SGI: Hardware

Can't wait they should be here next week

Right now I have 3 9-gig drives a 9 gig system drive and 18gig striped for data. Both will be replaced by a 120GB SSD.

Going to then clone the 9gig system drive to the SSD and copy the rest over then boom, a ton more space AND 3 less drives spinning and making noise!

But then the other part of me says I should put the Octane away and focus on my O2...get it pimped out and silent.

Finally got around to doing this!

I used the instructions here:
http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Clone_System_Disk

Turns out I had 3 17.3gb drives in there, not 3 9s but oh well, it's all smaller than the 120gb in there now!

Disabled the stripe I had between two drives and took them out.

Things to note:
1. The system drive is the BOTTOM drive in an Octane, not the top
2. The SE jumper MUST be set, and the SCSI ID jumpers must be removed for the Octane to see the drive
3. I had to put the SSD in the top bay to get it to be seen by hinv, middle bay wouldn't work - could just have been user error
4. The cloning process was full of SPAMS of errors about the RAD thread not running for 32mS. It caused me to miss when it actually ended

All told things start much quicker and fewer moving parts means things are that much quieter!
Next up I'll be trying to replace some fans in this thing. I have a spare Cherokee that hasn't been plugged in in months that's probably safe to open up without killing myself...

Lastly, some (manually transcribed since the Octane isn't on the net right now) diskperf details

diskperf -W -D -t5 -r512k -m4m test/testfile (a 2gig file)



(numbers were withing .5MB/S across all sizes from 512k to 4m)

Now I'm wishing I had taken numbers with the OLD drive before I removed it!

vegac wrote: But then the other part of me says I should put the Octane away and focus on my O2...get it pimped out and silent.

it might not really be worth the effort with the o2 - I have a 300mhz r5k o2 and even when i had dual 250mhz SE octane, it was no contest, the octane blew the o2 out of the water for almost anything other than maybe 1 or 2 texture demos and quake. (In fact my Indigo2 195Mhz R10k Max Impact blew the o2 away at a lot of things also)!

I seem to think it has a lot to do with the horrible SCSI trasnfer speeds of the o2 and the system disk - the system disk gets some really horrible performance no matter how good of a drive you put in it (never tried a SSD doe...) or at least that was my take away when I was last playing with it a few months ago.

I was playing with the idea of creating a 3 channel striped volume on my o2 and putting /usr and maybe /var on it (internal SCSI, external SCSI and PCI bus SCSI - last i played with it got ~80MB/s sustained). But really it would just be nothing close to a similar setup on an Octane (lack of time and workspace in my house is actually the main reason why I haven't tried yet). If you have a 400mhz r10k o2 then I can't really speak the same of it - I never got my hands on one.

Now if performance is not exactly that vital then I can see the allure - people still tell me its a very cool looking system

I had a 300MHz R10K O2 and have to say it never felt that quick to me. Always felt my R10K Indigo2 IMPACT felt like a faster system overall. Couldn't say why, and whether it was all in my mind though as I never did any benchmarks or anything to back that up.

in my experience the o2 always was a dog, even when brand new. remember the disappointment in the lab when we got those when they were sgi's newest and people going back to using their R5k indy's pretty quickly. it just did not feel like a substantial upgrade. upside were some prett useful video/texture capabilities and of course the looks.

as for the SSD upgrade i have to say i'm a bit surprised about those numbers. it's not even maxing out the internal bus from the looks of it? is that the adaptor? would be interesting to see how it performs when hooked up to one of those U160 adaptors or whatever fastest you can install in an octane.

chicaneuk wrote: I had a 300MHz R10K O2 and have to say it never felt that quick to me. Always felt my R10K Indigo2 IMPACT felt like a faster system overall. Couldn't say why, and whether it was all in my mind though as I never did any benchmarks or anything to back that up.

Yes, I have said o2 and it's been put in storage for the time being. Speed wise, it seemed OK, but just indifferent to my R5.

The o2 will get use when I get round to buying a bigger house, it will just probably have a headless task since it still does look soooo sexy.

It's true than an O2 doesn't hold a candle performance-wise to an Octane (especially my 550mhz r14k...though I still have dreams of a dual 600mhz) but let's be honest here, NONE of these machines really hold a candle performance-wise to a modern machine so that's not why I'm here.

After playing with it more though, I think most of my noise was coming from my 3 SCSI drives as the system is over-all much quieter than before, and I think with a fan swap or two I could get it NEARLY silent...

GIJoe wrote: as for the SSD upgrade i have to say i'm a bit surprised about those numbers. it's not even maxing out the internal bus from the looks of it? is that the adaptor? would be interesting to see how it performs when hooked up to one of those U160 adaptors or whatever fastest you can install in an octane.

the speed seems reasonable for a 40 MB/sec SCSI bus...octanes have slow scsi. If you need faster storage add a FC card and hide a shelf in the garage.

is it possible to tune the system by moving the OS and apps over to a really fast filesystem and only have the absolute minimum of data required to kick off the boot process on a disk recognized in the PROM? i imagine having it all on an SSD connected to something faster than internal UW-SCSI would make a ton of difference to the overall experience. heck, even starting netscape might be quick.

GIJoe wrote: is it possible to tune the system by moving the OS and apps over to a really fast filesystem and only have the absolute minimum of data required to kick off the boot process on a disk recognized in the PROM? i imagine having it all on an SSD connected to something faster than internal UW-SCSI would make a ton of difference to the overall experience. heck, even starting netscape might be quick.

There were some posts I recall reading by Ian Mapleson about moving /usr and /var to fast filesystems and from what I recall other people did that and said there was a significant improvement