kumanan

Alright my carPC is right behind my drivers seat because at times it may freeze so i gotta disconnect the m2-atx constant wire and plug it back in for it to turn on/off. I want to hide it in the trunk or somewhere else, but if it freezes i dont wanna have to pop my turnk and go d/c the constant wire just to get it back on... how do you guys do it ? i have a normal MII12000 with a M2-ATX, 250 GB HD, ATI 128MB Video card and 1GB memory.

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RedGTiVR6

a switch in the glove box that connects to reset and another that connects to power...just like you would have in your home PC.

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kumanan

ohhhhh so thats what you guys do... interesting, alright thanks

RedGTiVR6

let us know if it works for you!

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kumanan

well thing is, my car is on air ride, if i put the thing in the trunk, it will move around oto much causing freezes.....

spoonraker

If you build your case and mount it correctly, no amount of bumps will cause it to be damaged. Mine is mounted in my trunk less than a foot from the cone of my subwoofer. I have the cone and port facing directly at the PC, with 1000W of power and a 12'' woofer, no problems yet.

Also as for your problem with having to unplug your computer to restart it, just use a switch or a relay mounted somewhere convenient.

2k1Toaster

You might be a good canidate for an automotive harddrive, or hybrid drive, or solidstate drive. Maybe even a 1.8" drive for the OS. They can take more jiggling around before freezing.


Not true. Yes mounting it rigidly helps, but your computer can freeze if it cant access the data it wants. If it is media, it will just stop playing until the drive is out of harms way and can access it again. If you have a huge in use pagefile and it is doing a memory read/write while it starts bumping, then you can run into irrecoverable freezes that require a hard reset.

A good example is in my toshiba. If you take it and use it like a maraca, after a couple seconds it starts beeping at you saying that the hard drive heads have stopped and are safely tucked away because some idiot is shaking it. Now with a desktop drive, they do not expect the drive to move while operational, so no such protective measures. The heads will just slam into the platters causing physical damage, and hence "bad sectors". This happens to laptop harddrives to but not as much because they are usually built for the tough.

But yes any non-solid sate drive will fail in an automotive environment given time because of the irradic platter smashing!

And I don't know what this is, but I like it so -->

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Got my CarPC in at: 3pm MST Monday, May 29th, 2006

M10k; 1Gb RAM; 250Gb 3.5" HD; 7" Ex-Audio TS; M2-ATX; GPS bundled w/ S&T'06; RF Mini Keyboard

spoonraker

Obviously any hard drive mounted in a car is going to fail with time, but the issue was his suspension combined with bumps in the road making the computer fail. If you construct and mount everything well, any CarPC can last a long time under most conditions. Like I said, my computer can take a daily pounding from a subwoofer at nearly point blank. When I was testing the computer components in the car for the first time by just setting them in the trunk on a static proof bag, obviously the second I turned the bass on it rattled everything apart, the sound card fell out of the PCI slot and the hard drive slid across the trunk. I forgot to turn my amp off when I was first testing it lol... anyway, after mounting everything in my case I can burp my sub at max volume inches away from the computer without even thinking twice about something being damaged.

Now... would I recommend you try your best to mount your computer in a way to avoid unnecessary shock? Of course. I'm just trying to say that a car with stiff suspension driving normally on normal streets will not produce enough shock to worry about instantly damaging your hard drive.

Unless you drive a car with no suspension and routinely go offroading, I wouldn't worry to much about shock damaging your PC. Just build and mount everything very securely.

Think of it this way. When you securely mount your hard drive to your vehicle, it basically becomes part of the car. Especially since his is mounted nearly in the center of the vehicle. When he hits a bump his car becomes a giant lever almost, with the fulcrum switching between the front and rear wheels, and the computer is solidly mounted in the middle. Him hitting a speed bump to the computer is nothing more than a quick tilt upwards from the front, then back down, then upwards from the back, then down. The movement of the computer is absolutely nowhere near as violent as that of the wheels. Your toshiba may fail when you use it as a maraca, but with the computer mounted to the car, you would have to hit a bump so huge it causes your who car to be shaken like a maraca for it to fail.

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