Hardware

Hi, im a bit new to homelabbing, and recently bought a server - on a second hand market. The computer came with the following component, but im a bit unsure what it does exactly. It was sitting in one of the GPU slots on the Motherboard. I feel like it has something to do with adding HDDs. Could somebody please clarify this one for me? Much appreciated!

Recently heard about Thermal pads instead of paste, had never crossed my mind this could be a thing. Very curious to how good these actually are and if they perform any better? Also what does their lifetime look like? If anyone here has any experience with these please let me know 🌻

Seagate this week unveiled the industry's first hard disk drive platform that uses heat-assisted media recording (HAMR). Tom's Hardware:

The new Mozaic 3+ platform relies on several all-new technologies, including new media, new write and read heads, and a brand-new controller. The platform will be used for Seagate's upcoming Exos hard drives for cloud datacenters with a 30TB capacity and higher. Heat-assisted magnetic recording is meant to radically increase areal recording density of magnetic media by making writes while the recording region is briefly heated to a point where its magnetic coercivity drops significantly.

Seagate's Mozaic 3+ uses 10 glass disks with a magnetic layer consisting of an iron-platinum superlattice structure that ensures both longevity and smaller media grain size compared to typical HDD platters. To record the media, the platform uses a plasmonic writer sub-system with a vertically integrated nanophotonic laser that heats the media before writing. Because individual grains are so small with the new media, their individual magnetic signatures are lower, whereas magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) effect is somewhat higher. As a result, Seagate had to introduce its new Gen 7 Spintronic Reader, which features the "world's smallest and most sensitive magnetic field reading sensors," according to the company. Because Seagate's new Mozaic 3+ platform deals with new media with a very small grain size, an all-new writer, and a reader that features multiple tiny magnetic field readers, it also requires a lot of compute horsepower to orchestrate the drive's work. Therefore, Seagate has equipped with Mozaic 3+ platform with an all-new controller made on a 12nm fabrication process.

Abstract credit: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/01/19/1149214/30tb-hard-drives-are-nearly-here

This video shows how computer RAM is made. In this episode, you'll get to watch how it's made at the V-Color factory as part of our factory tour series. Processes shown include automated frequency binning, voltage and timings binning, assembly and manufacturing of RAM sticks with Surface-Mount Technology Lines, and burn-in testing. We also briefly talk about some hand-tuned overclock testing for high-end SKUs. This factory makes DDR4 and DDR5 RAM and manufactures anything from lower-frequency DIMMs to 8000+ sticks with the OC lab.

This is our SEASON DEBUT for the Factory Tour Series showing the inner workings of PC component manufacturing. Computer cases and servers are manufactured, assembled, and painted in these two InWin factories in Taiwan. Parts of these factories will show how computer cases are made, with a big focus on a brand new server-building facility. The factories shown in this video assemble ASUS and ASRock components into servers, among others for big names, and also handle the painting and machining processes for InWin computer cases (and their OEM'd clients).