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Chetar Ruby

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  1. Greetings fellow system builders. I am a computer refurbisher, taking old systems and reviving them to be useful again! Often I find myself needing PCIe 6-pin to 8-pin adapters to install decent GPU's into older machines to make them nice. I have been buying these things from Amazon. And well, I'm learning now, they're very very bad quality, getting very hot when used. And sometimes literally de-soldering themselves from the connector. So my question if anyone has recommendations: Where can I purchase some good quality PCIe 6-pin to 8-pin adapters, not made with cheap hair-thin aluminum wiring? Thanks for reading this. Hope y'all got some good suggestions!
  2. Because I'm not interested in that. It's failed. There is something wrong with it. I don't know what, but the only way I can be sure is to write off the entire thing. My data is priceless. I'm exceedingly upset about the damage and time wasted. I'm not going to give it another chance. It's an AMD based system, that's all that matters to me. Personally? I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think this is just what it does. Maybe it has a wonky SATA controller, or USB controller, I have no idea and I'm done fiddling with it. I've already wasted 3 days shuffling data around only to have it get corrupted by THIS machine. THIS AMD MACHINE. I'm not willing to spend any more time with that manufacturer's equipment. I've wasted enough and I've seen enough to know it's not for me. Works for you? Fantastic. I'm happy for you and the millions of others who have good luck with this stuff. For my use-case, it's not working. It's wasting my time, and wrecking my data. If it was an intel machine, I'd kick the whole thing to curb just like I'm doing with this AMD machine. I'm just here to share my experience. Not looking for a solution. I have one: Xeon E5-2667 v2. Use my experience however you see fit.
  3. You're right. I was changing my tools, suspecting software issues, or anything other than the hardware.. I didn't want the blame the hardware! But after many failed attempts, with different drives and different programs, I have to blame the hardware now.
  4. Enh. Memtest86 isn't the best judge of memory chips, when it just crashes out of the gate. I've seen that many many times. It's not all that unusual. It's just an old piece of software and doesn't like some machines. I've seen many intel machines lock up when ever you run memtest86 in SMP, but run fine in single core. I don't really put a lot of stock in memtest86 when it fails to run at all. I did run the Windows built-in memory test and it passed, so I dunno. I'm still blaming AMD, it's their CPU, so the rest of the machine is built to accommodate it.
  5. Bottom line is, I've been using Intel for 30 years. This dataset is about 10 years old, it's survived being copied with Intel machines over and over again, running Linux or Windows. And low and behold, I get an AMD machine and it trashes all my data. I'm not just drawing on this experience, I'm adding in my experience with the K6's being garbage. Look, AMD machine did this. It could be the RAM, or could be mobo, or it could be the CPU, or any combination of the 3. The point is.. I've never seen an Intel machine do this, ever. They either work, or they don't. Where AMD stuff tends to mostly work, but there's edge cases, every time. That was the K6 and apparently, it's Ryzen too. And there's is no way you're blaming the drives, I got about a dozen different drives here, doesn't matter which ones I use, it keeps trashing my data, randomly, unpredictably. That's a HUGE HUGE no-no in computing. Take the warning for what it's worth. Watch your data. Or don't. I won't use that stuff anymore. Use my experience, learn from it, or don't.
  6. Yes. I only need one massive data loss to write off a company as 'bad.' Call me strange?
  7. While I welcome advice, tips or troubleshooting guiding, I'm retiring this PC. I currently have a BioStar X370GT5 mobo with AMD Ryzen 7 1800X and 16GB DDR4-3200 DRAM. Some background: I'm a computer repair technician, been in the field for approximately 30 years. My first IBM PC compatible machine was an 10mhz 8088 running MSDOS. I have since owned 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium2, Pentium3, Core2, i7, and Xeon machines. I believe I experimented some with AMD's K6 line back in the day. I've had the machine for about a year. It seemed to work pretty decently, no tangible complaints until now. Over this weekend, I decided it's time to refresh my long term storage drives and started copying files with this computer. Typically USB<->SATA drive copying. But the strange thing was/is, every time I completed a copy and it's a large dataset, about 2TB, then I'd run a compare to make sure it copied correctly, it would fail compare. At a fairly random rate. Recopying the 'failed to copy' data results in more corruption to other files it seems, as subsequent compares reveal more corruption to the data, but different files. Most of the data is in archives (7z, rar, tar, zip, etc), so I can run archivers in test mode to verify the copy. Many random failures, with no rhyme or reason, just sprinkles of data corruption all over. I've basically determined this computer cannot reliably copy anything, between any two devices, be it NVME, SATA or USB. I don't know if it's memory issue or what. I even downspeeded the memory to the CPU's rating of 2667mhz. No overclocking of any kind being done here. I do want to note, running memtest86 from the Linux Mint 20.1 boot USB crashes the machine every time, with or without SMP enabled. Why am I posting? As I said, not looking for tips. I no longer trust this computer, or AMD, with my data. I'm posting mostly as a warning: AMD still makes unreliable equipment. I experienced their shoddy offerings back in the 486 clone days and swore off AMD then. But I foolishly decided to check out their Ryzen series and got myself (what I thought was) a reasonably nice Ryzen box. And my reward is unknown amounts of data corruption. Feel free to comment things to try, or suspected causes, but I'm still retiring the machine, bringing my Xeon E5-2667 v2 back out of the closet. So you've been warned.
  8. So this is a follow up on this device. I got it running thanks to AbsoluteFool's fantastic information, I ended up getting the linux version of IBM's Storage System ES DS management software. Work great with the chassis, but immediately, it's proprietary nature reared it's ugly head again. The situation: I have this 16 drive chassis (discussed and photo above.) I have 2 145GB Seagate FC drives installed in slots 1 and 2. The device gets really upset and loses it configuration if you remove these drives. The remaining 14 drives are all Seagate NL-35.2 series SATA drives, fitted with a SATA->FC interposer. The entire chassis is FC. The fly in the ointment here is two fold. I have two boxes of Seagate NL35 series FC drives, all untested and unknown. When I install one of these drives into the chassis, the storage management software gives little information, it just reports the drive is being 'bypassed' to avoid damaging my array (there's no other drives installed except those pair of 145GB FC drives.) I thought maybe I had a bad drive, so I tried three more of them, same bull. Drive bypassed, no real reason I can figure. I thought maybe it was cuz the chassis was in 4GB FC mode and the drives are 2GB FC, so I flipped it back to 2GB FC and it still won't have anything to do with these drives. Starting to feel like it's being ugly for no good reason, I experimentally set up a plain ol 1TB HDD I had, with the interposer and installed it. This drive comes up fully, the controller reports it's size, make, model, everything, but says the drive is 'uncertified' and cannot be used. So the thing refuses to accept any 'uncertified' drive, and at the same time, a similar drive is also rejected (the FC Seagate NL35.2's) even when it's very close to the stock drives (SATA Seagate NL35.) So here's what I was hoping someone might be able to point me toward... any way to hack the firmware on this thing and replace it with straight up Linux? Or any other firmware that will make the thing behave better and play nice with non-certified HDD's? Is there any other things I can try with this device, or is it basically stuck the way it is, and I'm wasting my time trying to resurrect it? Seems like a shame to kick it to the curb, it's a nice chassis, it runs great, but the inability to replace drives with off the shelf parts is a huge problem, like show-stopper huge. Anyone know anything more I can do with this device, or should I just let it rust in peace?
  9. You're awesome AbsoluteFool. Thanks so much for the fantastic info. Almost can't wait to go in to work in try some of this stuff out!
  10. Oh nice. I missed that skimming though it, my apologies. Thanks for the call out there. I'll try that out! Got any leads on a serial cable for the thing?
  11. Alas, this documentation is pretty useless. It's just showing how to connect multiple chassis, and what it's compatible with. There's nothing here about how you're supposed to configure the thing, and worse, it's references to software point back to Engenio.com (now NetApp), they won't support it, period. I tried wrestling with them already, they will have absolutely nothing to do with this chassis. And even worse, there's no info on the pinout of the serial connector. I appreciate the reply, but it doesn't really help me. The info I really need is referencing back to NetApp for additional support/info, and there's nothing on their site. They've scrubbed all references to this device, you just land on a generic "I have an LSI Logic device FAQ" page that has no info. Anyone know where the heck I can get the software to manage the bloody thing? As I've pointed out, NetApp won't give me jack.
  12. I'm not entirely sure. The labels on the back say Engenio. All the other labels on the thing are in chinese. I added the same photos I shared with NetApp.
  13. A friend of my suggested I come here and try posting. I have this older Engenio Class 4600 Model 0834 drive chassis. It's two power supplies, two drive I/F modules, and 16 fiber channel HDDs. The thing works, boots up, even can see some of the drives on the fiber channel connection to my workstation. However, I do not have the serial cable, nor any of the software. NetApp has rejected photographs of the device's tags and serial, refusing to help me in any way with software, documentation or support of any kind. So here I am, seeing if I can get any information. Anyone got documentation for this thing? Anyone know where I can buy the frickin' serial cable? Or possibly a pinout for it so I can construct one myself? It's a strange animal, seems to be a PS2-style round connector to plug into the drive I/F module, what on the other end I have no idea, hopefully 9-pin standard serial connector. Very much wanting to buy one of those so I can get into the thing. I've tried using nmap to hunt down it's IP address while connecting it to a isolated network, but sweeping 192.168.0.0/16 and 10.0.0.0/8 yielded no response. Anyone got one of these? Can anyone point me in the right direction to get this bad-boy up and running? I primarily want to get it going to use it to test a glut of fiber channel drives I have and want to resell, but i can't resell untested hardware, and this beast is the only fiber channel gear I have. Seems fiber channel is pretty obscure and hard to find anything related to it. I even tried pestering everyone who has one of these devices for sale on eBay. No one with a listing as of today (2-22-2018) has any information or the serial cable, all of them selling the chassis 'as is', no docs, no nothing. NetApp themselves is a dead-end, they refuse to help me, they are claiming it's not their gear and they have no record of the serial I provided (a photograph of the actual chassis and it's labels.)
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