Cleaning out some computing bits. Take it for free or I'll throw it out.

I am having a huge clean up and thought I'd offer some of this stuff to anyone to take off my hands before it goes into the rubbish. Note that I am offering no warranty whatsoever on these items. That said most of them should work fine. Pick up from West Beach. Pickup will generally be most convenient in the evenings or on weekends.

1. PCI USB controller. Via VT6212L chipset. This card gives you an extra 4 USB2.0 ports on the back of your PC and one more internally. Shouldn't be too hard to find drivers. Shouldn't be too hard to find drivers online for most operating systems.

2. 8 port 10mbit hub. - aside for bezz

3. Uniden (corded) Telephone. aside qzyphus

4. gone...

5. Standard VGA display cable. Approx 1.8m in length. pending qzyphus

6. Standard power cable, like this. I have 8 of these so you can take as many as you want.

7. 300W generic power supply. This looks like it's never been used. pending Leezee

8. 2 ADSL line filters. Looks like this. aside qzyphus

9. 2 ATA66/100 IDE cables. Standard cables with master and slave ports.

10. eSATA adapter and cable. Allows you to connect a standard SATA port on your motherboard to rear faceplate, then connect a SATA drive externally to your system (you'd need to get an enclosure for the SATA drive with an eSATA port). - pending Leezee

I'll probably be posting back with more gear so in case you are interested in anything from cables to components keep an eye on this thread.

def be keen on the hub mate

It's aside for you. PM me to arrange time to pick up or if you want phone number instead let me know.

BTW it has a BNC port on it as well and I just found a BNC cable and a few T pieces and a terminator. If you want them you can have them as well... If you want them and intend to use them I have to feel a bit sorry for you cause I bloody hated these systems in my early networking days.

Cheers.

Hey Bezz can you please grab me the esata thingy and the power supply when you go pick up you thing? Cheers.

oooh baby

i'll take the line filters and the vga cable and the telephone... with the combined powers of the phone and the filter i will haves me a landline!  and i need a vga cable for a 21" crt i've got around the place. i'm at work on SDB drive so i'll PM ya about getting it later in the week

normally i would take the usb card but i'm having enough trouble getting rid of random computer parts i shouldn't really be taking any more on :/

Leezee, i have that 430W Thermaltake psw you can have instead (sorry Oli)... 

Noted all and roost: no worries, someone else might pick it up as a spare.

Hey Oli I'm keen on the RAM. Is it alright if I can come pick it up tonight? I'll bring 2 Iced Coffees as well because I need the HD as well.

Sure thing. PM me with what time you want to drop by and we'll go from there.

Those things are beautiful mate if you don't have a proper eSata port on your mobo. On my PC back home I use the same thing, it came with the Icecube Pleiades external case. Lightning fast compared to firewire or USB!

you know it.

my 500G eSATA

I run a Mac laptop so can't connect anything with this. I don't think eSATA is any faster than Firewire800 if you're just connecting a single drive. Not because of the interface but because most recent consumer hard drives top out at 50 to 60MB a second anyway... I have a few external drives but via firewire. Prefer to keep the rest in my linux server.

If you go up to multi drive enclosures or external RAID storage systems it's probably another matter though.

Hmm. Interesting. I was using FW800 before I figured out SATA was hot-swappable so I switched over using the bracket. I must say that I noticed an immense increase. As a real world benchmark, I tested copying a few gig of files in Explorer (same files each time after rebooting) and it went from something like 7-8 minutes to around 2-3 minutes! That's a guess at the ratio though, it was some time ago but the difference was significant...

FW is hot swappable as well.

I don't think Windows support for Firewire interfaces is as good as on the Mac platform. After all it was invented by Mac. It's also worth mentioning that the Firewire chipsets on most PC motherboards and on the cheap firewire cards are plain shit.

If you benchmark them equally I am fairly confident you'd find both interfaces limited by the actual drive.

Really, shit in terms of performance or longevity?

Yeah I know, hence the reason I was using it first. Not much point in an external drive if you can't move it in and out without rebooting/shutting down etc.

There's also some bullshit option M$ changed in SP2 that limits FW800 to 400 speeds. I had fixed that though. eSata still smashed it to bits!

Just in terms of performance. I mean, it's not like devices connected to a Firewire interface on a PC aren't going to work from one day to the next. It's just that the chipsets are made on the cheap so they don't perform as well as they do in Mac systems. Apple has relied on Firewire for ages to connect devices that need lots of capacity without overloading the rest of the system (unlike USB for example which puts a lot of load on the host CPU when transferring data) so they put more effort into making it work properly since they know more of their users rely on it.

For single drive systems I'd basically I would just say that if you use a Windows PC then going for eSata is the best option. If you're on a Mac go for Firewire. If you work in video editing or something then you'd be paying a lot more for a much bigger setup than what most of us will be dealing with at home.

Regardless of which way you go though just realise that unless you're connecting multi disk storage (like RAID10 sets with 4 drives or 4 drive RAID5 arrays) systems or other very high transfer rate devices then it's usually the hard drive that will limit the system.

Personally for storage I have two Linux box sitting under my desk on a gigabit ethernet network. My system is built more for redundancy and security than performance but if I transfer between a SATA RAID5 array (4 drives) and a SATA RAID1 array (2 drives) I get about 55MB a second transfer rate.

Can those of you who have expressed interest in some items let me know sooner rather than later via PM so we can arrange a pick up time? The whole point of this was to make more room. I'll have succeeded when I get rid of this stuff.

sorry maing will definitely get onto you this week

Still waiting for some responses guys...

ok i lied... sorry been sharing a car so hasn't been so ez... don't hold anything especially for me but i'll take it if it's still there when i can get down