Ugh, why the hell aren’t those air-gapped?
Same thing in cars. Why is the infotainment system that is connected to the internet not air-gapped from the critical car functions?
These things aren’t hard to do. I guess we just need people to die before we take such basic safety measures.
I was able to pull out what used to be there:
Yeah, going along these lines. There is probably a USB header on the motherboard. These have pretty darn good speeds. You can get an adapter that lets you turn those into a USB-C port and then use a standard USB-C to Ethernet adapter. Something like this or this. No guarantee on either of those specific adapters being good though. Looks like slim pickings for such things and both of those are garbage brands.
If you have a USB-C port on the back of your motherboard, you can get an adapter for that directly.
Also, motherboards generally come with 2.5Gb/s ports now too. Some even have two. Something to consider.
Am I correct in understanding that the card will run at PCIe gen 3 X1 if I do this?
Correct. The situation you described in the original post would result in Gen 3 x1 speeds.
The interface will always default to the fastest standard that both sides can support. If one is gen 2 and the other is gen 4, gen 2 is the highest that can be supported. If one side is x8 and the other is x4, x4 is the highest that can be supported.
What can I do if the card is PCIe gen 2 x8?
If you put a Gen 2 x8 card in a Gen 4 x1 slot, you will get a Gen 2 x1 link.
File a small slit in the end of the slot so the card fits into it, but runs past the back. The card will run at Gen 3 x1 speed, but otherwise work properly.
Many motherboards even come with the end of the PCIe slots open for this exact purpose.
Edit: Gen 3 x1 runs at almost a full GB/s, so a 2.5Gb/s card (notice the change in size of the “B”) should have more than enough bandwidth on Gen 3 x1, even at 2.5Gb/s full duplex.
This is perfect thank you!
Since I had to do some troubleshooting to get it working, I’ll list what I had to do here:
I have Mint 22.1 and Heroic Launcher installed as a flatpak. Because of this, I could not install Mangohud from apt as Heroic could not find it in $PATH. Instead I had to install the Mangohud flatpak flatpak install Mangohud. I had to specifically choose the v23.08 branch when running that command, as the v24.08 branch did not work with heroic. After that, I went to the game configuration in Heroic and enabled Mangohud and all was good. :)
Has anyone found a good tool to list FPS in games? I know the steam overlay does it, but not all games are steam games.
Quick example: started playing Cyberpunk again, even added it as a non-steam game in steam, but the overlay isn’t there. I would really just like a tool that adds such an overlay for any game. What is out there?
Linux was improving before and continues to improve. The fact the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering is pretty telling and shows just how much improvement has happened and will continue to happen.
The helpful thing is we are at a point people are starting to move over in larger numbers. With every extra person, there is more enthusiasm to get the next useful milestone completed; which will continue to bring in more people. It’s pretty telling that the top PC gaming handheld is a Linux offering, not a Windows one. Just a few years ago that idea was unheard of.
As a personal anecdote, I work at a company that releases Windows software. However, in active development we have intentionally decided to not cut ourselves off from Linux and MacOS, and such OS releases are on the order of a month or three of work to make happen, rather than the complete rewrite monstrosity that is the case with our previous offerings.
There are companies that do freight forwarding. Much less dodgy than random person on the internet. Would be worth checking out.
Yeah, your suggestion is the only thing I could think that would even work, but honestly, it’s probably more trouble than it is worth.
An alternative which doesn’t quite meet the requirements, but will be much lower effort would be to format the drive(s) as exFat, which both Windows and Linux can read without issue. Then put them up as a network share in both OSes.
If you are wanting RAID 1 with those two drives…this won’t work unless you are either using hardware raid (maybe you can set it in your bios?) or if you can find a software raid that both windows and linux use. For RAID, maybe just pick one OS and that will be the one that has the share.
I would also recommend against the SSD caching idea with all this other stuff in the mix, wait till you have a dedicated NAS PC. You are going to pull your hair out otherwise.
OP, do you have an old computer, even an old laptop? A NAS doesn’t require much computing power. You can plug your drives in via a SATA to USB adapter. Then you will have a dedicated NAS box and all these problems get 500x easier.
Ok, but what if an entire programming language is made of whitespace?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
The biggest thing is you have changed a random write to a linear write, something HDDs are significantly better at. The torrent is downloading little pieces from all over the place, requiring the HDD to move it’s head all over the place to write them. But when simply copying off the ssd, it keeps the head in roughly one place and just writes lineally, utilizing it’s maximum write speed.
I would say try it out, see if it helps.
Also, if the HDD is having to do other tasks at the same time, that will slow it down as the head can only ever be in one place.
Some games also have beta channels that are just the past versions of the game. Weather this exists or not is completely up to the game publisher though. I mostly see it in games that have active mod communities, so they want to let you lock down your version so your mod pack doesn’t break suddenly.
Code should absolutely speak for itself. But the occasional comment is still good to explain the ‘why’ of the code when the why isn’t very obvious, often due to a niche requirement. Also any time you have to break out a hack, that needs comments up the ass, what was the bug, what URL did you find the fix at, why does this hack work, etc etc. It’s very satisfying to go back and remove those hacks after they are no longer needed, often because the underlying technology fixed the bug that had to be hacked around.
Pentium D processors are pretty power hungry, so factor that into your thoughts. Also make sure you put a modern OS on it that is getting security updates. It probably has Win XP or Vista installed which isn’t safe to connect to any network.
It should work fine as a router as long as you don’t enable any of the packet inspection features. For basic routing and firewalling for a home network it should be plenty powerful. I would personally put a small SATA SSD in it as the main drive and ditch the 90GB HDD.
As an additional idea, if you put a larger SATA drive or two into it you could make it a NAS.
I have not personally experienced a dropout with a SMR drive. That is from the reporting I saw when WD was shipping out SMR drives in their Red (NAS) lineup and people were having all kinds of issues with them. According to the article (below), it sounds like ZFS has the worst time with them. WD also lost a class action suit over marketing these as NAS drives, while failing to disclose they were SMR drives (which don’t work well in a NAS).
We want to be very clear: we agree with Seagate’s Greg Belloni, who stated on the company’s behalf that they “do not recommend SMR for NAS applications.” At absolute best, SMR disks underperform significantly in comparison to CMR disks; at their worst, they can fall flat on their face so badly that they may be mistakenly detected as failed hardware. Source
As you are looking for bulk data storage, the drive’s speed isn’t of too much concern. A 5400RPM drive is plenty.
If you are looking to put this drive into an array with other drives, make sure you get a CMR drive as SMR drives can drop out of arrays due to controllers finding them unresponsive. If a drive does not list it is CMR, it’s best to assume it isn’t. Seagate has a handy CMR chart, for example.
Additionally, if there are multiple spinning drives in the same enclosure, getting drives with vibration resistance is a good bonus. Most drives listed for NAS use will have this extra vibration resistance.
For running an OS off a USB drive, I would recommend getting a USB to M.2 enclosure and putting an M.2 drive in it. This will give you better performance than any flash drive out there. The memory they put into normal flash drives is just slow slow slow for the use case of an OS.
Now, the only negative there is that is kinda expensive. If you really want to stick to a normal USB drive, maybe try this one out. But I would really like to stress that running an OS off a normal USB drive is going to be slow.
Or car infotainment software…which for some reason is on the same communications network as all of a car’s safety-critical systems…