long term reliablity computer boards

I need a couple USB keyboards if you have any. The wireless keyboard that went to my Viao flatscreen got screwed by the grandkids and I am using a waterproof industrial keyboard....that might be great for a machine tool....but sucks for an 80 words per minute typist.

Gunner

"Somewhere a True Believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimum food or water,in austere conditions, day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon. He doesn't worry about what workout to do--- his rucksack weighs what it weighs, and he runs until the enemy stops chasing him. The True Believer doesn't care 'how hard it is'; he knows he either wins or he dies. He doesn't go home at 1700; he is home. He knows only the 'Cause.' Now, who wants to quit?"

NCOIC of the Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course in a welcome speech to new SF candidates

Reply to
Gunner Asch
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O.K. A stock of drives helps.

As long as the BIOS can *see* the whole drive. You might wind up with a 1TB drive and a BIOS (and perhaps controller chips) limiting you to the first 32 MB of the drive -- nothing else. (What is the max that the BIOS of the machines which you want to use will see in its entirity?

Great! I wish that similar schematics had been available for other switching mode power supplies which I had die. They were treated as proprietary -- if the maker were even still in business. :-)

I note that all of these are for the ATX style power supplies. Is that what your systems use? I wasn't sure from what you had posted.

And the only switching mode power supply which I actually succeeded in repairing was one in a dot matrix printer some decades ago. That one was simple enough so I was able to trace it all out (lots of unsoldering transformers to be able to measure resistances and such, those very few turn transformer windings really make tracing things difficult. It turned out to be a power resistor which was feeding forward enough voltage to get the switcher started. I packed my traced schematic in the printer when I closed it up. :-)

O.K. So *not* all ATX then.

Good Luck, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Hmm ... *that* should have better reliability. Assuming that they don't have the problem that some CF (Compact Flash) cards have when used for computer boot drives instead of camera media. They have a limited number of write cycles, so if you are booting from them and running a lot of things which write all the time, you will eventually run out of write cycles and it will get to be unreliable. If the solid state drives have gotten around that, they sound great. What kind of speeds do they offer?

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Very unlikely to work for machine control purposes. USB has a very high latency delay, so even if you manage to successfully fake out the software and tunnel everything over the USB to the ISA emulator, it will be extremely slow, way too slow for any kind of bus-in-the-loop or realtime application.

You see the same problem even with USB-serial adapters - send blocks of characters and everything is fine, but try to have two devices interact character-by-character and the latency kills you.

Reply to
cs_posting

I know I have a couple. Let me make sure they don't go to something, and that they are good and I'll email you. They are the small footprint Dell USB style

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Much obliged!

Gunner

"Somewhere a True Believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimum food or water,in austere conditions, day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon. He doesn't worry about what workout to do--- his rucksack weighs what it weighs, and he runs until the enemy stops chasing him. The True Believer doesn't care 'how hard it is'; he knows he either wins or he dies. He doesn't go home at 1700; he is home. He knows only the 'Cause.' Now, who wants to quit?"

NCOIC of the Special Forces Assessment and Selection Course in a welcome speech to new SF candidates

Reply to
Gunner Asch

formatting link

32GB: up to 100MB/s (read) 60MB/s (write) 64GB: up to 100MB/s (read) 35MB/s (write)
Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Hmm ... according to that, it is not EIDE but rather SATA. Which means that I could not use it in my old Tadpole SPARC based laptop. (That wants SCSI anyway, so I am still SOL with that. :-) But for other things, it would suffice.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

There are PATA to SATA interfaces for $20 to $30 that plug directly into the solid state drives, and use the standard 4 pin molex & 80 conductor EIDE cables. There also 5.25" bays to slide the SATA drive into, so a drive could be pulled out of one computer and stuffed into the backup machine to get right back to work. The solid state drives are less susceptible to vibration, use less power, and have a five year warranty.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Yes -- but this still does not deal with my need for a larger SCSI interface drive -- in a SPARC based Tadpole laptop. There is not room for one bridge card in the drive caddy (the SATA to PATA) let alone a second one to convert it to SCSI.

Certainly good for systems which use SATA, or even PATA with the appropriate bridge card. I didn't notice prices on the drives, however -- and that might be the killer for me. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

They are under $100. Not out of the question for a machine tool repair.

Do you need some SCSI drives? I may have a few left.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Agreed.

Thanks, but I've got plenty of SCSI drives (2 GB up through about 50 GB) in the more common 3-1/2" and some still in the 5-1/4" sizes.

What I need for the Tadpole is something like 2-1/2" SCSI drives (which of course means that the connector is non-standard for SCSI drives, because a full 50-pin IDC SCSI drive connector is longer than the width of the drives. The only maker I have found still in production is one with IDE drives with a converter module which all fits where the drive would normally go.

And these days, I'm using quite a few FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) drives.

Thanks, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

No problem. I don't have anything that uses SCSI these days. I did find an old Plextor PX--W124TSe external CDROM/burner while looking for the other drives. I did find a Quantum Viking 9.1 GB drive, PX09L011 that I got from a computer store that was closed a couple years ago. It uses the smaller 68 pin connector. I have a similar drive I pulled from a dying HP XP system with a bad motherboard. It was a secondary drive, with a PCI controller card. I don't know if I should hang on to them, or give them away. :(

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

[ ... ]

O.K. That does not sound like anything which would fit the Tadpole, which is the only one which is a problem for me.

Thanks much, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

I think the Ultra 10 I have has an IDE controller card, and I don't plan to fix the dead motherboard.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

The Ultra 5 and Ultra 10 were unusual ones in that they were aimed at the low budget end of the SPARC machine spectrum. Thus the IDE drives.

The Tadpole was made during the SCSI-only period -- and unfortunately the drives which I have are rather small -- with the largest being either 2 GB or 4 GB -- a bit of a squeeze for Solaris 2.6, even before I start putting in my suite of programs. :-)

The connector for external drives is one which was apparently used on some earlier Mac laptops -- an angular square 'D' with a grid of pins. Luckily, I was able to find cables from this to standard SCSI connectors -- but a laptop which *needs* an external disk box is a bit awkward. :-)

Some later SPARC systems may use SAS (SATA) drives, but the period which I am using (except for a couple of U-10s and one U-5) are either SCSI or FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop). The FC-AL drives will let you hook up to 125 drives on a single interface -- though they must slow down if you are trying to use many of them fast at once. But

14 drives spread between two RAID-5 arrays, two hot spares and two just sitting there waiting for a specific need.

Enjoy, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

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