One lives in a Telstra Velocity area - Smart Community
Velocity != NBN FTTP
edit or Opticomm… same deal.
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Funny thing is, a section of the estate down the road which is not part of our community (but you’d be forgiven if you did as its technically on our side of a boundary)… anyways they have Velocity… while we have Opticomm… and it gets even more stupid. The business park as you enter the estate doesn’t even have Opticomm or Velocity - still uses copper infrastructure… how dumb
Okay so this is definitely not a standard NBN set up. Which is what I thought.
No, its a third party that covered the estate - Opticomm
Trust me it sucks sometimes… when things go wrong. They blame RSP and RSP blames them. Consumer caught in middle.
I’m well aware, you can read a lot about them on Whirlpool.
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Speaking of new purchases… I picked up a Mikrotik RouterBOard RB 3011 UiAS-RM router for home. I got it 2nd hand, as I wanted a rack mount router for when I finally get wall mount cabinet in my garage done to house it 
Dual Core ARM processors - 1GB ram
This thing could run probably 3 or more 100/40 connections at the same time with load balancing… but no way can I justify getting a 2nd or 3rd 100/40 service to test it out
Me too. 141435 down, 56360 up. On 25/5 FTTN with Exetel and its mostly stable. No problems with streaming most of the time, even in peak hours.
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I’ve really been a bad boy, over the last month or two.
First it was a long term goal to get rid of the Tecnicolor TG789 and replace it with something awesome. so I recently picked up an ASUS RT-AC88U on OCAU for a handy saving over the insane retail and it was only a week or so old.
Second I spotted the newly updated verison of the Cygnett Charge Up Pro 20K PD at my local Costco as i was doing a casual lap and immediately double checked the pricing, then bought it for $119. (everywhere else it was $169)
I’ve splurged buying myself my first 4K Bluray Collection, Westworld, Season One (Red Limited tin version) on a handy sale at JB HiFi.
Now this past fortnight has cost me dearly. my beloved and babied A1297 17" BTO MBP seems to have, again bitten the dust. ironically it was while it was doing a Time Machine backup. it’s first in two years, so im kinda in trouble maybe.
have a Genius Bar appt this morning to see if we can get anything done. (the Logic board was replaced by apple in May about a bit before the unit went into Vintage support status.
Two of these PCIe card connectors for my internal RAID 0 SSDs for the Mac Pro 3,1.
However, I really am not sure what the process should be for using them, or what the difference is between the SATA connectors in the bays, and the 4x, 8x, and 16x PCIe slots. Right now, I have them plugged into the 4x PCIe slots, I can’t put them in the 16x because that holds my GTX 660. Would it be better to put one in the 8X slot? And as there is an additional SATA connector for the PCIe card (you can see it in the top right hand corner of the card), that means I should be able to draw power from the SATA/power connector next to the BlueTooth card on the motherboard, right? So then, really, I can put both RAID 0 SSDs on the same card, and then I should put those in the… 8X slot? Is that best here?
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Unless I’m mistaken, that’s a 1x PCIe connector on the card, so you’d see zero benefit by putting the card into the 8x slot over the 4x.
Additionally, I don’t think you’ll see a speed difference by using this over the onboard SATA connectors, but it does at least free up the drive bays for your spinning rust drives.
facepalm
Derp, I TOTALLY see that now. Yeah, it is a 1x. I wondered why the connector seemed so small versus my video card. I don’t think there are any bigger cards available within my price range, so you’re probably right. It does seem like even at 1x, it is marginally better than SATA II onboard, but most of the benefit is going to be from freeing up the drive bays for spinners. It probably DOES mean I didn’t need to actually buy TWO of the cards, so I may return one, or I may add a spinner 2.5 drive. I’ll have to think about it.
I can report that the RAID 0 SSDs, whether in the bays or in the PCIe cards, have the real world feel being totally snappy. I compared that to my spinner clone, and the difference is stark. I do video editing, so I need those other bays for storage disks. So this might, in the end, not be about any real speed increase, rather, it is about increasing the amount of physical drives I can have inside the Mac Pro.
That’ll do.
EDIT: It seems that PCIe 2.0 1x is almost twice as fast in theory as the SATA II bus. Meaning yes, there is a definite advantage, especially for RAID 0, which is leveraging the speed of two different connections. But it is not going to be anywhere near the almost 1000mb/s read/write I’m getting from the SATA III RAID 0 SSDs in my 2012 MacBook Pro. However, there is still room to grow for this set up because as prices for PCIe SATA III cards drop, I can invest in a 4x or 8x card in the future. All in all, I’m still happy with this purchase decision.
This:
Instead of that:
How did I get to be so … responsible… LOL
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Do NOT connect that to your motherboard. That’s not what it is. It is to allow a second SATA device from the new additional SATA bus you’re creating via PCIe. The PCIe card you’ve bought is effectively a SATA interface card, that adds a new SATA bus. i.e. if you had a traditional PC with lots of Power plugs and drive bays you could run a cable from the PCIe card to the new drive etc.
The two spare SATA ports on your motherboard are on the internal SATA bus and can be used for additional SATA devices too - the most common hack is to run a SATA cable up to the Optical drive port and throw an SSD or SATA blurry drive there. It’s a bit tricky to do though (see here).
Does that all make sense?
Not at all, no.
But I figured out on my own everything you just said. In fact, I didn’t realise this, but in fact, I have a SATA Power (not SATA data) splitter cord. I already have a SATA Blu-ray drive in there. Basically, I need to get POWER from wherever it is to the PCIe card second drive. Where is it though? Probably close to the optical bays, which means it’d have to be a very long splitter power cord to get back down to the PCIe card second drive. But in theory, that means four extra drives, not just two, at SATA III 6gb/s, I think.
The small half of SATA connecter is Data, the wide half is power.
PCIe card = 2x SATA ports, one for the 2.5-inch drive mounted on it, the other can be re-cabled anywhere. You won’t need to power the drive screwed to the card, or the card itself - as the card will get power from the PCIe bus. You will need to source SATA power if you want to add a second drive and use the spare PCIe card SATA port.
Mac Pro Motherboard = 4x SATA ports for internal Hard Drives + 2 spare SATA ports on motherboard (1 of which it sounds like has been used for your Bluray). You should have 2x ATA data cables (wide ribbon) and 2x Molex power in the Optical Bay area (i.e. Apple did this so you can run two optical drives). You will not be using either ATA data cable unless the bluray was added in addition to the original DVD-R drive. If you have a SATA bluray player then you or someone else has clearly already converted to SATA power instead of old school ATA power for that bay.
Long story short, you have 2x SATA ports from the motherboard you need to find power for (but there is power up in the optical bay so most people run the SATA cables up there and use the two power cables there + a converter from MOLEX to SATA Power) and you have 2x SATA from the PCIe card & 1x power from the PCIe card (for the mounted drive). So to get a 4th drive going you’d need to split the power from somewhere as you suggest. You will want to make sure that you aren’t exceeding the load of the Mac Pro PSU, obviously!
These are the sorts of things we use most often in life. Having our necessary chores made a little easier is pretty great. Thumbs up from me!
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I installed the Blueray drive myself, and I already did the conversion you speak of, that way I can use the DVD-RAM drive for R1 (USA) DVDs and the BD-RW drive for R2 (Japan) DVDs (since I own both). I own a couple of R3 discs too, unfortunately, so I have some kind of software hack so that somehow one of the drives can still do run decryption on the VOB files. I’m the kind to set it and forget it, so I’d have to revisit how I got it working.
Pretty much everything you said is everything I said. I think. Hence, where am I going to get more power is the question? I definitely need to check I’m not exceeding the PSU, considering I am also running extra power from the motherboard to the GTX 660.
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Big purchase…
Have wanted a Ford Ranger 4x4 Dual Cab for a while… finally made it happen. Put a deposit down on a XLT 4x4 Dual Cab run out model. Discount over incoming MY18 stock was good enough to make purchase happen now instead of mid-year.
Going from a 1.6 litre i30 6 speed manual diesel to a 3.2 litre 6 speed manual diesel 4x4 ute 
Will post a photo when I pick it up. Only photo I have now is it sitting on lot
EDIT: Should also mention - my wife is the best.
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We have a 2012 XLT. Great car, only draw back is the turning circle - it’s like turning an aircraft carrier around.
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Not surprised by that.
I test drove the automatic, as the dealer had a demo… so he gave keys and let us go on our own. Came back and went out in a manual with dealer (only because he had to accompany the trade plate which was on the car). The automatic I didn’t like at all. Having said that, I did stall at the first lights in the manual - as first gear is so short…