N8YX
02-10-2013, 12:54 PM
Once upon a time I had this nice little Shuttle Micro ATX (3.06GHz; 4GB RAM, 120GB HD) sitting on the shelf doing rig control duties. In the "Chit Chat" HRD thread I laid out the connection scheme...though at the time it was connected to both a TS-940S and an R-5000. This layout required 5 serial ports, 3 of which were facilitated by a 4-port PCI card.
Fast forward to the kachunka event. It's always a bad sign when your hard disk starts going kachunka, kachunka.
Rigs, peripherals and Shuttle got parked on the shelf. FT-980 made its way into the newly opened hole...
Last week I got hold of a new Intel 180GB solid state drive. Idea was to cut down on heat and eliminate any moving part failure modes from the equation. Well...seems all of those are SATA and my motherboards don't have SATA ports.
As a proof of concept I liberatedborrowed a SiiG SATA-4 PCI card from another system and swapped the Shuttle's 4-port serial card for the drive controller...then used CloneZilla to prep the SSD. Of course, it won't boot without drivers. So...we take the other (good) Shuttle PC and repeat the process after booting its IDE hard drive up then installing the SiiG drivers.
Once the SATA drive would boot...Windows Activation started whining, as the drive types and numbers have changed. Out comes my install disk and a Repair installation is attempted...but the Windows "Additional Drivers" routine kept throwing errors when pointed to the SiiG driver disk. :wall:
A new one is made, the drivers accepted...and the Repair installation proceeds. I plug in my product key at the appropriate time and let the system finish configuring itself.
After everything completes I make one observation: Man, this thing is fast. The IDE drive took about 3 minutes to get to a login screen from the time bootup commences. The SATA SSD takes about 3 seconds.
I need more I/O ports and less SATA ports. Though a combination serial ATA/serial port board doesn't seem to exist, I did find this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad5u2sa.php
8852
As a bonus it uses the same chipset (Sil3114) as the SiiG unit I have installed.
Need to get hold of two of those cards - one for each of the Shuttles - and two more Nvidia EVGA6200 or equivalent display adapters. Those are nicely supported by various flavors of Linux, and since the systems are being set up as dual-boot it makes sense to go with what works everywhere.
Fast forward to the kachunka event. It's always a bad sign when your hard disk starts going kachunka, kachunka.
Rigs, peripherals and Shuttle got parked on the shelf. FT-980 made its way into the newly opened hole...
Last week I got hold of a new Intel 180GB solid state drive. Idea was to cut down on heat and eliminate any moving part failure modes from the equation. Well...seems all of those are SATA and my motherboards don't have SATA ports.
As a proof of concept I liberatedborrowed a SiiG SATA-4 PCI card from another system and swapped the Shuttle's 4-port serial card for the drive controller...then used CloneZilla to prep the SSD. Of course, it won't boot without drivers. So...we take the other (good) Shuttle PC and repeat the process after booting its IDE hard drive up then installing the SiiG drivers.
Once the SATA drive would boot...Windows Activation started whining, as the drive types and numbers have changed. Out comes my install disk and a Repair installation is attempted...but the Windows "Additional Drivers" routine kept throwing errors when pointed to the SiiG driver disk. :wall:
A new one is made, the drivers accepted...and the Repair installation proceeds. I plug in my product key at the appropriate time and let the system finish configuring itself.
After everything completes I make one observation: Man, this thing is fast. The IDE drive took about 3 minutes to get to a login screen from the time bootup commences. The SATA SSD takes about 3 seconds.
I need more I/O ports and less SATA ports. Though a combination serial ATA/serial port board doesn't seem to exist, I did find this:
http://www.addonics.com/products/ad5u2sa.php
8852
As a bonus it uses the same chipset (Sil3114) as the SiiG unit I have installed.
Need to get hold of two of those cards - one for each of the Shuttles - and two more Nvidia EVGA6200 or equivalent display adapters. Those are nicely supported by various flavors of Linux, and since the systems are being set up as dual-boot it makes sense to go with what works everywhere.