HP T730: $129.40 (shipped)

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WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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I actually completely get it, but they don't see it that way since they do what is best for their bottom line since that's what gets them the business in the first place. Otherwise you can go an get HP or whatever other branded sfps and I'm sure they'll come packaged exactly how you tell them to, but at what cost? It's the classic triple constraint--right, fast, or cheap--pick two. :D

Now, if there is a box for you to check that specifies how to ship it, that should be followed 100% sans human mistakes that sometimes happen. No disagreement there.

a. Selling via Amazon is a whole headache within itself if their inventory is at Amazon's fulfillment centers. Then they have very little control, and if one of Amazon's overworked underpaid employees wants to F with someone because they're miserable, that happens. Or like the scenarios you explained where they say it is there, but it isn't. That's just Amazon's 'f u' way of doing business. I don't buy from them because of issues like this. I need a reliable source most of the time.

b. Amazon's retardery again. No defense for them, and I don't buy from them because of such issues.

Actually, I see how either a customer deals with the crap that they deal out, or just get what they need from somewhere else. Luckily, there are a lot of people out there that sell basically the same stuff around the same price. Logistics plays a big part sometimes, so next day shipping from CA is the same thing as regular ground 100mi away. This is why I'm always asking where the product is shipping from if I'm shopping around.

When something is this critical and has other much higher costs associated with it if things go wrong, I do the unthinkable--I order two--one each from different vendors with the same delivery promise. :D If one messes up, I'm still covered. Or in rare cases, I drive it over myself after I get it in my hands first.

Nah, I'm not going to say anything about not planning ahead because we all know how sometimes there is last minute work that has to be done--been there done that. :)

I hear you on that run to CDW!!! LOL!! Been there, done that! 90 and 94 both suck! Chicago traffic sucks! Man I am so happy to get away from that traffic. But I do miss having CDW only 10m away from home. I would typically leave as soon as I have the order confirmation and hang out in the willcall lounge vs fight traffic to get there before they close. But I had that luxury, which I know most people wouldn't.

Shenzhen...lucky I've never dealt with any of that personally. I have zero tolerance for the customer service games played in that part of the world, and my wife told me all about them since she built a lot of those cs centers and their training programs, lol.
Well, for Amazon, it really depends on whether their last mile is done by someone on their own fulfillment, or UPS/Fedex. With UPS/Fedex (as much as I joke about them being abbreviations for "Unionized Parcel Smashers" and "Fed-them-to-my-Ex"), they are usually pretty reliable - I only see issues in one out of 20 dispatches. When Amazon Fulfillment (especially their service in Midtown/downtown Manhattan, *eeeh* - yeah, their same-day delivery is often defined as "we'll sign it as delivered so we won't get punished and then we'll drop it off for you tomorrow and blame it on dispatch". My guess? Lasership and their subcontracted routes. It's kinda funny that I get better service (with even block-by-block tracking of their trucks) at my Amazon Prime residential/home delivery with 2 days committed shipping before 8p than dealing with the ol' corporate account.

Yeah, Chicago traffic is "fun". Although I usually dealt with a certain data center/former catalog printer out near McCormick Place. If I had to venture out it's Vernon Hills, Oak Brook/Downers Grove or a certain non-descript data center right next to Interstate 88 at Aurora/Naperville.
 

WANg

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This one? Maybe - But I think there's only one NBaseT chipset currently in production (The Aquantia Pacific/AQC111U), and most devices based on it go for at least 100. I am also not sure if it needs a USB 3.1 Gen 1 or Gen 2 port (The t740 has 2 Gen2 in the front, one USB-A and one USB-C, and no Gen2 ports in the back) - that's the same situation with the t640. That t640 is an interesting little machine that deserves its own brief guide. Especially since only 9 months after intro I am starting to see them on evilbay for 150-200, and those are like bona-fide AMD Ryzen NUCs good for building cheap clusters.

Also, *ugh*. I really shouldn't encourage people to use copper for > 1GbE. Singlemode Fiber+SFP/DACs are just so much easier at 10/40/100GbE speeds, and there's none of these weird little steps like 2.5GbE, 5, 10, etc. At some point you really should ditch copper for fiber.
Actually, now to think about it, I might NEED to - I just thought about the bigger implications of @zack$ asking about this one - VMWare dropped VMKLinux support for VSphere 7.x and above, and both the Broadcom Tigon fiber NIC and the Realtek NIC depend on VMKLinux drivers. Unless the t620 Plus/630/730/640/40 is never to be used for anything but 6.x and below, someone would have to test for USB NIC compatibility...
 
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Samir

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Well, for Amazon, it really depends on whether their last mile is done by someone on their own fulfillment, or UPS/Fedex. With UPS/Fedex (as much as I joke about them being abbreviations for "Unionized Parcel Smashers" and "Fed-them-to-my-Ex"), they are usually pretty reliable - I only see issues in one out of 20 dispatches. When Amazon Fulfillment (especially their service in Midtown/downtown Manhattan, *eeeh* - yeah, their same-day delivery is often defined as "we'll sign it as delivered so we won't get punished and then we'll drop it off for you tomorrow and blame it on dispatch". My guess? Lasership and their subcontracted routes. It's kinda funny that I get better service (with even block-by-block tracking of their trucks) at my Amazon Prime residential/home delivery with 2 days committed shipping before 8p than dealing with the ol' corporate account.

Yeah, Chicago traffic is "fun". Although I usually dealt with a certain data center/former catalog printer out near McCormick Place. If I had to venture out it's Vernon Hills, Oak Brook/Downers Grove or a certain non-descript data center right next to Interstate 88 at Aurora/Naperville.
Ah the fun of logistics, no? o_O

At one point in time I owned an auto parts distributor that sold mainly b2b. It was a franchise and the franchisor (terrible horrible crooks who stole $58k from me and my partner) recommended that we use their preferred shipper, Fedex. We did a lot of shipping and found a lot of packages arriving 9 days later for a 30mi trip. :eek: We got yelled at pretty good by our customers and started to find our own logistics. We needed something guaranteed and solid. We tried dhl, fedex, and finally settled on UPS because they were on point. I think in over 1.5yrs of business we had only 6 shipments we had to get a refund for being late. And this reliability really built our credibility with our customers. But this was also when signature shipments were the norm, so I don't know if the tossing or skipping would be more rampant today than it was back then.

I hated the traffic in Chicago, especially downtown. People would shoot their own mother than drive with civility. It is actually the worst driving I've seen on a regular basis in the US, and many times bordered on if not was just like third world road craziness. My wife didn't want me to come in the city to pick her up because no matter how cheery I was that day, one trip downtown would ruin my mood. It might have been just me because I believe in following the rules and not playing games or taking chances when cars and safety are on the line, but I'm happy to be away from that mess. The only thing I miss about it though was the lack of any speed detection--it was great to drive 100-110mph on the highways again without worrying about a ticket. :D But that was only if you didn't have traffic so it was rare to have that type of fun. I was in Deerfield and I didn't have to leave home for work so I only got out to pick up the wife from the Metra stations or go grocery shopping, lol. Or the occasional CDW or Frys run. But I had to plan that Frys run as it would be at least 1hr of driving even at elevated speeds, and if there was traffic--2hrs round trip driving time alone. It's probably why I would spend almost 4hrs at Frys every time.

Making the routes you had to, you definitely felt the sting of traffic. Those are some long runs and there was almost no way to make it both ways without traffic slowing you down. :( Being a car enthusiast as much as I am into IT, good open roads are almost a must for me. I've got to have a nice drive to calm me down and de-stress me every so often.

We moved to the Bay Area recently and while the traffic is just as busy, I have to remind myself not to drive rude like someone from the Chicago metro. My wife always has to remind me how nice people are, and she's right--next to Milwaukee, I think the Bay Area has been the friendliest and most civil driving I've been able to do in years. It's nice to be around nice people in traffic.
 
May 1, 2020
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I just got myself a t730 and had a question for you guys, since this seems like one of the most active threads on the machine.

It has a touch sensitive (presumably capacitive) power button right? Well mine seems to activate all the time when I handle the machine even with my hands not near the power button and sometimes just from fiddling with cables. Is there a way to fix this, like decreasing the sensitivity? or is this a just something bad about the board and I should contact the seller for a replacement?

Also is this at all a common issue? It's so frustrating working on a machine that will magically turn itself on and sometimes off.
 
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WANg

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I just got myself a t730 and had a question for you guys, since this seems like one of the most active threads on the machine.

It has a touch sensitive (presumably capacitive) power button right? Well mine seems to activate all the time when I handle the machine even with my hands not near the power button and sometimes just from fiddling with cables. Is there a way to fix this, like decreasing the sensitivity? or is this a just something bad about the board and I should contact the seller for a replacement?

Also is this at all a common issue? It's so frustrating working on a machine that will magically turn itself on and sometimes off.
Eh, not that I am aware of - the t730 (AFAIK) has an actual push-button microswitch - it should not be capacitive. If you look at one of my photos of the interior on the t730, look at the left side edge for a white component - if you look at where the Sandisk M.2 SATA SSD happened to be, look up at where the M2.22-110 screwhole happens to be - then go all the way to the left, it should be labeled "PB" on the board - that's the power button. See if it's dirty / needs some deoxit, or there's some alignment/loose plastics issue.

Otherwise, it could be a borderline power supply or a faulty board.

 
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fossxplorer

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@BenjaminCalibration I had exactly the same issue when i bought my first t730. It was pretty annoying the first days and i couldn't really understand why it was like that. I actually asked about this behavior in a post on this forum (can't recall which one anymore).
I suspected the issue to be the power button being pressed towards into the inside button @WANg mentions. When i screwed the board out fully from the enclosure and made sure it was better 'aligned' (i.e not too tight towards the front side) when installing it back, the problem was gone.

You might have the same issue, although i'm not sure :)
 
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May 1, 2020
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@BenjaminCalibration I had exactly the same issue when i bought my first t730. It was pretty annoying the first days and i couldn't really understand why it was like that. I actually asked about this behavior in a post on this forum (can't recall which one anymore).
I suspected the issue to be the power button being pressed towards into the inside button @WANg mentions. When i screwed the board out fully from the enclosure and made sure it was better 'aligned' (i.e not too tight towards the front side) when installing it back, the problem was gone.

You might have the same issue, although i'm not sure :)
You were 100% right. I was ready to believe it was capacitive because it was so sensitive to touch.

When I got in there, and took the motherboard out it was blatantly a button switch (I should've recognized as much initially but was too fixated on the capacitive idea). It clicked fine and seems to be working fine; I think what happened is that the mb screws were a little loose when I took it out, so during shipping it probably got jostled and pushed right up against the button and depressed passed the clicky point. So it managed to be clicked in but not quite activating the button so any slight bump of the faceplate near the button would definitely set it off and it would go off randomly/intermittently when the case was jostled or shifted (as in to put in a cable or USB stick).
 
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morecomputers

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Hi, I frequent the site periodically but its been a while. Wanted to first say thanks to @WANg for the tip in this thread on power switch issue. I had the exact same issue on recently buying from ebay. Had to disassemble and reassemble unit inlcuding slipping off motherboard and reseating and now power on switch works fine.

Also i have 4 port Intel NIC (i340-t4) IBM part. I find on this HP, the ethernet jacks on any of these cards sit deep relative to the back of the device. It is a pain to remove a Cat6 cable once plugged in as my finger cant get to the cable clip to release. Any suggestion on types of cables that have worked best for this device or do i just have to struggle with a nose plier etc and hopefully limit the times i need to pull the cable out?

thanks


Eh, not that I am aware of - the t730 (AFAIK) has an actual push-button microswitch - it should not be capacitive. If you look at one of my photos of the interior on the t730, look at the left side edge for a white component - if you look at where the Sandisk M.2 SATA SSD happened to be, look up at where the M222.110 screwhole happens to be - then go all the way to the left, it should be labeled "PB" on the board - that's the power button. See if it's dirty / needs some deoxit, or there's some alignment/loose plastics issue.

Otherwise, it could be a borderline power supply or a faulty board.
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Hi, I frequent the site periodically but its been a while. Wanted to first say thanks to @WANg for the tip in this thread on power switch issue. I had the exact same issue on recently buying from ebay. Had to disassemble and reassemble unit inlcuding slipping off motherboard and reseating and now power on switch works fine.

Also i have 4 port Intel NIC (i340-t4) IBM part. I find on this HP, the ethernet jacks on any of these cards sit deep relative to the back of the device. It is a pain to remove a Cat6 cable once plugged in as my finger cant get to the cable clip to release. Any suggestion on types of cables that have worked best for this device or do i just have to struggle with a nose plier etc and hopefully limit the times i need to pull the cable out?

thanks
Use a few Ethernet extenders - That’s what I use with my quadport GigE board on the t730.

539C3B17-24F8-4D46-8906-CFC08B00C596.png
 
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