Question for resident computer gurus

[Partial]

Why not use firewire, then? Or some sort of digital connection where noise and signal length won't be factors.

Not sure. Its the customers call. We don't have firewire connectors on our single board computers I guess because we haven't had a call for them from any of our industrial customers but this customer could certainly add a firewire card. Interesting thought though. Wonder if I would get an "attaboy" if I suggested it.

For that matter, they could probably add a PCIe SATA card and everything would be fine?! Of course that would add a cost to their chassis they probably don't want to incur.

I would explain to them that their case design is flawed and that no such repeater exists. I would then recommend possibly making a switch to the more reliable and faster firewire, where they'll have less issues with data integrity to begin with.

[AtlPackFan]

This would be ideal for hot swapping, but his company makes backplanes so recommending an external solution would be like MS recommending OSX.

Actually, we would have no problem with that...as long as it was hooked to one of our computers.

Here is a link to our website...just so you know what we do.

http://www.trentontechnology.com/

[AtlPackFan]

Why not use firewire, then? Or some sort of digital connection where noise and signal length won't be factors.

Not sure. Its the customers call. We don't have firewire connectors on our single board computers I guess because we haven't had a call for them from any of our industrial customers but this customer could certainly add a firewire card. Interesting thought though. Wonder if I would get an "attaboy" if I suggested it.

For that matter, they could probably add a PCIe SATA card and everything would be fine?! Of course that would add a cost to their chassis they probably don't want to incur.

I would explain to them that their case design is flawed and that no such repeater exists. I would then recommend possibly making a switch to the more reliable and faster firewire, where they'll have less issues with data integrity to begin with.

I probably wasn't very clear. I'm pretty sure the customer is just buying a COTS case and popluating it with our single board computer (SBC), our backplane and then their cards, drives, etc. which includes hot-swap caddies for their drives so they can swap drives out with taking the case apart.

[Freak Out]

I think these guys need some help as well.....retrieving lost emails and such.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ail/components

[AtlPackFan]

I think these guys need some help as well.....retrieving lost emails and such.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ail/components

They were probably using SATA drives with hot-swap caddys for storage.

[Tyrone Bigguns]

I think these guys need some help as well.....retrieving lost emails and such.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ail/components

Move along folks, nothing to see here.