HMMM....What could this be.... ;) TC's first X8DAi Build!

[370forlife]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

video card (9600GT 1gb) = $200 IIRC

Must have been a while back

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ce%209600%20GT

Need to do something about that, get that video card up to speed with the rest of the system. At least something like a GTX260.

Well, looks like badcaps is paying off

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

^
The video card is about a year old. I had it in another system for a while. I'm not big into gaming, so it will be ok for a while longer.....atleast long enough to get my 200 bucks worth out of it.

[c_hegge]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

it wont need polymer caps with those 6 fans in action.

I have 7 case fans in my system. I'm a big fan of fans

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

The 3ware 9650 and its goodies arrived a few mins ago!!

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

Some more pics:

The 3ware controller in its box:


Out of its box:




Removed cables from Supermicro to the SAS backplane (not needed, the 3ware has proprietary cabling):


Adios onboard raid....its good enough to run opticals, thats it:


SATA connectors on the back of the SAS backplane:


Getting messy looking:


That looks kinda sexy. The PCI card is a USB2 card. My only gripe about this system, its lacking USB ports. Only 2 in the front and 4 in the back, so I added the extra card:


Fans back in place:


Nifty card reader and those opticals again:


The memory should be here this week.

[stj]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

why does the raid-card have batteries?
i'v noticed batteries on some scsi raid too, but never knew why.

[370forlife]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

They have a CMOS that keeps settings like the mainboard. I think that big of battery may also keep the data that is on the card's ram/buffer too.

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

They have a CMOS that keeps settings like the mainboard. I think that big of battery may also keep the data that is on the card's ram/buffer too.

No battery is required for the controller to retain its RAID configuration, but as you said, it will prevent dataloss if the system crashes or power is lost. it is an optional feature for the card, I just thought what teh hell, why not get the whole works....

The module and batt will retain data stored in the cache at the time of the failure and rebuild it upon powering back up or system reset. This nifty little add on allows you to enable write caching without worrying, which increases performance.

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

It's alive and well!! This is my first post from it!! hit a few snags initially, the 3ware controller was not playing nice with the motherboard at all. Updated the BIOS on the board and the firmware on the controller, still no go. Stumped, I called supermicro......turns out there's a newer BIOS for the board that isn't even on the website. The support rep emailed it to me, I flashed the BIOS again, and shazam! 3ware and motherboard are now happy together.

I also saved myself 300 bucks today, I found a pair of 73gb SATA2 raptors I forgot I had, so I used those instead of ordering a pair of 150giggers.

Anyway, XP Pro x64 is installed and running. Once past the little bios glitch, it was smooth sailing. Device manager shows a purty 8 CPU's, 16 CPU's with HT enabled, and all 24gb of the RAM is present and accounted for. I still need my big dump drives. Was looking at a pair of 1tb drives, but it seems everything 1tb+ is miserably unreliable and failure-prone.... Eyeballing a pair of 640gb drives now, which seem to have better reviews.

More pics soon.

[weirdlookinguy]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

[weirdlookinguy]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

Also I have a 640GB Caviar Black in my machine, and my buddy and I have a 1TB Caviar Black in our 24/7 torrent box.

My 640GB is still very young (5 Months) but has given no trouble so far, it's been rock solid... the 1TB in our torrent server has gone bad on us twice now over the period of ten months - both times for bad sectors .

My buddy also had a 500GB Caviar Black in his system until he sold it last month. It ran for almost a year rock solid no problems same as my 640GB, and was still running terrific when he sold the system last month.

[stretch0069]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

so when the hell are you going to start folding with it???????????????????????????????

[pentium]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

so when the hell are you going to start folding with it???????????????????????????????

Shhhh, don't say that. He's sitting right behind me in the rankings.

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

so when the hell are you going to start folding with it???????????????????????????????

It will be folding very soon!!

[dood]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

Pic on the box doesn't match the card at all. Where's the heatsink?

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

Pic on the box doesn't match the card at all. Where's the heatsink?

Under the BBU. it looks like that before the BBU is installed, the module covers the heatsink.


Watch out Mikey, its folding now!! it's officially in use. Old system is shut down and waiting to be carted off to the shop.

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

Last week, this system had its first failure after almost 4 years of running 24/7/365. The 3ware controller was bitching and screaming at me.....so I checked it, half expecting to find a busted RAID and/or a bad drive.....but no! The friggin' battery for the BBU had gone bad, thankfully!! Damn OEM battery was 63 bucks from newegg.... There's cheaper off-brand replacements on fleabay for like 9 bucks.....but I wasn't willing to gamble that. Batt arrived today, and all is well in the world again.... While I had it out from under the desk, and dragged up to the shop for some work to change the battery, I gave it a blow job from the air compressor. It was quite dusty inside.

[Uranium-235]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

that compressor is always a such a whore

[thesloc]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

No SSD = fail

[Topcat]

Re: HMMM....What could this be....

No SSD = fail

Are you serious?! SSD with critical data = fail. I'll stay with my spinners.