We’ve already sold a handful of these Intel X25-V SSDs to customers and listed them on the website. V is for value and it is slower than the X25-M but still boasts a decent theoretical read speed (175MB/s), compared to the Kingston SSDNow value line that is 100MB/s. Albeit, this is alongside a very low write speed (40MB/s). The write speed would seem to be comparable to a 5400RPM hard drive and we’re pitting against one our favourites the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 3200BEVT, a very quiet 320GB 2.5″ drive that doesn’t have the whine that Seagate laptop drives do. But its’ about 20% less expensive than faster SSDs (like the ATP reviewed below) and offers 40GB of space instead of 32GB.
I installed Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2) and bonnie++. Results are below (all in MB/s)
Block Output on SSD: 43.735 MB/s
Block Output on HDD: 82.322 MB/s
Rewrite on SSD: 31.022 MB/s
Rewrite on HDD: 34.232 MB/s
Block Input on SSD: 211.938 MB/s
Block Input on HDD: 84.112 MB/s
Random Seeks Per Second on SSD: 3674
Random Seeks Per Second on SSD: 162.7
No surprise but Random Seeks is where SSDs just kill it – no stupid moving platters to spin up. On the other hand they are reasonably matched elsewhere and the hdd is a little more than a third of the cost. Will update shortly with our Fujitsu 40GB drive since these are the 3 we use across our product range.
We’ve already blogged about the D510MO Pine Trail motherboard with lower power consumption and a well thought out heatsink to keep the processor passively cooled. Unfortunately it does not work with Ubuntu out of the box – you have to flash the BIOS at least for 9.10 – but of course Aleutia does that for you before shipping it as part of our free OEM install of 9.10.
We’ve finished the stress testing of the board and will be offering it in our D1 and P1 starting tomorrow (soft launch tonight). Both feature much lower power consumption. With the D1 we’re switching from the Compucase 8K01 case we (and lots of other UK system builders) relied on before to a new, fanless model from Taiwan that is is 2/3 the size. The 8K01 has an internal brick adapter but relies on a cheap 5cm fan to keep it cool, resulting in noise, and meaning there’s just an IEC input not a DC input. Moreover, with two of the units, that noise increased over time which just isn’t acceptable. Now it will be fanless and have a 19V DC input.
The P1 is still aimed at sailboats and marine customers and so has a 6-26V DC Input with a 40GB hdd or 40GB Intel X25-V SSD (nothing larger is needed for sea navigation). It will be in a wall mount case with the option of a extra Gb lan port, making it ideal as a server. We’ve also dropped the price £80 and will now offer Win7 with it as well.
Over the years I’ve had both an IBM X30 and X40 Thinkpad, justly famed for their build quality and usability but small and light size. Before netbooks, the X-Series was the only 12″ notebook around but that portability (and the enteprise spec within) came at a high price. The X301 (Macbook Air slimness but with an optical drive – watch their cheeky ad here) retails at £1847.
The X100e instead features a similar chassis and display, with an excellent keyboard and pointing stick, but with “netbook” internals. So instead of a Core 2 Duo there’s AMD’s Neo MV-40 (inexpensive like the Intel Atom but a bit better performing) and the Ati 3200 onboard graphics we have come across and used in Jetway mini-itx motherboards. Supposedly it will drive older games like Half Life 2 at a playable frame-rate but I’ve been unable to get Big Buck Bunny running at 1080p at least as an h.264 nor will YouTube play at 720p (even with Adobe Flash 10.1 installed for both IE and Chrome). For now I will chalk this up to user error, at least until I install Ubuntu on it using these steps, an OS I am more comfortable with.
Most netbooks have a glossy finish (fingerprint magnet) and glossy display (useless except for seeing your reflection). The X100e has a glorious matte finish throughout and a bright 1366 x 768 11.6″ display, it’s best feature.
There are better and more thorough reviews online, specifically this one:
So I’m going to stop giving a general review and focus on power consumption as no one else has and it’s important to really establish how netbooks stack up with nettops like Aleutia T1s.
Running off the battery, without cranking down processor and with screen at full brightness (15 on scale of 1-15) it uses 25W. But that’s not with the CPU maxed out encoding a movie, but just with Chrome in background and using the Snipping tool:
Keep the brightness high but max out all the power-saving features (i.e. crank CPU down) and you’re at 20W.
I’ll post a review separately but of the 30 or so mini-itx cases we’ve worked with, the Lian Li PC-Q07 is the best. And because the board is vertically mounted it can fit a massive heatsink, allowing us to passively cool a 45W CPU (Quad Core AMD 600e or Dual Core 240e), or even a 65W (hell’s bells, we could go with Core i5 even at 73W). There’s also a 2.5″ SATA drive slot (for SSDs), a 3.5″ drive slot with anti-vibration rubber mountings, and either a 5.25″ optical drive (for Blu-ray Writer) or an extra 3.5″ drive (ideal as a cold swap, fanless, quad core server).
Aleutia is in the process of carving out a real niche as a Fanless PC company, with a range of silent PCs that are not only passively cooled but do not suffer from noisy case fans or unreliable Power Supply fans. This is feasible with low voltage processors like the Intel Atom but we’d really like to offer a serious Dual Core and Quad Core PC for our customers who need that extra horsepower.
AMD have helped by at last releasing a line of updated CPUs with a TDP of just 45W. By comparison, Intel desktop CPUs are 65W and more and both AMD and Intel Quad Cores typically give off 95W of heat. Our H2 features the Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200S (65W) rather than the Q8200 (95W) but it’s expensive and 65W is just to much heat to passively cool in a small case (and pretty tough even in a large tower).
The AMD 600e has 4 cores at 2.2GHz and we’ve found a specialized heatsink that can passively cool it.
We’ve also found the world’s smallest Micro ATX case and we’d love to offer it in this case (as mATX boards are much cheaper and allow for 8GB of RAM and more) but then we have the challenge of finding an mATX PSU without a fan or using a PicoPSU and connecting a 12V 9 Amp brick AC adapter which usually has a fan (and fanless versions are very expensive).
The solution is to mount the 600e and heatsink on a mini-itx board (in this case the Zotac 8200 with Nvidia 8200 IGP) but we need a case with a small footprint and a lot of height. I have looked at about 100 mini-itx cases but so far none fit the bill so we may have to custom make one. Need about 11 cm clearance.
We’ve already blogged about how great this board is and how much lower the power consumption is but now that we’ve had a chance to test it. we can confirm that power consumption averages 10 Watts less despite the slightly faster clock speed of the CPU (2 x 1.66GHz versus 2 x 1.6GHz). Best of all it’s passively cooled. There’s still a fan in the D1 case though we are working on making it completely fanless. Still comes with 4GB of RAM, a DVD-RW drive, and a Samsung F3 hard drive for £299 ex VAT.
We live in exciting times. Broadcom has released the Crystal HD BCM70012 (official link), a Mini PCIe 1080p decoder. Since the Aleutia Fanless T1 PC has a mini PCI express card slot (which we often use for an 802.11n Intel adapter) you can upgrade that low power PC so that it can play back 1080p content without having to resort to the more expensive Nvidia Ion boards we use in the Aleutia H1 Fanless HTPC.
Even better, the BCM70012 is supported by Adobe Flash 10.1 (still in beta), just like the Ion chipset. Flash 10.1 is less processor intensive than 10.0 because it uses the GPU as well. That means that for £25 extra, an Aleutia Fanless T1 can play back YouTube in HD (now 1080p) something that my MacBook cannot do, as well as BBC’s iPlayer (720p).
Many customers buy the Aleutia T1 to use an always-on server. It supports PXE Network boot and can be configured to automatically Power On after Power Loss. It is also very low power, using only 17 Watts under load. With 500GB and 750GB 2.5″ laptop drives now affordable, this makes it ideal as a small, low power network server.
However, the T1 has only 1 network port (10/100/1000) and naturally a lot of projects require two network ports.
We recently solved this for one of our customers by using a PCI Gigabit Network card with full Linux support and mounting it with a riser card in a larger, ventilated case. This has the advantage of offering more air flow. It’s not VESA-mountable like the T1 but it can be wall mounted.
Unlike many fanless network servers, the T1 Dual NIC comes with 2GB RAM (OEM customers can have 512MB or 1GB for less) and a decent x86 processor in the Intel Atom N270 at 1.6GHz.
Just before CES kicked off, Intel announced a new Atom mini-itx motherboard, the D510MO. This uses the new Pine Trail platform which combines the memory controller into the DX9 graphics controller, reducing power consumption. Intel has also finally ditched the cheapo fan it used to put over the graphics controller in favour of a large heatsink, allowing the board to be passively cooled. There are also 2 x DIMM slots (like the Asrock 330 Atom board) allowing for 4GB of RAM. The D510 CPU is also a bit faster (2 x 1.66GHz) than the 330 (2 x 1.66GHz).
The power savings are substantial. Anandtech has a great write up with load power consumption on a test system dropping from 44.2 Watts to 25.8 Watts. Idle power consumption also plummets, from 41 to 21.2 Watts.
All this is great news for Aleutia customers as we’ll be using it for our D1 starting this week helping us create a PC that is:
Fanless
Dual Core
4GB of RAM
Affordable
Optional SSD
Currently the internal PSU on the D1 uses a fan but we are looking at passively cooled PSUs.
This morning we’ve just received our first batch of the boards from Intel’s biggest UK distributor. To ensure quality (and avoid any grey market issues) we only source components from Tier 1 distributors. This translates to better support for end-users as it is simple (and quick) for us to replace any failed parts.
Been researching PC case manufacturers. This website is so far the nuttiest (though I am only on letter G in my list), with power supplies pictured on top of a mountain and proclaimed, “As Extreme as Everest”.
IBM’s market capitalization today is $166b and AAPL’s worth $170b. The order of the day is proprietary and with iPhone supremacy (100,000 apps!) it looks to become Microsoft. Here’s a clip from 26 years ago with Steve Jobs as David and Big Blue as IBM. (Smaller res because image quality sucks.)
Meanwhile Aleutia produces PCs with no moving parts that run on solar and can last 5 years in rural Africa.
Unlike Intel, AMD still produces 45W Processors. These are much easier to cool (with a huge heatsink you can go passive) and of course use less power than a 65W, 95W, or 125W processor. We’ve taken their newest Athlon II X2 240e which is 2 x 2.8GHz (2MB L2 cache) and put in a really small mATX case with an energy efficient Gigabyte motherboard and a whopping 8 (or 16 or 4) Gigabytes of super high-speed DDR3 RAM. This memory is clocked at 1300MHz!
Whole idea is a lot of server applications just need a basic processor (ideally dual core) but need lots and lots for RAM. This way we keep the power footprint down (about 50W) and the price is low: £499 ex VAT for the 8GB version.
As it is a server, we’ve added an extra Gb lan port via a PCI card slot and there’s an optional DVD-RW drive (though this adds to the power consumption). Only 3.7″ tall so practically fits in a 2U space.
A lot of applications can only use two cores and so it’s better to have 2 fast cores (2 x 3.0GHz) than the four slower cores of our energy efficient H2 (4 x 2.33GHz). For the H3, we’re using a new AMD processor (AM3 socket) as it offers better performance than the Pentium and Core 2 Duo processors. AMD is like Avis – they’re number two, so they try harder.
Specifically, it’s a Athlon II X2 250 (2 x 3.0GHz CPU). Unlike an Intel Atom 330 this is a real processor and more than capable for gaming or HD Flash playback.
We’d love to passively cool this but it’s not possible in such a small case so we are shipping it with a large heatsink and single, slow fan (speed can be set in BIOS) that will be extra quiet. Drive options will be 40GB hard drive (7200RPM, quiet, and cheap) or 32GB SSD. 4GB of 1066MHz RAM (our fastest yet!) as standard.
We have been working on a Single Core AMD Sempron 140 solution as this is a 45W CPU and not a 65W CPU. And it’s a beast (not your mother’s Sempron!) but again it’s too hard too passively cool as the video above shows. As soon as you remove the fan, temp jumps to 70 and then 80 C.
Our only hope is to use something like the Scythe Ninja, which is huge: 5 inches (or 120mm) cubed. So for now the spec is:
Onboard Nvidia Geforce 8200 (1080p is no problem)
H1/H2 Case
AMD Athlon II X2 250 CPU
2 x 2GB 1066 MHz Kingston RAM
12V DC Input (PicoPSU)
102W External AC Adapter
40GB or 250GB 7200RPM SATA-II Drive or 32GB KingSpec or 64GB Kingston SSD
Amazon UK will be listing the 64GB Kingston Spec which will retail for £449 ex VAT or £516.35 with VAT and shipping in the UK.
The Aleutia T1 has quickly become our top-selling PC since its general release in August. We sold nearly 100 in September and as it shares the exact same chipset as our F5 we have decided to phase out the F5 and offer the T1 with a new 750GB Drive laptop drive that uses only 2W, for total power consumption of just 18 Watts.
That means you get a fanless server with only one moving part (the hard drive), practically silent, and with 2GB of RAM and a Gigabit network port for a mere £279 ex VAT (£320.85 including VAT). Designed to be a perfect file or print server or host some light web traffic. Fully compatible with Windows Home Server as well – though it only has one drive and so isn’t an ideal WHS box. We’re releasing a new 4-bay Hotswap NAS for that purpose soon, the N1.
When you produce solar power, it’s DC (Direct Current). Most electronics and computer components run on DC, usually either 5V or 12V. But since The Grid is AC (Alternating Current), they come equipped with power supplies that go from 100-240V down to DC. That’s why your laptop has a “brick” power supply, switching the power from say 230V AC to 19.2V DC.
Our computers are all 12V or, even better, 6-26V DC. This means they can receive power when the batteries are low (and output is about 11V) or use truck batteries which are 24V.
The problem is monitors always have an AC “brick” built inside so if you are on solar power you have to use an inverter and go:
From Solar > 12V DC Battery > AC Inverter (up to 23oV) > AC Monitor > Back down to DC components inside monitor.
Wasting 10-15% of power you go from AC to DC or DC to AC. Ideally you could just bin the AC power supply of the monitor and go:
Schools in rural Nigeria are probably the last thing on the minds of Samsung engineers but it’s so much less expensive than the crappy 12V 10″ 800 x 600 Chinese monitors that sell for £150 to £200 on eBay and Car PC websites. And it doesn’t require difficult linux drivers like the USB monitors do.
It actually has a great spec: 20″, 1600 x 900 Resolution, 2ms response rate, 50,000:1 Contrast Ratio. I’ll have one in on Monday and post the video review next week. It only has a DVI port which means it will work with our best-selling Aleutia T1 and our H-Series but not crappy thin client type PCs like the Inveneo or Linutop.
Our new Home Theatre PC, and smaller than a shoebox. We’ve combined powerful onboard Nvidia 9300 graphics and a Blu-ray drive with DVI, HDMI, Optical and Coaxial Audio out (as well as a legacy VGA ports.
Every other HTPC out there seems to be Micro ATX isntead of Mini ITX and Blu-ray is always an optional upgrade. What’s the point of having a 1080p-capable PC if you have to speed a week on Bittorrent downloading a 20GB Blu-ray rip? Blu-ray optical drives should be standard and it is on ours. Otherwise, just buy a dedicated sub £100 media player (though their interfaces are usually terrible).
The limitation of mini-ITX and small PCs is it can be difficult to sqeeze in an extra graphics card. With that in mind, we’ve gone with some of the best onboard graphics available, the Nvidia 9300. And instead of using a dual core Atom processor, we’re fitting it with a new Pentium Dual Core E6300 Processor, with 2 x 2.8GHz CPUs, FSB of 1066Mhz, and 2MB of L2 Cache. http://processorfinder.intel.com/details.aspx?sSpec=SLGU9
Combined with 4GB of RAM, that makes this a tiny HTPC that you can actually use for gaming and general multi-tasking. All for just £399 ex VAT.
We love SSDs, particularly the Intel X25-M 80GB which I’ve blogged about before. But that’s expensive (£134 wholesale) and now Kingston’s released the SSDNow with pretty solid write speed of 80 MB/s and a nice 64GB capacity. eBuyer, Overclock.co.uk are selling these for about £92 ex VAT and wholesale is only 12% less.
Boot Time: From Grub to Usable Desktop it boots in 24.0 seconds.
Bonnie++ Benchmarks (all in MB/s):
Sequential Character Output: 11.609
Block Output: 21.171
Rewrite: 10.513
Sequential Character Input: 12.184
Block Input: 130.831
Random Seeks Per Second: 5119
Basically the Samsung F3 hard drive crushes it and offers 8 times the space at one third the price, i.e. the Kingston SSD comes out 24 times more expensive per GB. However, at Random seeks (access time) it’s 29.5 times faster which is kind of crazy. The Samsung 3.5″ hard drive, by contrast was just 1.3 times faster than the 2.5″ Fujitsu Drive.
We really, really prefer SSDs here at Aleutia HQ but occasionally some excitement comes into the “moving parts” end of the storage business.
I was a big fan of Samsung’s F2 Eco Drives: silent and just 4.5 Watts. But they were only 5400RPM. The F3 is 7200RPM and offers outstanding performance.
If you want to compare to your own drive, then open a terminal in Ubuntu and type:
I knew desktop drives were faster but since the industry only markets spindle speed and cache (and 7200RPM laptop drives have 16MB cache as well) I had no idea how much faster they were!
NB: Hope the cheesy wallpaper doesn’t cause anyone to think I’m a Maxim reader: it’s a top result on google image search for “Ubuntu wallpaper” and I found it too nerdy to resist!
Now that Beta’s been out for 24 hours I downloaded the AMD 64 Bit Edition for my Aleutia office PC. This is (relatively) energy efficient box made from discarded parts we’ve accumulated during testing: an Asrock A780GM-LE mATX motherboard with an AM3 240 CPU (2 x 2.8GHz, 65W), 4GB of Kingston RAM, SATA DVD-RW drive all in this nice mATX case (lower profile but otherwise similar to the one we use in our U6 Userful PC).
You can upgrade to Karmic from within 9.04 by typing:
Alt + F2
and then:
update-manager -d
Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release ‘9.10′ is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.
I did this but then it wouldn’t boot so I decided to download the Beta version (final version released at end of the month) and install afresh. This is probably best as a major feature of Karmic is the ext4 filesystem and you need a fresh install for this.
These are mere first impressions but the Beta is very polished (think Windows 7 Release Candidate) and makes good on its claims. Immediate benefits:
Very rapid install time (this is great for system builders like us)
Boot time is faster.
Nice colour scheme and very cool bootup screen
Ubuntu Software Center (in place of Add/Remove software)
Built-in logic games
OpenOffice 3.1 (ok not that big a deal)
New icons (particularly like the swiss army one)
ext4 and other fundamentals aside, it’s clearly an evolutionary upgrade. But, like me, you operate in the cloud or have your files backed up, then you might as well though you could wait til RC comes out.
I founded Aleutia to produce a mesh-networked, ultra low power, QWERTY-equipped handheld PC aimed at the rural African market and with a pricepoint of $20. Ambition was free email (TCP/IP over long-range 802.15.4) and basic information services in areas that had zero infrastructure.
Expertise was beyond us and we started scrambling for a product (money was running out).
Exhaustive googling found us a fanless thin client from DMP, a Taiwanese company. Add Puppy Linux and you could repurpose it as a crummy, but adequate PC with just 8 Watts power consumption.
We launched the successor in February 08 (500MHz CPU, 512MB RAM up from 200MHz and 128MB) and I based the company around it. We’d add value by keeping stock, speaking English, taking credit card payments and selling individual units rather than requiring bank transfers and minimum order values of $4000. Prices went up, not down which should never happen in (semi)commodity technology. Excuse was a weak dollar. Dollar came back with fury. Prices stayed the same.
But the form factor was great and we’d sold the E2 in 48 countries. A eBox-3300 was in the works – 1.0GHz CPU, 256MB RAM and just $100 from DMP. And only 5W. The VIA processor swapped for a proprietary (why?) CPU from DMP. And an IDE controller unrecognized by Linux without a complicated kernel patch. A new revision with 512MB RAM ($110) was supposed to fix this but failed to.
As a result, we’ve decided to drop DMP products from our website and sales channels. Will still honour warranty but anyone interested should contact either:
WDL Systems of North Carolina. Keeps stock but doesn’t provide software/OS.
Green Gadgets Ltd. of Israel. Keeps stock and can help spec up solutions, enable Linux.
From now everything we sell is our own. Mini-itx or smaller, except for servers.
Keep everything 12V for our customers off the grid or do even better by offering wide-input DC voltage (6-26 Volts).
As few moving parts as possible and no remaining focus on appallingly slow processors and IDE interfaces.
To all considering a DMP eBox, I’d strongly recommend the T1 which is fanless and 12V but has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU (N270, same as in Netbooks), up to 2GB RAM, SATA-II SSD, and is still VESA-mountable. All with power consumption of 14W. http://www.aleutia.com/products/t1
I have a 3 year old MacBook Core Duo which though lasting three years has been anything but reliable – the fan’s failed (a difficult replacement using online guides) and the hard drive failed about 2 weeks after the 1 year warranty ended. But I like the OS and it’s an acceptable mothership for my iPhone. I’d upgraded the drive to a 250GB 5400RPM Western Digital model long ago but after we brought in the new Intel X25-M 80GB Generation 2 SSDs I thought I’d install one.
I can’t recommend this enough as an upgrade for your laptop. It’s a whole new lease on life and far better/cheaper than just buying a new laptop (as I had planned).
Boot Time: Plunged from 80 Seconds to less than 10 Seconds.
Shutdown Time: 12 seconds to 2 seconds.
Safari Opening: 3 seconds to 1 second.
I now don’t have to set the computer to sleep since it so quickly shuts down and boots up. Power consumption is 0.15 Watts instead of 2W and since it runs cooler, the fan maxes out (and becomes loud) much less often.
We buy these wholesale and happy to supply for £160 ex VAT on their own via Paypal. About 20% less than anyone else. Or you can buy with one of our PCs such as the T1 or H2.
The MHW2080BJ became available in the UK about 6 weeks ago and we’ve sold several since, primarily in our fanless T1 PC. Though we prefer solid state drives, hard drives still hold their own in some areas (moving files across the disc) and of course are much cheaper. This goes for about £21 wholesale, versus £134 for the 80GB Intel X25-M Solid State Drive.
I ran a Bonnie++ test on it. Results are here and are all in MB/sec, except Random Seeks which is just per second.
We recently bought some of these for testing and will shortly be selling them. Build quality is outstanding and wonderful to have a height-adjustable monitor at a low price of £130 (ex VAT) especially for someone like me who’s 6 foot 3. Resolution is 1440×900 and it has both a VGA and DVI-D port (both cables included). The Aleutia T1 has a DVI port, as does our H1, H2, and Ion HTPC and these work nicely with it. The VESA mount on the back though is taken up by the height adjustable stand so you can’t mount a PC there.
But what’s awesome about this is the really, really low power consumption. We tested 16 Watt draw using a Watt Meter, versus about 22 Watts for a normal 17″ or 19″ TFT.
However the guys over at Silent PC Review have done a much more thorough review and got power consumption down to 11 Watts:
We love the Samsung U70 and Nanovision Mimo Monitors. USB powered monitors mean less cabling and are much, much cheaper than 12V DC monitors. The problem is Samsung and Nanovision really think of these as peripheral monitors and it’s not obvious how to set it up as your sole and primary monitor.
If you use Windows this is easier and for Windows 7 users there’s a beta driver (which was alpha last week). Download it here:
Installing the driver is easy (save to desktop, double-click to open, agree to their terms and conditions, and it wil linstall).
If you have your USB monitor attached and it’s on, it will come on as a screen and you can drag and drop to it.
However, to make it your primary monitor, go:
Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Display > Adjust Resolution
You’ll see both your desktops (in my case an Lenovo L1940p at 1440×900 and a Mimo 740 Touchscreen at 800×480):
Now select your USB monitor (Display 2) with the cursor and change the Multiple Displays option from ‘Extend these Displays” to “Show Desktop Only on 2″ as I’ve shown below. Feel free to email me (michael at aleutia dot com) if you have any questions:
I’m blogging right now from said bad boy and it’s an outstanding experience, if completely underchallenging for the H2. Power consumption is holding steady at 36 Watts and running Windows 7 32-bit even though this only lets me use 3 of my 4GB of RAM.
We’ve combined an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200S processor (65W at peak) with a super quiet low profile heatsink and 1200rpm fan and managed to fit it into a case that is just 2.47 liters. Smaller footprint than a piece of A4 paper and just 6.5 mm tall.
Watched Dragon’s Den in HD on BBC iPlayer and CPU utilization was around 30%.
Noise level: 33dB though that’s measure with a (probably crappy) iPhone app. Soho is pretty noisy so it’s effectively silent for us but if you’re in a soundproofed study in the Highlands, you’re still just going to hear a single, quiet fan.
No case fans needed since the chassis is so ventilated and we’ve gone with an Intel X25-M 80GB Solid State Drive wth an absurd 230MB/s read speed, 70MB/s write speed.
We hate moving parts here at Aleutia and we’re always working to bring the cost of our rugged PCs. That’s because we want to bridge the market gap between overpriced, niche industrial PCs and developing world budgets. That’s because both groups value the same things: energy efficiency, no moving parts (less things to go wrong), and the general ability to last for years in the field.
SSDs have traditionally been very expensive and the market has been either overpriced laptops (MacBook Air) or well-off consumers upgrading their overpriced laptops.
We’re now partnered with KingSpec, a large SSD manufacturer and will be offering their high speed 32GB and 64GB drives in our best-selling H1, as well our H2, T1, and P1 PCs.
With Read Speed of 175MB/sec and Write Speed of 100MB/sec, these offer far better performance than even desktop hard drives (at 60MB/sec typically) and much quicker access times (no moving platters to start up like in hard drives). And they only use 2W at peak.
As most of our customers run Linux (and not Windows 7) and value the ability to run XBMC or Boxee on our solid state machines, we’ve switched to a new drive make, KingSpec.
CD and hand shown for scale
We love the Samsung U70 and Nanovision Mimo Monitors. USB powered monitors mean less cabling and are much, much cheaper than 12V DC monitors. The problem is Samsung and Nanovision really think of these as peripheral monitors and it’s not obvious how to set it up as your sole and primary monitor.
