In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ren=E9_Luckow?= writes: > I've only had it running a little server at the office at room > temperature, but haven't experienced any heat issues.
I have a Soekris net4801 running since april as an end point for a tunnel to SixXS; only stopped to upgrade the operating system on that computer (OpenBSD). It has a enhanced availability Hitachi hard disk drive on it and runs nicely: # atactl wd0 readattr Attributes table revision: 16 ID Attribute name Threshold Value Raw 1 Raw Read Error Rate 62 100 0x000000000000 2 Throughput Performance 40 114 0x000000000d8d 3 Spin Up Time 33 155 0x001a00000002 4 Start/Stop Count 0 93 0x000000002ef2 5 Reallocated Sector Count 5 100 0x000000000000 7 Seek Error Rate 67 100 0x000000000000 8 Seek Time Performance 40 118 0x000000000025 9 Power-on Hours Count 0 91 0x000000001055 10 Spin Retry Count 60 100 0x000000000000 12 Device Power Cycle Count 0 100 0x00000000003c 191 Unknown 0 100 0x000000000000 192 Power-off Retract Count 0 100 0x00000000002f 193 Load Cycle Count 0 99 0x0000000031f1 194 Temperature 0 161 0x003100160022 196 Reallocation Event Count 0 100 0x000000000000 197 Current Pending Sector Count 0 100 0x000000000000 198 Off-line Scan Uncorrectable Sect 0 100 0x000000000000 199 Ultra DMA CRC Error Count 0 200 0x000000000024 (not very bad for a computer that has been running for eight months without being powered off, but it is a "server grade" hard disk drive, not a laptop one.) > Granted, it hasn't had much load beyond what I've been playing with on it. An operating system usually turns it on a few times each hour (of course, you can turn off cron and other processes that look at the filesystems on the HDD if it is an issue). So, even under low loads its hard disk drive is being exercised. > The HDD is about 12-13mm above the board itself and probably 2-3mm from the > lid. > > Without having actually measured it I would eyeball the distance > between the bottom of the disk to the top of the miniPCI slot to > roughly 4-5mm. These are very good distances, indeed! On the net4801 the drive is only a few milimeters from the lid (not more than two, think!). Using the drive heat to establish an air flow is a very good design decision. The distance to the board is greater than I would expect from the pictures... it seems that the HDD mounting kit has been designed to work reliably. > I have fitted a pretty large 3com miniPCI ethernet card in just to see > how well it would fit and have had no heat issues with that either, > there was plenty of room, of course it cut down the distance ti the > disk to about 1-2mm right where the miniPCI card is, but it haven't > caused any issues. Nice to know that large MiniPCI cards can be installed on the net5501 boards when SATA drives are being used! > The trick to placing the cable is to screw the two back screws in only > half so you can nugde up the bracket, then place the cable like on the > pictures, then just put in the two front screws and tighten the back > ones. Once the cable is properly bend it will pretty much stay that > way after it's been under pressure for a couple of days. Of the SATA > cables I've tested with the box, the one chosen is by far the most > flexible and the one with the shortest connectors. I have seen it in one of the pictures... it is very nice to get some advice from someone that has installed one of these mounting kits. This way, other users will not make mistakes when mounting the drive. I have ordered a second net5501 from kd85.com today, and I am awaiting for two SATA mounting kits. I want to upgrade my current net5501 to SATA and want to use a SATA drive on the new one from the beginning. Thanks for the advice about how mounting the kit and cabling the computer. I really appreciate your feedback (and I am sure a lot of net5501 owners will do to!) However, for the net5501 I have choosen Kerberos cases (I want to install these computers on a 19-inch rack). I am very happy with Soekris computers, only hope that the hang on boot problem on the current net5501 board will be fixed; a fix will make it a nice computer not only for embedded applications but also for environments were low noise and power consumption are important... for me, the main advantage of Soekris when compared with other low power computers is the comBIOS (the only one I am aware of that works reliably over serial lines on i386 architectures, and it has a nice command-line environment). Cheers, Igor. _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
