Astro Gadget AstroPC Pro with extra SSD and upgraded antennas.

[Vroobel]

I'm not sure, but I think it's the best place for this information, as it's a kind of tip.

 

Recently I bought two 6 dBi antennas which replaced two original short ones provided with my AstroPC Pro. It's a second upgrade, I already replaced an original ASIAir Plus antenna with the same 6 dBi one and the gain is significant. Working with NINA is much more pleasant now. 🙂

https://www.dewcontrol.com/details/p3099125_21560791.aspx

 

 

I have used the AstroPC from the beginning of this year. All USB 3.0 ports are used, thankfully a camera has its USB hub. But the AstroPC also has a USB C port which I used till now with a SanDisk 128GB USB 3 USB A/USB C pendrive. I used the pendrive as a storage for data of sessions. 

Today I realised that the AstroPC which originally uses 128GB SSD has two M.2 slots, so my spare 1TB Intel SSD found its place there. As a person with a strong IT background, I should know what the change means, but I was surprised by the improvement made this way. Copying (reading which is faster than writing) a set of 50MB files from the pendrive to the 'new' SSD results in less than 40MB/s transfer while copying the same files within the SSD is more than 20x faster - the transfer reaches 900MB/s ! 😮 Previewing FITS files using ASIFitsView takes one second over an RDP (remote access) while my fast laptop equipped with a similar 2TB SSD for data only does it in a half of second. For me, it's no different! I'm curious about the NINA behaviour.

Summarising, if you have the AstroPC, I can highly recommend equipping your unit with the second SSD. It can be 128GB or 256GB which are cheap, but it's still enough for a few nights of imaging.

 

 

Edited June 9 by Vroobel