In 2023, I ordered a cheap piece of crap USB to HDMI adapter. From time to time, I dabble with computers, but I don’t always have a convenient display at hand. Capture cards aren’t anything new, but the good ones a bit expensive for a hobbyist like myself.

The adapter sucks, and somehow it’s been one of the most useful tools that I own.

The way that it works is also brilliant: the adapter acts like a webcam on your machine. This means that you can open any app that can show webcam output, such as Cheese, and use your laptop as a crappy portable display. It also works in VLC, but I’ve had a much better and easier experience with Cheese.

Don’t expect any crystal clear output or high refresh rates.

But it gets the job done. Quick UEFI settings tour, OS installation, or general troubleshooting, it’s fantastic for those use cases. I have had a few displays that are picky about display resolutions and things like outputting anything at all, such as the LattePanda V1, and somehow this adapter makes it work quite reliably.

When I checked the price for the adapter I ordered, I found that somehow it has gotten cheaper. Don’t see that happening much lately.

Remember that failed experiment where I ran Jellyfin off of a LattePanda V1?

Do you recall all the parts where I said what this single board computer cannot do?

Yeah, I remember.

Then I took it and put the two of the most critical services running on it: the blog you’re reading right now, and my Wireguard setup.

Trust me, it makes more sense with some context. The board is incapable of doing anything else other than serving content from the eMMC module, and it has a functioning network port. It doesn’t seem to crash in these scenarios.

When I try anything else with this board, especially things that include USB connectivity, things break. This makes the board ideal for a light workload that needs to be up 24/7.

The biggest threat to my uptime is not internet connectivity or loss of power (although that did happen for the first time in a year recently), it’s me getting new ideas to try out on my setup, which results in downtime. This board is so unreliable for trying those ideas out that it removes any and all temptation to do that, resulting in a computer that has the highest chance of actually being up and running for a very long time.

To play things safe, I used an IKEA SJÖSS 20W USB-C power adapter that I got for 3 EUR, with a cheap USB-C to USB-A adapter thrown into the mix. It looks janky, but the adapter outputs 5V 3A, which makes it the beefiest power adapter that I have in my fleet for plain USB-A powered devices.

I then hit the board with some stress commands, including hitting the 2 GB of memory. It ran really well for days, no issues at all.

I also improved the cooling situation. I am now a proud owner of an assortment of M2, M2.5 and M3 screws and bits, and equipped with a Makita cordless drill, I made some mounting holes into an old aluminium server heat sink. The drilling was a complete hack job, everything was misaligned, but it was good enough. Certainly better than holding the board and heat sink together with thin velcro strips. The cooling performance is completely adequate, the board hits a maximum of 65°C with the heat sink facing down. This is well below the point at which the board starts to throttle its CPU.

The theoretical maximum Wireguard throughput on this board is about 340 Mbps, measured using the fantastic wg-bench solution.

Remember the part about the USB ports being flaky? Yeah. That didn’t stop me from getting a USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter to remove one of the main limitations of the LattePanda V1. Based off of vibe-recommendations by Claude, I got a TP-Link UE300 for its alleged low power usage and its availability at a local computer store in Estonia. It seems to work well enough, you can push gigabit speeds through it measured by iperf3, and the actual Wireguard performance that I could push through it with an actual workload was at about 420 Mbit/s, higher than indicated by the benchmark, and plenty fast for most workloads, especially in external networks that are usually slower than that.

A few hours after making that change, a HN post put some mild load on the LattePanda V1, what good timing.

As of publishing this post, the blog has been running mostly off of the LattePanda V1 for over a month now, with that gap in it being caused by contemplating getting that USB Ethernet adapter and temporarily running the blog and Wireguard off of another mini PC during that time.

Did you notice?

2026 July update

I was running out of room and network ports on my router, so I decided to stop this experiment. During all this time, there were no issues with the LattePanda V1, except when I accidentally bumped into its power cable and made it go offline. Oops.

Keeping my focus has been challenging. It’s not a new phenomenon, and I suspect that there are contributing factors that have lead to the unfocused state dominating. For example, I’ve been that guy who wants to be on top of things, to be in the loop, to respond to urgent issues. It feels fantastic to be in that firefighter role as it gives me the feeling of having an impact, but it results in me being drained at the end of the day and often over-caffeinated.

One day I was doing work on my laptop on a couch because hitting 30 apparently means that sleeping slightly incorrectly results in debilitating back pain. During that session, I was working on a larger task and making tons of tiny little changes that needed to be done in order to release a new feature. I was finally in the zone again, and it felt fantastic!

That’s when I decided to start an experiment: can I improve my focus by giving up my big monitor?

Results

I’ve done this type of “experiment” a few times in the past when the power has gone out and my super duper ergonomic setup has become useless. No power, no USB-C dock, no monitor. It wasn’t that fun and my eyes hated reading text off of a laptop screen.

A few things have changed since then:

• GNOME has working fractional scaling that you can simply enable in display settings
• ThinkPad displays have gotten better, with the picture being quite cromulent, and the 16:10 aspect ratio helps fit more on the screen
• the nature of my work has changed and will keep changing in the near future

Almost a month in, I’ve had a pleasant experience with this experiment. I feel more focused. Yeah, that’s it. Am I actually more focused is up for debate, as I’m not sure how to measure it objectively.¹

Working off of a single screen forces me to focus at what’s at hand. Alt-tabbing to a different app is quick, but just enough to deter me from doing it in meetings or other focused tasks.

In my personal free time², this has also resulted in computer use becoming more intentional. On a 34" ultrawide monitor, it was too easy to put YouTube running on the left side, and whatever else on the right. It was distracting and resulted in time being wasted doing nothing. Interestingly enough, making computer use more intentional was a trick that I tried when recovering from burnout, and it helped a lot.

As a side effect, the power consumption of my whole home office setup is significantly smaller, as I don’t have to power my ultrawide monitor. That made up most of the power consumption, with peaks of up to 100W.

I also don’t have to fight with my dock killing my whole network, because there is no dock.

How to do it well

If you’re just cleaning up your desk and plopping your laptop on there, you will likely have a bad time. The posture will be off, and depending on your laptop, the keyboard and touchpad combination can prove to be an ergonomic nightmare.

At the very least, you should put your laptop up somewhere higher. Ideally, it should be using a stand that allows you to use your favourite wireless keyboard and mouse below it. A simple laptop stand could get you most of the way there, but the ideal solution is a freely adjustable monitor arm combined with a VESA-mounted laptop holder. This gives you the freedom to place the laptop exactly as you’d like while leaving the desk free for your peripherals.

Most monitor arm laptop holders have side arms that keep it in place, but I found them to be extremely annoying, so I removed them by disassembling the holder and yanking out the side arms and springs. You may still need them if you are using a very aggressive vertical angle, but I hated having to give up one USB-A port and blocking about 25% of the exhaust fan also didn’t seem like a good idea. Mounting the laptop with the springy side arms was also awkward.

If you’re using a desktop and have a big display, then intentionally using a smaller and cheaper one for a while may prove to be just as effective.

If you’re using a laptop with a horrible display with poor viewing angles, glare and crappy resolution (which a lot of older ThinkPads have), then you can still try this out, but I suspect that you’ll not have a very good experience with it due to this reason alone.

Exceptions to the rule

I still prefer to do my gaming sessions on a big screen. It’s more immersive, and I can make out tiny details better, such as spotting a car in the distance while driving in the oncoming lane in Need for Speed Most Wanted.

Conclusion

I’m happy with this setup.

That’s all I ever needed.

The apartment that I live in right now has two small rooms with doors on them.

One of them is like a normal closet and that’s where the ISP passive fiber optic line comes in.

The other one is a similarly sized room with a bunch of shelves and ventilation to keep things cool. A pantry, basically.

I’ve used the closet as a networking and home server spot for a while now, with a small dedicated shelf holding everything. That shelf was a bit limiting, it could not accommodate all of my hardware that I wanted to play around with, and the closet did not have very good ventilation, which resulted in the top half of the closet getting notably warm during summer months. Not too warm, but warm enough to feel it when opening the closet.

One day I decided to realize an idea that had been in my mind ever since I started renovating this apartment: turn the pantry into a server room.

Meet the server pantry.

It’s cool.

It’s the furthest point in the apartment from the bed and my home office setup, so I can put incredibly noisy computers in it.

It only has a few spiders.

Due to the pantry being cool and dry, it makes for a good spot for hosting food and stuff. Adding <100W of heat output at the top of the room should not be an issue as hot air tends to rise, and if temperatures end up being an issue, I can open one of the two vents that are directly connected to the outside to get some fresh and cool air in. The temperature delta between the bottom and top of the pantry seems to be about 10°C, ranging from 6-16°C.

The impact of running things in a slightly chillier room is noticeable on the temperature sensors of the hardware that I put in there. A PC with overkill CPU cooler on an Intel i5-10500 did report 16°C CPU core temperatures at one point when idling, compared to 20-24°C when running in a cold corner in the living room. The LattePanda IOTA hit 30°C on the CPU cores. Hard drives hover around 30-37°C, with a maximum of 40-44°C.

It’s pretty cool.

2026 June update

I’ve now moved away from this concept due to Summer being a thing. Beer got too warm in there with 60-110 W of compute equipment being in there.

I got the opportunity to try out a MacBook Pro with the M3 Pro with 18GB RAM (not Pro).

I’ve been rocking a ThinkPad P14s gen 4 and am reasonably happy with it, but after realizing that I am the only person in the whole company not on a MacBook, and one was suddenly available for use, I set one up for work duties to see if I could ever like using one.

It’s nice.

I’ve used various flavours of Linux on the desktop since 2014, starting with Linux Mint. 2015 was the year I deleted the Windows dual boot partition. Over those years, the experience on Linux and especially Fedora Linux has improved a lot, and for some reason it’s controversial to say that I love GNOME and its opinionated approach to building a cohesive and yet functional desktop environment.

When transitioning over to macOS, I went in with an open mind. I won’t heavily customise it, won’t install Asahi Linux on it, or make it do things it wasn’t meant to do. This is an appliance, I will use it to get work done and that’s it.

With this introduction out of the way, here are some observations I’ve made about this experience so far.

Ergonomics

The first stumbling block was an expected one: all the shortcuts are wrong, and the Ctrl-Super-Alt friendship has been replaced with these new weird ones. With a lot of trial and error, it is not that difficult to pick it up, but I still stumble around with copy-paste, moving windows around, or operating my cursor effectively. It certainly doesn’t help that in terminal windows, Ctrl is still king, while elsewhere it’s Cmd.

Mouse gestures are nice, and not that different from the GNOME experience.

macOS has window snapping by default, but only using the mouse. I had to install a specific program to enable window moving and snapping with keyboard shortcuts (Rectangle), which is something I use heavily in GNOME. Odd omission by Apple.

For my Logitech keyboard and mouse to do the right thing, I did have to install the Logitech Logi+ app, which is not ideal, but is needed to have an acceptable experience using my MX series peripherals, especially the keyboard where it needs to remap some keys for them to properly work in macOS.

I still haven’t quite figured out why Page up/down and Home/End keys are not working as they should be. Also, give my Delete key back!

Opening the laptop with Touch ID is a nice bonus, especially on public transport where I don’t really want my neighbour to see me typing in my password.

The macOS concept of showing open applications that don’t have windows on them as open in the dock is a strange choice, that has caused me to look for those phantom windows and is generally misleading.

Not being able to switch between open windows instead of applications echoes the same design choice that GNOME made, and I’m not a big fan of it here as well. But at least in GNOME you can remap the Alt+Tab shortcut to fix it.

Installing stuff

The default macOS application installation process of downloading a .dmg file, then opening it, then dragging an icon in a window to the Applications folder feels super odd.

Luckily I was aware of the tool brew and have been using that heavily to get everything that I need installed, in a Linux-y way.

Permissions

I appreciate the concern that macOS has about actions that I take on my laptop, but my god, the permission popups get silly sometimes. When a CLI app is doing things and accessing data on my drive, I can randomly be presented with a permissions pop-up, stealing my focus from writing a Slack message.

Day to day work

Video calls work really well, I can do my full stack engineer things, and overall things work, even if it is sometimes slightly different.

The default Terminal app is not good, I’m still not quite sure why it does not close the window when I exit it, that “Process exited” message is not helpful.

Hardware

No contest, the hardware on a MacBook Pro feels nice and premium compared to the ThinkPad P14s gen 4. The latter now feels like a flexible plastic piece of crap.

The screen is beautiful and super smooth due to the higher refresh rate.

The MacBook does not flex when I hold it.

Battery life is phenomenal, the need to have a charger is legitimately not a concern in 90% of the situations I use a MacBook in.

Keyboard is alright, good to type on, but layout is not my preference.

M3 Pro chip is fast as heck. 18 GB of memory is a solid downgrade from 32 GB, but so far it has not prevented me from doing my work.

I have never heard the fan kick on, even when testing a lot of Go code in dozens of containers, pegging the CPU at 100%, using a lot of memory, and causing a lot of disk writes. I thought that I once heard it, but no, that fan noise was coming from a nearby ThinkPad.

The aluminium case does have one downside: the MacBook Pro is incredibly slippery. I once put it in my backpack and it made a loud thunk as it hit the table that the backpack was on. Whoops.

External displays

macOS does not provide scaling options on my 3440x1440p ultra-wide monitor. Even GNOME has that, with fractional scaling!

The two alternatives are to use a lower resolution (disgusting), or increase the text size across the OS so that I don’t suffer with my poor eyesight.

Apple ID and App Store

Never needed those. I like that. Having used an iPhone for a while, I sort of expected this to be a requirement, but no, you can completely ignore those aspects of macOS and work with a local account. Even Windows 11 doesn’t want to allow that!

Language switching

Switching the keyboard language using the keyboard shortcut is broken about 50% of the time, which feels odd given that it’s something that just works on GNOME. This is quite critical for me since I shift between the Estonian and US keyboard a lot when working, as the US layout has the brackets and all the other important characters in the right places for programming and writing, while Estonian keyboard has all the Õ Ä Ö Ü-s that I need.

The day it fell apart

I upgraded to macOS 26.3 Tahoe on 23rd of February. SSH worked in the morning. Upgrade during lunch, come back, bam, broken.

The SSH logins would halt at the part where public key authentication was taking place, the process just hung. I confirmed that by adding -vvv into the SSH command.

With some vibe-debugging with Claude Code, I found that something with the SSH agent service had broken after the upgrade. One reasonably simple fix was to put this in your .zshrc:

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=$(mktemp -d)/agent.sock
ssh-agent -a "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" > /dev/null 2>&1
ssh-add --apple-use-keychain ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 2>/dev/null

Then it works in the shell, but all other git integrations, such as all the repos I have cloned and am using via IntelliJ IDEA, were still broken.

Claude suggested that I build my own SSH agent, and install that until this issue is fixed. That’s when I decided to stop.

macOS was supposed to just work, and not get into my way when doing work. This level of workaround is something I expect from working with Linux, and even there it usually doesn’t get that odd, I can roll back a version of a package easily, or fix it by pulling in the latest development release of that particular package.

Conclusion

I went into this experiment with an open mind, no expectations, and I have to admit that a MacBook Pro with M3 Pro chip is not bad at all, as long as it works.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work for me right now. I might have gotten very unlucky with this issue and the timing, but first impressions matter a lot. The hardware can be nice and feel nice, but if the software lets me down and stops me from doing what’s more important, then it makes the hardware useless.

It turns out that I like Linux and GNOME a lot. Things are simple, improvements are constant and iterative in nature, so you don’t usually notice it (with Wayland and Pipewire being rare exceptions), and you have more control when you need to fix something. Making those one-off solutions like a DIY coding agent sandbox, or a backup script, or setting up snapshots on my workstation are also super easy.

If Asahi Linux had 100% compatibility on all modern M-series MacBooks, then that would be a killer combination.¹

Until then, back to the ol’ reliable ThinkPad P14s gen 4 I go. I can live with fan noise, Bluetooth oddities and Wi-Fi roaming issues, but not with something as basic as SSH not working one day.²

This is inspired by a dying Seagate Portable 4TB hard drive, and brought to you by 15 minutes of vibe engineering.

Enjoy.

Starting the RMA process on the Seagate website is one of the most difficult things I’ve done lately, and half the links there look like a legitimate phishing attempt.

By the time I got the RMA created, I’ve run out of time and energy to follow on with this process.

I guess it’s a great way to make your RMA rates stay low, though!

This is the Garbage PC.

Not too long ago, I received a half-broken Dell Inspiron N5110, sporting 6 GB of RAM, a dual core Intel i3-2110M, and an unsupported NVIDIA GPU of some sort.

One of the hinges was loose from the case because it was screwed into plastic (common issue for these types of laptops), the touchpad did not work, and to insert a drive into it, you had to disassemble the whole machine.

I’m quite confident that I’ve worked on this laptop model in a very distant past, around 2012-2013, and I remember it well because during the disassembly plastic bits were falling off everywhere and the right hinge was broken in exactly the same way.

I’ve always wanted to take a half-broken laptop and to mount it on some acrylic panels (plexiglass) using brass standoffs. I love how bare PCB-s look. They’re just so damn cool, and I can’t be the only one who thinks this way, right?

I also get a good feeling out of taking trash/obsolete parts and making them useful once again. This laptop was destined for the e-waste pile, which meant that it was a fantastic candidate to try this idea on.

The main constraint in this project was time. I’m a parent, I have a job, and sometimes between all that I like to rest, so the amount of available time for this project was about 8 hours spread across a month. I also lack proper tooling to do a good job, so this was achieved using whatever I had available, mainly a cordless jigsaw and a hand drill. On the upside, this means that if I can do it, then you can likely do it as well!

Disassembly and testing

This laptop turned out to be a total pain to work on.

During initial testing, it was very clear that the laptop needed a good thermal paste and pads replacement, as it tried to overheat playing casual videos off of YouTube.

After I disassembled the laptop to bare essentials and put it together as a test run for the “mount it on acrylic panel” idea, the extension board containing two USB ports and the Ethernet port just stopped working. I probably broke something, but annoying nevertheless. On the positive side, the overall size of the build was smaller as a result of this happy little accident.

Using this laptop via the HDMI output only also turned out to be an unnecessary headache. LibreELEC did not play well with it, often resulting in a blank screen, and on Fedora Workstation 43, there was a “ghost” display somewhere that always showed up on the display settings view. So did the internal display, even when it was disconnected.

This caused an issue when trying to get Fedora installed on this machine, as the installation UI would be placed on a screen that was not the HDMI output one that I was actually using. This issue can be mitigated similar to my LattePanda V1 adventure by disabling video outputs completely. For this laptop, I modified kernel parameters via /etc/default/grub and added the following kernel parameters:

video=VGA-1:d video=LVDS-1:d video=VGA-2:d

Yes, it’s possible to modify the display setup on your desktop environment of choice to disable certain outputs that way, but using kernel parameters ensures that if you change monitors, you won’t have to do that all over again.

To make this whole build even more garbage-tier, I used an 256GB SATA SSD with 5 known bad blocks.

The build

I sourced a large 4mm thick plexiglass panel from a hardware store, as that seemed to be the most accessible place where I can get one. In Estonia, these types of panels are often sold in the gardening sections of general hardware stores.

For attaching the motherboard to the board, I sourced an assortment of M2.5 brass standoffs and screws, and multiple sets in case I need more of a specific height (turned out to be a good call on my part). I chose M2.5 because the laptop used screws of that size, and this size is common in the world of Raspberry Pi and other SBC-s, which can be handy for any future dumb ideas experiments.

To mark the positions on the plexiglass, I put the motherboard assembly on it, marked some good spots with an awl ¹, and then drilled holes using a hand drill and 2.5mm drill bit.

I also sourced heat inserts so that I can melt them into the plexiglass assembly, but those didn’t work out very well. I used my Pinecil soldering iron to push these in to the 2mm pre-drilled holes that I set up for these, but I had alignment issues and the threads ended up getting gunked up by the melted remains of the plexiglass, so I could not screw any brass standoffs in there.

I tried to be very careful with getting the drill holes to line up, and it went mostly alright. My recommendation here is to be precise, and don’t screw everything tight before you’ve got screws and standoffs lined up for all planned holes, otherwise you lose the option of wiggling things a bit to get them to line up.

The standoffs and screws were screwed on tight enough to keep things in place, but not too tight to avoid cracking.

For the other panel, I cut out a similarily sized plexiglass panel, marked the holes again, and repeated the process. Since I was using a cordless jigsaw, I positioned the new piece so that the flat side of the plexiglass panel that I bought lined up with the other straight end on the existing assembly, because I will never get a good straight cut with a freehanded jigsaw. That worked out well enough.

For the power button, I reused the small PCB that contains the power button and power LED-s from the original case. To house that, I drilled a small hole with 1cm diameter to slip the ribbon cable in, and I used small pieces of 3M VHB double-sided tape² to secure it to the panel.

And there you have it, the garbage PC. The shine of the plexiglass does a fantastic job of bringing out the beauty of the motherboard and all its components. Standoffs leave plenty of room for the machine to breathe.

Since the extension board is missing, this build relies heavily on one USB port and one eSATA port that also supports USB connectivity. WiFi, Bluetooth, keyboard/mouse, it’s all over USB 2.0 ports.

One thing that I have yet to do is to add a base to the build so that it does not tip over that easily. Double-sided tape plus a wooden trim piece might do the trick.

The experience

This build is using parts that are about 15 years old. For context, that was when dubstep was popular, it was cool to hate on Justin Bieber, rage comics and bad memes were a thing, and the news in Europe were worried about Greece going bankrupt or something.

That does mean that the performance on this machine is not great.

The machine still runs warm, but not nearly as hot as before. In its stock form and before any thermal paste replacements, it ran about 85+°C, but now it doesn’t seem to ever hit 70°C.

As a basic desktop PC, assuming that you’re not trying to run a 1440p or 4K display, the experience feels completely usable!

If you’re thinking about setting this up as a media player PC, then you’re limited to H.264 playback. H.265 was just too much for this machine. If you use Kodi with Jellyfin, then it is luckily possible to enforce transcoding content to H.264, ensuring a smooth experience on the client side.

Other notes

I wish that this laptop supported a “power on with AC attach” type feature that turns the laptop on once the power adapter is connected, that would’ve made it more useful as a crappy little home server. If you don’t mind extended downtime during a power outage, then it can still do that job well enough, but it’s just something I was slightly annoyed with.

The board has a small SATA port that can be converted to a normal SATA port, plus an eSATA port, making it perfectly plausible to add two drives to this and to totally turn it into a home server.

I tried running Windows 11 on it once, but I tried to do that with the official installer and didn’t get past the “lol your hardware is too old” view. I know that you can remove that limitation, but given the 6GB of RAM and Windows 11 being awful with using resources, it was probably for the best to give up here.

The fan is audible when doing things. I did in fact take it apart and added some silicon oil inside the center to give it a fighting chance and it did improve the acoustics, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re doing similar projects with these old laptops. There does seem to be a way to control the fan by writing values to dell_smm kernel module controls in /sys/class/hwmon/, and if you overwrite the pwm value often enough, like in a 0.1 second loop, then you can definitely overpower the BIOS fan control on this board. The control does not seem to be fine-tuned, it’s either off, on, or full speed, but at least you can get some control over the fan speed if you really need to. Alternatively, you can slap a huge heat sink on the CPU and GPU if you want to, and you should be getting away with it.

The CPU throttles heavily once you hit 80°C while playing back video, so that seems to be the soft temperature ceiling for this laptop.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m happy I did this project. There were way more obstacles and challenges associated with this project that I expected, but the end result looks cool, so that makes it worth it in my view. It was also a good trial run to work with plexiglass and brass standoffs, and I will very likely do something cooler in the future based on this experience.

I hope that this inspires more people to reuse older hardware instead of just throwing it into the e-waste pile, especially with new computer parts sometimes experiencing price spikes due to the economy doing weird things.

If you’ve built something similar, then do share a link to it (ideally in blog post format) and I will happily link to it here!

2026-02-22 update

There was something missing from the garbage PC.

A garbage OS.

So I went ahead, connected the internal display temporarily, and installed Windows 10 on it. The included activation key did not work on it.

The GPU is confirmed to be a NVIDIA GT 525M. Latest supported drivers are version 391.xx, and had to be downloaded manually.

Unless you use higher resolutions like 3440x1440p, the experience is not bad at all, actually, and Kodi does a superb job playing back videos, even in H.265 format.

I hate to say it, but installing a legacy OS over Linux seems to be the best way forward for this particular combination of Dell and NVIDIA horribleness. Just don’t open any shady links on the internet with it, or connect it to the internet at all.

Microsoft seems to allow you to get security updates on it for a year for free, but only if you sign up with a Microsoft account, otherwise it’s paid. Sneaky. Still not falling for it.

2026 June update

The lack of a connected internal display was a real limiting factor in making this setup useful, so I attached it.

This display has some of the most horrific viewing angles of any display that I’ve used in the past decade, so I’ll probably have to add some adjustable hinges to it to make using it bearable. Alternatively, I’m considering getting the cheapest possible monitor arm that’s freely adjustable and attaching it there to turn this into the crappiest iMac-like experience that you can get.

LattePanda V1. It’s been a while, huh?

I had it as a backup server (which I blew up).

Then it got promoted to… a backup server. But then its PSU blew up.

Then it was waiting for some cool ideas at a potato enthusiast.

Now it’s back in my hands.

Unlike its modern counterpart, the LattePanda V1 is a flawed single board computer.

It’s slow.

It’s unstable if you connect power hungry USB devices to it.

It needs some cooling, but I’m too cheap to buy a properly designed heat sink for it.

It has display quirks.

It only has a slow 100 Mbps Ethernet link.

It only seems to work reliably on one side. Not even joking, the “heat sink down” configuration is the only one that works for me.

LibreELEC failed to play back any videos on it properly. The videos would play for 10 seconds, and then it would hang, no matter the encoding or hardware acceleration settings.

With hardware prices being wonky again, I decided to give this board a last chance of being useful. If new hardware is absurdly expensive, then it makes perfect sense to use what you have, no matter how slow or crummy it might be. Reduce, reuse, and only then recycle.

That’s when I decided to run a Jellyfin server off of it. Transcoding is out of the question, but serving media files over the network should still be quick enough, right?

For this experiment, I used one of the 18 TB hard drives that I’ve covered earlier. Just the single one, no redundancy here. This one drive is probably about 10x the cost of the LattePanda V1 itself, making it a perfectly reasonable choice.

For ease of troubleshooting, debugging and guaranteed eventual reinstallation, I put Fedora Server on an 128 GB USB 3.0 flash drive by Samsung. Risky move, I know, but as you might have noticed, this whole build is everything but reasonable. That left the eMMC storage as the perfect candidate for storing cache and service related files.

Cooling is solved by a random server heat sink slapped on the bottom of the LattePanda, with a few critical components like the CPU making contact with thick and soft thermal pads. The whole thing is fastened using velcro strips that I cut to a thin size in the middle so that I can route it between the components on the PCB and within the heat sink fins. The edges of the heat sink are covered with some painters’ tape that I had around to avoid shorting anything out on the board, because those parts on the board contain all sorts of metal bits and pins that have power going through them. I’m actually quite happy with that mount!

I’ve been experimenting with Podman again after Docker kept doing weird things with the v29 release, and I’ve been happy with the results, so that’s what I used on the LattePanda V1 as well. I slapped Jellyfin on it, threw in some test files and gave it a go.

Navigating the UI feels a bit slow at times, but it’s not really noticeable on an LG smart TV with a really laggy user interface.

Actual video playback that requires no transcoding works quite well, at least for smaller media sizes.

Technically, you can do transcoding on this and even utilize the tiny little integrated GPU in it, but the results are not usable. With smaller files it might be usable, but in one test I saw 7-8 FPS transcoding speeds and the server struggling to keep up, with CPU usage locked at 100%.

If we ignore all the downsides, then the LattePanda V1 can actually be a usable media server. Serving files off of a big drive does not require a lot of resources, and for that the LattePanda V1 is a solid choice. It also uses only a few watts of power on its own, so you can keep it on 24/7 guilt-free. In this build, the hard drive itself is actually the most power hungry component by a long shot (about 2/3 of the total power budget).

The 2 GB of memory is juuuuuuuust enough for this setup.

As of writing this post, it has been running for about a week, and it’s been fine. I intend to keep it running in a drawer for as long as possible just to see what will die first.

Will it be the eMMC storage?

The USB flash drive holding the operating system?

The expensive hard drive?

The power supply?

The thin velcro strips holding the cooling together?

My patience?

Don’t worry, I have backups. Well, backups of the important bits. I’m ready to lose data again.

2026-01-22 update

Okay, it was too bad of an idea.

The LattePanda V1 would occasionally just… stop.

From what I gathered by accident, it’s likely that the USB port containing the operating system would flake out and result in the system not being able to run any tools that are not in memory. I tried to move the installation to the eMMC drive, but after failing multiple times due to the display not working, or the system deciding to shut down randomly, I gave up on it. For now.

Guess I’ll have to use it in a solar-powered website project. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Some of my dumb experiments result in interesting findings and unexpected successes.

Some end up with very predictable failures.

What happens when you have two crappy USB hard drives running btrfs¹ in raid0 mode? Nothing, until something goes wrong on one of the drives.

Here’s what it looks like:

[188574.681476] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114512, gen 0
[188574.681479] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1133 off 175546368 csum 0x899d8def expected csum 0x6bd987b6 mirror 1
[188574.681481] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114513, gen 0
[188574.681484] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1133 off 175550464 csum 0xab3e9209 expected csum 0xb9ea310f mirror 1
[188574.681486] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114514, gen 0
[188574.681489] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1133 off 175554560 csum 0xc2f14e0c expected csum 0x503c7709 mirror 1
[188574.681491] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114515, gen 0
[188574.681494] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1133 off 175558656 csum 0x6ae8a7c9 expected csum 0xb4c26691 mirror 1
[188574.681496] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114516, gen 0
[188574.681498] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1133 off 175562752 csum 0x97db9766 expected csum 0xbe2e8040 mirror 1
[188574.681500] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114517, gen 0
[188574.681503] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1133 off 175566848 csum 0x86568469 expected csum 0x863fbb4a mirror 1
[188574.681505] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114518, gen 0
[189615.784048] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1181 off 23457792 csum 0xb19058fa expected csum 0x5d11a400 mirror 1
[189615.784086] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114519, gen 0
[189615.784119] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1181 off 23461888 csum 0x256ea900 expected csum 0xabd1eafb mirror 1
[189615.784133] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114520, gen 0
[189615.784153] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1181 off 23465984 csum 0x7b10000b expected csum 0x647fd7bf mirror 1
[189615.784165] BTRFS error (device dm-1): bdev /dev/dm-0 errs: wr 0, rd 0, flush 0, corrupt 5114521, gen 0
[189615.784178] BTRFS warning (device dm-1): csum failed root 719 ino 1181 off 23470080 csum 0xef791959 expected csum 0x175f7adc mirror 1

But in a way, this setup worked exactly as expected.

If you want to have a lot of storage on the cheap, or simply care about performance, or both, then running disks in RAID0 mode is a very sensible thing to do. I used it mainly for having a place where I can store a bunch of data temporarily, such a full disk images or data that I can easily replace.

Now I can test that theory out!

I like the Steam Deck. It’s what convinced me that gaming on Linux is actually viable now.

But after playing through games like God of War Ragnarök¹, I felt like I needed an upgrade. I love playing with the Steam Deck, but what I love more is playing without having to worry about playing around with graphics settings a lot. Great story and gameplay can only hide the fact that you’re running at 720p 30Hz on a big screen for a little bit.

I also get to play relatively rarely, so I might as well make it a better, more enjoyable experience. Quality vs quantity.

The specs

I went on a look-out for a used PC with roughly these requirements:

• any modern 6-core CPU or better
  • includes both Intel and AMD as the CPU does not matter much here²
• an AMD GPU that can do 1080p/4K gaming, depending on the game
  • NVIDIA was out of the question due to lack of support on SteamOS
  • Intel GPUs are a risk that I was not willing to take right now
• 16+GB RAM
• has to support an NVMe drive
  • using the SteamOS recovery image method is dependent on this
• acceptable case, PSU and cooling setup
  • if it does not burn the house down and makes the machine cool and quiet, then I’m fine with anything

The AMD GPU being a hard requirement turned out to be an interesting challenge. I wasn’t looking into putting together a custom build, but was rather going for a setup that works and that I can customize according to my specific needs. Turns out that most of the PC-s out there on the market are all based around NVIDIA GPU-s, and AMD builds of this range are relatively rare, with a guesstimate of the ratio being roughly 10 NVIDIA-based machines to 1 AMD-based machine. The good side of this is that the selection process was made way simpler as I got to choose between 3-4 options in the end.

During my search I also saw some machines that I would call absolute overkill, and I almost got one in a bidding war, but eventually I found a more sensible option. It also included a monitor, keyboard, mouse and three SSD-s that I didn’t really need, but the PC itself was decent.

Here’s what I landed on:

• Intel i5-10500
  • 6 cores 12 threads at a reasonable speed (4.2 GHz in real-life use)
• adequate Cooler Master CPU cooler that does a lot of RGB if needed
• 16 GB DDR4 RAM @ 2666 MT/s
  • I soon upgraded this to 32 GB because my brother had some leftover modules from his own memory upgrade
  • I forced the modules to run at 3200 MT/s. It’s memtest-stable so good enough for me.
• AMD RX 6600XT with 8GB VRAM
  • some might scoff at the VRAM amount, but coming from a Steam Deck where 16GB was shared between CPU and GPU, this is plenty!
• 512GB NVMe SSD
• three 256GB SATA SSD-s
  • previous owner put them in as RAID0, which is clever and works well as a game library
• some Gigabyte motherboard that works
  • it really doesn’t matter here
• some Fractal Design case, possibly a Define-series one
  • all I know is that it’s huuuuuuuuuge

All-in-all, it cost me 365 EUR in Estonia in October 2025, and so far I’ve made about 25 EUR back from the SSD sales alone, with some items still up for sale. It’s not as portable as a Steam Deck, but it’s cheaper even if we account for the cost of the game controller and cables/accessories/adapters that you usually need.

The setup

Regarding the operating system choice, I tried both SteamOS from the Steam Deck recovery image, and Bazzite. Both work fine and in the default couch gaming mode you won’t notice a difference, but I ended up defaulting to SteamOS because I had my setup and configuration changes tuned around that. The SteamOS recovery image approach does assume that you have an NVMe drive available, so if you lack one, you’re better off trying Bazzite as that can be installed on any drive.

I replaced the NVMe SSD with a cheap 128GB one and utilized the bigger drive in the LattePanda IOTA setup that now serves as my home server.

As a game library drive, I took a 1TB Samsung SSD that I had around, which roughly matches the storage that I had available on my Steam Deck that I ended up modding with a 1TB M.2 2230 SSD. With games like God of War Ragnarök taking up around 176GB, it’s not going to be the most luxurious arrangement, but for now it’s okay.

The Fractal case that it came up with was one that is fully metal, with sound dampening material present on the side panels. It’s a bit banged up, but still a pretty nice experience if you have the room for storing one in your setup. The case had one flaw that I stumbled upon: the power button on the Fractal case liked to get stuck, which seems to be a common issue with that model. I fixed that with a random power button that I sourced from a local electronic parts supplier for a few euros and that works really well now, with the additional bonus of it being slightly more cat-proof.

The default fan curves on the motherboard were a bit too aggressive, so I had to slightly tune them down, and now the machine is quiet while doing a great job with keeping the internals cool. You can hear a subtle whirring when you’re in the same room with it, but during gaming it stays at reasonable volumes and is not noticeable. Certainly quieter than a Steam Deck would be.

The gaming experience

The AMD GPU is a low/midrange model, but it gets the job done in 1080p gaming, and with a lot of titles it can do 4K with ease. In God of War Ragnarök I stuck with 1080p and cranked the settings, but with games like Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered, I pushed the resolution to 4K with high/ultra settings, and it runs smoothly at 60Hz.

This setup also taught me that Linux supports HDR now, which was news to me! My tech setup usually lags behind the state of the art, mostly because I don’t really see a need to upgrade to the latest and greatest thing out there if the current one works well enough, but this was a really nice surprise. My TV has a crappy HDR implementation, so I don’t get the full HDR experience, but it’s nice to see the TV show that HDR logo when I start up the machine.

Regarding the gaming experience, I’ve only noticed a few sore spots.

For whatever reason, the Need for Speed (2015) just does not start up on anything but an actual Steam Deck. It just doesn’t work here. I can’t be arsed to investigate this yet, the wonky physics in this game are perhaps not worth that effort.

It’s also clear that the choice of an Intel CPU is generally fine, but in God of War Ragnarök it was running too well, so the CPU kept dropping down to lower clock speeds, which then made the game performance inconsistent. Finding that this was the issue was actually quite straightforward: when I first loaded the game, the shader compilation was taking place in the background and even though the CPU was at a constant 100% usage, the game ran quite smoothly. It only started stuttering after that was done, and the integrated mangohud setup helped confirm the issue as its most detailed preset shows the frame time and CPU clock speed graphs really well.

Since this is just a Linux box, then you can of course run a few commands to fix it.³

Here’s how I fixed it.

Create a desktop entry at /home/deck/.local/bin/its-gaming-time.desktop with the contents:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Gaming Time!
Exec=/home/deck/.local/bin/its-gaming-time
Comment=
Icon=
Type=Application
Terminal=true

Create a file /home/deck/.local/bin/its-gaming-time with the contents:

#!/bin/bash
# Set performance mode
echo performance | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

# Set min_perf_pct to 100 (forces min freq = max freq)
echo 100 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/min_perf_pct

Don’t forget to mark the script as executable with chmod +x /home/deck/.local/bin/its-gaming-time.

Note that the script above does require that you have set up passwordless sudo on the SteamOS installation. This can be configured in /etc/sudoers.d/wheel, just make sure that the line starting with %wheel looks like this:

%wheel ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

With all that set up, in desktop mode, right-click on the desktop shortcut, “Add to Steam”, and now you can run this script any time in Steam gaming mode, even while a game is running!

All-in-all, I’m very satisfied with the experience that a cheap gaming PC box provides with SteamOS. The installation is painless, my wireless controllers just work, and aside from a few rare exceptions, my games run really well.

It’s also way easier on my eyes and with the 4K resolution I can actually see oncoming cars better in games like Need for Speed Hot Pursuit Remastered.⁴

The GabeCube

Less than three weeks after buying that gaming PC, the Steam Machine was officially announced.

The rumored specs suggesting a 6 core/12 thread CPU, 16GB DDR5 RAM, and a custom 8GB VRAM AMD GPU that seems to be roughly comparable to an AMD RX 6600XT-ish level of performance.

It seems that I have accidentally built a Steam Machine. Oops.

Of course, the specs and final performance are not public at the time of writing, and the Steam Machine has many benefits (better SteamOS compatibility, good WiFi, smaller size, likely more efficient and quiet), but it’s still interesting how close I got with my setup and selection criteria.

I was slightly disappointed that I got this machine right before that announcement, but then I reminded myself of the fact that I can enjoy games on the big screen right now, and the Steam Machine is scheduled for a release in Q1 2026, which can be as late as 31st of March 2026.

And hey, when the Steam Machine does come out and I decide to get one, the current gaming desktop will make for a very good home server candidate with all the room that it has available, and all the six SATA ports on the motherboard sure look tempting. I’m pretty sure that the Fractal case also allows something crazy like 17+ hard drives installed in it.

This approach of building my own Steam Machine of sorts did lead to me selling my Steam Deck. Better to have someone else enjoy it than having it sit in a box until its battery dies. That also serves as a major sign of confidence for this big box that makes my sparse downtime sessions more fun.

If you have a machine with a modern AMD GPU, then give SteamOS a try, you might be surprised at how well it works. Even a laptop with an AMD APU can do it, as long as you temper your expectations regarding the image quality.

Disclosure: the review sample was provided by DFRobot, the makers of LattePanda. I am allowed to keep the review sample indefinitely, no money exchanged hands, and as always, this post covers my own thoughts and views on the product.¹

In 2023, I happened to find a LattePanda V1 for sale at a good price. Given the then-poor availability of affordable Raspberry Pi units, I got one for testing and finding potential use cases for it in my setup. However, it was just a little bit too weak for any practical uses in 2023, with its CPU and USB connectivity being just slow enough to be of less use, and the networking being capped at 100 Mbit/s.

In 2025, we have the spiritual successor to it: the LattePanda IOTA. It keeps the same form factor, but the connectivity and raw power have all received a significant jump, with the CPU performance rivalling my current home server, the trusty ThinkPad T430.

The marketing materials list all sorts of sensible use cases for it. I’m sure that it works fine for those, but I’m only interested in one thing: how close does this board get to being the perfect home server?

The perfect home server uses very little power, offers plenty of affordable storage and provides a lot of performance when it’s actually being relied upon.

In my case, low power means less than 5 W while idling, 10+ TB of redundant storage for data resilience and integrity concerns, and performance means about 4 modern CPU cores’ worth (low-to-midrange desktop CPU performance).

The model and accessories

The model I’m reviewing is the 8GB RAM/64GB eMMC one, with a Windows 11 installation on it (not activated).

Along with the review unit itself, I got sent the following accessories:

• active cooler
• M.2 M-key expansion board
• 51W PoE expansion board
• M.2 4G LTE expansion board
• UPS expansion board

The board was tested with a Lenovo 65W USB-C power adapter, because that’s what I had available. Given the specs of the board and the accessories, that should be plenty. As far as I know, USB power delivery seems to work fine and it’s not just a weird USB-C connector that requires specific voltages to work.

The M.2 NVMe SSD used in this review is a 512 GB Samsung PM9A1. I got that one from another PC that really didn’t need a boot drive that large.

Most of the testing was done with a fresh Fedora Server 43 installation, kernel version 6.17.7.

The hardware

I suggest looking at the spec sheet if you’re interested in all the fine details and available configurations.

In short:

• CPU: Intel N150, 4 cores, 4 threads, up to 3.6 GHz
• RAM: 8/16 GB (depending on model)
• Onboard storage: 64/128GB eMMC (depending on model)
• Networking: gigabit Ethernet port
• Real-time clock: yes!

The overall connectivity has been improved with the new version of this board compared to the old board. The USB ports are all fast 10 Gbit/s ones, and we have actual PCIe connectivity to play with, although the available bandwidth is quite limited with a PCIe 3.0 x1 lane available on the port that both the M.2 M-key and PoE adapter connect to.

What caught my eye was the CPU performance I’ve been proudly running an old ThinkPad T430 as a server for a while now, with some failed attempts to find a more low-power and efficient solution.

The Intel N150 is now offering similar levels of performance, but in a much smaller power envelope.

When it comes to more specialized functionalities, such as GPIO and the RP2040 microcontroller, I don’t currently have a solid use case for them, so they won’t be covered in this review. I might fancy giving them a go in the future though, it would be nice to get some environmental sensors on it to monitor the temperature and humidity of the server room (which is a closet).

Since I also don’t have an 4G LTE modem available, I did not test the associated adapter.

M.2 M-key adapter

The way you can add expansion boards to the LattePanda IOTA is quite similar to how Raspberry Pi 5 and other similar single board computers do it: you simply run a flexible cable to an adapter board, and bam, you have extra connectivity!

With the M.2 M-key adapter kit, you get the adapter itself, some mounting screws and brass stand-offs, and a tiny little flexible cable for the PCIe signal.

The link speed is PCIe 3.0, with one lane available. In theory, this means a maximum of 1 GB/s of throughput. In practice and with this board and SSD combination, I got a maximum of ~810 MB/s. I expect some levels of losses with these types of setups, so in my view this seems normal. For the test, I just did a dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=/dev/null bs=8M status=progress. The SSD itself supports up to 4 lanes of PCIe connectivity so that should not be a limiting factor here.

The lovely part about M.2 NVMe ports is that you can use it for a lot of off-label use cases.

Fancy some SATA ports? There’s an adapter for that.²

Or a network card? Some fancy AI accelator thingy? Or a full-sized GPU? Anything will work (probably), as long as the cables and adapters are high quality, and you provide extra power to the device through other means.

PoE expansion board

The only device on my network that is connected over PoE is currently an Ubiquiti Wi-Fi access point, and that is unlikely to change in the near future because that would require a full replacement of my networking gear.³

However, I still gave this board a quick go, and I’m happy to report that it also works as an additional standalone Ethernet port. The Ethernet controller seems to be similar or the same as on the main board, and it shows up as a separate networking device. Both are Realtek NIC-s (Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller), and they work with the r8169 driver. Realtek has a spotty compatibility story overall on Linux from what I’ve read, but this one seems to work fine on Fedora Server 43.

I was very close to pulling the trigger and turning it into a beefy router so that I can finally move my Wireguard networks on the router as my current one cannot do more than 20 Mbit/s of Wireguard traffic, but I didn’t end up going through with that idea because of how well the SBC did in other areas.

UPS expansion board

As some of you might know, I’m a fan of playing with fir- 18650 Li-ion battery cells, and I’m hoping to one day build a solar-powered server of my own (of which there are many examples).

I took some spare 18650 cells that came from an old ThinkPad battery, made sure that the voltages are more-or-less the same, and threw them on the board.

Connecting the UPS board with the standoffs was fine, but the cable connecting it with the SBC was finicky. I triple-checked that the connector was the right way, but had to still use an uncomfortable amount of force to connect it all up. The battery cells themselves sit snugly on the board, and unless you drop the board, they should not fall out on their own. You’d still want to build a case around it if you’re going to actually put it to use in rough environments.

The manual for the UPS board emphasizes that it only works on Windows 10/11, and sadly that seems to be the case, the UPS does not seem to show up as an USB-listed device, and tools like NUT did not find anything to monitor with a quick 5-minute investigation.

The UPS board also has an interesting selection of switches that you can use to adjust the behaviour of the board, like automatically turning the board on when power comes back on, and setting an 80% battery charge limit. The first one was not really necessary to use, the board would follow whatever setting you have enabled on the SBC itself. I configured mine via UEFI settings to automatically turn on with a power adapter connected, and that worked here as well.

The run time of your LattePanda IOTA with the UPS expansion board will heavily depend on your workloads and quality of your battery cells. Mine were used cells, and then I hit the board with stress -c 4 to create some load on it. It ran for over an hour like that, and then I got bored and wanted to proceed with testing other accessories. The marketing materials mention up to 8 hours of runtime, and I suspect that with good Li-ion cells and workloads where you idle most of the time, it will likely be achievable.

The board seems to trigger a hard shutdown on Linux because the host OS is not aware of a battery being connected. Not that catastrophic for most modern filesystems and database engines, but something to consider in your own workloads in case they are Linux-based.

The UPS board seems to handle power connection and disconnection events well enough, it did not do anything weird when repeatedly plugging and unplugging the USB-C cable.⁴

Based on the readings from a wall outlet energy meter, the board uses up to 20W when charging the cells. It’s possible for the board to pull more than that with a maximum CPU load and connected peripherals, so I wonder if that may be an issue with more intense usage scenarios.

During charging and discharging cycles, even under heavy loads, the battery cells did not get hot and were at best warm to touch.

Ethernet

It’s gigabit.

Fine for my use case given that I still live in 2006 and only have devices that support gigabit Ethernet speeds at best (excluding the Ubiquiti Wi-Fi AP), but certainly less than some competing products.

eMMC and USB storage

Compared to the LattePanda V1, the USB port performance is actually decent for my use case. I can connect up to three USB-connected storage devices to the board, so that’s exactly what I did.

I set up three different USB-connected devices:

• USB hard drive (Seagate Basic)
• USB SATA SSD (Samsung QVO 4TB in ICY BOX USB-SATA adapter)
• USB NVMe SSD (512 GB Samsung PM9A1 with some random cheap USB to M.2 NVMe adapter)

For each device (including on-board eMMC device), I ran a while true; do dd if=/dev/X of=/dev/null bs=8M status=progress; sleep 5; done, which puts a sequential read workload on all the drives in an infinite loop.

After about 72 TB of data read in less than 24 hours, I checked the kernel logs and there were no stability issues whatsoever. The NVMe SSD started throttling due to heat, which was expected with that cheap adapter.

Assuming no issues with any cables and adapters, the USB ports seem to be solid enough for running storage devices off of. Yes, it can be a horrible idea in some use cases, but at the same time my ThinkPad T430 has been excellent with USB-based storage, and that’s with one of the USB ports being coffee-stained!

The eMMC chip is also more performant compared to the previous iteration, with sequential read speeds averaging around 316 MB/s, writes around 175 MB/s, and average read latency being around 0.15 ms. Certainly good enough for a boot drive.

Display connectivity

The LattePanda V1 struggled with larger displays, and when I gave it a go during this review, it would not properly display an image on my 3440x1440p monitor.

The LattePanda IOTA just did it, at 60 Hz. On Fedora Workstation and GNOME, the experience was smooth. Once you start doing things in the browser, like video playback, the situation is less optimal, but as a makeshift desktop PC it is alright for most low/mid-range activities.

Windows compatibility

The board came with a Windows 11 installation (not activated). As is tradition with Windows, the initial impressions are horrible, update processes running in the background made the active cooler go wild and the device felt sluggish.

But after that process is done, the experience is not bad at all if you look past the OS being Windows.

I did not do a thorough investigation and I suggest formatting the device boot drive either way when receiving it, but the Windows 11 installation looked clean enough, with no obvious bloatware.

Linux compatibility

The LattePanda V1 had some quirks. The performance was iffy, and you had to specify a Linux kernel parameter on first boot so that Fedora Linux does not confuse the optional display interface to be an always-connected primary display.

The previous version also didn’t include a real-time clock (RTC) by default, which meant that it was impossible to schedule some systemd timers as the time would always jump on boot years ahead on distros like Fedora Server. I got stuck in a reboot loop with a scheduled reboot job that way, was not fun to recover from.

With the LattePanda IOTA, I have not observed any weird oddities and quirks with it. Even the kernel logs don’t show anything that’s problematic, and the RTC is handy to have around as that helps avoid the issue mentioned above.

Active cooler

With the LattePanda V1, the cooler was not strictly required, but strongly recommended if you were going to use the board with moderate to high sustained loads. My solution was to slap an inappropriately sized heat sink to it with a thermal pad and zip ties and/or velcro strips, which looked horrible, because it was.

With the LattePanda IOTA, the cooler is now a mandatory part of the assembly. It can be fitted with either a passive cooler, a case with passive cooling, or an active cooler.

The active cooler does a good job of keeping the board cool, but it does get super loud at higher loads. The default fan curve is very primitive, with the fan changing it speeds in big and sudden increments. Bursty workloads certainly feel bursty with this fan. You will not want to be in the same room with this active cooler.

The sound profile is very similar to a thin and light laptop, and the fan has a very strong high-pitched whine to it.

Here’s an audio recording of the noise under heavy load if you’re interested (MP3 file). Recorded using a Google Pixel 8a.

You can mitigate the active cooler noise issue by reducing the CPU clock speed by setting a lower power limit in UEFI settings, or on Linux, setting a lower CPU performance ceiling using intel_pstate driver max_perf_pct option once on boot. This comes at the obvious cost of some raw performance, but given that CPU power scales non-linearly, you may not even notice it that much.

If you are sensitive to fan noise, then do get the passive cooler and slap a Noctua fan on it, it will likely be a much better experience with both the cooling performance and noise levels.

Oh, and fun fact: I got so carried away with testing that I actually forgot to remove the plastic film on the larger thermal pad that cools supporting components.

And then I did about 24 hours of stress testing with that arrangement.

I can confirm that the design of the board is idiot-proof, as I did not actually notice any severe throttling or thermal issues with that mistake. You can actually see the plastic film being present in a few photos of the board in this review. I still can’t believe that after all these years I ended up making that one mistake that you usually see online in tech support gore posts.

Power consumption

The idle power consumption of the LattePanda IOTA seems to be around 4.0W, which is more than the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB with its power consumption being around 3.2W. Slightly higher compared to that, but lower than most x86 mini PC-s with idle power consumption typically in the range of 6-14W.

During the disk read speed stress test, I saw a maximum of 24.4W pulled from the wall.

With the disk read stress test and a full CPU stress test, I saw a peak of 36.3W, with it quickly dropping down as the CPU settled down at a lower clock speed.

Home server

This board came surprisingly close to my perfect home server criteria that I had outlined earlier this year.

Less than 5W when idling? Check.

10+ TB of redundant storage? Check.

4 modern cores’ worth of CPU performance? Check.

Enough performance during bursty workloads? So far, yes.

I then installed a fresh copy of Fedora Server 43 and moved all my home server workloads to it. The eMMC storage is used as a boot drive, journald writes are disabled, workloads requiring good latency and speed are on the 512GB NVMe SSD, and bulk storage is connected via two existing USB-SATA adapters taken from one of those WD Elements/MyBook external hard drive enclosures.

Then it just worked. No issues.⁵

The drop in the overall power consumption of my whole home server and networking stack was also immediately noticeable.

Here are my observations of the CPU performance and behaviour after hitting it with an all-core CPU load:

• 2.9 GHz for a short time period (10-15 seconds), with CPU hovering around 80°C
• 2.2-2.3 GHz after that, with the CPU dropping to around 70°C

I have seen the CPU hit around 3.6 GHz with a single core load while there is nothing running in the background, but during my normal home server operations the cores are doing enough work across all 4 cores, so that doesn’t happen all that often, and 2.9 GHz is the ceiling for single core performance.

The only limiting factor so far has been the 8 GB of memory on my review unit, but on the bright side that limitation forced me to review the memory usage of some of the jobs that I run on my home server, which ended up with me finding a few resource hogs and then fixing them all up. Now I can run about 30 Docker containers of various resource consumption on a single board computer, and with less than 4GB of RAM used. I set up an 8GB swap file on the SSD, just in case.

Thanks to the relatively small boot drive, I also learned that even if you move the Docker data-root folder to another location, containerd will still clutter up your boot drive, so you’ll have to change that path in its /etc/containerd/config.toml file root setting.

I’m genuinely impressed with how well the LattePanda IOTA runs as a home server. The board isn’t really designed with that use case in mind, and I suspect that the Intel N150 might be doing most of the heavy lifting here, but still, very impressive!

Is it the perfect home server? No, but it’s pretty damn close to my definition of it.

UEFI settings tour

For those interested in what options are available on the board via its UEFI settings, here are some screenshots of the settings.⁶

• Main view
• Advanced
• Advanced -> ACPI
• Advanced -> CPU configuration
• Advanced -> Super IO configuration
• Advanced -> Serial port 1 configuration
• Advanced -> SMART Fan Control
• Advanced -> Trusted Computing
• Advanced -> NVMe configuration (no device connected at time of screenshot, oops)
• Advanced -> Power configuration
• Advanced -> USB configuration
• Advanced -> Serial Port console redirection
• Advanced -> SDIO configuration
• Advanced -> Realtek PCIe Ethernet controller
• Chipset
• Chipset -> System Agent (SA) configuration
• Chipset -> Device configuration
• Security
• Security -> Secure Boot
• Boot
• Save & Exit

Conclusion

If the LattePanda IOTA with its adapters fits your project requirements, you’re aware of its limitations, and the price is right, then I believe it’s a solid choice for your next project. My testing didn’t immediately break it, even when I forgot to remove the plastic film on one of the thermal pads.

The current pricing of it and its accessories seem to be roughly in the ballpark of the Raspberry Pi 5 8GB (based on prices in Estonia). Boards like the Zimaboard 2 (have not tested it myself) are more expensive, but they’re also catering to a slightly different audience and have better specs, like 2.5G Ethernet ports and SATA ports with power delivery suitable for running two 3.5" hard drives straight from the board.

It’s hard to beat the bargain that you can get from a used mini PC or NAS, but it won’t come with the charm, low power consumption and bragging rights that a single board computer gets you, especially if you’re using it for an off-label use case like I am.⁷

In the meantime, I’ll keep rocking it as a home server. In case something noteworthy happens, I’ll update this post, which is brought to you by the very same LattePanda IOTA at the time of publishing.

2025-12-12 update

About a month after switching my home server workloads to it, the LattePanda IOTA is still rock solid. No issues with USB HDD stability as well.

The only complaint that carries over from the review is the fact that the active cooler is still way too loud. I’m seriously considering getting the passive cooler for it to shut it up. I can hear it from the bedroom while the IOTA is in a closet on the other side of the apartment!

I also played around with Intel RAPL settings, which allow you to control the power budget of the CPU on the fly.

The power limit is 10W by default, and short term power limit is 20W. You can control it via these toggles:

/sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/constraint_0_power_limit_uw
/sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw

Get current values:

cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/constraint_0_power_limit_uw
cat /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw

Set a new limit of 8W to both:

echo 8000000 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/constraint_0_power_limit_uw
echo 8000000 > /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl/intel-rapl:0/constraint_1_power_limit_uw

These reset every boot, so you should probably set a one-shot systemd unit to call these early in the boot cycle.

The LattePanda IOTA is the most exciting yet boring addition to my setup. It just works.

Start of experiment: September 2025

Post last updated: October 2025

Check the live status of my Orange Pi Zero here!

I love the Orange Pi Zero. It’s tiny, uses very little power and it’s just neat! It’s also the subject of the very first post on my blog, which makes it a bit special.

Unfortunately I haven’t really found a good use case for it, given that its performance is quite limited and the CPU is a 32-bit ARM CPU with 4 relatively weak cores, which rules out using it as a Docker container host due to the architectural limitations.

The board is currently not doing much, but I’ll figure out a use case for it.

The board also has a few quirks at the moment that I’ve worked around. For example, rebooting seems to be broken, and it’s unlikely to get fixed any time soon. I resolved it by simply not rebooting it¹, at least not on a regular schedule, anyway. I’m hoping that any short-term power outages at home will take care of the need to reboot it.

It also runs quite hot in its stock Armbian configuration, which I worked around by running powertop --auto-tune on startup as that forces the CPU to always run at its slowest clock speed (480 MHz). Without it, I found that this board can run its CPU at 105°C, and it does have a thermal shutdown feature.

This board has been featured in a few previous posts as well, and even then it was quite underpowered:

• the little Wi-Fi AP that could
• seedbox on a wall
• database optimization adventures on low-end hardware

Now that I have it set up, will it be able to survive to year 2038 and beyond? Only time will tell.

Which issue will we run into first? Plausible options based on my previous experience:

• the cheap 8GB SD card craps out
• component on the board dies from heat-related issues
• the USB power supply dies
  • it’s currently running off of an IKEA extension cord that has two USB-A ports, so hopefully not
• board loses Armbian support completely (currently under community maintenance status)

The board is currently running the latest version of Armbian, and I might occasionally refresh its version from time to time.

If you like Armbian, then please support them! They’re doing great work with keeping all sorts of SBC-s up and running with usable versions of Debian and Ubuntu Linux.

2025-10-20 update

What are the chances that the day I make this project public, AWS suffers a massive outage? Poetic in a way. And yes, my website and the Orange Pi Zero were fully operational.

Our apartment came with a refrigerator. It was alright, it made things cold, it kept them cold. It was also incredibly noisy, and no matter how much I fiddled with its settings, the compressor was always running and any ice cream left in the deep freeze part got rock solid.¹

When I hooked up one of my smart plugs to it, I soon learned why: one of the two compressors was running all the time. This lead to a huge block of ice forming on the back of the main compartment, and the deep freeze section icing up really quickly. I suspect that the thermostat may have been busted and contributed to the issue, but after trying to repair a dishwasher, getting cut about 10 times on my hands and losing, I had zero interest in attempting another home appliance repair on my own.

The refrigerator was the UPO Jääkarhu (jääkarhu means polar bear in Finnish), and the manual that the previous owner had still kept around had July 1995 on it, meaning that the refrigerator was about the same age as I am: 30 years old. Not bad at all for a home appliance!

I shopped around for a new refrigerator and got a decent one that’s about the same size, except newer. I won’t mention the brand here because they didn’t pay me anything and this post really isn’t a refrigerator review, but it was in the low-to-midrange class, sporting a “no frost” feature, and could be bought for about 369 EUR in Estonia in the summer of 2025. Based on some napkin math, I assumed that within a few years, the electricity savings will cover the upfront cost of buying the new refrigerator, assuming that it doesn’t break down.

After letting it run for a while, I had some data!

Turns out that the old one consumed 3.7x more electricity compared to the new one.

Here are some typical daily power consumption numbers:

• old refrigerator: 2.6 kWh
• new refrigerator: 0.7 kWh

The difference is more noticeable if we zoom out a bit.

Moving from ~78 kWh to ~21 kWh consumed each month is nice. Around the time we replaced the refrigerator, we also got a working dishwasher, and with those two combined I saw a solid 10-20% decrease in the overall power usage of the whole apartment. We went from using 334 kWh in June to 268 kWh in July, 298 kWh in August and 279 kWh in September.

Remember that napkin math I made earlier? If we assume about 57 kWh savings per month, and an average electricity price of 17 cents per kWh (based on actual rates during August 2025), it will take about 38 months or a bit over 3 years for the new refrigerator to pay off in the most pessimistic scenario. The pay-off will likely be larger if we account for energy prices usually rising during winter.

Don’t worry about the old refrigerator, we gave it away to a person who needed one for their new home in the short term as a stopgap until they get further with renovation work. Even got some good chocolate for that!

The only point of concern with this change is that I don’t really trust the new refrigerator to last as long as the old one. The previous one was good for 30 years if you look past the whole ice buildup, heat and noise, but with the new one I suspect that it’s not going to last as long.

At least my new refrigerator doesn’t have a Wi-Fi-connected screen on it!

This post is NOT sponsored, the products were bought with my hard-earned money.

I’ve been running a full SSD storage setup for a few years in my home server and I’ve been happy with it, except for the storage anxiety that I get with running small pools of fast storage, which is why I started looking at how the hard drive market is doing.

Half of tech YouTube has been sponsored by companies like ServerPartDeals, so they were one of the first places I looked at, but they seem to only operate within the US and the shipping+taxes destroy any price advantages from ordering there to Estonia (which is in Europe).

At some point I stumbled upon datablocks.dev, which seems to operate within a similar niche, but in Europe and on a much smaller scale. What caught my eye were their white label hard drive offerings. Their website has a good explanation on the differences between recertified and white label hard drives. In short: white label drives have no branding, have no or very low number of power-on hours, may have small scratches or dents, but are in all other aspects completely functional and usable.

White label drives also have a price advantage compared to branded recertified drives. Here’s one example with 18 TB drives, the recertified one is 16.7% more expensive compared to the white label one, and the only obvious difference seems to be the sticker on the drive. I highly suspect that the white label one is also manufactured by Seagate based on the physical similarities.

I took some time to think things over and compared the pricing of various drives. The drives were all competitively priced between each other, with the price per terabyte hovering around 13 EUR/TB, so it didn’t matter much which drive size you picked, you’d still get a pretty solid deal. It was also a better deal compared to using an WD Elements/My Book drive of the same size.

I decided to go with two 18 TB hard drives. I considered buying the 20 TB or 22 TB capacities, but decided to go with 18 TB because it’s the largest single hard drive that I can easily and quickly buy a replacement for in the form of a WD Elements/My Book drive.

The stock on datablocks.dev is quite volatile, the drives are in stock when new batches arrive, but they can also quickly go out of stock. I saw this live with the 22 TB hard drives, one day there are 35 left, the next day there can be 7 left, and then only one lone drive.

At the time of writing, the 18 TB model that I bought is out of stock, so my choice to go with a slightly smaller but more easily replaceable one is validated.

For those that have followed my blog for a while will know that I’m a huge fan of all-SSD server builds, especially this one by Jeff Geerling that I still consider building from time to time. If I dislike noise, higher power usage and slower performance, then why did I get the hard drives? It’s simple, really: I now have an actual closet that I can stash my home server in, meaning that noise isn’t that big of a worry, and as long as my home server takes about the same amount of power as my refrigerator or dishwasher, then that’s fine. SSD prices still haven’t gone down as much as I’ve hoped over the years, so the all-SSD build ideas that I have are way outside my budget.

The drives arrived in a reasonable time window. The packaging was adequate, although I was slightly concerned with the cardboard box showing signs of something hitting it hard. The drives were packaged within sealed antistatic bags, and with ample bubble wrap surrounding them.

Just as described, the drives did have slight scratches and very minor dents in them, but in all other aspects they looked like new.

Before putting them to use, I formatted the drives using badblocks. It took a full 24 hours to do a full drive write. The write performance peaked at 275 MB/s and slowed down to 123 MB/s at the end, which is expected.¹

I also had to choose a larger block size for badblocks because otherwise it could not handle the drive, resulting in the command being badblocks -wsv -b 8192 /dev/sdX.

I unfortunately did not save the SMART data from the time I received the drives, but the contents were as expected, there were no more than a few power on hours and other metrics were OK. Keep in mind that it’s also possible to reset SMART data on a drive so this information cannot be taken at face value.

The drives are noisy, as expected. They run at 7200 RPM and do the usual clicks and clacks that a normal hard drive does. If this bothers you, use foam to fix it. The soft side of a sponge can work just as well.

With these drives I’ve now followed my own advice and tiered my storage: two 1 TB SSD-s for the things that benefit from good speed and latency (databases, containers), and 18 TB hard drives for bulk storage, backups and less frequently used data. Coming from an all-SSD build, I expected the performance to drop in day-to-day operations, but in most cases I cannot tell a difference. My family photos load just fine, media plays back well, and backups take slightly longer, which isn’t noticeable due to them running during the night. Only when I look at the Prometheus node exporter graphs do I notice that sometimes the server is waiting behind the disks a bit more due to higher iowait.

The power usage did shoot up as a result, roughly 10-20 W. Not ideal, but my whole networking and home server setup is idling at below 45 W, and I’ve had less efficient home servers in the past, so it’s not that big of a deal.

In this configuration, the drives run quite cool. During formatting on a hot day, I saw them go up to a maximum of 51°C, but in general use they sit at around 38-42°C.

Overall, I’m reasonably happy with the drives. I expect these to last me at least 5 years, and I’m probably going to switch one of the drives out a bit sooner to reduce the risk of a full drive pool failure. They’ve made it the first 50 days, so that’s good!

Oh, and here’s the smartctl -ax output for the disks after running them for about two months:

• disk 1
• disk 2

2026-02-13 update

6 months later, and my drives are still doing well. smartctl -ax output:

• disk 1
• disk 2

In the meantime, what did die on me was a Seagate Portable 4TB drive that I used mainly for backups. :)

A Latvian blogger that I follow also had a pleasant experience with datablocks.dev, and they wrote about it here.

I’ve been running four Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD-s for a while now. They’re old enough to be popping up on the second-hand market, so I thought it would be good to provide a few additional data points for those thinking about buying one.

Mine have mainly been used in a home server setting, with one also being used as a backup drive at times. I initially got these drives because I found the noise that hard drives generated to be unacceptably high in a small apartment. They’re also quite a bit faster than hard drives and use significantly less power.

The drives were manufactured in 2021, two in April, two in June.

Overall, I haven’t seen many issues with the drives, and when I did, it was a Linux kernel issue. These drives are still performing at the expected speed and at during write-heavy workloads they only drop down to 140-170 MB/s, which is considerably better than what the cheapest SATA SSD-s can do in the same scenario, those can go a low as 30 MB/s or even worse.

I did notice that one of the drives reported 4 bad blocks over its lifetime, and oddly enough it’s the drive with the least amount of power-on hours.

The reported SSD lifetime is reported to be around 94%, with over 170+ TB of data written. At this point, the drives are not even close to the 1440 TBW endurance limit that Samsung has published.

The price hasn’t gone down as much as I’ve hoped over the years. At the time I bought the drives, they were roughly 400 EUR a piece, and now they’re selling for about 270 EUR a piece. It’s still significantly cheaper, but back in 2021-2022 there was more optimism about SSD prices coming down over the years. For comparison, 4TB SSD-s from other manufacturers and form factors (NVMe, SATA) start from about 190-200 EUR, however I am not fully confident that those perform at the same level, at least under sustained writes.

For those curious, here’s the full smartctl -ax output for all the individual drives.

• S5STNF0R405312K
• S5STNF0R407424M
• S5STNF0R614596K
• S5STNF0R614601K

I had a few old ThinkPad batteries lying around. They were big, bulky and not holding much of a charge. Inside those were standard 18650 Li-ion battery cells.

I have two TOMO M4 power banks around, and they are fantastic for reusing these old 18650 battery cells inside them. You can even mix and match cells without a worry because they are individually addressed, meaning that any issues with battery charge levels and voltages differing between cells are not a concern. Unfortunately the TOMO M4 lacks modern features, such as USB-C ports and USB-C PD outputs at higher voltages and currents, which makes it less useful and convenient in 2025. I haven’t found any newer designs from them as well that are just as cool.

I still wanted to reuse those 18650 cells, so I went to AliExpress and bought some 18650 battery enclosures for testing. One holds 8 cells, another one 10 cells, and the largest one could fit 20 cells inside it.

Unfortunately, they all suck and are likely a huge fire hazard in the wrong hands.

For the 8-cell variant, I used newly bought 18650 Li-ion cells that were charged up to the same level. This battery enclosure worked quite well, until it didn’t. For whatever reason, the enclosure could not charge itself and other devices at the same time.

With the 10-cell variant, I used two different batches of used 18650 Li-ion cells from old ThinkPad batteries, charging them up first. That one worked fine, until it also failed in weird ways. It got quite hot during charging/discharging cycles, and eventually the segment display that’s responsible for displaying the charge level stopped showing certain segments. At that point I lost trust in that enclosure, too.

I had the most fun with the 20-cell battery enclosure. My first fuck-up involved using two old battery cells with different charge levels, which resulted in some magic smoke coming out of the PCB of the enclosure itself. Somehow that didn’t break the battery bank enclosure, so I crammed 20 charged up used and mixed 18650 Li-ion cells in it and started charging and discharging it. The batteries got quite hot, likely around 50-70°C based on the temperature readings of my hand.¹ At that point I realized I was playing with fire and stopped.

The USB-C PD behaviour was different on all power banks. Some were fine with powering a ThinkPad laptop with the appropriate cable, some were flaky with setting the power levels, and some were just useless with certain cable or device combinations.

The battery banks rely on a very simple arrangement: the 18650 Li-ion cells are connected in parallel, and the resulting 3.7-4.2V is then boosted up for the appropriate voltage on the control board. This carries risks: if you insert two or more Li-ion cells with different voltages, then one will start charging the others to bring the cells to the same voltage, and that can become uncontrolled and result in a cell overheating and/or exploding. It’s also a horrible idea to mix and match used cells of different capacities and wear levels as they will charge and discharge at different rates.

In my experience, a cheap DIY power bank enclosure also carries the risk of attracting attention at an airport security check. After learning how bad these can be, that is an entirely justified suspicion.

I ended up throwing all the battery bank enclosures out, the hardware failures and issues made me too concerned about one of these starting a fire. I like controlled fires, but the uncontrolled ones are really not my cup of tea.

If you know of a 18650 Li-ion cell battery bank enclosure that works like the TOMO M4 but has modern features (USB-C port, USB-PD, can charge laptops etc.) then please do reach out to me as I’d love to test one out. You can find the contact details below the post.

My evenings of absent-minded local auction site scrolling¹ paid off: I now own a Lenovo ThinkCentre M900 Tiny.

It’s relatively old, being manufactured in 2016², but it’s tiny and has a lot of useful life left in it.

It’s also featured in the TinyMiniMicro series by ServeTheHome.

I managed to get it for 60 EUR plus about 4 EUR shipping, and it comes with solid specifications:

• CPU: Intel i5-6500T
• RAM: 16GB DDR4
• Storage: 256GB SSD
• Power adapter included

The price is good compared to similar auctions, but was it worth it?

Yes, yes it was.

I have been running a ThinkPad T430 as a server for a while now, since October 2024. It served me well in that role and would’ve served me for even longer if I wanted to, but I had an itch for a project that didn’t involve renovating an apartment.³

Power usage

One of my main curiosities was around the power usage. Will this machine beat the laptop in terms of efficiency while idling and running normal home server workloads? Yes, yes it does.

While booting into Windows 11 and calming down a bit, the lowest idle power numbers I saw were around 8 W. This concludes the testing on Windows.

On Linux (Fedora Server 42), the idle power usage was around 6.5 W to 7 W. After running powertop --auto-tune, I ended up getting that down to 6.1 W - 6.5 W. This is much lower compared to the numbers that ServeTheHome got, which were around 11-13 W (120V circuit). My measurements are made in Europe, Estonia, where we have 240V circuits.

You may be able to find machines where the power usage is even lower. Louwrentius mada an idle power comparison on an HP EliteDesk Mini G3 800 where they measured it at 4 W. That might also be due to other factors in play, or differences in measurement tooling.

During normal home server operation with 5 SATA SSD-s connected (4 of them with USB-SATA adapters), I have observed power consumption being around 11-15 W, with peaks around 40 W. On a pure CPU load with stress -c 8, I saw power consumption being around 32 W. Formatting the internal SATA SSD added 5 W to that figure.

USB storage, are you crazy?

Yes. But hear me out.

Back in 2021, I wrote about USB storage being a very bad idea, especially on BTRFS.

I’ve learned a lot over the years, and BTRFS has received continuous improvements as well. In my ThinkPad T430 home server setup, I had two USB-connected SSD-s running in RAID0 for over half a year, and it was completely fine unless you accidentally bumped into the SSD-s.

USB-connected storage is fine under the right circumstances:

• the cables are not damaged
• the cables are not at a weird angle or twisted
  • I actually had issues with this point, my very cool and nice cable management resulted in one disk having connectivity issues, which I fixed by relieving stress on the cables and routing them differently
• the connected PC does not have chronic overheating issues
• the whole setup is out of the reach of cats, dogs, children and clumsy sysadmin cosplayers
• the USB-SATA adapters pass through the device ID and S.M.A.R.T information to the host
  • the device ID part especially is key to avoiding issues with various filesystems (especially ZFS) and storage pool setups
  • the ICY BOX IB-223U3a-B is a good option that I have personally been very happy with, and it’s what I’m using in this server build
  • a lot of adapters (mine included) don’t support running SSD TRIM commands to the drives, which might be a concern
    • has not been an issue for over half a year with those ICY BOX adapters, but it’s something to keep in mind
• you are not using an SBC as the home server
  • even a Raspberry Pi 4 can barely handle one USB-powered SSD
    • not an issue if you use an externally powered drive, or an USB DAS

After a full BTRFS scrub and a few days of running, it seems fine. Plus it looks sick as hell with the identical drives stacked on top. All that’s missing are labels specifying which drive is which, but I’m sure that I’ll get to that someday, hopefully before a drive failure happens.

In a way, this type of setup best represents what a novice home server enthusiast may end up with: a tiny, power-efficient PC with a bunch of affordable drives connected.

Less insane storage ideas for a tiny PC

There are alternative options for handling storage on a tiny 1 liter PC, but they have some downsides that I don’t want to be dealing with right now.

An USB DAS allows you to handle many drives with ease, but they are also damn expensive. If you pick wrong, you might also end up with one where the USB-SATA chip craps out under high load, which will momentarily drop all the drives, leaving you with a massive headache to deal with. Cheaper USB-SATA docks are more prone to this, but I cannot confirm or deny if more expensive options have the same issue. Running individual drives sidesteps this issue and moves any potential issues to the host USB controller level.

There is also a distinct lack of solutions that are designed around 2.5" drives only. Most of them are designed around massive and power-hungry 3.5" drives. I just want to run my 4 existing SATA SSD-s until they crap out completely.

An additional box that does stuff generally adds to the overall power consumption of the setup as well, which I am not a big fan of. Lowering the power consumption of the setup was the whole point!

I can’t rule out testing USB DAS solutions in the future as they do seem handy for adding storage to tiny PC-s and laptops with ease, but for now I prefer going the individually connected drives route, especially because I don’t feel like replacing my existing drives, they still have about 94% SSD health in them after 3-4 years of use, and new drives are expensive.

Or you could go full jank and use that one free NVMe slot in the tiny PC to add more SATA ports or break out to other devices, such as a PCIe HBA, and introduce a lot of clutter to the setup with an additional power supply, cables and drives.

Or use 3.5" external hard drives with separate power adapters. It’s what I actually tried out back in 2021, but I had some major annoyances with the noise.

Miscellaneous notes

Here are some notes on everything else that I’ve noticed about this machine.

The PC is quite efficient as demonstrated by the power consumption numbers, and as a result it runs very cool, idling around 30-35 °C in a ~22-24 °C environment. Under a heavy load, the CPU temperatures creep up to 65-70 °C, which is perfectly acceptable. The fan does come on at higher load and it’s definitely audible, but in my case it runs in a ventilated closet, so I don’t worry about that at all.

The CPU (Intel i5-6500T) is plenty fast for all sorts of home server workloads with its 4 CPU cores and clock speeds of 2.7-2.8 GHz under load.

The UEFI settings offered a few interesting options that I decided to change, the rest are set to default.

There is an option to enable an additional C-state for even better power savings.

For home server workloads, it was nice to see the setting to allow you to boot the PC without a keyboard being attached, found under “Keyboardless operation” setting. I guess that in some corporate environments disconnected keyboards are such a common helpdesk issue that it necessitates having this option around.

Closing thoughts

I just like these tiny PC boxes a lot. They are tiny, fast and have a very solid construction, which makes them feel very premium in your hands. They are also perfectly usable, extensible and can be an absolute bargain at the right price.

With solid power consumption figures that are only a few watts off of a Raspberry Pi 5, it might make more sense to get a TinyMiniMicro machine for your next home server. I’m definitely very happy with mine.

2025-06-08 update

The USB storage idea was a bit too insane. I saw sporadic errors on random drives, suggesting that there is an issue with the PC USB ports under long-term use. It wasn’t noticeable at all until I explicitly looked at the kernel logs, just to be safe. Good call on my part.

As a result, I have switched back to my trusty ThinkPad T430.

Some logs that demonstrate the issues, collected using journalctl -o short-precise -k -p 4:

Jun 08 01:33:32.318310 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:33:32.318603 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:33:32.320109 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825796880 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x80700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.320775 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825795856 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.321444 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825794832 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.322078 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825793808 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.322746 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825792784 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.323409 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825791760 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.324049 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825790736 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.324706 lilnas kernel: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 1825789712 op 0x0:(READ) flags 0x84700 >
Jun 08 01:33:32.324736 lilnas kernel: btrfs_repair_io_failure: 982 callbacks suppressed
Jun 08 01:41:38.201307 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:41:38.201614 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:41:38.201892 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:41:38.202158 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:41:38.202529 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 01:41:38.202814 lilnas kernel: usb 2-5: cmd cmplt err -2
Jun 08 08:33:15.572984 lilnas kernel: usb 2-4: cmd cmplt err -2

I bought the Fairphone Fairbuds XL with my own money at a recent sale for 186.75 EUR, plus 15 EUR for shipping to Estonia. The normal price for these headphones is 239 EUR.

This post is not sponsored.

I admire what Fairphone wants to achieve, even going as far as getting the Fairphone 5 as a replacement for my iPhone X.

Failing to repair my current headphones, I went ahead and decided to get the Fairphone Fairbuds XL as they also advertise the active noise-cancelling feature, and I like the Fairphone brand.

Disclaimer: this review is going to be entirely subjective and based on my opinions and experiences with other audio products in the past. I also have tinnitus.¹

I consulted rtings.com review before purchasing the product to get an idea about what to expect as a consumer.

The comparison headphones

The main point of comparison for this review is going to be the Sony WH-1000XM3, which are premium high-end wireless Bluetooth headphones, with active noise-cancelling (before that feature broke). These headphones retailed at a higher price during 2020 (about 300-400 EUR) so they are technically a tier above the Fairbuds XL, but given that its successsor, the WH-1000XM4, can be bought for 239 EUR new (and often about 200-ish EUR on sale!), then it is a fair comparison in my view.

After I replaced the ear cushions on my Sony WH-1000XM3 headset, the active noise-cancelling feature started being flaky (popping and loud noises occurring with NC on). No amount of cleaning or calibrating fixed it, and even the authorized repair shop could not do anything about it. I diagnosed the issue to be with the internal noise-cancelling microphones and found that these failing is a very common issue for these headsets, even for newer versions of it.

I am unable to compare the active noise-cancelling performance side-by-side, but I can say that the NC performance on the Sony WH-1000XM3 was simply excellent when it did work, no doubt about it.

The Fairphone shop experience

The first issue I had with the product was actually buying it. For some reason, the form would not accept my legal name which has letter “Õ” in it, a common vowel in Estonia. Knowing how poorly Javascript-based client-side validation can be built, I pulled a pro gamer move and copy-pasted my name into the form, which bypassed the faulty check altogether.

Similar issue occurred with the address field, as we also have the letter “Ä” ( and “Ö”, “Ü”, for that matter).

The name

I can understand why Fairphone went with the name “Fairbuds XL”, it kind of made sense in their audio product line, and Apple set a precedent with AirPods Max.

However, there is such a big missed opportunity here: they could’ve called the product…

Fairphones.

Yes, it would cause some confusion about their other product line, which is the Fairphone, but at least I would find the name more amusing.

Packaging

The packaging for the headphones is quite similar to what you’d get with the Fairphone 5: lots of cardboard and seemingly no plastic or otherwise problematic materials.

Aside from the headphones themselves, you also get a nice egg bag, meant to protect your headphones when travelling with them.

It’s okay, but nothing special, and it won’t protect your headphones from physical damage should they fall or get thrown around in a backpack. The Sony headphones come with a solid hardcase, which have done a fantastic job of protecting the headphones over the last 4 years. Longevity of a device depends both on repairability and durability, which is why a hard case would benefit the Fairbuds XL a lot.

Factory defect

My experience with the Fairbuds XL were off to a rocky start.

I noticed that the USB-C cable that connects both sides of the headphones was inserted incorrectly. The headphones worked fine, but you could feel the flat USB-C cable being twisted inside the headband. The fix to this was to carefully push the headband back, disconnect the USB-C cable from the headphones, flip the cable around and reconnect it.

Not a good first impression, but at least the fix was simple enough.

Fit and feel

The Fairbuds XL are not as comfortable as the reference headphones. The ear cushions and headrest are quite hard and not as soft as on the Sony WH-1000XM3. If you get the fit just right, then you probably won’t have issues with wearing these for a few hours at the time, but I found myself adjusting these often to stop them from hurting my ears and head even during a short test.

The ear cups lack any kind of swiveling, which is likely contributing to the comparatively poor fit. Our ears are angled ever-so-slightly forwards, and the Sony WH-1000XM3 feels so much better on the ears as a result of its swiveling aspect.

I also noticed that you can hear some components inside the headphones rattling when moving your head. This noise is very noticeable even during music playback and you don’t need to move your head a lot to hear that rattling. In my view, this is a serious defect in the product.

When the headphones are folded in, the USB-C cable gets bent in the process and gets forced against one of the ear cushions. I suspect that within months or years of use, either the cable will fail or the ear cushion gets a permanent imprint of the USB-C cable position.

The sound

I’m not impressed with the sound that the Fairbuds XL produce. They are not in the same class as the Sony WH-1000XM3, with the default equalizer sounding incredibly bland. Most instruments and sounds are bland and not as clear. That’s the best I can describe it as.

The Fairbuds app can be used to tune the sound via the equalizer, and out of all the presets I’ve found “Boston” to be the most pleasant one to use. Unfortunately the UI does not show how the presets customize the values in the equalizer, which makes tweaking a preset all that much harder.

Compared to the Sony WH-1000XM3, I miss the cripsy sound and the all-encompassing bass, it can really bring all the satisfying details out. Given that I had used the Sony headphones for almost 5 years at this point may also just mean that I had gotten used to how it sounds.

Active noise-cancelling

The active noise-cancelling performance is nowhere near the Sony WH-1000XM3-s. The effect is very minor, and you’ll be hearing most of the surrounding sounds.

Touching the active noise-cancelling microphones on the sides of the headphones will also make a loud sound inside the speaker, and walking around in a room will result in the headphones making wind noises. Because of this, I consider the active noise-cancelling functionality to be functionally broken.

Microphone quality

I used the Fairbuds XL in a work call, and based on feedback from other attendees, the microphone quality over Bluetooth can be categorized as barely passable, getting a solid 2 points out of 5.

To be fair, Bluetooth microphone quality is also not great on the Sony WH-1000XM3-s, but compared to the Fairphone Fairbuds XL, they are still subjectively better.

Fairbuds app

The Fairbuds app is very simple, and you’d mainly want to use it for setting the equalizer settings and upgrading the firmware. The rest of the functionality seems to be a bunch of links to Fairphone articles and guides.

The first time I installed the app, it told me that a firmware upgrade version V90 is available. During the first attempt, the progress bar stopped.

Second attempt: it almost reached the end and did not complain about a firmware upgrade being available after that.

Third attempt came after I had reinstalled the app. And there it was, the version V90 update, again. This time it got stuck at 1%.

I’m probably still on the older version of the firmware, but I honestly can’t tell.

Bluetooth multi-device connecting

This is a feature that I didn’t know I needed in my life.

With the reference Sony WH-1000XM3-s, whenever I wanted to switch where I listen to music from, I had to disconnect from my phone and then reconnect on the desktop, which was an annoying and manual process.

With the Fairbuds XL, I can connect the headphones to both my laptop and phone and play media wherever, the headphones will switch to whichever device I’m actually using! This, too, has its quirks, and there might be a small delay when playing media on the other device, but I’ve grown so accustomed to using this feature now and can’t imagine myself going back to using anything else.

This feature is not unique to the Fairbuds XL as other modern wireless headphones are also likely to boast this feature, but this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to try this out myself. It’s a tremendous quality of life improvement for me.

However, this, too, is not perfect. If I have the headphones connected to my phone and laptop, and I change to headset mode on the laptop for a meeting, then the playback on the phone will be butchered until I completely disconnect the headphones from the laptop. This seems like a firmware issue to me.

The controls

The Fairbuds XL has one button and one joystick. The button controls the active noise-cancelling settings (NC on, Ambient sound, NC off), plus the Bluetooth pairing mode.

The joystick is used to turn the device on, switch songs and control the volume, and likely some other settings that relate to accepting calls and the like.

Coming from the Sony WH-1000XM3, I have to say that I absolutely LOVE having physical buttons again! It’s so much easier to change the volume level, skip songs and start/stop playback with a physical button compared to the asinine touch surface solution that Sony has going on.

The joystick is not perfect, skipping a song can be a little bit tricky due to how the joystick is positioned, you can’t always get a good handle due to your fingers hitting the rest of the headphone assembly. That’s the only concern I have with it. If the joystick was a little bit concave and larger, then that may make some of these actions easier for those of us with modest/large thumbs.

The audio cue for skipping songs is a bit annoying and cannot seemingly be disabled. The sound effect resembles someone hitting a golf ball with a very poor driver.

The ANC settings button is alright, but it’s not possible to quickly cycle between the three modes, you will have to fully listen to the nice lady speaking and then you can move on to the next setting. I wish that clicking the button in rapid succession would skip through the modes faster.

USB-C port functionality

I was curious to see if the Fairbuds XL worked as normal headphones if I just connected them up to my PC using a USB-C cable. To my surprise, they did! The audio quality was not as good as with Bluetooth, and the volume controls depended on which virtual device you select in your operating system. The Sony WH-1000XM3 do not work like this, the USB-C port is for charging only as far as I’ve tested, but it does have an actual 3.5mm port for wired use.

When connected over Bluetooth and you connect a charging cable, the Fairbuds XL will pause momentarily and then continue playback while charging the battery. This is incredibly handy for a wireless device, especially in situations where you have an important meeting coming up and you’re just about to run out of battery. The Sony WH-1000XM3 will simply power off when you connect a charger cable, rendering them unusable while charging.

Annoying issues

For some reason, whenever I charge my Fairbuds XL, they magically turn on again and I have to shut them off a second time.

I’m never quite sure if I’ve managed to shut the headphones off. It does the jingle that indicates that it’s powered off, but then I come back to it later and I find that they’re powered on again.

Customer care experience

I was so unhappy with the product that I tried out the refunding process for the Fairphone Fairbuds XL.

I ordered the Fairbuds XL on 2025-02-10 and I received them on 2025-02-14, shipped to Estonia. According to Fairphone’s own materials, I can return the headphones without any questions asked, assuming that my use of them matches what can be done at a physical store.

For Fairphone Products, including gift cards, you purchased on the Fairphone Webshop, you have a legal right to change your mind within 14 days and receive a refund amounting to the purchase price of the products and the costs of delivery and return. You are entitled to cancel your purchase within fourteen (14) days from the day the products were delivered to you, without explanation and without any penalties.

In the case of a Cool-off, Fairphone may reduce the refund of the purchase price (including delivery costs) to reflect any reduction in the value of the Products, if this has been caused by your handling them in a way which would not normally be permitted in a shop. This means You are entitled to turn on and inspect Your purchased device to familiarise yourself with its properties and ensure that it is working correctly – comparable to the conditions that are permitted within a shop.

It took me almost 4 months to receive a refund from Fairphone, and even then it happened through a chargeback that I initiated through my bank. During those 4 months, I also had to send the device back twice because of a processing error on Fairphone’s part. I have detailed the full experience in this post.

Based on the experiences by others in the Fairphone community forum, it seems that unacceptably large delays in customer service are the norm for Fairphone.

Fairphone, if you want to succeed as a company, you need to make sure that the one part of your company that’s directly interfacing with your actual paying customers needs to be appropriately staffed and resourced. A bad customer support experience can turn off a brand evangelist overnight.

Closing thoughts

I want Fairphone to succeed in their mission, but products like these do not further the cause.

The feature set of the Fairbuds XL seems competent, and I’m willing to give a pass on a few minor issues if the overall experience is good, but the unimpressive sound profile, broken active noise-cancelling mode, multiple quality issues and poor customer service mean that I can’t in good conscience recommend the Fairphone Fairbuds XL, not even on sale.

Perhaps less resources should be spent on rebranding and more on engineering good products.

I’ve changed my home server setup a lot over the past decade, mainly because I keep changing the goals all the time.

I’ve now realized why that keeps happening.

I want the perfect home server.

What is the perfect home server? I’d phrase it like this:

The perfect home server uses very little power, offers plenty of affordable storage and provides a lot of performance when it’s actually being relied upon.

In my case, low power means less than 5 W while idling, 10+ TB of redundant storage for data resilience and integrity concerns, and performance means about 4 modern CPU cores’ worth (low-to-midrange desktop CPU performance). I seem to only ever get one or two at most.

Low power usage? Your performance will likely suffer, and you can’t run too many storage drives. You can run SSD-s, but they are not affordable if you need higher capacities.

Lots of storage? Well, there goes the low power consumption goal, especially if you run 3.5" hard drives.

Lots of performance? Lots of power consumed!

There’s just something that annoys me whenever I do things on my home server and I have to wait longer than I should, and yet I’m bothered when my monitoring tells me that my home server is using 50+ watts.¹

I keep an eye out for developments in the self-hosting and home server spaces with the hopes that I’ll one day stumble upon the holy grail, that one server that fits all my needs. I’ve gotten close, but no matter what setup I have, there’s always something that keeps bothering me.

I’ve seen a few attempts at the perfect home server, covered by various tech reviewers, but they always have at least one critical flaw. Sometimes the whole package is actually great, the functionality rocks, and then you find that the hardware contains prototype-level solutions that result in the power consumption ballooning to over 30 W. Or the price is over 1000 USD/EUR, not including the drives. Or it’s only available in certain markets and the shipping and import duties destroy its value proposition.

There is no affordable platform out there that provides great performance, flexibility and storage space, all while being quiet and using very little power.²

Desktop PC-s repurposed as home servers can provide room for a lot of storage, and they are by design very flexible, but the trade-off is the higher power consumption of the setup.

Single board computers use very little power, but they can’t provide a lot of performance and connecting storage to them gets tricky and is overall limited. They can also get surprisingly expensive.

NAS boxes provide a lot of storage space and are generally low power if you exclude the power consumption of hard drives, but the cheaper ones are not that performant, and the performant ones cost almost as much as a high-end PC.

Laptops can be used as home servers, they are quite efficient and performant, but they lack the flexibility and storage options of desktop PC-s and NAS boxes. You can slap a USB-based DAS to it to add storage, but I’ve had poor experiences with these under high load, meaning that these approaches can’t be relied on if you care about your data and server stability.

Then there’s the option of buying used versions of all of the above. Great bang for buck, but you’re likely taking a hit on the power efficiency part due to the simple fact that technology keeps evolving and getting more efficient.

I’m still hopeful that one day a device exists that ticks all the boxes while also being priced affordably, but I’m afraid that it’s just a pipe dream. There are builds out there that fill in almost every need, but the parts list is very specific and the bulk of the power consumption wins come from using SSD-s instead of hard drives, which makes it less affordable.

In the meantime I guess I’ll keep rocking my ThinkPad-as-a-server approach and praying that the USB-attached storage does not cause major issues.

I’ve written about abusing USB storage devices in the past, with a passing mention that I’m too cheap to buy an IODD device.

Then I bought one.

I’ve always liked the promise of tools like Ventoy: you only need to carry the one storage device that boots anything you want. Unfortunately I still can’t trust Ventoy, so I’m forced to look elsewhere.

The hardware

I decided to get the IODD ST400 for 122 EUR (about 124 USD) off of Amazon Germany, since it was for some reason cheaper than getting it from iodd.shop directly. SATA SSD-s are cheap and plentiful, so the ST400 made the most sense to me.

The device came with one USB cable, with type A and type C ends. The device itself has a USB type C port, which I like a lot.

The buttons are functional and clicky, but incredibly loud.

Setting it up

Before you get started with this device, I highly recommend glancing over the official documentation. The text is poorly translated in some parts, but overall it gets the job done.

Inserting the SSD was reasonably simple, it slotted in well and would not move around after assembling it. Getting the back cover off was tricky, but I’d rather have that than have to deal with a loose back cover that comes off when it shouldn’t.

The most important step is the filesystem choice. You can choose between NTFS, FAT32 or exFAT. Due to the maximum file size limitation of 4GB on FAT32, you will probably want to go with either NTFS or exFAT.

Once you have a filesystem on the SSD, you can start copying various installers and tools on it and mount them!

The interface is unintuitive. I had to keep the manual close when testing mine, but eventually I figured out what I can and cannot do.

Device emulation

Whenever you connect the IODD device to a powered on PC, it will present itself as multiple devices:

• normal hard drive: the whole IODD filesystem is visible here, and you can also store other files and backups as well if you want to
• optical media drive: this is where your installation media (ISO files) will end up, read only
• virtual drives (up to 3 at a time): VHD files that represent virtual hard drives, but are seen as actual storage devices on the PC

This combination of devices is incredibly handy. For example, you can boot an actual Fedora Linux installation as one of the virtual drives, and make a backup of the files on the PC right to the IODD storage itself.

S.M.A.R.T information also seems to be passed through properly for the disk that’s inside.

Tech tip: to automatically mount your current selection of virtual drives and ISO file at boot, hold down the “9” button for about 3 seconds. The button also has an exit logo on it. Without this step, booting an ISO or virtual drive becomes tricky as you’ll have to both spam the “select boot drive” key on the PC while navigating the menus on the IODD device to mount the ISO.

The performance is okay. The drive speeds are limited to SATA II speeds, which means that your read/write speeds cap out at about 250 MB/s. Latency will depend a lot on the drive, but it stays mostly in the sub-millisecond range on my SSD. The GNOME Disks benchmark does show a notable chunk of reads having a 5 millisecond latency. The drive does not seem to exhibit any throttling under sustained loads, so at least it’s better than a normal USB stick.

The speeds seem to be the same for all emulated devices, with latencies and speeds being within spitting distance.

The firmware sucks, actually

The IODD ST400 is a great idea that’s been turned into a good product, but the firmware is terrible enough to almost make me regret the purchase.

The choice of filesystems available (FAT32, NTFS, exFAT) is very Windows-centric, but at least it comes with the upside of being supported on most popular platforms, including Linux and Mac. Not great, not terrible.

The folder structure has some odd limitations. For example, you can only have 32 items within a folder. If you have more of that, you have to use nested folders. This sounds like a hard cap written somewhere within the device firmware itself. I’m unlikely to hit such limits myself and it doesn’t seem to affect the actual storage, just the device itself isn’t able to handle that many files within a directory listing.

The most annoying issue has turned out to be defragmentation.

In 2025!

It’s a known limitation that’s handily documented on the IODD documentation. On Windows, you can fix it by using a disk defragmentation tool, which is really not recommended on an SSD. On Linux, I have not yet found a way to do that, so I’ve resorted to simply making a backup of the contents of the drive, formatting the disk, and copying it all back again. This is a frustrating issue that only comes up when you try to use a virtual hard drive. It would absolutely suck to hit this error while in the field.

The way virtual drives are handled is also less than ideal. You can only use fixed VHD files that are not sparse, which seems to again be a limitation of the firmware.

Tech tip: if you’re on Linux and want to convert a raw disk image (such as a disk copied with dd) to a VHD file, you can use a command like this one:

qemu-img convert -f raw -O vpc -o subformat=fixed,force_size source.img target.vhd

The firmware really is the worst part of this device. What I would love to see is a device like IODD but with free and open source firmware. Ventoy has proven that there is a market for a solution that makes juggling installation media easy, but it can’t emulate hardware devices. An IODD-like device can.

Encryption and other features

I didn’t test those because I don’t really need those features myself, I really don’t need to protect my Linux installers from prying eyes.

Conclusion

The IODD ST400 is a good device with a proven market, but the firmware makes me refrain from outright recommending it to everyone, at least not at this price.

If it were to cost something like 30-50 EUR/USD, I would not mind the firmware issues at all.

I’ve recently made an effort to reduce the amount of tech stuff that I own. Lack of space, lack of time and the guilt of storing perfectly functional hardware unused in a box were the main motivators.

This has resulted in experiments with my assortment of USB flash storage that I’ve acquired over the years. They’re too old and cheap to be worth selling, so why not run them to the ground?

I’ve always liked the idea of USB sticks. They’re small and the good ones are actually surprisingly fast, especially compared to hard drives. This is why I started installing operating systems on them. It’s really handy to have a USB stick around with a full operating system on it for testing purposes, and I’m too cheap to buy an IODD device.¹

What I’ve learned is that Linux installed on a USB stick is a much nicer experience compared to a Windows To Go installation, even on the cheaper and crappier ones.

The Windows experience

I’ve used Rufus for creating portable Windows installations in the past, mostly on portable SSD-s. These have come in handy when I’ve had to update the firmware on certain PC-s or associated hardware, like USB-C docks.²

Recently, I took a Samsung FIT 128GB USB 3.0 drive to see how well Windows can operate off of it.

It’s horrible.

Windows will run, but the first time you boot it, you will have to wait for all sorts of driver and update installations, which puts a huge strain on the storage, making the whole experience borderline unusable. Once that process is complete (multiple hours later), it’s actually not that bad, until you receive yet another Windows update.

For a USB stick that you use only occasionally to troubleshoot hardware, Windows is a really poor choice. Even on a proper portable SSD, it will still be relatively slow due to all that driver and update installation taking place in the background.

Eventually, that installation will also probably brick itself in one way or another, and not even due to any storage failures. Simply using the same disk on multiple machines will accrue configuration and driver cruft that likely results in Windows giving up. It’s just a guesstimate on my side, but I would not be surprised if it was true.

After a Windows update run completely fried one USB stick³ that I used for testing, I gave up on it.

The Linux experience

Most Linux distributions have supported a LiveCD/LiveUSB solution for at least 15+ years at this point. It’s a neat idea: your installation media also doubles as an emergency portable installation of that Linux distro, which you can use to quickly test the functionality of a PC, repair an existing installation or install it on a new machine.

The downside of that solution is that the software on it cannot be changed. You can temporarily install new software or update existing packages during that session, or have a separate writeable partition set aside on the USB stick for storing any permanent changes, but it’s a bit of a hassle to think about that nuance every time.

This is why I went ahead and installed Fedora Linux 40 on a Sandisk Ultra 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive (the one that is actually 16GB). The storage speed is still a bottleneck, but it’s much less noticeable during normal use.

After the installation is done, you’re simply using the system as-is. Opening programs will have a slightly longer delay, but it’s still a perfectly cromulent Linux experience.

A fresh installation of Fedora Workstation 40 uses only 3.6GB of storage! On a 16GB USB flash drive, this leaves plenty of room for performing system updates and installing a small number of applications. If you choose the btrfs filesystem during the installation (the default option), then the files will also be compressed to save even more space and increase the effective storage bandwidth.⁴

You’ll only notice that you’re running off of a USB flash drive when installing new packages, performing system updates or downloading large files. At least with Linux you have control over when you want to install the updates.

Using btrfs also allows you to easily check the flash drive for any integrity issues. Simply run sudo btrfs scrub start -B / and you’ll know soon enough if your flash drive is messing with your data.

The backerupper USB stick

One actual use case that I have for a full Linux installation on a USB stick is the backerupper solution: a fully featured Fedora Linux installation, stored on a small USB stick, and with limited access to networked storage.

Most people working in IT know the joys of working with hardware that family members and relatives own. Before doing any destructive changes, it’s always a good idea to make a full disk copy of the storage on the machine you’re fixing. If you screw up, you’ll have a way of setting everything back just as it was before you did any work on it. A full disk image will also mean that nothing will be left behind before you do a fresh installation.

I already have a home server with some spare storage, so using it as a target for any backups makes perfect sense to me.

This solution has already come in handy once when I had to deal with a 10-year-old laptop with a dying hard drive.⁵

Crappy storage is still crappy

Don’t expect any kind of longevity with USB sticks, the wear leveling and endurance is not on the level of proper SSD-s. Linux is nicer to the USB stick regarding the wear and tear, but given enough time, the USB flash drive will still fail.

I will still keep using USB flash sticks for this purpose. I have backups of the USB stick installations on my server, so restoring it will simply mean getting another USB stick and writing the full disk image back to it.

USB sticks are also great for specialized solutions that don’t do a lot of IO operations. LibreELEC, a media-center oriented Linux distro, can be run off of a USB flash drive without any major issues, since its storage demands are very small (unless you install a ton of plugins).

Conclusion

Linux and USB flash storage is a great option for making backups or having a working operating system available for disaster recovery scenarios. Just mind the endurance of the flash storage, and don’t use Windows.

In 2011, I was finishing 9th grade. As a gift, I got to choose a laptop in the 400 EUR range. I ended up picking an ASUS Eee PC 1201PN. It was new and the first computer in my life that was 100% mine, but awfully slow for a lot of tasks.

It was so slow that I ended up giving Linux a go as a result. Linux! I didn’t even know computing all that well around that time!

A few years later, I bought a ThinkPad T60 off of someone I knew for about 40 EUR. It was about 8 years old at that point, but it ran circles around the new laptop that I had in performance.

That’s when I learned about the absurdly good price-to-performance ratio of used business-grade laptops, and the crappiness of netbooks.¹

Note that I keep repeating the phrase business-grade laptops. Think Lenovo ThinkPads, Dell Latitudes or HP EliteBooks.²

That’s the core of this whole idea. Consumer-grade laptops are cheaper when bought new, but that is a result of a lot of compromises made in the build quality. Business-grade laptops are used for work and need to be reliable for years, which means that they will last for a long time.

Used laptops are cheap

I recently checked what the prices are for used laptops, mainly focusing on the 100-300 EUR range as I find that to be the sweet spot for bargains.

For 195 EUR, I can get a ThinkPad X395, sporting an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U quad-core CPU, 16 GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD, sold by a store that specializes in selling used hardware. You even get a 6-month warranty! That’s crazy good value.

New business-grade laptops cost somewhere around 1000-2000+ EUR. They are generally faster and provide more memory and storage, but in the best case scenario that performance difference will be 2-3x at best, while the price is 5-10+ times higher. The math does not check out.

The price depreciation curve is also quite harsh on new laptops. You can pay 2000 EUR for a new laptop and only be able to sell it for 1000 EUR a year from now. Two years later? 500-700 EUR. The prices eventually settle at around the 5 year mark, which also happens to align with the extended warranties expiring.

Used laptops reduce stress

With used laptops, you don’t have to worry about the wear-and-tear that much.

You accidentally drop your laptop on the floor? It might still be fine!

Your child picked off all the keycaps on the keyboard? No worries, replacements are easy to find!

Your lunch for the day ended up leaking all over the laptop, killing it completely? No problem, you can get a new one and still end up paying less compared to a new laptop!

Buying used is no excuse to mistreat your hardware, but I personally love the lack of stress associated with trying to keep a new and expensive object in pristine condition. The laptop already has some cosmetic damage on it, so why worry?

Used laptops are surprisingly reliable

Reliability is often one of the top reasons why some people avoid buying used laptops. I attribute this to the experiences people have with used cars. You pay less, until you pay a lot more to get that hunk of junk fixed once it breaks down on you.

I’ve had the complete opposite experience with used business-grade laptops. The ones that make it to the used market have gone through years of reliability testing, and those that don’t make it were defective anyway. The only areas to pay attention to is basic maintenance (remove dust, apply new thermal paste) and a potential battery replacement, which are quite simple to do on modern business-grade laptops. It’s so easy that even children and teenagers can do it with a little bit of guidance and supervision!

The reliability doesn’t stop with the hardware. Buying used often means that you’ll be buying a laptop that has received all the software and firmware fixes to all sorts of issues. Linux users will also have a much better time with used laptops since by that time most of the issues associated with new hardware will have been fixed in the kernel.

You should avoid buying new and used consumer-grade laptops. I’ve seen so many of those with missing pieces of plastic and the hinges breaking open the laptop case, but rarely with business-grade laptops.

Used business-grade laptops are so reliable that some companies are even willing to rent and support those machines for a really low price.

Exceptions to the rule

There will always be a place for new laptops.

Sometimes you do need the latest and greatest hardware for CAD work, complex video editing or high-end gaming.

Some people find that a 30-second build of their software project taking 20 seconds is worth the productivity gain, regardless of the higher price or increased environmental impact of buying new.

Some simply want to play around with the latest and greatest, for fun.

There will always be people who find the idea of used laptops off-putting, and companies do prefer to buy pallet-loads of new laptops every few years.

On the bright side, this does mean that there will always be a supply of cheap used laptops available for the rest of us.

Conclusion

If you ever need a laptop and your needs are not extremely specific, then give a used business-grade laptop a try. It will be fine, I promise.

This is a follow-up to my two previous attempts on this topic:

• Can a laptop from 2012 be a viable home server?
• ThinkPad as a server: the follow-up

Since then, I’ve had quite a few changes to my home server setup:

• I put my home server stuff on an IKEA pegboard
• I tried the Zimaboard
• I switched back to the ASRock DeskMini
• I got fiber again!

Zimaboard was great, until the CPU became just a little bit too slow for my needs.

ASRock Deskmini X300 was great, until I learned that it’s actually relatively bad at idle power usage due to lack of lower sleep states.

Combined with my recent tech cleanup, I am now proudly running all of my services on a single home server, powered by my trusty ThinkPad T430.

The promise of USB-C everything was too good to pass up, so I stopped resisting.

Doesn’t mean that I won’t run hardware into the ground.

Compared to last two attempts, I’ve made a couple of important changes to the setup.

There is a weekly tlp recalibrate BAT0 job scheduled that completely drains the battery and charges it up again, which should make sure that the laptop battery survives for a longer time. The battery charge threshold is set to 80%.

I’ve used a knock-off Honeywell PTM7950 thermal pad on the CPU. The cooling performance is comparable to using thermal paste, but hopefully it doesn’t drip out.

The whole setup is mounted to an IKEA pegboard using a Nillkin ProDesk laptop stand and a generous amount of zip ties. The combination of zip ties and the rubber feet on the stand result in the stand barely moving once mounted. The laptop stand itself is very sturdy, and you’ll have to use a lot of force to change its angle.

The CPU uses less power compared to the previous one. The one in the server is the Intel i7-3632QM, a quad-core CPU with a 35W TDP.

I still have some scripts running to limit the CPU temperatures to 85°C, just to be on the safe side and avoid overheating at all costs.

The power consumption is improved on this setup:

• mean: 27 W
• min: 23 W
• max: 70 W

Results on the DeskMini on a typical day:

• mean: 34.8 W
• min: 28 W
• max: 89 W

All measurements include the power consumption of the UPS, fiber PON and the router, which is around 10 W.

And the performance is good enough.

I’m happy with it.

It’s also handy that I now have that one laptop that I can sticker bomb without feeling guilty about removing them later on.

2025 June update

I have been running the ThinkPad T430 as a home server for a long time now. In fact, it’s one of the longest stints I’ve had with a specific home server setup. The battery recalibration was temporarily disabled because of it interfering with UPower configuration that I had in place for shutting down the laptop at a higher battery percentage (40%), but in all other aspects it’s doing fine, and after removing UPower, the battery recalibration works again.

There was a short week-long experiment with a ThinkCentre M900 Tiny, but that got put on pause because the USB-connected drives were a bit flaky. The ThinkPad T430 has proven itself to be a more stable server platform as a result.

I had the opportunity to test the resiliency of my home server setup due to a scheduled power outage on 2024-09-13.

It was also Friday the 13th. I’m not superstitious, but I’m a little stitious.

My setup usually consists of the home server, a Wifi AP/router combo box, a converter box for the fiber line, and a CyberPower UT850EG UPS.

The planned power outage was communicated a week in advance and was supposed to take up to two hours. It ended up taking about 1 hour 20 minutes.

The CyberPower UPS is good for temporary loss of power and can probably run my whole networking and home server setup for about 10-15 minutes, which is not enough. Luckily I have one of those Jackery power banks that can provide 230V output for a much longer time. During a trial run, I found that this Jackery box can sustain my homelab for about 4 hours without any issues.

At 11:02, the power went out and UPS did its thing and kept the setup alive. I then turned on the Jackery power bank, connected the UPS to the 230 V power line and everything remained operational. I continued working on my laptop as usual.

My blog and all the other services I run on my home server kept working.

I hope to one day do something similar but on a bigger scale, involving solar panels and big batteries. Would be wicked cool to keep a whole building running off of batteries during outages.

I helped a family member upgrade to a newer iPhone and make some room so that the internal storage does not run out.

They had Nextcloud installed on the current phone, but due to limitations of the Nextcloud iOS app, the backups only take place if the app itself is open, meaning that we had hundreds of photos and videos that were not yet backed up.¹

The network was slow and I was in a time crunch, so I opted to copy the media off of the phone by connecting the iPhone to my laptop over a Lightning cable. After entering the PIN on the phone again and approving the connection, I could see the iPhone in my file manager, but opening it would show nothing at all. This was very unusual as other iPhones I used in the past just worked on my laptop.

Rebooting the phone and connecting it again did nothing. Different known good Lightning cables did not improve things, either. Even a separate Windows 10 machine could not see any images, so it wasn’t a Linux thing.

Various Apple-related posts online were devoid of useful advice.²

I was not ready to give up just yet and I finally stumbled upon this Ask Ubuntu answer. This had potential, so I gave it a go, and I’m happy to report that it worked on my Fedora Linux machine!

These are the steps that I took. The commands need to be run in a terminal window.

Tested with Fedora Linux 40.

• install the necessary packages
  • on Fedora, run sudo dnf install -y ifuse libimobiledevice libimobiledevice-utils
• connect your iPhone to your PC
  • if your phone is not yet paired, then run idevicepair pair
  • if it’s already paired, verify the connection by running idevicepair validate
• mount your phone to an empty folder of your choice
  • if an empty folder does not exist, run mkdir ~/my-iphone (use any folder name that you want)
  • to mount the phone, run ifuse ~/my-iphone
• you can now browse your media via your file manager or terminal by navigating to ~/my-iphone
  • photos and videos taken by the camera will be in the DCIM folder
  • other folders, such as Photos and Downloads may also interest you
  • to make a full copy of your phone to a folder named iphone-backup, run cp -r ~/my-iphone ~/iphone-backup
  • alternative way to create a full backup: rsync -aAXv ~/my-iphone ~/iphone-backup
• once you’re done, unmount the iPhone by running umount ~/my-iphone
• it is now safe to disconnect your iPhone from the PC

If you have copied everything over and want to make more space on your phone using this method, then you need to delete files under the DCIM folder and the cached thumbnails under the PhotoData folder. iOS seems to generate thumbnails for the photos you take and even if you delete all the actual photos off of the device, then the photo thumbnails will still show up in the Photos app and elsewhere. This confused the hell out of me after I deleted the backed up photos off the phone the first time.

Alternatively, you can just delete files from the Photos app on the phone itself to avoid this nuance.

Linux has its flaws, but at least it provides you with the power and tools needed to get you out of tricky situations.

I probably shouldn’t have written down my notes on the eGPU setup I had years ago.

I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later.

Oops.

I got access to an allegedly-faulty AMD Radeon RX 480 and an NVIDIA GTX 1650 for free thanks to my friend, so I ordered the EXP GDC Beast v8.5c, two sorts of 6/8pin power cables, and a 12V 12A DC power supply.

The idea was to take a ThinkPad T430, bolt a GPU to it, and use it as a stationary workstation until the laptop dies or gets too slow for modern tasks. The resale value of the T430 is too low for me to justify selling it, and if there’s anyone out there who can run a T430 into the ground 5+ years from now, then it’s probably going to be me.

Quick specs:

• CPU: Intel i7-3820QM
• RAM: 16GB DDR3
• Storage: 4TB Samsung 870 QVO

Side-note: I also went ahead and replaced the thermal paste with a bootleg Honeywell PTM7950 phase-changing thermal pad. It works just as well as fresh thermal paste, but hopefully it won’t drip out if the laptop is running up-right, in a vertical laptop stand.

Testing

My testing with the GTX 1650 was brief, as the open source nouveau driver crashed on the Wayland desktop¹, the proprietary drivers under Fedora did not seem to work, and under Windows the NVIDIA driver intentionally triggers the error code 43 issue. A tweak exists for the Windows issue, but that didn’t help much either.

The AMD Radeon RX 480 seems to work well out of the box on Windows 11, plug-and-play. However, it wasn’t that stable, but that could be related to the possibly faulty GPU itself or the power supply that can barely drive it under load. Or the fact that Windows itself was running off of a 128GB Samsung USB 3.0 flash drive. Probably the latter, given that the USB stick died as a result of this experiment.

On Fedora Linux 40, I discovered that eGPU-s aren’t really plug and play. Sure, the image is there, but on my ultrawide monitor I saw a whopping 11 frames per second! Turns out that by default GNOME on Wayland doesn’t like to use the eGPU as the main rendering device, even on more legitimate Thunderbolt-based eGPU setups. It’s a common enough problem that there exist multiple solutions to this issue.

I didn’t like any of them², so I disabled the i915 kernel driver responsible for driving the iGPU, which did the trick. The 3440x1440p ultrawide monitor was being rendered by the eGPU and for the most part the experience was very smooth.

The iGPU in the T430 can also run the ultrawide monitor at 60 Hz via the DisplayPort port on the dock, but it can’t run things at 60 FPS at all times because it’s really, really weak.

The eGPU ran things much smoother, which made the whole setup feel more responsive and great to use. It’s not the fastest setup in the world, but the GUI running smoothly certainly makes it feel like one.

I didn’t have a ton of games installed for testing, but I did give Minecraft a try, and it ran just fine. The CPU was struggling when building new parts of the map, but the visuals were doing fine and I could see myself playing on this setup for hours.

There were some things that weren’t running smoothly even with the eGPU. For example, 1080p H.265 video playback was awfully choppy. Using radeontop revealed around 80% GPU usage, so either the decoding engine is crap on this GPU, or the very limited PCIe bandwidth and CPU-GPU data transferring is the culprit.

I also tested LibreELEC to see how it handles the eGPU and I’m happy to report that it renders Kodi on it by default, with the UI running very smoothly.

On Linux I also saw some stability issues and crashes, but those could also be down to the faulty GPU or the PSU being underpowered. I can probably rule out the latter by limiting the GPU clock speeds, and the Arch wiki has some great instructions for that. Those toggles do work, but I noticed that GNOME can be a bit choppier when the GPU switches between lower power states to higher ones.

The physical stability of this setup is questionable, especially if you use a bigger GPU. Most prefabricated cases for this eGPU adapter assume that you’re running it with an ATX/SFX PSU, so those are out of the question for me. There exist some 3D printable designs out there, but they can sometimes be very specific to a particular setup or GPU, so I’d have to design my own.

The power consumption of this setup isn’t great, unfortunately. Using a smart plug I measured the idle power of the eGPU component to be about 20W. Typical desktop usage and video playback results in around 50W and peaks around 120-130W, which is right on the limit of the shoddy PSU I’m using.

If I had the choice to pick any GPU for this setup, then I’d likely opt for a modern AMD GPU that didn’t require additional power via the 6/8 pin power connector as that option would likely be a lot more efficient while yielding similar performance.

I ended up disassembling the setup in the end, partly because I misdiagnosed a Mesa bug to be a GPU issue, and because the RX 480 really was acting weird from time to time, even with LibreELEC.

Not all experiments end up being successful.

Conclusion

I think that these types of eGPU adapters are great even in 2024, but only for a small number of very specific use cases, and with GPU-s that actually work.

If you already have an older laptop around, and a compatible spare GPU collecting dust, then this setup will make sense for desktop or media playback machines, and perhaps gaming if your demands are not very high.

I don’t suggest building this setup from scratch, it’s probably not worth the money and hassle. Used gaming PC-s that have similar specifications to this eGPU build, but with no funny PCIe bandwidth limitations, go for less than 200 EUR at this point.

The ThinkPad T430 has a few options for running it with an external display:

• VGA port, which is pretty much obsolete at this point
• mini DisplayPort connector on the laptop itself
• DVI or DisplayPort on a dock

The mini DisplayPort port has annoyed me for as long as I’ve had this machine.

Most places where I’ve had to present something only offer an HDMI cable, which means that I always have to carry a dongle around, and I keep forgetting to bring one everywhere I happen to go.

Until now.

I have a few of these SATA HDD adapters that replace the optical drive on the ThinkPad T430, and I discovered that my mini DisplayPort to HDMI adapter can fit in one without a problem.

I don’t currently have a need for a second SSD in my T430, so this “mod” makes perfect sense to me.

I bet there is someone out there who is capable of routing an actual HDMI port in place of this adapter. The existence of FHD mods for this laptop suggests that this is possible. If you’re that person and created that mod, let me know.

The ThinkPad T430 is not a remarkable laptop. It’s thick, bulky and built like a tank. I got mine in 2016 when the first university scholarship money dropped, and it’s still my backup laptop of choice.

Around 2017 I did something every reasonable poor computer science student would do: I got an eGPU adapter for it to play some games. I never ended up playing many games, but I loved tinkering with and testing this setup a lot.

These are my notes on the setup that I used to have. The notes used to be on Reddit, but after yet another user-hostile change¹ I deleted my account and all the content associated with it.

The specs

The ThinkPad T430 that I used had a CPU swap at one point, running an Intel i7-3820QM. This upgrade doubled the CPU performance on the laptop compared to the dual-core CPU that was in it before. This change was critical because it opened the door to running lots of modern games at reasonable performance.

The eGPU adapter I ran with was the EXP GDC Beast v8.4, using the ExpressCard34 connector. This adapter turned the ExpressCard34 slot into a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot. It’s not really hotpluggable, but using this connector instead of something like the internal Wi-Fi adapter slot made this setup much more portable. Done gaming? Shut down, disconnect the ExpressCard cable and you’re good to go!

This adapter is also a good example of connector reuse. The other end of the ExpressCard plug is an HDMI port. Video signals require good quality cables, and so does PCI Express.

The eGPU was once powered by a simple ATX PSU with the jumper wire set on the 24-pin connector, but eventually I bought a Dell DA-2 power supply. The adapter has a power connector designed specifically for that pinout and it made the setup a lot cleaner.

At one point I got a fully metal case for the eGPU. It made the setup a lot cleaner and the risk of the GPU tipping over while turned on was also substantially reduced.

I tested a few GPU-s:

• AMD Radeon HD 6870
• nVidia GTX 950
• nVidia GTX 1080
• AMD Radeon RX 480

The HD 6870 was an old card back in 2017, and it did not run great at all with this eGPU adapter. It was buggy and the performance sucked.

Loaner GPU-s, such as the RX 480 and GTX 1080 were much better experiences, as long as you output the video signal to an external display right from the GPU.

The nVidia GTX 950 was the card I ran with for the longest time in this setup. It worked well with this setup and had decent gaming performance.

eGPU tech tips

You will want to use an eGPU adapter with an external monitor for the best performance. The PCIe bandwidth is very limited in a setup like this. Using the internal display of the laptop will mean that the final rendered image will have to be sent back from the eGPU to the CPU. 1x PCIe 2.0 lane is about 500 MB/s of bandwidth. Sending 60+ frames in the native resolution (1600x900) will eat it all up. The higher the resolution on the internal display, the fewer frames you’ll get.

I tested out these two scenarios in CSGO. The internal display yielded about 61 FPS while an external display would result in 100-180+ FPS.

The PCIe link bandwidth was not actually that noticeable in a lot of games, such as GTA V, Rocket League and Dirt 3.

In some games, such as Dirt Rally (2015), it did not matter what settings you went with, something about the game made it run poorly no matter what graphics settings you went with. In cases like that you might as well cap the framerate to something tolerable like 30 FPS and crank the graphics settings up.

VFIO on a laptop???

This setup was also around the time when I first learned about the magical world of VFIO and GPU passthrough.

The logical continuation of that discovery was to try it out on my laptop, and to my surprise it actually worked. I could pass the eGPU to a VM and play GTA V on it!

This setup ran on Antergos OS, a flavor of Arch Linux. It’s been so long since then that the flavor of Arch Linux is now discontinued.²

The laptop was ideal for this purpose as well. You have the integrated GPU, display, keyboard and mouse for the host system, and you can pass USB devices and the eGPU to the VM.

There were the usual VFIO tricks that I had to try out to avoid the dreaded error code 43 issue, but after that it was smooth sailing.

The performance was very similar to what I saw on the host system.

Here’s a clip of me recording this setup while playing GTA V. Smartphone cameras have come a long way since then.

ExpressCard eGPU-s in 2024?

What got me started with writing down my notes were some YouTube videos that were made on this topic recently.

A pimped-out ThinkPad T430 can still be a perfectly serviceable computer in 2024, and an eGPU will completely sidestep the problem of the weak integrated GPU.

The T430 is not powerful enough to natively run a 3440x1440 ultrawide monitor at 60 Hz. It is even struggling to do it at 30 Hz. An eGPU adapter with a modern low-power GPU, such as the AMD Radeon RX 6400, could solve this issue nicely and give the ThinkPad T430 a new lease of life.

I’d be lying if I wasn’t considering remaking this setup with everything I’ve learned 6 years later. GPU pricing sucks, though.³ They still sell these eGPU kits in various forms, however the price has doubled or even tripled over the years.

If you’re interested in building a similar setup, then do check out egpu.io. With an M.2 or Thunderbolt connector you can build a much more capable eGPU setup.

If you can get a PCI Express signal out of a computer, then you can probably rig a GPU up to it. Unless you’re Jeff Geerling, in which case you might need to recompile the kernel a few times.

A family member has a Canon PIXMA MP250 printer, originally released in 2009. It has been a very reliable piece of hardware, especially for a printer.

Then came Windows 10. The printer would not work out of the box with it and the official drivers got stuck during installation. Fiddling with the printer in device manager, trying to install drivers via Windows Update and stars aligning got the printer to work again.

Then came Windows 11. Nothing I did could get it working now, and the printer is not even officially supported by Canon on this version of Windows.

This printer works out of the box on any mainstream Linux distribution, and the family member had been using the printer with Ubuntu for years, but a certain piece of important software in Estonia was not working properly a lot of the time, which triggered a switch to Windows.¹

Quick searches online suggested that I could turn this printer into a network printer, as long as I had some patience and a spare computer.

The idea is simple: take a spare computer, hook it up to the printer, install CUPS on it, configure it and you’re good to go!

I initially tested this setup with a Zimaboard running Fedora Server, but the final solution used an old Raspberry Pi B+ running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS.

How to set it up

The steps will be similar with other pieces of hardware and Linux distributions, you may just need to adjust a few commands and package names.

The steps are roughly based on these two guides:

• Setting up Network Printer with Raspberry Pi and CUPS
• Raspberry Pi Print Server: Setup a Network Printer

If you’re following along with a Raspberry Pi, set up your OS first. A minimal installation with no graphical interface will be just fine.

Next, install CUPS and optionally the right printer drivers for your printer. The Canon PIXMA MP250 requires the package printer-driver-gutenprint.

sudo apt install -y cups printer-driver-gutenprint

Make sure that CUPS is running.

sudo systemctl enable --now cups.service

Next, allow your user to manage printing. In this example, the username is pi.

sudo usermod -a -G lpadmin pi

Next, make sure that CUPS allows connections from other machines in your network, and then restart it.

sudo cupsctl --remote-any
sudo systemctl restart cups

Find out the IP address of the Pi and navigate to it in your browser. It will look something like https://192.168.0.49:631. The browser will likely warn you about a self-signed certificate. It’s safe to proceed.

If you haven’t already connected your printer to the Raspberry Pi via USB, then do so now.

Use the graphical interface to add a new printer under the Administration section. You’ll need to enter the username and password for your user here. It’s the same user we used earlier, so in this example it’s pi.

If you can’t find your printer model listed in the Add printer view, then you are probably missing the proper driver package, or your printer simply isn’t supported.

After adding your printer, you can use the CUPS web interface to print a test page.

If that worked, then you should now be able to use any other device on the network to print!

On Linux and Windows, open the settings section that handles printing, and add a new printer. This networked printer should appear automagically, no additional configuration required.

I also did testing using a Fairphone 5 running Android 13, and an iPhone X running iOS 16. In both cases the printing just worked.

I’ve used the scanning functionality of this particular printer on Linux and it has worked, however I forgot to test this out using this setup. I’ll try to test that out once I get the chance to try the printer out again.

Hardware tech tips

I first ran this setup with a Zimaboard to test the idea out. It worked very well, but as a simple print server it is a bit overkill.

I then replaced it with a Raspberry Pi B+, and while the printing works, I discovered that a single ARM CPU core is apparently a limiting factor during printing. A simple test page print pegged the CPU at 100%, and that’s with the 700->1000 MHz overclock applied.

If you don’t mind a slower printing speed, then any Raspberry Pi will be absolutely OK. More performant versions of Raspberry Pi will likely fare even better.

If you already have a small home server running, then you may want to hook the printer up to that and set up the printer there. It’s already running 24/7, so it would be a perfect match.

One useful aspect of this setup is that you can queue up print jobs even when the printer itself is powered off. Once you turn it on, the print jobs will start, assuming that you have enough paper and ink.

Free open source software prolongs the useful life of hardware once again. See y’all in October 2025!

2024-06-15 update

This post got featured on:

• XDA Developers
• hackster.io
• Hackaday
• Hacker News

And even the leader of OpenPrinting, Till Kamppeter, chimed in! They also held a talk about OpenPrinting at FOSDEM 2024.

Regarding scanning, seems like there’s a separate project for that called SANE - Scanner Access Now Easy.

Find out more about OpenPrinting here.

2024-11-14 update

A reader shared with me the p910nd project that can be used for a similar purpose. I have not yet tried this myself.

There’s even an OpenWRT page that describes its use on a router!

I’ve reached a point in my setup where most of the devices that I use are based around the coveted USB-C port. This meant that I had a valid reason to get a few extra because I didn’t yet have a stockpile of good USB-C cables.

That’s when I found out that there exist cables that have little screens on them that show the power consumption of the connected device. This is a great little addition to my power consumption monitoring addiction. It’s also a simple way to understand if your device is charging at the speed that you expect it to.

The cable I ordered cost 6.72 EUR. It is a bit stiff and hard to work with, probably due to its supposed USB 4 support requiring actually good cabling and shielding. It works well enough for an USB-C dock with a DisplayPort connection that’s running a 3440x1440 display at 60 Hz.

It’s too early to give a definitive answer about the longevity of the cable.

You should be able to find these types of cables with a search query like “USB 4 Cable with LED Display”.

The paranoid side of me suspects that a cable like this one would be an ideal place to hide a malicious chip. That’s the only downside that I can think of.

If you’re interested in going more in depth with measuring the power consumption over USB, then you might want to look at other options. This GitHub repository lists a few examples of these types of measuring devices.

I recently busted out my old ThinkPad T40, the last of the OG IBM ThinkPads.

I picked it up some time around my university days because I liked collecting ThinkPads at the time, and it was a nice complement to my existing ThinkPad T60 and T430.

The battery is dead, but everything else still works. Checking a few online listings, I’m surprised that I can still find batteries sold for this model. Probably old stock that’s been sitting around in a warehouse slowly discharging to death, but hey, you might get lucky!

I also learned that I had replaced the internal IDE hard drive with a 16 GB mSATA SSD via an adapter at one point. I don’t think they even sell SSD-s that small nowadays, but the size feels age-appropriate.

I had already installed a flavor of Linux on this, but had completely forgotten the password.¹ This was a good excuse to wipe it and see if I can install a modern mainstream Linux distro on it.

I went with Debian 12 (Bookworm). It’s the newest Debian release, and unlike many other distros, they still offer 32-bit installers.

It had been a while since I had last installed Debian via the terminal user interface. The experience felt surprisingly snappy.

I went with the good old XFCE desktop environment. It strikes a good balance of being lightweight, simple and usable.

Things were great until I started up Firefox. It works, but man, is it slow. All the years of browser complexity have caught up with this laptop and made the web barely usable.

It does pass the techtipsy test.

This will likely be the last time this laptop runs a modern OS. 32-bit CPU-s are losing support both in x86 and ARM ecosystems, and the year 2038 is not that far away any more.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

ThinkPad keyboards were once well known for their great layouts, feel and functionality. This included the media playback control keys.

On the ThinkPad T430, the new chiclet keyboard layout moved the media keys to the function row. Still there, but less convenient to access.

The ThinkPad L390 Yoga doesn’t have any visible function keys for controlling media playback. However, I found that the play/pause and stop buttons are still functional on the up/down arrow keys. Left/right arrow keys act as Home and End keys.

evtest output for play/pause key combination:

Event: time 1714716211.222697, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716211.222697, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 1
Event: time 1714716211.222697, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716212.291293, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a2
Event: time 1714716212.291293, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 164 (KEY_PLAYPAUSE), value 1
Event: time 1714716212.291293, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716212.366568, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a2
Event: time 1714716212.366568, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 164 (KEY_PLAYPAUSE), value 0
Event: time 1714716212.366568, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716214.026847, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716214.026847, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 0
Event: time 1714716214.026847, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------

evtest output for stop key combination:

Event: time 1714716254.780584, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716254.780584, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 1
Event: time 1714716254.780584, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716255.614775, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a4
Event: time 1714716255.614775, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 166 (KEY_STOPCD), value 1
Event: time 1714716255.614775, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716255.658388, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value a4
Event: time 1714716255.658388, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 166 (KEY_STOPCD), value 0
Event: time 1714716255.658388, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------
Event: time 1714716256.961601, type 4 (EV_MSC), code 4 (MSC_SCAN), value e3
Event: time 1714716256.961601, type 1 (EV_KEY), code 143 (KEY_WAKEUP), value 0
Event: time 1714716256.961601, -------------- SYN_REPORT ------------

On a very recent laptop, the ThinkPad P14s gen4, the media playback keys seem to be gone. Left/right arrow keys do still work as Home and End keys, though.

If you also miss your media playback control keys on your ThinkPad, then hit that Fn key and give it a go, you might get lucky!

I’ve had the opportunity to try out another new laptop at work. I’ve used a brand new laptop recently, and it was horrible.

But this time I’m pleasantly surprised.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s gen 4 has great specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U (8 cores, 16 threads, up to 5.1 GHz)
• GPU: AMD Radeon 780M (integrated)
• RAM: 32GB DDR5, soldered
• SSD: 1 TB NVMe
• Display: 1920x1200 resolution
• Two USB-C ports
• Two USB-A ports
• HDMI out
• A full-sized Ethernet port!

I have used it for about a month at work, and so far I have not noticed anything outright broken about it. The Fedora Linux 39 installation that I copied over from the previous laptop (Dell Latitude 5411) simply works, no modifications required. The CPU is blazing fast. The GPU driver does not crash. No issues with Wi-Fi or Bluetooth so far. USB-C docks and monitors that I have just work. The webcam is also functional and has an acceptable image quality for meetings. CPU and GPU temperature data is present with lm-sensors.

The build quality is what you’d expect from a modern ThinkPad: better than consumer-grade crap, but not as solid as a ThinkPad T430. The case has a soft-feeling light gray finish to it, which will likely look horrible after a few years of use.

The battery life is not great: don’t expect to last a full 8-hour work day on battery with this thing. It’s been years since Apple has released Apple Silicon laptops with great battery life and somehow the rest of the industry still hasn’t caught up.

The fan has a really annoying high-pitched whine to it. You only hear it when pushing the CPU hard, like you’d do when compiling a legacy Java monolith, but in a quiet room it’s really annoying. I’m not even sure that the fan has to be run that hard, the AMD Ryzen CPU inside is very efficient and can regulate its power consumption based on the current temperature. You can tweak the fan curve on this laptop with a basic script.

I haven’t tried functionality that I don’t use myself, such as the fingerprint reader, so I cannot comment on that.

This laptop can also play games. I took an external SSD, installed Bazzite on it (GNOME + gamemode version), set everything up, and installed Forza Horizon 4 on it. It runs, and for an integrated GPU surprisingly well. I could push the game to run with medium-high settings on the internal 1920x1200 display at a solid 60 FPS, with very rare dips below it. That’s even better than what I got with the Steam Deck, and the CPU running near the 5 GHz mark certainly contributed to it. This makes the laptop a great candidate for a LAN party after work, unless you favor more demanding games, in which case you might want to temper your expectations a little bit.

It’s the first time that I’ve had a brand new laptop that just works on Linux. Hats off to the FOSS community for making this happen, AMD for getting their act together, and Lenovo for not completely fucking it up this time.

2025 June update: Fairphone support is unacceptably bad. I have detailed my experience in this post where it took me almost 4 months to get a refund for the product. As a result of this experience and flaws with the phone, I have lost confidence in Fairphone, and have become skeptical of their ability to support their products long-term.

Changelog:

• 2024-03-06: 58 days, initial post
• 2024-07-28: 202 days, still going strong!
• 2024-10-15: 281 days
• 2025-01-08: 1 year!
• 2025-04-14: I’m very disappointed

After months of contemplating I finally pulled the trigger and got myself a Fairphone 5. The fact that iPhone X stopped receiving major iOS updates certainly helped make that decision.

“But why? My Xiaomi/Oneplus/Samsung/other glued-together device is like so much cheaper and faster and makes better photos and the software is good after I completely format it and install a custom ROM! And LinusTechTips said that it is trash!”

Well, it’s simple: Fairphone is the one of the few companies out there that has a good track record of long-lasting software support and the phones they produce are easily repairable.

The competition is catching on regarding the software support side, but at this time those claims have not been proven yet, unlike Fairphone.

They also make an active effort to make sure that the people behind the production of their phones are treated well.

These efforts need to be supported so that we don’t end up replacing our phones every few years because the manufacturer stopped releasing software updates or your battery died and you cannot easily replace it.

This post is not sponsored, I bought this phone with my own money. The iPhone X that I used before the Fairphone 5 got passed to someone else as an upgrade so this was not a vanity purchase.

tl;dr it’s a perfectly cromulent phone that comes with some intentional trade-offs that improve the repairability and longevity while reducing the environmental impact and human suffering.

For those who saw the LTT video: Fairphone made a response video where they address most concerns and explain some design choices and trade-offs that they made with the Fairphone 5.

The mission

I really admire what Fairphone is trying to achieve.

If you’re not sure what makes Fairphone special and different from others, then give their website a read. They also held a talk at FOSDEM 2024 which goes into more technical detail, describing their journey, goals, and challenges faced when building phones and trying to support existing ones for as long as possible (Qualcomm sucks in this regard).

In short: they build sustainable phones that you can use and repair for a very long time, made by people that get paid and treated fairly.

One of the not-so-fun facts from their FOSDEM 2024 talk was that it only takes a few extra dollars per phone to make sure that the factory workers get paid a living wage. Makes you think: if that is all it takes, then why aren’t other companies doing it?

My use case for a phone

It’s important to recognize that everyone uses their phone differently. Some expect great performance, especially if they play games. Some just want a good camera. Some just want to chat with their friends and family and share dank memes.

My expectations are very modest: a phone should make adequate pictures, be reasonably fast and get regular software updates. This post is written from my perspective and will likely conflict with your views on what a phone should be, keep that in mind.

The Fairphone 5 is the first one that I actually considered buying because it resembles a modern smartphone with relatively few compromises. This is in part thanks to the rate at which smartphones innovate slowing down, both in performance and the amount of new features that people actually care about.

The cool factor

I got the transparent edition, meaning that the backside of the phone is made out of semi-transparent plastic. I can at a moments notice flip the phone over and see the components, including the battery, SIM card and the microSD card. Absolutely unpractical, still cool though.

I wouldn’t do the “I can replace the battery in 30 seconds” party trick too much because I feel like the plastic clips holding the back cover in are quite fragile and can break if too much force is used. You can easily buy replacement covers, though.

The software

My first proper smartphone was a Samsung Galaxy Gio back in 2011. It was also my first introduction to custom ROMs and over the years I ended up running all sorts of phones with various flavours of Cyanogen and LineageOS. At one point certain banking and e-ID related apps began blocking users who decided to run custom ROMs, so I went to the Apple side for a few years.

Why this preface? Well, it’s because coming back to the Android side of things felt so refreshing and freeing.

I can:

• finally run a real version of Firefox on my phone with an actual ad blocker.
  • this is an absolute gamechanger for me and something I sorely missed on iOS
• install any app that I want.
  • there are also a lot more FOSS apps available.
• rearrange shortcuts on my home screen as I want to.
  • or hell, run a different launcher altogether
• seamlessly back up photos from my phone to PC using Syncthing!
• work with actual files!
• cram in a 512GB microSD card.

The Fairphone 5 ships with Android 13, with Android 14 upgrade currently scheduled to summer 2024. The base OS is quite clean, the only preinstalled app (other than the Google stuff) is the “My Fairphone” app that shows information about your device. That same app can also be used to verify that the functionality on your phone works, and yes, the speaker testing ones get quite loud.

If you decide that the stock Android experience isn’t for you, then know that this phone can easily run alternative operating systems. At FOSDEM 2024 almost every alternative OS booth had one or more Fairphone 5 running, including Ubuntu Touch and CalyxOS. It’s clear that the FOSS community has embraced the Fairphone.

I was a bit sad to see that a lot of open source apps that I used to run or that come up in searches are unsupported or out of date. In some cases modern forks exist, but overall the picture looks very discouraging, especially if I was new to the scene.

Performance

The performance isn’t great, but it’s good for most activities. I can feel it being sluggish from time to time or with certain animations.

This is due to an intentional trade-off that Fairphone made: to be able to properly support this device for a very long time, they had to go with a Qualcomm SoC that gets long-term support, and that ruled out the ones that provide the best performance. They ended up putting in a chip that was designed for IoT applications, funnily enough. If having a slightly slower phone is what is needed to run this phone for 5+ years, then it’s a worthwhile trade-off in my view.

Fairphone highlighted the OEM support issue in their FOSDEM 2024 talk in case you’re curious about why this trade-off needed to be made. My opinionated tl;dw: we have to get OEM-s to either open source the proprietary parts or hit them with some regulations and enforcement so that they do support the chips they produce for longer.

Battery life

The battery life is what you would expect from a typical smartphone: 1-2 days of normal use, but I once stretched it to almost 4 days during a time when I used my phone very little. Do note that this is highly dependent on your usage patterns, if you do constant video calls then you can’t expect the battery to last much.

If you want to extend the longevity of your battery, then there is an option to limit charging to 80% in battery settings. I’ve recently enabled it because it doesn’t impact my use of the phone much. Let’s see how it fares in a few years.

Size and feeling

This phone is big. Really big. Biggest one I’ve had yet.

I actually prefer smaller phones, something like the iPhone 13 mini size would be ideal (Apple stopped making smaller phones that aren’t iPhone 7 reskins after that so that’s not an option any longer). When I was in a store that sold iPhones, I compared my phone to the latest iPhone 15 offerings and was surprised to see that my phone was about the same size as an iPhone 15 Plus. Hopefully we’ll see smaller Fairphones in the future, all while not introducing too many compromises.

Some people are surprised at the thickness of the Fairphone 5. Yes, it’s thicker than most of the competitors, but note that with other phones you’ll likely buy a separate case for the phone, so you’ll end up with something just as thick anyway. At least with Fairphone 5 you don’t have a glass backside that easily shatters if you drop it.

Camera

When I bought the phone, I expected only one thing from the Fairphone 5: its camera should be better than the one on the iPhone X. GSMArena comparisons and reviews by others looked promising

The camera on the Fairphone is acceptable. I don’t have proper photography education, but in most cases the Fairphone makes OK pictures. In low light situations it seems to be inferior to flagship phones from other companies, which may often end up with smudged pictures. At least it has a low light mode, something that my previous phone (iPhone X) lacked. The colors look funky sometimes and are oversaturated.

This is a selection of photos made with the Fairphone 5. Thumbnails are compressed to avoid unnecessary bandwidth. Click on the image to view the original, full-sized version.

The headphone jack

I feel like I’m obliged to mention that this Fairphone doesn’t have a headphone jack. As someone who spent a few years on iPhones, this one doesn’t bother me too much.

USB-C port

I plugged it into an USB-C dock and it actually output to an external display in portrait mode. Not sure how practical, but really cool.

Oh, and the USB-C port is easily replaceable.

Price

If you only focus on the spec sheet and compare the Fairphone 5 to the competition, then it will strike you as an expensive phone, coming in at 699 EUR.

It is expensive, but that’s a result of a lot of small things. Fairphone tries to do their best to source the raw materials from ethical sources and that narrows down your selection by a lot. Add to that living wages to the factory workers, more repairable components, declining to add sponsored apps/ads into the OS and that’s the result.

If you take the price and divide it by the number of years that you expect to get out of this phone (5-10 years), then the price is likely much more comparable to the competition.

If a higher purchase price results in less human suffering and a longer lifetime of the device, then so be it.

Schematics

They provide schematics for the phone (direct link here).

My hours of watching Louis Rossmann do board level repairs have taught me that this is a very good thing.

It’s not perfect

Every phone has issues.

iPhone 15 had overheating problems.

That one iPhone SE 2020 that I ran for a few months had a hard to reproduce system board issue that made the phone inoperable for 5+ minutes in random situations.

Here are some issues that I’ve noticed while using the Fairphone 5

SIM card

After I set up the phone, the SIM card would stop functioning properly after a few hours of use. Reseating the SIM card did not work, and I was quite frustrated because I was expecting to send the phone back just after I set it all up. Luckily it seem to be a known issue and there is an official support article that covers it. My SIM card is much older than the specified 2 years, but I couldn’t be arsed with replacing it yet so I used pure ethanol to clean the contacts on the SIM card, popped it back in and it has worked with absolutely no issues ever since. I’m glad that I got this easily fixed, but for a normal customer this would be a very frustrating experience so hopefully there is something that Fairphone can do to fix and/or avoid this in the future.

The display

The display of the Fairphone 5 supports 90 Hz refresh rate, but ships with it set to 60 Hz. I’ve heard that most other phones do something similar with the likely reason being the negative impact that high refresh rate displays have on the battery life. At the time of writing, however, there is a known issue with the 90 Hz mode which can actually result in more lag and a worse user experience. I’ve set the display back to 60 Hz for this reason. Luckily this is something that can probably be fixed with a software update.

The automatic brightness setting is quite bad, especially when compared to any iPhone. The brightness jumps around a lot in darker conditions and it’s very irritating when driving because random street lights and cars seem to trigger the sensor often. Again, probably something that can be fixed in software.

Software stability

Overall the software is stable, but there was this one time when the phone crashed and rebooted unexpectedly. It was triggered while playing music and opening a Snapchat notification. Nothing serious and has only happened once in an almost two-month period, but still noteworthy.

The Google crapware

This isn’t really a Fairphone issue, but more of an Android gripe. I still have to mention it though. The Android 13 experience has started resembling the Windows experience. I had to toggle off countless “features” to turn off most of the Google crapware that ships with the phone, and even then I still have to stare at the unremovable Google Search bar at the home screen. That thing takes up so much useful screen real estate and is absolutely useless to me. It used to be removable according to some discussions I found online, but I guess Google noticed that feedback and made it a permanent fixture on the home screen with an update. Absolutely disgusting. You can work around this by using a launcher that’s not affected by Google. Kvaesitso is a FOSS one that seems to work well enough for me.

Final thoughts

Fairphone 5 is what you get when you focus on delivering a phone with long-term support and repairability in mind, all while doing your best to treat your workers well. This does mean that you’ll be making some trade-offs.

You won’t get the best performance, the best camera, or the smallest size. What you get in return is the ease of repairability, years of software updates with a proven track record, and the knowledge that at least those workers who assembled your phone get paid a living wage.

If you don’t expect much from a phone and are willing to pay more for a phone that you can use for a lot longer, then the Fairphone 5 is a good option.

Can I make it to 2031 with this phone? I’ll definitely give it a try.

2024-07-28 update: 202 days

My Fairphone 5 is still going strong. Here are some notes after 202 days of use.

Android 14

The promised Android 14 update is here and on time. The upgrade took a while to install but was boring, in a positive way. Nothing I relied on broke and the interface looks more-or-less the same.

The only aspect I’m not happy about with the Android 14 update is the USB webcam mode feature not being present. It’s possible that it’s an optional feature of Android 14, and none of the Fairphone 5 materials indicate it being included.

Video playback issues

I’ve noticed some oddities regarding video playback. The video playback can be choppy on higher resolutions, especially when I run them at 2x speed. Lower resolutions are fine. Sometimes the issues only occur with certain encodings, like H.265, or audio tracks where I can only seem to hear certain audio channels.

Camera in action

The camera doesn’t seem to be the best option for point-and-shoot situations where there is a lot of movement or where the lighting conditions are bad. I’ve taken my fair share of blurry photos as a result. The included microphone also seems lacking in real life use, especially when I accidentally cover them with my fingers.

If I could pick one improvement for the next Fairphone, then it will have to be the camera. A lot of people care about camera quality and might rule out getting a Fairphone as a result.

At least with the pro mode you have a lot of control over the camera, which is great for more stationary shots.

Durability

I have nothing bad to say about the durability here. I have dropped it a few times already and as a result I have two small dings on the aluminium frame.

The backside has also held firm. After one fall a couple of clips came loose, but I could easily pop them back in.

Various oils and finger grease have an interesting effect with the transparent case, resulting in the see-through effect being better. The grip has gotten better with time and negates any need for a separate case. The Fairphone 5 is still a big phone and not that easy to handle one-handed, but the grippy backside makes up for part of it.

The display glass has a few scratches, but nothing too bad. I can’t seem to find any serious scratches on the backside.

Battery

The battery has held up fine. I turned off the battery saving feature because of how simple it is to replace the battery, enabled fast charging because it’s really handy, and stopped showing the battery percentage on the notification bar to reduce battery anxiety.

5G

I switched mobile service providers during this time and could finally test the 5G capabilities of this phone. Since I went with the cheapest option at the time, then the signal strength will not be as good as with other ones, but at least I know it works in Estonia.

Maximum speeds I’ve seen are around 250 Mbit/s. Could be limited by Fairphone 5, or the service provider (more likely option).

Display brightness

At some point I got an update that seems to have improved the automatic brightness feature. It’s not as jarring as before, especially at low light levels. I’m not sure which update fixed it, but I haven’t noticed any annoyances with it for a long time.

2024-10-15 update: 281 days

I have one gripe with the software support on Fairphone 5.

The security updates are lagging behind way too much.

They’ve always come with a small delay of a few weeks, but it took over a month to get the 5th of September security patches. These are supposed to be monthly.

I finally received the 5th of September security patches today, 15th of October. There’s already a new security bulletin out with the October patches, which I don’t have on my phone.

It’s better than no updates at all, but this does not bode well for future long-term software support.

2025-01-08 update: 1 year

Well, I’ve successfully made it 1 year with the Fairphone 5.

Overall I’m impressed with how little the phone gets in the way. It just gets along with doing normal phone things.

Security updates are still lagging behind, so that’s a bit concerning.

Camera is still not the best, but not the worst.

The USB-C port is holding on nicely, but largely thanks to a few pocket lint cleanings that I’ve done using a small needle.

There have been a few unexpected quick reboots on the Android layer, but these are rare enough that I end up forgetting about them. Seems to happen about once a quarter.

I have dropped the phone at least 100 times at this point, mainly due to my clumsiness and open pockets. Fairphone 5 has shrugged it all off.

The Fairphone app also reminded me of my phone-versary and let me know that I’m 20% there towards my goal of using the Fairphone 5 for at least 5 years. It also asked for feedback regarding the Fairphone experience, which some may find annoying. I see it as a positive sign that they’re at least trying to collect feedback to improve this and any future Fairphones.

At this point in time, I’m happy with my Fairphone 5, and have not considered replacing it. It’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

Here’s a cat picture to celebrate the occasion.

2025-04-14 update: I’m very disappointed

I don’t take video recordings often, but when I do, it’s about content that I care about. Unfortunately, the Fairphone 5 is butchering them.

The HDR feature is ruining the framerate of the videos. The sound is seriously lacking in videos, rendering some videos unusable, and unfortunately I’m not alone in this regard. The autofocus keeps kicking in constantly in videos with no good reason, resulting in lots of frames having blurry sections in them, repeatedly.

It’s very hard to take good non-blurry photos with the Fairphone 5. Definitely not a point-and-shoot camera.

The security updates are lagging behind by over a month, constantly. It’s April 14th, and I’m still on the March 5th security patch level. There is no news about Android 15 coming to the phone, while the people behind CalyxOS have shipped an Android 15 based version on the Fairphone 5.

The phone has rebooted on me at least 4 times within the last month, which is unusually high. The worst one was while I was driving.

And I’m still waiting for that refund on the Fairbuds XL. And yet again, I’m not alone in this.

I’m starting to feel like in order to create a well performing, sustainable and repairable phone, we first need to take a good phone and then make it repairable and support it for a long time. Fairphone is trying it the other way around, and it does not seem to be working out.

Guess I’ll have to get a glued together phone again, at least that will work well until its battery dies along with its software support.

The experiment has ended

I have stopped using the Fairphone 5. It will likely still find some use as a test bed for alternative operating systems or using it as a very fancy baby monitor. I just need a phone that I can rely on.

Sustainability and repairability does not matter if the product is unusable.

For those wondering, I bought a Google Pixel 8a as a replacement. It addresses the shortcomings of the Fairphone 5 and the battery will be completely dead by the time the software support runs out, which should be in 5-6 years or so.

It turns out that you can’t trust any USB type A power adapter to be within spec.

I have a Catit Flower Fountain for my two adorable cats. The idea of a water fountain for cats may sound odd, but having one really helps with cats staying hydrated and that alone avoids all sorts of health issues.

At one point I wanted to see if I could create a sort of a DIY UPS for the water fountain. It would be quite bad if I was at work and a power outage results in cats not being able to drink water (they don’t really care for normal water bowls after getting the fountain). I had some battery banks available for testing, and I noticed that the pump for the water fountain is powered over a USB type A cable.

Should be easy, right?

Apparently not.

I tried multiple different power banks between the water fountain and the USB power adapter that came with it, and all of them would work for a bit and turn off after some time. I didn’t think much of it back then, but I did notice that two of the power banks I used started glitching out during normal use elsewhere.

Months later, I attached an IKEA power strip to the side of my work desk to make charging various things easier. It also has two USB type A ports and the water fountain was near the desk temporarily, so I plugged it in there. It worked, but I noticed that the water fountain was quieter now, the “hum” that it makes was almost gone. That made me curious, so I used the original adapter again and the “hum” was there again.

I took a look at the original power adapter specs to see if there’s a difference in the amount of current that these two different USB power sources provide. What I discovered instead was that the power adapter that comes with the fountain outputs a solid 7.5V. I measured the voltage with my multimeter as well, and it reports 7.71V. USB type A ports typically provide about 5V, with a maximum of 5.25V from my observations in the real world.

7.5V over USB type A is probably not safe with other devices, especially since a normal person only sees a USB port on the adapter and thinks that it is perfectly safe to use it to charge their phone or other devices. Yes, properly implemented USB type C ports can negotiate all sorts of voltages, but this is not one of them.

Probably explains why my power banks are acting odd now and glitching out.

This is why I have trust issues.

2023-12-19 update

By popular demand, here are the two adorable cats.

I stumbled upon this Hardware Haven video about the Zimaboard recently.

I liked it a lot.

I finally bought one.

In short, Zimaboard is a small single-board computer that is relatively affordable and comes with an interesting selection of ports, which includes an exposed PCI Express port.

Before we get down to the build, here’s a list of aspects that I want to see in my dream home server:

• low power usage (2-15W typical power usage)
• 8GB of RAM or better
• enough performance to run my workloads, most of which are containerized
• 2x SATA or NVMe SSD slots, plus option for a third drive for the OS
• passively cooled and completely silent
• compact size
• gigabit Ethernet or better

You might be thinking, “Wait, that’s your dream setup? No clusters of machines, Threadrippers, 10 Gigabit networking, crazy number of disks?”. Well, yes. After years of trying all sorts of setups and learning about my home server usage patterns, this is the set of requirements that finds a balance between performance, efficiency and silence.

Basics

I recommend checking the product page to see the exact specifications. The configuration I bought was the 832 model: 8GB of RAM, 32GB of eMMC storage and a quad-core Intel Celeron N3450 CPU. It’s not the most powerful setup or even a recent one with the CPU being from 2016, but it’s just powerful enough to fit my needs.

This variant of the board costs 200 USD, but other configurations cost much less than that, I just needed the extra memory to be on the safe side. If you don’t care about the noise and size aspect of home servers, then you can get a better deal on the used market (see the TinyMiniMicro project for inspiration), but as you know by this point, I care about those aspects a lot.

The package

What sets the Zimaboard apart from other single board computers is how polished the product feels. Unlike a board like the Raspberry Pi, this one comes with a case and a cooling setup already attached to it. I suspect that a similarily configured Raspberry Pi 4/5 with all the accessories added on top would result in a price that’s quite similar to the cost of a top-of-the-line Zimaboard.

The heatsink looks great and is practical at the same time. Under the most torturous loads I could only see the CPU being around 72°C and due to it being passively cooled it made absolutely no noise. With the case being present, I do not have to worry about placing the board on my desk and scratching the table or shorting something out.

The board does not seem to have a power button, but by default it’s configured to power on as soon as you connect the power supply, which is great if you’re going to use this as a home server.

The box that the board was shipped survived and overall I’d say that the packaging is good. The board comes with some stickers and a single SATA data+power cable. The included power adapter comes with EU, US and UK plugs all included.

Shipping to Estonia was quite fast, taking just 10 days. The shipping costs were 18 USD.

Storage

The included 32GB eMMC storage is fine for hosting your operating system. The read speeds cap out at around 175 MB/s and the typical write speeds I observed were around 50-100 MB/s. The storage is identified as mmc-BJTD4R_0xc7d04e40 under /dev/disk/by-id/, and searching online suggests that it’s a Samsung chip.

Because this board offers two SATA ports, I also added a SATA Y-cable to my order (4 USD) so that I can take my existing Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA drives and move my home server setup to this board.

Allegedly this cable can also be used to drive two 3.5" hard drives powered by the board itself according to the shop page for the Y-cable, but I suspect that at that point you’ll be pushing the limits of the 12V/3A power adapter.

There is also a white drive activity LED placed near the SATA power connector on the board. Perhaps not for everyone, but I like the aesthetic and the sight of the server doing server things.

The performance of the SATA ports is what you would expect. When performing read operations on both SSD-s I saw the maximum total transfer rates hover around 900-950MB/s, which is pretty close to the SATA III transfer speed limit.

There is no native way to mount the two SATA drives to the Zimaboard. The creators of the board do sell a metal bracket, but it doesn’t seem to integrate that well to the board. However, there exists a 3D printable design that houses two 2.5" drives, even 15mm ones, and that’s how I ended up using a 3D printer for the first time in my life. The print was done using a Voron v2 Afterburner printer hosted at k-space and it came out pretty well.

The SSD mounting holes were a bit finicky due to slight printing errors, and during my first installation attempt I forgot to put in the plastic middle layer of the case that’s between the PCB and the stock bottom cover, but other than that the installation was a breeze.

The drives never hit above 64°C, which is absolutely okay for these SSD-s. I’m not sure how actual spinning hard drives might fare in this environment, but I don’t think that it’s going to be that serious because 2.5" hard drives should not generate as much heat in the first place.

Power consumption

What I love about this board is the power usage. At this point my home server is not even the most power hungry component of my setup, that honor now goes to the ISP-provided router/modem combo box that always draws at least 12W, even when it’s in bridge mode.

Here are my power usage measurements (measured with a simple power meter):

• idle: 2.5W
• no drives attached, CPU stress test (stress -c 4): 9.0W
• one Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SSD attached, CPU stress test: 13.2W
• 2 SSD-s attached, typical power draw in my setup (~10-40% CPU usage): ~8-9W
• 2 SSD-s attached, max load on SSD-s and CPU: ~14W

The Zimaboard, ISP modem/router box, my TP-Link router/Wi-Fi AP and my CyberPower UPS all together use at most around 34W, all combined. That’s even less than what my Dell monitor uses at reasonably low brightness levels!

These tests are not scientifically accurate, but they should give you an idea on what power consumption numbers to expect when running this setup.

Performance

I use a simple Prometheus Node Exporter + Grafana setup to view how much resources my various servers use. My home server has lately either been an ASRock Deskmini X300 based setup or an old ThinkPad T430, and something that both had in common was that the CPU usage was generally very low, mostly at or below the 10% mark. There would be bursty loads from time to time and backup processes running that bump that up, but not significantly.

Memory usage of my setup was also quite low, with all my services and containers fitting into 2GB during typical usage. With this information and some CPU performance comparisons done, I knew that the Zimaboard will likely be able to handle my home server tasks.

This board is not very powerful, but if you mainly rely on containerized workloads and can rely on Intel QuickSync to accelerate media transcodes, then you’ll be just fine.

I was actually impressed with how well the GPU-accelerated transcode worked on this machine once you set everything up properly. If you’re running Linux and Jellyfin, run vainfo to get a list of supported codecs and make sure that you have hardware decoding selected for those in Jellyfin settings. Also enable hardware encoding. I checked with intel_gpu_top to see if work was offloaded to the GPU and saw activity there, which means that hardware acceleration for Jellyfin worked out great! Check the Jellyfin hardware acceleration for more details on other requirements that have to be met for all of this to work.

Caveats

The Zimaboard does ship with a Linux-based OS called CasaOS. However, I had no intention of using it as I know what my requirements are and my infrastructure is already decently documented and set up via Ansible, which is why I can’t say how good that experience is. I also did not test Windows 10 or 11.

During testing, I noticed that the USB 3 ports can act a bit weird. The Fedora Server USB stick would not boot properly if connected to one of the USB ports, and when doing other tests with external USB storage I noticed hiccups from time to time. Not sure what might be the cause, but I’m writing it down nevertheless. It’s not a dealbreaker for me luckily since I don’t rely much on the USB ports in typical use anyway.

I did not test the PCI Express port, simply because I don’t need it, yet. It’s a great addition, though, and opens up plenty of modding capabilities in the future.

Fedora Server and btrfs

The Zimaboard gave me an opportunity to start fresh with my home server.

I made a leap: I’ve ditched ZFS and am now running Fedora Server with my storage being on a btrfs RAID1 setup, snapshotted and backed up using btrbk. It was a bit tricky to migrate and set everything up regarding backups and snapshotting, but I got it working.

ZFS is great, but it has always felt like an unwanted guest in the Linux ecosystem. The kernel developers don’t care much for maintaining compatibility with ZFS since it’s not in the kernel due to licensing issues, and Ubuntu has been one of the few distros that actually ships a kernel that includes ZFS built in. I didn’t want to be tied to Ubuntu forever, especially because of how they try to make snap a thing. ZFS DKMS builds are generally okay on distros like Debian, but on others you might find yourself not being able to access your data after a reboot because of a kernel update.

btrfs has had some issues in the past, especially with the RAID5/6 setup, but in my single and dual disk setups it has been solid for years, except for that one time around 2018-2019 when I ran btrfs RAID1 over USB storage. To be fair to btrfs, that was a pretty stupid setup.

Before committing to btrfs, I used two USB sticks to create a RAID1 setup and created real torture test scenarios. Tests looked something like this:

• write a file to the filesystem
• use md5sum to calculate a hash of it for verification purposes
• completely wipe one USB drive with dd
• run md5sum to calculate the hash again (it matched every time)
• run btrfs scrub on the filesystem to fix all errors
• rinse and repeat with variations to this setup

After doing all that, I was quite confident that this was going to work.

One thing to note with btrfs: if you’re running any type of multi-disk and redundant setup like RAID1 or RAID10, then make sure to include the mount option degraded in /etc/fstab so that you can still mount your filesystem if one or more of your drives fail. If you lose too many drives then it’s still probably going to fail to boot.

Here’s my /etc/fstab setup to serve as an example:

LABEL=turbo /turbo      btrfs subvol=turbo,compress-force=zstd:1,ssd,degraded,nofail            0 0

When doing the migration I kept all the paths the same, and each ZFS dataset was recreated using btrfs subvolumes, which is why this filesystem is mounted on a top-level folder.

Alternatives

My notes for the next dream home server setup included a few candidates:

• the Zimaboard

• Asustor Flashstor 6 or Flashstor 12

• a TinyMiniMicro style machine with at least two NVMe SSD slots

The first two fall nicely into my requirements for the dream home server. I picked the Zimaboard mainly because it’s much cheaper and I was already running two SATA SSD-s for my home server storage, so migrating would be really easy and I would not have to buy any new drives.

If large capacity SATA SSD-s start becoming less common and NVMe SSD-s become even cheaper than they already are, then I’ll have to look into something like a Flashstor.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very happy with this purchase. The performance is just enough for my services to work reasonably fast, the board uses very little power and it’s silent, and it looks good on my wall.

My setup is also quite flexible, so in case I need more resources, I can get more Zimaboards and make them serve different purposes. However, it’s more likely that I’m going to discover a new toy to experiment and play with by the time I run out of resources on this one.

2024-08-20 update

I ran the Zimaboard for over half a year, but decided to switch back to the ASRock Deskmini X300.

I still love the low power consumption and the expandability, but I ended up putting more load on the system than I initially anticipated CPU-wise (running over 20 different Docker containers, some heavy). Should’ve guessed that it would happen eventually.

If it came with an embedded AMD Ryzen APU, then that would probably change things up quite a bit.

Zimaboard: still the closest thing to my dream home server, but it’s that last little bit of performance being missing that gets me. If your needs are moderate or low, then it’s still a fantastic option, if the price is right.

My eyes are now on the Asustor Flashstor Gen 2 machines. Up to 12 NVMe SSD-s plus 4 cores of AMD Ryzen goodness sounds too good to be true. Let’s see what the reviews will say once it’s out.

k-space is a hackerspace in Tallinn, Estonia, and they organized a hackathon recently. Unlike in most hackathons, in this one you could whatever you like with no expectations about building a business or coming up with an MVP, just come on down to the space and start working on your passion projects!

I had some ideas on what I could do, but a few of them would have required access to workshop tools, for which I did not have a key. I could always get one, but was too lazy to bother with it. I looked at the list of ideas that had been written down by other hackerspace members and picked the one marked as [easy]: Wire up electronic lock for workshop.

If I achieve that goal, then I don’t have to worry about getting another key, and I could also get access to all the workshop tooling! And since it was marked as easy, I figured that I could do it and have some time left over for playing around with things like the laser cutter.

Impressions

Before I get to the technical part, I’d like to say a few words about the hackathon and the organization itself.

The highlight of the hackathon was the immense sense of accomplishment that I felt. I work as a software developer at my day job, which often involves dealing with incidents, migrating services from virtual machines to Kubernetes, and sometimes from Kubernetes to Kubernetes, and anything else that comes my way. The issue with most software teams is that the products that you build and maintain are often disconnected from the real world. You don’t see the physical impact of the work that you do, and that can leave you feeling empty. Sure, you spent days switching a service to Kubernetes, but you don’t feel like you did anything at all.

During this hackathon I had the opportunity to build things with my own hands, and the door controller software doing its thing resulted in real-life actions. You swipe the card, it beeps, and you can hear the electronic lock being opened. That, and the opportunity to work on a project involving a Raspberry Pi and mounting it so neatly was very satisfying.

The hackathon crowd itself was not that big, hovering around 15 or so people. We even had guests from Germany who were really helpful, great to talk with and they provided their expertise to help out wherever possible. I loved how the collaboration worked for the rewrite of the door controller software to the Go programming language. One guy knew all about the original software and how it works but was just learning Go, and the other guy was just visiting the space and had extensive Go experience.

Although this post is mainly about my own experience and the stuff that I worked on, there were plenty of other cool projects going on during the hackathon as well. One that I really liked due to how practical it was is “the kegerator” that provided cold carbonated mate tea throughout the hackathon. It lives in an old fridge and I think the execution of it was really neat! Here’s the livestream recording where other projects are also covered.

There were plenty of refreshments available and I took full advantage of that because if there’s one thing that can get my brain working on overdrive, it’s copious amounts of sugar and caffeinated beverages. Oh, and we got pancakes as well! Peetri Pizza really blew it with the pizzas though, never seen pizzas that are this sad.

There were some small issues, such as the streaming setup crapping out at the last day during the part where we presented our work, but overall I was happy with how the hackathon turned out.

For future hackathons we probably need to do a bit more marketing and think about the dates more so that we can get more enthusiasts on board. Having our German friends around really added a lot to the event and I would like to see more knowledge-sharing between communities in the future.

Build log

Here’s a rundown of what I did during the hackathon.

There’s also a video where I talk about my hackathon work!

Whenever you see the name Arti, then that refers to my good friend who helped out a lot during the hackathon.

Day 0

The hackathon began on 27th of July at 18:00.

Everyone presented their plans and then the work begun.

I used the first evening to put together a rough plan and figure out what needs to be done. In short, the plan was like this:

• buy some quick splice terminals
• assemble the Raspberry Pi with the custom HAT that is used to interact with the card reader and electronic door lock
• install the card reader on the door
• run the networking and power cables
• connect all the cables to the Pi
• set up the card reader software
• test in production

After taking some pictures of the door lock test setup that another participant assembled, I decided to go and rest for what’s to come.

Day 1

This is the part where all the action started.

I began by taking stuff apart.

After making some additional holes I ran the cable that connects to the electronic door switch. That was easy enough.

Then I began thinking about where the Raspberry Pi door controller setup would go. The workshop is a very dusty place and it would probably need some kind of protection from it. The first idea was to custom design a 3D printed case or customise an existing design, but after a short discussion and brainstorming we realized that getting a plastic box big enough to house the Pi and all the wiring makes more sense.

Me and Arti set off to find something like that in the hackerspace. After going through lots of boxes and shelves, we stumbled upon two metal boxes. Those boxes used to house some kind of security equipment and had inside circuitry that converts 220V AC to 13.6V DC, which was ideal for our use case. It also had leads to connect an UPS battery, which was even better!

Oh, and we also found this fun little thing.

Anyway, I went ahead and drilled some mounting holes for the Pi. We had M2.5 nylon screws and standoffs available at the space, and with some assistance from Arti I learned about the wonders of countersink drill bits.

I really liked how the mounted Pi looked. I’ve seen a ton of projects on YouTube and elsewhere with Raspberry Pi-s being modded and mounted in all sorts of ways, but doing it myself felt really good, especially since I was reusing an old metal box that had no other purpose.

I set up the microSD card with Raspberry Pi OS and figured that I could find it on the k-space network. However, I then remembered that the internal network was /16, which made the process much longer. I did not have access to the network switch, but I did end up getting acces to a Pi, it just wasn’t the one I just set up. That was a fun discovery.

I decided to go with the easy route and connect the Pi to an actual monitor and keyboard. That process ended up being faster than scanning the network for Pi-s.

I also added an UPS battery to the setup. It barely fit the enclosure and it had to be raised a bit so that the lid on the box would close properly. But it worked out really well!

By the end of the day we also had the card reader installed on the door. We contemplated putting the reader on the other side of the glass because the reader can read cards up to 9cm away, and quick tests showed that it would actually work, however we had concerns about mounting it that way, and it would look a bit too janky even by k-space standards.

Day 2

Day 2 started with me trying to figure out how to run the cables. Making a suitably sized CAT5e cable was easy and it worked on the first try and drilling a hole through plywood was also simple, but when trying to figure out how to run the power I ran into a bit of trouble. There was very little room in the junction point that I intended to use, and when my brain shorted out I asked Arti for some help (again). He figured out a way to run the additional cable while not interfering with the power cables that ran to the light fixtures.

Due to the way we decided to run the card reader cables, we had to extend the cable that comes from the card reader. For that I used a CAT5e cable and some quick splices. I later learned that using your thumb power alone is not enough to splice cables, you actually need to push them all the way in with plyers. Once that was figured out, me and Arti installed a very professional looking cable cover involving a random piece of plastic tube, zipties and screws. Not that I needed the help, Arti was just working on porting some Python code to Golang and wanted a break. He ended up making a lot of breaks, not sure what that says about the learning curve of Golang.

Now came the difficult part. I had to wire up everything to the Raspberry Pi without breaking anything. I had the photos I took on day 0, but in hindsight they were not that great since I had trouble figuring out what went where. Luckily another door controller in the space had a similar setup and I could use that as a reference point.

The Raspberry Pi HAT gets 12V input power, some of that is passed to the door controller, and then we have two leads that are connected to both the door controller and the electronic lock. If someone swipes their card and they have access to that particular door, the card reader light goes green and 12V is applied to the electronic door lock, making it open it. There’s software that controls it, but I did not have to worry about that too much because two other hackathon participants were working on that.

I had Arti check the cabling before the initial test and after a hesitant go-ahead from him we powered it on. The Pi powered on, but the card reader was not doing anything. It was supposed to do a few beeps and show a red light. Uh-oh. That’s when Arti reviewed the quick splices that I used and pointed out that they were not pushed all the way in. After using brute force (pliers), we powered it on again and it worked!

The rest of the evening was spent testing out the card reader software that was being ported. That revealed a few issues, but we did get a successful door opening!

At this point I was very happy and I think half the hackerspace heard that.

Day 3

At this point I was quite tired, but I felt really accomplished. I assembled the setup without burning everything down, and I only shorted out the UPS battery once after absent-mindedly connecting the same alligator clip to both power leads. Whoops.

I spent that half-day cleaning everything up and mounting the power and networking cables to the wall. I also labeled the box so that we know what that mysterious white box is and where it gets its power.

At 14:00 the hackathon timer ran to zero and we were wondering what would happen with the countdown. Well…

I presented my work, listened to what others were up to, and then we got some creative awards. Arti, the guy working on the Golang port of the door controller software, got “K-SPACE Certified Go Developer”, and I am now a “K-SPACE Certified Licensed Electrician”. Whoo!

I’d like to thank everyone who organized the event, and Arti Zirk for helping out with the project on many occasions!

That was pretty much it!

Oh boy, here I go testing a new laptop again!

Well, it was new back in 2020.

You might remember my article on why I went back to a ThinkPad T430 in 2022. Or that other time when I got a new HP laptop for testing and got so frustrated that I wrote about it.

Well, today I’m writing about the Dell Latitude 5411.

It’s not the newest laptop in the world, but I decided to give it a go because of a few reasons:

• nobody wanted one at work due to the reputation of this laptop (sounds like a jet engine)
• it’s almost 3 years old at this point, which is the Linux compatibility sweet spot (in theory)
• there were some changes coming to the office, which meant more flexible seating arrangements and everything being designed around USB-C, and I wanted to continue my employment at the same company which might have been tricky with a ThinkPad T430

And that’s how I ended up with one.

The Linux compatibility sweet spot

If you have spent any time using new hardware on Linux, then you probably know how painful it can be. You might get lucky and receive hardware that has support right from the get-go, but in most cases there are issues around that may or may not get fixed with time.

If you take the same device a couple of years later, it’s highly likely that the Linux support on it will be much better. The price of the device will also be much lower than before, especially if you get it on the second hand market.

Any machine that falls into this time window is what I like to call “the Linux compatibility sweet spot”. This Dell happens to be one such machine.

Here’s a quick rundown of some specifications:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-10850H 6C/12T, 2.7 GHz/ 5.1 GHz
• RAM: 32GB DDR4
• SSD: 512 GB NVMe
• OS: Fedora Linux 38
• Thunderbolt support
• Wi-Fi, Ethernet based on Intel chips

The Dell Latitude 5411 is powerful, and the components in it seem to be working just fine under Linux. The USB-C port has not had major issues in a work environment, and it also works tolerably with a Dell WD19TB Thunderbolt 3 dock. My ultrawide monitor works, the Ethernet port on the dock can push gigabit speeds, and USB 3 ports work as expected.

Honestly, that’s pretty much it regarding compatibility. It just works most of the time, and that’s why I like this machine.

Oh god, the noise

Not everything about this machine is ideal, though.

One of the first things I noticed with this machine is some kind of electrical noise. Some call it “coil whine”, but all I know is that it’s this high-pitched squealing that’s coming from the laptop. Based on some searching and personal testing I can confirm that the noise is related to the CPU switching between idle and really high turbo boost speeds very quickly. If you remember the spec sheet, you’ll know that this CPU can reach 5.1 GHz. The noise is apparent whenever there’s a load on the CPU, and it’s probably the sound of the power delivery components screaming in pain to deliver all this power that this furnace of a CPU requires.

There is a workaround to the electrical noise: try running the CPU at a lower speed. You can do that by disabling Intel Turbo Boost, for example. There’s an UEFI setting for that, but on Fedora Linux 38 there’s an even easier option in the form of the “Power Profiles” setting. When running the CPU slower, the noise is much less severe.

This machine got the reputation of being a jet engine at work, and I agree with those people as this thing can be damn loud even when it’s seemingly not doing much. This is a result of the CPU demanding a lot of power and the cooling solution not being able to catch up. I feel that the stock fan curve is quite aggressive to prevent any reliability issues after long-term use.

If you have the same laptop and are looking for a fix to that issue, then you’re in luck! There are plenty of solutions out there and I am personally a fan of this Arch Wiki section. I use dell-bios-fan-control to be able to control the fan speed myself, and a simple script to fine-tune the behaviour of the system. The script looks something like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

echo "Finding device path."
device_path=$(echo /sys/devices/platform/dell_smm_hwmon/hwmon/hwmon*)
echo "Device path: $device_path"

echo "Testing existence of paths."
cat "$device_path"/temp1_input
cat "$device_path"/pwm1
echo "Testing existence of paths done."

echo "Disabling Dell stock BIOS fan control."
/root/.local/bin/dell-bios-fan-control 0
echo "Done!"

while true; do

  temp=$(cat "$device_path"/temp1_input)

  # Only two fan speed levels seem to exist, anything above 200 is basically
  # equivalent to full speed.
  if ((temp > 50000)); then
    echo 64 >"$device_path"/pwm1
  else
    echo 0 >"$device_path"/pwm1
  fi

  sleep 15
done

The CPU is already temperature limited even in the stock configuration and will throttle under load, which should mean that running the machine at a lower fan speed is just fine. Let’s hope that I’m right.

The damn USB-C port

While the USB-C port generally works well, I do still get annoyed with it. When connecting it to my Dell WD19TB Thunderbolt 3 dock, there’s a good chance that it will do nothing but charge. Restarting the machine with the dock connected will usually work, but it does take away from the portability of the setup.

I’m convinced at this point that USB-C is a cursed standard and will never “just work”. If you disagree, then please look up any article that tries to explain how USB-C works and all the things you have to keep in mind if you want to buy a damn cable for your device that does what you want. And then add Thunderbolt to the mix.

If this aspect starts becoming very annoying, then it might become a dealbreaker for me, but right now it happens infrequently enough that I can ignore it.

Oh, wait, it happened again while writing this article. Damn it all.

Other notes

Here’s a rundown of some observations that I’ve made while using this machine:

• you can actually boot from the microSD card, which is nice
• if you dual boot Fedora (two completely separate installations), then you’ll get two Fedora entries in the boot options list, and although the names are identical, you can set a preferred boot order just fine
• keyboard and touchpad are not the best things out there, but they are at the very least tolerable
• cannot say the same about the clit mouse, it’s not that good
• battery life is what I expected from a laptop that’s not an Apple M1/M2 based laptop: 2-4 hours of use when doing any real work, and up to 8 hours if your work involves staring at the screen with the brightness set to low and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth turned off
• lowest power draw I observed with upower was around 6 watts
• this machine has enough power to be a solid desktop replacement for software development
• the above is true even when you switch turbo boost off, you still have 6 cores running at 2.7 GHz!
• never managed to overheat the machine, even if I accidentally forgot to turn the laptop fan back on while running heavy loads (CPU throttled to around 2.2-2.4 GHz, which is impressive!), or when I accidentally put it in my backpack while it was still running
• “power on with USB-C connected” or any other UEFI setting with a similar purpose should be avoided, you will end up putting it into your backpack while it’s running
• this laptop has a full sized Ethernet port, which is incredibly handy for many IT professionals
• it even has the old Dell barrel plug charging port, which is great for situations where you’ve damaged the only USB-C port on the laptop
• I don’t have too much faith in the construction of the machine, some parts feel very plasticky and might not hold up well 5-10 years from now
• I was the one who actually made the recommendation to purchase this particular laptop model at my current job back in 2020 due to the fleet of ThinkPads being compatibility nightmares with the monitors and docks available, and in that regard it was an improvement. Shame about the fan and electrical noise.

Conclusion

Will I end up switching to a modern laptop now? Maybe. I’ve done so for my day job already, but the jury is still out on whether I might end up with this particular model for my personal use (especially because of the damn Thunderbolt dock issue). There are alternative laptops out there with similar pricing that are also in this Linux compatibility sweet spot.

Should you get one? If the price is right and you don’t mind applying the workarounds for the issues I mentioned, then go for it!

I have restored some faith in modern laptops now. They all suck in different ways, but this one is not the worst one, and that’s good enough for me. Probably. I’ll keep my ThinkPad T430 in an easy to reach spot, just in case.

A friend once showed me a power bank that was so cool that I had to get one myself. Ended up getting two, and here’s why.

This post is not sponsored.

Removable batteries

Let’s start with the feature that I appreciate the most: removable batteries! The TOMO M4 accepts up to 4 18650 lithium ion battery cells, which are very common nowadays and can be purchased from lots of retailers. You can also mix and match cells and even run the power bank with 1-3 cells in it.

If you’re feeling adventurous and you know what you’re doing, you could in theory take an used battery pack from a device that utilises 18650 lithium ion cells, disassemble it completely and use the healthier cells inside power banks like this one. They might not be healthy enough to power bigger devices, such as e-scooters, but they might be just enough to charge your phone. This is something I want to try out eventually with things like old ThinkPad laptop batteries since the risk of burning the whole building down is smaller with those.

I’ve previously bought cheap “10000 mAh” power banks from brands like Xiaomi and have had mixed experiences. Yeah, they usually get the job done, but should the battery die in it, then you’re probably just going to throw the thing away because the battery is not easily replaceable. That’s really wasteful.

With the TOMO M4 it’s a matter of sliding the plastic case open and just replacing the cells, similar to what you’d do for a TV remote with AA batteries. It’s so easy that even your grandma could do it!

I don’t understand why it’s acceptable to enclose consumable items like batteries in devices that are difficult or impossible to open up (the real reason is probably profits, right?). The battery will die at some point, no matter how well you take care of it.

If the rest of the device holds up, then the TOMO M4 could realistically be the last power bank I buy.

The cool factor

Now that we’re done with the most practical aspect, let’s look at the display. Once you power it on, you’ll see the green-lit LCD screen light up. The screen shows the charge level of the individual cells during standby. While charging, you’ll see a nice little animation.

But that’s not the coolest part. If you connect a device to one of the USB ports, it will show the voltage and current that the power bank is outputting. Multiply those two numbers and you can actually see the wattage that a device is pulling.

Not everyone probably appreciates this as much as I do, but I just find it to be really cool.

The downsides

There are some things I’ve noticed about this power bank that are less than ideal.

The charging port is micro-USB, which is not that great in 2023. Out of all the IT gear that I own, this power bank is the only regularly used item that charges via that port. I’d love to see this replaced with USB-C port, just for the sake of uniformity. It’s probably possible to modify this power bank and replace the charging port with an USB-C port, but I have not got around to doing that yet.

The display backlight can be turned off with a single click of the power button. However, if you’re charging a device that is close to being fully charged and starts trickle-charging, the display backlight will turn back on. This is less than ideal in situations where the backlight illumination bothers you, such as during night.

The detailed analysis that I mention in the next paragraph mentioned that this power bank “Can be used as UPS”. I put this to the test with two devices: Raspberry Pi model B+ and a LattePanda V1. The Raspberry Pi struggled a lot and the red power LED flickered constantly, indicating issues with power delivery. The LattePanda V1 booted up and ran nicely for a while, but under a bigger load it threw some errors into kernel logs and eventually locked up completely. On a functional level this power bank can probably act as a UPS, but in practice it did not work out for me. Other factors, such as the USB cable used and/or the lithium ion cells that I used in the power bank, might have also influenced the results of this quick test.

The technical details, in detail

If you’re interested in all the technical details for this particular power bank, then definitely check out this review on lygte-info.dk. It’s a very detailed overview of the capabilities of this power bank, its behaviour under different circumstances and a bunch of measurements and explanations to back it all up.

I also like the way they phrased the verdict: “I will rate it as acceptable.” Short and concise.

The author also reviews lots of other products and has the reviewing process documented in detail.

Closing thoughts

In general, I’m very happy with this power bank. Although I’d probably not recommend it as an UPS for low-power computers, I’d happily recommend this to someone who needs a simple power bank that they won’t have to throw away after a few years.

As with many homelab experiments around 2022/2023, it all started with Raspberry Pi-s being either out of stock or absurdly overpriced.

I once noticed a listing for a LattePanda V1 on a local auction site. The price was reasonable at 45 EUR, and after I looked at the specifications, I had to get one to play around with.

The auction site usually sells used items, but this LattePanda V1 was brand new in box, which surprised me. I got the 2GB RAM/32GB eMMC option.

I put the LattePanda through its paces, and here’s what I learned.

Please note that my use cases are more on the software side, I did not try out the hardware capabilities that SBC-s are also associated with (GPIO, camera/display ports etc).

The hardware

What makes the LattePanda V1 special is that it’s based off of an x86 CPU. Mine came with an Intel Atom x5-Z8350. 4 cores, not very fast ones, but similar or better to what you’d find in a Raspberry Pi 4. Most single-board computers usually come with an ARM-based CPU.

The board behaves like any normal PC. You power it on, you see the LattePanda logo, and the OS just starts up. Smashing the “Delete” key during the boot will direct you to the UEFI settings. Since this board is marketed towards the technical crowd, it has so many settings that you can play with. Definitely more than what I’d know to do with.

The board comes with Windows 10 preinstalled. I booted it up and gave it a go, and it was slow as molasses while it downloaded the latest updates. At one point I reinstalled Windows 10 and ran into issues. It “works”, but I had trouble getting any Intel GPU drivers installed on it, which rendered it almost useless for any media playback use case that I could have used it for.

The port selection is okay. It comes with 100 Mbit/s Ethernet, one USB 3.0 port and two USB 2.0 ports. I could get around 350 MB/s out of the USB 3 port with an external SSD, and the USB 2 ports pulled anywhere between 15-40 MB/s, depending on my luck. If you fancy a gigabit connection, then an USB-to-Ethernet adapter might do the trick.

Adding one external HDD or SSD over USB is okay and works well, but after adding a second one I noticed issues with either one of the disks not receiving enough power. If you intend to use the LattePanda V1 as the brains for a cheap NAS, then use drives that are powered externally.

The eMMC storage on the board is decent. Regarding performance it’s somewhere between a hard drive and a proper SSD, and the sequential read speeds max out around 150 MB/s. My main concern with it is the durability. The eMMC chip is probably hidden behind the metal shielding on the board and replacing it (if that is even possible) might turn out to be tricky. ls -lah /dev/disk/by-id/ lists the eMMC chip as mmc-DA4032, which a little bit of Googling refers to it being a SanDisk chip.

The microSD card port works, but either booting from the microSD card is not possible or the board was a bit temperamental when I gave it a go with Ubuntu Server 22.04.

The board runs hot in its barebones configuration, any decent load over a longer time period will result in the CPU throttling itself. I recommend rigging up a metal heat sink to the bottom of the board to avoid throttling and stability issues under very high load. A thermal pad, a piece of metal, and a bunch of zip ties will do wonders.

The Linux experience

When experimenting with Linux, I found a couple of annoyances. The LattePanda V1 seems to have a display connector on board. However, in Linux it turned out to be an annoyance as the system always presented a 1024x768 display being connected to the system. Booting into a Fedora Linux liveUSB environment will lead you to staring a blank view with only the wallpaper present. Playing with settings in UEFI did not lead to any improvements. What works is adding a kernel parameter: video=DSI-1:d. With Fedora Linux, if you apply this fix in GRUB when first booting into the liveUSB environment, it will persist after the installation is done.

Once I had Fedora Linux booted up, I did not have a good time. The display flickered when I dragged the mouse near the edges and the performance was awful. It didn’t take long for the desktop session to crash.

One of the main reasons I wanted to experiment with this setup was the low power usage of this board. The LattePanda V1 idles at around 3 watts, and under a high CPU load generated with stress -c 4 I could get it to 5-6 watts. This made it a great candidate for running this website and Wireguard VPN 24/7 at home. I ended up installing Ubuntu Server 22.04 on it and actually ran this website off of it for about a week or so.

The reason I stopped using the LattePanda V1 for that purpose was the performance. The 100 Mbit/s Ethernet wasn’t a disaster, but it did set limits to how much traffic I could push through the board. What made me reconsider was the CPU performance. Simply put: SSL encryption speeds were about 5-10x slower than on my ThinkPad T430 that ran as a server before.

My performance testing wasn’t scientific or anything, but I did run simple tests. One of the involved running curl against resources, such as an image on my blog, in an infinite loop and over multiple threads. The ThinkPad T430 peaked at around 650 Mbit/s of network bandwidth while the LattePanda V1 struggled at around 60 Mbit/s.

After looking for some other benchmarking options that I could set up really quickly, I also gave ApacheBenchmark a go. This more-or-less confirmed my findings and the requests per second results are the following:

• ThinkPad T430: 301.72
• LattePanda V1: 55.86

The LattePanda V1 was over 5 times slower in that test. With a slow internet uplink this might not matter much, though.

I ended up putting the T430 back in service after doing more calculations. One idea I had with the LattePanda V1 was to have that run 24/7 due to its low idle power usage and have another beefy server run during certain hours. I liked that idea until I calculated the difference in power savings. Having the main server with around 12 W of idle power turn off for 6 hours and the LattePanda running at the same time would have actually increased the total power consumption of the setup compared to having the main server running 24/7.

The math will make sense if your main server uses much more power. Most desktop PC-s that I have seen idle around 35-50 W and rack-mounted servers use even more than that, so in those situations this might make more sense. Or you can whip up a solution that starts and stops machines in your homelab on-demand.

Oh, and don’t expect to run CPU or GPU based transcoding off of this thing with Jellyfin. It works okay for certain video formats and resolutions, but a 1080p H.265 video transcoded to H.264 is just not fast enough on this machine.

A suitable use case

I might change my mind at one point and give the LattePanda a go again as a low power web server. I hate unused hardware, which is why this LattePanda V1 is now serving as an offsite backup. The USB 3 port makes sense for attaching a bigger storage device and if you run ZFS, you can also send your whole filesystem to it with zfs send/receive or syncoid. I haven’t had much luck with ARM and ZFS, but with the LattePanda and its x86-based CPU I have not had issues.

Conclusion

All-in-all, it’s a neat little board that shows signs of instability from time to time. If you intend to just run Ubuntu Server on it and your workloads are not very performance critical, then it might work out well for you. Think of it like a juiced-up Raspberry Pi 4 to get an idea of what it might be suitable for regarding performance.

It did not fit the use case I intended to use it for, but I’m still happy that I could play around with this board. It was fun!

2023-02-16 update: this post is not about the “GB vs GiB” issue, or the “lost disk space” that you notice after formatting the device in an OS. Please read the article in full before making inaccurate comments online.

For many years, I have used two SanDisk Ultra 16 GB USB flash drives as OS installation media. Since I do not trust Ventoy yet, and alternative “one stick that does it all” solutions have had odd bugs from time to time, I prefer having separate physical USB sticks for each OS, one for Fedora Linux, and one for Windows 10.

I hate reflashing sticks all the time and would like to have at least one around that always has Fedora Linux on it, so I decided to get two more USB sticks of the same brand and size. Once they arrived, I got annoyed.

The old flash drive shows up like this in GNOME Disks.

Here’s the new one.

Although it does not matter one bit for my use case, I am annoyed that the new one is shipping with much fewer bits than the old one. I’m a whole 607125504 bytes short! That’s 579 MB, or about half a gigabyte.

The only difference that I can make out on the surface is that the new one was manufactured in Malaysia.

But it seems that SanDisk (or their new owner Western Digital) has legally covered their butt with this knowledge base article.

Here’s the line that explains why some bytes are seemingly missing on formatted media. This is what consumers are usually concerned about once they use their storage device.

SanDisk defines 1 GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes. Operating Systems define 1 GB as 1,073,741,824 BYTES.

However, this section is the one actually relevant to my finding.

A portion of the total capacity is used to store certain functions including optimizations of the memory that support performance and endurance and therefore is not available for user storage. This is disclosed on our packaging and marketing materials when you see the statement “Actual user storage less.”

Based on this, I assume that SanDisk cheaped out and decided to not add enough flash to provide both the advertised storage of 16 000 000 000 bytes available to the user and some room for over-provisioning that flash storage benefits from. And somehow they are the only ones who do it this way, as all other storage media that I own shows up with the proper number of bytes.

And for those interested, here’s f3 output for both the old and new sticks.

Old:

# f3probe /dev/sdc --destructive --time-ops
F3 probe 8.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.

WARNING: Probing normally takes from a few seconds to 15 minutes, but
         it can take longer. Please be patient.

Good news: The device `/dev/sdc' is the real thing

Device geometry:
	         *Usable* size: 14.91 GB (31266816 blocks)
	        Announced size: 14.91 GB (31266816 blocks)
	                Module: 16.00 GB (2^34 Bytes)
	Approximate cache size: 0.00 Byte (0 blocks), need-reset=no
	   Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)

Probe time: 1'49"
 Operation: total time / count = avg time
      Read: 463.8ms / 4814 = 96us
     Write: 1'48" / 4192321 = 25us
     Reset: 1us / 1 = 1us

New:

# f3probe /dev/sdd --destructive --time-ops
F3 probe 8.0
Copyright (C) 2010 Digirati Internet LTDA.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.

WARNING: Probing normally takes from a few seconds to 15 minutes, but
         it can take longer. Please be patient.

Good news: The device `/dev/sdd' is the real thing

Device geometry:
	         *Usable* size: 14.34 GB (30081024 blocks)
	        Announced size: 14.34 GB (30081024 blocks)
	                Module: 16.00 GB (2^34 Bytes)
	Approximate cache size: 0.00 Byte (0 blocks), need-reset=no
	   Physical block size: 512.00 Byte (2^9 Bytes)

Probe time: 1'02"
 Operation: total time / count = avg time
      Read: 338.2ms / 4814 = 70us
     Write: 1'02" / 4192321 = 14us
     Reset: 1us / 1 = 1us

I’m not even mad, I’m just disappointed.

2023-02-16 update

This post received more attention than usual, so here are some additional details and clarifications.

Why do you not trust Ventoy?

Ventoy is a great tool from what I’ve seen online and the use case it fills does save time and resources. However, I have some reservations about it. If I had to compromise a bunch of critical systems over a long time period, then publishing a great tool and having it tamper with your OS installation media silently would be a really good pick. At this time, I don’t trust the developers of the tool enough and I don’t have the time or skills to perform repeated audits of the software every time they release a new version.

MBR vs GPT partitioning

That was an oversight on my part, I should have presented both disks with the same partitioning scheme to avoid unnecessary confusion. This has now been corrected.

Alternatives to Ventoy

One reader pointed out a physical device that can be used for a similar purpose as Ventoy: IODD. I have not tested on myself and reportedly it has some bugs and is not 100% perfect, but it seems like a neat hardware-based alternative.

I have personally tried out things like DriveDroid in the past, but that required a rooted Android phone and it was not 100% bug-free either.

Everyone knows that GB and GiB are not the same, why is this post even a thing, the author is clearly incompetent and dumb.

Read the article.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my ThinkPad T430 that was tasked with being a home server. After doing some experiments with my setup a couple of times, it is once again the main server for all my self-hosting needs. However, this time I have made some adjustments.

Background

The monstrosity that you’re looking at is what I’d call “the minimum viable ThinkPad as a server”. To be fair, you could go even more minimal by ripping out everything but the motherboard and the drives, but for my use case this is how far I was willing to go.

In my previous post about this setup, I mentioned that the T430 suffered unexpected shutdowns under certain situations, which usually involved running the fan at the lowest speed, moderate to high CPU load, and a lot of storage activity. It wasn’t the CPU as the temperatures were way below the critical point, so I suspected either the motherboard or the storage running hot and tripping some sensor that I wasn’t aware of.

For a while now, I have been thinking about running the T430 as bare as possible. One idea involved taking the bare motherboard and the storage and slapping it on an acrylic sheet with some stand-offs, which should give it the best chance at cooling. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to commit to this, and that setup would have had some downsides as well. At some point an idea popped to my mind: I could probably achieve a similar result by stripping everything but the bare necessities from the laptop and improve the cooling as a result. That’s how I ended up with what you just saw.

T430, stripped

I ended up removing the following from the T430:

• palm rest
• smart card reader
• Bluetooth chip
• WiFi chip
• the whole display assembly

This was in part motivated by the fact that those parts are the ones that are not in the best shape on my main ThinkPad T430 that I use as an actual laptop. The other part was this nagging feeling that the most powerful PC that I own (the ASRock DeskMini X300) was woefully underutilized as my home server.

The keyboard had to stay because the power button is part of the keyboard assembly. There are ways to power on the laptop without the keyboard:

• put the laptop in a dock and use the power button that is present on the dock
• short a specific pin on the keyboard connector to ground

I do have some extra ThinkPad docks around that I could have used for this purpose, but it would have made the setup bulkier, which is why I did not go for that, at least not yet.

There is also an option in UEFI settings that can be used to turn the laptop on by connecting the charger (“Power on with AC attach”), but that only seems to work if you have a battery connected and after you have turned the laptop on manually once. The same caveat applies for Wake on LAN functionality. If the laptop overheats or it runs out of battery completely, then you need to manually power it on.

The cooling situation

Removing the palm rest reveals something that might be related to the unexpected shutdowns that I observed with this setup previously.

Under this area is a chip on the motherboard that seems to generate a modest amount of heat. While the machine is running, it gets warm to touch and gets hot if you throw a high load at the system, especially if you include storage in the mix. With the laptop lid closed and the palm rest being present, the cooling situation for this area can be quite bad indeed. Now that the palm rest is removed, this area of the laptop is now exposed, which should help with the cooling for this chip.

Having the keyboard connected in this state isn’t too bad. It does restrict the airflow a bit, yes, but at least it can be fastened using two screws, which means that it won’t move around and cause any other issues.

With this setup, the cooling has improved noticeably. Unfortunately it didn’t come to my mind to make a before/after comparison to better illustrate this, so I will just write about how well it operates in this configuration.

Currently, I have the laptop fan controlled by a modified version of the minimum viable fan control script. The fan only kicks in after the CPU reaches 60°C, ramps up to a moderate speed at over 85°C, and lets the default fan behaviour handle everything if the temperatures reaches over 95°C. This results in the fan being off completely for most of the day as the server is idling at around 5-10% CPU usage and temperatures being anywhere between 45-60°C. When there is a workload on the system that taxes the CPU, the fan will kick on with a small delay.

I’ve also disabled turbo boost on the Intel i7-3632QM that is currently in this T430, which limits the clock speed to 2.2 GHz max. Performance takes a small hit, but the CPU is now running much more efficiently. This is one of the tweaks that allows the laptop to be near silent. At a full 8 thread CPU load using stress -c 8, the CPU core temperatures peak at 70°C at 22°C ambient temperature, with the fan running at around 2600 RPM.

As a result of all of this, the T430 is very quiet while using about 10-12W of power while idling. Under the maximum CPU load generated by stress, the total system power usage is around 34W.

Putting the “paste” in thermal paste

Originally, the T430-as-a-server ran vertically using a basic laptop vertical stand. Back when I concluded the initial test in 2022, I disassembled the machine and noticed something very odd with the thermal paste.

Based on this image and the fact that I ran the machine quite warm most of the time (CPU temperatures around 60-80°C), I assume that the excess thermal paste started slowly dripping down. The part that concerns me the most is that the top of the chip was barely covered by the thermal paste. Either that part of the chip had great contact with the heatsink, or the thermal paste drooped down with time and left it mostly uncovered. It could explain some of the issues, but I’ll avoid making any definitive conclusions from this alone.

To avoid similar issues in the future, the laptop is now on a stand at about 60° angle. Not sure if it will work, but it’s worth a shot.

Closing thoughts

Overall, I’m happy with how this experiment turned out. Cooling is no longer an issue, and the T430 that I initially got for spare parts is actually being useful. The amount of performance this machine offers while using very little power seems to be a good balance for the workloads that I run on my home server.

I hate buying things that are single-purpose, which is why I ended up with this setup.

Take a speaker, a battery, put them together, and what you now have is a portable speaker. Since I had access to both, I felt no need to buy a separate portable speaker for use in social events.

The fact that this JBL soundbar supports Bluetooth was what sealed the deal. Just make sure to keep the setup a fair distance away from any bigger bonfires, liquids and bugs, and you should be good to go.

This post illustrates something that is not common on modern laptops: changing the CPU.

Background

One of the modifications that you can do to a ThinkPad T430 laptop is changing the CPU to a more powerful quad core model. That’s exactly what I did back in 2017, but due to the poor availability of compatible CPU-s in my region I went for one with a 45W TDP, which is a bit much for a laptop designed for CPU-s with a 35W TDP.

You could work around this issue with software, and that’s what I also did for a long time. Since I now own two T430-s and the availability of 35W parts is better now, I decided to go for one to see how well these two options compare (result: it doesn’t overheat as often, but it managed to do it once anyway).

Unlike my T430, most modern laptops come with a soldered CPU. There do exist laptops that come with a socketed CPU, but those are not that common and are designed for very specific use cases.

Soldering the CPU right to the board has its benefits, such as the machine being thinner, and CPU-s don’t really die all that often. However, what we have lost out on is the option to upgrade older machines with more powerful components, extending the useful lifetime of the device.

Yes, you can replace soldered CPU-s, but that requires a skillset and equipment that few people have.

I’ve decided to give a new laptop a test drive, mainly because I had the opportunity at work, and also out of morbid curiosity.

It’s the HP Elitebook 845 G9, and it has pretty good specifications:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 6800U
• RAM: 2x16GB DDR5
• Storage: 512GB KIOXIA NVMe SSD (KBG50ZNV512G)
• OS: Fedora 37, kernel version 6.0.8

This laptop was also shown in a recent LinusTechTips video and praised for its ease of repair and maintenance.

However, I can’t seem to enjoy nice things. This attempt at using a newer laptop has had some frustrating challenges. Perhaps the common denominator is Linux. Or me. Can’t rule anything out.

This is simply my experience with this laptop, including my attempts to overcome certain issues with workarounds. If you find something that’s factually wrong about any part of this post, then please reach out!

Wi-Fi

It all began with the Wi-Fi card not working. The card can be replaced, but the results can be mixed.

An Intel Wi-Fi card that I had lying around would not be recognized by the system at all. The situation was fixed by the reseller who replaced the Realtek RTL8852BE chip with another Realtek one, this time with the Realtek RTL8822CE.

Yes, there exist drivers that you can install, but it’s far from an ideal solution. You will have to reinstall the Wi-Fi driver after every kernel update, and the kernel updates frequently on Fedora Linux.

The HP website allows you to pick between a Realtek and Qualcomm Wi-Fi chip. My recommendation is to go with the Qualcomm option because the Realtek RTL8852BE does not work out of the box.

Airplane mode

This is an issue I didn’t think I would ever have to worry about.

The laptop would switch itself to airplane mode at random on boot. Not on every boot, but about 50% of the time. When you try to disable Airplane mode from GNOME settings, it would flip back on again, no matter how often you tried.

To turn Airplane mode off properly, you have to use the Airplane mode keyboard shortcut, and even then it might take an attempt or two.

Some HP users suspect that the issue might be related to a botched firmware update. There’s a kernel patch in the pipeline, and some users say that blacklisting the hp_wmi kernel module could also fix the issue.

Others say that this behaviour might be related to certain events being triggered on the laptop, such as lid closing or the screen rotating. The proposed fix did not work to resolve this issue on my laptop.

Blacklisting the hp_wmi kernel module was what improved the situation for me.

USB4 and Thunderbolt

This laptop is noteworthy due to its support for USB4, which brings with it support for Thunderbolt, making it one of the first AMD-based laptops to properly support that feature.

At my current employer the general trend has been towards standardization: every meeting room and desk has a single USB-C port that you plug into, and you should be good to go.

I can confirm that USB-C docks seem to work quite well under Linux, especially the one integrated into my Dell monitor at work.

I can also confirm that the Dell WD19TB Thunderbolt 3 dock does work.

On Windows 10.

Not on Linux though.

At some point the errors I saw in kernel logs got quite ridiculous.

When reconnecting the port, the results were slightly different almost every time.

The UEFI settings allow some control over the behaviour of the USB-C ports. You can even disable Thunderbolt support and use them as plain USB-C ports with DisplayPort support.

The behaviour of the dock would also be different depending on how you connect it. If the dock is connected during boot, your USB devices and Ethernet port will all be functional, but there’s no display output. If you boot while the dock is disconnected and connect it once you have reached the GUI, your display will work, but you have no USB or Ethernet support.

Even if one of the two critical functions of the dock work, reconnecting the cable will eventually result in nothing working. You also have a 50% chance of the machine locking up completely.

The reasons for these issues can be any one of these:

• the proper kernel support is not there yet
• HP messed something up with the latest UEFI update for Linux users
• I was using it wrong

Dell WD19TB Thunderbolt dock workaround

After multiple sessions of troubleshooting, I seem to have come up with a solution that seems to work for my use case, which involves connecting a couple of USB devices, an Ethernet cable, and one 1440p monitor. You’re giving up Thunderbolt capabilities and forcing the dock to fall back to USB+DP altmode setting, but in return you’ll get a setup that actually works.

To get the Dell WD19TB Thunderbolt dock working, do the following:

• go to UEFI settings and turn off Thunderbolt mode
• save settings and reboot
• connect your monitor over HDMI

Yup, that was it. I could not get DisplayPort working. Only HDMI.

The UEFI settings do contain a setting that allows you to sacrifice USB and Ethernet bandwidth to allow for higher resolution DP signals to be passed through, but that’s simply not acceptable to me. Based on the description, I think that the setting forces all USB devices to run at USB 2.0 speeds. This setting may fix the issue if you want to use DisplayPort, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Suspend

Doesn’t work. The screen will go black and the power button indicator will keep blinking. Only way to break that cycle is to force the laptop to reset by holding the power button down for an extended amount of time.

On Lenovo laptops I’ve seen an option that allows you to change the S3 state behaviour for Linux compatibility. I haven’t found a way to do something similar on the HP yet.

Stability

This is the straw that broke the camel’s back. When playing back video, I noticed issues with glitching and stuttering. The video would play fine, until a frame froze for a few seconds, and then everything continued as normal.

What ruined everything for me were the random crashes that only occurred when playing back video.

When I checked system logs from a previous boot (journalctl -b -1), I found that something was up with the GPU driver.

This was not a one-off event and once it had happened for the fourth time, I gave up on this machine and switched back to my trusty ThinkPad T430.

Conclusion

Given enough time, I’m sure that at least some of the issues will get fixed, either with a kernel update or HP rolling out a UEFI update that fixes things for Linux users.

It’s also possible that a specific set of UEFI settings will contribute to fixing any of the issues listed here. The number of combinations you can have is too high for me to bother testing all of those, so I won’t be doing that.

In its current state, I cannot recommend this laptop to Linux users. You can get most things working, but you will still be incredibly frustrated with the issues that remain.

Something has to change, and it’s going to be how I choose hardware in the future. Linux will stay, which means that the newest and “greatest” hardware is off the table for me. Honestly, lagging behind the newest hardware 3-5 years (or 10 in my case) doesn’t sound too bad, you’ll still get the performance improvements at a fraction of the original price.

If that’s what’s necessary for a good Linux experience, then so be it.

You have probably heard about the Raspberry Pi. It’s a nice little affordable single-board computer with a huge community using it for all sorts of projects.

I got my first Raspberry Pi, the Model B+, during my first year at university, which was around the winter of 2014/2015. The idea of a super tiny PC that could actually do useful things was just very fascinating to me, and I loved the way that green PCB looked.

Over the years, I’ve used that Pi and newer revisions of them in all sorts of use cases: a simple Kodi media box, a Minecraft server, a web server, retro game emulation box, and much more.

Because the goal of the Raspberry Pi was to be an affordable platform for experimentation and learning for everyone, they had to keep the costs down. This meant that the computing power that the Raspberry Pi 1 packed wasn’t much. With the Model B+, you get one ARM CPU core that you can overclock to 1 GHz, and 512MB of RAM. It wasn’t much even at the time of release, and it definitely isn’t great in 2022.

Due to the very limited performance, the use cases for a Raspberry Pi 1 are quite limited in 2022. Use cases that don’t require much computational power are often better solved by other platforms. Use cases that are actually useful to me and solve a problem I have are too much for the Pi 1. At the same time, I absolutely hate it when I have computing equipment sitting around on a shelf doing nothing. I can’t even sell this Pi, because it is not worth much any more and it has some sentimental value for me.

Taking all that into account, and looking at my parts box, I decided to give one idea a go: let’s build the slowest damn Syncthing backup endpoint imaginable.

The build

Here’s a quick rundown of the parts:

• SBC: Raspberry Pi 1 Model B+
• Storage (microSD): SanDisk 8GB that I had lying around
• Storage (USB): Crucial BX500 1TB SATA 2.5" SSD, in an IcyBox USB-SATA enclosure
• Power: official Raspberry Pi microUSB power adapter
• Networking: TP-Link TL-WN722N USB WiFI adapter
• OS: Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit (lite)
• Acoustic foam: yes.

Use case: networked offsite backup of files that I cannot afford to lose, powered by Syncthing, btrfs as the filesystem, and btrbk as the snapshotting solution.

I set the OS up using the Raspberry Pi imager due to the useful options it offered, such as automatically setting my SSH public key authentication up. Once booted, I logged in and ran sudo apt update -y. I knew what to expect regarding performance, and was still surprised at how slow things have become. Updating the system and deploying the configuration using Ansible took hours.

The 1TB SSD is formatted as a btrfs file system and mounted to /storage. For the Syncthing service, I created a separate user syncthing with the home folder on /storage/home/syncthing. The synced data will live on /storage/syncthing. Keeping the home folder on the SSD is intentional: Syncthing keeps track of application state in a database and storing it on the microSD card will wear it out much faster. The database can also be quite big if you have a lot of files to sync.

I’m not going to go into the btrbk setup in much detail, but if you’re interested in that, then I do have a write-up about btrbk. Long story short: snapshots are cool, and they help prevent data loss in case of accidental deletions.

I set up Syncthing to allow access to the GUI from over the network by changing the ~/.config/syncthing/config.xml file while the service was stopped. Just change the GUI listen address to 0.0.0.0:8384, that will make the GUI accept connections not only from localhost, but from all machines on the same network. The next step was to set a password to the GUI and check the “Use HTTPS for GUI” box, because you probably don’t want any rando messing your machine up.

The choice to go with the WiFi for networking is related to the environment this system will eventually be deployed to. Ethernet isn’t an option there.

Once the system was all set up and files were syncing extremely slowly, I kept an eye on the Pi, especially the red power LED. I had set the CPU to run at 1 GHz using raspi-config, and with both the WiFi adapter and SSD connected, I had concerns that the Pi could not supply enough power. The power limitations of the Pi are a common source for issues and that has come up in the past as well, especially with external storage connected to the Pi. However, with this particular setup this has not been an issue so far. The fact that Pi is so underpowered that it cannot even make full use of the SSD is probably a contributing factor to the overall stability.

The file sync was very slow, but at least it was working. The typical transfer speeds hovered around 1.5 MB/s. Not great, but given the fact that this setup will operate in an environment where the download speeds are typically capped around 15-20 Mbit/s, this will be more than enough.

How well will this setup work over a longer time period? Only time will tell. Just like with other disastrous tests that I have done, I’ll try to update this post whenever anything noteworthy happens.

Does this setup make any sense if you need a performant Syncthing endpoint? Hell no. However, I’m very happy that this little Pi finally has a purpose.

Alternatives

This project was about finding a purpose for an SBC I already had lying around.

If the price and availability of Raspberry Pi-s wasn’t a complete shitshow in 2022, I would go for a Raspberry Pi 4 in a heartbeat. I can’t, and that makes me and most of the Raspberry Pi community very sad. The more performant Pi-s open up so many possibilities.

An Orange Pi Zero running Armbian was something I also considered, since I had one lying around, but it was a bit too competent for the job, and I might find a better use for it eventually.

If you wanted performance, then any x86-based PC will do just fine. My recommendation is to go for an used PC, be it a laptop or a very small and efficient PC. Just keep in mind that the power usage is typically higher on these setups compared to a small ARM-based single-board computer. If a machine runs 24/7, then the difference between 2-3 W and 10-20 W will start to matter, especially when energy prices are quite high in your region.

A couple of years ago, I worked on a ThinkPad T60. That ThinkPad had been in use by a family member before that, and I started its cleanup by disassembling the whole machine and making sure that it was pristine. However, once I put it all back together, I saw that it was password protected. I wasn’t even able to access the BIOS. After repeatedly asking for hints for the password and trying some simple cases myself, I never cracked it.

Not too long ago I got curious and looked for a way to overcome this issue. That’s when I stumbled upon this SuperUser post about resetting the supervisor password on a ThinkPad.

Once my to-do list was down to a reasonable size, I decided to finally give this a go, since it didn’t seem that difficult. Here’s an illustrated guide on how I approached this task.

Sources that are relevant to this topic:

• How to remove the Supervisor BIOS password for an IBM ThinkPad

• www.ja.axxs.net

• “How to unlock BIOS Supervisor Password from Lenovo Thinkpad Laptop (no damage to laptop)” by Arpan Dubey

Setup

What you’ll need to pull this off:

• your ThinkPad T60 laptop that has a supervisor password enabled
• a screwdriver
• anything that conducts electricity and can be used to short two pins
• a steady hand
• a magnifier, if your eyesight isn’t that great

To begin the process, you need to remove the palm rest of the ThinkPad. Follow the service manual if needed. Removing the keyboard screws is optional, but it might help you access the correct pins better.

The process

The steps for performing the supervisor password clearing:

• turn on the laptop
• when you see the ThinkPad logo, short two specific pins
• keep shorting those pins!
• press F1 to go to the BIOS
• navigate to the section in BIOS where you can set the Supervisor Password
• enter the supervisor password setting prompt and enter a blank password in the first field
• stop shorting the pins, and then enter an empty password to the second field
• save settings and restart
• after rebooting, you should be able to boot without having to enter a password

What follows is an illustrated guide of the process.

This is the step where I messed up initially. The contact between the pins was not good and I got prompted with the supervisor password prompt. Power the machine off and try again if you face the same issue.

Once the pins are shorted, you should be able to access the BIOS with a little bit of F1 key spamming.

After saving the settings and rebooting, you should be greeted with a successful boot.

Once you’ve confirmed that everything’s OK, assemble the machine again and enjoy the laptop that you just saved from becoming e-waste.

Caveats

This guide might not be terribly relevant in 2022. I still remember starting my software development career in 2016 with a ThinkPad T60 and it was painful even back then. These laptops are classics, but they are really starting to show their age. I’ve even encountered issues like the WiFi chip causing lots of trouble, with the connection being very spotty and borderline unusable.

But hey, at least it’s not completely unusable any more!

I stumbled upon this post in /r/thinkpad, which got my attention. It showcases an ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter that they purchased from AliExpress. The adapter has a similar purpose to the one designed by thinkmods.store, with the added bonus that it could fit longer NVMe SSD-s if you didn’t mind them sticking out of the case. You could also order one instantly, so I did.

For those interested, the title of the listing at the time of writing of this article is “ExpressCard interface to m.2 NGFF nvme solid state disc x201 t430 hp8570 w520”. The listing I chose was this one. I’m not affiliated with the manufacturer or the seller in any way.

The idea

I try to avoid buying things that I don’t need, which is why I came up with an excuse for getting this adapter: adding a cache SSD to my ThinkPad-as-a-server.

The OS is running off of an mSATA SSD that I could theoretically use for the same purpose, but eventually killing the SSD that also hosts the OS with constant writes sounded like a really bad idea. I also didn’t want to have excessive writes on my pair of Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SATA SSD-s, because replacing those will be quite expensive down the line.

Here’s what we’re working with:

• Sabrent Rocket Nano NVMe 2242 SSD (512GB)
• the aforementioned ExpressCard to M.2 NGFF adapter
• ThinkPad T430 with an ExpressCard34 slot

Quick word on the packaging: it was packaged in a small cardboard box, which held up okay, but a more rough treatment of the box would probably have broken the tiny PCB.

Assembly

According to comments I saw before purchasing the adapter, I expected the assembly to be a bit tricky, and after assembling it I have to agree with that sentiment.

First, you’ll have to squeeze the SSD in there. Unlike M.2 slots that are common in laptops and desktops alike, this one requires you to horizontally push the SSD in without breaking anything. Don’t be afraid to use a bit of force here, but be careful in how you apply it.

After the SSD is in, screw it in properly and place the assembly on one of the metal parts.

Now comes the fun part: you’ll have to clip on the top part as well. My recommendation is to first clip in the part that sits near the contact pins, then the one at the other end of the adapter, and then push in the metal shielding at the edges.

Tests

To test this adapter out, I just plugged it into my main ThinkPad T430 running Fedora 36 and Linux kernel version 5.19.12. It worked right out of the box.

My ThinkPad T430 can now support hotpluggable NVMe SSD-s, and 4 internal SSD-s in total. Not quite tricked out as this setup, but not bad for a 10 year old laptop.

Please note that these tests are not done with any meaningful testing methodology and are just quick one-off tests that aim to showcase what to expect when using this adapter with the configuration I’m using it with.

To check how well the adapter performs, I opened gnome-disks and did a quick benchmark offered by it.

The average read speed is at 411.2 MB/s, and writes at 366.7 MB/s.

The results are in line with the limitations of a PCIe 2.0 x1 link, which has a theoretical cap of 500 MB/s.

What’s more noteworthy is the latency. Average access time is at 0.03 ms, which compares well to a Samsung 870 EVO 1TB SATA SSD that’s connected to the same machine, which reports an average access time of 0.07 ms.

When copying files to the SSD, the temperature sensor reported a maximum of 60°C. Additional read operations in the form of an ZFS scrub hit 63°C, which was the maximum I observed during my quick testing.

When I threw both read and write operations to the SSD, the total I/O bandwidth for both operations was capped at around 390 MB/s according to zpool iostat 1 -v. If your workloads do a lot of read-write operations in parallel, then take this into account.

As for my use case, it seems to be holding up okay. I’ll have to report back after this adapter and SSD combo has been in use for a longer time.

I’ve always been a fan of tinkering with cooling setups on my computers. I’ve even went as far as writing crappy solutions to make up for deficiencies on the hardware level. After years of dumb experiments I’ve seen how little you can get away with in cooling and how to run your machines as quietly as possible without giving up too much performance.

I also appreciate simplicity, which is why I’m currently running the simplest damn solution you can imagine to control how my ThinkPad T430 and ASRock DeskMini X300 run: a shell script.

It also comes with some added benefits:

• self-documenting
• highly customizable
• low resource usage

These scripts are not “battle-hardened” and using them incorrectly may or may not result in hardware failure. Use at your own risk. The only guarantee I can give is that it works on my machine™.

If you’re someone who doesn’t like tinkering with their computers and wants their machines to “just work”, then this article likely isn’t for you.

ThinkPad T430

With the ThinkPad T430, the script does two things:

• control the fan speed
• preemptively throttle the CPU and GPU

This type of behaviour is optimized for mostly quiet operation. The fan is running at its lowest speed when under a small load, and the CPU/GPU throttling has an added benefit of reducing the overall power usage, too. The difference between non-turbo and turbo speeds on the Intel i7-3820QM can be as much as 13-15 watts.

To enable fan control on ThinkPads, you need to have a file at /usr/lib/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf with the following contents:

options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1

Reboot, and you can now have full control over the fan speed in your ThinkPad!

The script itself looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

while true; do

  temp=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone1/temp)

  if ((temp > 90000)); then
    echo level 7 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  elif ((temp > 75000)); then
    echo level 5 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  elif ((temp > 60000)); then
    echo level 3 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  elif ((temp > 30000)); then
    echo level 1 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  else
    echo level 0 >/proc/acpi/ibm/fan
  fi

  if ((temp > 97000)); then
    echo 350 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_max_freq_mhz
    echo 350 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_boost_freq_mhz
  elif ((temp > 90000)); then
    echo 650 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_max_freq_mhz
    echo 650 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_boost_freq_mhz
  else
    echo 1250 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_max_freq_mhz
    echo 1250 >/sys/class/drm/card*/gt_boost_freq_mhz
  fi

  if ((temp > 70000)); then
    echo 1 >/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
  else
    echo 0 >/sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo
  fi

  sleep 0.5
done

What we’re doing is reading the temperature of the CPU package and then setting the fan speed and throttling based on that. Note that the temperatures are represented without any decimal places. A reading of 78000 means that the chip is running at 78 °C.

On my ThinkPad T430, the fan speed levels can be roughly described as such:

• level 1: lowest speed, barely audible
• level 3: audible, but tolerable
• level 5 and above: it’s probably loud enough to bother you

The second section controls the integrated GPU. What I’ve found in my testing is that a weak integrated GPU can still chug up to 20 watts, which is a considerable amount, especially on a laptop. The card* wildcard is there because the integrated GPU may change between card0 and card1, and I’m too lazy to make the script any smarter.

The values written there correspond to the maximum GPU clock speed. 1250 happens to be the max clock speed (in MHz) and at that speed the GPU is using a lot of power. 650 is the speed at which the integrated GPU is running most efficiently. 350 is the lowest speed, and you will notice it due to the performance being extra crappy.

With the CPU, I chose to just turn the turbo boost on or off. With turbo boost off, the CPU will top out at 2.7 GHz and around 22 watts of power usage. With turbo boost, the CPU can run anywhere between 3.4-3.7 GHz, depending on the number of cores under load. You’ll likely notice much higher CPU temperatures and power usage climbing to around 35 watts. Fast at short and bursty workloads, and yet efficient and relatively cool at sustained loads.

And at the very end, you have a simple sleep statement. I’ve set it to half a second, but feel free to set it as you see fit. Higher intervals might not be that good of an idea because the script may not be able to respond quickly enough to changing thermals, just keep that in mind.

ASRock DeskMini X300

Although I’ve opted for a more experimental setup with my home server and the ASRock DeskMini X300 is no longer running as one, I think it’s still worthwhile to share how I configured the fan control logic on this machine.

With the ASRock DeskMini X300, my goal was simple: let it run as quietly as reasonably possible without losing too much performance.

This machine was running 24/7 as a server and has a powerful 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 5700G CPU in it. One thing this script is heavily relying on is the fact that Ryzen CPU-s have well-engineered boosting logic in them, meaning that they’re already designed to run at the highest speed possible and only limit their speed if they hit power or thermal limits.

One thing you may need to do first is installing lm-sensors and running sudo sensors-detect. By default the CPU fan speed controls were not properly exposed, but after running sensors-detect and saying yes at every prompt, they were picked up.

The script looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

# /sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3

echo 1 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2_enable

while true; do

  temp=$(cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon4/temp1_input)

  if ((temp > 94000)); then
    echo 170 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 90000)); then
    echo 140 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 70000)); then
    echo 120 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 40000)); then
    echo 30 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  else
    echo 0 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  fi

  sleep 5
done

The hwmon values and which fan you’re controlling is likely different on your own PC. Take a look at the paths found in the script and poke around while also physically looking at your PC. Try enabling PWM control by writing to pwm*_enable handles and then setting the fan speed. As a result of your poking, you should see the CPU fan change its speed. If it doesn’t, try another value.

The values you can write are in the range 0-255, where the higher value corresponds to a higher speed.

I’ve limited the TDP of my CPU to 35 watts using a setting found in UEFI settings. This results in the CPU running cool and quiet even under a full load.

systemd service

To run your fan control script as a systemd service, drop the script to your preferred location (I placed it in /root/.local/bin/fancontrol), then create a file /etc/systemd/system/fancontrol.service with the following contents:

[Unit]
Description=Quick fan control software

[Service]
ExecStart=/root/.local/bin/fancontrol

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And once that is done, enable and start your fan control service with sudo systemctl enable --now fancontrol.service.

If you encounter issues or something isn’t working right, check the status of the service with systemctl status fancontrol.service or full logs with journalctl -u fancontrol.service.

Conclusion

If you want something that works out of the box and does the smart stuff for you, then give this Arch Linux wiki page a look. If you’re not into that and want to easily tune the behaviour of your machine, then feel free to use these scripts as a baseline for your own experimentation.

After playing around with fan curves on my ASRock DeskMini X300 based home server, I noticed one interesting thing. At least it was interesting to me.

Background

I had one goal: to try to see if I could turn it into a semi-passive PC by only turning the fan on when the PC was under load while keeping it off for as long as possible. Running the fan only when necessary means less noise and less dust accumulating on the heat sink. No dust, no maintenance required.

The cooling solution used is the Noctua NH-L9a, a low-profile CPU cooler. The two main selling points for me were that it was small enough to fit into the DeskMini, and it is much quieter than the stock AMD Ryzen Stealth cooler.

I started with something reasonable: only kick the fan on when the CPU is over 55°C. This did end up with the fan occasionally turning off, but after around 10-15 seconds it would kick on again. With time, I bumped this limit up by 5-10 degrees each time and ended up with the current configuration. The fan now turns on after 80°C and starts spinning at a modest level at over 90°C.

By turning this limit up, I noticed that the PC could be run in a fanless mode for much longer. This meant that the PC was also much hotter itself and was warm to touch, but nothing extreme or concerning.

Results

I added a couple of lines to my fan control script to track the CPU temperatures and the fan speeds, here are the results:

Based on the data I gathered, the CPU fan was off for 90.7% of the time during this test period. The temperature in the apartment was around 26-30°C, which is pretty much the worst case scenario in my region.

My running theory is that a hotter heat sink is able to dissipate more heat passively. The motherboard and the metal case may also be small contributors to cooling the PC this way. The PC is also acting as a 24/7 home server, which means a lot of idle time that’s interrupted by occasional short-term load. Heat from those bursty loads can be stored in the heat sink relatively easily without it heating up enough to trigger the fan.

This approach will likely not work that well if your workloads are more demanding and result in a higher continuous loads on the system.

Yes, I’m aware that running a PC like this may have negative consequences. I ran the server like this for about a week and while I liked it being a semi-passively cooled server, but decided to go back to the old behaviour.

While there are plenty of fanless designs out there that run hot by design, I decided that I don’t want to take this risk with the DeskMini. It would be a cool experiment, but my main server is probably not the best candidate for it. The CPU could handle it without breaking a sweat, but I’m more concerned about the rest of the components, especially the motherboard. The stickers on the DRAM modules were already warped due to the heat, I prefer not to damage anything else.

For those who want to try something similar (and at your own risk, of course), here’s my fan control script. Just make sure to install lm-sensors first and run sudo sensors-detect so that the controls are exposed by your system. The exact paths and values may be something you need to change to match your system.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

# /sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3

echo 1 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2_enable

while true; do

  temp=$(cat /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon4/temp1_input)

  if ((temp > 94000)); then
    echo 120 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  elif ((temp > 80000)); then
    echo 70 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  else
    echo 0 >/sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon3/pwm2
  fi

  sleep 5
done

Honorable mentions

I’m not the only one who likes to experiment with the ASRock DeskMini X300. This all started with an idea of fitting a passive cooler into the DeskMini and me discovering that it was already done.

More fun ideas:

• the hotrod of PC cooling
• a reader of FanlessTech actually slapped the passive cooler onto the DeskMini

After some spicy feedback to my post where a ThinkPad T430 acted as a server, I decided to try out one UPS that was recommended on the basis of it being much more power efficient compared to the APC UPS that I previously ran.

That UPS? CyberPower UT650EG.

Why switch out a perfectly good UPS?

The APC Smart-UPS 750 is good, but uses a lot of power compared to the whole setup, making up roughly half of the total power consumption at idle: ~17-18W. It’s also very big compared to what it is actually powering.

One of the main selling points of this particular CyberPower UPS is that it uses very little power itself. Depending on the model, the UPS can use around 1-2W of power, at least according to the tests that they publish on their website.

Once I set up everything with the new UPS, I gave it a go. After the battery was fully charged, I did observe a dramatic drop in power usage. The whole setup now ran around 19-21W when idle, which confirms the power consumption numbers claimed by CyberPower.

Overview

The UPS itself is great for someone who just wants to connect a couple of devices into a standalone UPS. The model I got came with three EU-style sockets. Compared to the APC UPS, this is a much cleaner setup as I do not have to connect an extension cord using an adapter.

The APC Smart-UPS 750 can provide anywhere between 100 and 120 minutes of runtime with my setup. I did a quick runtime test with the CyberPower UPS as well and found that with around 25W of load it ran for 37 minutes. Not the best runtime, but given its size it’s a respectable result.

Uninterruptible power supplies like to be noisy when running off of batteries. This CyberPower unit is no exception. However, by letting it run on batteries and double-clicking the power button I managed to silence the alarm and in subsequent power cut scenarios it has not started beeping. I was unable to find a simple manual explaining how to operate the UPS and what other button combos might be out there. The piece of paper that came with the UPS was also lackluster. I’m not sure if this was intended functionality or not, but I do like that turning the alarm off is an option in the first place.

The status LED-s on the unit are okay. There aren’t many of them and the legend explaining the behaviour of those lights is just enough to understand what’s going on.

The not-so-good parts

This particular unit has an issue. I did a poor job reading the spec sheet at my local retailer and missed the fact that this specific model does not come with USB connectivity. If the UPS runs out of power, it cannot warn my server to shut down in advance, resulting in a dirty shutdown scenario. Given how stable the power at my apartment generally is, this won’t likely be a major issue, but it’s definitely something I miss. The APC UPS supports this, plus you can log everything about how the batteries are doing and even detect input voltage anomalies that you probably weren’t even aware of.

What I’m concerned about is the battery. The specifications say that the battery is not user replaceable. I hope that this is simply something the legal team thought of to avoid any liability when dealing with users who messed this process up. If not, then it will be a major problem down the line. Batteries are consumable items, and according to various threads on the web about UPS batteries, the consensus is that you should replace them every 3-4 years to avoid problems with the batteries swelling up and potentially causing fires.

If the battery dies and I cannot replace it, then what am I supposed to do, throw the otherwise functional UPS straight to the landfill? Not acceptable.

Speaking of concerns, I happened to see some troubling reports about certain CyberPower UPS-es catching on fire. The culprit seems to be a certain type of glue used in the manufacturing of the UPS that ends up conducting electricity after a longer time period. I unplugged my UPS, powered it off and gave it a look, and it seems like I should be fine. At least I hope so.

Based on this view inside the UPS, I feel like changing the battery should at least be possible, assuming that replacement batteries are readily available. Just make sure to not touch the rest of the components as they can probably kill you, and that’s just not a fun thing to do.

Conclusion

If you want a dumb and efficient UPS that protects you from basic power cutouts and input voltage changes, then do consider this UPS. However, if you care about USB connectivity and ease of maintenance, then I recommend looking for other options.

You’ve disabled the boneheaded Lenovo WiFi adapter whitelist using a tool like 1vyrain, installed a better adapter like the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260, and found that Bluetooth is not working as intended on your ThinkPad T430 running Linux?

Here’s a guide on what you can try to resolve some issues you may encounter.

The integrated Bluetooth adapter

The ThinkPad T430 comes with Bluetooth out of the box. Mine is this one:

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]

I run Fedora Linux and frankly the experience with the stock adapter is horrible. Getting stuck while pairing a device or the GNOME Bluetooth settings GUI hanging isn’t a rare sight. Sometimes I’ve had to run a script to reset all USB devices to get things sorted out, or restart the machine altogether. This is not fun when a work call started 3 minutes ago and your Bluetooth headset is just not working.

After installing the new Intel WiFi adapter, I thought that I’d just disable the integrated Bluetooth controller via the UEFI settings. That should do the trick, right?

Nope. Apparently this disabled ALL bluetooth devices, including the one provided by the Intel adapter.

Well, no problem, I’ll just physically remove the Broadcom device and that should force the ThinkPad to use the Intel adapter, right?

Nope. Now the machine just shows no Bluetooth devices.

udev to the rescue

If you install the Intel adapter and don’t touch any of the settings, you’ll have two Bluetooth adapters. On my laptop, the OS used the Broadcom adapter by default, which was evident by all GUI interactions interfacing with the Broadcom one and throwing out errors in dmesg -w as a result.

Since disabling the Broadcom bluetooth adapter via other means did not work, I had to look for some solutions. One that I stumbled upon relied on udev rules.

Essentially, what you want to do is drop a file in /etc/udev/rules.d/, name it something like 81-bluetooth-hci.rules and make the contents something like this:

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0a5c", ATTRS{idProduct}=="21e6", ATTR{authorized}="0"

Make sure to replace the idVendor and idProduct with the correct values for your Bluetooth adapter. Output of lsusb will likely contain those values.

In my case, the output of lsusb is

Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0a5c:21e6 Broadcom Corp. BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 [ThinkPad]

The idVendor and idProduct info is in this string: ID 0a5c:21e6.

After making this change and restarting, you should see thatbluetoothctl list outputs only one Bluetooth device.

[host@T430 ~]$ bluetoothctl list
Controller AC:FD:CE:30:EB:BA T430 [default]

Because Bluetooth is still a hot mess in 2022, I still have to occasionally beat it with a hammer. However, the experience with the Intel adapter is much better and a simple “turn the adapter off and on again in the GUI” solved 99% of the issues I’ve encountered since then.

“Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

If for whatever reason this solution does not apply to you, and you feel like you want to hit your machine with a big hammer without having to restart it, then here’s a script that resets all the USB devices on your machine. I’ve observed that most Bluetooth adapters run over USB, which is why this script works with those as well.

It has helped me countless times when desperate for a quick Bluetooth fix on various desktops and laptops that I’ve used.

Run it at your own risk.

#!/bin/bash

for i in /sys/bus/pci/drivers/[uoex]hci_hcd/*:*; do
  [ -e "$i" ] || continue
  echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/unbind"
  echo "${i##*/}" > "${i%/*}/bind"
done

I’m a man of many ideas. It’s a shame that most of them are quite stupid.

This is one of them, but at least it makes for a fun experiment.

Intro

After adding an UPS to accompany my server, my setup was as complete as it could reasonably be. The server is low power, but packs quite a punch with fast storage and plenty of compute power around. The UPS provides a battery backup for both my server and the router.

There was still one annoyance lingering at the back of my head: this setup took 40 watts of power in idle. That’s a lot for something that runs 24/7. Yes, /r/homelab regularly showcases more power hungry setups, but my standards are quite high when it comes to power use. I want to go as low as reasonably possible.

I recently bought a spare ThinkPad T430 so that I can have a backup machine in case something happens to my laptop that doesn’t suck. I’ve also had ideas about a server setup involving this laptop.

That’s when I decided to try running my services off of the ThinkPad T430.

The setup

Here’s a quick rundown of the relevant specifications:

• CPU: Intel i5-3320M, 2 cores 4 threads @ 3.3GHz max
• RAM: 16GB DDR3
• OS disk: 256GB Micron mSATA SSD
• Main storage: 2x 4TB Samsung 870 QVO SSD

One of the main reasons that this setup is viable in the first place is the fact that the ThinkPad T430 supports up to 3 SSD-s if you replace the optical drive with a HDD caddy. Your OS can run off of an mSATA SSD and your mirrored storage can utilize the two 2.5" SATA slots.

You probably don’t want to use a setup like this if you want to store a lot of big files, such as your legally obtained media collection. If your data can fit on a pair of SATA SSD-s, then this setup will be just fine.

Why use a laptop as a home server?

If you don’t have a home server yet and want to start off as cheap as possible while also being mindful of the power usage, then an used laptop with a competent CPU is a fantastic starting point. In an age where 6 CPU cores is considered mid-range, two CPU cores might not sound like much, but for most home server workloads it’s absolutely fine.

Laptop CPU-s are designed to use as little power as possible. After all, they need to run off of a small battery most of the time and have to run cool as well to make do with the limited cooling setup that they have. This makes them ideal for a machine that runs 24/7.

I measured the power usage of my ThinkPad T430 in this configuration and found that it used around 15-20 watts when running with a low load. This is comparable to the ASRock DeskMini X300.

What sets laptops apart from the usual desktop-based home server builds is that they often have a working battery, which can act as a poor man’s UPS. If you momentarily lose power, then the server will happily keep on working until the battery runs out, which might take 1-2 hours (or more if your battery is in a good state). This is comparable to the runtime I saw with the DeskMini server build and the APC Smart-UPS 750.

Most laptops also come with an Ethernet port, and if the laptop is made some time after 2005, then it’s likely running at gigabit speeds. Unless you have a valid use case for 10 gigabits or more, then this will be plenty of network bandwidth for most home server use cases.

One aspect that’s often overlooked with a laptop-based home server setup is the inclusion of an integrated keyboard and mouse. If you accidentally mess up your configuration and your server does not start up properly, then you can just open the lid and start fixing it on the spot. On any other setup, you’d have to find a monitor to hook the server up to and find a spare keyboard to use as well, which can be a hassle.

Performance

A home server that serves the needs of a couple of users at most and runs some scheduled tasks from time to time can run perfectly fine off of a dual core Intel Core series CPU from 2012. You probably don’t want to run intensive computational workloads off of it, such as transcoding video files on a service like Jellyfin. However, you can utilize the integrated GPU to off-load specific workloads to it, and media encode-decode for select video codecs is one of those. Intel QuickSync is an absolute godsend for situations where you need to transcode media on a CPU that isn’t that powerful.

My home server runs a lot of services: Docker containers, this blog, data archival jobs, backup jobs etc. When running them on the T430, the average CPU usage was around 20%. Not ideal, but still leaves plenty of headroom for services.

The overall usability and performance that this machine offers was completely acceptable. It’s not as lightning fast as something that runs a modern CPU, like the AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650G in the DeskMini, but it gets the job done.

Caveats: thermals

A home server built around a used laptop brings a lot of benefits. However, it also has some potential downsides that you should be aware of.

Most laptops have fans, and they can be damn loud. The ThinkPad T430 is notoriously loud if you have the cooling fan manufactured by Toshiba. In a home setting this can potentially a deal-breaker, unless you can wedge the laptop into a corner of the room where it’s not audible.

There exist solutions to the fan control problem. You can install a tool like thinkfan or just write your preferred fan level to /proc/acpi/ibm/fan to avoid the cooling fan running too loud (instructions here).

Running the fan at the lowest speed works fine most of the time since your CPU can throttle itself when it’s running too hot. However, with my setup I had an odd issue where the machine would power off suddenly when it was doing a lot of I/O workload, such as scrubbing the ZFS pool on the two 4TB SSD-s. This happened even when the CPU was not even close to throttling, running around 75 C. I do not know what the actual reason for the sudden shutdown is, but I suspect that it may be related to the motherboard overheating or the system treating the hot SSD-s as hard drives that are over the critical temperature limit of around 60 C.

I was able to work around most of the cooling-related issues by mounting the laptop vertically and limiting the maximum CPU clock speed to around 2.4 GHz using the knobs made available with intel_pstate.

The CPU temperatures during normal operation were mostly around 60C, with a high load reaching max 75C with the tweaks applied and the CPU fan running at the slowest possible speed.

Caveats: maintenance

If you have a machine that runs 24/7, maintenance will become an issue. No matter how often you clean your home, dust will accumulate. On desktop PC-s, cleaning out your CPU heatsink is just a matter of taking off the PC case side panel, removing the heatsink fan, cleaning off the dust and putting it all back together. You probably want to replace the thermal paste from time to time as well.

On most laptops, cleaning out the CPU heatsink is much trickier. You will likely have to disassemble most of the machine to even access it, which takes up much more time compared to a desktop PC, which also means more downtime.

Depending on the model, a simple change, such as upgrading your storage or replacing a faulty drive, can also be more complicated. I’ve seen laptops where you actually have to disassemble the whole machine to access the hard drive. The ThinkPad T430 has an easily accessible setup when it comes to storage, but the main storage bay does have an annoying pull-tab setup that probably won’t survive multiple subsequent changes.

Conclusion

Aside from the setbacks that may or may not be due to the specifics of my setup, I find that a laptop can make for a good home server. If you have more specific requirements, then a custom-built server is likely the way to go, but if you’re just starting out, then definitely do consider this option.

After running this setup for a week or two, I decided to go back to my previous setup based on the ASRock DeskMini. The reliability woes weren’t something I was too happy with, and I didn’t really have another use case for the DeskMini either, so it made sense for me.

I changed my setup again.

I’m now the proud owner of an APC Smart-UPS 750.

Why? Because I got it as a gift, and I have never actually had an UPS before, so it makes for a good introduction to this world.

Overview

My setup is quite basic: everything that I have on my table (server, monitor, laptop) is connected through the UPS. Since my setup uses very little power, I’m running way below the output limit of 500 watts.

When I’m not using my laptop, the UPS reports itself at 10% utilization. My server and the UPS itself seems to consume around 35-40 watts, as measured by an energy meter. When the laptop and monitor are also powered on, the load is around 15-25%, depending on the workload.

To make sure that I get the full benefit of the UPS, I connected it to my server with an USB cable and installed apcupsd. By default, the daemon could not detect the UPS, which was then fixed with the help of this StackExchange answer:

I had the same problem with COMMLOST with a USB connection, after a lot of research I found by pure hazard that with a USB connection you should change DEVICE /dev/ttys0 to DEVICE in /etc/apcupsd/apcupsd.conf with nothing after it, this way apcupsd search everywhere on the system to find the UPS and connect correctly, no more COMMLOST.

After that, restart apcupsd with:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apcupsd restart

With the UPS connected and the service up and running, I could now see more detailed specs. The output for apcaccess looks something like this:

APC      : 001,043,1007
DATE     : 2022-02-04 21:49:08 +0200  
HOSTNAME : deskmini
VERSION  : 3.14.14 (31 May 2016) debian
UPSNAME  : deskmini
CABLE    : USB Cable
DRIVER   : USB UPS Driver
UPSMODE  : Stand Alone
STARTTIME: 2022-02-01 05:45:50 +0200  
MODEL    : Smart-UPS 750 
STATUS   : ONLINE 
LINEV    : 241.9 Volts
LOADPCT  : 9.1 Percent
BCHARGE  : 100.0 Percent
TIMELEFT : 98.0 Minutes
MBATTCHG : 5 Percent
MINTIMEL : 3 Minutes
MAXTIME  : 0 Seconds
OUTPUTV  : 241.9 Volts
SENSE    : High
DWAKE    : -1 Seconds
DSHUTD   : 90 Seconds
LOTRANS  : 208.0 Volts
HITRANS  : 253.0 Volts
RETPCT   : 0.0 Percent
ITEMP    : 33.3 C
ALARMDEL : 30 Seconds
BATTV    : 27.4 Volts
LINEFREQ : 50.0 Hz
LASTXFER : No transfers since turnon
NUMXFERS : 0
TONBATT  : 0 Seconds
CUMONBATT: 0 Seconds
XOFFBATT : N/A
SELFTEST : NO
STESTI   : 14 days
STATFLAG : 0x05000008
MANDATE  : 2007-03-16
SERIALNO : < serial number goes here >
BATTDATE : 2007-03-16
NOMOUTV  : 230 Volts
NOMBATTV : 24.0 Volts
FIRMWARE : 651.13.I USB FW:7.3
END APC  : 2022-02-04 21:49:10 +0200  

I’ve seen some unintentionally funny abbreviations, but CUMONBATT takes the cake.

Battery runtime test

To test out the state of the batteries and understand how the UPS handles power failure scenarios, I decided to pull the plug and see what happens next.

The first thing you’ll notice is the beeping. It’s not quite as loud as a smoke detector, but I couldn’t blame my neighbours for thinking that this was the case. To silence the UPS, just press the power on/test button (the one with the | on it).

While on batteries, the UPS emits a hum that’s not too different from the one present near some power stations and transformers. Other than that, it doesn’t get awfully loud or anything, at least on a small load.

I continued using my laptop and monitor while keeping an eye on the apcupsd daemon and apcaccess output. The estimated runtime was around the 60 minute mark and it ended up being quite close to the actual figure.

Around the 10% capacity mark apcupsd triggered a shutdown of the server. The UPS still provided power at that point. I decided to supply the UPS with power again and turn on my server. To my surprise, the UPS now cut off all output power and started blinking some lights, one of them indicating some sort of an issue with the battery. I turned everything off, then on again and the UPS was just fine.

I’m not sure if the last incident was intended behaviour or my inexperience causing an issue.

Power usage

The goal of moving my setup to an efficient machine was to experiment with how low can I go with the power usage of my setup. Unfortunately with the introduction of the UPS I have wiped out almost all of the gains that I got from the move. The UPS itself seems to constantly consume around 17-18 watts, which is just a bit more than my server itself is using.

However, I hope that the reliability improvements and various protections that come with the use of an UPS make up for that downside.

LAN resilience

With the initial setup that I had, the server and the UPS were both on my desk. In the event of a power outage, the server, my laptop and all the connected peripherals would continue working. The only issue is that the networking won’t work in such a scenario, as both the ISP provided modem-router box and my own router would be knocked offline. What use is a server disconnected from the network?

Since I use my laptop for work, I’m not too worried about it losing power. Laptops have batteries, so in the event of a power outage, it will just continue running off of the internal battery.

I’ve configured my router to resolve my own domains internally, meaning that even when I cannot connect to the Internet, my locally hosted services will keep working in some capacity.

With all of this in mind, I decided to move my setup closer to my main router.

Power goes out, my server and local network will still keep on working for up to 2 hours due to the low combined power usage.

Desktop integration

When testing the UPS on my main workstation (ThinkPad T430 running Fedora 35), I was positively surprised by the out of the box experience that I had with the UPS. With the USB cable connected to the laptop and the apcupsd service running in the background, I could see the remaining battery life of the UPS the same way that the laptop battery shows up.

And once I ran out the batteries, I got a notification saying that the UPS was about to run out of power soon.

I love seeing these relatively niche use cases supported out of the box. Props to the developers behind these quality of life improvements!

Conclusion

Would I have gone out and bought this UPS if I didn’t receive it as a gift? Probably not, because I didn’t see much of a need for one.

Now that I have it, will I keep using it? Definitely, assuming that the inevitable battery replacement cost is reasonable and the process of changing them is easy enough for an enthusiast to handle.

From the manual:

For Professional Business Applications – Not For Consumer Use

Look, ma, I’m a professional now!

Not too long ago, I had the goal of consolidating all my computing needs onto a single desktop PC. That meant moving from an mITX-based build to something that had a bit more expandability. Since I already had a Fractal Meshify C Mini, I decided to go for an mATX motherboard. And that’s how I ended up with an ASRock X570M Pro4.

mATX: a dying breed?

One of the requirements for the build was that it had to support IOMMU well so that a VFIO setup would be possible. While AMD B-series motherboards may work just fine in such scenarios, the X-series boards allegedly have better IOMMU groups and thus better compatibility with VFIO.

Once I started the search for the new motherboard, I was surprised to see that locally there was only one mainstream option available. There were plenty of B450 and B550 boards available, but only a single X570 board in this form factor.

I checked the board out, saw that it had plenty of NVMe and SATA storage options, and went for it.

PCIe connectivity

When you have a bunch of PCIe devices to connect, the way those lanes are connected start to matter.

Based on my own testing, I’ve found the following:

• the first M.2 slot (under the heatsink) is connected to the CPU
• the first PCIe x16 slot is also connected to the CPU
• the rest of PCIe connectivity goes through the chipset
• most (if not all) SATA ports seem to go through the chipset as well

This matters, because anything connected to the CPU via the chipset shares the bandwidth of a limited x4 link. This was apparent when running two NVMe drives and noticing that one of them was much slower when I also put load on SATA SSD-s.

GPU-s can still work fine when connected via the chipset, but there’s definitely a performance penalty involved. While I don’t have the exact numbers available at this time, I do remember a CSGO benchmarking map showing at least a double-digit framerate difference compared to the full x16 slot.

I also gave PCIe bifurcation a go. I borrowed an ASUS PCIe adapter card that can support up to 4 NVMe SSD-s, hoping that I could set up a crazy storage setup. The bifurcation works, but for the CPU I used (AMD Ryzen 7 5700G) I was only provided the option of 2x4 split, which meant that at most I could run two SSD-s in the riser card at a time. A non-APU Ryzen CPU is likely needed to take full advantage of the bifurcation support.

For VFIO, this board is fine. Anything in PCIe slots, including the chipset ones, I was able to pass through to the VM. USB and SATA ports were a different story, I wasn’t able to pass through a single controller, the VM would not start up properly.

If you have an use case where you need reliable and fast PCIe connectivity, then I’d recommend another platform that has lots of real PCIe connectivity, such as the AMD Threadripper/EPYC platform. This board exhibited some odd behaviour when trying to utilize all the PCIe slots, or when trying to use the ASUS Hyper M.2 card in bifurcation mode while also having the GPU connected at the bottom PCIe x16 slot.

Chipset fan

One aspect of X570 boards that stuck out to most people on release was the inclusion of a chipset fan. Not too long after, people started to report that those fans are very loud and low quality, resulting in them failing easily.

For this particular board, ASRock provides an option in UEFI settings that allows you to run this chipset fan semi-passively. It will spin up once on boot and sit idle the rest of the time, unless the temperatures are high enough. I was not able to get that fan to spin even with a full GPU load and all SSD-s running heavy read operations at the same time.

If you have PWM fans, it’s also possible to manually control these in Linux with the use of fancontrol. For me, it just took a bit of trial and error to figure out the mapping between the software fan controls and the actual fan in the PC, after that I could fine-tune them to run as quietly as possible. Yes, even the chipset fan was controllable using the same method.

AM4 socket long term support

AMD introduced the AM4 socket back in 2016 and promised to support it until 2020. I applaud that effort and am happy that I was able to run the latest AMD Ryzen 5000 series APU on a B450 board. If you happen to have a newer CPU that requires a UEFI upgrade for it to be supported, then you will be in a world of hurt.

I found myself in a situation where I had a motherboard that didn’t have the newest UEFI version from the factory, and a CPU that was just a bit too new for it to work. The board supported AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU-s, not 5000 G-series CPU-s. I also didn’t have an older CPU available that I could use to perform this upgrade on my own. Luckily I was able to find a loaner 5000 series CPU, perform the upgrade and finally assemble the machine.

At least ASRock puts a sticker with the UEFI version on the chip itself so that you can check the CPU support once you physically have the motherboard, but it’s pretty much useless when buying this board online. There’s no indication as to which version it will ship with, the best you can do is to look for some Reddit threads where others have shared their experiences with the board and the UEFI version it shipped with from the factory.

Pro tip for CPU and motherboard manufacturers: if you’re going for long-term support on your platform, please include a CPU-less UEFI upgrading solution. Some high-end motherboards already ship with that type of functionality, but I believe it should be made mandatory for all boards. Avoiding headaches like that will be worth the extra cost.

Verdict

It’s fine, looks good and gets the job done. Can’t recommend it for someone who needs a lot of performance and PCIe lanes, but for hobbyist workloads it will probably be just fine. UEFI flashing situation really soured the experience though.

I wasn’t happy with my “one machine that does it all” setup, which is why I finally bit the bullet and got myself an ASRock DeskMini X300 bare-bones kit. This is a fantastic little desktop PC kit that is very small, quiet and can still be configured to have ridiculous amounts of power. In the past. I once built a low-power server based off of the predecessor, the DeskMini A300, and instantly fell in love with this form factor. Since then, I’ve tried to come up with a reason to get one, and finally I’ve got one.

Configuration

Because this is a bare-bones kit, you have to supply your own parts.

My configuration:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G, locked to 35 W TDP in UEFI settings.
• Cooling: Noctua NH-L9a
• RAM: 2x 16 GB DDR4-3200 SODIMM
• NVMe storage: 2x Samsung SSD 980 500GB
• SATA storage: 2x Samsung SSD 870 QVO 4TB
• USB storage: 1x Samsung SSD 860 EVO 250GB in an IcyBox USB enclosure

The use case for my kit is simple: it’s my server that hosts all my services and data, including this blog you’re reading.

Why this setup in particular?

• Most of my storage needs can be served by two 4 TB SSD-s.
• 8 cores with SMT are perfect for multithreaded workloads, such as Jellyfin transcoding. This also works well for just running a bunch of services on the same machine.
• Can support up to 64 GB of RAM, which should be plenty in the foreseeable future.
• Supports fast NVMe SSD-s, which are perfect for more IO-sensitive workloads, such as databases.
• Low power usage. Even with my almost maxed out kit, it still uses around 14 W in idle. At most this PC can use around 50-60 watts due to the CPU TDP limit and SSD-s hitting full load.

Why is this form factor so good?

Desktop PC-s are big. Really big. While the small form factor PC movement has become more popular lately, the most commonly available cases and parts still end up taking a lot of space and resources. There are legitimate use cases for these types of setups, especially if you’re running video renders, scientific simulations or a lot of VM-s as part of a lab. Not every workload needs such a big setup, however.

The DeskMini X300 looks like a miniature version of a desktop PC in a tower case. Similar shape and features, but at a fraction of the size and raw resources usage. One might say that it even looks adorable, similar to how Raspberry Pi-based builds look compared to desktops.

This PC takes up just 1.92 liters in volume (excluding the power adapter). For comparison, a micro-ATX case like the Fractal Meshify Mini C, takes up a whopping 33.4 liters. I don’t have the raw numbers regarding material usage or the weight difference, but this comparison should give you an idea of the material usage difference between the two.

Caveats

I love this piece of kit, but I do have to acknowledge that there are some trade-offs that you should be aware of.

Starting with the obvious one first: you’re trading off some expandability. No discrete GPU-s will fit in this thing, not even an external one due to lack of Thunderbolt. On the other hand, if you don’t foresee a need for such additions to your PC, then the DeskMini will be a great choice.

Something that’s specific to the X300 is the lack of USB connectivity. You get two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, one USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port as well. If you have a USB hub, then this won’t be much of an issue, but this configuration is quite limited compared to most modern desktop motherboards.

The motherboard inside this thing can also be a point of concern. It’s a non-standard form factor, meaning that in case of failure you’re unlikely to easily find a replacement. The most obvious step here would be to either repair it or get another DeskMini kit to replace your existing one.

One aspect of the DeskMini X300 that you may care about is the fact that the power supply is an external 19V 120W power brick. This does mean that replacing the power supply won’t be much of an issue, but you do have to take this into account when planning your build. The power brick is quite big and has to be placed somewhere, after all. In my setup, I’ve opted for sticking it to the underside of my desk with double-sided tape.

GPU-s, APU-s, and the future

For anyone who’s followed the GPU market in 2021/2022, the ridiculously high pricing of GPU-s shouldn’t come as a surprise. As a firm believer in thinking that low power computing is the future, I think that this presents a great opportunity to start thinking differently about our computing architecture.

AMD introduced the concept of APU-s back in 2011. In its current iteration in the form of AMD Ryzen 5000 series APU-s, they provide a compelling package, combining powerful CPU cores with a decent GPU that’s perfectly capable of many tasks, including low-spec gaming.

I’ve previously covered what I think about the state of computer hardware and the resource usage associated with it. It’s possible that we’re simply in a time in history where resource abundance allows us to push the limit of what computer hardware is capable of without thinking much about the cost. At some point we do need to address that issue, and I think APU-s will play a role in it.

We already have examples of what APU-like chips can be capable of in the form of the last two console generations. To get an idea about the power usage numbers, check out the power usage statistics shared by Sony for the PS4 and PS5. The power usage of the PS5 is still almost 200 W under load, which isn’t that great, but that’s likely due to the high performance goals set for the console itself. You’d have to give up some image quality or performance for a more efficient setup, which is something the marketing department isn’t probably very happy about, given that they’re in direct competition with Microsoft with their newest XBOX lineup that is also pushing the limits of the custom APU inside it.

The integrated GPU solutions that AMD and Intel have put out are becoming more and more capable. Even an AMD Ryzen 3 2200G from 2018 with its measly 4 cores and a Vega 8 GPU is still capable enough to run GTA V at 1080p with low-medium settings smoothly (60 FPS or more). You do have to make a conscious trade-off in image quality and performance when relying on APU-s, but if you’re willing to make that trade-off, you can get a decent gaming experience.

Even the Steam Deck is shipping with a custom AMD APU. What makes this one different from AMD-s previous APU-s is the inclusion of a modern GPU core based on the RDNA 2 architecture, which should be a big jump from the relatively old Vega-based GPU-s that desktop APU-s have shipped with.

If it weren’t for the progress in gaming tech, such as high refresh rate monitors and ever-increasing system requirements for newer games, APU-s would be a good default choice for casual gamers, negating the need to get a huge box that you have to somehow also fit on your desk.

I have run on an APU-based setup and was happy with the experience, unfortunately an APU-based machine just doesn’t cut it for virtual reality workloads, yet.

Comparison to TinyMiniMicro PC-s

ServeTheHome’s TinyMiniMicro series gives a good overview of the options available for someone who wants a very small 1 liter PC to do all their work on. Since these machines are also very small, power-efficient and yet still quite powerful, I think a comparison between the two is a reasonable one.

One area where the TinyMiniMicro PC-s win is an obvious one: the size. They are about half the size of the DeskMini X300: 1 liter vs 1.92 liters.

TinyMiniMicro PC-s are also abundant on the used market with various configurations. In most cases, the storage and RAM are upgradeable, and with some older models you’ll find that the CPU is also socketed. Depending on your market, this means that you may be able to get a whole PC for cheaper than the DeskMini + the rest of the components (CPU, RAM, storage, Wi-Fi etc.).

The size and cost benefits do come with some compromises that are not acceptable for my use case. At 1 liter, the only option you have is to include a blower type cooler in your PC. This type of cooler is similar to the ones found in laptops and has in my experience resulted in a lot of annoying noise under heavy load.

The UEFI settings on these machines may also be quite limited. Sure, if you just need the basics, these will be fine, but if you want to configure the fan behaviour, you might find yourself unable to do so. On the DeskMini, you can setup the CPU fan to run just the way you like it. In my case, the fan only turns on when the system is under load, the fan is completely stopped while the machine is idle.

The DeskMini also allows you to change out the CPU cooler with anything that’s AM4 socket compatible. The case of course sets some limits to that, unless you’re a madlad who doesn’t let boundaries bother them. With the Noctua NH-L9a AM4, the setup is very quiet, especially once you limit the CPU TDP and adjust the fan curve. In my experience, the “coil whine” noise that the system produces under load is more audible than the CPU fan itself.

When it comes to storage options, the DeskMini is an obvious winner. In modern TinyMiniMicro machines that I’ve seen, you can at most install two NVMe SSD-s. This is a step up from older machines and you can still do a lot with that, but the DeskMini trumps that with the addition of two SATA ports, which allows you to go crazy with the storage configuration.

Both the DeskMini and TinyMiniMicro-series PC-s are fantastic, but for my use case the DeskMini X300 was the obvious choice.

Tech tip: VESA mounts, for what?

The DeskMini X300 is so light and small that you can easily attach it to a monitor arm using a piece of foam and long velcro strips.

Future plans

I’m hoping that the current DeskMini-based server configuration is the one that will last me a while. The obvious upgrades in the future would be to max out the RAM at 64 GB and upgrade the NVMe and SATA storage to whatever options are available in the future. I’m not expecting the DeskMini X300 to get a CPU upgrade, which isn’t too tragic, given that the Ryzen 7 5700G has 8 fast cores.

My adventures in low power computing may take me to another setup in the future. Until then, I’ll see how the DeskMini does. So far, it has met my expectations in performance, power usage, reliability and noise.

Future of desktop computing?

Predictions are difficult to make, especially in turbulent times that we’ve found ourselves in. I do hope that this form factor takes off and that we reevaluate our current computing workloads to be more suitable for machines that use a lot less power.

Constraints often result in clever tricks and fantastic end results. Hopefully we’ll see something similar in the future.

To get an idea of what you can achieve with very limited hardware, check out the Coding Secrets YouTube channel that showcases all the tricks and thinking behind some of the most impressive effects on game consoles from early 90’s.

Sure, you can argue that not having to think about such limitations can help create solutions faster and that definitely has some value, but at some point we need to start optimizing. Computing resources are cheap right up to the point where every app on your PC thinks the same way.

This post is inspired by this article from the Low-tech Magazine. I highly recommend giving that a read as well!

Over my lifetime, I’ve used a bunch of different computers, mainly due to new ideas and requirements popping into my mind every time I’m content with my current setup. One of my last changes might be a bit of a headscratcher for some.

Background

At my current place of employment, I’ve had the opportunity to try out recently released laptops from Lenovo and Dell, with the goal of evaluating them for software development workloads and pick a default option for new hires. My work laptop at the time was the Lenovo ThinkPad T480 with some decent specs and an NVIDIA GeForce MX 150 GPU that was weak and throttled itself whenever it hit 70 degrees Celsius in Windows 10, making it absolutely useless.

I tried out a fair number of makes and models: Lenovo ThinkPad P14/T14 (gen 1 and 2) in both Intel 11th gen and AMD Ryzen 4000/5000 series configurations, plus some Dell Latitudes with Intel 11th gen CPU-s as well. And the result? A lot of disappointment.

The non-exhaustive list of issues I ran into with these machines on Fedora Linux 34:

• The touchpad would sometimes randomly not work on one of the ThinkPads.
• On AMD models, performance was less than stellar for my workloads and not a significant jump over a laptop from 2018.
• The Intel CPU-s had throttling issues that made them unusable for basic things like calls over Google Meet as they would throttle to 400 MHz.
• On one of the Dell machines, it was very easy to overheat the SSD, which lead to the CPU throttling to 400 MHz. Yes, the SSD caused the CPU to throttle.
• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth would not work on one of the laptops, even when I was using an up-to-date Linux distro. Likely related to the type of adapter used (not Intel).

Once that experiment was done, we settled on the least crappy version of the ThinkPads that had an AMD Ryzen CPU, at least those didn’t sound like jet engines under load and didn’t have insane throttling issues.

It’s not all that bad, though. I was now committed to using my current ThinkPad T480 for as long as possible. It, too, had a rough start, but at least all the issues it came with have been ironed out over time.

Hopping between machines

At this point in time, I had three machines:

• desktop PC (for work and personal stuff)
• work laptop (for work stuff only)
• personal laptop (for personal stuff, of course)

I could not rely on the work laptop for personal use as it has limited storage options. Call me a freak, but I feel very uneasy running on a single SSD, even if my data is backed up to my NAS and on external backup drives. With my desktop PC use case affecting other workloads as well, I had to come up with a solution.

Syncing data between machines was not the issue here. Syncthing is an absolute open-source gem and had no issues with things like node_modules folders. The main issue was the fact that I didn’t want to carry two laptops around or buy an extra USB-C dock for use at home.

I took the risk and jumped back to the ThinkPad T430 for both my personal and work use cases.

ThinkPad T430: the history

My ThinkPad T430 has a rich history. I got it in 2016 to replace my aging ThinkPad T60. Getting this laptop felt similar to that time a desktop PC that ran Windows 98 got replaced with a dual-core “beast” in 2006.

In 2006, my webpage load times went from 30 seconds to a second. Getting Android app build times from 60 seconds to around 10 seconds on the T430 felt the same.

This ThinkPad T430 has survived all the following:

• A bicycle crash while it was in a backpack. The latch mechanism broke and there are a couple of cracks in the palm rest, but the rest is working fine.
• A coffee spill, which luckily only discoloured the casing of two USB 3.0 ports.
• Liquid metal experiments, had some pretty close calls there with my dumb ass almost shorting the system out.
• Use as a budget low-power server machine for a bit.

5 years later, it’s back in my possession again after a short stint at a family members’ hands.

There’s more to this than simply a rich history, though.

The modifications

Over the years, I’ve been inspired by whatever modifications people over at /r/thinkpad have come up with. If you want a short summary, you can check out the definitive T430 modding guide to get some inspiration.

To make this machine viable in 2021, you need the CPU, RAM and SSD upgrades at the very minimum.

Here’s the list of upgrades I’ve done:

• CPU upgrade to a quad-core Intel i7-3820QM (45W TDP).
• RAM upgrade to 16 GB DDR3 memory.
• Storage: 250GB mSATA for OS, 2x 1TB SATA SSD-s for data, made possible with a HDD caddy that replaces the optical drive.
• New third party 9-cell battery. I’ve had mixed experiences with these, but the one I have now seems to be good enough.
• Replaced the heatsink and fan assembly with one that has a Delta fan (FRU 04W3270). It’s quieter and doesn’t have the high-pitched whine that the Toshiba fan exhibits.
• At one point, I ran an external GPU off of the ExpressCard34 slot.
• Installed 1vyrain to get rid of annoying limitations, such as the Wi-Fi whitelist.
• Upgraded the Wi-Fi card to Intel Wireless-AC 7260.

There are some things I’d like to eventually tinker with:

• Replace the display with a compatible 1600x900 panel that has better image quality. The current screen is awful.
• Do something fun with the ExpressCard34 slot. There’s the thinkmods.store ExpressCard34 SSD adapter, but I haven’t seen that released yet.

With these modifications, it feels like an usable laptop again.

But why?

The reasons why I went back to the T430 are quite simple.

• Build quality: it has survived a nasty fall, and it will probably survive the next ones as well.
• CPU performance is roughly on par with the T480 under sustained load.
• No dedicated GPU that takes up valuable space and power.
• Battery life with the 9-cell battery is on par or even better in real world use scenarios, compared to the T480.
• Ridiculous storage configurations: dual-boot, triple-boot, RAID1 setups, 16+TB of solid-state storage, it’s all possible on this old laptop!
• Decent selection of ports, including VGA and gigabit ethernet.
• Docking stations can be dirt cheap and be bought for less than 10 EUR (used).
• I have plenty of Lenovo barrel plug chargers, but only one USB-C Lenovo charger. I really didn’t want to buy more chargers when I have plenty of perfectly working ones.

There are some downsides, though:

• No HDMI, I’d need a mini-Displayport to HDMI dongle for that to work.
• No USB-C, which might be an issue if your environment at work is optimized for that.
• It runs hot, but doesn’t have the same level of on-chip thermal protections that the T480 has, resulting in this awful piece of software I wrote back in 2018.

That’s nothing compared to the unreliability I’ve experienced with the T480. I’ve witnessed the keyboard dying once and the motherboard being replaced twice, once due to charging related issues, and the other time due to random system crashes and screen glitching.

Verdict

I’ve been using this setup for over a month now, and it has been surprisingly adequate. Yes, opening Java projects in IntelliJ will make things slow, and to record my desktop with OBS and acceptable performance, I had to drop my screen resolution to 720p. I can’t expect everything to work super well on this machine, but for a computer that’s released almost 10 years ago, it’s still holding up well.

I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022. Without this, my laptop would likely be obsolete by now.

2022-01-12 update

This post got a lot of feedback and comments on HackerNews with people sharing their experiences, feel free to check it out and join the discussion!

2022-09-01 update

This post was translated into German and featured on golem.de, check it out!

Welcome to 2021. We have:

• supply chain issues
• no reasonably priced GPU-s
• consumer-grade CPU-s with peak power consumption at 296W
• GPU-s that consume 350-400W of power under normal use

At the same time, we have made great leaps in CPU/GPU architectures and chip manufacturing technologies, which should result in faster and more efficient devices, right?

Well, yes. However, with some fierce competition between AMD vs Intel and AMD vs NVIDIA all reason is thrown out the window and the power limits are raised in order to preserve the performance crown. In the end, all that matters is “but my CPU is 5% faster in this benchmark!” or “Oh yeah Intel has the performance crown even if it took 290W to get there”.

This all sounds absurd during a time when it’s clear that energy usage is becoming a big problem in the near future. Using up more power daily also makes it more difficult to rely on renewable (not necessarily green!) energy sources due to the simple fact that building more capacity is more expensive.

All that power, but at what cost?

What is often missing from this conversation is that it’s not only the CPU or the GPU that uses up a lot of energy while running.

When you have a hungry chip in your system, you will likely need to get a bigger cooler in your system to dissipate all that heat. Whoops, more raw materials (aluminium, copper) required.

The GPU is so hot that the manufacturer had to put on a giant heatsink, multiple fans and made the whole darn thing barely fit in your case. Same story.

Something has to deliver all that power as well. And just like that, the required amount of electrical components on the GPU board or the motherboard has just multiplied.

The hot air gets stuck in your PC case? Sounds like someone is going to need to make an investment into some PC fans.

And to finish it all off, you discover that your power supply cuts out during high loads, because 800W power peaks are acceptable now I guess. Time to go to your local PC parts store to get a new power supply.

You might look at your monthly electricity bill and not even notice the power required to run such a machine, but the thing is that the real cost comes from everywhere else. That cost is not low.

Okay, you convinced me, now what?

If you already have bought hardware that fits the above description, then there isn’t much to do other than limiting the power usage. CPU-s and GPU-s generally follow this kind of rule:

If you use Windows, then one example of making a positive change is to change the power limit of your GPU. For AMD GPU-s, this is present in Radeon settings and is a simple percentage slider. For NVIDIA cards I usually opt for using MSI Afterburner. While doing any changes, definitely have something like FurMark running in the background, that helps measure performance and get readouts for your current power usage and the performance that you get out of it.

A modest reduction of the power limit will likely yield a small drop in performance, but a much bigger drop percentage-wise in the power consumption of the GPU.

For CPU-s, there are two types of options:

• configure power limits in UEFI settings (depends on your CPU and motherboard manufacturer)
• limit the CPU power usage using tools available in the operating system

Here are some examples of the knobs and tools that you can use to achieve this:

• AMD CPU-s and UEFI: cTDP option in UEFI settings. Just set the TDP that you want to run the CPU at and you’re done! Allows you to run your 105W TDP CPU at 35W, for example.
• AMD Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and UEFI. Sometimes the cTDP setting is not present, which means that you’ll have to go to the overclock settings and input the correct parameters to set the same limit.
• AMD and Linux: cpufreq. Honestly, not the best way to do it since the steps don’t seem to be that granular, but it’s better than nothing.
• Intel and UEFI: supported CPU-s likely support similar techniques to AMD, but since I don’t have experience with Intel, I cannot say what exactly you can change.
• Intel and Windows/Linux: disable turbo boost. Peak performance will definitely suffer, but you end up running your CPU at the base clock, which is likely very close to the efficiency point of the cpu.
  • in Linux, use the intel_pstate driver.
  • in Windows, you can set the “Maximum processor state” under the legacy power options UI to 99%, which will disable turbo boost.

This list is not complete and there might be better options out there. Just go with the one that is easiest for you and prefer UEFI-level settings to any OS settings as those will persist even if you change your operating system.

I changed my mind. Why should I care?

Using less power actually comes with a lot of benefits:

• smaller electricity bill (just don’t expect any dramatic changes)
• your PC will run much cooler now, negating the need for a big and wasteful cooling setup
• you can run your PC much quieter now as well, less heat to dissipate -> fans don’t need to run as fast now
• you can pick cheaper (in price, not quality) options when it comes to PC components since you don’t need all that overbuilt capacity.

Why do you care?

Once you limit yourself with the amount of resources available to you, you’ll soon discover that you can do a lot even with a small power budget. I’m running all my self-hosted services, gaming and work off of one decently configured PC that is quiet and yet powerful enough to perform well at any task I throw at it. If you can do all of that with a CPU that was originally designed for laptops and has a rated TDP of 65 watts, then why get anything more powerful?

Apple has joined the game

We were in a Intel-lead stagnation, with new chips adding minor features and introducing small improvements in performance. AMD came out with the first Zen-based CPU-s in 2017, followed soon by APU-s that were used in laptop designs as well. At that point AMD had almost closed the performance gap in the laptop space, forcing Intel to up their core counts and the turbo boost power limits as well. With the introduction of Ryzen 4000 and 5000 series, AMD went above and beyond and managed to bring great CPU and GPU performance to the laptop space, with the one notable omission being Thunderbolt 3 support.

Then Apple came out of nowhere and provided heavy competition for both companies. The new Apple M1 chips are fast as hell for what they really are and consume so little power that the fans in the laptop rarely have to turn on. You also get the benefit of having an amazing battery life. That same design has also found use in the desktop lineup in the form of the new iMac, and who knows, maybe it will also end up in a proper workstation machine at some point?

While I don’t like the software stack that MacBooks ship with, and the poor repairability is a major downside for me, I still have to admit that Apple is moving in the right direction with their chip designs. Performing well without your laptop turning into a poor man’s version of a jet engine is exactly what we should be striving for.

Closing thoughts

I understand that the reason we often end up using the latest and greatest hardware is a result from the need to perform our work as fast as possible, because you’ll end up using less time, and less time spent on a task should result in more productivity. However, this has to be more sustainable, and continuing the trend that the “big boys” are going in goes against that.

I hope that we will see more progress in this area, especially from companies other than Apple.

Introduction

About a year ago, I bought an used PC based off of a Lenovo Erazer X510. It had a dual-core Intel Pentium G3220 CPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a crappy Codegen 400W power supply and a 60GB SSD. I added an Nvidia GTX 1050 and just like that, a budget gaming PC was born. My brother ended up using it, and it was good for games that didn’t require a powerful CPU.

A year later, the dual core CPU was really showing its age. It could not even run GTA V, and the 4GB of RAM did not help the situation either. After checking the used PC parts market, I had essentially two choices:

• get a quad core CPU (Haswell Intel i5) and upgrade the memory to 8GB
• get a cheap PC and move over some parts, such as the GPU, SSD etc.

Performing the upgrade

I happened to find a PC that cost less than the CPU + RAM upgrade would have cost for the original setup. However, that PC was a complete horror show, and I only discovered that once I brought it home. Here’s a short list of things wrong with the PC:

• The Nvidia GT 210 that was inside it was missing the L-bracket, and the heatsink had been cut, and another smaller heatsink was brutally screwed on top of the existing one. That’s definitely how cooling works, right?
• The Windows 10 installation that it came with was probably a pirated Russian version of it. I couldn’t confirm it because the installation bluescreened on the first boot and everything was in Russian.
• It had some random stickers on it, which was fine, but it took some force and alcohol to get it off properly.
• One of the memory sticks inside it threw a lot of errors in memtest. Might explain that BSOD I got.
• The HDD was barely held in place with a wood screw. Yes, a wood screw.
• One of the PC fans was not connected. The end of the connector was just cut off and the exposed cables were wrapped over another power cable. I don’t know how that could have ever worked.

It goes to show that you really need to do your homework when buying a suspiciously cheap PC. In my case it was fine as I was going to replace a lot of the parts anyway and it ended up being a good gaming PC, capable of running GTA V and streaming CSGO on Twitch. A less experienced buyer would have been absolutely screwed though.

After moving the good parts over, I was left with a weak but functional PC. I didn’t really have a good use for it so I considered selling it. But then I thought about it and decided to try to build a good gaming PC out of it, since I didn’t have a competent machine at the time and I needed something to drive a big TV.

The plan

The case and the PSU this setup came with were not that great. I’d hate it if I built a good PC and the shoddy PSU fried it.

After some careful consideration, I decided to get the following:

• Case: Fractal Design Meshify Mini C with dark tempered glass. I would have preferred a plain version of this case, but the tempered glass doesn’t look half bad either, just can’t drop that panel. Oh, and it looks good as well.
• PSU: Seasonic Core 500W 80+ Gold. They make good stuff.
• Storage: 2x 1TB Crucial BX500 SSD. Have to keep the games somewhere and an SSD-based RAID0 setup made the most sense to me.

The core of the system would be the motherboard, CPU and 8GB of RAM that I pieced together from leftover sticks. All I needed to do now was to simply upgrade the CPU and get myself a GPU, right?

CPU upgrade

The Lenovo Sharkbay platform supports Haswell CPU-s, which includes Intel Core 4000 series CPU-s. I checked used CPU listings and opted for an Intel i5 4460. 4 cores, 4 threads at a reasonable clock speed, that should play all the games I have with reasonable performance.

The CPU arrived, and with it came trouble. Because I started following the hardware world in more detail in 2016, I was not aware of one crucial detail: Haswell vs Haswell Refresh. Turns out that the CPU I bought was part of the Haswell Refresh series, meaning that you either needed a motherboard that supported this CPU, or a motherboard that offered a BIOS update which adds support for the upgraded CPU-s. This motherboard from the Lenovo prebuilt PC turned out to be neither of them. The fans spun up and kept spinning at max speed, but the PC did not POST.

Frustrated and disappointed, I decided to double down. I got myself another used CPU and was luckily able to sell the existing CPU for the same price I got it for. This time, the CPU was the Intel i5 4440, same specs, but a year older and a small drop in clock speeds. Plug it in, and it works like a charm.

Proprietary connections

Once the new parts arrived, I started building. I knew that the Lenovo machine had some non-standard front panel connectors that would not work well with more standard cases. I got myself a PCIe USB 3.0 internal header adaptor to enable the front USB ports and left the audio ports disconnected since I had no need for them.

Finding out which pins are for the power button was also a relatively simple process. I grabbed my flathead screwdriver and tried shorting pairs of pins in the front panel connector area. Once I found the one that turned the machine on, I connected the PC power button connector there. I didn’t care for the other connectors, so I left those disconnected as well.

Adding the GPU

To make this machine into a proper gaming PC, I needed a GPU. At first, I used an AMD RX 560 that I had, but since I borrowed it from my main PC and the Nvidia GT 710 was a horrible GPU for even the most basic tasks, I had to put that one back into the workstation.

The GPU market of mid-2021 is not that great. Any decent GPU from the last 5 years is completely overpriced, and even cards like AMD RX 480 - a 5 year old card at this point - sell for the original price from 2016. Somehow I managed to stumble upon an AMD RX 570 4GB model with a somewhat acceptable price, so I pulled the trigger on that one. That card is powerful enough to keep me busy until the prices for newer GPU-s become reasonable on the used market.

I plug the GPU in, and the TV displays nothing but a black screen. Tried the Nvidia GT 710 and the integrated graphics, all good. Tried the RX 570 as a secondary GPU, and the PC gets past the POST screen. Odd.

After some searching and digging, I saw some forum posts detailing how the CSM (compatibility support module) setting on the motherboard could fix the issue. I went into the BIOS while running off of integrated graphics, enabled CSM, plugged the RX 570 in, booted, and it actually worked now!

What I discovered after using the GPU for a while was that it got quite loud under load, even though the GPU itself wasn’t that dusty. While cleaning it, I noticed that the thermal paste seems to have never been changed, and it showed: the thermal paste was rock solid. I had to take a plastic prying tool to get rid of the thermal paste without breaking the GPU. A repaste and a reassembly later, the GPU was whisper-quiet even under a full FurMark test.

Cooling

The Lenovo prebuilt game with a surprisingly adequate CPU cooler. However, the fan was not having a good time and made more noise than I’d like. I decided to splurge a bit and got for a beQuiet Pure Rock Slim 2 as I had a good experience running that cooler on a PC I built years earlier.

When installing it, I noticed one critical flaw: the CPU cooler mounting holes were non-standard. They were simply too big. If I had the patience, I could have probably added some washers or other available solutions to fix it. Anyway, I ended up just replacing the fan on the original cooler with the one from the beQuiet cooler. I could probably use the CPU cooler in another project, so no big loss there.

I also noticed that the stock fan curve (or lack of it) means that the case fans run pretty loud by default. To fix this, I used Noctua low noise adapters that I happened to have from previous projects. It did fix the issue, but I still wish that I had more granular control over the fan speeds.

How well does it work?

This PC has mainly two uses: watching media and playing games. To keep it short: yes, it works well for these use cases. I value smooth performance more than a crystal clear image, which results in me running all of my games under 1080p and medium-high settings.

I don’t consider this particular setup to be in any way practical. The cost of all the parts is actually quite big once you add it all up. The setup does do everything that I need it for and that’s what makes it worth it for me. As an additional bonus, I also get the satisfaction of prolonging the life of the used parts (CPU, RAM, motherboard).

I’ll try to see how long I can keep using this setup. In case the CPU and/or RAM become the limiting factors, I’ll just replace that part of the system with something reasonable and carry the rest of the system over.

Gallery

Here’s what the setup looks like.

Introduction

I’ve covered my self-hosting setup in a previous post. It has been a couple of months and the setup has mostly been fine. Sure, the power usage was pretty big under load, and yes, my internet did cut out every time I turned the VM on with all the services starting, but other than that, it has been rock-solid.

However, I soon realized that in most situations, the 12 CPU cores is a bit overkill. Performance was fantastic, but due to the case and the cooling solution that I’m using, the fans did have to ramp up to cool the CPU down. Due to the ongoing GPU drought driven by yet another cryptocurrency bubble, it also felt a bit wasteful to use an AMD RX 560 just to drive two 1080p monitors.

It just so happened that around this time, AMD released the Ryzen 5000 G-series APU-s to retail. Yes, you could buy the 4000 series “OEM-only” APU-s from certain online retailers as well, but with this release, it’s 100% official. The release date rolled around, and the reviews were good. A day later, the CPU was also listed at a local reseller and was actually in stock. After checking the street price for a used Ryzen 9 3900X and the Radeon RX 560, I decided to go for it, as it would be very close to a free “upgrade”.

Prep work

Before performing the purchase, I confirmed that the motherboard that I use (Gigabyte B450 I AORUS PRO WIFI) supports this CPU after a BIOS upgrade. B450 chipset lives in a bit of a gray area where the CPU support is determined by the motherboard manufacturer. No updates? No CPU support for you.

From my previous BIOS updating experiences, I remember that this particular motherboard had some buggy BIOS implementations. I ran into two issues:

• PC would get stuck on POST if you reboot. It’s annoying when making changes to UEFI settings, but with my use case this is not that big of a deal.
• If you remove a boot option, then it is impossible to get it back. Seriously, even a CMOS reset did not help with this one.

This time around, I decided to update the versions one by one to follow the happy path and not run into other types of issues. The bug did resurface right after the first version that I tried, so that was a bit disappointing.

Once I was all up-to-date, I carefully removed the old CPU and plugged in the new one.

Hold on, why would you intentionally downgrade your CPU?

It all came down to “use the right tool for the job”. The Ryzen 9 3900X is a good CPU, no doubts about that, but during my work, I kept an eye on my CPU usage quite often and found that even in the worst-case scenarios, such as IntelliJ IDEA performing indexing, I wasn’t using the CPU to the full extent. It’s great for those scenarios, but I wasn’t hitting them as often as I would have thought.

It also did not help that the CPU did not have an integrated GPU. When all you have to run is a basic desktop setup with 60Hz 1080p monitors, having a dedicated GPU to run them sounds so wasteful. This increased the power use of the whole setup and the GPU could be utilized better elsewhere.

The Ryzen 7 5700G is a downgrade in multi-core performance, mainly due to 4 fewer cores and only 25% of the L3 cache, but according to various reviews and benchmarks, you could actually expect a small single-core performance uplift. Nothing groundbreaking, but good enough for my use case.

Power usage

Because I don’t change my CPU-s too often, I thought I’d take the time to run some benchmarks and measure the power usage of the whole setup. This includes everything: the PC (with two spinning hard drives), standing desk, two 1080p monitors and peripherals.

Please note that these benchmarks are not very scientific and are simply my observations of the change you can expect when performing a switch like this on your own setup. I did my best to make sure that the running conditions are as close as possible by stopping the service VM, waiting until the background CPU usage was normal, running the memory at the same spec etc.

AMD Ryzen 9 3900X + Radeon RX 560

• Idle, sitting on desktop: ~139W
• Full synthetic CPU load using stress: ~253W

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G + integrated Vega 8 GPU

• Idle, sitting on desktop: ~99W (generally between 85-100W)
• Full synthetic CPU load using stress: ~166W

As expected, the change of the CPU and removal of the dedicated GPU results in a big drop when it comes to the power usage of the whole workstation setup. To go even lower, I’d have to switch out the core of the PC to something like the ASRock Deskmini X300 and replace the hard drives with two big SSD-s. I’d go for that as soon as bulk SSD storage became a viable option. Unfortunately, this is not the case, yet.

Performance

Reputable review sites, such as AnandTech, have already done a lot of benchmarks with better testing methodologies, so I instead went ahead and tested out something that I do quite often at work: running tests in poorly written Java projects!

For this, I have two Java projects that have their own test suites. Project A has 900 or so tests, which are mainly parallel in nature. Project B has 2000+ tests, where a good number of them are dependent on a single thread to do all the work.

To run the tests, I just call the “Run all tests” function in IntelliJ and let it do the work of running the tests and measuring the elapsed time. And as mentioned before: this is not scientific, there are probably some errors in here, but the actions performed here are in my opinion a pretty good reflection of day-to-day work, and that’s what matters the most to me. Tests were run twice with a short break between the test runs to let the CPU cool down a bit.

Project A: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

Test run 1: 10.396s.

Test run 2: 10.494s.

Project A: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G

Test run 1: 15.561s.

Test run 2: 15.690s.

Project B: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X

Test run 1: 364s.

Test run 2: 365s.

Project B: AMD Ryzen 7 5700G

Test run 1: 471s.

Test run 2: 480s.

The performance hit was somewhat expected for project A due to the parallel nature of the tests. However, for project B I expected better results than that due to the alleged improvements in single-thread CPU performance.

The Linux experience

I expected the APU to work as expected, with perhaps some small issues popping up here and there. I’m currently running Fedora 34 with all the latest updates installed and the kernel version at 5.13.6, which should be the best option when trying to get new hardware working on Linux.

The CPU portion of the APU is working relatively well for a CPU that was released just a couple of days ago. I have noticed that for some reason this CPU is constantly clocked at around 4.2GHz on all cores at all times, even if there isn’t too much going on in the system. sensors, the program I use to monitor system temperatures, is also having a small hiccup, as I cannot see the CPU temperatures at all, only the integrated GPU temperatures show up even after running sensors-detect.

nvme-pci-0900
Adapter: PCI adapter
Composite:    +47.9°C  (low  = -40.1°C, high = +89.8°C)
                       (crit = +93.8°C)
Sensor 2:     +47.9°C  (low  = -40.1°C, high = +89.8°C)

iwlwifi_1-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +48.0°C  

amdgpu-pci-0a00
Adapter: PCI adapter
vddgfx:        1.36 V  
vddnb:       999.00 mV 
edge:         +51.0°C  
power1:        6.00 mW 

The GPU seems to be a bit rough around the corners. I’m using the GNOME desktop environment, which means that I’ve learned to endure laggy user interfaces. I default to using Wayland, but I sometimes also use Xorg for those situations where the application I’m trying to run does not work properly under Wayland (looking at you, Slack and your screen sharing functionality…).

The integrated Vega 8 graphics are almost as fast as the dedicated RX 560 GPU under normal light desktop workloads. Once you run something very heavy, like Furmark, the GPU performance tanks and the desktop becomes almost unusable. This is not the case when running some WebGL workloads though, so it could be an isolated case.

The most serious issue I’ve managed to find is that Firefox has some issues with this GPU once you put enough load on the GPU. You may start to notice flickering and UI elements blinking when moving around. A good test case for this is to run Netdata in live mode and have a 1080p Youtube video in another window. I haven’t seen anything like that since running the Nvidia GT 710 with Nouveau drivers under Fedora 34. At least it does not crash the browser or the Wayland session, so it’s not a complete disaster. Still, pretty annoying, so I hope this gets resolved eventually. If I had to guess: the issue is probably related to the Webrender implementation that makes use of the GPU to speed up the browsing experience.

Closing thoughts

Overall, I’m happy that the APU actually works. I’ve had a couple of bad experiences in the past where the Ryzen 3 2200G had stability issues and had to be replaced, so this experience is already a step up from that. The PC runs cooler and quieter, the desktop experience is good enough for me and the CPU performance is acceptable.

I’m sure that the issues that I’ve had with this APU under Linux will be fixed eventually. Each kernel update usually brings lots of improvements to new hardware and I’m sure that this APU is no exception.

As for the BIOS issues, I’m happy that AMD and Gigabyte opted to support the B450 chipset well into 2021, but I’m sure that this choice has come at the cost of QA. If I had to choose between buggy support and having to buy a new motherboard for my new, shiny CPU, then I’d still pick the first one.

Update (2021-08-18)

I’ve had this CPU for a while now, and there have been a couple of kernel updates in the meantime. Here are my notes.

The idle power usage has recently been in between 65-70W for the whole setup. I’ve measured the desktop itself to take up 38W of that.

Although my motherboard does not seem to expose the cTDP option or have ECO mode available, I still managed to limit my TDP to 45W using this trick that /u/The-Stilt mentioned over at Reddit:

The potential lack of the ECO-mode does not prevent you from using it, 
since it is nothing but a preset of PPT/TDC/EDC settings.

Eco-Mode (95W): PPT = 128W, TDC = 80A, EDC = 125A

Eco-Mode (65W): PPT = 88W, TDC = 60A, EDC = 90A

Eco-Mode (45W): PPT = 61W, TDC = 45A, EDC = 65A

This had a great effect on the full load of the system: 3.8GHz all-core while the whole setup consumed 113W.

Update (2021-08-20)

Quick update on the GPU situation: Firefox seems to be fine now, I could not get the flickering to occur again even under worst case scenarios.

Notes and stuff

Here are the outputs for a couple of commands that I could think of.

IOMMU groups

Script taken from Arch wiki.

shopt -s nullglob
for g in `find /sys/kernel/iommu_groups/* -maxdepth 0 -type d | sort -V`; do
    echo "IOMMU Group ${g##*/}:"
    for d in $g/devices/*; do
        echo -e "\t$(lspci -nns ${d##*/})"
    done;
done;

IOMMU Group 0:
        00:01.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge [1022:1632]
IOMMU Group 1:
        00:02.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge [1022:1632]
IOMMU Group 2:
        00:02.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne PCIe GPP Bridge [1022:1634]
IOMMU Group 3:
        00:02.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne PCIe GPP Bridge [1022:1634]
IOMMU Group 4:
        00:08.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge [1022:1632]
        00:08.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir Internal PCIe GPP Bridge to Bus [1022:1635]
        00:08.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir Internal PCIe GPP Bridge to Bus [1022:1635]
        0a:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cezanne [1002:1638] (rev c8)
        0a:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio Controller [1002:1637]
        0a:00.2 Encryption controller [1080]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) Platform Security Processor [1022:15df]
        0a:00.3 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne USB 3.1 [1022:1639]
        0a:00.4 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne USB 3.1 [1022:1639]
        0a:00.6 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) HD Audio Controller [1022:15e3]
        0b:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 81)
        0b:00.1 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 81)
IOMMU Group 5:
        00:14.0 SMBus [0c05]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SMBus Controller [1022:790b] (rev 51)
        00:14.3 ISA bridge [0601]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge [1022:790e] (rev 51)
IOMMU Group 6:
        00:18.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166a]
        00:18.1 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166b]
        00:18.2 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166c]
        00:18.3 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166d]
        00:18.4 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166e]
        00:18.5 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166f]
        00:18.6 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:1670]
        00:18.7 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:1671]
IOMMU Group 7:
        01:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset USB 3.1 XHCI Controller [1022:43d5] (rev 01)
        01:00.1 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset SATA Controller [1022:43c8] (rev 01)
        01:00.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Bridge [1022:43c6] (rev 01)
        02:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
        02:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
        02:04.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
        02:05.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
        02:06.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
        02:07.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
        06:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9260 [8086:2526] (rev 29)
        08:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection [8086:1539] (rev 03)
IOMMU Group 8:
        09:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. U-SNS8154P3 NVMe SSD [2646:5008] (rev 01)

# lscpu
Architecture:                    x86_64
CPU op-mode(s):                  32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order:                      Little Endian
Address sizes:                   48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
CPU(s):                          16
On-line CPU(s) list:             0-15
Thread(s) per core:              2
Core(s) per socket:              8
Socket(s):                       1
NUMA node(s):                    1
Vendor ID:                       AuthenticAMD
CPU family:                      25
Model:                           80
Model name:                      AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics
Stepping:                        0
Frequency boost:                 enabled
CPU MHz:                         3800.000
CPU max MHz:                     4672,0698
CPU min MHz:                     1400,0000
BogoMIPS:                        7585.94
Virtualization:                  AMD-V
L1d cache:                       256 KiB
L1i cache:                       256 KiB
L2 cache:                        4 MiB
L3 cache:                        16 MiB
NUMA node0 CPU(s):               0-15
Vulnerability Itlb multihit:     Not affected
Vulnerability L1tf:              Not affected
Vulnerability Mds:               Not affected
Vulnerability Meltdown:          Not affected
Vulnerability Spec store bypass: Mitigation; Speculative Store Bypass disabled via prctl and seccomp
Vulnerability Spectre v1:        Mitigation; usercopy/swapgs barriers and __user pointer sanitization
Vulnerability Spectre v2:        Mitigation; Full AMD retpoline, IBPB conditional, IBRS_FW, STIBP always-on, RSB filling
Vulnerability Srbds:             Not affected
Vulnerability Tsx async abort:   Not affected
Flags:                           fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl nonstop_tsc cpuid extd_apicid ap
                                 erfmperf pni pclmulqdq monitor ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movbe popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt tce topo
                                 ext perfctr_core perfctr_nb bpext perfctr_llc mwaitx cpb cat_l3 cdp_l3 hw_pstate ssbd mba ibrs ibpb stibp vmmcall fsgsbase bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid cqm rdt_a rdseed adx smap clflushopt clwb sha_ni 
                                 xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves cqm_llc cqm_occup_llc cqm_mbm_total cqm_mbm_local clzero irperf xsaveerptr rdpru wbnoinvd arat npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save tsc_scale vmcb_clean flushbyasid decodeassists paus
                                 efilter pfthreshold avic v_vmsave_vmload vgif v_spec_ctrl umip pku ospke vaes vpclmulqdq rdpid overflow_recov succor smca fsrm

# lspci -nnk
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne Root Complex [1022:1630]
	Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne Root Complex [1022:1630]
00:00.2 IOMMU [0806]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne IOMMU [1022:1631]
	Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne IOMMU [1022:1631]
00:01.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge [1022:1632]
00:02.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge [1022:1632]
00:02.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne PCIe GPP Bridge [1022:1634]
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:02.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne PCIe GPP Bridge [1022:1634]
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:08.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir PCIe Dummy Host Bridge [1022:1632]
00:08.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir Internal PCIe GPP Bridge to Bus [1022:1635]
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:08.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir Internal PCIe GPP Bridge to Bus [1022:1635]
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
00:14.0 SMBus [0c05]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SMBus Controller [1022:790b] (rev 51)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:5001]
	Kernel modules: i2c_piix4, sp5100_tco
00:14.3 ISA bridge [0601]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH LPC Bridge [1022:790e] (rev 51)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:5001]
00:18.0 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166a]
00:18.1 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166b]
00:18.2 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166c]
00:18.3 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166d]
00:18.4 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166e]
00:18.5 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:166f]
00:18.6 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:1670]
00:18.7 Host bridge [0600]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Device [1022:1671]
01:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset USB 3.1 XHCI Controller [1022:43d5] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device [1b21:1142]
	Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
01:00.1 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset SATA Controller [1022:43c8] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device [1b21:1062]
	Kernel driver in use: ahci
01:00.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Bridge [1022:43c6] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
02:00.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
02:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
02:04.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
02:05.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
02:06.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
02:07.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] 400 Series Chipset PCIe Port [1022:43c7] (rev 01)
	Kernel driver in use: pcieport
06:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation Wireless-AC 9260 [8086:2526] (rev 29)
	Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device [8086:0014]
	Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
	Kernel modules: iwlwifi
08:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation I211 Gigabit Network Connection [8086:1539] (rev 03)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:e000]
	Kernel driver in use: igb
	Kernel modules: igb
09:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller [0108]: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. U-SNS8154P3 NVMe SSD [2646:5008] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Kingston Technology Company, Inc. U-SNS8154P3 NVMe SSD [2646:5008]
	Kernel driver in use: nvme
	Kernel modules: nvme
0a:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Cezanne [1002:1638] (rev c8)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:d000]
	Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
	Kernel modules: amdgpu
0a:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio Controller [1002:1637]
	Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir Radeon High Definition Audio Controller [1002:1637]
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
0a:00.2 Encryption controller [1080]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) Platform Security Processor [1022:15df]
	Subsystem: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) Platform Security Processor [1022:15df]
	Kernel driver in use: ccp
	Kernel modules: ccp
0a:00.3 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne USB 3.1 [1022:1639]
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:5007]
	Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
0a:00.4 USB controller [0c03]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Renoir/Cezanne USB 3.1 [1022:1639]
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:5007]
	Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd
0a:00.6 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) HD Audio Controller [1022:15e3]
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:a0c3]
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
0b:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 81)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:b002]
	Kernel driver in use: ahci
0b:00.1 SATA controller [0106]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [1022:7901] (rev 81)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:b002]
	Kernel driver in use: ahci

Background

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X230. It’s a small and good laptop that I’ve used as my main laptop and a server as well.

A couple of years ago I messed around with flashing alternative BIOS implementations on the X230, such as the skulls project, which made installing prebuilt coreboot images very simple. Of course, before doing any testing, I made backups of the stock BIOS implementation (ooh, foreshadowing!).

Skulls was nice, it booted fast, but changing the boot order likely required modifications and rebuilding the coreboot image (I wanted to set the mSATA SSD as the first bootable device). It was also not UEFI-compatible, which could have probably been solved with something like TianoCore, but I didn’t feel like messing with that too much. Eventually I flashed the original UEFI implementation back and went on with my life.

Then I stumbled upon the 1vyrain project project, which allows you to “jailbreak” your BIOS. This modification also enables a lot more bells and whistles in the BIOS under the Advanced menu option, plus it also gets rid of the WiFi adaptor whitelist that Lenovo has put in place, allowing you to now use any adaptor that’s compatible with the form factor.

The mod was very easy to install and had no issues, until I got myself a DDR3 SODIMM RAM kit. One of the sticks was not working properly, showing up with graphical glitches and failing a memtest run. To troubleshoot it, I decided to change the speed at which the memory runs from DDR3-1600 to DDR3-1333. It booted, and still had the issues.

Then I changed it to DDR3-1066.

Black screen. Uh-oh.

Initial troubleshooting

Thinking that this is just a simple issue that I could get fixed by clearing the BIOS settings and starting fresh, I looked up some basic instructions on doing so.

Things I tried:

• remove the battery (even if it is completely dead, like mine), and hold the power button for 60 seconds, then attach the battery and turn it on again.
• remove both the battery and disconnect the internal CMOS battery that sits under the palmrest and hold the power button for 60 seconds again.
• disconnect all the batteries and leave the laptop sitting on a shelf, then try again.
• try “the secret ThinkPad power button combo”:

… unplug the AC adapter and take out the battery. Then, you push the power button 10 times in a row at one second intervals. Next, you push and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Then you put the battery back in and push the power button… and she lives. The computer came back, good as ever.

After all of that, the laptop was still as good as dead. You could see the light turn on, the fan starts spinning, but nothing shows up on the screen. At that point I knew that the BIOS reflash was probably my only choice.

Flashing the BIOS

To fix the issue, I had to flash the BIOS externally. Luckily I still had the original BIOS backup images available.

With the help of a good friend, we set everything up and did some tests to ensure that the connection is good and that read/write operations on the chips return consistent results.

Once we had specified the correct chip type by looking at what was written on the chip package itself, we flashed both the top and bottom chips with the original images that were once made as a backup. After reading the chips back and comparing checksums using md5sum, it all looked good.

We disconnected the SOIC clip, attached the power cable and tried turning the laptop on. Power button light comes up for 1 second and then turns off. Not a good sign.

We flashed both chips again and made sure that everything is in order. No dice, the symptoms are the same.

A closer look

It didn’t take too long for me to start thinking about what I could use all these extra laptop parts for. After all, the screen was good, it had 16GB DDR3 RAM, two SSD-s, a screen assembly in good condition etc. I was stopped in my tracks when my friend noticed something.

It turns out that during this flashing process, we (probably me) had managed to get rid of a resistor that sat next to the top flash chip. Whoops. Turns out that it was an important one, because over at Reddit, someone else also ran into this issue and had similar symptoms .

To resolve this, my friend had the idea of putting a 10K resistor in there to see if it fixes things. The issue was that the only one available right from the get-go was a very big one, so he had to be clever with it. He ended up positioning it upright with a piece of wire handling the other side.

This, however, didn’t improve the situation much.

Schematics to the rescue

To understand the role of the missing resistor better, we started looking for schematics online. I managed to find an OK looking one from a random forum and started browsing through it. The keyword of the day was “SPI” and when searching for it, we found some promising results. My friend found the resistor and found that we could just short it, since the resistor used to be between two wires. And that he did.

We attempted to power on the machine again and this time the error sequence was different as the laptop went into some sort of a party mode with lights flashing. The usual troubleshooting steps didn’t work that well here, either, so it’s possible that the stock BIOS image did not like something here.

What we did have was the option of flashing the known-good skulls image on. I handled that part quite OK, since all the commands were in my bash history anyway. The excitement, however, got the best of me and I managed to repeat the original mistake and I bumped the soldered piece of wire off of the board, putting us back to the original issue.

After another session of carefully connecting the two wires, we repeated the steps and after the flash, we finally saw the Skulls splash screen.

It works!

After booting into a Fedora 34 liveusb environment with iomem=relaxed, I grabbed the latest release of skulls ( released on 4/20 🔥) and used the internal flashing method to update.

Reboot, and we saw party mode again. Having used skulls in the past, I knew that this was likely down to skulls (or coreboot) being very picky about RAM. The solution here is to reseat the RAM modules and turn it on again. Why does that work? Not sure, but it did.

To make this solution more resistant to my unintentional attempts of breaking things, I added a glob of hot glue next to the top chip to make sure that I don’t knock anything off of the board again.

Testing

Once the laptop was assembled again, I did some testing to see if everything still works as intended.

Fedora 34 liveusb boot resulted in a black screen once, but on the second try, it worked again.

Windows 10 installed fine on the machine and while some functions don’t work as well (TrackPoint and touchpad being the prime examples here), it was still usable. Unfortunately I did not manage to write down the original Windows 10 key that is embedded to the stock BIOS image, so I could not activate it. But hey, at least it works.

Lessons learned

Even though this adventure started with a self-inflicted wound, I still consider it a success, as I learned a couple of things.

• It’s very easy to get confused when reviewing how the wires should be set up on the SOIC test clip and the device that’s actually performing the flashing.
• If a piece of software exposes a bunch of knobs and levers and warns you about catastrophic failures that might occur as a result, then trust it and don’t mess with things that you have no clue about. With this example case, though, I didn’t expect a memory speed change to result in such a catastrophic failure in the first place…
• Developers that know hardware are worth their weight in gold.
• Access to schematics is very valuable when fixing hardware.

And on the final note, I would like to give a shout-out to Arti Zirk, the guy who helped fix the mess I created. If you need someone who is well-versed in anything related to software development, Linux and embedded systems, then he is your guy.

flashrom references

This section has some commands that might be useful to you. Unless you’re using the exact same flasher, you will probably need to specify a different programmer with the -p flag.

The names and extensions for the input-output files are arbitrary. A file is a file.

Reading/writing the top chip.

Note that I had to specify the chip type, otherwise flashrom would complain.

The top chip is 4MB and the bottom chip is 8MB. This should also be reflected in any output that you get.

--verify option is also useful for checking if the results are OK. I also recommend reading the image from the chip after a write and comparing its checksum using md5sum, just to be extra safe.

# Read the existing image on the chip
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -r top.bin -c MX25L3206E/MX25L3208E 

# Write the specified image to the chip
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -w top_backup.bin -c MX25L3206E/MX25L3208E 

Reading/writing the bottom chip

# Read
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -r bottom.bin -c MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E

# Write
flashrom -p ft2232_spi:type=2232H,port=B,divisor=4 -w bottom_backup.bin -c MX25L6406E/MX25L6408E

Setup

After I had a perfectly functional, quiet and performant server up and running, I fell victim to my imagination and completely changed my self-hosting setup. Again.

Here it is, in all its glory:

Well, at least that’s what’s on the table.

This machine is a true all-in-one: it hosts all my services in a VM while also acting as my main workstation.

Specs

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X. 12 cores and 24 threads in a consumer platform is absolutely bonkers.

RAM: 32GB DDR4 @ 3200MHz

Motherboard: Gigabyte B450 I Aorus PRO WIFI. It’s OK, but oh man are the newer BIOS releases buggy. At least it gives 0 hoots about flashing an older BIOS version.

GPU: AMD RX 560. It gets the job done.

HDD: 2x 12TB WD white-label (WD120EDAZ) drives, shucked from WD My Book external drives.

SSD: 240GB Kingston A1000 NVMe for OS, 2x1TB Samsung 870 EVO SATA SSD for fast solid state storage

PSU: Seasonic Focus something-something. Doesn’t really matter, it’s reliable and has plenty of power.

Cooling: Noctua NH-D9L on the CPU, 200mm fan at the front and 2x80mm beQuiet fans at the back to keep the system cool.

Case: ThermalTake Core V1. Not the smallest case, but super simple to work in!

Why?

Before setting this up, I had three machines running:

• a laptop that was always on so that there won’t be any conflicts with Syncthing.
• a server with server workloads
• a desktop that I mainly used for work

At any point in time, I had at least two machines running and the desktop was fired up for a good part of the day due to work. Since trying to reduce my electricity usage was one of my goals with going low-power on my server, this sounded a bit wasteful. At this point I got the brilliant idea of trying to combine this into one machine that does it all, but before that, I had some concerns. The hardware was simple: just shuck the 12TB drives in there and get some big SSD-s and partition them, but the software part required some thinking and testing.

The software

To keep the work to a minimum, I found that the easiest way to move my setup was to just put the existing server installation into a VM. I’ve had plenty of experience with VM-s so this was not a difficult task, just install libvirt and all the dependencies will be settled automatically.

The problem is the networking. If I want the VM to show up as a separate machine on the network, I need to add a virtual network interface as a macvtap device, which means that the desktop and the VM can both connect to the internet and to other devices on the local network, but the desktop cannot reach the VM directly. There are other solutions, such as the default NAT-based solution, but with that, forwarding ports is quite tricky to someone not familiar with networking.

To overcome this limitation, I came up with a pretty simple solution: add another network interface to the VM! This time, the interface was set up as the NAT-based solution. To make this work, I had to make sure that the Debian 10 install was configured to use that interface as well, which meant a little copy-pasting in /etc/network/interfaces. To make the host connect to this machine using the hostname, I also added an entry to /etc/hosts on the host machine to route all requests to the hostname via this second virtual network interface.

With this, the main obstacle was resolved and the host machine had no issues connecting to the VM.

The storage

Since this machine was also used as a workstation, I had to be a bit clever with my storage setup. The bulk storage in the form of two 12TB hard drives was 100% managed by the VM.

The 1TB SSD-s were partitioned as such:

• 2x 500GB partitions for my workstation running in BTRFS mirror, since I don’t trust ZFS updates on Fedora.
• 2x 250GB partitions for fast SSD-based ZFS mirror in the VM
• 2x 250GB free space for overprovisioning.

In the event that something does go wrong, it should not have too much of a negative impact either on the host or the VM. If the drive quality does become a concern, there is always the option to upgrade to PRO series drives that should have a much better endurance rating.

Pros and cons

With that, the setup was up and running. The VM initially had assigned 6 CPU cores and 8GB of RAM, but lately I’ve decided to assign 12 cores and 16GB of RAM to make the most out of the available resources.

So, how well does it work?

Quite well, in fact. There were some hiccups, though:

• the latest BIOS update for the motherboard was very buggy, which resulted in the ability to permanently get rid of boot devices in the boot device selection menu and the annoying issue of getting stuck in POST when rebooting the machine
• the VM would sometimes have issues with networking, which I attempted to fix by treating the NIC-s within the VM as non-hotpluggable devices. This seems to have done the trick, as I have not had any issues since.

With this setup, there are some tradeoffs that you should be aware of.

Pros:

• Everything runs in one machine with reasonable power usage : ~70 W when idle and monitors off, ~120 W with monitors on and a light workload
• Optimal utilization of resources. Instead of having to upgrade my workstation or server separately, I can just share the resources and modify limits any time I want. Should I upgrade to 64GB of RAM in the future, I can make some more available on the server by changing only one configuration parameter in the VM. The same goes for storage. If I were to upgrade to something bigger and faster, then it will benefit both the workstation and the server workloads.
• Easier troubleshooting. In case things go wrong with the server, I don’t need to grab an external monitor and hook it up to the server, the console is accessible via virt-manager on the host.

Cons:

• All eggs in one basket. If your host OS breaks something, then this will affect your server workloads as well.
• Noise. While not so bad with noise-cancelling headphones, it can still be annoying when you have hard drives running at your desk.
• Your server workload is dependent on your host OS booting up first, which will require manual input from you if your host installation is encrypted.

Conclusion

This setup worked out better than I expected, with no further issues occurring over a couple of weeks. The availability issues during restarts are not a concern for me, as this is a hobby to me, and the flexibility and ridiculous amounts of power this setup has outweighs all the cons.

Let’s see how long this setup lasts.

2021-06-28 update

It still works like a charm!

Anyone that has bought themselves external WD drives from the Elements/My Book/Easystore series are probably familiar with the acoustic characteristics of the drives. The drives have a loud hum caused by WD running the drives at 7200rpm while claiming the drives to be “5400rpm-class” and the clacking of the read-write heads is audible as well. In a small space, such as an apartment, the hum is maddening, especially when you have more than one drive running at the same time.

After running such a setup for months, enough was enough. I bought some sound dampening foam and used that to try to limit the noise that my setup was making. However, that didn’t do much and the before/after noise comparisons didn’t have much of a difference. As a result of this testing, I did have various pieces of acoustic foam left, and after I noticed that my Lenovo M73 Tiny PC had a similar shape to the WD My Book 12 TB hard drives that I got recently, I had an idea.

I used four pieces of foam and placed them so that I could stack the hard drives on top. This resulted in the humming noise being completely eliminated. The sound of hard drive read-write heads is still there, but it is so much less audible now. After this change, I have started hearing the cooling fan more than the hard drives themselves.

This setup could probably be improved by switching around the setup so that the hard drives were at the bottom with the bottom drive having additional foam or rubber feet below it to support it better. For the time being, I’m perfectly happy with this arrangement, as long as it doesn’t fall over.

2021-04-23 update

I have now added a fan to the setup!

The fan itself is powered by one of the USB ports with the help of a spare sacrificial USB cable and a Noctua omni-join kit that I had left over.

The drive temperatures are now reading around 42C and 46C.

The Orange Pi Zero is one hell of an SBC. It has served as a Wi-Fi access point for months without issues and as a testbed for playing around with MySQL.

I wanted it to be a useful device again, but had trouble finding an use case for it due to its hardware limitations. After messing around with my amateur archival work, I had accumulated some data that might be worth keeping around. Due to my network being quite unreliable and slow, I decided to go with torrents as the main distribution method. I could have just hosted the torrents on my main server box, which is what I later did anyway, but then I realized that hosting torrents is a workload that a weak machine could handle just as well.

I took a board that was left over from a shelf, grabbed some twine and nails and banged together this monstrosity:

This brave little machine runs on Armbian and hosts one Transmission instance. This instance is a mirror for some of the data that I collect as part of my archival effort. The OS lives on a 120GB Crucial SSD with the help of the nand-sata-install script that Armbian provides, and the data lives on one 4TB Seagate hard drive that is somehow still working.

The board is pressed against the metal part of an AMD AM4 socket stock cooler with the help of a thick 5mm thermal pad and solid copper wires taken from an electrical cable. This looks very janky, but the cooling performance is absolutely fantastic: 30C when idling and not more than 50-60C under the heaviest workloads.

The total power consumption of this setup is typically between the 5-10W range, which isn’t the lowest, but still acceptable. The CPU is a 32-bit one, so let’s see if this board can make it to 2038.

2021-04-02 update

The 4TB Seagate HDD decided to start a career in experimental music production and started clicking and not showing up when connected to a PC. And thus, the seedbox on a wall has been put on pause for now.

My self-hosting adventure started during my university days. Once I actually had money to buy myself a decent used laptop (ThinkPad T430) that had more than 3GB of RAM that my ThinkPad T60 had, I could use some of my older hardware as testbeds for any of the stupid ideas that I had. For someone that liked to learn more about Linux and wanted any excuse to play around with hardware, something like a RAID0 setup over 4 80GB Samsung hard drives on an old PC setup sounded great.

I also had a small collection of data that I had on an 1TB external hard drive, and I wanted to also have backups of the data that lived on my laptop. This was the main motivation for setting up a machine that would serve as a NAS and a testbed for anything that I wanted to try out.

The first box: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ based PC

At this point in time, I didn’t really have any names for my systems. They were simply named by the model of the machine or whatever else I had in mind.

One of the first “server” builds that I built was based on some old parts I had lying around. The CPU was from an old family PC that we got in 2006, and to this date, it is the only surviving component from that build. The motherboard was from a place that collected old hardware and resold some of it and if I remember correctly, it was the abit KN9 Ultra. AM2 socket, DDR2, 6 SATA ports, all that good stuff. This was coupled with 4GB of DDR2 memory. Not much, but it is a start.

The details regarding the hard drive situation are a bit hazy, but at least initially it hosted whatever drives I had around. At some point I managed to buy 8x 500GB hard drives to test out ZFS on a big array. This was mainly inspired by the glorious 32TB server build in an NZXT S340 case that someone showed off in Reddit. I’m still surprised that it was acceptable for me to be in the same room as that monstrosity.

This setup ran well for a while and there weren’t any hardware issues with this setup. Drives were OK, speed was acceptable, and ZFS did its job well, since this was all a big RAID-Z3 array. I even removed two drives temporarily to put in a GPU at one point and ZFS did not complain. After putting the drives back in, the drives were resilvered and all was good.

The engoodening of my server: AMD Ryzen

2017-2018 was wild in the world of CPU-s. AMD came in with some well-designed CPU-s that provided a much better value proposition than the competing Intel CPU-s at the time. The value was insane: double the cores for the same price! It didn’t take much for me to be convinced that the next server build will be an AMD Ryzen based machine, and as soon as I had the resources, I got myself parts for doing that upgrade.

The build wasn’t without hiccups, though. I discovered that cats really like playing around with screws and walking on all the expensive computer parts that took up half of the free space in the apartment. Nevertheless, I managed to complete the build.

Laptop-as-a-server

Due to reasons that have no rational explanations, I started looking into switching out this perfectly working server machine into something more power efficient. The CPU sat idle most of the time and I figured that I could use the machine somewhere else.

And thus, one of the stupidest server builds was born: a ThinkPad X230 serving as a server, with two 4TB WD Red hard drives attached over USB 3.0, running BTRFS RAID1. I do not have pictures of the setup, but this was pretty much it. I learned soon after that cats like climbing on things and that they have no understanding of the amount of force that is required to temporarily disconnect the USB 3 cable from the laptop. This is the part where BTRFS failed on me and I actually lost data in the array. Luckily I had working backups.

Not long after this incident, I started looking for alternatives.

Low power, but still somewhat usable?

My search criteria was quite simple:

• low power (ruled out any desktop builds)
• x86 based (no OS lock-in)
• hosts at least 2 drives over SATA
• reasonably priced

The closest match I could find was the TerraMaster F2-221. It has a low-power Intel CPU, standard UEFI implementation, fits two drives and has two SATA ports. The only part that it really didn’t fit under well was the reasonable cost aspect, but it was still much more affordable than the alternatives.

Around this time I also discovered the world of shucking. I got myself two 8TB WD MyBook drives and used them in this build. However, what I did not take into account was the noise. These 8TB drives were much louder than the 4TB WD Red drives that I used previously, and allegedly this is due to WD labelling these drives as “5400-rpm class”, even though they actually run at 7200 rpm. The TerraMaster NAS unit had no vibration dampeners or other methods to isolate the noise, so I had to stick it in a closet.

The TerraMaster build was otherwise great. I could upgrade the RAM to 10GB using the available DDR3 SODIMM slot on the board, and the services that ran on it were fine. This thing could even run Jellyfin, assuming that you utilized the integrated GPU to provide hardware acceleration for transcoding video.

However, there were some limitations for this setup:

• OS lives on an USB drive. Generally fine, but depending on your setup you could pick between internal USB 2.0 ports or one of the USB 3.0 ports at the back.
• When you have lots of small files and a database on the system as well, the lack of SSD base storage became quite painful. You could do it over the available USB 3.0 ports on the back, but that’s it.

Back to the desktop

Due to a combination of me getting two ITX builds and having workloads that are performance-sensitive (PostgreSQL, Nextcloud, Jellyfin), I decided to go back to where I started from and put the setup back into a desktop case. For that purpose, I picked the Thermaltake Core V1, mainly due to how easy it is to build in it and it having room for 2x8TB hard drives and 2x 2.5" SSD-s.

This box was very fast. Too fast, in fact. It also used quite a lot of power. 70-120W doesn’t sound like much, but when this box is supposed to run for 24 hours a day, this really adds up. I had reached my storage target, the performance was acceptable and everything was working, which meant that the next logical step is to change the setup and hit some limits again.

Quest for low power usage

At this point, I had made it a game for myself to try to go as low as possible with the power usage of my setup while also running my workloads at an acceptable performance level. From my previous meddling, I had a ThinkPad T430 that now boasts 16GB of RAM and a 4-core Intel i7 3820QM quad-core CPU, which is plenty of performance. This laptop also houses up to three SSD-s, which meant that having performant storage around over SATA was also not an issue. The main storage (2x 8TB) was attached over USB 3.0. Not the best solution, but ZFS has handled these kinds of setups very well in my past experience.

Can we go even smaller?

Recently I have learned about tiny form factor machines produced by big OEM-s, such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. These machines are very compact, but can pack quite a punch with a desktop-level CPU and the ability to put in 16+GB of RAM while being powered by a laptop power supply. The only downside of these builds is that the internal storage can be limited to 1-2 drives (SATA or M.2 form factor) and not all USB ports might be USB 3.0.

Once I stumbled upon one offer for a Lenovo M73, I knew that I had to try this kind of setup out. Initially I was thinking of using such a machine for media center purposes, but after I accidentally configured one too many UEFI settings for my ThinkPad X230 in the advanced BIOS settings, I needed a replacement laptop. And thus, the ThinkPad T430 based server was replaced by the M73. I did have to limit the CPU power usage using intel_pstate driver and the USB 3.0 ports needed a bit of bending so that they aren’t loose, but other than that it has been smooth sailing.

This is where the story ends for now. The machine takes about 13-15W when idling, and with 4 8TB external hard drives attached, the typical power usage is between 40-55W. I am planning on replacing the 4 drives with 2 high-capacity drives, something like a WD Elements/MyBook 14TB once those go on sale.

Future plans

This is probably where the setup changes will stop for a while. I occasionally play around with some alternative setups to try to go even lower (Raspberry Pi 4), but so far this setup has proven to be the minimum viable server. It does everything that I need, the power usage is low and it has room for expandability with regards to services that I can run on it.

If I had to start from scratch, then I would probably opt for an AsRock Deskmini X300. It has the same power efficiency benefits, but you could install a more powerful CPU, a lot of RAM and up to 4 SSD-s, two of which can be NVMe drives.

The bulk storage would still be over USB 3.0, but that comes with its own benefits:

• you can not go over a reasonable amount of drives, meaning that your wallet will be happy.
• you do not need to shuck the drives, you can use them as-is and get warranty service without issues.

This has been my self-hosting journey throughout the years. I hope that it was at least somewhat interesting and maybe gave you some ideas to test out on your own.

I used to work on a short-term project a while ago where the goal was to visualize some metrics that were collected from a pretty fancy smart home setup. This data included power usage of various sections of the building, temperature sensors, water usage levels and more. The data itself was collected by a proprietary piece of software that sent this data to a MySQL database. My job was to understand the data, get useful values from the binary data and visualize it.

The hardware

While testing out this solution, I started with an Orange Pi Zero that a good friend had given to me. You might remember this board from a previous adventure. This board boasts a whopping 4 ARM 32-bit CPU cores running at 1000MHz, 100 Mbps networking and one USB 2.0 port. The slow USB port means that the read speeds for any storage you attach to it will be capped out at 40 MB/s.

With all of this in mind, I still went ahead and built this monstrosity. I took a 480 GB Kingston SSD that was lying in a box and connected it to the board.

The workload

This server had two jobs: collect the incoming data from sensors to a MariaDB instance and visualize it using a tool like Grafana. The first part was OK, since the amount of incoming data was not that high and the SBC could handle it. However, I hit some roadblocks when trying to visualize it.

The first hurdle was to convert the binary values into something usable. Going by the documentation, I could figure out how to show signed and unsigned integer values correctly by utilizing some SQL magic that did the conversions more-or-less correctly. However, with other data types, such as floating-point values of varying precision and other fun formats, I could not use the same methods to perform the conversion.

The second hurdle was performance. The incoming data was put into one table, which would periodically get split up on a month-by-month basis to avoid the table getting too big. Not a bad solution, but since I was planning on using Grafana, having all the data in one table was the only sensible solution if I wanted to show data for previous months as well. This meant that I had one big table with all the important data, plus some adjacent ones that provided details for the sensor/meter type, its value type (integer, floating point, etc.) and more. Performing SELECT statements with a couple of joins proved to be a headache: the queries would trigger a full table search, which was very painful on a system where the maximum read speed of the SSD is 40 MB/s. Understandably, lookups on a database that was already at a couple of gigabytes in size and growing would be slow even for shorter time spans (30 days).

These limitations meant that in its current state, the solution was pretty limited in functionality and very slow to use as well.

The solution

I soon learned that the company behind the hardware and software of this system provides a tool which can be used to connect to the database and read the collected data, with values converted properly and sensor/meter names provided as well. And to top it all off, this thing was written in Java!

I decided to dig around in the provided .jar file using IntelliJ IDEA and stumbled upon some interesting files. These files corresponded to different data types, and also contained the logic that was used to convert the binary data to usable values. I can only guess that this conversion was made with the goal of keeping the database size as small as possible, or to just avoid users from using this data for other purposes using tools made by other companies.

There were still the performance issues to resolve. I looked into optimizing MySQL/MariaDB tables and queries and stumbled upon some useful tips and tricks. While I cannot remember the exact details, I did end up testing the different DB engines (InnoDB vs whatever they had previously), configuring various cache sizes and limits, indexes on various column types, investigating query plans and the performance benefits of denormalization.

And then it clicked.

What if I wrote a small Java service that would handle the data conversion and put all the data into one table that holds only the relevant data and has the correct set of indexes set up? The service would periodically check the main table that collected all the data, select the results, convert the value into something that a human can understand, and then insert it into a new table that is optimized for read performance.

After hours of work, I had this Java service up and running on the underpowered server and started testing this solution. Queries that would previously take minutes to run, would now finish within seconds. Even queries with a time window of 90+ days would still finish within 5 seconds. This improvement in performance is further amplified by the fact that Grafana is able to show multiple graphs at the same time, resulting in multiple queries running at the same time.

Deployment

The hardware that I tested this solution on was pretty neat and used up very little power. The total cost with the SSD included was roughly in the 100-150 euro range. However, it was decided that the deployment would be done on a more conventional machine.

I went ahead and built a tiny PC based on the AsRock Deskmini A300. The build included a dual-core AMD Athlon APU (cut-down version of a Ryzen APU), 16 GB of DDR4 RAM because it cost just as much as an 8 GB DDR4 kit did at the time, one 120 GB SATA SSD for the OS, two 512GB Kingston A1000 NVMe SSD-s for the main storage (ZFS mirror) and a cheap 480 GB Kingston A400 SATA SSD for local backups. This whole build fit in a 500 euro budget and was a bit overkill for the purpose, but the performance that you could get out of this build was insane. And to top it all off, the server itself is very tiny and energy efficient, meaning that you could stick it pretty much anywhere, and it would still run happily while consuming less than 50 watts even under the most intense workloads.

The performance optimizations that I did were a must-have on the SBC that I did most of my testing on. On this new build, however, all the bottlenecks were lifted. The CPU probably had more processing power than 20 of the Orange Pi Zero boards combined, and the maximum read speeds on the crazy fast ZFS mirror were measured in gigabytes per second. Queries that took a second to run on the old setup were now done in the blink of an eye (or in other words, measured in milliseconds).

This deployment would probably last years without any intervention from anyone, assuming that the incoming data would not grow too fast. Unfortunately the solution itself did not find much use, so I could not test this theory out. The box itself is still happily running at the time of writing.

Lessons learned

The main reason that I am writing about this experience is the simple fact that it was a fantastic challenge to try to extract as much performance out of the Orange Pi Zero based server. Getting your queries from 30 seconds down to 0.3 seconds felt like a great achievement, plus I got to revisit some database related topics that I first learned about during my university days.

This experience also shows that even low-end hardware can achieve a lot if you are aware of its limitations and can work around them with a little bit of effort. After this project, I have played around with my homelab setup a lot and have finally settled on a solution that does not consume a lot of power, but can still run all the workloads that I want to run.

Introduction

This is a short overview of one way to take your old video tapes and make digital copies of their contents.

To get started, you will need the following:

• old video tapes that you want to make copies of (VHS and its variants)
• a device that can read analog AV signals and convert them to digital signals
• a device that can play back the tapes (VHS player, camcorder etc.)
  • in this example, we will be using a camcorder that has video playback capabilities.
• a computer with enough free space to store the digital copies
  • for VHS and H.264+MP3, this means roughly 1.5GB of space for 1 hour of footage
• VLC media player
• time and patience

In this example, we will be using the Nedis VGRRU100BK. Not because it is any good, it was just something we had access to.

The process

Step 1: setting up the physical devices

Set up your video playback device so that it can play the cassettes that you are planning to record.

Connect the AV output cables (composite or S-video) to the input of the USB device. For this specific device, it means connecting the appropriate composite AV cables together and connecting them to the USB stick using a proprietary connector.

The end result might look something like this:

Step 2: testing the initial display output

In this example, we will be using VLC to play and record the videos. We are using Linux here, but the process should be very similar on Windows.

Open up VLC.

In the top-left corner, click on Media and select Open Capture device....

You should see a screen similar to this one:

Your computer probably has multiple options for selecting audio and video devices, since microphones and webcams will likely show up here. If you are unsure which one is the correct one, go through each one-by-one until you find the options that work.

In this example, our video capture device is named /dev/video2 and the audio feed for the capture device is hw:4,0.

In the bottom-left corner, you have the option to play back the video signal directly in VLC. You can use this to check which video and audio device is the correct one.

If all goes well, you should be able to see the output in VLC:

Step 3: recording

Once you have found the correct configuration, you can click on the arrow next to the Play button and select the Convert option.

In this view, you can configure deinterlacing, select the video profile, and set where the resulting video file will be saved.

For our purposes, we have chosen to deinterlace the video, since it provided a higher quality output, and we have stuck with MP4 as the output format because it is an acceptable default option for us.

Displaying the output while converting the video did not work for us and that might be related to how VLC accesses the video feed in Linux (only one program can read the stream at a time, it seems).

You can now click Start in VLC to start recording the video. You will also need to hit Play on your video playback device.

Wait until the VHS tape has finished playing and then hit the stop button in VLC.

Step 4: verify results

You can now open the resulting video file and check the results.

If you have additional VHS tapes to record, then repeat step 3.

Troubleshooting notes

There were some challenges to get this setup working.

Not able to read the output from the USB capture device

Being able to read the video signal from the USB capture device turned out to be a headache. The software that comes with the USB capture device (Arcsoft ShowBiz) had issues displaying the video signal and was generally unreliable and crashing.

Other software, like OpenShot and Kdenlive video editors, could not recognize the video capture device.

Since we found that this USB capture device emulates an USB webcam, we tried viewing its signal using a browser or a camera app in the OS (Cheese in Linux, Camera in Windows), but that did not work out either.

We eventually found success with VLC and then chose it for performing our video recording effort. It has multiple advantages over the software shipped with the capture device itself:

• it just works
• free and open source, meaning that you can do your recording on different platforms
• no need for a license key
• up to date (Arcsoft ShowBiz installation files were unchanged since 2012)

VLC truly is a Swiss army knife for media playback and recording.

VHS playback troubles

We initially tried the recording process with a proper VHS player, but while recording the footage and reviewing it later, we noticed that at random points the VHS player had fast-forwarded over portions of the video.

The camcorder did not exhibit this behaviour, so we went with that. However, with the camcorder we could only output mono sound, which means that the resulting video file will only have one sound channel present. This will be especially noticeable when listening to the recorded footage using headphones. To fix this, we used HandBrake to copy the single audio channel to both channels, which resolved that issue for us.

One day I stumbled upon a Craft Computing video about his new server build, and on the parts list was a Sedna PCI Express 2x SATA adapter card:

There are different designs out there, including a 4x SATA card, which is bonkers.

Anyway, I thought that I might as well give this a shot, since I have two 4TB 2.5" 15mm Seagate hard drives running, with one of them being in the process of accumulating bad sectors.

The installation procedure itself is simple, just take your drives, screw them in and plug this into a PCIe slot.

So, how well does it work?

Quite well, actually.

The PCIe 2.0 x1 link does mean that your speeds will be capped at around 500MB/s, but with current hard drives you are unlikely to reach this limit. SSD-s, on the other hand, will be bottlenecked in sequential read/write workloads.

lspci -nnk output:

01:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller [1b21:0612] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: ASMedia Technology Inc. Device [1b21:1060]
        Kernel driver in use: ahci
        Kernel modules: ahci

The drives are individually addressable and show up as normal drives (like /dev/sda). S.M.A.R.T info is functional and readable.

This adapter has been running in my system for over half a week now and so far there haven’t been any stability issues whatsoever.

Should I get this?

This adapter is a good fit for the following use cases:

• there are no more HDD/SSD drive mounts in your system left and you do not want to use double-sided tape as one
• you have run out of SATA ports and don’t mind using up a PCIe slot
• you want to install additional SATA drives in your system, but also would prefer to keep the amount of cabling in your system at a minimum
• flexing on your friends with your fancy new 8/10 TB storage card

I would recommend looking into alternative solutions if your use case matches one of these:

• using this adapter with SSD-s on sequential read/write workloads that exceed 500+MB/s
• adding more than two SATA drives into your system (get a simple PCIe -> SATA adapter that only provides the data connectors instead)

After a run-of-the-mill Windows BSOD, I was redirected to the UEFI settings and was presented with this fun little bug:

LinusTechTips has some pretty great videos about building insane PC and server setups, such as:

• unboxing and deploying petabytes of storage

• 7 gamers, 1 CPU

• building sleeper PC-s

• testing sketchy CPU-s

• opening up a 100TB SSD

I have the ideas, but not the budget of LinusTechTips, so writing them down and hoping that one day I can test this out is the best I can do for now.

The project itself

The main idea is to have a laptop that has ridiculous amounts of storage and the performance to back it up. The idea started gaining traction in my head after I realized that my Lenovo ThinkPad T430 can house up to 3 SSD-s, which makes it a perfect candidate for a system with a ZFS mirror configuration. It also helps that it is powered by a quad-core CPU and 16GB of RAM.

Additional points:

• low power, should stay below 60-90W even under the worst case scenarios
• portable, just plug in the power and an ethernet cable and you are good to go
• built-in UPS in the form of the laptop battery
• well built, can survive a fall or two (already has done so, but that’s a story for another time)
• includes a screen and a keyboard for those times where you really screwed something up and need to fix it fast
• supports 1x mSATA SSD (great for / partition) and 2x SATA HDD/SSD (one in the usual drive bay, the other in the HDD caddy that is replacing the optical drive)

Storage

With SSD prices having dropped quite low and capacities increasing with time, it might not be completely unreasonable to get SSD-s with capacities reaching multiple terabytes. At the time of writing, Samsung, for example, is shipping SATA SSD-s with capacities up to 8TB, which is the same size as the main hard drives in my server right now.

However, these SSD-s are also ridiculously expensive, with the 4 TB model costing ~400 euros and the 8 TB costing almost 800 euros.

Hard drives are generally cheaper per TB, but in this case we don’t actually have much better options. 2.5" 9mm hard drives seem to go up to 2TB at most. You will also have to take into account the fact that hard drives do not like impacts, such as falls, and they are much slower than SSD-s in most workloads.

Cooling

Since I have fitted this T430 with an Intel i7 3820QM CPU with a 45 watt TDP, cooling is an issue. Liquid metal, beefier heatsinks, fresh thermal paste, I have tried it all, but the only solution that has actually worked is disabling the turbo boost feature. There is also this other solution I created that automatically throttles the CPU at a chosen temperature limit using Intel p-state driver, but that solution requires a rewrite.

With poor cooling comes great noise, so ideally this server should run in a place that does not bother anyone with its high-pitched fan noise.

Performance

With a quad core CPU, this system can do quite a lot. Running Nextcloud, PostgreSQL, Jellyfin or any other service should be a breeze, especially since the main storage is SSD based. The amount of RAM is also perfectly suitable for doing quite a lot. Run a couple of VM-s, transcode your media, it can do it all (with reasonable expectations, though).

Portability

One of the best features of this setup is that you can just grab it and go, should the need arise. Its low power requirement makes it a much more suitable candidate for powering it in situations where the electrical grid is down and all you have is a generator or some form of renewable energy. In addition to that, everything you need to work with the machine is already there, just open up the laptop and start working using the built-in keyboard and screen.

The good build quality of the laptop also means that you do not need to worry much about putting it in your backpack and throwing it around. Sure, the plastic might break in some places, and if the impact is strong enough then it can still break, but it is less likely to break when compared to alternative thin and light types of laptops.

Practicality

It’s not all fun and games, though. This setup does have quite a few downsides:

• no way to upgrade CPU and RAM any further. What you have is what you will have to live with.
• it’s expensive simply due to the fact that the SSD-s get very pricy if you require high capacities, hard drives are still more economical for storing huge amounts of data
• the cooling issue will remain unsolveable, unless you invest time and resources into designing a custom solution

Conclusion

Do I still want to build this?

Yes.

Can I build this?

Not unless a delivery truck full of 8TB SSD-s happens to crash in front of me.

Or someone sponsors me. Take a hint, WD/Seagate.

Maybe I am unlucky with computer hardware.

Maybe I have the opposite of the golden touch of Midas.

Or maybe it’s just the fact that I use my hardware for things they were never meant to be used for.

Anyway, I have acquired two Seagate 4TB external hard drives for doing some testing with ZFS. I shucked them (took them out of their enclosure) and started using them as internal drives in many different configurations.

Funnily enough, even though the two external drives had different branding (Backup Plus, Expansion) and enclosure design, the hard drives in them were identical.

Some info about the drives:

• Model: ST4000LM024-2AN17V
• Recording type: SMR (shingled magnetic recording)
• Form factor: 2.5"
• Interface: SATA
• Thickness: 15 mm

Before I get to the stupid stuff, I would like to mention what these drives are good for, and where they suffer heavily.

Good:

• WORM (write once, read many) type of workloads, such as a Steam library, your media collection etc.

Bad:

• random read/write workloads (performance is absolutely rubbish and makes the system unusable)
• write heavy workloads (SMR requires some clean-up activities that are managed by the drive, and you cannot do anything while those take place)

The stupid stuff

I have done some pretty dumb things with these, such as using them in an InWin Chopin computer case and letting them hit 60C under load. Fun fact: these drives actually fit almost perfectly in the case, as long as you bend one small metal section for one of the drive cages. Not so fun fact: they will overheat if you have a high CPU load and you cannot do much about that.

Currently these drives are sitting in my main desktop. Initially I tried using them in a mirrored configuration under Windows, because having your whole Steam library downloaded with disk space to spare is pretty cool. Unfortunately, one of the disks started having issues and it got kicked out of the mirror. It kept doing this every time it accumulated bad sectors.

Now these two sit in a ZFS mirror configuration inside a VM, acting as some sort of a temporary scratch disk. Another free fun fact: kvm (or qemu, or libvirt, one of those) will pause the VM if it detects that one of your disks has encountered I/O errors, and seems that the only “fix” is to force a restart of the VM (could not unpause the VM).

It has become some sort of a fun pastime for me to keep an eye on one of the failing drives and the status of the ZFS mirror.

Will ZFS detect some errors?

How large can the bad sector count get before the drive dies?

When will it actually die?

Why is S.M.A.R.T still reporting that the disk is OK?

So far, so good.

Expect this list to grow with time.

I happen to run on an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard that used to run fine, but ever since I installed one UEFI update, it has had this one annoying issue: whenever you reboot, it gets stuck at POST. Cold boots work fine and the shutdown-and-push-the-power-button cycle also does the trick, but it’s not something I want to do all the time, especially when the machine is out of reach.

Before you say it: no, warranty service was not an option here, especially since this motherboard has suffered a fall once and it has this slight curvature in it. No, this separate incident was after this freezing issue started occurring.

Initial troubleshooting

I went through most of the standard hardware troubleshooting procedures:

• clear CMOS
• re-seat RAM
• try a different CPU
• disable features in UEFI, reduce PCIe speeds
• disconnect storage devices

No luck, issue was still there. The POST code was stuck at A0. When taking a look at the ASRock Dr. Debug POST codes list, I saw that A0 falls under

Problem related to IDE or SATA devices. Please re-install IDE and SATA devices. If the problem still exists, please clear CMOS and try removing all SATA devices.

Since I had just done that procedure, and the issue was still there, I was stumped.

Wake-on-LAN

I had tried wake-on-LAN many years ago and was successful with it, so I thought that perhaps this could be an option. After all, I really did not want to get a new motherboard if I could just work around this issue.

I checked the ASRock UEFI for various wake-on-LAN related settings and found a couple of them. Oddly enough, the Wake on LAN setting itself only became available after I enabled booting from LAN in a completely unrelated UEFI section. In addition to the Wake on LAN setting, I also made sure to enable waking up from PS2 and PCIe devices, just in case.

After a quick Google search I found the Arch Linux Wiki page on this topic and saw that I needed to make sure that my network adapter was configured properly for wake-on-LAN to work.

[root@my-machine]# ethtool enp9s0 | grep Wake-on
	Supports Wake-on: pumbg
	Wake-on: g

Super, everything should work then!

I set up an always-on machine to send the wake-on-lan magic packets using wol every minute so that the machine eventually wakes up again. It’s configured, I shut down the problematic machine and wait.

Nothing happens.

Huh, perhaps I missed something.

No, everything was configured properly and the magic packet setting g was on by default.

I checked the wiki page again and two things caught my eye:

Note: Setting one of u, m or b along with g might also be necessary to enable the feature.

It is known that some motherboards are affected by a bug that can cause immediate or random wake-up after a shutdown whenever the BIOS WoL feature is enabled

Well, that’s interesting.

I added * * * * * ethtool -s enp9s0 wol pumbg to my crontab and shut my machine down.

Power supply does a click. Silence. Another click, ethernet port LED-s light up and my machine is powered on again. Success!

As it turns out, I did not even need to enable sending wake-on-LAN magic packets from another machine, the two motherboard issues managed to cancel each other out.

I have a bad habit of testing things whenever a “good” idea pops into my head. This is a short overview of one of them.

The Orange Pi Zero is a SBC (single board computer) that has a slow 32-bit ARM 4 core CPU, 512MB of RAM and no display output. It’s actually quite OK for many tasks, such as reverse proxy (assuming 100Mbit/s is enough for you), low-performance NAS (assuming you are fine with 10-12MB/s file transfer speeds) or a Syncthing relay. Oh, and you can also turn it into a Wi-Fi access point.

Why?

Because Armbian made it really easy to test out and I was interested in seeing what kind of performance an old USB Wi-Fi dongle could offer. This cheap AP could also come into handy in situations where my main access point dies for some reason.

How?

Go to the Armbian device page for your SBC and download the latest image, then write it to your microSD card using the tool of your choice, start your SBC and finish the initial setup.

After all that is done, start armbian-config as root. This tool allows you to do many things over a terminal UI, including a no-hassle method of setting up an Wi-Fi AP.

The option you are looking for is under Network -> Hotspot.

Follow the on-screen instructions to set everything up. After the initial setup is done, make sure to navigate to the same menu again to change the SSID and the Wi-Fi password because the defaults are horribly insecure.

After all this you should be good to go!

Issues and troubleshooting tips

It would not be a proper project if something didn’t go wrong in the process.

Before starting this configuration, run ip a to see if your Wi-Fi device is present. In my case the Orange Pi Zero also has onboard Wi-Fi, but that particular one has poor support, so I use an USB Wi-Fi dongle instead.

If your Wi-Fi device is not showing up, make sure that the correct firmware is present. In my case I had to install firmware-atheros package so that my ath9k_htc based Wi-Fi adapter would start working. dmesg and lsusb -v can help determine what chip your Wi-Fi adapter is using and what driver it needs.

The Orange Pi Zero that I have could set everything up, but it would crash hard with the logs not really showing much. After testing the USB Wi-Fi adapter in all the different USB ports with no success, I opted to use armbian-config menu System -> CPU to limit the CPU clock speed to 480MHz and set the CPU governor to performance to rule out power delivery issues that might be caused by variations in CPU power usage. That seems to have done the trick, because after that change the Wi-Fi AP has been rock solid.

Testing and conclusions

After setting it up and tweaking it a bit I started testing this thing out. The AP had no major issues throughout the day and did not crash.

The performance, however, isn’t anything to write home about. Speed maxes out at 30Mbit/s and is generally lower than that, especially when more than one client is connected. You can do things like Steam Remote Play (stream your game over your home network), but the quality will suffer. It was still quite fun to mess around in GTA V regardless of the image quality and during ~1h of play time there were only 4-5 stutters that were caused by the network.

Would I use this as my main Wi-Fi access point?

Definitely not. Any half-decent router will out-perform this setup.

Can it still be useful?

Definitely. A crappy Wi-Fi AP is better than no AP.

Parts list

• Orange Pi Zero SBC (512MB RAM)
• Orange Pi Zero expansion board (adds two USB 2.0 ports)
• Cheap case for the Orange Pi Zero
• 32GB Sandisk microSD card
• TP-Link WN-722N USB Wi-Fi adapter
• Official Raspberry Pi microUSB power adapter

Update (2020-08-22)

It’s still working and is happily serving as a temporary Wi-Fi access point.

During additional testing I could also hit 40 Mbps speeds when testing in an environment with far fewer competing Wi-Fi access points nearby.

Update (2020-08-30)

It’s still running well and it seems that it won’t be a simple temporary solution after all.

Update (2020-11-30, approximately)

This setup has now been retired. It had 0 issues throughout its lifespan as a Wi-Fi access point, but I replaced it with a more standard Wi-Fi access point so that this board can be used somewhere else.

The setup did surprisingly well and even survived nightly automated updates and restarts, which can be attributed to the good work that the Armbian project has done.