Hardware

Wayne Hartman — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:02:56 GMT

As I had mentioned in my previous posts, the biggest barrier to purchasing a Mac had been price. For the hardware that you get it seems awfully expensive when you match that up to a comparably equipped PC. One of the benefits of a Mini, however, are its ultra-compact size, energy efficiencies, and more importantly how quiet it is. I have a 9800GTX+ in my PC and the box sounds like a wind tunnel with all the fans that are in it to keep it cool.

But does it have any guts? I got the lower end model at $599, and I have to say that it leaves a little to be desired. I notice quite the slow down when I fire up Parallels, a virtual machine software. My system slows to a crawl and I pretty much guarantee that the cause can be traced to the paltry 1GB of memory that comes standard in the tiny box. I find this a bit troublesome simply because my PC with 1GB of RAM can handle a VM taking half the RAM just fine.

I also find the 120GB 5400 RPM drive a little on the slow side if opening multiple apps up at the same time. Parallels also chokes here because of the intense disk IO nature of keeping two operating systems functioning at once. Upgrading the hard drive to a 500GB 7200 RPM drive would likely yield favorable performance gains.

I imagine that if I were to throw in the 4GB maximum of RAM, the OS would likely run a bit smoother, I guess it's just disappointing that 1GB doesn't seem enough. I also find it a little hypocritical with Apple's consternation over Vista being on the piggy side of resource intensiveness, when their own OS experiences similar issues.

While picking up the Mini, I got a mini-DVI to DVI adapter without realizing that the Mini actually comes with one. I took it back, but then realized that I wanted to use multi monitor mode, so I ended up purchasing a mini-DisplayPort to VGA adapter. Multi-monitor modes work flawlessly and it even surprised me that I didn't have to restart the machine in order to take advantage of the second display--very impressive.

In the end, the Mini makes a great computer for doing standard things that you would on the PC. Playing serious video games either in Parallels or native Windows just doesn't work well with the nVidia 9400 graphics chip, but if you're wanting to own a Mac without being taken in by a full priced iMac or PowerBook, the Mini presents itself as a suitable introductory model and is certainly competent for my purposes including learning the OS and doing iPhone development.

Mac Mini: A Week Later

Wayne Hartman — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:53:04 GMT

Last week I posted about picking up a Mac Mini for dev work. After a week of use (I only powered up my PC to play TF2 last night), I've come away with a better feel for the Mac Experience.

As much as the Apple Fanboys tout OS X's intuitiveness, I have to say that Macs would be easier to use if they were my first computer. That might sound strange, even derogatory, but there are a lot of things that don't translate well when coming from a Windows-centric view. Like I had mentioned last week, the whole deal with the home and end keys has been a struggle. For example, even after a week, I still find myself trying to use them in Microsoft fashion to go to the beginning or end of a line. I'm slowly, but steadily breaking myself of the habit.

The other issue I had is what is termed 'mouse acceleration'. This controls how quickly the mouse moves on the screen. Instead of being linear in nature, there is some 'ramp up' time to moving the mouse. This has some advantages in making very precise strokes with the mouse (something that would be very useful in say, Photoshop), but isn't very helpful for general mouse use. This is another instance of just getting used to the OS, but is an annoyance nonetheless. I overcame this issue by swapping mice with my three year old son. He was glad to get my white HP mouse and I was glad to get his black Microsoft mouse that let me install a driver to get the acceleration I was used to.

One thing that I really enjoy is the consistency in the menus. No matter what app I'm in I can expect the same menus in the same place. Apple seems pretty strict about its user interface guidelines, in this case it pays off to have apps that behave the same no matter what. I had used Safari a little bit because of some fickleness with Firefox and had to find out how to change some of the app settings. I found this by going to the 'Safari' menu and selected 'Preferences'. When I was back in Firefox, I wanted to change where downloads ended up (why the desktop by default???) but couldn't find it where those options are in Windows (Tools --> Options). My memory immediately went to Safari and I thought 'why not?' and there it was: under 'Firefox --> Preferences'. Very nice.

All and all it has been a good experience. Despite the initial frustrations in a new world, I find OS X a nice change of pace--and it's not just the glossy buttons and the smiling Finder icon. It's just a joy to use.

Tomorrow I'll talk about the hardware and how it performs.

Making The Leap To Mac

Wayne Hartman — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:24:33 GMT

Yesterday I made the leap. I had been pondering making the jump to a Mac ever since the Mac Mini made its debut a few years ago, but it hasn't been until the iPhone came out that I started seriously looking into it. The Mac's increased popularity and market share haven't hurt either, but it's viability as a development platform has certainly increased because of the appeal for iPhone apps.

The barrier to entry has always been price. The Mac Mini was a tempting diminutive box to get, but its hardware was dated and it wasn't getting the regular hardware refreshes that its siblings would get every six to twelve months. So when the Mini got a all-of-a-sudden hardware upgrade, I knew the time was right. Coming with Leopard and Apple's latest iteration of iLife, now more than ever was a good time to break into the Mac platform.

The biggest adjustment I've had to make so far has been keyboard shortcuts. I'm a big user of the home and end keys to quickly move around in text editors, so losing that one-key functionality has been a bummer. In fact, while trying to use the Mac equivalent, I accidentally navigated away from creating this blog post. That was pretty frustrating considering that I was almost finished, but I understand that there will be pain coming from a PC-centric paradigm to an Apple one.

The first piece of software that I installed was, of course, Firefox. There are a few functions that I'm used to having that Safari just can't compete with with. The first one being the JavaScript blocker, No-Script. The other is closing tabs by simply click wheeling the tab instead of having to click on the 'x'.

All in all it has been exciting to do something new and I look forward to learning something outside of my current experience.

Say 'No' To Tatiana Del Torro

Wayne Hartman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:26:18 GMT

So I'm a closet American Idol watcher. Last season was the first season I watched, but more importantly it turned out to be something that my wife and I could watch together without the other one cringing or outright leaving the room.

So with the thirty six contestants picked, there were two real upsets. First, Jamar Rogers. The guy obviously had great talent and a great voice so it came as a great surprise that he got ousted by the judges. My wife was so disappointed that her eyes got all teary eyed up. It's a shame because I think he would have gone far in the competition.

And then there's Tatiana. Every time that I see her onscreen my fists ball up and I turn to my wife and tell her I just want to bop that girl on the head. Why is she so repulsive? To me the American Idol competition is about finding the best--not just the best voice, but finding the best artist. I think one of the finer qualities of last year's winner, David Cook, was his enduring humility. He took his licks from the judges well and when showered with praise, he did not let it go to his head. Tatiana is completely the opposite. She's a very self-centered, over-the-top, selfish brat. She has a decent voice, but she really lacks the polish of someone who could really make a career in the biz. So, calling all Idol fans everywhere, for the love of all that is good, DO NOT VOTE FOR HER--SAY NO TO TATIANA DEL TORRO!

Review: Windows 7 Beta 1

Wayne Hartman — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:37:43 GMT

I've been taking Windows 7 for a spin and kicking its tires, which was relatively painless. Installation went quick, smooth without any bumps and I was quite impressed with how quickly it boots up. If eye candy is your thing, then Windows 7 definitely has it, building upon the Aero interface with the new addition of the tuned up taskbar. One of the things that I really thought was cool with the windows that have a progress bar (think installations, copying of files, downloads etc), the progress would reflect in the app in the taskbar. What this means is that you can be copying an item and have the progress window covered, and know it's coming along. The eye candy kinda wears on me though, so I found myself turning the Aero glass off and switching to a much more opaque theme. I think all the transparency is distracting, but that's maybe because I am still using Windows XP.

Copying small and large files didn't suffer from the usual Vista hangs and eternal copy times, which was a welcome relief. Application launches seemed pretty snappy, though I didn't take any hard numbers to be able to compare to both XP and Vista.

One of the downsides I experienced was lackluster performance on video games. It was reporting 100+ fps on Team Fortress 2, but the visuals said otherwise. Despite any performance enhancing tricks I pulled (dual core hacks, adding 2GB of RAM, etc.), I could not get it to perform very well. To be fair, I installed Vista Ultimate SP1 with the same settings and it did a much better job.

UAC, the much maligned "Cancel or Accept" prompts were noticeably muted in this release. Apple really got them on that with their 'I'm a Mac' commercials, but I personally didn't seem to mind. You fire up any common Linux distribution and you'll see as many, if not more such prompts in order to make any root required changes.

Final verdict? Well, I'm going to wait and see. I know that more betas ought to be coming down the pike and with Direct X 11 still in beta mode itself, I'm going to reserve judgment until the release candidates or a gold disc to really see if Windows 7 is for me. I find it promising that Microsoft is starting to listen to its user base, creating an OS from user requirements (performance and stability) instead of marketing 'air castles and flying ponies'. We'll see what year-end or early next year brings us.

Windows 7 Beta: Live

Wayne Hartman — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:08:27 GMT

Tonight I'm installing Windows 7. I just got it installed after only twenty minutes from the time the install program booted. At a glance, there is lots of eye candy. I really enjoyed that the startup animation is in true 32-bit graphics instead of 8. I can see that it already has quite a bit of polish to it. First disappointment? I have a burned disc that contains (among other things) anti-virus software and for some weird reason, it detects it as a blank disc. I'll go download some now, and will do live updates as the night goes on.

UPDATE 16 JAN 2009 22:09
I'm giving AVG a try since an article I had read stated that it had Windows 7 support. We'll see how it goes with 29 seconds remaining. I noticed that Windows 7 has already eaten 57% of my RAM. Considering it doesn't know yet what programs I like to use, I'm not sure what exactly its prefetching for me...

UPDATE 16 JAN 2009 22:14
Looks like it installed without a hitch, now Windows isn't whining at me that I don't have an antivirus installed. I'm going to now do some network copying. One of the biggest problems that I have had with Vista was copying things too slowly across the network. Before that though, I need to join my Win2k3 domain. Catch ya back after the reboot and copy.

UPDATE 16 JAN 2009 22:24
Reboot is very quick! It's pretty nice. Joining to the domain was nothing out of the ordinary and copying a 2.5GB file (the ISO of Windows 7) seemed to take a typical amount of time (for XP, that is!). One other gripe though, is they really need to get rid of the Vista startup sound. Listening to R2D2's nonsensical chatter is more pleasant than the electronic toot-toot-toot-toot of the Vista startup sound. No we're moving onto the clincher for how well this performs. I'm downloading Steam right now and will download and play Team Fortress 2. The deal breaker for me was a 10-15 fps drop when playing games on Vista. This was unacceptable, so we'll see how Windows 7 fairs.

UPDATE 16 JAN 2009 22:33
While I'm reinstalling TF2, let's go over the new taskbar. While I find the new taskbar to be interesting and full of eye candy goodness, I just don't find it to be that revolutionary as far as being a good interface. Say I have two windows of Firefox open. The two windows will be grouped under a single Firefox icon. Now, I can hover the mouse and wait for it to bring up the mini-preview windows, or I can click on on the taskbar icon for it, then click on the preview of which one I want. In previous versions of Windows, I could just click on the taskbar item that I wanted in a single click, while this one demands two. This might seem a little picky to some, but a new interface ought to increase productivity, not drag it down.

Another annoyance that I found was when I went to the Control Panel. Vista brought about the death-by-a-thousand-control-panel-items and made it somewhat difficult to find the item I wanted to configure. It seems that they multiplied with this latest release, but to make it worse it wouldn't let me view the items as a list, instead of a vast sea of icons. Poo poo.

UPDATE 16 JAN 2009 23:49
Well, with a long time still to go to finish downloading TF2, I likely won't be doing anything with that tonight. However, I did notice that this beta is running the Internet Explorer 8 beta as well. To say the least, I'm not impressed with it. I noticed that I was unable to use my internal software database web interface because it appears to have some javascript problems. I also noticed that it wouldn't let me scroll on the editing area of my blogging software, either. It has some serious problems to overcome, so I have flat out just dismissed it all together, settling entirely on Firefox during my review of Windows 7.

UPDATE 17 JAN 2009 10:07
So, I've put it through its paces on TF2. Verdict? I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I pretty much set it at the settings that I use on my XP setup, and it was reporting to me that it was running at ~110 fps. That is quite phenomenal, but the 'smoothness' of it certainly did not feel that way. It would seem to be quite jumpy for having such a high framerate. I did try using the dual core hack, but that didn't seem to work, nor did limiting the fps to 60 and 75. I did notice that my RAM was topped out and when doing the Windows performance test, I scored lowest on RAM, with a 4.5 score. I'm wondering if a RAM upgrade is in order...

UPDATE 17 JAN 2009 13:16
After playing with settings for a little while, I began to notice that my slow down were occuring when my disk drive was being accessed. I mentioned previously that my RAM was getting maxed out, so I wonder if Windows is constantly having to page things out, which would explain the constant disk thrashing while playing. I found some cheap RAM at Best Buy, I think I'll be swinging by to get some RAM.

UPDATE 18 JAN 2009 19:17
So I swung by Best Buy yesterday and picked up an extra two GB of RAM. I saw a marked decrease in disk thrashing and my RAM wasn't absolutely maxed out, like when I had 1 GB installed. Performance seemed to increase in TF2, but never quite got up to what I was getting in XP. I decided to install Vista Utlimate so that I could get a fair comparison. I nearly nuked my BIOS while doing an update (Vista wouldn't even install with my new RAM), but I was able to recover and get it up and running. Right now I'm downloading TF2 again.

I ran the Windows Experience test on Vista this time and noticed that I scored better in some areas with Windows 7, most notably in the CPU and memory section. I'm not sure how to interpret that (except the evil conspiracy theorist in me), giving Microsoft the benefit of the doubt would mean that Windows 7 does better at using my hardware or has a more efficient architecture. The conspiracy theorist in me says that they're just inflating the numbers...

Tonight or tomorrow I'll report my Vista experience and offer my conclusion on what I think of Windows 7 as it compares to both Windows Vista and XP.