Shopping for my new notebook

My current notebook, BenQ S32B has been serving faithfully to me for 36 months and it is time to change as I need to pass it to another colleague in my department.

It's time for new notebook shopping!!! My requirements are as below:-

• Light

• Long battery life (>4 hrs usage time)

• Fast

• With Dedicated GPU

• Priced at around RM3000 (USD1000)

With these new requirements, my first choice would be Mac Book Air 11”. It look good, light and the aluminium chassis is nice to hold. It was weekend and I decided to head down to the nearest Mac store to have a look a the real thing. The first impression was good as the Mac Air is really a looker. After toying it for few minutes, I realize that the screen is too small for daily usage, limited USB slot (2x), no HDMI out and no Ethernet RJ45 out! I know that we can purchase the Ethernet adapter and USB extender separately but I don't like the idea of having RJ45 Ethernet adapter externally. My job require me to perform a lot of network troubleshooting and RJ45 Ethernet adapter is important to me. On top of this, I can't play my favorite HD file on my big screen due to the absent of HDMI. The screen is just too small to my liking for daily usage. I need to have an external monitor in my office and at home if I decide to go with this Mac Air 11”. Out of budget for these extra gadgets and it's time for alternatives.

My colleague, Ben suggested that I have a look at Acer TimeLineX and my first impression was, “An ACER again? A student's notebook again?”. After looking for more information on the unit, my perception for Acer has changed once again. The TimelineX offer up to 8 hours of battery life, dedicated RADEON HD6550M 1GB GPU, an i3-380 processor and 2GB of memory and a 13.3” HD LED LCD. The weight is about 1.7kg with battery....Impressive and it's priced at RM2200 (USD750) which is very reasonable for the specs. The downside of this notebook comparing with the Mac Air is the absence of the fast hard drive, SSD. So, I've decided to replace the HDD with an Intel X25M 160GB at the cost of RM700 and upgrade the RAM to 4GB. After all these upgrade, it still cost me

I am a happy man now with a decently fast notebook at a reasonable spending :)

SSD review in on the way..............

iPad 3G, do I need this?

Due to the uprising trend and consumer interest towards Apple's gadgets, I have decided to get myself an iPad 3G 32GB last week to catch the wave and the decision burned a big hole in my pocket. I have included the Marware Evo-Cue and a matte screen protector in the package with a total cost of about SGD1200 (MYR 2800) before the 5.5% GST refund. It is selling like hot cake in Singapore with 300-400 units sold over the weekend from a single outlet.

Well, this is my first gadget from Apple as I have been using Windows and Linux all these while. At first glimpse, the iPad is a COOL product. Booting up was a charm, ohh wait...I think there's no boot up because it booted up instantly because it doesn't has a Hard Disk. The aluminium chassis made it feel "good" on hands and the screen is nice too (no complain on this). Setting up the iPad was a charm as most of the critical settings are easily accessible via the "Settings" tab.

My iPad is being delivered with the following pre-installed apps:-

• Calendar
• Contacts
• Notes
• Maps
• Videos
• YouTube
• iTunes
• App Store
• Safari
• Mail
• Photos
• iPod

After getting the iPad from the town, I was stranded in the airport for 4 hours due to a flight delay (Tiger Airways sucks). I've decided to burn the time with the new iPad. First, I try to connect to the available Wifi AP and none of them are offering free internet services :(

So, the iPad is pretty useless without an Internet connection as I do not have apps to play with.

Then, I tried to pair the iPad up with my phone (HTC Wildfire) over bluetooth. The pairing was successful but the it can't connect to each other...Gosh...I can't transfer the photos and videos from my phone to the iPad for viewing. There are so many issue with bluetooth on the Iphone and iPad. I attempted to pair the iPad to my friend's HTC HD2 but there was no luck as well (sad). The iPad was useless for the entire duration.

I managed to hook the iPad to the Internet when I reached home. It asked me to create an iTune account before I could download any apps whereas my Android does not require me to do this. Signing up the iTunes account is quite a pain as it require a lot of personal information (data mining). They should have make the signing process as simple as signing up on Twitter, that's the standard of today!

Done with iTunes account and I downloaded Skype and eBuddy, there were no iPad version for it so I have to use the iPhone version :( Sad.........the resolution and keyboard doesn't really fit the iPad.

Next, the Safari web browser. It was nice for the first page but not after you open additional tab as the iPad does not support multitasking :( The additional tab will open but the page will reload again whenever you switch back to the previously closed tab :(

The Mail is good for iPad. Setting up Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and exchange is easy as you just need to key in your username and password. The Mail will take care the rest for you. No complain on the Mail for iPad.

Conclusion:-

In my humble opinion, this is just an overpriced luxury gadget. It doesn't really help me much in work, so I will give low scoring on practicality but it will score high on the cool factor.

I would rather spend the money to buy a small and lightweight notebook which would offer much more functionality than the iPad.

I like:

- Cool factor

- Slim

- Light

- Fast boot up

- 10 hours battery life

- Nice display

I dislike:

- Overpriced

- No multitasking

- Almost everything need to be done with iTunes

- Need to jailbreak to get extra functionality but it will void the warranty.

- Money pit as you will spend a lot of apps.

- Feel like a bigger iPhone

- No card reader slot

- No USB slot

- Non-replaceable batteries

I will provide a new update if I decide to jailbreak it later.

Hardware RAID vs Software RAID

On the recent few server launches, we have acquired one of the latest hardware RAID card from LSI (LSI 3ware SAS9750-4i). So, it's time for a test.

Server specs:-
1 x Intel Xeon 5504
4GB DDR3 ECC RAM

RAID hardware: LSI 3ware SAS9750-4i
Configuration: RAID5
Hard Disk: 3 x 500GB WD RE3

[root@localhost ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img count=300 bs=10M

300+0 records in

300+0 records out

3145728000 bytes (3.1 GB) copied, 106.22 s, 29.6 MB/s (writing speed)

[root@localhost ~]# dd if=test.img of=/dev/null bs=10M

300+0 records in

300+0 records out

3145728000 bytes (3.1 GB) copied, 1.18725 s, 2.6 GB/s (reading speed)

And it's time to test the rebuild speed. HOT pull out one of the Hard Disk and insert it back to rebuild. The rebuilding time was about 2hrs for 500GB drive

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RAID hardware: None, mdadm
Configuration: RAID1
Hard Disk: 2 x 500GB WD RE3

[test@localhost ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img count=300 bs=10M

300+0 records in

300+0 records out

3145728000 bytes (3.1 GB) copied, 30.1198 s, 104 MB/s (writing speed)

[test@localhost ~]$ dd if=test.img of=/dev/null bs=10M

300+0 records in

300+0 records out

3145728000 bytes (3.1 GB) copied, 10.175 s, 309 MB/s (reading speed)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RAID hardware: None, mdadm
Configuration: RAID0
Hard Disk: 2 x 500GB WD RE3

[user@localhost ~]$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test.img count=300 bs=10M

300+0 records in

300+0 records out

3145728000 bytes (3.1 GB) copied, 13.5305 s, 232 MB/s (writing speed)

[user@localhost ~]$ dd if=test.img of=/dev/null bs=10M

300+0 records in

300+0 records out

3145728000 bytes (3.1 GB) copied, 1.0086 s, 3.1 GB/s (reading speed)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Comparison:

From the result, it show that RAID 0 has the best performance but the trade off is the reliability as it has a single point of failure comparing with RAID1 and RAID5.

Write performance is poor on RAID 5 due to the parity bit calculation and this setup is not recommended to host application which require intensive write operations. If you need good read and write performance with redundancy, consider RAID 10.

RAID1 is my favorite setup as it has the balance on all factors (space, reliability, performance) due to its simplicity, reliability and performance. RAID1 setup is recommended for simple and basic server setup.

iostat

One of the client's news portal has a surged of visitors due to a very interesting local news. The traffic doubled up overnight and the server was struggling to cope with it. The specs of the server is as below:-

Dual Xeon 5405

16GB DDR2 ECC RAM

2 x 320GB SATA 7200 (s/w RAID1)

I have tuned the webserver and mysql to allow more connections but the load was too high. The average load can go up as high as 40 during peak hours. The webserver can accept up to 352 concurrent connections now, up from 152 before the tuning. Memory usage should be still fine as only about 30MB swap being used as shown from "top" and "free".

The output from iostat is as below:-

Linux 2.6.26-2-amd64 (zz) 09/15/2010 _x86_64_

avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle

23.95 0.00 4.44 0.80 0.00 70.82

Device: tps Blk_read/s Blk_wrtn/s Blk_read Blk_wrtn

sda 28.06 1000.72 1154.44 1459026910 1683138720

sda1 28.05 992.46 1154.38 1446969730 1683053488

sda2 0.00 0.00 0.00 4 0

sda5 0.01 8.27 0.06 12056864 85232

sdb 30.07 1078.20 1154.44 1571984044 1683138720

sdb1 30.04 1069.93 1154.38 1559927008 1683053488

sdb2 0.00 0.00 0.00 4 0

sdb5 0.04 8.27 0.06 12056720 85232

md0 163.84 1221.37 1143.97 1780718146 1667876624

md1 0.01 0.01 0.05 16216 79440

Is this bad? or normal for a 3 years old server and hard disk?

Is a hardware upgrade an imminent solution for this problem? I'm thinking of an upgrade to the latest Nehalem with SAS (Hardware RAID 10), what do you think?

Spent 3 hours fixing PHP SMTP mailer

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

5400rpm vs 7200rpm Hard Disk Drive

I got my first touch with a computer during the 386 era in my school computer class. I was being exposed to the basic programming (BASIC) and gaming from a 5.5" Floppy Disk drive. My dad bought me my first computer back in 1995 which run on Intel Pentium MMX and Windows95 with a 1.7GB Hard Disk (pathetic! my SD card can store more data than this HDD).

Many years down the road and after few PCs change, I finally own my first notebook in 2002. With a notebook, I feel that the data redundancy is getting more important as I put almost all my work data inside 1 single Hard Drive. Then I started to realize the importance of doing a more regular backup on the notebook comparing with my desktop that run on 2 x HDD. Even a regular backup would cause a havoc on critical day if the Hard Drive decide to die.

What is the next step?

I change Hard Drive every 2 years, it's for better reliability, performance and space upgrade. My current notebook came with a Fujitsu 160GB 5400rpm Hard Drive. The performance was adequate when I just got it that time as I do not store a lot of data especially emails in my notebook. Now, I have more than 100,000 emails in my hard disk itself and it's a pain whenever my email client (Thunderbird) trying to load that particular folder and compact it. This also affect other applications that try to load huge data from the disk.

2 years are up and I've decided to change the Hard Drive. After looking around, I have narrowed down my option to Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200rpm. My options were Intel X25M 80GB SSD and Seagate Momentus Hybrid XT. SSD were too expensive per GB and Momentus Hybrid was not in the market yet.

Here is the screenshot of the benchmark test on HDtune on both of the Hard Drives, do the judging.

What is web hosting?

In a simple definition, web hosting is taking your web pages (for example html,php,asp and java files) and placing them on a web server which will be stored inside of a data
center. Web servers are simply computers or servers designed for web hosting. Data
centers are constantly connected to the internet with high-speed connections with multiple backbones and backup lines so that the world can access your web files through the internet. "Virtual hosting" or "Virtual Host" allows more than one web site to be run on the same server on the same IP address. This makes web hosting very easy and affordable compared to running your own dedicated web server whereby you would need to pay few hundreds of dollars per month to maintain it. With virtual web hosting your site shares server resources with many other sites on the server. This is why it is important to choose a host that utilizes powerful equipment and high standards of security. Almost all of the web hosting server now combine database server and email server under the same physical server for easy administration by both the users and administrators.