Spot the SSD! - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: XOIIO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 12:06:33 am
content: So, while helping someone clear out inventory (they are shutting down their computer business slowly), I came across a barracuda backup server and a link balancer.Now, the backup server has a decent enough cpu in it, and is rack mountable (as is the link balancer but there was only one set of ears), so I grabbed that after giving him the hard drives from it, figuring i can load parted magic onto a drive and have it permanently set up to do data recovery.Now, the load balancer was pretty unremarkable, but I did get one thing out of it, which is technically an SSD. I hadn't encountered one of these before so it was a pretty cool find. I just want to see how long it takes other people to figure it out. (probably not that long, but its still an interesting find, and I think it should hold parted magic just fine, though not a lot else with it's massive 4gb capacity)

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 12:44:04 am
content: Just above the ATX power connector?

author: XOIIO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 01:05:29 am
content: Quote from: Mechanical Menace on April 07, 2016, 12:44:04 amYup, it's a little teeny IDE flash module. Needs 5v external power, but it's the cutest little internal storage device I've ever seen.Makes me wonder what sizes they maxed out at, just had a look on ebay and there's one of these selling for about 10 bucks, I plan on installing parted magic to it, ittl be the first time i use any ide device in ages, I just need to hook an actual hard disk up to install windows so i can then use unetbootin to put the iso on it.There's also the knoppix live cd I've heard about, there's a full version too which needs 4.7gb of space, this thing only has 3.8 usable though so a bit out of reach. Parted magic has done me well for any data recovery I've encountered so far.Basically now just a little rack mount unit I can toss a hard drive into, start up, and (hopefully) vnc into to copy things to network drives.

author: XOIIO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 01:09:10 am
content: Seems they go up to 8gb total or so, on ebay that's about $50, little steep for my taste, at that rate I may as well just get a low capacity hard drive since I have room for two. I'll go that route if I need to use any larger sort of distro.Could also do a usb controller and flash drive internally, but this thing is so thin I doubt there are any usb controllers that would fit. Not sure if there's any internal headers for usb, I'll have to check.

author: AlessandroAU
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 03:02:43 am
content: You can also get similar drives that plug into the sata porthttps://www.umart.com.au/umart1/pro/Products-details.phtml?id=10&id2=159&bid=2&sid=163060

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 03:59:55 am
content: Yeah but what's the point?You can get SATA to IDE converters for less than 4$..for examplehttp://www.dx.com/s/sata%2bto%2bide?PriceSort=upand all you have to do then is to attach a sata cable and power to the converter and SSD you can buy from stores - a 32-64GB SSD is cheap these days, less than $50 .. just at a quick peak at an online retail store i can buy a 60 GB ssd drive for $41, taxes included.Yeah, there's cables, that solution is neater and takes less space, I give you that... there are also companies that make SSDs in the form of DDR3 memory sticks, and some even manage to work with the 2-3w "budget" of the memory slot, so they won't require additional cable, besides the sata cable.Anyway, ssd drives are very lightweight so they can easily be taped to the case somewhere (for example the side of the power supply) if the case must be extremely small or something like that

author: linux-works
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 04:04:38 am
content: industrial pc's (mini-itx comes to mind) will use onboard sata or ide solid state drives.some of the 40 pin ide ones have 'funky power' pins on them which makes them a little incompat.a friend builds pcs for audio system use that have the ide dongle 'disk on a chip' stuff. they worked well and not needing any extra wires, were nice and reliable for years at a time.

author: station240
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 04:09:43 am
content: Another way to do this is an IDE to Compact Flash adapter, and a CF card.

author: radar_macgyver
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 04:46:59 am
content: These are called Disk-on-Modules, they're fairly common on servers sold as "appliances", to store the OS. SATA versions, as noted above, are still available. Some Supermicro motherboards have aspecial SATA portwith optional pins that power their SATA DOMs.

author: XOIIO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 05:09:45 am
content: Quote from: mariush on April 07, 2016, 03:59:55 amPoint is, it was free, so why not make use of it? Plenty of space left after installing puppy linux, I couldn't get parted magic to work yet, an old version of unetbootin might do the trick, I'm not sure.It keeps both sata ports free too so I can stick two drives to recover from in there at once, or I might use an adapter and mount a laptop sata drive under the case so I can just use live cds. It's just a bit of a faff going around it whenever you want to access usb ports, so my zalman drive isn't quite so easy to use on this thing.Quote from: station240 on April 07, 2016, 04:09:43 amAh, yeah, if I was using thinclients for some reason that would probably be a more economic way, but this is really just a one off. I spend a decent amount of time trying to get the firmware update utility to work in various versions of dos, thankfully the barracuda custom bios/password didn't screw it up. This thing would have been junk otherwise.

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 05:26:18 am
content: Quote from: station240 on April 07, 2016, 04:09:43 amThat usually gives terrible performance though since the cards lack cache. Tried that a couple of times in the past, it's pretty much unusable.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 06:19:51 am
content: Quote from: Kilrah on April 07, 2016, 05:26:18 amI once wired a CF card slot onto a P3 motherboard for use in a homemade router. It worked surprisingly well and allowed me to have it all working with no moving parts. (The PSU was replaced with a bunch of buck converter modules and a large 12V wall wart. The CPU heatsink is passive.)

author: Kilrah
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 07:28:50 am
content: Well yeah, if you choose the one application that basically does no disk I/O whatsoever anymore once booted it's not gonna be a problem

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 12:55:36 pm
content: Still faster than a spinny disk, and no motor and bearings to wear out, and no head to crash. Now that cooling fan, on the other hand... the newer ones are better, but back in the early days of Barracuda the fails failed quite regularly. At one point they must have been spending too much having units shipped back for repair, plus that also meant downtime with no protection, so if you told the support tech you were capable, they would just send new fans for you to whack in yourself. I cracked open a lot of barracuda cases in my day.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 02:20:22 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on April 07, 2016, 12:55:36 pmI doubt i's faster. Might be at random read/write (very unlikely) but overall I doubt it very much. I guess it is completely inferior to normal SATA, mSATA or M.2 SSDs. Modern HDDs have some fast transfer rates. I have two of 5TB hitachi HDDs, they have about 220-300MB/s sequential read/write speed.

author: XOIIO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 04:16:19 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on April 07, 2016, 12:55:36 pmYeah, the cpu fan sounds a little on it's way out, I'll probably get a replacement at some point. It sounds like barracuda's support has gotten worse over the years, and apparently the life expectancy of the link balancer that the ssd came from was 5 years, that seems pretty low considering it cost around 5k. Nice that they would actually just send you the parts.Quote from: wraper on April 07, 2016, 02:20:22 pmYeah, considering it's an IDE interface, the max speed is about 133mb/s, and it's probably going a lot slower than that on this machine.This thing probably will be a somewhat temporary setup in the long term, I want to get a rack mount pc case with a front panel so I can use some hot swap caddies that go right in the front, instead of needing to go into the case to do it, but I don't get enough work to make that worthwhile yet.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 07, 2016, 07:16:30 pm
content: Their game was to get you to pay for both the licensing AND the quick replacement service - If you paid up support, it didn't matter how old the device was, if it fails, they send you a replacement. Their real 'product' is the service and the user interface - the internal guts of all of their various appliances is all open source software, you can duplicate it all on your own for zero software cost, however in many cases the only UI would be Linux command line.Never used one of their load balancers, but they are supported by many common systems. I have used their spam filters quite a bit, they are pretty nice actually. And the web filter is not bad either, at least for smaller companies. The mail archiver I never did like, only dealt with one, the client had a model definitely big enough based on the specs provided by Barracuda, but they thing couldn't so anything other than keep a message journal, it was nowhere near powerful enough to actually remove and stud items from user email accounts. It couldn't complete a processing pass on all the mailboxes in the system despite it being rated for 2x the actual user accounts, and every time it started a pass, it would completely crawl even mailboxes it had previously processed, instead of picking up where it left off.