BTW, I don’t know if you know, but the RAID controller in the AMD chipsets is actually a licensed copy of a low-end Promise RAID controller, and some people have reported better RAID setup-management using Promise drivers & s/w than the s/w supplied by AMD, who are not great at updating things unless they are forced to! I had a lot of trouble with it, and in the end I got a 2nd hand Adaptec RAID 6805 Kit at a swap meet for $200 (retail is about $600). It supports SAS 2.0, and when I get some decent spare cash, I’ll get a bunch of SAS HDD’s. 🙂 One other problem with the old 32bit BIOS, is that most high-end RAID cards will not work because they don’t have the address space (you have to get a server board). Not a problem with the UEFI BIOS I found. 🙂

Hey… If anyone is interested… I’ll post the spec for a system I designed for a friend working in the USA for a very high-end graphics/multimedia development *workstation*. All up, it was about US$50k! 😆 *sigh* I wish I had the money… 😉 BTW, I know that sounds like a LOT (and it is), but it included an automated Quantum Scalar LTO Ultrium 4 tape library, and a very large SAS NAS and a 2TB SSD. Put it this way… His previous system would take just over 5 hours to render a complex set of scenes, this one takes just over an hour. It will pay for itself in 6 months or so he tells me. Not a bad ROI. 😉

I’m willing to bet that the hard drive manufacturers are doing the same thing, and if you get the same drive, but from different factories, it will behave differently. It is probable that Australia gets drives from different factories than the US.

I will have a DVD on this box, and DVDs are cheap, so I’ll have plenty of back-ups, and I was planning a RAID just to keep my hand in.

One of the heretical things I’m doing is using a Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB 2 1/2″ 7200 rpm laptop drive as my boot drive on my big system. This is their hybrid drive with the on-board SSD. It makes Windows 7 night-and-day faster. Not only does it *boot* much faster, but it also starts up programs much faster. I was running Windows 7 off of 7200 rpm 3 1/2″ SATA drives, but there’s no comparison. All those tiny little registry reads that make normal hard drives skip around like a happy schoolgirl on program start (but much more slowly!) get fulfilled from the SSD, making everything faster. I first encountered this drive when I put it into my Macbook Pro and found that everything worked much faster. But it makes desktop machines faster too.

I’m dubious about the long-term reliability of this drive but (shrug). The Antec case I am using has a 2 1/2″ hot-plug slot on the front intended for a SSD, but a regular laptop drive works fine too. So just use a good backup program and when it dies, slap a new one in, restore from your backup, and keep on keeping on. My Linux still lives on the two 2TB 7200 RPM 3 1/2″ SATA drives, since it’s serving a lot of data to my entire home network, but if not for that I wouldn’t bother with the 3 1/2″ drives anymore. The way this hybrid drive speeds up the system is astounding and most people don’t need more than 500gb anyhow. (I *do* realize that I’m not “most people” :twisted:).

I have tried a LOT of cases over the past few years, and the best by far (especially bang-for-buck) are Cooler Master. Better than Antec (which are generally a little higher priced), and definitely better than most *unknown* brands! I have 2 now, an older Centurion 534 Plus+ (my linux server/test box now), and a new Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced which I got because it has heap’s of config options, has a lot of cooling and even has a HDD dock bay on the top to plug in a SATA HDD (an external eSATA dock costs about $35, so having one built into a case I paid $110 for is a good buy, and I have used it several times). It’s a great case! I got a Cooler Master 800W 80+ Gold PSU to go with it. Rock steady voltages with almost zero ripple (as far as I could see on my old Tektronix CRO) and super efficient (avg 92+%)! 😆 The CM 690 is very quiet, and stays very cool. I’m happy with it (and, it’s a tool-less design).

My housemate has the cute little Cooler Master Elite 360 (which we got for about $50). She wanted a small case and only one burner. It’s compact (and can stand upright, or down flat like the old IBM XT cases, the front badge even rotates LOL), but I found it easy to work in. 🙂 (It has a Silverstone Strider Plus ST60F-P 600W 80PLUS Bronze PSU, which is overkill, but they had a clearance and I got it for about $60! A bargain for a good high-end PSU!)

My previous case was an Antec Sonata II, and I was very disappointed with it.

I better check on dinner (making pasta! Should be just about ready! I can smell it… *drool*) LOL

I hear you badtux! Been there… yadda! 😉 😀

I wasn’t sure what your power requirements or budget were Bryan, so the Antec 430W was a minimum guestimate. 🙂 I stuffed up the last link in my example system above, that was for a 955 BE deneb CPU. One of the great things about this particular CPU (and this ASrock Mobo) is that it will easily overclock if you need extra *oomph* for a big job, and the ATI Cool-n-Quiet s/w works well on it also to run it it low speed/power when it’s not needed. And I know that like me, you hate OCing CPU’s! 😆 But… I tried it and it worked well and I went and got a much better CPU cooler (Zalman CNPS9700) and even OC’ing the 965 to 4.1GHz, the temp never get’s above 52C and the voltages are stock. The problem with AMD deneb & Thuban (x6) cores, is they have a low max temp ceiling (60c) before they will start to die, and low max voltage (1.55V I think from memory). One GOOD thing about them is that if you keep within spec, they are very stable and you can easily get more out of them than you paid for, handy when you do need that extra! 😀 AMD do it themselves on the latest X6 thuban cores. The 1100T will automatically shut down unneeded cores and speed up the remaining from 3.3GHz to 3.7GHz (very conservative!) Curiously, AMD state that Turbo mode will shut down 3 cores, but I found that I had 4 running at a tad over 3.7GHz during a video conversion (the conversion s/w I was using I had set to have a 4-core affinity, to grab the max available processing capability of 4 cores, and leave me 2 for other things). *shrug*

But it’s nice to see we are thinking along similar lines! Could be somewhat scary also! 😆

I keep hoping the clients will understand that Linux is more suitable for what they do than Windows, but it is a tough row to hoe.

yeah… Amen to that! I must say though that I am enjoying the latest Ubuntu 11.0. I just installed Linux Mint 11 on my housemates PC, and she took to it like a duck to water! She’s 62 and only ever used Windoze before. I set up a dual boot Win7 x64 / Mint 11 x64, and she now boots straight into Mint when she turns on the PC, and only used Win7 for things she only has Win app’s for. 🙂 She likes it and I caught her on Skype chatting to an old friend trying to convince her she should use Mint! 😆

Oh! I spotted a mistake in my first post. I said that current old ASCII BIOS’s only supports HDD’s larger than 2GB, that should be 2TB of course. 😉

Also, on HDD’s… WD suck HUGE!!! I’ve had 3 die the past year and all were 1TB, NOT the really problematic 3TB ones!! I have 2 Seagate 1TB drives (ST31000524AS) and they haven’t skipped a beat in 2 years, and a pair of Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB in a mirrored RAID (after a lot of research, I found these to be the most reliable RAID certifies SATA3 drives for the price, and have a 5yr warranty). I found that linux will kill newer HDD’s quicker than Win (yeah… I know!!) 😆 It’s because the new drives (so-called *green* drives especially, like WD’s *IntelliPark* feature) will quickly park the heads when idle, and linux is rarely *idle* in most config’s. So they do a lot of *move-park-move-park* cycles under linux, far more than win. This will kill a drive in 6 months or so! It was assumed that this was only a *feature* of green drives, but it has been found also in the WD premium Black drives also. This is simple to explain… The *Green* drives are HDD’s that fail the *Black* drive tests and are downgraded to el-cheapo *Green* drives!

Anyway, here’s a post on WD forum about the problem (there are many articles about it):

WD2001FASS – Caviar Black 2TB Load Cycle Count

Anyway, hope this all help’s. 🙂

One of the things I make money doing is converting data from main frames to structures for Win boxes. The telcos that produce the original files that I work with charge ten times as much as I do to produce the same result, and I clean it up before sending it to the client.

I keep hoping the clients will understand that Linux is more suitable for what they do than Windows, but it is a tough row to hoe.

I received the XP boot disk and a bonus Linux boot disk from another developer who has a 10-machine license, but only 4 machines, so it’s legal and above board.

Badtux, the total contents of the hard drive on the machine that is having problems fit on a 16GB thumb drive, without any compression. I don’t do music or video, so 100GB would be wretched excess, but 1TB is the current sweetspot, so I’ll go with a pair of those.

Kryten, I was thinking of the Antec Greenwatts EA650, because you need a lot of power for all of the fans that come with cases these days. One of the cases I’m looking at has four 120mm fans installed.

I don’t do things quickly, but I’ll probably put it together as a Linux box initially to burn it in, and then add in the Win after I know the machine is stable. Linux will be able to use everything, but, obviously, XP won’t, so Linux is the only way to find problems with the hardware.

Everything else is subject to change.

Oh, I used ASUS boards “back in the day” and they were once extremely reliable. Time changes everything, alas, and when you are targeting over-clockers, stability is probably not going to be a major concern.

Also, given the shoddy quality of current SATA hard drives, if you don’t run Linux RAID mirroring on your two hard drives, you’re an idiot. Western Digital makes the best SATA drives. But that’s like saying that Jeb! Bush is the best Republican governor Florida has had in the last ten years :). Unfortunately Windows won’t do software RAID of their boot drive, so if you *really* want to dual-boot rather than use VMware Player to run Windows XP, you’ll need to set aside a couple of partitions at the beginning of each drive for Windows to use as singletons. But your Linux partitions need to be RAID, even /boot can be a RAID1, just manually put a grub boot sector on the second hard drive with (if the drive is partitioned as Windows=partition 0, boot RAID1= partition 1, rest of system = partition 2):

# grub
> root (hd0,1)
> setup (hd1)
^D
#

and you’ll be 100% guaranteed to be able to boot into Linux on your mirror drive if your primary drive fails.