Time To Build A New Box

by Bryan

15 comments

1 Badtux { 05.26.11 at 11:19 pm }

If you’re not a MSDN subscriber, join Technet Plus (which is $300 for a year, but the licenses you get during that year remain active after your subscription is over) and download Windows 7 Ultimate. It comes with a Windows XP license in a Virtual PC container also, which works reasonably well. Note that you can also get an XP boot CD that way, via downloading it and burning it. The problem with XP is memory. I cannot run XP native on my hardware because I have 12gb of RAM and XP simply can’t cope.

One thing that peeved me two motherboards ago was that I had a great power supply, and Intel went and changed the ATI spec to a new connector type. So my old power supply was useless. Then there’s the SATA power issue where old power supplies don’t have SATA power connectors. Sigh. They really do want you to upgrade *everything*. The only thing that stayed constant was the metal case, which I’d bought when they switched motherboard formats from the AT form factor with the big round connectors to the ATX form factor with the little round PS/2 connectors.

You can still get good motherboards aimed at non-gamers, but you’ll pay. Supermicro has some pretty good motherboards aimed at professional workstations. But you’ll pay for the privilege of not having all that gaming BS in the BIOS. Me, I simply don’t enable all the overclocking and alternate voltages yada yada, leave it stock vanilla, the modern processors are so ridiculously fast that it doesn’t make sense.

Right now though I’m not seeing the joy of the AMD processor you’re choosing. The Intel Core I7 2nd Generation (Sandy Bridge) is wicked fast yet sips power at idle. Oh, go to 22B hard drives. Seriously, you never have too much hard drive space, and they’re faster than the 1TB drives while not being much more expensive.

If you’re running Windows XP, VMware Player is *free* for Linux and runs Windows XP quite well. Just plop 8GB of RAM into your Linux system and there you are. I told IT at my current employer that I would be installing Linux on the PC they gave me then XP into a VMware Player virtual machine (note that my current job description says “Virtualization Engineer” and I pretty much rammed the VE card up the bureaucracy to let me do this, IT wasn’t happy but ended up wringing their hands and saying “okay, but we won’t support you if it breaks”, well, duh). I only have 6GB of RAM on that PC, but have no problem running the entire Microsoft Office suite *PLUS* the VSphere client suite in a 1.5GB XP VM, while continuing to do Linux development on the Linux host. Lest you say surely this can’t work with sufficient performance to be usable for real work, here’s an entire product line which is exactly that — Windows virtual machines in VMware Player running on top of a Linux host that contains a storage stack capable of accessing massive SAN data. I probably shouldn’t post that link for reasons that become obvious if you Google my real name, but (shrug). Let’s just say I’ve tested this product extensively and it works much better than I expected.

Basically, the only reason to run *any* workstation OS natively nowadays is if you’re doing 3D gaming or doing development for 3D GUI applications. Virtualization has come to the point now where it renders dual-booting obsolete for most purposes… the last frontier is gaming, but if you’re not into gaming, (shrug).

Oh, why I run Windows XP in VMware Player instead of in Linux’s native KVM virtualization system: my testing of native KVM is that it’s not there yet. Disk I/O on the qcow2 virtual hard drives is abysmally, ridiculously slow, and creating LVM volumes instead as your “hard drives” makes your VM go fast but the management infrastructure to cope with that doesn’t exist. Then there’s the slow speed of the KVM console driver… you can watch grass grow faster than the mouse moves in a KVM console window. Right now VMware Player integrates *much* better with the GUI, and its disk performance for its C: drive (its vmdk format) is acceptable. I have various rants on how Linux geeks don’t understand user interfaces, and KVM is a prime example of that — nobody ever cared to fix the KVM console driver (which has been broken ever since it was the QEMU console driver five years ago) because, well, who uses that? Doesn’t *everybody* simply rdesktop or vncclient into their virtual machines? SNORT!

Ah well, geeking out…

– Badtux the Geek Penguin

2 Kryten42 { 05.27.11 at 12:53 am }

Noooooooooooooo!!

Don’t get an ASUS Mobo!! You WILL regret it!! I have had 2 the past year, and both were terrible!! They have a lot of BIOS issues, and their *support* is a joke! I’m a VIP ASUS member, and have been for a decade, and they don’t even reply to my email’s and serious support requests! I’ve had many ASUS Mobo’s, and they have definitely gotten worse over the years. And, their support for DDR3 RAM is incredibly fussy at best! Many that worked on their previous gen Mobo’s, fail on the newer ones! When I upgraded my ASUS, I found the RAM I Had (Corsair) would refuse to work without a lot of BIOS tweaking, and would only work at the slowest speed (well under the rated speed of the DDR3 sticks) and looser settings. I had to try a half a dozen at the shop before we found a pair that worked at rated spec from scratch (which surprised my friends at the shop no-end!) When I my new ASrock board earlier this year, we tried the same RAM sticks, and they all worked no problems!

When I built my housemates system before Xmas, I used the ASUS M4A89TD PRO/USB3. We had a lot of RAM problems, and many other weird problems, some which were resolved after several BIOS updates. One which continued was a refusal to start at all (wouldn’t even POST) unless every USB device was unplugged, and then plugged in again! If her external WD drive was disconnected at boot, it would start to boot and then shut down! We got fed up and returned it, and got an ASrock. Never had a problem since!

The best bang for the buck AMD MoBo (or Intel for that matter) are ASrock. (and in a ridiculous twist of irony, ASrock was the el-cheapo ASUS brand, but has become a premium brand even surpassing the parent company the past year). ASrock Mobo’s are cheaper, and have much better tech support.

I have the ASRock 890GM Pro 3 with integrated Radeon HD 4290 graphics which even works very well with Win7 for about $100 (and it has 4 USB3 ports). ASrock are the first to release a UEFI BIOS Mobo (64-bit, not 32 ala the old style ASCII BIOS) and properly supports HDD’s larger than 2GB (the max without kludges on the old BIOS) and it’s a nice friendly GUI BIOS interface. 🙂 About time!

ASrock 890FX Deluxe5
(Without integrated graphics)

ASrock
890GX Extreme4 R2.0
(With integrated graphics)

As well as UEFI BIOS, they are the first to support the next Gen AMD AM3+ Zambezi Fusion 4/8 core CPU’s slated for June/July, but still support current CPU’s.

Never skimp on the Mobo. It will limit your options for the future. It’s the foundation of a good, stable, long-life system. 🙂

As for the CPU… I’d recommend the AMD Phenom II X4 955, or 965 (depending on budget).

For my system RAM, I got the Corsair Vengeance CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3. They are 1.5v modules which is the voltage the Phenom II’s use for RAM by default. They are high-performance at a very reasonable price (I paid around AU$118). My housemates system (which has a Phenom II X4 965) uses Corsair CMP4GX3M2A1600C9 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3, which we got for around AU$75, and they work well). 🙂 I’m sure Newegg have some good deals. 🙂

3 Kryten42 { 05.27.11 at 12:56 am }

Here’s a review of the ASRock 890FX Deluxe5:

ASRock 890FX Deluxe5

BTW… Curiously, I have an ASUS WiFi Router and we have 2 ASUS LCD displays… they are just great! Never had a problem… But their Mobo’s just suck!! 😉 🙂

Oh… And Gigabyte are not much better IMHO! I’ve had both.

4 Kryten42 { 05.27.11 at 2:21 am }

Hmmm. I have no idea what your budget is, but a pretty good mid-range system can be had at Newegg for about US$325 (Mobo w/ gfx, CPU & RAM). You won’t save a lot by downgrading the components (maybe $5-$20 on CPU, $20-$40 on mobo, $10-$40 on RAM even if you go for 2x2GB)

I found that using VMware Workstation v7.1 with 2+ virtual systems needs more than 4GB RAM or it slows dramatically (I run VMware on CentOS with a Win7 x64 and Ubuntu 10.10 systems, sometimes I also need to run a Win XP session.)

ASRock 890GX PRO3 – AM3 AMD 890GX Motherboard

G.SKILL Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) SDRAM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103808

I’ve found that to be a pretty good middle-road base system. 🙂

Oh… depending on how old and the output of your PSU, you may have to get a better one. I’ve solved a lot of weird problems with a new PSU! 😉 A decent one for the above plud HDD’d & optical drives etc for a good price might be an Antec EarthWatts Green EA-430D 430W Continuous power ATX12V v2.3 / EPS 12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC PSU. It’s one of the VERY FEW ATX12V v2.3 + EPS + 80PLUS Active PFC PSU’s for under $80. (About $59 @ Newegg).

Hope this helps. 😉

5 Badtux { 05.27.11 at 9:59 am }

Ah yes, forgot — if you want a premium made-in-America workstation motherboard guaranteed to work 5 years and likely to last much longer, buy a Supermicro. They’re $$$ but they’re worth it — our dirty secret at work is that every system we ship is actually a Supermicro MB and chassis with our “secret sauce” added. The hardware has been solid as a rock. As in, we probably sell 20% of their production and not a single dead power supply, not a single dead motherboard, now if only hard drive vendors could be so kind as to quit shipping crap. (We have so many warranty returns on hard drives that we have a special process set up just for that, and we’ve tried *every* manufacturer in hopes of finding better ones… but no joy, if it isn’t SAS the vendors don’t bother with quality because hey, handling returns on junk drives is cheap, right? 🙁 ).

The only problem with Supermicro is that they’re mostly making dual-socket Xeon server boards nowadays and lag seriously behind in coming out with new workstation boards. Their motherboards are also notoriously picky about RAM, you use the RAM they’ve certified, or it doesn’t work. That’s why I have an Intel motherboard.

As for ASUS boards, I don’t know about their AMD boards. But their Intel boards are junk. Their BIOS doesn’t properly support the features of the modern chipsets and CPU’s. Even where the chipset supports VT-d, for example, ASUS has never bothered to fix a bug in their BIOS that returns an incorrect VT-d PCI map table when the BIOS function to get that is called, making their motherboards useless for using PCI passthrough with Xen, KVM, or VSphere/ESXi. Intel, on the other hand, *always* gets things like that right in their BIOS (duh, of *course* they properly support all features of their chipsets!). Supermicro does too, but for different reasons (because most of their production is going into servers running ESXi nowadays, and their customers would howl if they broke the BIOS).

In general after having dealt intimately with Taiwanese vendors at my last two companies, I don’t trust them further than I can throw them. They hire contractors to do things like write firmware and fix BIOS bugs, and have nobody on staff who understands the firmware. And the firmware is JUNK. I had one vendor tell me that it was completely physically impossible for a 1Mhz PIC to communicate full duplex at 9600 baud, and that’s why half of the characters showing up on the front panel of our unit ended up gibberish. As someone who’d done it on a 1Mhz 6502, which had less CPU horsepower than a 1Mhz PIC even, I called bullsh*t. After my boss finally got the firmware out of them, I found out that while it was sending characters to the display, it wasn’t monitoring the serial. While it was debouncing keys on the input keypad, it wasn’t monitoring the serial. And there were cycles aplenty being wasted everywhere in busy-wait loops, far more cycles than needed to handle everything. Now, thing about a PIC is no interrupts and no timers, so you have to do everything as a cycle-counted state machine. I communicated that to the vendor. I might as well have been speaking Urdu. They had not a single person on staff who knew what a cycle-counted state machine was (this isn’t rocket science people, this is basic stuff taught in 2nd year computer architecture classes at college, at least at *good* universities!). The programmer who’d written the code was a contractor who was long gone. They had no intention of fixing it. Giving up, I re-wrote the firmware and my boss then had the unpleasant chore of forcing them to put it into every front panel they sent us.

That was *ONE* incident. There was also the Case of the Curious Power Supply Controller (don’t ask, you have four power supplies in a chassis powering 48 drives, you *cannot* take the controller you had for a two-supply unit and have it work, you’ll end up setting off smoke detectors!), there was the Case of the Curious Front Panel Connector (which allowed shorting out the front panel entirely if you didn’t match things *JUST* right), the Case of the Curiously Identical Wiring (where there were a half dozen *identical* wires with *identical* connectors coming from various bits and pieces that needed to be plugged into the motherboard, with *nothing* to denote what they were), and other stupidity of that nature. The Taiwanese build junk. They haven’t always built junk, but they got American Disease and started outsourcing everything, and so… (shrug). They get typical outsourced results. Siiiigh!

– Badtux the Manufacturing Penguin

6 Badtux { 05.27.11 at 10:13 am }

Ah yes, RAM. It makes no sense to put less than 8GB of RAM into any system you build today. With 8GB of RAM I can run a hosted ESXi in VMware Player (don’t laugh, it makes for quick prototyping of 32-bit virtual machines compared to doing installs over the network) in 2GB of RAM, *AND* a hosted Windows XP in 1.5GB of RAM, and *still* have 4GB of RAM left over for Linux. Indeed, I have plenty of RAM to fire up the old OS we use on our appliances to do compiles in *another* virtual machine.

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.

7 Bryan { 05.27.11 at 5:13 pm }

For capability reasons, the processor has to be an AMD Deneb, and the sweetspot on price/performance seems to be the X4 955. Price/performance on RAM is two matched 4GB sticks on a dual channel motherboard.

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.

8 Badtux { 05.27.11 at 10:14 pm }

Ah yes, yet another case where my job title of “virtualization engineer” comes into play :). I keep forgetting that not everybody has a bunch of 32GB or 64GB virtual machine images hanging around, heh!

9 Bryan { 05.27.11 at 10:59 pm }

You also mix your own music, and do video, where most of what I do is data base stuff, with minimal CPU utilization. some of the data bases are large, but rarely over a gigabyte.

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.

10 Kryten42 { 05.28.11 at 2:58 am }

HI guy’s 🙂

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

Class dismissed! 😉 😆

(PS. Sorry I’m not around much. Got a lot of things to deal with atm, and I just got over a nasty cold. We had a few mornings below 0C over the past month and wind chill has been -10C a few times, and it’s not even officially Winter yet!) LOL

Oh!! I have new glasses finally! Fewer typo’s… u notice? 😉 😀

Anyway, hope this all help’s. 🙂

11 Kryten42 { 05.28.11 at 3:01 am }

*SIGH* Sorry… Seems I messed up that last link. I was in a rush to go make dinner! Tummy is not happy! 😉 😆

12 Kryten42 { 05.28.11 at 3:23 am }

Oh! BTW… Regarding cases. 🙂

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

13 Badtux { 05.28.11 at 2:28 pm }

Regarding SATA hard drives, they’re *ALL* junk. We ship over 1,000 SATA hard drives per month, and no vendor’s managed to give us drives that are worth a ****. The closest to “good” SATA hard drives that we’ve found are the “server-grade” ones from Western Digital, but even they end up with us having to RMA dozens of drives per month. (before you laugh, the next-best vendor has *twice* as many failures). Not to mention that the “server grade” ones are hard to find on the open market if you don’t buy quantity 1,000 :). And *NEVER* buy a “green” drive, those things are only suitable for use in USB enclosures as backup drives, not for daily use — they’re painfully slow in daily use because they spin down so often.

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:).

14 Bryan { 05.28.11 at 9:47 pm }

Back when I was building a lot of boxes, one of the things that drove me nuts was that the same part, ostensively from the same manufacturer, was obviously different as a result of outsourcing to different factories. After a while I figured out the codes so I only bought the “good” versions, rather than having to return the failed parts for replacement.

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.

15 Kryten42 { 05.29.11 at 2:02 am }

Yeah, pretty much all low-end HDD manufacturers drives suck. I was very wary of geting the Hitachi’s because they took over the abysmal IBM HDD manufacturing (remember the atrocious *Deathstar’s*?) But, after many reviews (including some long-term hard and heavy tests), I decided that the Ultrastar 7K3000 was the safest bet. They cost over double the price (same as WD RE4 & Segate Constelation ES Enterprise class drives), but most tests showed consistently better results in a RAID, and they have a 5yr warranty. 🙂

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. 😉