Sgi O2 workstation truly deserves its reward winning status. In a world of omnipresent PCs, only computers like Apple and sgi give us the different looks and feels. Sgi is really a fun to use. It comes up with two utmost extremes: one end is ultra expense the other is very affordable hardware availability from second hand market.

The first look on this machine doesn’t give us much impression of a computer if not placed near a monitor, a mouse and keyboard. It indeed has all the features a computer has. The upper front hides a well-shaped CD-ROM drive door. The bottoms and lights are no bigger than necessary.

When turn around and look at it’s back, all the ugliness of a computer appears:

68 pin SCSI connector: can be used to hook external hard drives, tape drives and so on.

A proprietary parallel printer port: To use the port you need the cable supplied by sgi. The other end of the cable can be used with most printers though.

The DB-15 monitor port is a standard one that works with PC monitors.

10/100Mbit/s port Ethernet.

Two serial ports.

PC compatible (PS/2 standard) mouse and keyboard ports.

Sgi has a very good collection of hardware libraries in its technical web site: www.techpubs.sgi.com. You can download the PDF or view the HTML files on-line to learn how to dissemble an sgi O2. Here I want to focus on various and interesting parts of the O2. One thing to say is you don’t have to use a screwdriver to take most of the parts out. This is a unique design. The box doesn’t come with a lid. (The bigger sibling of O2 is Octane that also has modular design but everything is bolted tightly. Sgi's new workstation Fuel is more like a PC than an sgi)

The rock solid Sony made power supply warrants reliability. However, the easiest failed part of a power supply is the fan. High quality fans are hard to find, as the manufactures can’t beat the price of products from cheaper sources.

The main board is what used to be called all-in-one design. It can house one PCI card. The hostid which license engine uses to distinguish the machine is located on the PCI card. Therefore, as long as you keep the PCI card, you can change the main board without needing to reapply for the license. The CPU is covered by a large heat sink. This is a 195Mhz CPU. The CPU may get too hot for the heat sink and a small fan on top is there to cool the CPU module. The small fan may invite problem. It’s impossible to detect CPU fan problem as to let the fan work, you have to insert the mainboard back into place, and nothing can be seen then.

Memory is sgi proprietary made. The 8 slots should be used in pairs with 1G maximum capacity. One cravat is patches should be applied for Irix 6.3 for memory configuration larger than 256MB. Otherwise the machine would not boot properly. The problem is very misleading as you may think the memory modules just installed cause the problems. Kingston is a very good third party memory manufacturer. It makes memory for almost all branded computers. Irix 6.5 doesn’t not have O2 256MB problem but always doublethink before upgrading. There are software applications that are picky for OS versions.

There are two versions of O2, R5000 series and R10000 series. Asides from firmware difference, there is a big physical dissimilarity: R5000 O2 has two internal hard drive bays whereas R10000 has only one though the back panel has two 80pin SCAs. (The above pictures are all for the R10000 version) The hard drive is mounted on the drive sled. Those who need a larger hard drive may prone to use an external hard drive. It’s feasible as the O2 has a standard 68pin connector. However, I would suggest replace the internal hard drive, which in most case a 4G or 9G SCSI drive with larger 36G or 73G drives. We can use this small adapter with flat cable to connect the new drive to O2 (when no spare drive bay or sled is available). Sgi has a very useful clone mechanism to copy the disks. After cloning the internal disk, the new drive can be mounted on the sled and the old O2 has a larger system disk now. One thing to note is about the SCSI drives. Some used SCSI drives may have problem working with O2. A low level format may address the problem. I have encountered the problem but didn’t have chance to further investigate before returned them back. A brand new 73G Seagate ST373405LC can work very well with O2s.

Hard drive on sled and audio-video module

68-80pin SCSI adaptor and cable

The machine boots with a very ear catching sound. Sgi is not noted for graphics for nothing. It boots graphically from ground up. This is also one of the features I like. The GUI of Irix is superb and exists out there for a very long time. It’s also a full featured Unix system. The characteristic of it is that it’s hard to make a thing work. However, once it works, it will work forever.

Please send to info@haofengtech.com for any comments, corrections and suggestions.

If you are interested in other sgi related information please visit: 

http://www.sgiaddict.net/

Last revised on 07/02/2002