Features

• USB port to plug a printer into, lets the Airport become a wireless print server
• WPA/WPA2 Security with 128-bit WEP
• Guest Networking – you can create a secondary wireless network (‘John’s Guest Network’) with a different password or no password at all.
• Dual band
• Supports up to 50 users simultaneously

Looks like a good solution for retail shop, classroom, or busy home.

BTW It’s currently on sale at Amazon
Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Simultaneous Dual-Band) (MC340LL/A)

Did it work? No. No mouse cursor movement at all. Windows 7 sees the new device, but it pops up an error saying it had a problem installing the drivers.  So I rebooted the machine and the problem goes away and the trackball works.  I can ALMOST accept that this is the way things are now, because its a “new” device. So guess that happens when I plugged the old mouse back in? Yep, it doesn’t work unless you also reboot the machine.

So mouse hotswap is just broken in Windows 7.

p.s. I’ve tried this on two different computers with different versions of WIN7, same exact problem on both machines.

So which one do you get? Well a few things to keep in mind. The motherboard supports 6 SATA hard drives and 2 IDE devices. So you should get a case that can support at least 8 drives.

The first case I tried was the Zalman GS1000, which is very nice looking, and can hold 8 hard drives. Unfortunately, I could not get ANY power supply plugs to reach the motherboard with this case.

I lucked out with the Antec 650 Titan EATX server case, because not only did it have a power supply mount near the motherboard power supply connectors, but the 650 W power supply ended up being perfect for my build.  How did I know that? I purchased a 1000W power supply first and mounted it into the Antec 650 case,  and I used a logging watt meter to measure the idle and peak watt usage while running IoStress on all hard drives  on the server.  IoStress pegged all 16 cores, and maxed out all 6 hard drives for a week. I checked the logged results — 520 W max usage.  The idle power consumption is less than 300W. Windows 7 does a good job at shutting down cores when they are not being used,  and the low power opterons help out alot.

I assumed that laser printing would be the most cost effective way to print, since the toner cartridges can usually print thousands of pages and cost less than $100.

So lets look at laser printing and see how much one solution actually costs per page. The HP LaserJet P1006 costs about $99 and it prints 17 pages per minute.   The replacement toner cartridge is the $68 HP35A (CB435A),  and HP says it has a 1500 page yield.  So that comes out to costing us 4.5 cents per page  ($68 / 1500) .  Of course the big catch with this printer is that it can’t print color. 

For Color and some nice “All-In-One” features like scanning, fax and photocopying, the HP Photosmart C4480 All-in-One is a good value. Its only $99.  If you buy the HP 74XL  Inkjets, you can get your per page cost down to 4.6 cents. ($35/ 750)

OEM HP 74 (CB335WN) Black Ink Cartridge $15 for 200 pages. (7.5 cents a page)

OEM HP 74XL (CB336WN) Black Ink Cartridge $35 for 750 pages. (4.6 cents a page).

OEM HP 75 (CB337WN) Color Ink Cartridge $20 for 170 pages (11.7 cents a page)

OEM HP 75XL (CB338WN) Color Ink Cartridge $40 for 520 pages  (7.5 cents a page)

Ok so color printing is expensive part, which makes sense because those color cartridges are actually 3 ink tanks in one.

But the great thing about the HP 74/75 cartridges is that you can get them refilled at places like Cartridge World, or you can simply buy them refilled online at your favorite inkjet website. 

I was quoted around $20 for a refilled 74XL cartridge at Cartridge World — that brings the price down to 2.6 cents a page.

So let me summarize:  Look for a decent HP printer that takes the HP 74/75 cartridges, make sure to buy the large “XL” size cartridges, and you can get your combined average color & bw printing down to about 5 cents a page.

Western Digital MyBook 2TB NAS

This is a great looking product,  extremely easy to use, holds a massive amount of files, and its one of the cheapest Network Attached Storage (NAS) products you can buy.

Unfortunately, its performance is TERRIBLE.   The average new SATA hard drive in your desktop PC can write files at around 60 MB/s  (60 megabytes a second), or a 5GB file in about 2 minutes.  The MyBook World Edition can only write files at around 5 MB/s so that same 5GB file would take 17 minutes.  I don’t understand why this product would be more than 10 times slower than a regular hard drive. Heck the Buffalo 1TB external USB hard drive I reviewed last month  writes files at 25 MB/s – five times faster than the MyBook.

The MyBook has a Gigabit Ethernet port, which has a max rate of 125 MB/s, it also has TWO internal hard drives, that we know should be able to do 60 MB/s (assuming they are SATA drives, which they probably are). So WHY is this drive so dang slow?

I checked to see if I could reformat the hard drive to make it RAID 0 striped, hoping to improve the performance. Unfortunately the MyBook only offers Raid 1 (redundant data) or drive spanning.  So ultimately, because of the bad performance this product is unacceptable.  I’m planning on continuing my investigations into NAS products to see if I can find  something that actually comes close to maxing out Gigabit Ethernet.  I know nothing on the box said “Its really fast!” but I can’t help but feel a little misled.

Today I gave up waiting for a hardware to show up and called them on my day off. After 38 minutes of hold music I finally got to speak with someone in customer service. The first thing they told me was that one screen in there computer said I had received the hardware, and another screen said I hadn’t. Then she said she would get the hardware right out to me. I told her NO THANK YOU!  So in two days the DSL service I never got to use will get disconnected.

The confusing part (at least for me) is that the new 54XX Xeons are cheaper than the similar, older 53XX Xeons. For example:

a. Intel Xeon E5335 Clovertown 2.0GHz LGA 771 80W Quad-Core 2U Passive Processor Model BX80563E5335P – Retail $349.  

b. Intel Xeon E5405 2.0 GHz 12M L2 Cache 1333MHz FSB LGA771 Active Quad-Core Processor $230

These processors have the same 2.0Ghz clock speed, same 1333Mhz front side bus, but the 5405 has 50% more cache than the 5335.  So it’s better and $120 cheaper.  So that begs the question:  Can I use the 54XX Xeons in a dual socket 771 system that supports 53XXs?

Suprisingly the answer is YES, mostly.  The Intel 5000 chipset motherboards claim to support most Xeons from 51XX to 54XX.  You would hope that 3rd party Intel 5000 chipset motherboards would behave the same.   This article  discusses swapping 53XX and 54XX CPUs out in the same motherboard and doing benchmarks. So its definately doable.

There are a few exceptions.  The very fast and expensive E5472 has a 1600 MHz FSB that is too quick for older motherboards that max at 1333 MHz.    The Dell Precision 490 that I like so much has some versions that don’t support any quad-core processors at all. Obviously that old version isn’t going to work with the 5400s.  The newer Dell precision 490′s that support 53XX’s should work fine with 54XXs.

For compatibility with older servers and for exact replacement purposes you will see 53XX Xeons around for some time. But if you have a capable motherboard, I would definately recommend saving some money and using a Harpertown Xeons. Good Luck!

Dell Precision 490

In my last post I wrote about trying to obtain a dual quad-core workstation on the cheap, I wrote that buying a new bare-bones dual Xeon setup (case, power supply and empty motherboard)  would run $500-$700.

Well the reason I started this article is that I found Dell Precision 490 bare bones systems on E-Bay for as cheap as $150.  Add in two Xeon E53XX or E54XX quad-core CPUs for as cheap as $229 ,  4GB memory kit for $120,  $100 for a decent video card, $100 for a decent SATA/300 HDD and your done.

Let me add all that up for you:

————————-

$150 Dell 490 Bare Bones

$229: Intel Xeon E5405 Harpertown 2.0GHz LGA 771 80W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80574E5405P – Retail

$229: Intel Xeon E5405 Harpertown 2.0GHz LGA 771 80W Quad-Core Processor Model BX80574E5405P – Retail

$120: 2 X 2GB DDR2 ECC Buffered RAM DDR2-533 RAM

$100:  Your budget for a video card

$100:   SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM

————————-

TOTAL $928 — not including shipping.  That’s a deal.   Now for the caveats…

When Dell first made the precision 490, the motherboard only supported dual core Xeons.  Some time later, Dell started shipping 490′s with a new motherboard that could support Dual or Quad core.

So when your shopping for bare bone 490′s your going to have to ask the seller. I don’t have motherboard part numbers for each version,  if anyone knows please comment.

I have purchased one of these the bare bones systems already, but I didnt know about the motherboard differences, so I probably ended up with the wrong version. I’ll post some pictures later on.