91Chris

Hi. I've got a couple Iron Wolf drives. Set them up with mergerfs. The drives are immediately showing "zzz" in the "disks" utility after files have been transferred. I have tried turning on the standby feature in "drive settings". I have also run... sudo hdparm -I /dev/sdc | grep level ...and get no output. So I run... sudo hdparm -S 120 /dev/sdc and get... /dev/sdc: setting standby to 120 (10 minutes) But nothing. I still see the drive in the "disks" utility with "zzz" immediately after copying a file over to the drives. I checked the SMART data of the drives and both show a lot of errors... Contacted Seagate for support but they told me they couldn't help because i am using Linux. Both drives connected to the SATA 2.0 ports on my X9DRi-LN4F Any help is appreciated, Chris

Ok thanks I will just leave them spare. Thanks for the advice.

Thanks for the reply. Would adding the 2 spare sticks hurt performance though? The board came with 2 sticks and I bought a 128GB set of the same model number. May as well use it if it wont hurt anything? 128 already overkill for me but was only a few quid more than 64.

I find it a little confusing though. Do I share memory equally across both CPU or do I fill one side and not the other? Do I put 2 sticks in some banks and populate all "1" slots or go for complete banks instead? Chris

Hi. Got a X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard and 18 RAM sticks. Little confused on which slots I should populate first. Do a short change each CPU or fill one and leave some blank on the other? Do I populate the "1" slots first or fill the channels. Really no clue. Can anyone help? https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/motherboard/C606_602/MNL-1258.pdf Cheers, Chris

Hi. Its an OSCam server I run. I connect to lots of proxies. I didn't mention it because I doubt anyone would know what it is. Basically it tries to establish a connection to a bunch of servers constantly. Seems like something is getting overloaded on my network. Something I found strange is that the ping to my switch ,which my PC is directly plugged into, is slightly higher than the ping to my router, which is connected through the switch. I wonder if my network is miss configured? I can believe the router getting overloaded, but not the switch, surely? Cheers Edit: Never mind, this explains the higher ping response of the switch vs the router https://superuser.com/questions/1165871/why-the-ping-reply-time-from-switch-is-higher-than-that-from-devices-on-it Seems like a none issue.

Hi. I get very bad ping spikes on my network. If I ping my router or my main switch I see lag spikes and in really bad situations I drop a packet. I know the cause but I don't know why it is happening... My server runs something which connects and sends requests to lots of other servers. Turning this off "fixes" the issue. I am no expert but it seems like there are too many packets for my network to handle? My router is a Apple Airport Extreme 5th and the switch is a Dell PowerConnect 5324 Any experts know how I can find the reason why this happens? My server runs Ubuntu. Cheers, Chris

Supermicro CSE-835 X9DRi-LN4F+

Hi. Recently bought some server hardware, only used consumer stuff up untill now. I want to add more RAM but as I understand it, I have to be carefull with compatability. The RAM that came in the machine is this (uploaded image) Looking on ebay I found plenty of RAM that matches the "M393B1K70CH0-CH9" part, but after that the numbers vary (eg M393B1K70CH0-CH9Q5). Does this matter? Any purchased sticks will be added to the existing RAM. Cheers, Chris

Ye I wanted to add a budget but this is the internet, lots of currencies and market prices. £200-300 $260-360 €230-330 for cpu board and maybe ram too. Ye I belive IOMMU is vt-d on intel system Thanks @NelizMastr those xeons are even suggested on the freenas forums. I think my budget should be able to stretch a little better though?

Hi. Looking to replace my server (i7 860s h55m-ud2h) with something that supports full virtualization and device passthrough. Looking for cheap hardware, I cant afford to buy new. Lots of old server grade stuff on ebay but not really sure what to look for. It doesnt need to be super high end as I am happy with my current hardware... It just doesnt support full virtualization (freenas needs "UG" support). Better is of course better though. Looking to spend £200-300 $260-360 €230-330. Not set in stone but gives you an idea of what I have been looking at on ebay. I am running freenas right now. I will play with the unsupported device pass through methods in bhyve before switching to esxi and running freenas and linux as vms. Any suggestions?

All of the fast boot options are disabled by default. All I do is enable Virtualization and set RAID mode. I will look to see if there is a BIOS switch. I see there are DIP switches on the bottom of the keyboard. Pretty sure it's not a flashy keyboard though, I got it because I thought it was simple... With pretty lights. I see keyboards out there with screens and a bunch of extra buttons etc.

OK so resetting the CMOS did allow me to get into the BIOS, not because I had something set incorrectly but because after resetting it I was prompted to go into the BIOS. I have a physical CMOS reset button on my board so I guess I can just use that each time I want to enter my BIOS. Thanks, Chris.

I tried an old generic Dell keyboard I had lying around, real POS and even that didn't work. I spam the Del key as soon as the PC turns on but nothing. I already run stock BIOS settings with a couple of small changes (nothing to interfere with boot times), so I'd imagine resetting the CMOS will do nothing to help. I will try though and see how it goes.

Hi. I have a GA-Z77X-UP5 TH motherboard and a Ducky Shine 2 (I think, maybe 3). The Motherboard has no PS2 ports, only USB. My PC boots up and loads Windows faster than my keyboard is functional, so I am unable to get into the BIOS. Any ideas on how I can get in? I tried unplugging my drives but this didn't work. Cheers, Chris

Yes. I want to stop that if possible. Maybe some 3rd party software I can use which disables and re-enables that display, preferably automatically or with a hot key or something? Cheers, Chris EDIT: Turns out Windows key + P is good enough. Not automatic but better than digging through menus each time.

Not really sure where to ask this... I have 2 displays. If I switch input on my primary display (away from my PC) Windows continues to display content to that display, even though I cant see it. Is there any way to have Windows shift all content from that display onto my secondary when I switch inputs, then switch back when I select my PC as the input? Hope that makes sense. Maybe some one has already worked around this problem themselves? Cheers, Chris.

OK, kind of counter intuitive but whatever. I understand the computing is done by both GPU's, but surely splitting the displays across multiple cards would reduce some kind of load as the primary card isn't drawing to two displays? I did try connecting my displays to separate cards to test in games and I cant get it to work. The second display shows up in Control panel but is like grey'd out. Doesn't matter which DVI port I use... I'm not expecting a huge difference... if any. I just want to see what the deal is. Chris

Ok, but what if the game I'm playing does not support SLI? Thanks for the replies

Hi. I have 2 GPU's in SLI and 2 displays. My main display is where I play my games and I usually have a Twitch stream or something running on my second display. I've always had both monitors plugged into the same GPU, but the other day I heard someone say that the second display should be plugged into the second GPU. This apparently takes the extra load off the first GPU resulting in higher frames in games. Can anyone confirm this? All the info I found was 5 years old now. The way the guy explained it made sense, but I don't know. Cheers, Chris

Hi. Just installed a new PCI-e network card into my PC. The PC was shut down, but the power supply was left on. As soon as I seated the card the PC booted up, this is something that I have never had happen before. Once in Windows I noticed that my GPU drivers had been removed... Everything apart form GeForce experience. Can anyone explain why this happened or suggest what could have caused it? It's repeatable. Chris.

Chris230291 https://www.vessel.com/videos/LCoY5zfFf https://www.vessel.com/videos/JYZEYDYx0

I didn't mean to. The forum gave me 404 error when I hit "post", so I just did it again. I have no problem buying from Amazon but if I can get the exact same thing much cheaper directly from China then I'd rather do that. I have seen those bad reviews but I am not sure what to make of them to be honest. They could be giving the bad reviews because they are not tech savvy and their issues could just be user related. The video I watched was actually a real time demo doing exactly what I want to do with it, seemingly problem free. I'm pretty tempted to just go ahead and try it based on the video alone, but i thought I'd ask here. Here's the video I mentioned... http://youtu.be/ARTFLCswGuU?t=8m40s Chris.

Hello. Not sure if this is the best section to post this in... Does anyone have any experience with the cheap HDMI capture cards that are available on AliExpress, eBay etc? Ones like these... http://www.aliexpress.com/item/YK762H-PCI-E-HDMI-Video-Capture-Card-161390/32240673391.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/HD-Video-capture-Card-PCIe-1080P30-HDMI/32268733818.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/YK762HY-PCI-E-HDMI-Video-Capture-Card-161389/2048391436.html Just wondering if they are any good? I'm looking at getting one so I can use my PC as a monitor for games consoles where I would play the games through the card via VLC or similar. I'd like any input in regards to quality and latency. I have seen a YouTube video where a guy used one to play his PSP through it and he described it as "snappy". He seemed impressed but more opinions are better. Not interested in solutions like "why not just plug the console directly into your monitor?". This is what I am currently doing but I'd much prefer to play the games "in" Windows so I can just tab in and out of the game without switching inputs. If anyone is already doing what I'm trying to achieve successfully then I'd like to know what hardware you're using. Thanks, Chris.

Hello. Not sure if this is the best section to post this in... Does anyone have any experience with the cheap HDMI capture cards that are available on AliExpress, eBay etc? Ones like these... http://www.aliexpress.com/item/YK762H-PCI-E-HDMI-Video-Capture-Card-161390/32240673391.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/HD-Video-capture-Card-PCIe-1080P30-HDMI/32268733818.html http://www.aliexpress.com/item/YK762HY-PCI-E-HDMI-Video-Capture-Card-161389/2048391436.html Just wondering if they are any good? I'm looking at getting one so I can use my PC as a monitor for games consoles where I would play the games through the card via VLC or similar. I'd like any input in regards to quality and latency. I have seen a YouTube video where a guy used one to play his PSP through it and he described it as "snappy". He seemed impressed but more opinions are better. Not interested in solutions like "why not just plug the console directly into your monitor?". This is what I am currently doing but I'd much prefer to play the games "in" Windows so I can just tab in and out of the game without switching inputs. If anyone is already doing what I'm trying to achieve successfully then I'd like to know what hardware you're using. Thanks, Chris.