As I’ve been putting the new system together, there have of course been some minor problems popping up.
The fans in it are still noticeable in a quiet room. It’s not as bad as the old system or an Xbox 360, but it’s still a bit louder than I would have liked. The front also has a BLINDINGLY BRIGHT blue LED that sits right at eye level with me when I’m sitting in the living room chair. It’s like a laser trying to burn a hole in my skull. I’m thinking about moving the box down to the rest of the entertainment centre, so maybe it won’t be as bad from an angle. Otherwise, I’m going to need some duct tape…
I set up the audio cables so that everything gets routed through the Linux box, like it was before, but no sound was coming out. I fiddled with cables and mixer settings and all that for quite a while before finally googling it and discovering that other people had similar problems with Intel HD Audio chipsets under Linux. The solution once again was to go to Realtek’s web site and get their latest drivers. It’s annoying that it didn’t work out of the box, but at least Realtek isn’t one of those companies that tries to pretend Linux doesn’t even exist.
And finally, in order to get those old recordings I mentioned before, I had all sorts of fun trying to get USB enclosures working with one of the old SATA drives. I have three such enclosures, but still have yet to get this part done:
- The first enclosure, from EagleTech, is one that I’ve already mostly destroyed just trying to get the case opened and closed, thanks to a tight fit and lack of grip points. But although it has a SATA data connector, it does not have a SATA power connector, the drive doesn’t have an old Molex power port, and it looks like an adapter between the two is the only little bit of hardware I don’t have in my big pile-o-parts.
- The second enclosure, some generic brand picked up at Future Shop, wouldn’t even power on. Sigh.
- And the third enclosure, from Acomdata, freaked out and generated all sorts of kernel errors when the USB driver tried to put it in high speed mode. It bumped it down to “full speed”, which means USB 1.1 at 12Mbps, and although it behaves at that speed, transferring over 600GB of data at that rate would take a week of nonstop copying.
Maybe I don’t need old TV episodes that badly…
Update: Yay, after a bit more scrounging around I managed to find a Molex-to-SATA power adapter after all and the EagleTech enclosure will work after all. The transfer should now only take about 6 hours instead of a whole week.