pc – Kev's Development Toolbox

September 2, 2024September 2, 2024

My PC with only SSDs sounds like it has a grinding mechanical hard disk :-0

My self assembled desktop PC has as far as I can remember randomly made an odd grinding and clicking sound. It hasn’t bothered me too much, but as I’m sitting at my desk if I start to pay attention to the grind click (silence) … grind click (silence) … repeating over and over, it’s pretty clear something is up with one of my fans. I did a quick search and found this exact discussion here. I also have and EVGA RTX 2060, so it sounds like this is a common thing with this model. The thought in this thread is that the fans on the GPU are not able to cycle between idle and slow spin speeds, until the GPU gets more active, the fans spin faster and then the issue goes away.

In the thread, it was suggested to change the cooling curve so at a minimum the fans are never below around 35% … and that’s done the job. Problem solved.

June 5, 2022June 5, 2022

500GB HDDs are now less than $15

There’s no reason to not use SSDs for storage at this point, but if you need a new or replacement SATA HDD for an older PC, you can get a 500GB drive now for less than 500GB:

February 28, 2019February 28, 2019

Adding new drives to an HP DL380 G7 Homelab

I recently ran out of space on my Homelab ESXi running on my HP DL380 G7 server, so it’s time to add some more storage. First, I checked the list of supported drives known not to have the thermal runaway issue on the DL380 and similar models. I have a couple of WD Blacks right now, but the model numbers on those are hit and miss, some models work, some don’t, and I couldn’t find the exactly same model number on sale again (the working model I have is WD7500BPKX). I noticed though there’s a longer list of WD Blue drives that are known to work ok, and looking on Amazon I found some refurb 1TB drives for $40. Since this is just a hobby server and I don’t need to store anything critical on there, this sounded like a good deal.

I needed a couple of extra drive caddies too, here’s what I picked up:

2x KKmoon HHD Tray Bracket For HP G7 2.5″ Drive Caddy SAS SATA 371593-001 DL380 DL370 DL360 G5 G6 G7″
2x WD Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5 Inch – WD10SPZX (Certified Refurbished)

The WD drives arrived same day from Amazon – they were in sealed bags but obviously not the original packaging as they were refurbs. They were also wrapped in plenty of bubblewrap which was plenty adequate to protect them during shipping, and shipped in a Jiffy bag:

The HP server drive caddies arrived the following Monday (ordered on Saturday). Again, packaged well, in a box and in a Jiffy bag:

Here’s the assembled drives ready to go:

And here’s the new drives going in:

Space before:

Space after – ready to go:

October 20, 2014

Computer History Museum release source for early versions of CP/M

Press release here. CP/M was significant in the history of the development of the IBM PC as IBM famously approached Kildall to license CP/M for the OS for the first IBM PC, but failing to work a deal approached Bill Gates at Microsoft instead.