Kohjinsha SC3 SSD: Not all mSATA's are equal.

A long time ago in 2014 I upgraded my trusty Kohjinsha SC3 to an SSD (Original Post), however over time it started flaking out and then it up and died on me. After a bit of testing it turned out the Intel 310 mSATA had suffered from it's (now) well known firmware issues and committed suicide for no particular reason.

Initially I replaced it with a 2nd hand Cruicial M500 mSATA and things seemed a bit off, after much testing (again) this time it turned out the drive was hitting it's thermal limit inside the very confined space of the SC3 and then shutting down, after a few hours it would naturally cool enough to work again but as soon as any real load was applied, shutdown. The drive itself is perfectly fine just it seems to like running a bit hot, again a known issue.

So I finally convinced myself to try one of the WAVE branded SSD's that keep cropping up on eBay, general word on the net is they they run cool and fast and seem to be relatively sound in terms of quality. First impressions it all looks quite good, enough words for a moment lets have some pictures.

Crucial M500 on the left WAVE 128GB on the right

The WAVE only has chips on one side, this helps with speed and temps.

The WAVE in it's mSATA to ZIF adapter, nice air gap between the two.

The Crucial M500 on the other hand is quite a snug fit.

Testing & Benchmarks:

Original Toshiba MK6028GAL

Intel 310 mSATA SSD

New WAVE 128GB mSATA SSD, sorry it's blurry was testing my new PODO camera.

Initial Conclusions:

So far so good, it pretty much beats the Intel hands down aside from 4K Q32 and it does 'feel' a bit quicker. I never benched the Crucial drive mainly because I could not before it fell over, however with a USB3>SATA dongle in UASP mode it did run roughly level with the WAVE drive so I imagine similar results if it had benched in the SC3. The temperatures are the main thing here, in the open air in my frankly freezing room the Cruicial M500 idled at high 40's to low 50's and peaked at near on 60 degrees when being benchmarked. The WAVE as you can see above hit 51 degrees in the enclosed space on the SC3 while being benchmarked so this looks like another win here.

I'm reinstalling Win 10 on the SC3 which is an adventure in itself due to chipset issues, it's loosely covered here. As things stand I can recommend these drives, UK viewers can get shop here for them Wave Gadgets @ eBay

New download links for all files and new domain :)

I recently found out that my FTP hosting had changed the way it worked and screwed up all my links, between that and Rapidshare going weird the other year I have decided it's time to do the job properly and host the files in a better fashion.

All files will now be permanently available via my new domain nebularnerd.co.uk which for now will bounce back to this site until I decide if I'm going to stick with Blogger or not.

I shall update all my older posts and threads on various forums over the next week but for now here are the links.


Version 5 page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 5

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 5 (Lite)


Version 4.1 page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 4.1

Version 4.0SE page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 4.0SE

Version 4.0 page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 4

Version 3.1SE page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 3.1SE

Adobe Flashplayer 11.1.111.10.apk

Version 3.0 & 3.1 mini patch page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 3.1

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 3.0

Version 2 page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 2.0

Version 1 page.

Novo 8 Advanced 2.3.4 UK Rooted Rom Version 1

TRENDnet TEW-812DRU AC1750 Antenna Upgrade

A few weeks ago I managed to score a rather cheap refurbished TRENDnet TEW-812DRU Wi-Fi router, I had been eyeing this model up for a few months, while most reviews give positive marks for the speed (it is fast), gigabit lan ports and fairly decent firmware it's rather let down by the antennas which are not too great over any real distance especially if you have thick solid walls such as I have. On the whole though it's main feature is it's excellent 802.11ac wireless speeds which will beat a lot of the more expensive units around.

While reading around I came across a great review from SmallNetBuilder where they opened it up and revealed that it had pigtail connectors for the wireless antennas, this along with DD-WRT* releasing a firmware for the unit told me it was time to break open the piggy bank.

I shall make a second post with a few more details regarding DD-WRT and speed/reception performance in the next week or so.

*At time of writing (Jan 2015) you must have a v2 unit to run DD-WRT, TRENDnet offer an 'Open Source Firmware' for the v2's which is a branded copy of DD-WRT but I went with the official DD-WRT one as it's a later build.

The Build:

Click any of the pictures for a larger view.

First up you need to get the lid off, lift the two rubber feet off to expose the screws then work the lid open with a spreader. Wedge it in between the grey side and black lid and gently work your way round.

Once the lid is off you'll see the mainboard with the pigtails for the antenna, NOTE: v1 models differ slightly, check the SmallNetBuilder review to see.

These are the stock antennas hidden under the mainboard, if you live in small property they will work well enough.

Next up it's time to  mutilate  modify the lid to take some new antennas, you can buy 'Pigtail to RP-SMA leads' on eBay for next to nothing but make sure you have enough cable to position them. I decided with this three in a row layout but in hindsight I should of spaced them further apart.

Once you have the connectors mounted just pop them onto the boards connectors and close up the lid. Tape over the old leads so they don't short out on anything.

Once done all you have to do is attach the antennas, this is where things were not initially as successful as I was hoping. From my previously modded Asus WL-520G and D-Link DIR-615 routers I had some big rubber duck antennas which were meant to do 2.4GHz and 5Ghz, in short on 2.4GHZ they were excellent, on 5GHz they were truly awful.

Not to be deterred I splashed out on some rather natty Alfa APA-M25 antennas that do an excellent job covering the 3 floors of my house with 3/4 to full strength on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz. You can buy them on eBay. Full specs can be found here.

Much neater and much better, I might at some point alter the layout to give the antennas a bit more room to breath but they seem to be working well enough at present.

New year, New Posts

Just a quick post to say that I'm still here and am planning to try and write a lot more this year than last. The main reason for starting the blog was to get my Ainol Novo 8 Advanced firmware out into the wild, however the device is now pretty much obsolete and there is not much more that could be done beyond where I got to so I won't expect to be posting a lot about that in the foreseeable future.

I have a few things lined up, some will be new projects, some not so new stuff and the odd review/post of bits of tech that I happen to purchase.

Posts coming up:
TRENDnet TEW-812DRU v2 Router Antenna Upgrade (new project)
D-Link DIR-615 Antenna Upgrade (old project)
Lego Car Dock V2 for Xperia Z

Planned future projects:
Mini posts on some of the stuff I repair for people (Phones, laptops etc . . .)
Retro Home Computer foot pedal to emulated Joystick/Keyboard via Arduino or similar. (Extra input method, handy for crouching, reload etc . . . in First Person Shooters)
Possibly some sort of expansion to the above, custom spinner controls for arcade games or such.
Write up about my lan/firewall setup.
Other things that may spring into my head as I go along.

Stay tuned :)

Sony Xperia Z Lego dock prototype.

Having got fed up with my cars headunit poor support for large MP3 collections through it's USB port I decided to use my Xperia Z to provide my tunes on the move. The main obstacle with this is that no dock or mount would support the phone in the Case-Mate Tough case for my phone and allow me to charge to phone without opening the USB flap all the time. At first I purchased one of these docks from Amazon (click picture for item page):

My plan was to take a Dremel to it to widen it enough to accept the phone and case but upon disassembly that proved to be a non starter as the phone case is just too bulky for the charge pins to reach the connectors so on to plan two.

 Borrowing the internals from the above dock and a quick mod to a couple of bricks I now have a working prototype for my in car dock, in a rather amazing coincidence it happens that my Honda must of been built with the dock in mind as it fits exactly into the width of the cubby hole I wanted to place it in.

Prototype Lego dock

Top view showing charge pins from purchased dock.

Rear view, I will eventually add a better connector maybe something magentic.

Modded Case-Mate case to accept charge pins.

In car shot, will look much better when painted.

Somehow Honda managed to make the flap exactly the right size :)

Eventually the design will be tidied up and painted black, safety wise all is good as the headunit can change tracks and the console recesses far enough to be well out the way of the gear stick.

Reading Amiga floppies on PC back in 2006

I love the old Commodore Amiga and still play some of the games from time to time, however originally getting the games onto the PC to play in WinUAE could be a chore. You could download them but sometimes you might not be able to find the game or download it in a reasonable time (early pre-meg broadband) leaving you to make your own image. In 2006 you had three main choices Disk2FDI, The Amiga itself or the new fancy Catweasel cards that cost quite a bit.

Back then I made my little contribution to the cause by suggesting an oddball idea that got picked up, played with and then after time a release, thanks to to the amazing efforts of the folk on the English Amiga Board including Toni (WinUAE) Wilen and Simon (fdrawcmd.sys) Owen we now had a way to read some Amiga floppies directly in a modern OS as long as you could physically attach a pair of floppies to your system to perform the read with.

It all started with this post:

Hello everyone

I was trawling the net just now and totally at random fell upon this floppy driver http://simonowen.com/fdrawcmd/ basically it allows low level access to the floppy controller under xp/xp64.

As some of you may know the catweasel board is currently out of production due to germanys new enviromental laws (the catweasel pcb used some now banned substances) so until that situation can be solved no more catweasel

If someone here with uber programming skills has some spare time would they cast an eye over and see if it could be used to generate adf files or even allow some form of native access under WinUAE?

The full thread including the subsequent release of ADFRead is here:
Could WinUAE make use of frawcmd.sys (I am/was Oberth on this forum)

There was an updated 1.1 release of ADFRead over on WinUAE but after that better solutions came along and modern PC's stopped with the whole floppy drive thing. It was a small contribution granted but I am pleased that it actually became something usable even in a limited form. 

Currently in 2014 we are lucky to have the Kryoflux USB Floppy controller that will read just about anything floppy based, I will buy one when I have nothing else to buy one month as I still have a pile of Amiga floppies and would like to backup some of my disks and maybe find something to contribute to the Software Preservation Archives.

Nvidia GeForce FX5900 Mega Cooler

I found this pic in my archives and thought I would throw it up just to show you some of my older mad ideas.

Sometime around 2003ish I had a Leadtek Winfast A350 powered by an NVidia Geforce FX5900 core. It was the top flight card when I purchased it and did fancy things like that new fangled DVI stuff (through a separate chip no less)

However after some time there developed two problems, the first was that the clever fan shroud stopped being clever due to the fans packing up, the second was the newer FX5950 based card that my father possessed, it was not much faster but in those days FPS scores were everything. Thus the MEGA COOLER was born.

Essentially what you are looking at might well have been the first triple slot cooler. It had a stock Socket 939 cooler bolted to it (hence the bent fins) The blue ram coolers were from some DDR cooling kit I had knocking around mounted to the existing ram cooling plate using my favorite combo of superglue with thermal compound (As seen in the ASUS WL-520G heatsink upgrade)

Initially it was a great success, overclocking proved no issue due to the stupidly huge heatsinks and airflow, and you could keep your FX5950 cards thank you very much. However not long after PCI Express came along and showed us a bright new world where even the lowest cards ran light years quicker. I can't remember what happened to MEGA COOLER, I could hardly palm it off at Computer Exchange. Maybe, just maybe it's hiding in a cupboard somewhere waiting to be found and perhaps benchmarked ....

For the insomniacs you can read all about the card itself it at Leadtek's own page and at Toms Hardware