[Dave Rice]

I’ve just re-tested the WD Green as it seemed odd. There didn’t seem to be anything running in the background that would affect the results, but clearly there was.

That’s more like what I was expecting, slightly down on the competition. I used it as a system drive in my R5 3600 over Christmas when daughter needed a PC to play online games with her siblings & mates and whilst it was noticeably slower than my Kioxia, it was still miles better than a spinner.

Might try a bit of overclocking, see how much difference that makes to the feel of the system.

 

[Dave Rice]

The results are in. I used two Fideco M2 USB Enclosures, they both have the same Realtek RTL9210B-CG controller but different formats (I’ve mentioned them before), to test the M2 drives. There are 2 SATA and 1 NVMe Gen 3 x 4.

I also tried a Silicon Power 2.5″ SSD in a Sabrent enclosure and it will not boot. The Pi had issues writing to it, although it managed it in the end, and I also used my W10 PC. Lots of flashing lights but no boot. The drive / enclosure work just fine as a backup target and has been formatted in NTFS, various forms of FAT and ext4. I also tested the generic Class 10 SD card in the Pi 3B+, the official card supplied with the P400 and the USB SanDisk 3.2 Gen1 Ultrafit in my Pi 4.

The tests were completed with the Pi Diagnostics in Accessories and run a couple of times to rule out exceptions.

Unsurprisingly USB 3 maxes out the Integral SATA and Hynix NVMe drives, I wanted to see if there was any effect on the IOPS. But the WD Green performed very poorly and wasn’t constrained by USB3.

The USB Ultrafit wasn’t as good as I was expecting, indeed it failed one test, which was a surprise. The only reason to use one over the official SD card is reliability. I have lost count of the number of SD cards I’ve got through over the years.

Will I be getting an Argon NVMe case? Maybe. It’s still not quite up to use as an everyday hack but it’s getting there. For the uses I put them to disk i/o and lots of storage isn’t that important but reliability is. USB thumb drives are so cheap now I’ll probably get a few likely looking physically small ones and give them a test.

 

[Dave Rice]

Ed, I believe it’s down to chipset and motherboard support as well as drivers (which are especially important for installation media). I seriously doubt the M2 pcie drive would be seen at all.

In a reverse scenario, I have put an M2 WD Green SATA into the second slot of my Thinkbook, It’s not detected at all. Turns out the M2 slots are NVMe only. I suspect that the only way I could boot from a SATA device of any format is via USB adapter, but I’ve not tested that. I do know a Thinkbook will boot from a USB thumb drive though. Would it boot with a Thunderbolt device? Not a clue.

You may be right, but I suspect it’ll be a leap too far.

[Dave Rice]

There’s an Intel SSD PCIe NVMe Boot Installation Guide here. Basically it has to be UEFI and the Mobo OEM has to have implemented the requisite features, none of which will be on by default. There will be much tinkering with CSM settings, which always caused me grief. I’ve given up using new hardware on old hardware that wasn’t really designed for it.

You may be right John, I forget as it’s ages since I cloned a SATA drive to an NVMe. In fact it’s increasingly rare I touch SATA drives in PCs or Laptops these days.

[Dave Rice]

I see a load of new budget Ryzens on E-Buyer, but turns out they are Zen 2 and not 3. More dirty tricks and they don’t hold up to Intel £ equivalents.

Still, at least there is now something I can put in my spare 18 month old motherboard that’s been hanging around.

[Dave Rice]

For the plain Pi you get the Argon M2 case, the bottom half has the M2 slot and it has a double headed USB 3 plug to connect the two.

It also has 2 x full size HDMI ports which makes life easier, and the case acts as a heatsink. £50 though.

[Dave Rice]

As usual this has tweaked my interest in what could be possible. From previous tinkering I have some USB 3.1 NVMe caddies and SATA drives hanging around, plus a 2.5″ SATA enclosure with SSD and a tiny San Disk Ultra fit that I use in my existing 4 as it can safely be left in.

It looks like a powered hub may be required for the NVMe adapter and SATA enclosure, so for a portable device that isn’t a practical solution. However, the Argon One M2 case doesn’t need a different power supply for it’s USB 3 M2 slot so we’ll see.

This is more academic in nature. How much difference will it really make? Will it make it closer to an every day hack? I may try overclocking as well.

I still have the original mid range Hynix NVMe in the new Thinkbook, but it’s only being used as a backup device which is a total waste (the system drive is a Crucial P5). I’ve always intended swapping it for the SATA WD Green M2 in one of the caddies and can then use the brilliant free Acronis from WD.

The Hynix is 1176 R / 1603 W and I’ll benchmark it in the caddy on a Wintel as well as seeing what the Pi can make of it. Should keep me quiet over Easter.

[Dave Rice]

Yes I suppose fiddling with DNS would do it. It would be a bold move and they’d have to convince the public the dangers of having an out of date AV was justified or that there was a real chance that Putin would weaponize it. Probably the latter would play better with the popular media journalist types, no need for anything technical just some jingoism.

Not one customer or family member has asked me about Kaspersky yet and whilst I have a strategy in place I’m going to keep it to myself unless they do. I suspect the question will come at renewal time, but most have renewed for 3 years at a time.

The charity’s Bitdefender is up for renewal in May and whilst there is still a good £ deal on the table I’m actively trying to reduce the complexity of their IT. The elderly Synology NAS and Office on the PCs have been replaced by Google Workspace and I also don’t need to manage profiles on the PCs any more. My calls have dropped dramatically.

So I’m moving them to Norton for Small Business, which I’ve used elsewhere for customers with more seats, and with 25% discount it’s good value too. It’s easy to deploy centrally via an email invitation, real KISS stuff, and the default set up is perfectly acceptable whilst sill allowing fine control if needed. It lacks the reporting of Gravityzone, but that’s such a handful – for instance the default policy will block ALL Wi-Fi, I really won’t miss it. The real killer USP though is a 24 / 7 helpdesk for all employees, not just the techy or the boss.

The question now is whether to think about a Chromebox when a PC or laptop dies, or go to Chrome OS Flex right now. My T400 isn’t doing much these days, may be time for a play.

[Dave Rice]

Sensible advice. I wonder how they’d block updates?

[Dave Rice]

I don’t use Android Auto so I’ve no idea.

[Dave Rice]

Local storage for serious video content creators is the only application I can think of. I wouldn’t be looking at a Taiwanese USB box in those circumstances though. A Drobo via Thunderbolt would be my go-to, very MAC friendly too as this is the application where MAC still rules. I have helped some serious (but not true professional) content creators with Wintel kit and it’s a minefield of hardware compatibility and software issues.

[Dave Rice]

What a load of tosh, especially on RAID. No mention of backup at all, or sharing your files with other devices.

It totally misses the point that a Synology or QNap NAS is not just a bit bucket, which is exactly what a USB enclosure is. They aren’t that cheap either! The Sabrent is £200 and why any home user would want a 4 Bay is beyond me. £182 buys you a 12TB WD Elements including the drive if all you want is huge lumps of storage.

Biggest loads of bollocks I’ve seen since the last PMQs.

[Dave Rice]

Good news on your Bro, I spent a week in Cornwall catching up with the family – came back with Covid 🙂 It was worth it. Absence make the heart grow fonder is very true, Zoom is no substitute.

Anything you could plug into an OTG port (or even a router USB port) will be no more than a bit bucket and an unwieldy one at that. Mobile devices (and Chromebooks) are not designed to manage local storage in anything but a basic fashion, like manually pushing files from here to there. Apps are all front ends to cloud based back ends.

Which is exactly what a Synology NAS is, your own private cloud but a cloud solution nonetheless. There are legacy protocols like SMB (the old drive letter way of doing things) but it’s all about Synology Drive now. Attached locally or via the internet, it will work out how to connect, SMB can’t do that. The same with the Photo app, it all just works IF everything can connect and the model is local Wi-Fi connected to the internet via a router with some Ethernet ports.

You could have someone else, like your Mum, host the Synology but you would be limited by their upload speed and streaming 8K video? Forget it.

You either have to go back to the old landline model or totally embrace the cloud and I think you know which one makes most sense financially as well as suiting your lifestyle and it’s not a landline.

If you ever need to store anything particularly important somewhere off-grid there is always space on my servers and it can all be encrypted, all you need do is ask. That goes for all of you too.

[Dave Rice]

Your only option is the cloud then.

[Dave Rice]

The way to do it painlessly is via a NAS, of that there’s no doubt. There’s plenty of WiFi storage about but they lack the apps and are just bit buckets.

With a NAS you get the apps, both on the NAS to organise the photos, and on the devices to automatically upload photos as well as view / organise them. With Synology all interaction with the NAS on a “PC” (i.e. not a mobile device) is via a browser so the o/s doesn’t matter.

A DS118 1-Bay Enclosure will cost you £155, 2TB £43, 3TB £65 plus the cost of an external drive to back them up to. So you’re looking at the thick end of £300.

However these are tough boxes and there is a second hand market out there on E-Bay. All but very old ones run the same o/s – DSM 7 – but the + models can run more business orientated apps. The hardware just affects how quickly it runs. You can check by Googling Download Center and the model name.

[Dave Rice]

Almost tempted to try that with my Pi4 for the hell of it, but have just tested positive for Covid so it’s probably just brain mush talking (I feel fine BTW).

My customer needs the XP VM to access the local network, but of course internet access is a bad idea. Without recourse to VLANs or routers capable of running one way linked subnets there is an easy way to do this. Give the VM a fixed IP address but leave the Default Gateway blank. That way any traffic for the local subnet proceeds as normal but anything going outside of that is dropped.

That does leave the VM potentially vulnerable to anything that gets inside the local subnet, but TBH these days the risks are negligible if you are running the other networked devices properly patched and with AV (if applicable) and are running a Firewall on XP.

[Dave Rice]

One of the barebones mini PCs would fit the bill and Linux shouldn’t be an issue but XP? It’s got a bit old now for drivers to put it mildly (it’s not a BIOS thing). What I do for a customer who must still use XP (old door access control system) is run it in a VM.

Gigabyte BRIX Mini PC GB-BACE-3160 £125 2.24Ghz J3160 quad core SoC, 802.11ac, BT4 and Gigabit. You won’t get that new hardware working with XP. 4GB ram will be enough for a lightweight Linux + VM though I’d go for 8GB.

£180 with 8GB DDR3L and a 240GB SSD, bargain. With a distro like Lubuntu or LXLE it should be very usable and bang up to date.

For a bit more oomph look for older NUCs on E-Bay like this one: Intel NUC NUC5i3RYK Mini PC, i3 5010U 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD, Wifi, Bluetooth Win 10 £110 there are loads out there, just avoid the dual core Celerons (too weedy).

 

 

[Dave Rice]

A more usual for me build this week, an office type PC. There are no budget AMD offerings these days so it’s an i3-10105, budget Gigabyte H510M H motherboard and 8GB DDR4 2666.

Find of the day was the Lexar NM620 256GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe for £28. Advertised as “Up to 3000MB/s Read, 1300MB/s Write” which turns out to be spot on despite a review that said it was rubbish.

Absolutely destroys anything under £40, keeps up with all the more expensive options and it has a 5 year warranty. For Gen 3 x 4 this will be my go to.

Needless to say the i3 bombs along, but not so long ago 4C 8T was known as an i7…

[Dave Rice]

Ed, I’m not accusing you of paranoia! But there is plenty out there to go around. With regards Hikvision a lot of it is briefings by their OEM competitors or by other installers seeking to queer others bids often claiming the MoD have banned Hikvision (they haven’t).

I have personal experience of both of these and when you push for evidence it of course collapses, but dirt sticks as they say. I have heard that Hikvision Wi-Fi capable cameras can contact Beijing directly!

The MoD process isn’t straight forward as you will often be working through a third party to provide quotes to another third party project management outfit with the MoD sitting behind everything and not accessible. So these rumours can have power as often the people involved in the chain have neither technical or sector knowledge. Double that up for the MoD desk jockeys.

I always thought Bullguard was Danish? I have tried it a few times but it doesn’t stack up to the competition. I discounted Sophos as they are a bigger seat outfit, but I see they now do Home stuff and Comodo are now American. If I was concerned about meddling by country of origin I’d probably avoid anything American TBH. But I’m not.

[Dave Rice]

A lot of politics at the moment, I don’t buy into the theory that KIS will be used as an attack vector. Changing my AV 2 months into a 12 month sub won’t hurt the Russian economy either.

I have been through this hysteria with Hikvision cameras. If we want UK solutions someone had better start making them!

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