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2016/12/08

Log 2016120801

The Robot was dug out from the clutter in the room and is now on top of a two drawer file cabinet where it should be. It is now ready to have it's new 4 port SATA RAID expansion card and an additional 5.25" drawer installed.  The motherboard supports 8 SATA drives, which most of mine are currently mounted to.  But I've come to find that four hard disks are probably taking up a lot of it's RAM, or memory.  In order to alleviate that, I'm installing an expansion card into one of the motherboard's slots.

The drawer is just for storage.  The Robot's chassis is tall and has three CD/DVD drive bays that I'll never use.  Two of them already have storage drawers and I currently have the upgrade to install the final one.

My graphics are running off of what's soldered on the motherboard.  Unfortunately, to run it, that's also using memory.  I don't have the money yet to get another expansion graphics processing unit, but I think I can tell what made the prior one that I had go bad.  These days, graphics cards come with their own down facing cooling fans.  Well there wasn't much space between it and the card below it, so it's airflow was being blocked.  When I was playing movies, it would crash The Robot.  My theory was that the card was overheating and had done that so much that it damaged the graphics processing unit (GPU).

Not all of the lower cards are the same size and shape.  So, I think that if I reorder the cards from top to bottom, with the thinest being at the top, I can create a space for better air flow should I insert another expansion graphics card into The Robot.

Doing these things might help to allocate more cache memory to Google Earth.  And this is essential to working with the North Country Trail Association's GIS Repository. Even when just working with Michigan's tracks as I've recently modified it to do.

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