I think that's fairly normal for the 5040. I stressed over it for a while but there's little I can do. The specs for the CPU say it's good for way more heat than that. The case it's in is already cavernous with chimney effect (vertical) cooling.

The only thing that would get it much better would be liquid cooling but then you're back into where do you get the right size block and mountings for a CPU that's designed to live in data centre router type equipment where noise is just not a concern.

The design is just poorly thought out in terms of where people that don't like jet engines under their desk (because I already have crappy tinnitus) are going to get cooling solutions from. I want to save what little decent hearing I have left for my guitar abuse

I have no idea what the A1222 is like, but I sincerely hope it's quieter or has better options.

No, I don't believe something as modern as the 7800XT will work. That's more modern than the 6700XT in my gaming PC (and considerably cheaper - hmm!).

I believe the RX500 series is as recent and powerful as it gets. By that, the RX580 8GB is the best supported card. For the vast majority of the time you won't get any benefit from anything higher than RX550, but there are certainly a few games like Dhewm3 where every FPS counts and in that respect, RX580 > RX550. But not by much, just a few FPS. I know since I own both cards and have tried them.

Someone please correct me if any of the above is wrong.

Did this ever see the light of day? I mean, I assume not, or it would be out there?

@Hypex thank you - I haven't checked these yet as it's been a manic work week, but I will.

@Hypex the limitation is a physical one. The 4x slot on the x50x0 motherboards is right next to the 16x slot so unless you have a very basic, single slot graphics card, nothing is going to fit in that 4x slot. If you use an extender then you can bring it out clear of your primary card. An incredible oversight in design if you ask me, but maybe they never considered modern, or multiple cards during design?

@daveyw be aware that when it comes to MOS in particular, cards start to get very picky about working in the second slot. When I tried, I had a card that was allegedly supported by MOS, albeit a very poor card (an HD5450). It would work in the primary slot, but not the 4x slot. I think (but don't quote me) that I established that the extender / adapter wasn't the issue.

I do intend to revisit this at some point. I'm even considering what sort of impact moving my primary card to the 4x adapter would have, because we're likely not using the full 16x bandwidth or anywhere near it.

I've no idea how Linux plays with this, I only tested MOS at the time, but I do now have a second SSD that I was going to try Linux on, but since I learned that PPC Linux doesn't support RX cards, Linux will have to be on a secondary card too.

It's all a bit of a minefield. Plenty of people have done it, but it's annoying to say the least and involves some pretty ancient hardware.

@nbache

Yes to both of those last two as well. So I think in terms of whether libs and drivers are the latest, I should be good.

So is any work still being done on drivers and the like? Does someone need to know that there were problems with SATA Optical drives and the 50x0 driver?

Ok, now it's my turn to be wrong

When I referred to the 5040 driver, I actually mean the unified one, the one called "p50x0sata.device" I called it the 5040 one (wrongly) because the 5020 one is explicitly called p5020sata.device and well, there are only 2 boards that we use, 5020 and 5040. So, yeah, my bad there.

So, what I actually mean, is that the unified one, in my testing at the weekend over the coarse of this thread was terribly buggy with the internal CD drive and the (presumably older) 5020 specific one worked much better for me even though I have the 5040 board. Is it meant to be used on the 5040 board? I don't know. Presumably not, or things wouldn't have progressed to the unified driver. All I know is that the 5020 specific driver worked better in my 5040 than the 50x0 driver.

I probably wrote far more there than I needed!

So as for the other questions, AmiUpdate says it's v2.54 (18.2.2024). Is it configured correctly? Don't know. Both 'www.amiupdate.net' and 'update.amigaos.net' are defined and enabled. I don't see much else of relevance in the prefs. aminupdate.net is the default, bold, server.

For update 2 - no I didn't install that because my system came preconfigured with a USB "rescue" disk instead of actual install media and was installed (ny me) by restoring this to a new hard drive. The text in the top menu bar says Update 2 is installed, but that will have been by the supplier, not me, so I assume it is, but since I didn't do it, I can't be sure.

I mean, it doesn't really sound like much is up with the system in terms of drivers and libs. I think it's just pretty normal to get DSI errors and stuff. That's how it's been so far anyway.

@nbache

I think you missed my point there a bit. I realise that AmiUpdate can tell me if any of the programs and libs that it knows about are up to date or whatever, and yeah, I run it quite often. But it didn't for example know that if I wanted to run an internal SATA CD drive on a 5040 board that actually, the 5020 data driver is what you want because the updated 5040 one doesn't appear to work properly*. And it can't know that "hey, you've got XYZ lib and ABC libs and they're known to cause issues together" etc.

*NB: No idea how stable or performant running the 5020 sata drive on a 5040 is, all I know is that it resolved the issues with the CD drive. I've switched back for now since I never intended to install the internal drive permanently anyway as my case doesn't have a 5.25" bay.

For what it's worth, I ran AmiUpdate just now. It found an update for GeekBench2D, installed it, I rescanned afterwards and AmiUpdate crashed with a DSI error. So that's nice and stable too

@Hypex

Is there any mileage in me giving a list of versions of all the kickstart files and system libs in my system? Would anyone actually know if one was out of place? Such a list doesn’t need to be posted here, could be anywhere.

Just got in from a day out. So, yes, I’ve always felt that the system seems a bit flakey. It does seem like it’s easily crashed but unless there is a list of what all the correct latest or most compatible kickstart devices and libs for each system are then It’s not desperately easy to know what might be out of place. Especially when my system, like most now wasn’t built from scratch, but from a recovery stick.

@Lio - bingo, that works, so it just needed the right device and unit specifying. I should have read more carefully as it looks like Maijestro already said this earlier up. Oops!

And also, creating a CD def icon for USB0 also puts the finishing touch on and makes it looks right.

It's a bit picky about not picking up the disk if it was in at boot until after you've ejected it and put it back in again but I think I've read that elsewhere. And it can stick after you've ejected it so I'm guessing some task has not let go of it, but that's minor details I can live with.

Sorted then. I have a drive I can use on the odd occasion I need it.

@Lio

I'll give that a go when I get time. I hope it's that simple, and if it is, thanks! I'm not convinced it's something I tried yet, not the DOSDEV anyway.

But the problem isn't really about the icon - it's about the fact that it doesn't see any audio portion of the disk. For example, on H2 disk 2 none of the audio tracks are present. On any audio CD, regardless of whether it's an audio icon or hard disk icon, none of the audio tracks are present.

This is with p50x0sata.device or usbdisk.device. If I use p5020.device (for the internally attached drive), all is well in that regard, there are other problems, but not that.

One more update before I pack up for the night. I found part of the culprit for SATA at least.

The culprit is p50x0sata.device. If I comment that one out and instead use p5020.device things works as I would expect, audio CDs have the gold CD icon on the desktop and after adjusting the tool types for "PlayCD" it will play the CD, eject the CD and do all the things you'd expect it to.

DVDs also appear as discs but DVPlayer play the video but honestly, that might not be setup right. I have only the old one that comes with the OS and I'm not purchasing the one you can buy separately just to do some testing (I'm never, ever likely to sit in front of the computer to watch a DVD when I have a perfectly good 55" TV in the living room!).

Icing on the cake though is that the system will not boot with a disc in the drive, it just hangs on scanning the SATA bus. So that's never going to work for me as I'd never remember to eject the disc every time. Never mind how you're meant to install an OS from a CD

Heretic 2 couldn't read the disk, as soon as I set the device to p2020sata.device and unit 1 the whole system hangs. Not sure what that's about.

So, putting the system all back together (without the SATA), and going back to the USB devices and it's just the same as it was before. Not a big surprise given it's using usbdisk.device not p5020sata.device. I think that's about as far as I can go for now unless there's software things I can try.

I'll upload a photo to this shortly when I can remember my image host and credentials, but suffice to say, after 2 cables and a whole lot of reboots, I've got an internal SATA DVD writer attached and it's exactly the same. Audio CD shows as a hard drive. So at this point I'm glad I didn't spend out on any extra hardware.

It was flaky getting here too. Most of the time the system wouldn't boot with a disk in the drive, it would hang on scanning SATA port 1. The first time it booted with Heretic 2 CD in the drive (a hybrid disk) and I could browse the files. If i went into the game and selected vsata.device unit 1 it was an instant system hang (no crash, just a hang). Then I rebooted to workbench, ejected Heretic2 disk 2 and inserted an audio CD and something kernel panic'd so I had to reboot again. This time I got to the same point I was at with the external USB drive of the audio CD being a hard drive with no files on it.

So I'm back to...

Do I need to configure something or change something? Could something be setup wrong on my system? Honestly I've never touched optical media on any Amiga before this so I'm a complete noob here. Obviously I've had CDs and DVDs before, just not on Amiga or Amiga-like's.

Here's some of the u-boot log since I have a serial console attached the rest is quite long:

I think the first thing to do is for me to grab my internal DVD drive and connect it to the SATA port as normal, which I can do just by removing the side panel of the case and confirm that it is the USB drive causing the issue and not the OS. Right now I assume it is, but it would be prudent of me to check. I think I can check this tonight as I should only need a SATA and power cable.

So, I don't have 2 SSDs in there at the moment but I did buy a second disk for either linux or MOS the other day. I haven't tackled the GPU side of it yet - that's another can of worms.

Another reason is that my case doesn't have a 5.25" bay and the case was £200 so I don't really want to replace it for one that does. I DO have a SATA DVD writer that used to be in a machine that I could do something with (like get an enclosure).

Anyway, I think we've answered the question that the 2 drives I have here don't work with OS4. None of this is urgent, or any kind of priority, as per my original question, I just wondered if I needed to do anything special and it sounds like the answer is, no, not if the drive is fully supported, and these don't appear to be.

[EDIT] Somewhere, hiding in a box of cables, I know I have a bracket that would bring power and sata to the back and I could use a simple eSATAp cable. That's probably the easiest option as I could then attach either an SSD or a DVD drive depending on the situation..

Update: A powered USB hub and my original USB CD drive behaves exactly the same and holding CTRL during insert of disk didn't make any difference - which doesn't surprise me much as it doesn't seem capable of reading the audio portion of the disk at all, whether pure audio or hybrid.

So I'm back to square one really. Either PCIe SATA controller with eSATA and external eSATA caddie for my SATA optical drive, or keep trying different USB CD drives. Maybe starting with the specific LG model shown above if it can still be found.

Either option not ideal.

@all

Based on the replies here, I'll give holding CTRL down when I insert the CD but it indeed sounds like my drive is not behaving like a standard drive, it sounds like it's presenting to the system the same way a USB disk would. Or maybe it's not supporting the relevant commands, whichever technicality it is, the result is the same to me!

Probably the easiest and cheapest next step here is to disconnect the powered hub that I have from my Mac and connect it to the Amiga. Then I can see if the first drive I bought works. If so, I'll look for a powered hub. That would be cheaper than other options which would be at least a PCIe SATA card with external eSATA and / or a different case that has a 5.25" bay.

Incidentally, what is the generally accepted way to refer to the computer? Is it an AmigaOne? Is it just an Amiga? X5000? Obviously there are times when you need to be specific and say X5040, but otherwise I'd prefer something more generic but I don't know what. A minor detail for sure

Part software part hardware I guess...

Is there anything special I need to do to get an external USB CD drive to work on OS4 (4.1FE fully updated)?

I ask because I'm now on my second attempt at getting a USB CD drive to use with the machine. The first didn't work because the machine couldn't supply enough power so it just shut down the ports.

Today I got another, this one has a second USB port for power alone and I have that connected to a battery pack. It works, but if I put an audio CD in, the OS sees this as a hard drive that has no files, it doesn't see it as an audio CD.

Similarly, if I insert Heretic disk 2 for the CD audio, the game doesn't see it. This will be for the same reason. I get that I can image the CD (and that is how I use it) but that's not the point here, the point is I am trying to find a USB CD drive that I can use because my case intentionally has no 5.25" bays.

The device reported for the CD drive is 'usbdisk.device unit 0' - i mean, that doesn't even sound CD-like, although mounter does say CDFS for the file system. But it just doesn't see it as an audio CD.