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February 22, 2006
Hercules Upgrade
Getting on with the time of year for my upgrades, I finally embarked upon upgrading Hercules, My strongest workstation. This is one of the reasons I've been so sparse in contact.
Hercules Inner Self
Frankly, I've been putting this off for quite some time since I depend on this machine so much. It's a dual processor XEON that I use for everything. It’s a hybrid Linux/Windows workstation. I rarely even boot up Xena (My windows workstation) since I use VMware to run multiple Operating system instances (Windows for my main browsing internet access, Windows for work, XP for graphics, Solaris for Work and a few other Linux/DOS instances for testing boot disks). I love Vmware! best investment in software I ever made. This creates a double-edged sword. Whenever I work on Hercules, I loose access to all those virtual machines (at least for the time being). Recently I've been upgrading other machines so I can begin offloading the virtual VM's to other machines. Slated is another dual processor XEON for the Seismic Radiobot which will be my backup machine.
This entry chronicles some pics and gotcha's on the recent upgrade. The most recent changes were from 2 400mhz/2.4Ghz Xeons to 2 533Mhz/3.2ghz Xeons. An upgrade of the disk subsystem from 2 80GB SCSI Ultra160 Maxtors to 2 150GB SCSI Ultra320 Maxtors, a doubling of Ram from 1Gb to 2GB and a new Active PFC 600 Watt power supply to handle it all. This should help me train on Solaris 10 and provide the oomph without the lag. (Or so I thought).
The first upgrade was to the Seasonic 600Watt S-12. Recently I've become a bit concerned about electrical usage and heat exchanged for such. Recent hikes in cost for power and the future heat in summer months really made me think about this. I've been reading allot about the power draw of XEONS and active PFC power supplies. In fact I did research for weeks on power supplies alone. The costs can be astronomical (as can be the power draw). I finally settled on a Seasonic S-12 after reading Tom's hardware article. it ranked 2 out of a number of power supplies, had all the connections I needed, was reported to run cool and had active PFC. I can attest that A. It does run COOL, B. Active PFC seems to have some affect, C. it runs quiet. The 15$ new egg rebate also helped. This sucker cost around $160, more then I've ever spent on a power supply, yet there are many that are more expensive. I really like this power supply. It supports the EPS12V (BTX) connector for dual processors and dual core CPU's, but also can come apart for regular ATX boards. It's quiet, cool and well made. I highly recommended it. In comparison to my Antec 550Watt EPS12V power supply, it runs cooler. Much cooler. Although it has a 120MM fan, it's just as quiet as the 2 80MM fans on the Antec.
Does PFC Work? I used the Kill-a-watt meter to test the machine's draw before and after swap out. The dual Xeons & 6 drives were pulling about 160 watts on idle. Less then I had originally thought.. After swapping with the Seasonic, it was pulling about 156 watts. Hmm, not much of a difference, yet the heat output certainly was different. Will it save on my electric bill? Probably not. Yet when you have more then one machine running 24x7 it will start to add up. Besides it's important to consider efficiency when connecting to a UPS.
The Maxtor SCSI upgrade was done next. I elected to use the ZALMAN ZM-2HC2 NP(Noise Prevention) Heatpipe HDD Cooler. Previously I had been using the Antec hard drive coolers for these 10,000 RPM drives. I'm not sure it did very well as every few months one of the two drives would end up needing replacement. Heat was around 40c to 50c, which isn't too bad, but I felt they did not breathe enough for these drives. The Zalmans are good, but I do not think they are good enough for these drives either. The temps hovered around 45c. Probably not enough airflow. I elected to go with the I-STAR iStorm7 Heat Terminator Bracket 2x5.25" with 3 HDD Drive with 1x80mm Fan. This proved to be an upgrade well worth the money. Quiet and Cool. The drives now hover down to 34c. The fan is very quiet and I think it helps the case breathe better too.
For those interested, I modified the Nagios check_smart utility to monitor the temps so I was sure these upgrades would actually have an effect. If anyone wants my new improved check_smart nagios plugin let me know.
Close up of the heat sinks
The next step was the CPU and memory upgrade I've been putting off. It was not something I was thrilled about doing because it required removal of the Extended ATX motherboard. My case, albeit large, has some brackets that block slipping the ram directly in. Plus if you've ever installed XEON heat sinks, you know what a pain that can be. Recently I won a pair of MCX603-V Heat sinks. Rated high, yet costly and difficult to acquire I was pretty stoked to get them way under actual cost. They suckers are big. heavy, yet work like a charm. I've been using the heat sinks that came with the Supermicro X5DA8 and although they work well, I was a bit concerned about using them with the higher powered CPU's. First off they are a bit noisy when the CPU's heat up. Those 60MM fans at 5000RPMS can make a grating whine. Second, I was not sure how well they would cool the CPU's. For the Swiftech's I purchased a pair of 80mm Thermaltake Smart Case Fans. This gave me a more CFM and a bit of control to the fan speed. Although putting on the Swiftech's was a bit more difficult then regular Xeon heat sinks, the effort was well worth it. This combination really rocks! It dropped my CPU temps a whopping 10C. On idle the temp is now around 35c and on a faster more powerful CPU! I'm very happy with this combination. Noise is a minimum.
Since these smart fans work so well I'll be swapping in 3 of them on my case. I highly recommend them. You cannot go wrong for $9.00. You have the choice of Full speed, temperature controlled or manually controlled fan speed. You can use a motherboard connector or a regular power supply connector. Although whiney at high speed, finding a sweet spot between good performance and noise should be easy enough. At full speed (4800RPM) they push a whopping 70cfm of air. I may try one of the Panaflo's, however they are not adjustable like the smart fans. I ended up purchasing a 120MM smart fan and plan to do a casemod to allow more air to be drawn out of the computer.
So onto the next upgrade was Ram, this was simple. Pop in 2 modules, boot up and there ya go.. Or so I thought. Per a prior entry, I had previously upgraded a pair of 160GB IDE Maxtor’s to 320GB WD drives. This proved to be a big mistake. Mixing the two manufactures on the same bus wreaked havoc on the bus, kernel and ultimately my data! (Those drives are no longer in Hercules and now exist in the Radiobot, which already had WD drives and is now ready for MP3s woot!) I think part of the problem here also had to do with the ram upgrade. it seems with the two drives on the bus and the ram upgrade the kernel did not like how DMA with the IDE drives was being mapped. For some reason my I/O dropped from 60MB/s down to 3MB/s. It took many hours of testing. I removed the WD drives and the system still under performed. I finally decided to fool the kernel and lie. When booting I told the Kernel it only had half the ram it really did. The system hung on booting. I then told it, OK, you only have 1.5GB. This time it booted and everything went back to normal regarding speed. I left it like this for a week as I tried recovering my data. it seems with the WD drives and the memory problems my file systems were corrupting. Fortunately for me, my Kuro boxes saved my ass! These had redundant backups of my Mp3 and file archives (I have two Kuros) and I was able to rsync the files back. Don't think I lost too much. Phew. Last time I ever mix those drives on the same bus!
So after all the upgrades, The system seems to run much cooler, quieter, yet also draws less power then I expected. As of now (even while writing this) with VMware running and 4 drives the system is pulling only 168 watts of power. Not too shabby eh?
Linux still under performing?
So I'm still working on the upgrade because I feel it's still under performing, or at least the later kernels are. I've noticed my I/O dropped with the Bonnie benchmarks on the later kernels. Not sure if it's a high memory DMA access issue or just re-adjustments of the kernel. it seems my SCSI I/O is almost half the prior benchmark. Although 65MB/S throughput is good, prior benchmarks were at 145MB/s. it could be the driver, so it looks as though I'll be hacking s'more before it's finally ready.
If interested I have a some pics in the Technology section of my gallery.
http://www.cotrone.com/rob/gallery/Technology
Posted by Me on February 22, 2006 07:00 AM