IT Hardware Insights & Guides

A SAS host bus adapter with eight ports can address hundreds of drives. The component that makes that possible is the expander, and it is...

A barcode scanner reads the code the same way whatever it is plugged into. What changes, and what causes most of the integration problems...

The Dell RN698 is a DisplayPort male-to-male video cable, listed across the parts market at around six feet in length and also appearing ...

The Dell GG217 is a part number that turns up on procurement lists long after the systems it was designed for have been retired, usually ...

The Intel AXXBPVIDCBL is one of those parts nobody thinks about until a compute module will not POST and there is no way to see what it i...

What USB, Ethernet, wireless, Bluetooth and serial each do on a label or receipt printer, where each one fails in practice, and why the i...

The four constraints that decide whether a GPU fits, why the riser is the real question, passive versus active cooling, and how a GPU can...

What differs between 2.5 and 3.5 inch drives, the 7mm to 15mm height question people miss, when adapters work, and which form factor suit...

The four things that separate a consumer SSD from an enterprise one, when the cheaper drive is genuinely fine in a server, and when power...

What SMR and CMR recording mean, why SMR drives collapse under random writes and fail RAID rebuilds, where SMR is genuinely fine, and how...

What a switch line card is, why supervisor engine and software version decide compatibility as much as the chassis, and what to check bef...

What GBIC, SFP, SFP+, XFP, QSFP+ and QSFP28 are, which modules fit which ports and in which direction, and how to identify a transceiver ...