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Hardware & Electronics

The most popular blog posts about hardware & electronics on Hacker News. 3,044 posts.

Any year
517

Everything I Know About SSDs

March 2019: Introduction: I started writing this rather long page for my own benefit, when I acquired a upgrade from my old 2006 Win 8 250 gb HDD PC to a Dell Optiflex 3010 with a 128 gb SSD. I never used more than 30 or 40 gb of the system drive, and I'm not a gamer or an avid film or music collector either. Not on a…

521

Building a Hackintosh Pro

If Apple built a compact, upgradeable tower that could house one or two full-size GPUs, I'd have bought it without hesitation. Sadly, that machine doesn't exist. There's no doubt that Apple has a refresh for the desktop market in the works. I just don't know

522

I'm a USB-C Maximalist

My wife and I recently went on a 7 week holiday around Europe. Although we each took a massive backpack, we wanted to travel fairly lightly. I took a single universal power brick. This little unit was all I needed to charge my various gadgets. It has a hefty USB-C PD (Power Delivery) port for rapid charging of my…

527

Building a NAS

I’ve been fascinated by high-volume, fault-tolerant data storage systems for a long time. I started my data storage setup in earnest with a 4-disk RAID 5 array on an ARC-1210 controller installed in my daily-driver Windows desktop. When that array inevitably filled up, I added another array on a second ARC-1210. That…

532

RuBee

I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A…

534

The Raspberry Pi can boot off NVMe SSDs now

When the Compute Module 4 was released (see my CM4 review here), I asked the Pi Foundation engineers when we might be able to boot off NVMe storage, since it was trivially easy to use with the exposed PCIe x1 lane on the CM4 IO Board. The initial response in October 2020 was "we'll see". Luckily, after more people…

539

Hacking Portable Air Conditioners

I bought a couple EdgeStar AP14001HS portable air conditioners in April 2020, since I expect to spend most of the Summer at home. I'm not able to use window A/Cs here, though that would be the obvious choice for efficiency because all the hot parts remain outside.