Tag: pci express

Universal PCIe, AGP, PCI, ISA card storage board (#P43)

Looks like I haven’t tagged any post as “project” for over a year now…time to release some open hardware

I don’t really store much computer hardware – most components are either in use (at least occasionally), waiting to be sold (eBay and the like), or waiting to change hands the next time I visit family. Of course there’s floppy drives somewhere, or good old memories (ha), but it’s not like I have a collection of each and every Socket A motherboard or something crazy. There is, however, two boxes (Really Useful Boxes to be precise, the 9 liter type that I use for lots of things since they fit a specific cupboard nicely) of extension cards. […]


Fried Meilhaus ME-8200 Digital I/O card (WHL #75)

I can’t stand throwing away allegedly damaged stuff without proper diagnosis (or even working surplus items) at work. For today, I took home a pretty nice I/O card for final testing before sadly putting it in the bin. It’s a ME-8200B PCIe card from Meilhaus, a German test equipment specialist. It’s red (which makes it faster), and it retails for 680€ plus VAT at the moment, so certainly not something you’d throw away without second thought. However, due to our overpriced fancy standard clients at work, testing PCIe cards is basically impossible – you can’t do that inside those tiny cases, and I’d hate to completely disassemble one of those things (short cables to fit the envelope!), […]


NVMe boot on unsupported platforms via Clover (#P42)

A bit more background info on last week’s NVMe adapter board used on the incompatible Fujitsu D3348-B1 2011v3 platform.

The Clover boot manager has been around for quite some time now, and its predecessor is already well over a decade old. It once formed from the rEFIt boot loader back when Hackintoshs were the cool gadget to have, and it had an intermediate fork step with rEFInd (oh those EFI puns…). Thankfully I’m really late to the M.2 party (or any other SSD form factors other than 2.5″/3.5″, really) for hardware compatibility reasons, and so all the early adopter issues have been ironed out over the years. […]


SSD M.2 NVME to PCI-E 4.0 X4 Riser Card Replacement PCI-Express X4/X8/X16 M Key Adapter Card Computer Accessory (WHL #72)

More computer stuff this week, but with parts directly shipped from China.

With the somewhat recent upgrade from a socket 2011 to a 2011-3 desktop board, I also made the switch from Windows 7 to 10. Not that I like any of those, but more and more software will only work with the latter, and some specific tool that I wanted to try basically requires 10 or defaults into a non-hardware accelerated mode that is simply pointless to use. As I had a Win 10 diagnostics M.2 drive handy, that was my starting point.

Thing is – since I cheaped out on the board revision for a significant discount, it does not support v4 CPUs (which I’m fine with), and it also does not support NVMe booting (which would have been nice). […]


JMB363 2 Port PCI-E SATA II 2.0 RAID & 1 IDE 3.5″ to PCI Express Adapter Converter Card Expresscard (WHL #67)

Time-incorrect retro computing time! We’ve had a lot of computer-related stuff recently, but this one is an elegant mix of old, niche and Wan Hung Lo. It’s perfect.

First of all, what is it? It’s a PCI Express 1.0 x1 card with (according to Wikipedia) the only native PCIe to PATA and SATA interface chip there is, a JMicron JMB363. The “confidential” three-page datasheet floats around on the interwebs if you want to take a look. PCIe 1.0, AHCI and IDE compatible, HotPlug, NCQ, UDMA6 = ATA133 (1 port, so 2 devices), SATA2 (3 Gb/s and 2 ports, so 2 devices as well), RAID 0/1/0+1/JBOD functionality. […]


Supermicro X9SRW-F small riser mounting adapter (#P24)

More fun with the Supermicro X9SRW (and we’re still not done yet!)

The two X9SRW machines that I got had the same CPU and RAM situation, but one of them was in a 815 (1U) case, and the other one still is in a 825 (2U) one. I scrapped the noisy 815 for my board and allocated the more spacious 825. Fans are not the only thing that differs, though, as the added height also caused Supermicro to exchange the riser card for a different one. While the top riser is just an angled PCIe x8 connector (high up to make room for some heat sinks underneath), the bottom one is a WIO type that distributes 32 lanes in total. […]


Mellanox ConnectX-3 MCX311A-XCAT 10GbE and Solaris 11.3 (WHL #42)

The heat. F*ck me.

I think post #42 deserves something nerdy. More nerdy than usual. Glad to report that I just bought something suitable – two Mellanox SFP+ cards (MCX311A-XCAT), capable of 10GbE over fibre (IEEE 802.3ae) and per DAC cables (not even sure which 802 that is – 802.3ak is Twinax as used in DAC, but thats quad-Twinax as used in CX-4 connectors, like Infiniband does). 55.00€ delivered from the Netherlands, as fast network connections are “Neuland” in Germany and therefore carry a heavy premium. Slap on some 1.5m of compatible FS.com […]


Mini PCIe Module QCA9880 WPEA-352ACN 802.11AC Dual Band Wireless WiFi network card support Linux (WHL #39)

While I’m in the “X doesn’t do Y, so let’s hotchpotch DIY something to get Z running” mindset, let’s release something else that I’m slightly bitter about. WiFi network cards. [scroll down to the first image to skip my rambly introduction]

I’m not a big fan of Intel for their business practices, but when it comes to Consumer/Prosumer network cards, Intel is basically the brand to get. I’m running a CT Gigabit (82574L) addon card in my AMD ZFS server, and my old Thinkpad has something similar (82567LM) built in. […]