Shuttle owners- how to best set up harddrives

wethree wrote on 8/25/2004, 5:43 PM

I'm running Vegas5b on a couple of Shuttle SB51G s. They're mini xpcs and have only one available PCI slot (mine contain sound cards).

What's the best way to string additional media drives from the Shuttle's three remaining (two rear, one front) firewire outlets-- or would it be better to gerry-rig something ala the ide controller schemes outlined in the thread below labeled 2 Drives?

In other words, what's the downside to just stringing together external firewire drives from one of the onboard firewire spigots? (like the four WD160-200g drives ive got now, with a Sony DVD burner chained to the end of em...)

thanks

bt

Comments

aress wrote on 8/25/2004, 5:57 PM

i have two of these....i daisy chain all firewire externals, and have two 250gig internals going....plenty of storage to work local and backup......

wethree wrote on 8/26/2004, 12:38 PM

hey aress

how do you have those big internals hooked up, and how hot do your shuttles run -- have you needed to place additional cooling fans?

Per Sandra 2000, My CPU runs at 60C/143F (when coasting) with a 40G WD internal drive on the onboard IDE, an Audigy2 audio card in the PCI slot, and a ATI9700pro video card installed in the AGPslot.

My real question is anybody got a neat way to soup these things up a little more? I've got 1 G of RAM, a 3.02 Northwood P4, and a533fsb and the last stills project (40 nmins, 370 png stills) with the equivalent of a jumback playing in the background, and a parade of ken burnsian stills playing PIP in the foreground took 29hours to render-- and thats after using Imaginate to prerender the stills into an .avi that I hoped would unburden Vegas from having to generate media from scratch...

I gotta find a way around these hair-raising 29 hour renders, with pagefiles that baloon to the edge of the max-- ( I actually crashed this last time twice while rendering when the pagefile went beyond what my 1 G of RAM and pagefile designation could bear)

I know-- build in sequences, but geez... What's a workflow for coordinating all these concurrently rendering smaller sequences ...

bestx3,

bt

HeeHee wrote on 8/26/2004, 12:45 PM

If your CPU is running 60°C while idle, you have bigger problems than hanging firewire hard drives off the system. What type of CPU heatsink are you using. With a 3+ Ghz P4 you should have a Heatsink rated for a Prescott at the least, especially in that tiny box.

FYI - the main drawback in using shuttles or other cubes for high end systems is the noise factor (You need plenty of cfu's!)

John_Cline wrote on 8/26/2004, 1:29 PM

One of the machines around here is a Shuttle with a 3.06Ghz P4. Shuttles have a heat-pipe CPU heatsink that vents the heat to the outside of the box, it usually works pretty well. Perhaps the thermal interface between the CPU and the heat sink base isn't correct. I suggest you get some "Arctic Silver V" thermal grease and make sure the heat sink is properly installed. Having too much grease is just as bad as not having enough.

John

HeeHee wrote on 8/26/2004, 2:40 PM

Good point John. Very true about the Thermal Interface Compound.

wethree wrote on 8/26/2004, 5:48 PM

thanks guys--

checked my other shuttle SB51g and it indeed idles at 45C. It's running a 2.4g P4, an m-audio revolution card and just the onboard IBM graphics card that the SB51g comes with.

Then I took the cover off the other shuttle, dusted it out, updated the bios to the 2/2004 version, toggled from default? of SMARTFAN to come on at temps over 72C to Fan 1and3 running FUL whenever temp over 54C, then finally drilled a new grid of exhaust holes to better expose the onboard fan of the ATI9700pro graphics card, and ouila!-- that dropped my CPU idle temp to 50C.

Is this enough? Anybody else running vegas on a shuttle SB51g with an ATI 9700pro or better in its PCI slot and running cooler than 50C?

heat sink and amount of thermal grease seem OK.