Quoting Kirk Wallace <[email protected]>: > I would consider using the drives you have and set up RAID. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
Funny enough, my existing EPIA800 mobo started life ~8yrs ago as a car MP3 player, hence the custom power supply. But the drive crashed on hard bumps, so I got pulled into duty as a mini RAID file server with 2 60GB PATA drives. I was looking to upgrade about 4 yrs ago so got the 2 120GB drives, but never did the conversion. Hence those two drives floating around. > In my opinion, for motherboards, try to use what you can get cheap or > free. I like older complete PC's such as a full or small form Dell's or > similar. > http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=SYS > or eBay > > To me, trying to get a tiny PC (or notebook, laptop, etcetera) to work > with an EMC2 machine just adds more needless work, unless you happen to > carry your CNC around in your pocket. Any motherboard I would consider > would need at least three PCI slots of some variety, so that cheap > add-on parallel port cards could be used (despite rumors, parallel ports > are not going away anytime soon). > http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl?EMC2_Supported_Hardware > (see parallel port card section) Laptops are generally not good for any type of real-time control, but my small mobo requirement comes from us trying to make everything as compact as possible with the on-board PC. Would've done a larger mobo if that was the only answer, but with a workable Mini-ITX option, everything will be nice and compact and will fit in the existing enclosure (with only small mods to the back panel cutouts). > I avoid using the motherboard parallel port, so when I blow up the port, > I don't have to replace the whole motherboard or PC. ... Agreed. For this though, I always use a buffered/isolated breakout board. And also because many parallel ports don't provide a full 5V, or very low current. > ... Another pet peeve, the EMC2 PC should stay with the machine it is > intended to run. If you need a PC for another application, get another > PC. Correct. This will be dedicated, and installed on the machine. My CNC mill for example runs Mach 3 on a dedicated mobo, all integrated nicely into an enclosure with the stepper drivers, etc. I should stop talking about Mach3 here on this list, especially since I'm not going to need that anymore. :) Cheers, -Neil. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All of the data generated in your IT infrastructure is seriously valuable. Why? It contains a definitive record of application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity, and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. IT sense. And common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2d-c2 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
