Storage!

HELL YES.

I actually have stacks of those Adaptec 29160 SCSI cards. Just about every desktop PC I own has one, from my P233MMX to i7 at work to this thing (except for the PCI-X G5 because Adaptec/Apple never supported these cards on G5 for some reason...) They're PCI-X cards but they work fine in 32-bit PCI slots too. But SCSI drives themselves seem to be getting harder and harder to come by as they mostly get retired from industry and shredded or destroyed to protect "sensitive data" that nobody cares about, so mostly the SCSI cards are just adding boot time and wasting space.

Anyway finally I got my hands on some:

...a matched pair of 73GB, 10k RPM Cheetahs to be exact. Niceeeeee.

In they went. Everything powered up smooth & was readily detected by the system. First try!

But HOLY crap, it was already loud (and could ventilate a room) with its dual Xeon coolers and quad case fans. Add these things in and it's like listening to funny cars race fighter jets. Hopefully the overall drone will be lessened a bit when I close the case.

BTW it occurs to me I never showed a clear pic of what this thing looks like with everything installed. Well, here you go:



Yeah, yeah, this isn't exactly artisanal cable management. I'll tidy it up later in final assembly. Maybe.

Anyway seeing as these are old server drives from a machine that was sitting god-knows-where for 15 years and was ready to be junked, I figured I'd better use the SCSI ROM drive check utility to look for errors.

None found! My drives are healthy. 😎 The disk check took about 45 minutes per drive, and there was a nice progress meter displayed as it was doing it.

Then I decided to do a low-level format, just to make sure everything's fresh. These are *very* fast drives on an Ultra-160 card (albeit running in 32-bit mode), so how long could it possibly take? An hour ?? Here's what that process looks like:

Are you kidding me.

(It actually took closer to three hours. Per drive. It's still doing the second one and I'm going to bed now. I'm glad electricity's cheap here ...)

Given how hot these Xeon's can get I'd clean up those cables.
also let me know your CPU's temps when you can, I think something is wrong with my setup and my 2 xeon's are burning up all the time.

EDIT:
I have 2 120mm fans 2 80mm fans 2 60mm fans and one 92mm fan in my case and they still run hot and loud.

So I bought two of these.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/380752983495?_trksid= … K%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
They work grate, they still run hot, but I can quite down the system a lot more. Keep in mind I can use 771 heat sinks on my board with 771 mounts. I don't know about you board.

So far Linux (psensor) is reporting ~41 C just doing stuff on the desktop (installing packages, system updates, etc.) That actually seems really low; I'm not 100% sure the app I installed is reading the sensors properly. The case is wide open though.

What are you using to measure temps?

I did notice yesterday the CPU fans were blowing *cool* air onto my shins as I was messing around with the SCSI utilities. Maybe I've just discovered the mythical pair of cool-running Xeons.

I'm using speed fan. Make sure you app is reading the cpu core temp and not the package/socket temp.
Your temps are about the same as my package/socket temps.
Mine idles around 55c and loads around 65c. I think my mobo is over volting the cpu.