I thought about a tape drive. But the PD drive a ls-120 drive dose me well.
But maybe I'll use tape for a base system image.
So if I lose the raid, ether two drives dieing or the card going bad I don't have to set everything back up.

But I think a really big flash drive or external ssd would be less hassle and safer. I have too many CRT, I don't want to lose a tape to one like I have lost floppys.

This is where my main backup server comes in handy. I just have images kept on there. makes life so easy.

Wish I had that kind of space. I have the money/time and all. But I can't stand having a lot of computer clutter.

best part! I had mine in the basement for the longest time. only did a basic cleaning every other month. never had a single issue. I moved it into the garage later, because I wanted to setup ethernet bonding and running two new gig cables to the basement wasn't a viable option.

I have always wanted a tape backup drive. At one point, I sourced one which still works with NT4 for my 486. I think it was a Travan branded drive. It was the perfect matching beige. I obtained a 20 GB tape. The damn Travan was DOA. I lost interest in tape thereafter.

I was looking up the specs of my zero channel raid card. It seems 16 MB ECC EDO is the max "approved". https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/_ … rop/ca_dimm.htm

luckybob wrote:

best part! I had mine in the basement for the longest time. only did a basic cleaning every other month. never had a single issue. I moved it into the garage later, because I wanted to setup ethernet bonding and running two new gig cables to the basement wasn't a viable option.

Flooding, cars and wood/metal work prevents that for me.

How about building a man cave in the backyard, complete with plumbing and electricity? 15 m^2. South facing solar panels on the roof. Anyone here doing that? Sounds like bliss, but I'm about to build a more practical garden shed/wood shed in my dream spot.

feipoa wrote:

How about building a man cave in the backyard, complete with plumbing and electricity? 15 m^2. South facing solar panels on the roof. Anyone here doing that? Sounds like bliss, but I'm about to build a more practical garden shed/wood shed in my dream spot.

That's doesn't fix the problem of having excess computer stuff now does it? 🤣
I been really trying to down size, I even sold my unisys computer that's was the size of a small DVD player. I want to stick to having one really nice system.

In a side note, I now have room for a nice size UPS. Having only one pc/monitor and only one set of spares for this system.
I'm eyeballing a retro 1500va UPS for a fun project after this.
Still installing apps, with raid5 this will take some time. But I got most of the big ones done.

my family moved into our current home in '89. he took a 4-car garage and doubled it, made the addition insulated and heated. thats where I am now (I inherited the house). That said, I have plans now to have solar installed this spring. We have room for almost a 5MW system, giving us a huge savings because we get a metric fuckton of sunlight on all that garage roof. I could fit 8MW, but the city I live in has some asinine rules, and long story short, I can only fit ~5MW.

I have a south facing roof and west facing roofs (rooves?), but I'm waiting for solar to drop even further before taking the plunge. Everything costs twice as much up here compared to below the 49th and the mortgage is sucking us dry.

I've never seen an 8-car garage. Sounds like bliss. Wait, I think Jay Leno has an 8-car garage.

well 8 is a bit stretching it, you can get 8 cars in it, but not big ones. anyway, there are several local companies that will do 100% of everything to install solar. You then pay a flat rate, then it's like $50 a month. its a bad deal in the long term, because they get your tax credits, but if you're a big consumer, then it is really nice. Colorado has a shitty solar plan, you get like 1-2 pennies per KW. So 99.9% of all savings in solar is to use it, and not pay the $.09 KW. In the summer this gets doubled to $.19 if you use more than a certain amount. Again, if you use a lot of power, you save.

I'm looking at 10+ years from now, and I'd want to pay it off all at once. What you don't use, gets sent to the utility company and it "runs your meter backwards". So it doesn't matter all that much how much you use. If you go on holiday for 3 months, you'll come back to a cheque from your utility company paying for your solar electricity. I do plan to wire the shed with some Costco-bought solar panels with a small battery pack. Beats running wire through the lawn and back into the house.

I like how off-topic this thread got. ^.^

luckybob wrote:

I like how off-topic this thread got. ^.^

Hahaha yeah, we should have a ''bar'' topic so people can say ''meet you at the bar'' and talk about stuff there 🤣

Dont we have a IRC?

I idle on undernet 24/7, with the occasional bark out to the other guys who've also been idling there since around 1995.

Anyone catch the game last night? 🤣

I liked the part where the guy tried to kick the orange ball through the uprights and make the final score in the 3rd period.

What wait, I defiantly remember it being a blue ball.

All off topic joking aside.
I have about half of my software installed. Would be closer to being done but I forgot how quirky a dual piii system can be with pin modded piii-s CPUs. Oddly the optic drives loose connection when I'm installing apps from a cd. DVDs are oddly fine. I can also image cds fine too. Also there is some sort of odd idling stability problem. If the system sites for over an hour it locks up. Probably something in the power saving settings. I turned off all power saving. Hopefully that will fix the system locking up.

Ok guys. I have some good news! Some bad news and some more good new!

The good new is that I'll be finishing up this build tomorrow! And will run all the benches I can think off.
The other good news is that I have now in my possession my old 604 setup! The one with the pcie asus board!
The bad news is that this 370 system dose not like my pick of parts. The video card and cpus are less then ideal for the motherboard and both hapen to be coursing some buggy lockups and crashing 😒

If I can't fix the problems I'll likely put my 604 system back together. I'd hate lossing the awe and voodoo2s but I rather have a stable system. And my old 604 system was rock solid. But I will not switch to it before finishing up this build.

Infact the only reason I got rid of the 604 system was that my video card at the time had overloaded the atx power cable. But I cough it before it damage anything. After that happens I have it to a friend of mine.