OK, I noticed about a third to one half of my audience reads this blog on iOS devices and Macs. I guess it makes sense since no Windows users will be interested in these 'On the Mac' series of articles. If you have not notice already, Apple quietly releases iOS 7.0.6 and 6.1.6 over the weekend to address a vulnerability in the underlying SSL implementation framework.
My advice to all of you : Just Patch It. If you have iOS 7, upgrade now to 7.0.6 and likewise if you iOS 6, upgrade to 6.1.6. The vulnerability is serious enough for Apple to warrant a standalone iOS release, even for iOS 6. Apparently, iOS 5 is not affected. More information at HT6147.
It has also been discovered that the same vulnerability exists on Mavericks. There is no patch at this point from Apple so you have to stay tuned for updates as to when this patch will be made available. Meanwhile, you can try to mitigate the risk by not hooking up to public Wifi systems (where the exploits are most easily executed). Perhaps you can just use FireFox or Chrome for now until Safari is fixed.
Update : Apple has rolled out Mavericks 10.9.2 which contains the fix for the TLS/SSL vulnerability.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
On the FileServer : The Hardware - Hotswap cages, enclosures and controllers
In this series of articles, I'm going to briefly jot down my setup. Hopefully this can provide some insights and ideas to those who are considering building their own NAS. Now, you might ask why a NAS at home? And even if we want a NAS, we can just buy one off the shelf, so why build? These are valid questions and I will share with you my thoughts. I'll then go ahead and list down the main components of the hardware I use.
So, why do you even want a NAS at home? Let's face it, in this digital age, you would have build up a lot of photos of your kids, families and loved ones. Probably videos too. You're likely to have a massive iTunes collection, and maybe a sizable movies collections as well.
Traditionally, you have a desktop (or laptop) and you dump everything on it. The more careful ones will buy an external drive (see some of my recommendations here). At some point in time, you realized you run out of disk space, or you simply need more. Or perhaps you want to share them with another desktop (or laptop) in the household? That's where a NAS will come in useful. It provides a central location where you can deposit your digital life.
Why build your own then? Yes, you can just buy any one of them off the shelf. But I prefer the flexibility of building my own and to also satisfy the geek in me. It isn't really that difficult, you just need a bit of planning and some basic system administration skills. In this article, I'll continue with the hardware I use and then in subsequent articles, I'll follow through with the software and the final setup.
In a typical NAS, one of the key features is that you want many drive bays, which can be easily accessible. Why is this? The more the drive bays you have, the more disks you can plug in, plain and simple. But why do you need it to be accessible? Drives fail. It's not a matter of 'IF' but 'WHEN'. When a drive fail, you don't really want to open up the case and pull the drive. You want to just yank the dead (or dying) drive out from its bay simply by pressing a button or lifting a lever. Because of this requirement, I install what is known as a hot swap cage. There are 2 types, 3.5" or 2.5". 3.5" are more common since they provide more value compared to their physically smaller 2.5" brother.
You can find these hot swap cages on Amazon, an example (3.5") will be ICY DOCK FlexCage MB974SP-2B Tray-less 4 x 3.5 Inch HDD in 3 x 5.25 Inch Bay SATA Cage - Front USB 3.0 Hub
. This specific model provides 4 bays, and uses up 3 5.25" bays in your tower. This is also known as a 4-in-3 cage. There are also 5-in-4 cages available. You need to plan a little bit further and decide if you want the 4-in-3 or 5-in-4. I personally use a 4-in-3.
An example of a 2.5" hot swap cage is Thermaltake MAX-1542 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1400101A
. In most cases, you don't want these unless you plan to use the smaller 2.5" form factor drives. For me, I do have some 2.5" drives lying around (as a result of multiple upgradings of laptop drives) so I got one of these. I use the 4-in-1 type which takes in 12mm 2.5" drives. I have personally saw 6-in-1 cages (Thermaltake MAX-1562 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1600101A
) but they can only take 9.5mm drives.
Alright, so I have a 4-in-3 and a 4-in-1 cage installed. It can take in 8 drives. Typically, an Intel-based motherboard (like ASUS P8H77-M/CSM LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
) comes with 6 SATA ports. You need an additional disk controller to provide the extra SATA ports. I purchased an Dell PERC card off eBay. It's really a rebadged LSI Megaraid SAS controller card. This is a somewhat high-end card meant for servers so you might want to go for 'consumer' class controllers, like StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express SATA 6 Gbps eSATA Controller Card - Dual Port PCIe SATA III Card - 2 Internal/2 External Card PEXESAT322I
.
If you need more than 8, or perhaps you just don't have enough bays internally in your tower, you can opt for external enclosures. There are multi-bay external enclosures that run over USB3 or eSATA. I hunted for a while before settling for this bundle - TowerRAID TR4M+B - 4 Bay eSATA RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Performance Tower w/ 6G PCIe Card (Black)
.
One thing to note on the difference between an USB3 enclosure and an eSATA one. You cannot hot swap individual disks in an USB3 enclosure. This means if your enclosure has 4 disks, and one of them is dead, you have to bring all 4 disks offline before you can pull the dead disk. eSATA does not have this issue. However, in order to use all 4 bays in an eSATA enclosure, the eSATA controller card must have the 'Port Multiplier' feature. If you buy the bundle listed above, it will work nicely.
If you choose to still go with USB3 (it's definitely a lot easier to setup), you should seriously consider Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with USB 3.0 & eSATA
. For Singapore readers, just go SLS and buy it. It's known as Hotway Probox here.
Alright, that's all for now regarding hardware. Do also note that I don't build for performance (despite having a server class SAS controller) so you need to understand what you're buying if you choose to follow my hardware setup.
Do feel free to ask questions if you have any. I'll try to answer them, and stay tuned for the next installment where I'll talk briefly about the different drive types and what you need to look out for. And if you find my articles helpful, you can help to support the site by buying through the links above. Thank you!
So, why do you even want a NAS at home? Let's face it, in this digital age, you would have build up a lot of photos of your kids, families and loved ones. Probably videos too. You're likely to have a massive iTunes collection, and maybe a sizable movies collections as well.
Traditionally, you have a desktop (or laptop) and you dump everything on it. The more careful ones will buy an external drive (see some of my recommendations here). At some point in time, you realized you run out of disk space, or you simply need more. Or perhaps you want to share them with another desktop (or laptop) in the household? That's where a NAS will come in useful. It provides a central location where you can deposit your digital life.
Why build your own then? Yes, you can just buy any one of them off the shelf. But I prefer the flexibility of building my own and to also satisfy the geek in me. It isn't really that difficult, you just need a bit of planning and some basic system administration skills. In this article, I'll continue with the hardware I use and then in subsequent articles, I'll follow through with the software and the final setup.
In a typical NAS, one of the key features is that you want many drive bays, which can be easily accessible. Why is this? The more the drive bays you have, the more disks you can plug in, plain and simple. But why do you need it to be accessible? Drives fail. It's not a matter of 'IF' but 'WHEN'. When a drive fail, you don't really want to open up the case and pull the drive. You want to just yank the dead (or dying) drive out from its bay simply by pressing a button or lifting a lever. Because of this requirement, I install what is known as a hot swap cage. There are 2 types, 3.5" or 2.5". 3.5" are more common since they provide more value compared to their physically smaller 2.5" brother.
You can find these hot swap cages on Amazon, an example (3.5") will be ICY DOCK FlexCage MB974SP-2B Tray-less 4 x 3.5 Inch HDD in 3 x 5.25 Inch Bay SATA Cage - Front USB 3.0 Hub
. This specific model provides 4 bays, and uses up 3 5.25" bays in your tower. This is also known as a 4-in-3 cage. There are also 5-in-4 cages available. You need to plan a little bit further and decide if you want the 4-in-3 or 5-in-4. I personally use a 4-in-3.An example of a 2.5" hot swap cage is Thermaltake MAX-1542 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1400101A
. In most cases, you don't want these unless you plan to use the smaller 2.5" form factor drives. For me, I do have some 2.5" drives lying around (as a result of multiple upgradings of laptop drives) so I got one of these. I use the 4-in-1 type which takes in 12mm 2.5" drives. I have personally saw 6-in-1 cages (Thermaltake MAX-1562 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1600101A) but they can only take 9.5mm drives.Alright, so I have a 4-in-3 and a 4-in-1 cage installed. It can take in 8 drives. Typically, an Intel-based motherboard (like ASUS P8H77-M/CSM LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
) comes with 6 SATA ports. You need an additional disk controller to provide the extra SATA ports. I purchased an Dell PERC card off eBay. It's really a rebadged LSI Megaraid SAS controller card. This is a somewhat high-end card meant for servers so you might want to go for 'consumer' class controllers, like StarTech.com 2 Port PCI Express SATA 6 Gbps eSATA Controller Card - Dual Port PCIe SATA III Card - 2 Internal/2 External Card PEXESAT322I.If you need more than 8, or perhaps you just don't have enough bays internally in your tower, you can opt for external enclosures. There are multi-bay external enclosures that run over USB3 or eSATA. I hunted for a while before settling for this bundle - TowerRAID TR4M+B - 4 Bay eSATA RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Performance Tower w/ 6G PCIe Card (Black)
.One thing to note on the difference between an USB3 enclosure and an eSATA one. You cannot hot swap individual disks in an USB3 enclosure. This means if your enclosure has 4 disks, and one of them is dead, you have to bring all 4 disks offline before you can pull the dead disk. eSATA does not have this issue. However, in order to use all 4 bays in an eSATA enclosure, the eSATA controller card must have the 'Port Multiplier' feature. If you buy the bundle listed above, it will work nicely.
If you choose to still go with USB3 (it's definitely a lot easier to setup), you should seriously consider Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure with USB 3.0 & eSATA
. For Singapore readers, just go SLS and buy it. It's known as Hotway Probox here.Alright, that's all for now regarding hardware. Do also note that I don't build for performance (despite having a server class SAS controller) so you need to understand what you're buying if you choose to follow my hardware setup.
Do feel free to ask questions if you have any. I'll try to answer them, and stay tuned for the next installment where I'll talk briefly about the different drive types and what you need to look out for. And if you find my articles helpful, you can help to support the site by buying through the links above. Thank you!
Current Deals : 18th Feb - Nexus 7 FHD and SSDs
The Google Nexus 7 Tablet (7-Inch, 32GB, Black) by ASUS (2013)
is back at $239. If you missed it the last time round, now is the time. I love mine.
Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1
is still $449! Looks like it's going to be a more or less permanent price drop.
If you prefer Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE1T0BW
, it's $499!
Lastly, I saw an interesting item on sale. Now, if you're the type who can't leave your iPads behind even as you need to visit the toilet, then this is for you, CTA Digital Pedestal Stand for iPad 2/3/4 with Roll Holder
.
is back at $239. If you missed it the last time round, now is the time. I love mine.Crucial M500 960GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter/spacer) Internal Solid State Drive CT960M500SSD1
is still $449! Looks like it's going to be a more or less permanent price drop.If you prefer Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE1T0BW
, it's $499!Lastly, I saw an interesting item on sale. Now, if you're the type who can't leave your iPads behind even as you need to visit the toilet, then this is for you, CTA Digital Pedestal Stand for iPad 2/3/4 with Roll Holder
.
Thursday, February 13, 2014
Current Deals : 13th Feb - Some on-going coupons
Some on-going coupons deals -
- $3 off Seventh Generation Baby Wipes
- On-going 20% of selected Omron BP Monitors
- $7 off the ever popular Panasonic Oral Irrigator EW-DJ10-A
I saw this Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive SATA 6Gbps 64MB Cache 2.5-Inch ST1000LM014 for $99. This is the newer slimmer 7mm version but spins at 5400rpm instead. Might be a good buy as it's not that much expensive over the normal all-platters version.
The Crucial M500 480GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT480M500SSD1 is still $259 so grab while you can.
The Crucial M500 480GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT480M500SSD1 is still $259 so grab while you can.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Current Deals : 3rd Feb - Omron BP monitors coupons
There is now a coupon for a 20% off selected Omron BP monitors. I personally have the Omron 7 Series Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor
and it works well. It's more convenient to use than the upper arm type. The size is also more friendly if you ever need to bring it out for travelling.
and it works well. It's more convenient to use than the upper arm type. The size is also more friendly if you ever need to bring it out for travelling.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Current Deals : 23 Jan - Crucial M500 SSDs
I just found out (23rd Jan 2014) that the highly rated Crucial M500 SSDs have a price drop.
What to Buy on Amazon : Office Supplies
One of the more useful item to help you get organized is a labeller. There are a few reputable brands out there which make very nice labellers, like Brother, Epson, Dymo etc. The thing here is, labellers locally here in Singapore is extremely over-priced. As a result, whichever model you want is probably a lot cheaper on Amazon.
I personally used Brother's PT-80 but seems like Amazon no longer carries it. The closest will be the Brother PT-70 Personal Handheld Labeler with special time & date function.
After getting the labeller itself, you'll need the correct type of tapes to go along. Brother makes 2 types of tapes, laminated and non-laminated. The PT-70 uses the M-series tapes which are non-laminated. The tapes come in a few colors and sizes so it depends on your preferences. The one I prefer is Brother M231 1/2-Inch Black on White Tape for P-Touch Labeler
.
Other office supplies you can get from Amazon will be stationeries. I quite like Sharpie stuff and I have used Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Markers, 12 Black Markers(30001)
and also Sharpie Accent Tank-Style Highlighters, 12 Fluorescent Yellow Highlighters(25025)
.
The other item that is of amazing value will be BIC Round Stic Ball Pen, Medium Point (1.0 mm), Blue, 60 Pens
. It's going for $3.99 right now. You can't really argue with the price point of 6.7 cents per pen.
Lastly, mechanical pencils. My current favorite is Uni's Kuru Toga. Normally, you can find the 0.5mm version of it locally at very competitive prices. However, the 0.7mm version is no where to be seen. As a result, I got mine,Uni-ball KuruToga 0.7mm Mechanical Pencil Starter Set, from Amazon instead.
Have fun!
I personally used Brother's PT-80 but seems like Amazon no longer carries it. The closest will be the Brother PT-70 Personal Handheld Labeler with special time & date function.
After getting the labeller itself, you'll need the correct type of tapes to go along. Brother makes 2 types of tapes, laminated and non-laminated. The PT-70 uses the M-series tapes which are non-laminated. The tapes come in a few colors and sizes so it depends on your preferences. The one I prefer is Brother M231 1/2-Inch Black on White Tape for P-Touch Labeler.Other office supplies you can get from Amazon will be stationeries. I quite like Sharpie stuff and I have used Sharpie Fine Point Permanent Markers, 12 Black Markers(30001)
and also Sharpie Accent Tank-Style Highlighters, 12 Fluorescent Yellow Highlighters(25025).The other item that is of amazing value will be BIC Round Stic Ball Pen, Medium Point (1.0 mm), Blue, 60 Pens
. It's going for $3.99 right now. You can't really argue with the price point of 6.7 cents per pen.Lastly, mechanical pencils. My current favorite is Uni's Kuru Toga. Normally, you can find the 0.5mm version of it locally at very competitive prices. However, the 0.7mm version is no where to be seen. As a result, I got mine,Uni-ball KuruToga 0.7mm Mechanical Pencil Starter Set, from Amazon instead.
Have fun!
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