Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.php?threads/recommend-me-a-soldering-iron.360761/

 

https://uk.farnell.com/tenma/21-10115-uk/soldering-station-60w-220v-uk/dp/2064549 - I bought one of these, and I seem to recall it was on the recommendation of one @Gareth Halfacree.

It's been excellent.

 

I'd agree that they're focusing very strongly on the SMB market these days and trying to establish themselves as a "real" storage company, but unfortunately that seems to be to the detriment of a large chunk of their customer base of SOHO and content creators - where >gbit is definitely a nice to have, and QNAP has it very well catered for.

They could easily differentiate SOHO and SMB models with partner programs and support offerings between them, instead of feature set.

 

I've been using a iroda solderpro 120 for a while now, seems to do the job, not the most accurate I'd say more a general kitchen knife than a scalpel

 

When I was working in electronics, 25+ years ago, Metcal irons were well regarded. Not sure if they are still good.

 

I was tempted by QNAP, but I can't afford a 10 gig switch and none of the PCs at home have anything other than one or two 1 gig ports.

I can at least LAG the ports on my switch to offer better throughput to my main rig.

Plus DSM > QTS.

 

You may be disappointed there... 2x1Gbit does not equal 2Gbit... two lanes of cars, rather than faster cars.

I would have thought most of 10GbE QNAPs in use in home environments are probably attaching the 10Gb directly to the main workstation, sans-switch. Total cost: £20 DAC cable and ~£50 NIC. Not insignificant, but nothing like switched 10Gbit.

Indubitably!

I'm a synologite... (synologer?)... myself, in spite of some of the hardware shortcomings in comparison to QNAP mainly due to this.

 

??

It worked on my QNAP box - bonded the ports in QTS, did the same on my switch and the two ports on my motherboard.

 

Was that LACP, or something else? And 200MB/sec from what appeared to be a single stream? Much overhead? Did you have to faff much?

Whilst there are scenarios where you can increase the effective point to point bandwidth by link aggregation (e.g. SMB multichannel), I never found it to be terribly reliable, and generally LAGs are better suited to increasing the multi-client bandwdith (or for simply redundancy) at the server/switch rather than the client.

 

As stated above typically bonded ports are resilience on consumer grade kit. It’ll fail over when one is down. If you have LACP or Etherchannel link aggregation supported on a managed switch you can do bonding. The algorithm isn’t perfect but with two links it basically sends every other packet down each. The algorithms are more complicated than this but the analogy will do. Anyway. You lose some efficiency in the bonding.

 

iirc, it was called channel bonding in QTS, LAG in my managed switch and I can't remember what windows called it.

 

I translate that as 'Bought it now, expecting a row when the card/bank statement arrives'... could be wrong, wouldn't be the first time.

 

5 packs of 4x AA cells because the Co-Op near work was selling them for 42p per pack. I've mostly switched over to Eneloop rechargeables now, but at ~11p per cell it's worth stocking up on spares. Plus there are cases where the voltage drop of NiMH cells causes an issue in the device its powering even when the cells are nowhere near empty.

 

Keeping up with the drum-related purchases, I decided to get a Pearl Eliminator Redline double pedal - another ebay bargain, this time for a brand new product. I used to have a Tama Iron Cobra (great pedal) and sold it back in 2009, so it's nice to be back in the game again. Also these Sabian hats are incredible.

 

I took a punt on the 7dayshop good to go rechargeables, turns out they're just dandy for all the remotes, the phone and that sort of thing. Think i've only charged the ones in the most used remote once.

Whether i'd use them for anything more important, not so sure. And, yeah, for things like the smoke alarms and CO alarm I don't use rechargeables (think you're advised not to IIRC). Could do with finding some 42p packs myself

 

I'm sensing a "buy quick & say nuffin', before they realise they screwed up!"...

 

I still have a load of Energizer Lithium AA and AAAs I got for similar money at a Co-Op which was closing down. No idea why they had them in the first place, but Co-Op do tend to do silly cheap clearance stuff from time to time.

 

This is why I got the eneloops, really. They're extremely low self-discharge, so don't lose their charge over time. Plus they're capable of supplying at least 2A per cell when you need them to.