Need a solution to a problem on a boat

Associate
Joined
8 Sep 2005
Posts
20
Location
Southampton
Hello All!!

(A Brief history) I work on a 25meter survey vessel. We spend large amounts of time offshore doing hydrographic and ecological surveys and the occasional painstaking radar traffic survey.

We are lucky enough to have some of the most sought after navigation hardware at our disposal and this is all linked into two main navigation/data PC's via a huge network of serial ports and cabling.

(Now the problem) As you may or may not know the weather conditions effect the stability of the boat we often find ourselves contending with very rough sea conditions and Slamming up and through waves.Not to mention the continuous vibration from Main engines and generators that are running 24hours. This over time has taken its tole on a countless number of Hard drives and general pc components. Weve tried everything from elastic bands to laptop hard drives to various foan and bungee chords etc.....

Our current train of thought is two shuttle computers with SSD's but i'm not so sure !

Any advice on SSD's? Are they what we need? They dont have to any bigger than 64gb and the software is designed to run as a boot so the computer spec is not of gaming standard!! No i7 extremes please as nice as they would be!!

Space is about enough for two standard atx towers.

Any thoughts and opinions would be much appreciated!

Thanks

Franko
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
30 Mar 2009
Posts
404
Ruggedised laptops tend to be stupidly expensive, thinking on this i would opt for the SSD system something with a decent sized case and opt for as much passive cooling as you can get, fewer fans fewer moving parts to be damaged by the motion of the vessel, however this does limit you to faily low powered solutions like intel Atom machines etc etc.

something like http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-364-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1436 with a solid state drive in a mini ITX chassi with as much vibration damping as you can fit and some good case mounting to minimise movement.
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Dec 2008
Posts
10,370
Location
England
SSDs or their little brother, usb sticks, would certainly solve that problem. It would be a good idea to use low profile heatsinks to reduce the moments acting on the motherboard. A bit surprised that you're not having problems with power cables working loose over time, but the only obvious answer to that it epoxy/soldering them in place which isn't ideal.

As far as antivibration mounting, inner tubes (full of air) are about as good as it gets.
 
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