Abit KT7A-RAID

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Since we're reminiscing ... the legend

 

[Rubycon]

Quite whiny those were...

Remember the Taisol coolers? Everyone loved those because they were cheap, worked well (best value) and you didn't have to worry about ripping the socket off if the system was dropped.

Swiftech had a page with pictures (before youtube haha) that demonstrated their bolt through solution protected the chip's fragile exposed core even if the box was thrown out a window to concrete below!

My first Athlon was a 850MHz slot-A specimen. I changed resistors to get it to 1.07GHz shortly thereafter. I had a full length Alpha deep finned heatsink on it with a pair of 60mm YS Tech fans. The cartridge had its edge milled with a ventilation slot and another pair of 60mm screamers were installed on the backside of the cartridge to blow air directly on the PCB, venting out through the slot on top. It was "prime stable" and sufficiently quiet since the fans were undervolted to ease the noise.

Later that year I quickly moved to socket-A.

Oh and those 75GXP drives. Loved 'em. The seek sound was so different from other IDE drives. Ran a pair of 30s in RAID0 on a Promise FT66 card with no issues. Got a pair of 75GB models when they became available. Those were considerably hotter. Still no issues until one of them fell off a table and was recognized but made weird noises. IBM utility showed a code that translated to "device damaged due to excessive shock". Well, it was right.

The quality issues and speed of ATA devices didn't get better fast enough. I had a variety of higher end "enterprise grade" storage controllers and disk products. AMI MegaRAID, LSi, Mylex, HP, DPT, Intel, Areca, to name a few. I had 16 raptor 150s in RAID0 on an Areca ARC 1680ix-24 at one point. These were later switched out to Fujitsu 300GB 15K SAS devices. In 2009 I went with SSD storage and the rest has been history.

 

[Ketchup]

I recall getting my first 7200 RPM hard drive, a Seagate. It was replacing a 4000 PRM Quantum Bigfoot TX. It was very much like when I upgraded from my 7200 RPM WD Black to an SSD. Amazing!

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I recall getting my first 7200 RPM hard drive, a Seagate. It was replacing a 4000 PRM Quantum Bigfoot TX. It was very much like when I upgraded from my 7200 RPM WD Black to an SSD. Amazing!

Anything is amazing compared to a Bigfoot!

Also, I kinda miss the noises of my old 10K and 15K rpm SCSI drives. That and my old MFM ones :

 

[bigboxes]

Oh and those 75GXP drives. Loved 'em. The seek sound was so different from other IDE drives. Ran a pair of 30s in RAID0 on a Promise FT66 card with no issues. Got a pair of 75GB models when they became available. Those were considerably hotter. Still no issues until one of them fell off a table and was recognized but made weird noises. IBM utility showed a code that translated to "device damaged due to excessive shock". Well, it was right.

The quality issues and speed of ATA devices didn't get better fast enough. I had a variety of higher end "enterprise grade" storage controllers and disk products. AMI MegaRAID, LSi, Mylex, HP, DPT, Intel, Areca, to name a few. I had 16 raptor 150s in RAID0 on an Areca ARC 1680ix-24 at one point. These were later switched out to Fujitsu 300GB 15K SAS devices. In 2009 I went with SSD storage and the rest has been history.

You are crazy! And you have way too much money. Those IBM drives were quiet and quick. Too bad about the head crashes.

You went to SSD storage in 2009? One, how did you afford that (we are talking file server)? How do you back up your SSDs?

 

[ElFenix]

Since we're reminiscing ... the legend

i had one of those or something like it on a swiftech mcx 462. damn it was loud. but the internet had me running scared of burning up my processor if i didn't have some super loud fan on a ginormous heatsink.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

i had one of those or something like it on a swiftech mcx 462. damn it was loud. but the internet had me running scared of burning up my processor if i didn't have some super loud fan on a ginormous heatsink.

To be fair, stuff like this used to happen.
Guilty myself back when I was reviewing HSFs - some wouldn't sit quite flush with the die and POOF!
or the telltale "CRUNCH!" sound when you mounted it wrong

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

I nearly cried when I saw this thread. I created my forum account here specifically to ask about how to build a new system. My very first computer built was an Abit KT7A-RAID system. I'm not sure if my parents threw out the old motherboard but I had it sitting in a desk drawer at some point when I left for college.

On that note I think this weekend I'll go pay a visit to the parents and drop off my old X58A system and put it in a closet. I'll go search for this motherboard too but hopefully it's somewhere in there. I'd love to find that old Athlon 1100 I had and an Athlon 1333 a friend gave me later on. Using a mechanical pencil to connect the (L1?) bridges still seems like a fond memory.

Edit: And yes I recall all those ATA ports. 4 freaking ports, 8 hard drives?! Woot! But most of my trouble ended up coming from that terrible Deathstar 75GXP I put in there. I really thought it was my motherboard half the time but it ended up being just that terrible hard drive screwing my data up and crashing.

 

[mikeymikec]

Edit: And yes I recall all those ATA ports. 4 freaking ports, 8 hard drives?! Woot! But most of my trouble ended up coming from that terrible Deathstar 75GXP I put in there. I really thought it was my motherboard half the time but it ended up being just that terrible hard drive screwing my data up and crashing.

My DeathStar experience was "it was fine until one fateful day"... as a result I implemented a proper backup system, after losing all my old college work and porn. I was not impressed.

 

[Rubycon]

You are crazy! And you have way too much money. Those IBM drives were quiet and quick. Too bad about the head crashes.

You went to SSD storage in 2009? One, how did you afford that (we are talking file server)? How do you back up your SSDs?

Yep, and been called worse for sure!
SSDs were in my personal system. Had a few dozen Gskill Falcon 128GB drives. They were quite cheap at the time ($300 USD each) and performance was decent at 255/220 R/W. The Intel X25 160G2 was far superior even if its writes were just over 100MB/S. Its iops were out of this world at the time only exceeded by much more expensive enterprise SLC drives, which we obtained a few of those too!

I usually have everything backed up on a SAN which (now) is flash based. There is a mix of RAM SAN devices too for more quick access of detached storage.

As for Socket 462...

Never cracked a die.
But I did fry a Palomino by turning it on bare. I did see the video and wanted to see if it smoked. And it did!
Remember the thermistor in the middle of the socket? The little blue guy on Abit boards? I always bent mine up trying to make the best contact with the underside of the chip.
Of course it couldn't track on die temps like a proper on die sensor.
Funny how everyone wanted AMD to cover their dies and Intel's solution was mechanically superior. Today, hardcore users are paying $50 for a 3D printed tool to de-lid their skylake and kaby lake chips for direct die cooling.

 

[bigboxes]

Yep, and been called worse for sure!
SSDs were in my personal system. Had a few dozen Gskill Falcon 128GB drives. They were quite cheap at the time ($300 USD each) and performance was decent at 255/220 R/W. The Intel X25 160G2 was far superior even if its writes were just over 100MB/S. Its iops were out of this world at the time only exceeded by much more expensive enterprise SLC drives, which we obtained a few of those too!

I usually have everything backed up on a SAN which (now) is flash based. There is a mix of RAM SAN devices too for more quick access of detached storage.

I was going to go SSD in 2009 when I went to the darkside with my i7 920 build. However, at that time the first consumer release, an Intel X25 80GB (G1?) had a firmware problem and I decided against it until Intel worked the bug out. I soldiered on with my Raptor (still going strong as an extra storage drive). I never went to SSD in my main rig until I built the rig in my sig in early 2015. Soon after my 920 build my wife was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and that wiped out our resources.

 

[Rubycon]

Wow sorry to hear about that.

 

[bigboxes]

Wow sorry to hear about that.

Me too! It's quite the battle. But it's why I didn't get that SSD when Intel finally worked out the bugs out of its firmware.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I was going to go SSD in 2009 when I went to the darkside with my i7 920 build. However, at that time the first consumer release, an Intel X25 80GB (G1?) had a firmware problem and I decided against it until Intel worked the bug out. I soldiered on with my Raptor (still going strong as an extra storage drive). I never went to SSD in my main rig until I built the rig in my sig in early 2015. Soon after my 920 build my wife was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and that wiped out our resources.

I had the Kingston badged version of the X25. Both died within a few weeks :|
OCZ (Vertex 2, Agility 3, Arc 150, Vector 180) have been solid. Go figure

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

good lam bang cap 3

You're not the blackman. Where's my free iPod?

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

My DeathStar experience was "it was fine until one fateful day"... as a result I implemented a proper backup system, after losing all my old college work and porn. I was not impressed.

I struggled since Day 1 of my build. I didn't have knowledge of HD failures enough and nor did we all know DeskStars were actually DeathStars until a few years later when the failure rates became evident. Anyhow, my drive would sometimes make noises at boot like "Tschh Tschh Tschh Tschh" (4 click/hisses about half a second a part) and it would repeat that every few seconds, and the drive would fail to get detected at boot. I RMAed in a week or so and my replacement unit didn't have issues til maybe a few years later. Did we even have SMART back then? Anyhow, I probably went through 3 drives in the end and sometimes it would just take a reboot to work again. All I remember was when 2004 rolled around I saved up enough money to throw in a 160gb HD instead and that Deathstar was taken out.

In the days of mechanical drives, life was rough. I remember in college I had my laptop HD die on my 3-4 times either from shock like dropping my laptop or slamming the lid shut too hard.

 

[bigboxes]

@Rubycon Here's one more that I found. I'm not sure if it's doing duty or sitting in a box though. I believe I got this with my X2 4400+. Badass for a stock cooler. I think I went straight to a Zalman and used it later in my file server.

A little good news. Took wife to Houston for her four month checkup at M.D. Anderson. Her cancer is stable. She's been on chemo for over a year. They can no longer detect the tumor in her lungs. The tumors in her liver and stomach remain unchanged. But she's stable. That is, the cancer is not spreading and growing. For now, she'll remain on the chemo as a maintenance. I convinced the doc to lower her level of the drug to see if we can improve her quality of life while we monitor her closely.

 

[Rubycon]

Great news and best wishes for a full recovery.

And yes I remember that cooler. I had one of those, came with my FX60 cpu. Hard to believe that was 11 years ago!