Nekochan Net

And placing an octane on top of a stack also has a downside. But hey, when they were used, they weren't ment to be stacked...
Althought here are flaws (who made the O200 feet so fragile?), they have more than enough to compensate (the O2100 has wheels ).

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Toika Myra Fiona Lisa Sandra Danica Giana Lara Iona Aida

My favorite flaw is in the O2k systems. On the CPU boards they have these little flanges on the side that make sure that each cpu board bracket contacts the others (I guess for grounding reasons). Anyway. They put them in such a way that if you put in a CPU board in slot 1 then try to put something in slot 2, you end up bending all the flanges. The best way I've found is to start at the highest numbered board and work down. It's annoying though because the system counts CPUs starting with board 0, so you have to go from low to high when filling out a case.

Granted few people swap boards much, but it's still annoying.

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UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity. -- Dennis Ritchie

It's even more likely to occur on an Onyx2 Graphics Module or an Onyx3 GBrick. I have a *thin* sheet of stiff plastic that I place on the 'finger' side of the board that's already in the chassis <just deep enough to cover the fingers or the edge of the bulkhead>, then insert the adjoining board, and pull the plastic sheet out - before I insert the chassis bolts or tighten the compression connectors.

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One would assume that the designers, of a machine which tended to cost upwards of $10K when first introduced, would understand that their market was not made up of morons (Alas, you never know I guess...). And a simple warning would have made it clear.

It would have been swell to be able to have stacked the CD-ROM (or external HDDs) on top of the O2 or Octane... just like the Indigo. Much less foot print... Plus making the Octane slightly taller would have given enough volume to include an internal 5 inch storage unit for a CD-ROM.

There were some mechanical design decisions in SGI-land which were truly epic in magnitude due to their stupidity. My biggest peeve were the drive sleds: I used to have a twin tower (alas, the two towers seemed fairly different in design and purpose so I never understood the monicker, but I digress) 4D, and the drive tower was so stupidly designed, why did each drive require like 10 liters volume and 10 kilos in sheet metal in its enclosure? When I owned an indigo, indigo2, and octane... I always wondered if SGI had a department whose only mission in life was to design drive sleds.

Each generation brought an incompatible drive sled, and an incompatible form factor for the GIO. The engineering resources for that must have been pretty high. Heck the Indy and Indigo2 were the same generation, yet they had incompatible form factors for their GIO implementation...

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

It is worse with the O3k (fuel, O300, O3000 etc) - all different sleds & different drive interfaces!!!

Fuel - no sled - 68pin
O3000 - sled + FC interface
O300 - different sled + 80 pin

I guess the Tezro & O3500 had different sleds as well!!!

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Now that is only consistent with previous totally incompatible designs.

Generally speaking I think the sleds are a good and userfriendly concept. Other vendors (like Sun) have things like that too, but only few have made an art of designing these things like SGI did. Not only are the SGI sleds incompatible, they also managed to reduce the chances to use an internal disk without a sled to a minimum.

At least the latter might be better in recent systems... I've used SCA disks in Octanes without a sled with no trouble.

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www.sgistuff.net - SGI info since 2001

I became a SGI fan when my Dad started his new job at SGI. He brought home an 02 and an Indy. Promptly there after he showed me Doom. I got a tour of where he worked once it was really cool see a wall of indys and desks with four or five O2s. He worked on the firmware for the VW320 and later worked on an obscure digital video recorder project where he was force fed irix. I guess Irix spreads from person to person cause I love my sgi boxes and I'm pretty sure I'm hooked for life.

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R14000 600mhz 1GB ram 1x 73GB 10k 2x 18GB 10k v10 graphics Irix 6.5.29
R4400 200mhz 256mb ram1x 36GB 10k XZ graphics Irix 6.5
R4600 133mhz 128mb ram 1x 1GB 24-bit XL graphics Irix 6.5
Dual PIII 1ghz 512mb 1x 80GB Ide 7200 Win2k server

If they'd made the disk area an eigth-inch (3 mm) wider they could have fit a CD-ROM in there.

The sun caddies are usable over a wide range of boxes and disk types.
I have the same sleds in Ultras, Enterpriseds and Sunblades (ok - they are FC disks)...
For SGI I have
Sleds for my Challenge/Onyx
Sleds for my Indigo 2
Sleds for the Octane / Origin 2xxx
Sleds for my O300
Sleds for my O3800
Sleds for my D bricks (crappy, super brittle plastic)

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The Visual Workstation 540 also has a another completely different kind of drive sled, fortunately there was one spare in mine after the original owner had taken their disks out.

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NeXTStation x 2, A4, A7000, RISC PC

Are you kidding? Only SGI would make a PeeCee completely propietary.

In contrast, I have used the same SUN drive sleds in an Ultra2, Ultra60, Blade1000, Ultra20, and in a brand new storagearray... for SCSI/SCA, FC, and SATA drives.

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"Was it a dream where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a
pyramid with thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?"

To be fair it does use SCA SCSI drives, but they are installed on a little metal tray that slides into the drive bay. Of course the RAM is completely weird..

No, IBM pulled the same stunt with some of their x86 servers. There are at least two variations on that black-with-slats drive sled that look almost identical but in fact, they're about .125" different in height. Thanks, IBM. Great job.

No, SGI is definately worse. In the VW320, even a floppy drive needs custom rails to allow you to fit it in the 3.5" media bays at the front.

No doubt. I was only commenting on the "only SGI" part. Others have been idjuts also