StarTech HSB430SATBK – Fan Replacement

The StarTech HSB430SATBK is a great drive cage – it fits into 3 5.25″ external bays and gives you 3 3.5″ SATA hot-swap HDD bays. Unfortunately, fans going bad is not uncommon. Here’s a quick how to if you ever need to replace the fans on the StarTech 4 bay HDD cage. First remove all the screws from the back plate – don’t remove the screws from the fans – they are screwed into the … Read more…

Insteon Review Part 2: In the Kitchen

After the success of the previous Insteon test as noted here, I decided I would try installing a device into a heavily used area – the kitchen. We did not have any under-cabinet lighting, and 6 large overhead flood lights were just overkill…so I bought some small fluorescent lights and two OutletLinc Relays and figured that I had the perfect location for a SwitchLinc. So I bought a SwitchLinc 2487S to control a light above the … Read more…

ATT Galaxy S2 Jelly Bean Update

A few weeks ago, I received a text from ATT telling me that there was an update available for my Samsung Galaxy S2 – Jelly Bean. The directions included a link to a website (http://www.samsung.com/us/attgalaxys2/update) that eventually instructed me to use Kies to apply the update, just like ICS – no OTA update here. I then realized that I needed to install Kies on the computer I was using and proceeded to do so…this took forever … Read more…

FreeNAS Build Project: Part 3

This post is slightly out of order – I’ll do part 2 with all specs, hardware, and pictures shortly. For now here’s some brief preliminary findings – the configuration: 4 mirrors of 2 x 146GB SFF 10K RPM drives ZIL housed on 1 mirror of 2 Intel 330 60GB SSD drives DL380G6 with 30GB PC3-10600R RAM ESX is connected to this via NFS (I know sync writes…that’s why the ZIL is on the SSDs). So … Read more…