best cheap/free scores 1.1

[Curious.George]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

A baker's dozen 2.5" 10K U320 72G SCA drives. Well, at least they won't take up much space! :-/

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

A baker's dozen 2.5" 10K U320 72G SCA drives. Well, at least they won't take up much space! :-/

heh....never seen those in a 2.5" flavor.

[Curious.George]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

heh....never seen those in a 2.5" flavor.

That's why I bothered to add the photos.

They were used on old(er) blade servers when you couldn't get more than ~16G of RAM on a blade (but, put two of these and you've got 144GB of secondary storage at your fingertips -- repeat for 14 or 15 blades...)

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored a Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R, fully boxed with shield, manuals and driver DVD for just $6.

Seller said it wasn't working in his classified ad (OLX, which some of the Romanian fellows here know about) and asked just $6 (25RON - 11RON board + 13RON postage) for both the board with shipping to my town. Tested it with a Q9400 and a 2GB Mushkin DDR3 stick, POST'd on first try! Was a little dirty though, but nothing medicinal alcohol couldn't solve.

[brethin]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

That's why I bothered to add the photos.

They were used on old(er) blade servers when you couldn't get more than ~16G of RAM on a blade (but, put two of these and you've got 144GB of secondary storage at your fingertips -- repeat for 14 or 15 blades...)

Those would be nice if they were 68 pin.

[Curious.George]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Those would be nice if they were 68 pin.

In addition to being inappropriate for the application from which they were rescued, you'd be hard pressed to find a way of mounting a 68-pin signal connector AND 4-pin power connector on the device (unless you opted to mount the drive "sideways")

Unless, of course, you designed a form of Single Connector Attachment!

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

In addition to being inappropriate for the application from which they were rescued, you'd be hard pressed to find a way of mounting a 68-pin signal connector AND 4-pin power connector on the device (unless you opted to mount the drive "sideways")

Unless, of course, you designed a form of Single Connector Attachment!

Yup. Made for hot swap bays & servers. 68-pin internal SCSI drives were more workstation-oriented, and it was a small & short-lived era. The nice thing about 10k & 15k 2.5" drives is fast access times. In certain type stripe arrays with good controllers in SAS of course, (I've never tested this in a u320 SCSI and I doubt they'd fare nearly as well), they can give a SSD a good run for its money....they won't beat them, but for a clunky old mechanical HDD, they're impressive!

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

The saga of Half Life, and Portal, for me are impressive works , they cannot be missing on my computer xD.

Haha, that is too funny - I'm the same way with those. Another one is Colin McRae Rally 4. It's outdated by today's graphical standards, but is still fun.

I have this computer mounted in my computer workshop connected to a TV, and when I get bored I put series, or play a game, the GT1030 behaves quite well for the use I give it . It would not be bad to put a 1050, but for now I do not hurry, when I can put it on.

Yeah, for that kind of use, the 1030 is more than enough.

In certain type stripe arrays with good controllers in SAS of course... they can give a SSD a good run for its money....

I don't know. SSDs have gotten pretty cheap nowadays.
I put a 120 GB "house brand" SSD from Micro Center in my work laptop and so far it has help up just fine. Typical usage is about 4 -5 power cycles on the laptop daily, and about 4-10 times in Standby/Sleep. The AV (Symantec, of course) also tends to scan and trash the SSD pretty badly most of the time.

For $20, I'm very than happy and already think it paid itself off.

As for SCSI... that is one of those things I couldn't care about at all anymore. Too complicated and proprietary for its own good.

[Topcat]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I don't know. SSDs have gotten pretty cheap nowadays.
I put a 120 GB "house brand" SSD from Micro Center in my work laptop and so far it has help up just fine. Typical usage is about 4 -5 power cycles on the laptop daily, and about 4-10 times in Standby/Sleep. The AV (Symantec, of course) also tends to scan and trash the SSD pretty badly most of the time.

For $20, I'm very than happy and already think it paid itself off.

As for SCSI... that is one of those things I couldn't care about at all anymore. Too complicated and proprietary for its own good.

I wasnt referring to costs...more @ performance...and then the reliability of a spinner then the redundancy of a striped/mirror (raid10). SSD can't hang with that in a good workstation.....but I'll concede it for a laptop or other disposable system for sure, where raw performance is the only thing that matters. All my HTPC's run these $20 SSD's....if they shit the bed, replace the drive, dump OS install image with clonezilla, and BOOM, back up & running with little effort. For Critical stuff, I will never rely on a SSD.

[Curious.George]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Yup. Made for hot swap bays & servers. 68-pin internal SCSI drives were more workstation-oriented, and it was a small & short-lived era.

Yeah, I'm only holding onto SCA and FC-AL drives, at this point. They tend to be "packaged" more densely than wide (or narrow!) SCSI.

The nice thing about 10k & 15k 2.5" drives is fast access times. In certain type stripe arrays with good controllers in SAS of course, (I've never tested this in a u320 SCSI and I doubt they'd fare nearly as well), they can give a SSD a good run for its money....they won't beat them, but for a clunky old mechanical HDD, they're impressive!

I liked them because they could be mounted external to the machine (so I didn't have to pull the covers off to get at them) AND because they could be spun down, removed, replaced and spun back up long before the days of pluggable USB drives! So, I could treat a 4/9G SE SCSI drive in much the same way that I now use thumb drives -- except, I can actually run applications (and OS's with larger LVD drives) off them. Ain't gonna happen with a slow thumb drive.

And, I've not had spinning rust fail me -- but have "lost" many FLASH devices over the years (usually with no advance warning)!

[Curious.George]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

I wasnt referring to costs...more @ performance...and then the reliability of a spinner then the redundancy of a striped/mirror (raid10). SSD can't hang with that in a good workstation.....but I'll concede it for a laptop or other disposable system for sure, where raw performance is the only thing that matters. All my HTPC's run these $20 SSD's....if they shit the bed, replace the drive, dump OS install image with clonezilla, and BOOM, back up & running with little effort. For Critical stuff, I will never rely on a SSD.

I look more for cost-per-byte (or, cost-per-terabyte, as the case likely is!).

Most of my (PC!) applications are either limited by meatware or CPU bound so the disk has very little impact on overall performance. And, stuffing 2T of SSD in each box just so an app loads faster isn't a good use of dollars. Once you get beyond a certain "critical minimum" of RAM (i.e., so the entire "problem" can reside entirely within it), then you just need more and faster cores!

Or, more workstations! :>

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

but I'll concede it for a laptop or other disposable system for sure, where raw performance is the only thing that matters.

All my HTPC's run these $20 SSD's....if they shit the bed, replace the drive, dump OS install image with clonezilla, and BOOM, back up & running with little effort.

Yup, that's how I treat those SSDs as well: non-critical, performance-oriented use only. Funny, though, as I have this in my work laptop . But my work laptop is not "critical" to my job function, so that's why. (In fact, the other day, its account locked itself out... again... - took almost 2 days for IT to get it unlocked. In the meantime, I was still able to get by just fine without it.)

For Critical stuff, I will never rely on a SSD.

Same.
For critical use, I tend to stick to older sub-120 GB drives (IDE or SATA). Can't really beat the old Barracuda 7200.7 and WD800 drives, IMO. Yes, they do fail occasionally, but still much more reliable than any modern drive I've seen.

On that note, I've heard that some research/tests claim that SSDs are supposed to last anywhere from 25-100 years with full-max stress endurance every day. But as with anything new that's advertised as the "latest and greatest", I find that a little hard to believe.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Scored some free oldies:

ASUS K8N-E with bulged KZGs on VRM low + ASUS Radeon 9550 256MB AGP8x - POSTs fine, much to my surprise. Came with 1x 1GB DDR400 stick and a 512MB DDR400 stick.

ECS 848P-A v1.0 - POST's fine although is picky about RAM sticks.

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

Interestingly, the ECS board looks pretty solid to me. 2x RAM slots (it's 848P, so that does make sense), OST caps (though I've yet to see any of them fail on ECS boards, unless you're using a gutless wonder or a PSU plagued by that era such as some of Antec's PSUs) and a thru-hole socket!


Anyways, my primary problem now is a Soyo SY-6VBA133 I bought earlier. I replaced the bigger Wendell caps (I wouldn't trust them even if none were bulged or bad in any kind of way) and now the board will not POST at all. I am only getting a faint continous rapid clicking in the internal speaker.

Would that because I didn't replace any of the smaller caps? (22uF and such)

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

did you test it before the recap?

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

did you test it before the recap?

Yes, and it did POST, but wouldn't turn on unless I momentarily shorted green and black then powering it on as normal (from front panel).

Replacing caps fixed that but brought the aforementioned problem.

I however didn't replace any of the small caps.

[stj]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

mabe you fitted a bad cap or fitted them backwards because of miss-printed pcb (like asus)

[ajshoe]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

picked up a free maytag bravo washer yesterday (5 years old) in perfect condition - washer would fill with water and then agitate for 1-2 minutes. then freeze. looked at control board - bad 1000 uf 6.3v cap. replaced it - works perfect. amazing how a .50 cap can put a $800 washer to the curb !

[Dan81]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

mabe you fitted a bad cap or fitted them backwards because of miss-printed pcb (like asus)

Checked silkscreen twice. Soyo doesn't have backwards cap silkscreening like ASUS does. I got all the caps in the proper orientation.

[momaka]

Re: best cheap/free scores 1.1

picked up a free maytag bravo washer yesterday (5 years old) in perfect condition - washer would fill with water and then agitate for 1-2 minutes. then freeze. looked at control board - bad 1000 uf 6.3v cap. replaced it - works perfect. amazing how a .50 cap can put a $800 washer to the curb !

Nice!
I've been seeing a lot of washers here lately getting discarded - both new and old. The top-loading ones typically, from what I can tell by the symptoms in the description, just need a new motor coupler - an easy 30 minute fix, if even that.
The front-loaders seemed more like bearing and spider jobs, though hard to say.

If I had a van or a pickup truck (well I do - at work ), I'd take some of these and try to fix them. Did ours about 2 years ago. Needed new drum bearings. Not exactly the easiest job, as it required taking apart the whole washer and the bearings were quite stuck (and I am not the strongest dude in the world, so it was all more than a good workout for me.) But for $30 in parts and a weekend of time (also power-washed the drum and drum cover, which got rid of that "old washer" smell), it practically brought it back to nearly "brand new" working condition.

Anyways, my primary problem now is a Soyo SY-6VBA133 I bought earlier....
...
Yes, and it did POST, but wouldn't turn on unless I momentarily shorted green and black then powering it on as normal (from front panel).

Time for a new thread with pictures.
If the symptoms changed for the worse after your recap job, either you missed or messed something or the board had other pending failure to begin with (though, this is a P3 board with a through-hole CPU socket and low-power chipsets, so that rules out the BGA on those cracking.)