[conspire] Zotac and Shuttle and Asu, oh my (durability)

[Daniel Gimpelevich]

On Mon, 2017-12-04 at 08:57 -0800, Tony Godshall wrote:
> > Example 2:  My new toy the Zotac, at minimum, has appallingly bad
> > prospects for I/O expansion when viewed as a server.  Mass storage
> > on a _quality_ interface is limited to exactly one SATA connector.
> > Possibly, one might also count additional storage in the SD/SDHC/SDXC
> > card reader, though I'm not sure about speed.  External storage is
> > possible only on USB.  (But it's pretty damned good for $125 w/ 1 year
> > mfr. warranty.)
> 
> By the way, we've had very disappointing results with the durability
> of Zotac units as workstations.  We're back to Shuttle DS68U and DX30
> units.  Single laptop-size hard drive, dual laptop-size memory sticks
> fanless.  We also like the fact that we've had no driver troubles with
> any of the hardware and they have serial ports and even PS/2 and VGA
> which helps in terms of swapping out old machines, giving workstation
> machines a second life as interfaces legacy industrial equipment etc.
> (DX30 needs a header cable for VGA, order it with).
> 
> Other units we've been disappointed with durability are Lenovo Q180
> and Q190 and ASUS EB1021.  A lot of the issues seem to have been
> fan and heat-related, so the fanless nature of the Shuttle's should be a
> benefit.

I ended up getting a refurb HP t730 Thin Client with a 16GB M.2 drive
for close to what I would've spent on an APU2 for gateway/router use,
and I put a $20 quad Intel 350 NIC in its slot, because the onboard is
Realtek. The much larger L2 cache than the APU2 has can come in very
handy if I have the thing running any crypto, but it seems to idle at
17W on the Kill-A-Watt, which isn't great for an always-on device, but
it could be a lot worse. Fanless would've been nice, but barring the
APU2, I would've had to compromise too much. Thoughts on these in
comparison to the Zotac and Shuttle units?

This one does not have the wifi card, which is ubiquitous on eBay and
elsewhere, but unfortunately, the internal antennae that mount to the
chassis are not. The only info I have on the antennae is on page 19 of
this PDF:
http://h22235.www2.hp.com/hpinfo/globalcitizenship/environment/productdata/Countries/_MultiCountry/disassembly_deskto_201511423012668.pdf
Any chance somebody knows a place where dead units get sent where I
might fetch those exact antennae? I don't want to mount generic ones
randomly.