Published on
August 6, 2010 in
Technology.
Tags: 2640x4, 9200, desktop, Dimension, hot swap, HP, RocketRAID, SAS, sata, SFF.
I recently acquired some HP Small Form Factor (SFF) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hot swap hard drives from work. We use them for data storage on high end servers because they are lightening fast and the hot swap capability allows you to pull a bad drive and replace it without turning off the server.
These drives tend to be very expensive because of their speed and capabilities. Having a couple at home would be very cool indeed except for one problem: I don’t have a server to plug them into and they don’t easily connect to anything in a desktop computer… Or so I thought!
After tons of googling and trolling the online shopping sites, I finally found a solution that is not only fairly inexpensive but also allows you to connect the HP SFF SAS drives to your desktop computer in a RAID setup!
To do it, you’ll first need to Continue reading ‘How to add HP SFF SAS Drives to your desktop pc’
Technorati Tags: 2640x4, 9200, desktop, Dimension, hot swap, HP, RocketRAID, SAS, sata, SFF
I’ve had my Dell Dimension 9200 (also known as the XPS 410) for a few years now and have been connected to a Netgear WGR614 router which has a maximum wired speed of 100mb. As I have been acquiring a lot of wireless N equipped devices, I decided to upgrade my router to the Netgear WNDR3700 wireless N router with Gigabit wired network ports.
I have a Windows Home Server and my main machine running Windows 7 (Dimension 9200) which both have gigabit network cards in them. I thought it would be awesome to have a gigabit router which would allow me to copy very large files between machines at super fast speeds. This is where all of my trouble began.
My shiny new WNDR3700 gigabit router is delivered and I am psyched to get it online. I power it up and start connecting my machines. First, my Windows Home Server which is running on a Dell Optiplex GX620 slimline. I connect it and watch the router port light turn green which means it’s connected at gigabit speed. Sweet!
Next I connect my Dimension 9200 and watch as it blinks green a few times then promptly switches to an amber light which means it’s connected at 10/100mb. What the hell?
I check my router settings and make sure I’m running the latest router firmware just to rule out a router issue. I even pulled out a gigabit switch I have to see if the machine would connect to that at 1000mb. It would not. That rules out my new router.
So my troubleshooting begins. Continue reading ‘Gigabit connection not working on Dell Dimension 9200 (XPS 410)’
Technorati Tags: 82566DC, 9200, Dell, Dimension, gigabit, intel, netgear, router
I’m a techie… I’ve come to expect certain things when it comes to technology. Specifically, backwards compatibility.
In the old days, you pretty much expected that when you got a new gadget or piece of software, that it would be painful, if not impossible to make it work with your old technology. Nowadays, it’s pretty much the opposite. New wireless networking hardware almost always works with what’s existing. The new version of USB works with the old. The new versions of software generally work with the old.
This is why I’m currently rather annoyed with the next generation of the SD flash memory cards called SDHC or Secure Digital High Capacity. I got a new Canon Rebel T2i digital camera for Christmas. To go with it I bought two Kingston 8gb SDHC cards from Amazon as they were on sale for about $15 a piece.
I popped my new cards in my camera and took a bunch of Christmas pictures. All went well until I tried to take the card and pop it into the built in card reader on my new Dell Dimension 9200 computer with a 19-in-1 TEAC media card reader. My pc started acting buggy and wouldn’t read the card. Continue reading ‘SDHC Flash Card Reader Annoyances’
Technorati Tags: 2405FPW, 9200, Canon T2i, Dell, SDHC, TEAC
