A note to AOC-SIM1U+ card owners

 

I am attaching a tool that might be copied to the unRAID flash stick and run directly from within unRAID after booting in order to list or set settings of the IPMI card! Works like a charm. No need for a monitor and keyboard at anytime, even while setting up an used SIM1U+ with already programmed IP address.

 

Boot into unRAID and call the attached executable. The file is an ELF executable, so check/set +x and execute.

Calling it without parameter list possible cmdline parameters.

ipmicfg-linux.x86.cfg

A note to AOC-SIM1U+ card owners

 

I am attaching a tool that might be copied to the unRAID flash stick and run directly from within unRAID after booting in order to list or set settings of the IPMI card! Works like a charm. No need for a monitor and keyboard at anytime, even while setting up an used SIM1U+ with already programmed IP address.

 

Boot into unRAID and call the attached executable. The file is an ELF executable, so check/set +x and execute.

Calling it without parameter list possible cmdline parameters.

 

Thanks for that, this will come in handy once my card shows up

Thanks starcat.

 

I am still looking to find a bargain for the AOC-SIMu!+ card.  In the meantime, I have ordered four 2TB drives and hope to have a total of nine by the time I am ready to build.  I think the bottleneck will be waiting for the Norco 4224 case with the 120mm fans to be released.

 

By the way, if anyone sees a bargain for the Corsair CMPSU-750HX, let me know.  I am also on the watch for bargain for the Kingston KVR800D2E5 RAM modules and a 2 GB USB flash drive.

Good luck getting a deal on the RAM, I ordered 2G. about a week ago. RAM has been going up, up, up. I paid $65.98 shipped from the egg. I just closed my eyes and clicked the button, it was painful.

Good luck getting a deal on the RAM, I ordered 2G. about a week ago. RAM has been going up, up, up. I paid $65.98 shipped from the egg. I just closed my eyes and clicked the button, it was painful.

PAINFUL??  I paid US$500 +SH&H for my first 16MB RAM upgrade. At the time I was doing graphics design and prperess production on a state of the art machine with 4MB of RAM, and I can't tell you how happy I was whan I upgraded it to 16MB! That machine started flying I tell you! I thought no sane person would ever need more RAM that that.  

Now you talk about painful!    How times have changed!

 

Good luck getting a deal on the RAM, I ordered 2G. about a week ago. RAM has been going up, up, up. I paid $65.98 shipped from the egg. I just closed my eyes and clicked the button, it was painful.

 

If you know how to search you most definetely can and will find a great deals on ECC DDR2 unbuffered memory. Reasons - the 1GBit DDR2 chips were selling for under 80 cents a year ago (and you need 18 pcs of these for 2GB ECC stick). Today's price for these is close to $3.

The trick is to find a vendor with old stock (at the old price) and place your order. Remember we are buying a kind of "server" memory and this is not what the general population is after.

So good luck to you all.

 

For example I just bought 4 sticks of 2GB DDR2 800 MHz ECC unbuffered memory for Can $ 33.47 each (the vendor only shipped 2 and they are still in transit)

 

 

 

 

By the way, if anyone sees a bargain for the Corsair CMPSU-750HX, let me know.

 

Btw, if you are building a low noise server, take a look at the Seasonic X-Series X-750 750W ATX 2.3 (SS-750KM) PSU, it is the same as the 750HX but has a temp controlled fan that spins only when needed, i.e. most of the time it won't spin keeping overal noise level down. I have such in another computer and this PSU is a dream. Actually the 750HX is built by Seasonic for Corsair.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151087

PAINFUL??  I paid US$500 +SH&H for my first 16MB RAM upgrade. At the time I was doing graphics design and prperess production on a state of the art machine with 4MB of RAM, and I can't tell you how happy I was whan I upgraded it to 16MB! That machine started flying I tell you! I thought no sane person would ever need more RAM that that.  
Now you talk about painful!  Grin  How times have changed! 

 

 

Okay, so it looks like I'm older. I paid ~$500 for my first memory upgrade (Mac Plus), I think it was 2 Meg, $850 for a 300 dpi inkjet printer, $500 for a 40M hard disk... fun times.

I remember paying that much for a 64K memory update to 128K total!

I remember paying that much for a 64K memory update to 128K total!

Oh yes!! That was for the Apple II right?

 

I paid ~$500 for my first memory upgrade (Mac Plus), I think it was 2 Meg

LOL and now you call ~$70 for 2000 Meg "painful"!!  

 

You'd think we are now doing our jobs 2000 times better... Nope! The os dino eats 1999 parts of it and we are just as productive as before.

 

It was for an Atari 8bit. My friend did the update for his Apple II. Both systems used the the 6502 cpu. It's how I got started in programming. My, those days were so long ago.

Most of the really cool 'wow' stuff on the Apple II was done with 'peek' and 'poke' commands, remember?

I remember paying something like $2800 for my first Apple II.  Upgrades included DUAL floppy drives, 32K RAM, 'Visi Calc' speadsheet, 'PFS Write' Word processor (you could do bold or underlined text), and a dot matrix printer that weighed about 40 lbs.

 

...and I do remember PEEK and POKE 

 

It was for an Atari 8bit. My friend did the update for his Apple II. Both systems used the the 6502 cpu. It's how I got started in programming. My, those days were so long ago.

 

Ha! memory lane visit... I had a C64 with the 6502. I programmed an assembly utility to use the MIDI port. Didn't realize I had to put delays in there, sent program change commands to every device on the MIDI bus and crashed everything. LOL! those were the days, the things we could do with 64k.  What a great lil machine!  Reminiscing.......

What trip down memory lane would be complete without a bit of Geocities action (fair warning: awesome music ensuing)...

Man I had two 8 bit atari computers an 800 (48mb ram max) and later a 800xl with 64Mb of ram - laser turbo firmware upgrade on the FDD, 80 and 120 column switchable display, it was totally pimped!

 

28" TV as a monitor. That was like 30 yrs ago!

 

 

Man I had two 8 bit atari computers an 800 (48[red]m[/red]b ram max) and later a 800xl with 64[red]M[/red]b of ram

That was 48KB, not 48MB! 

 

 

You sir are correct. It was indeed KB not MB. Oh boy those 30 years are catching up!!!! 

 

 

You sir are correct. It was indeed KB not MB. Oh boy those 30 years are catching up!!!! 

 

They made 28" monitors 30 years ago?

I have been running the SMART test, short disk scan, long disk scan, and full zeroing writes on the new drives that I've been receiving in anticipation of my Unraid build.  The 2TB drives that I am testing are:

 

3 Western Digital WD20EARS

3 Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS

1 (with 2 more coming) Samsung Spinpoint F3EG HD203WI

 

Using the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows utility on my Windows XP laptop, I have noticed that the WD20EARS are the slowest for the full zeroing writes.  We are talking about 6 hours longer than the Seagate and Samsung drives!  I was not using the jumper on pin 7 & 8 on the first 2 WD20EARS and the long disk scan would take 20+ hours and the full zeroing write would take about 17 hours.  On my last WD20EARS, I placed a jumper on pin 7 & 8 and the long disk scan took less than 10 hours (on par with the Samsung and Seagate drives).  But the full zeroing write is still taking over 16 hours compared to about 10 hours for the Seagate and Samsung drives!

 

01. To clarify, pin 7 & 8 are the left most pins on the WD20EARS?

 

02. Now that these disks have passed all the pre-clearing tests, I wished there was just a way to write the pre-clear header on these disks instead of having to run them through the pre-clear stages again once I get my Unraid server running.

 

I decided to pre-clear these drives under Windows since I could not afford to have my only computer tied up running Unraid while pre-clearing these drives.  I needed to quickly determine if the drives are good just in case I needed to return a bad drive.

I have been running the SMART test, short disk scan, long disk scan, and full zeroing writes on the new drives that I've been receiving in anticipation of my Unraid build.  The 2TB drives that I am testing are:

 

3 Western Digital WD20EARS

3 Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS

1 (with 2 more coming) Samsung Spinpoint F3EG HD203WI

 

Using the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for Windows utility on my Windows XP laptop, I have noticed that the WD20EARS are the slowest for the full zeroing writes.  We are talking about 6 hours longer than the Seagate and Samsung drives!  I was not using the jumper on pin 7 & 8 on the first 2 WD20EARS and the long disk scan would take 20+ hours and the full zeroing write would take about 17 hours.  On my last WD20EARS, I placed a jumper on pin 7 & 8 and the long disk scan took less than 10 hours (on par with the Samsung and Seagate drives).  But the full zeroing write is still taking over 16 hours compared to about 10 hours for the Seagate and Samsung drives!

 

01. To clarify, pin 7 & 8 are the left most pins on the WD20EARS?

 

02. Now that these disks have passed all the pre-clearing tests, I wished there was just a way to write the pre-clear header on these disks instead of having to run them through the pre-clear stages again once I get my Unraid server running.

 

I decided to pre-clear these drives under Windows since I could not afford to have my only computer tied up running Unraid while pre-clearing these drives.  I needed to quickly determine if the drives are good just in case I needed to return a bad drive.

Just "writing" zeros to the disk will not allow its smart firmware to detect un-readable sectors.  You might be able to perform a "long" test both before and afterwords and end up with the equivalent read/write/read process.

 

I never created a method to only set a pre-clear-signature on a disk.  Too risky for 99.999% of the users out there.

Thanks Joe L.  I thought about running the full read/write/read, but decided not to do it since I would have to still run the pre-clear script later when I have a dedicated server.

 

For now, my intention is to quickly and confidently identify good drives from dead drives and so I am only performing a short scan, long scan, full write, and a final short scan.  One drive arrived with plenty of bubble wrap, but half of the drive was unwrapped.  Luckily there were foam peanuts in the box.

 

According to Seagate, the short scan gives you a 90% confidence that the drive is good.  The long scan gives the remaining 10%.  I read that on their support web site.

According to Seagate, the short scan gives you a 90% confidence that the drive is good.  The long scan gives the remaining 10%.  I read that on their support web site.

 

Those number seem a little off to me.  I have had a few drives pass a couple rounds of preclear only to fail within the month.  Had i not done the rounds of preclear it could have taken a much longer period of time for the drive to fail.

Thanks Joe L.  I thought about running the full read/write/read, but decided not to do it since I would have to still run the pre-clear script later when I have a dedicated server.

 

For now, my intention is to quickly and confidently identify good drives from dead drives and so I am only performing a short scan, long scan, full write, and a final short scan.  One drive arrived with plenty of bubble wrap, but half of the drive was unwrapped.  Luckily there were foam peanuts in the box.

 

According to Seagate, the short scan gives you a 90% confidence that the drive is good.  The long scan gives the remaining 10%.  I read that on their support web site.

True, the short scan verifies the "read" electronics works.  I've never read anywhere it writes to the disk at all.  The long scan reads all the sectors.   In my mind, neither gives 100% confidence the drive is good since they do not attempt to write to the entire drive.

 

I've had disks arrive with no bubble-wrap. just some crumpled paper.  I much prefer the "Retail Kits" when I purchase a disk since their packaging is so much better.

 

Joe L.

Joe L.

01. To clarify, pin 7 & 8 are the left most pins on the WD20EARS?

 

That seems to be correct, but always double-check your drive's sticker just to make sure: