Category Archives: PC hardware

SCSI HBA Recycling?

Posted on February 10, 2021 by Michal Necasek

Several weeks ago I bought this Adaptec 39160 64-bit PCI SCSI HBA in order to experiment with different HBAs: The motivation was that although I’ve been a happy user of LSI HBAs (SCSI and SAS, PCI and PCIe) based on … Continue reading →

Posted in Adaptec, Fakes, PC hardware, SCSI | 10 Comments

Nehalem and 4 Gbit DDR3

Posted on February 5, 2021 by Michal Necasek

While discussing Intel desktops with DDR2 memory using 2 Gbit technology (4 GB UDIMMs), the question of Intel’s next generation and 4 Gbit DDR3 (8 GB UDIMMs) came up. It’s more or less the next iteration of exactly the same … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 12 Comments

DDR2 4GB DIMMs

Posted on January 29, 2021 by Michal Necasek

Last week the OS/2 Museum got its first ever set of real (i.e. not fake) 4 GB DDR2 desktop (unbuffered) DIMMs, a pair of Samsung 4GB PC2-6400U modules. Such modules are quite rare and correspondingly tend to be unavailable at … Continue reading →

Posted in DDR RAM, Fakes, PC hardware | 22 Comments

Booting Windows XP, Or Not

Posted on January 22, 2021 by Michal Necasek

For a number of years now I’ve been using a SATA SSD with a “portable” Windows XP installation on it. Portable in the sense that it was capable of booting on a number of my machines, either in IDE mode … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, PC hardware, Windows XP | 16 Comments

Seek and Ye Shall Find…

Posted on January 20, 2021 by Michal Necasek

…in the strangest places! Lately I’ve been digging up marketing materials related to Intel’s desktop boards (I’ve long been toying with the idea of writing up a brief history of the circa 10 years of Intel Extreme Series boards). There … Continue reading →

Posted in Archiving, Intel, PC hardware, PC history | 2 Comments

The Answer To 0x49: Fujitsu FMR

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Michal Necasek

This is a guest post by A. N. Other. The following was originally intended as a comment to “Not MSX Either“, the 4th installment in the hunt for the mysterious 0x69 FAT VBR-start byte which was allowed in DOS. Due … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, NT, PC hardware, PC history, Undocumented | 7 Comments

Every Bit Matters

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A couple of months ago the OS/2 Museum got hold of a 13.6 GB Fujitsu MPE3136AT IDE drive from 1999. The drive was working… more or less. It behaved quite strangely; the drive was detected and readable, but seemed oddly … Continue reading →

Posted in Fixes, PC hardware, Storage | 7 Comments

Return to Stormville

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Michal Necasek

A while ago I griped about a strangely ill-behaved Intel DX79SR Stormville board. To recap, the board simply refused to take any memory in the 4th memory channel. Since then, there have been very interesting new development in the story. … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Intel, PC hardware | 3 Comments

Seagate Serial Talk

Posted on August 5, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Some time ago, the OS/2 Museum obtained a 10 GB Seagate ST310014ACE hard disk (IDE 3.5″ low profile). The disk was unusable because it was locked. That is, it needed an unknown password to gain access to the medium. After … Continue reading →

Posted in Hardware Hacks, PC hardware, Seagate | 23 Comments

X7DBE WTF

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Michal Necasek

Several years ago I got two Supermicro X7DBE boards at a bargain price. These are nice dual Socket 771 boards of circa 2007 vintage, built around the Intel 5000P Blackford chipset and using FB-DIMMs with up to 32GB memory supported. … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, Supermicro, Xeon | 18 Comments