Daily Tech News 5 March 2023

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• Iran has struck lithium - an estimated 8.5 million tons of it. (The Register)
  
  That sounds like a lot - and it is. Global lithium production in 2021 was estimated at 100,000 tons, half of it from Australia. But there's an estimated 6 million tons just sitting in the Salton Sea stinking up the place. Lithium is not particularly rare, and not all that valuable, so not a lot of effort has been put into finding more of it when we already have enough for 300 years.
  
  You'll sometimes see figures that by 2030 we'll be using 3 million tons of lithium per year, but that's actually lithium carbonate - Li2CO3 - which is only 10% 20% lithium by mass. Even at that rate known reserves will last more than a century sixty years.
  
  
  

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• I accidentally bought a couple more computer cases today, even though I just bought two expensive Hololive limited edition computer cases that I haven't put anything in yet.
  
  Before I accidentally bought a house last year I was rebuilding my home office, and one of the things I had planned was to build a couple of custom NAS boxes using Silverstone's CS01-HS. It's an aluminium mini-ITX case with six 2.5" hot swap drive bays plugging into a SAS/SATA backplane, which is not something you normally find in mini-ITX cases, plus room for another two 2.5" drives inside, which is a little more common.
  
  Anyway, fast forward a year and I'm looking at cheap options to get a computer in every room of the new house (which has too many rooms) and I tripped over the CS01S-HS on Amazon. That's the silver version; I had planned to get one each in silver and black, but apparently the entire range has been discontinued in the past year and Amazon only had a couple of remnant silver models in stock. I said to myself that I would have bought them if they still had both, but since they don't, I moved on.
  
  And then found the black version under a separate listing, even though the silver version showed the black version as sold out. And they only had one of the black version, so if I missed out now that was it.
  
  So I bought both.
  
  And now I have to figure out what to do with them. It's a mini-ITX case so you only have one PCIe slot, and the case itself only provides room for a half-height, half-length card. And there are very few mini-ITX motherboards with eight SATA ports (even this one only has six and it ain't cheap) so that slot is pretty much dedicated to a SATA controller. Only pretty much, because you can now get five and six port SATA controllers that fit in an M.2 slot. I'm not sure why those exist when the one case that would require such a thing has been discontinued, but they do.
  
  My first thought was to use the Ryzen 5700G, which still has the fastest integrated graphics of any readily available desktop CPU. But that's Socket AM4, and a quick search found exactly one Socket AM4 mini-ITX motherboard in stock in Australia, and that only has gigabit Ethernet, so I'd need to use the sole M.2 slot for a SATA controller and the PCIe slot for 10GbE, which wouldn't leave me with a boot drive separate from storage.
  
  Probably best to use a current model motherboard with at least 2.5Gb Ethernet and not worry about the graphics. If I want to do media transcoding an Intel CPU is probably the way to go, even though it's worse for gaming.
  
  Why a 2.5" NAS? As I mentioned yesterday, SSDs have already fallen in price by 30% this year. I'm going to stuff it full of cheap SATA SSDs and run ZFS. It won't be cheap - individual SSDs might be but eight of them aren't - but good dedicated NASes aren't cheap either, unless your employer happens to be throwing them out... Which is why all my Synology boxes date back to 2013 and really need replacing.
  
  
  
• The importance of being ECC. (Robert Felder)
  
  At least DDR5 has on-die ECC, and some really weird systems with nominally non-ECC RAM have block ECC as well. I wonder if any regular motherboards have support for that, since it seems you can do it with regular Intel CPUs.
  
  
  
• Lemon-derived extracellular vesicle-like nanoparticles block the progression of kidney stones by antagonizing endoplasmic reticulum stress in renal tubular cells. (ACS)
  
  Shut up and take my money.
  
  In rats.
  
  Squeak.
  
  
  
• Although that Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED laptop I mentioned yesterday is very tempting, the truth is now that I've settled in in New House City I only expect to travel any real distance about once a year.
  
  And for the same price as that laptop (13700H, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, RTX 4050) I can get a desktop system with a 13500 (almost exactly the same as the 13700H laptop chip), 128GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and a Radeon 6700... And 24TB of hard disk storage as well, just because.
  
  So I think that's what I'll do.