Saturday, February 27, 2010

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, February 04, 2010

A tale of three SATA caddies

I'm a fan of removable SATA tray caddies for backup. These caddies slide into a special 5.25inch drive tray and being SATA, they can be hot swapped too (though getting the hot swap to work on some controllers, notably certain nForce models, can be quite challenging). Yes, you can just use external USB or even ESATA drives, but ESATA isn't particularly widespread and the caddies have several advantages over USB drives:-


  • They can use inexpensive 3.5 inch SATA hard drives without needing an external power supply, since the caddy tray provides power from the computers power supply.
  • They fit inside the computer, therefore they do not clutter up your desk or position themselves somewhere where they can easily be knocked or accidentally disconnected during a backup.
  • Because they are SATA, data transfer rates are higher, this is a major plus for bigger backups.
Until recently, I'd been purchasing my caddies from E-Buyer, a popular supplier of IT equipment here in the UK. The caddies were branded as "Plexus". Somewhat inconveniently, it's not possible to buy a caddy without buying the tray part (the bit that fits inside the 5.25 drive bay), however, at £4.59 plus shipping for both components, it was hard to care about the pile of unused trays.

Unfortunately however, E-Buyer suddenly stopped supplying the Plexus caddies altogether. This left me in something of a dilemma, at least USB and ESATA are standard parts, a Plexus SATA tray caddy is not. I'd invested in several of these drives for backup and data storage, so I set out looking for a compatible alternative.

Comparing pictures available on the internet yielded some interesting results. Caddies supplied by Lindy Electronics and by Pluscom looked strangely familiar, even down to the zig zag pattern on the side of the tray. I decided this warranted further investigation so I ordered a caddy from Lindy and a friend who had also adopted the caddy system ordered one of the Pluscom models.

Comparing the three, they do look very similar. There are some notable differences however:-

The (apparently discontinued) Plexus caddies have a ribbon cable to connect the SATA and power cables to the drive, whereas the other caddies simply have a connector that the drive must slide onto. This means that the Plexus caddies can accommodate non standard SATA drives including 2.5 inch drives. This is very convenient if you ever repair computers and need to inspect hard drives in another machine. However, since the physical dimensions of the caddy are designed for 3.5inch drives, a 2.5inch drive cannot be screwed in place so you probably wouldn't want to do this as a permanent solution.

The Lindy caddy has a different style of handle, but is otherwise identical, apart from the price which is as much as 4 times higher.

The Pluscom caddies are the most different. There's an extra plastic guide rail on the side of the caddy. The Pluscom tray has been redesigned slightly to use this. What this means is that the Pluscom trays are unable to accept the Lindy or Plexus caddies, but the Pluscom caddies fit just fine in the Lindy or Plexus trays.

From my observations, it seems like the caddies are all manufactured at the same factory, with minor modifications according to each resellers spec. Funnily enough, the best caddies (the Plexus ones) also proved to be the cheapest.
Posted by at 1 comment:
Labels: , , ,

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Trials HD - Its lack of multi player is perplexing

I finally got around to buying the excellent Xbox Live Arcade game, Trials HD. For those of you who have not played it, the game involves trying to ride a motorcycle across insanely deadly ramps and obstacles without falling to a grizzly death. Although the visuals are 3D, the gameplay is strictly 2D, so all you have to worry about is accelerate, brake and leaning backwards and forwards, making this one game that's completely trivial to play but challenging to master. The game is a riot especially with friends (and a few beers on hand). All the more reason why I don't understand why there was no multi player mode of any kind put into the game. Even if full on split screen or XBL multi player was outside of the budget of the game, it would have been trivial to implement a "hotseat" (take it in turns to beat your friends time) type of mode. Anyone who has played the excellent Trackmania hotseat mode will know what I mean. In spite of this oversight, I'd still highly recommend the game to anyone.

Trials HD is (to my mind anyway) a remake/re-imagining of the old 8 bit classics, Kickstart and Kickstart 2. It's great to see an old game concept bought back to life with new console technology, but with the core gameplay mechanics left in tact. I don't think Kickstart/Trials would have worked in full on 3D, lining up the jumps and ramps would just have been too frustrating.

I can think of a few other 8/16bit classics that should be given a fantastic new remake, but I'll save that for another blog post.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , ,

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Monday, January 18, 2010

New look for 2010

So I've given the old blog a bit of a facelift for 2010, so my loyal readers (all two of them lol) hope you like the new look better.

You may have noticed I closed one of my websites, lets-play-ds.com is no more. I felt that trying to cover the entire world of Nintendo DS was simply too much for one person. I am considering another videogame related website but it will be on a more narrow focus. I did enjoy reviewing games for the site but I guess my standards are too high, I like to spend at least a day playing them :)

I kept a copy of the site and I'm considering doing more reviews on here, just because I like writing reviews, but of course it is all time permitting. Top-Windows-Tutorials.com is still taking big chunks of my time but it's really starting to roll now, soon I will be on minimum wage!
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: ,

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, December 26, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Do you have confidence in your SATA controller?

I certainly don't in my J-Micron SATA controller which is the secondary SATA controller on my ASUS P5K motherboard. The screen shot below shows a CRC check done on a bunch of files. The CRC's were generated on the same drive and then verified back as soon as they were calculated.

Yes, in between taking the CRC's and reading them back, there are now 194 CRC mismatches. Maybe J-Micron consider that acceptable, but I certainly don't, the words "epic" and "fail" spring to mind.


Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Weekly auto blog post (weekly)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted by at No comments: