The Bleeding Edge

While Dell was building the 7865, I ordered a PCIe SSD array from OWC, populated with 8 4 TB M.2 drives for a total of 32 TB. Today I installed it in the workstation. I updated SoftRAID before I started. If you've been following along, you'll remember that it refused to start … [Read more...]

I ordered 4 8TB M.2 SSDs from Amazon. I ordered a Thunderbolt 3 4 drive housing called the 4M2 from OWC. The SSDs came with heat sinks.  The housing came with a fan. There's no room for the fan when the heat sinks are present. Here's a look at the housing with two of the 8TB … [Read more...]

To my surprise and pleasure, the Dell workstation came with a  10 GbE motherboard port. I've been using 10 GbE for about 5 years now in the server room, using mostly fiber connections, but, in recent years, some copper ones. I've bought workstations with it, but never used that … [Read more...]

In the preceding post, I observed a gradual, intermittent failure of an OWC disk array. I suspected the OWC box, but it could have been one of the 18TB Toshiba disks, so I popped them out of the box and installed them in an OWC dock. I copied over 8 TB of data to each … [Read more...]

In my new, much smaller office, I needed a new, somewhat smaller workstation. I had been using a Lenovo P16 laptop with 128 GB of RAM, and, while it served me well for most things, it couldn't handle the larger photographic and Matlab tasks very well. For the last decade or more, … [Read more...]