The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Oman7,
I installed my CoolIt ECO, the first week of May. That's right at 5 months ago, and I haven't blown it out, or even dusted it yet. It still shows no signs of dust, a modern miracle in these parts, since the dust here get's into everything. It's finer than Talcum Powder and doesn't absorb moisture at all, in fact it somewhat repels water! I never saw much of a buildup of dust with the Freezer 64 in this case, either. I would love it if I didn't have to clean out the radiator for at least a year! LOL!!

Russ

 

Nice idea, but not very practical if it can't fit in a 3.5" bay.

 

Well, you can't fit a hard disk silencer in a 3.5" bay, it's physically impossible since the drive occupies all of the bay anyway.

It's not like anyone actually uses anywhere near all of those 5.25" slots right?



(I'm curious to see how many people recognise this face)

 

Haha no, it's widely known as the 'troll face' - usually accompanying a blindingly obvious troll statement, such as the one I posted above

 

Trolling 4chan again? Whats your handle?

 

Nah I don't tend to post there, just browse (and usually laugh).
As for front bays, my ODD bays have fan controllers and hard disks in them most of the time. Been a long time since I had more than one optical drive (between all of my PCs, let alone in each)

 

I don't use my 5.25" bays, but I can't fit all the hdd's I need in them either lol.

 

Sam, you use PCI or PCI-e to Sata cards. I'm pretty sure you don't run them in raid. So did you have to reflash the cards to IDE mode? I'm really afraid to connect anything to my new SYBA card, until I know I have things right. Windows 7 is not exactly supported on the card. They say on their site to simply run the vista driver. I ran the utility, and it installed a Raid driver. But I'm not interested in running a Raid array :/ I guess my question is, since windows now has some idea of the card installed, will it recognize devices connected to the card? What's more interesting is Device manager is still fickled. Where there were 3 errors, now there are only 2.
SD-SATA-4P

 

Oman7,
It's just the raid driver. You have to install them to be able to hot swap. You don't have to configure raid unless you want to.

From what I remember, the PCI buss is only 66MHz, so for anything but optical drives it's going to be noticeably slower. You can get a PCI-E 4x Sata-II card, but it costs a bit more, still it's 4 internal Sata-II ports and 2 e-Sata ports, running on a 100MHz buss. After this one the price goes up a good bit to have 4 internal SataII ports.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...controller_pci_express-_-16-132-018-_-Product

Russ

 

From what I remember PCI =
33Mhz x 4 bytes (32 bit) = 133MB/s
66MHz x 4 bytes (64 bit) = 266MB/s

AFAIK most devices are 32 bit. Hard to tell as it's not something that's usually in the specs. Could someone clarify as to what is the usual for standard devices ie a sound card or SATA card? I think using a 64 bit OS automatically sets it to 64 bit though I could be wrong.

If using a PCI card for just storage(not OS) you should be able to get by just fine. Of course accessing multiple disks at once would probably bog down pretty quick but using a single drive should get the drive's full performance. Also of note if you use any other PCI cards, they share bandwidth. IIRC the sound card starts skipping when I put heavy load on my friend's PCI SATA controller. Take away the load, and the sound is normal again. Not a perfect example I know but it should give you an idea of how PCI acts.

 

Russ, I shouldn't need a new card :S

Gosh, this reminds me of the IDE card I bought a while back. Never could get that pos running either. I even emailed startech...

Lots of people use this Syba card. I guess all that's left to do is simply connect drives to it, and go from there

I use onboard audio. I imagine running multiple transfers via the card would saturate it fairly easily

 

The card I bought came with drivers for Vista x64 I think, which worked fine on Server 2008R2 (server version of Win7).
I did not have to do anything special to get the cards working on Server 08. They were a nightmare to get drivers for in XP, but relatively straightforward for Server08.

I have not had any issues with sound skipping when using several of the PCI cards, but that's not too surprising, since I'm pretty certain the onboard audio for modern boards runs of the PCI Express bus, not the PCI bus. There are, however, several SATA cards in the 1x slots in this system as well.

 

Well...this is a friggin nightmare. I may be on the right track now though. Syba's web site is a joke. That or I am Quite frankly though, it should not be this difficult to plug and play this damn card! I decided to go to silicon image site and go for their specific drivers. Looks good. But now I have to find out how to flash my card to IDE bios. THEN I can get down to business. I guess the reviews weren't joking...

I found what I theoretically need. Hopefully I don't brick the card. But it's under warranty, so...

Wow. Windows 7 is really something. I removed the Raid utility which installed itself of its own accord, and now windows 7 sees my BD drive which is connected. Weird...

 

Oman7,
Once you removed the Raid drivers, it is automatically set to IDE Mode, so there's no flash necessary!

Russ

 

Well...it certainly passed the transfer rate test. It hit 16X right as it hit the end of a optical disc. That's all I really need. Unfortunately, device manager is only calling it Cd-rom drive. Not its proper name. Imgburn, and windows explorer sees it properly though. Pretty weird stuff. I think I'll run it like this for a few days, and see how it goes. The two exclamation points are still in the device manager. If I attempt to uninstall them, windows freezes. I worry about data corruption at this point, so only optical drives for now...

You've sure been around the block haven't you russ

 

Perhaps I am confused, but why make your SATA card run as IDE? Doesn't installing RAID drivers enable full SATA function to this card? You don't have to set up a RAID array, just because you install the drivers.
Perhaps i am missing a key part of this conversation...

 

I assume maybe you need it in IDE mode to run DVD drives form it? No idea, I've never installed more optical drives than will fit on the motherboard.