Raid card for general computing?

[kindlestone]

I have a SAS RAID controller card and want to know if there is any way to use it as a media encoder for screen recordingto reduce the stress on my CPU. Can it be done?

[dalekphalm]

2 minutes ago, kindlestone said:

I have a SAS RAID controller card and want to know if there is any way to use it as a media encoder for screen recordingto reduce the stress on my CPU. Can it be done?

err... what?

 

No.

 

You want to use a SAS RAID Card to encode media? What? How would that even work? Yes, RAID Cards (true ones anyway) have a Processor onboard the PCB board, but that processor only knows how to do one thing: Calculate RAID Parity Data and deal with HDD reads/writes.

 

No. You cannot do what you want. If you want to reduce CPU Stress when encoding Media, you need a GPU (Even the iGPU on AMD/Intel APU's helps).

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

but that processor only knows how to do one thing

Most LSI cards have a POWER chip. Its a normal cpu, but you can't use it for anything else.

[dalekphalm]

7 hours ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Most LSI cards have a POWER chip. Its a normal cpu, but you can't use it for anything else.

You're correct. I just looked up the specs on a SAS2008 controller (really popular controller) and it uses a PowerPC 440 CPU. Granted it's running at 533 MHz... sooooo even if you COULD use it for rendering, it likely would be slower than your main CPU anyway lol. Although that's a pretty old RAID Controller. Most of the newer ones are at least dual core, in the GHz range.

 

Still, you'd have to literally hack the firmware and write custom code for it, and have intimate knowledge of the design and operation, and have electrical diagrams, etc.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 hour ago, dalekphalm said:

You're correct. I just looked up the specs on a SAS2008 controller (really popular controller) and it uses a PowerPC 440 CPU. Granted it's running at 533 MHz... sooooo even if you COULD use it for rendering, it likely would be slower than your main CPU anyway lol. Although that's a pretty old RAID Controller. Most of the newer ones are at least dual core, in the GHz range.

 

Still, you'd have to literally hack the firmware and write custom code for it, and have intimate knowledge of the design and operation, and have electrical diagrams, etc.

Won't be practical, but would be a fun project if someone did that.

[dalekphalm]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Won't be practical, but would be a fun project if someone did that.

You'd essentially have to be a systems chip engineer to have the knowledge to do so. I'm sure it's hypothetically possible, but not at all practical.

 

Still, if someone did that, it would be cool.