Hardware For Sale/Trade

A couple obvious questions would be... How much are you looking to get for them, and where are you located? Are they new or used?

Are they 12V-only drives (meaning pulled from EMC arrays that don't supply 5V)?

Are they 520-byte sector size, and if so, have you tried converting one of them to 512-byte to see if it will work? Some 520-byte drives throw a check condition when you try to switch to 512-byte.

Chris

i am looking to get $200 usd each if someone is only interested in a few. however i have no problem dropping the price considerably if someone is interested in a larger quantity. they are used drives and located in southern ct.

as for the specifics of the drives im not sure how to tell sector size or voltage.. would the part number or firmware number be able to tell you these?

Disk drives display their voltage requirements on the label. Normal drives say something along the lines of:

+5V 1.0A
+12V 1.3A

But if a drive is 12V-only, it'll say

+5V ----
+12V 1.8A

Note the dashes next to the 5. That means it doesn't use 5, and only uses 12.

There's no sure-fire way to know what the sector size is or what it's fixed to. If the firmware version is "000x", where "x" is typically going to be in the 1 to 4 range, then it's a generic drive, and won't have any firmware problems. Anything other than "000x" means it's an OEM drive, which may or may not be 520-byte.


As a point of reference, I actually don't have any interest in buying these drives. I'm just trying to help you gather all the information you need to be completely up-front with your customers. 12V-only drives or drives that are fixed at 520-byte are difficult for the lay person to work with.


Chris

ok maybe i should have looked a little closer before saying i didnt know the voltage..
it says. +5 1.2
+12 1.1

the large sticker says firmware xr55 but theres a smaller sticker at the bottom that says "firmware revision xr52"

XR52 and XR55 sounds to me like Xyratex. Xyratex, from what I recall, doesn't play silly games with the sector size, so I would be willing to wager that the drives you have there are either "normal" or can be made "normal" with a small amount of effort using Seagate's SeaTools Enterprise Edition (free download from Seagate).

Chris

only problem i have is i have no fc connection to see if your right...

nobody's interested in these huh?

We're all interested but in case you hadn't noticed, money is not growing on trees these days

Addendum: all SOLD OUT. No upgrades until someone points me to another batch of RM7000-600T CPUs.
Btw., I´m not going to buy a batch of 665 pcs. from China unless these are far less than a buck per piece .

Sorry.

Edit: No use to suggest 7035 and 7065 CPUs - these are not pin (ball ) compatible with the RM5271.

The 7035 should be a perfect match for the rm5231 in the Cobalt Qube. I'll trade you one Qube2 for an upgrade

If somebody wants a 600Mhz working module for O2, I have one I could sell, just PM me with the right price.

ORLY? I wonder how your asking price compares to Ian's? This is tempting.

It seems I was again too fast on the trigger ...
about half a dozen of O2 CPU modules which proved dysfunctional in the past will eventually take part in another attempt to be upgraded to 600MHz.
I´ll possibly get me some more bare CPUs from China or elsewhere where they are available by the hundreds.
For a small quantity of 10 prices vary between 15 and 35 bucks.

The staff at the repair shop told me that if BGA CPUs grow old unsoldered due to oxidation of contacts the soldering process becomes more difficult.
Anyway, it is controlled optically afterwards using x-ray; but one can´t use a bare CPU twice if there were short-cuts detected since reballing is much too expensive.

TBC

How complex is that board, edefault ? There are hungry people in Guangdong these days. Those boards are a little rare and expensive, plus they are old. Complete new ones might be cheaper and better ? Not that hard to reverse engineer even a six-layer, throw them in a surface grinder and take off .010", photograph, take off another .010" and photograph, etc etc.

900's would be even spiffier tho

Yep, someone to reverse-engineer an O2 module would eventually want to use a more powerful CPU from the PMC MIPS series..
IMO not going to happen, though: there are not enough O2 owners out there willing to buy, say, a decent 1GHz CPU module.
Or are there? I´d gladly donate a module
Another issue: now IRIX is discontinued, with no source code available ... would it be possible to get it running on non-SGI hardware?

If I could get a bare CPU (or three) and the SPROM plus whatever else, I could try a conversion with one of my modules and work up a profile for the BGA soldering.

I've learned BGA rework over the past two years and have never had a single bridge. Granted, I use a Teradyne Summit 750 for re-flow so that helps a bit. I inspect with a Photon Dynamics x-ray.

I'm learning re-balling now.

I make a loss on my hobbyist pricing. Not managed to tempt any commercial sales yet though.

Ian.

Not possible without the O2 PROM source (according to Joe) and SGI told me this will not be released. Unless Rackable
decides otherwise, 600 is it for O2.

Ian.

That's why I was thinking brand new boards would be the way to go. Starting out with a $125 used board then going thru all the hand labour to de-populate it, then solder on another chip, then check and recheck because all the parts were used, that's got to be a lot more work than starting with new components.

The prom data would make this a real winner tho. I myself am kind of iffy at 600 but 900 ... I know, performance is not all about processor speed but still ...

Yeah, a new board would be cool if possible, and maybe make it easier to offer larger L2/L3?



Joe & I had originally hoped to offer a 1.5GHz module with 16MB L2. That was our initial plan. Then the Sandcraft chip didn't
seem so much like it would be possible, so we aimed for 900MHz. Note the L2 was to be 50% faster than normal (IBM told Joe
this was important to help match the faster CPU clock). Alas, without the PROM source, not gonna happen.

To clarify, here's the response I had from SGI as of Jun/09:



Sorry guys...

Ian.

PS. I have a slightly different theory. I don't think they even have the PROM source anymore. My guess is the dev systems
have long since gone, ditched during shakeouts, Chap11, buyout, etc. I know the ICE-dev systems went long ago.