eBay Arrivals, February

Amazingly, February is drawing to a close and as I said last post, I am still waiting on a few items before I can continue with a couple of projects, so to fill in the time I thought I would highlight some of the eBay loot from the last week or so.

The first items are a couple of Intel NUC computers from the original source, I had bought one from him at the great price of C$148 shipped and he told me he had one more left, so even though I had no idea what I needed it for, I could not resist.

I have a use for one of them, it will become an emulation machine for my old game library, I will detail the progress in the blog when a couple of other components arrive.

If I rewind to a year ago, my passion was with Raspberry Pi computers, mostly model 3B although I had a couple of previous generation models during those education months, suffice to say I learned a lot from them, and then in the middle of 2019 my interests moved back towards full sized computers.

All the Raspberry Pi units have now been sold back into the eBay ecosystem, developing cash for the new crop of projects. This is the circle of life for my continuing learning process with technology.

The next few pieces of tech are more modest, but they will be used for various important projects in the coming months :

A used memory module for one of the NUC machines, they come with 2GB preinstalled and this is a matching unit for the second slot, it arrived by Canadapost lettermail, total price six bucks.

I'll put that in perspective, travelling back through time to the early 1990's when I bought my first 386 computer, RAM was something like C$90 a megabyte, so applying that rate the above quantity of memory back then would have been (grabs calculator) C$180000

Next arrivals were a couple of 2.5" hard drives, one 500GB conventional unit with moving platter and a 120GB solid state drive.

This used 500GB unit is destined for a desktop project as I want to make the NUC machines as quiet as possible. This was C$18.90 delivered, so if I rewind once again to my original 386 when an extra 100MB hard drive cost me two hundred bucks, this amount of storage back then would have cost me (grabs calculator again) a cool one million dollars....

I think I still have the receipt for that original computer, so at some point I will post it to the blog.

The last arrival came all the way from Denmark of all places.

Samsung 128GB Solid State Drive, no moving parts and (apparently) 6.0 Gbps speed. This unit will be used for some project, perhaps a boot drive for a desktop. The price, including shipping across the planet, was C$23.94 which was rather impressive.

So, that's it for current eBay arrivals, I am waiting for a few more things so that I can kickstart the new NUC builds, and I will keep the blog updated as they arrive.

Waiting for eBay

I started on eBay back in 1998 when it was a very different experience than it is today, the primary difference is that nowadays there is enormous competition and so, over the two decades, eBay has grown and changed to compete and in many ways, that has made the experience worse for small sellers like myself.

I still find eBay is a great place to buy, but not as great to sell.

The thing about having a hobby is to enjoy it, and my ongoing interest over the decades has been the tech side, or electronics in general, and I made a decision a while ago that I would attempt to make my hobby revenue neutral.

I would achieve this by selling items that I found in thrift stores, yard sales or at the Computer or Hamfest events, to generate cash to buy things that I wanted, often at good prices on eBay, even when shipping costs were taken into account. This has been a very good system and I hope to continue as long as it is viable, but as I say, eBay is not as great a place to sell as it used to be.

The fees have risen over the years, plus now fees apply to the shipping costs as well, a smart move for the eBay shareholders, but effectively squeezing profit margins for all the little guys.

But hey, that is life, so live with it.

I'm not attempting a rant about eBay, just saying how things have changed and it is a challenge to keep a tech hobby like mine at a no cost point, but I am mostly achieving that. The title of this blog entry is my current condition, waiting for Canada Post to deliver several items I have purchased on eBay so that I can progress current projects that are sitting on the bench.

The Dell D326T Power Supply is not like the other

I discussed lightly during the T1700 project that Dell build certain proprietary features into their computers, this is never an issue as they produce their identical machines in such vast numbers that spares will always be available.

The caveat is that using a Dell component in another build can often provide various hurdles to overcome.

Take the D326T power supply as an example, also known as the less sexy L255EM-00

The D326T is a solid beast, ATX sized power supply with one (quite short) 24 pin ATX motherboard connector, one 4 pin ATX CPU, one 4 pin FDD and four 15 pin SATA connectors. It supplies 255 Watts total and is rated as 80 Plus Silver.

But not one molex connector.

I did say it was ATX sized, but that is a little bit off, mainly as it is taller than a standard ATX power supply by an annoying amount. It will not fit (without modification) into a bog standard ATX case, and I mean a sort of standard case from five or ten years ago.

When compared to a standard older ATX power supply, the Dell unit on the left measures about the same width and length, but the height is noticeably deeper.

Actually one half inch deeper.

If you can live with the lower number of connectors, and the proprietary shorter length, then all is good. The power output is more than adequate for general computer use, and the 80 plus rating means it can consistantly perform.

The only problem is that it won't fit in most cases.

Memories....