Nekonomicon - Dr. Dave

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of USB Mass Storage at Dec. 2, 2010, 11:34 p.m...

And this is why most 'NAS' products are deficient.

Once you set up a real fileserver and go the NFS route, you really don't care. A little Atom board with gigabit and PCIE, and you're cooking. You just plug the USB mass storage device there and mount away remotely.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of USB Mass Storage at Dec. 3, 2010, 12:17 a.m...

I'm old-skool here, a ZX10 motherboard (SGI bios!) with a pair of P3-1GHz processors. Serverworks chipset, dual-channel SDRAM. Bunch of 64-bit PCI slots, some 66 MHz. In an SGI rack case with (if I remember right) 11 hard drives with everything but the system disk running RAID. System cooked a Silencer 750 PSU a couple of years back with a BANG-BANG-BANG, it's got an Antec Signature 850 in it now - basically a good Delta server-grade PSU in a standard PC form factor. In the process of moving up to Infiniband for some of the fatter network links.

With GigE, pretty much you can consider the network storage local, whether the mounts are Windows native or NFS. I know the 4-disk 1.5 TB RAID stripe wonks about 130MB/sec when tested locally, so it's the Gig-E that's the bottleneck, and it's running 64-bit, 66 MHz on the PCI side. No matter what anyone says, it's really all about the bandwidth.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.
and authored 2311 notes

Wrote on the subject of Fuel DMediaPro DM6 PCI Digital Video at Dec. 20, 2010, 10:29 p.m...

I have a few of them here, but they look like the -001 version with the green PCB. I also have some of the brackets with the cables which plug into the connectors on the top of the board, though these are likely not used when running in SGI mode. I think that these cards can also handle audio - but traditionally SGI's use a separate discrete audio path - so it likely goes unused.

Differences seem to be in the top connectors, obviously. I'd bet the boards are electrically and functionally equivalent, with the 'newer' board utilizing smaller parts, and looks like it has centralized the logic a bit more (one big Xilinx as opposed to a bunch of various glue FPGA/CPLD's), and since many Xilinx parts include internal RAM, you don't need external memory chips. This also might explain the '3V only' change as well. There also is significantly less heatsinking on the newer board, which also leads me to believe the newer board is evolutionary, as this all adds up to the sorts of changes boards go through from first revisions.

Supposedly the DM6 works in Octane too. Anyone remember offhand if they are keyed for 5V or 3V in the shoebox/shoehorns?

_________________
:O3000:

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel: 700 MHz, 4GB RAM, V12, GigE, 2xU320, DM6 at Dec. 20, 2010, 10:32 p.m...

You should be able to find the DB9 cross-cables super cheap at your local satellite shop, they were often used for upgrading firmware on FTA units.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel: 700 MHz, 4GB RAM, V12, GigE, 2xU320, DM6 at Dec. 20, 2010, 11:19 p.m...

The Sound Blaster Audigy (with the firewire port) works fine, though the firewire port is purely cosmetic. The Audigy2 cards have sample-rate issues that render them problematic on a Fuel. Some of the later 'cheaper' Audigy cards don't use the EMU chip though, so best to stick with the original Audigy (or the Audigy ES, same minus the firewire).

An M-Audio Revolution 7.1 is the best one obviously but practically unobtanium, and the RAD boards require an external DAC.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel: 700 MHz, 4GB RAM, V12, GigE, 2xU320, DM6 at Dec. 20, 2010, 11:47 p.m...

smj wrote:

Dr. Dave wrote: The Sound Blaster Audigy (with the firewire port) works fine, though the firewire port is purely cosmetic. The Audigy2 cards have sample-rate issues that render them problematic on a Fuel. Some of the later 'cheaper' Audigy cards don't use the EMU chip though, so best to stick with the original Audigy (or the Audigy ES, same minus the firewire).

That's interesting, because the recommendations I'd read specified the Audigy2 ZS. Does the "ZS" avoid the sample-rate issues you mention?

Nope. I got one to try a while back. Almost impossible to watch a movie without getting sound sync problems. Only the original versions work with no major issues. I think the Audigy2's use an updated EMU processor that is not 100% back compatible at the register level.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel: 700 MHz, 4GB RAM, V12, GigE, 2xU320, DM6 at Dec. 21, 2010, 1:13 p.m...

It should be noted that the RAD will drive the coax digital input on a consumer home-theatre receiver, but only for stereo as far as I can tell. These are easy to come by, and should be cheap to do.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

Dr. Dave
From Ottawa, Canada >burp<
Who joined Feb. 13, 2004, 10:37 p.m.

Wrote on the subject of Fuel / Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Only Mono? at May 14, 2011, 2:13 a.m...

I've tested both the Audigy2 and Audigy cards on a Fuel, and can say that the Audigy2 cards 'almost work'. Their biggest annoyance is when watching videos the audio unsyncs annoyingly, and basically just doesn't work quite right. In a pinch, for basic sound, it'd be OK but not perfect.

The regular Audigy work fine however. I suspect the Audigy2 is not quite 100% back compatible with the older Audigy parts, and in both cases IRIX is trying to only talk Audigy to both with the same driver.

I just looked here, the boards are the SB0090 boards and ignore the error on bootup in the logfile. They work perfect. There is also a version that does not have the firewire port that should also work, but I've never seen one.

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Once you step up to the big iron, you learn all about physics, electrical standards, and first aid - usually all in the same day

The collected works of Dr. Dave - Page 4