Upgrading my work computer

[Dan81]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

lol u know, video cards can behave really weird when they fail. let me tell u about what i experienced.

i bought a used radeon 9550 256mb video card off ebay and it turned out to be faulty. funny thing is, the picture is flawless without the drivers but once the drivers are loaded, artifacts slowly start appearing on the screen and get more and more until the screen is unviewable.

on testing and troubleshooting, reducing the agp acceleration to 4x or off didnt work. it was only until i turned off agp acceleration, agp reads & writes and pci reads & writes that the artifacts stopped. so im guessing the video card has bad bga on one or more of the lines that connect to the agp bus. however, using the video card like that is like using it without the drivers. the screen was too laggy to do anything.

since the card is artifact free at the bios screen, i can just use it as a sacrificial lamb test video card to see if a computer displays anything on the boot screen. if the mobo or psu is bad and blows up the video card, no big loss lol! hahaha!

next, i have a radeon 9600 xt also from ebay. displays fine at the bios screen, also runs games in direct3d fine without artifacts but in 2d or directdraw mode, there are yellow and blue line artifacts acrosss the screen. however, i can watch tv and videos fine without artifacts. really weird... lol

I wonder if the caps isn't the culprit on the 9550. I have a 7300LE that would die if drivers were loaded and the culprit was bad caps. Recapped and it works fine now in a E2160 machine.

[momaka]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

^ I doubt it. ATI cards *usually* use good caps.
Sapphire and VisionTek are some of the brands that sometimes don't. PowerColor too, I think. But an ATI-built card - no way!

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

Update: I installed this M.2+SATA III card to PCI-E 2.0 1x adapter card that i'd bought a while back. Why M.2, you would ask? Well, that's because it's the only card i found on ebay with the Marvell 88SE9130 chipset which supports HyperDuo technology (see here for an in-depth review).

I knew that with the bandwidth limitation of a PCI-E 1x slot, any adapter is not going to get anywhere near native SATA III speeds, as the maximum theoretical throughput of a PCI-E 2.0 1x slot (which is the case here, it's even worse for a 1st gen x1) is 5Gbps, as opposed to the maximum theoretical speed of 6Gbps for a single SATA III port. So there was not much incentive to spend money on a SATA III card for the SSD alone as it would give little benefit vs the motherboard SATA II ports. But this HyperDuo thing seemed interesting, so i bought it. What HyperDuo is, it's SSD auto-tiering, similar to Fusion Drive on a Mac - where SSD and a spinning disk are combined into one logical drive, with the most frequently used data automatically cached to the SSD, effectively giving you the best of both worlds - a large, cheap drive and high speed.

It was obviously left to myself to hack on another SATA port to the card as i had no intention of buying a M.2 SSD - the card uses the SATA connection of the M.2 slot so only SATA SSDs in M.2 form factor are supported, no black magic there. I kept my Samsung PM951 128GB SSD and eventually settled on a recovered 1TB Seagate 7200.11 for the spinner side. I wanted to buy a WD Black for this purpose but hey, this drive was free. This drive was pulled from a 1st generation Xeon Mac Pro that came in with a failed RAID 1 array. Its companion had dead motor bearings, but this one had only a few bad sectors and we could easily get all the data off and rebuild the RAID 1.

Some firmware work and the bad sectors were cleared, also updated to the latest SD1B firmware so the infamous "BSY bug" doesn't bite me. I did several full scans and a few hours of continuous random access testing on the HDD before deeming it fit for use.

I put a second SATA port on the card, cutting off the tracks to the M.2 slot close to the coupling capacitors. This is very important, as due signal to reflection effects on the unterminated transmission line, it is going to cause trouble if you leave them connected. Before i cut them, i was either getting that port detected at just 1.5Gbps (SATA I speed) or the card would just hang POST when a drive was connected to that port.

I made sure to have all signal wires the same length, insulated the signal connectons with kapton tape, then added some conductive tape on top of that (cut from a bad LVDS cable) over the whole job, touching the ground connections, to provide shielding for the high-speed signals. I added the shielding tape after i had some initial data corruption and had to delete the array and start over - it's been working fine since.

The HyperDuo array was built in "Capacity" mode for fastest speed (otherwise you're basically stuck with the write speed of the spinning disk alone). This made a nice chunky 1.02TB usable C: drive - not filling that up anytime soon! I have also added another 2TB Seagate Barracuda that was lying around and set up automatic backup - i am running a rather crummy drive, splitting data with a SSD on a hacked-together controller card - so some failsafe mechanism was in order.

As i later found out, the activity LED was only hooked up to the M.2 slot, so the M.2 SATA drive itself would have handled that, the controller does not have any activity LED output (i've checked the datasheet). So that header you see there is useless, but i'm not going to bother taking it off now.

I am pleased to say that it works great. I did have to load drivers at Windows Setup - Windows 10 would still see the drive without loading any drives, however once the initial file copy was done, Setup would proceed extremely slowly and eventually hang. I initially found some drivers dated 2015 and then some 2016 ones, both work great. Then i had the C: drive show as removable.... Here i found a fix for that.

I do like this card though. It boots really fast - its BIOS screen flashes by so fast it's actually a challenge accessing it - unlike an Asmedia ASM1061-based solution. The Marvell Storage Utility which manages the array under Windows is old and quirky, i had to do a hack to even get the HyperDuo menu to show (and even so, it's kinda buggy), but from what i've read, the card handles all caching on its own anyway at hardware/driver level, and all that utility does in this regard is to allow you to manually specify some extra folders to be cached or not, so it's not a huge deal. It does have some nice additional functions but i do not need any of them as they are mostly administrative/enterprise stuff like sending emails if something interesting happens to the array. Being the boot drive, i could hardly see how that would work if the array fails, anyway.

Was it ultimately worth the $35 i paid for it and the extra work? Well, that's still up for debate, but i would say yes, for the convenience of having a really large, fast boot drive on the cheap. At least so far, it is every bit as fast as having Windows installed on the SSD alone, without the bother of juggling stuff around when the 128GB SSD fills up.

[momaka]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

Was it ultimately worth the $35 i paid for it and the extra work?

Well, it's not just about the money. The other question you should ask yourself is, did you learn something new from doing this and did you have fun. I personally think these two are sometimes more important than money alone. And by the looks of the involvement and energy you put behind this, I'd say you did enjoy it.

Also, pretty cool how you can have an SSD acting sort of as a "cache" for your frequently used data and then the big mechanical HDD as the bulk storage.

For me, this is probably way over my head. So even if I was stuck with using Quantum Bigfoot HDDs, I likely still couldn't/wouldn't have done it. Besides, my daily use PC still has a 80 GB HDD and a Pentium 4, and *overall* I find that fast enough for my needs. I other words, I'm not ready for a fast PC like yours just yet.

PS:
You should get a hot glue gun (or use it more often) - in cases like yours above where there's many loose wires soldered to a loose connector, I always apply a hefty amount of hot glue. It's almost permanent, yet still easy to remove if really needed. And keeps the wires in place in case of an "accident".

I do really dig the metal jacket/shield you put on top of those wires, though. And that QR code on it makes it looks completely legit.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

I have had trouble with hot glue messing up a USB 2.0 signal.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe i hadn't allowed for the solder to cool down fully and the hot glue knocked a wire off. It was years ago. But i have been wary about smearing hot glue over high speed signals since.

Here's a pic of how everything looks in the case. The added port looks as stock as it could be.

Ultimately the header for the LED ended up being useless - turns out it relied on the m.2 SATA SSD to provide the signaling. The controller itself does not have any provision for an activity LED - i've checked the datasheet as well. Now the only time my HDD led lights up is when the computer is performing a backup to the 2TB drive. I'm fine with that.

It has been pretty much smooth sailing so far. I have however found the PC lagging twice now, every time after the weekend. I could restart it from the OS if i was patient, it was just very slow, to the point of mouse cursor lagging. I think it has to do with the scheduled automatic optimization, as i found that window on the screen every time. Must be something wrong with that.

However, when i trigger optimization of the HyperDuo array manually from the admin interface, it is able to perform that with no issues. I think i will disable auto optimization and make an AutoHotkey script to automate the manual procedure, make a scheduled task to run the script and i'll be all set.

Indeed, this computer is overkill for 90% of what i need to do, but for the 10% of work when i need it to shine, it does.

[momaka]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

I have had trouble with hot glue messing up a USB 2.0 signal.

Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe i hadn't allowed for the solder to cool down fully and the hot glue knocked a wire off. It was years ago. But i have been wary about smearing hot glue over high speed signals since.

Hot glue is a special low-melt plastic and is non-conductive at all. So what you saw was probably a coincidence. I've used it over USB 2.0 signal wires myself and even seen some cheap manufacturers do it on front USB headers for PC cases.

Here's a pic of how everything looks in the case. The added port looks as stock as it could be.

Looks good.
And it beats my cable management any day!

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Upgrading my work computer

Turns out the lag issue is a memory leak - happened again over the weekend. Was able to open the task manager and see i was sitting at 98% memory used, but whatever was using the memory was not reported. Haven't had enough patience to wait to see what is causing it and forced a reboot via the command prompt. Will see next weekend.