What was: Asus K8VM800 + AMD somethingorother (64bit, single core) + 2GB ram (1×1G+2×512M) + ATI Radeon 9800 Pro All-In-Wonder (TV tuner + 128M)

Thinking of replacing with these:

• I don’t need fancy graphics, the 9800 worked perfect for the games I played… heck It even ran Doom3 just fine with decent settings when it came out. I liked the TV tuner, but I’ll just get a USB stick to replace that functionality.
• I DEFINATELY need multi core, I was growing sick of managing apps’ process priorities to get things done. Why not go quad? I mostly do web & program development, graphics and video editing on this machine, including non-persistent virtualisation.
• The 2GB was working OK, but I needed more sometimes(especially when I was using FF2 ).
• Old setup utilized the SATA RAID (1) for the primary OS and documents (my other drives contain the pr0n and other can-be-lost items)
• I have 3 legacy PCI cards I’d like to keep (PCMCIA bridge, HDTV tuner, WiFi: if a better board is out there that has just 2 PCI for me I can sacrifice this card)

avoid the USB TV Tuners if you can. they suck and break often.
go quad
ram is cheap
P35 is so last year. get a P43/P45 board.
I checked newegg,…. right now, Gigabyte boards offers 2 PCI slots. Asus, Biostar, and MSI offers 3 or 4 PCI slots.
Abit and Intel/Foxconn will be releasing their new boards this week or the next. I believe some of them will have 3 PCI slots.
get an intel.

don’t get a fucking asus or biostar.
I got a amd 9750, gigabyte 790x-ds4 for $310.

Pretty good price… Vista gives me a 5.9
You can get a 3870 for $120 on new egg too, spider platform ftw.

why?
should have returned it

No reviews on this one yet, should I go for it?

If i get that one I can nix the raid card

What is it with you and all the Asus hate?

So that I could get lectured by someone and return it, duh.
i would say find the motherboard with the HIGHEST possible reviews you can. if 100 people gave it 5 eggs, they most likely aren’t wrong.

if you checked the reviews on the other Asus P45 boards, some received no problems, some DOA.
that’s very typical for Asus. if it works, its awesome. if not, its hell.
i’d hit it, but that’s me.

i don’t like shitty products that break.

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I have no idea what possessed me to do this, but I bought a 300x CF card and a CF-to-IDE adaptor to use it with, then I set it to be my Z: drive and put a 1.8GB pagefile on it. I figured it would benefit from the virtually-nonexistent random seek times that FLASH memory has, and that 300x (45MB/s) would be fast enough to be useful. I was right; PCMark05 reported a consistent increase in HDD performance of about 500 points, and more importantly, my HDDs are quieter, especially on bootup — which actually matters when your boot disk consists of three fucking Raptors that sound like coffee grinders on a good day.

One note: I had to use a special driver for the CF card to get Windows to treat it like a fixed disk (instead of a removable one), because without that it won’t put the pagefile on it. I don’t know if it’s the stock driver for Hitachi Microdrives or if someone edited it, but either way, if someone else wants to do the same thing, PM me and I’ll send you the driver I used.

Was it worth $75? Meh, I dunno, but it was a fun project and it improved things a bit.
awesome. now you can chew up a cf card in short-order

seriously tho… 11ty/10 on the retard-o-meter.
We’ll see how long it lasts. But whatever, it’s got a lifetime warranty.

I think I can deal with pegging the retard-o-meter if it also means I get a 10% increase in HDD performance.
i think you’d be better off with one of those adapters that allowed you to plug in sdram/ddr as a hard drive. i know they had limitations, i think they released another version that accepted ddr2 or something

boot times were amazing with those, but they relied on a small battery to keep all the data intact

Nope, still no DDR2 version of the iram. Which is a shame considering the price of DDR2.

the batt is a moot point when it’s just a pagefile.
What about a way to use a 8GB SD card?
I would think SD cards would be cheaper and easier to find. I know I can get an 8gb SD card at microcenter for $30. Although I did just find a 8GB CF card at newegg for $36 including shipping

I like that it cuts down on the seeking of the Raptors.

That’s seriously not a bad thing.

Is there anything inherent about that setup that couldn’t be done off of a USB thumb drive?

I’ve got a 4gb Corsair Flash Voyager GT sitting around that is pretty speedy for a USB drive.

yeah good point, i was pointing out the battery as a shortcoming to the device in general, but for a page file who cares.

too bad they don’t make it compatible with ddr2, i would buy one right now. could you imagine how quickly video transcoding and dvd ripping would be?

meh no diff than having a buttload of system ram. actually system ram would be a bit faster because it goes cpu > mem controller > ram… These ram-as-storage cards put the pci-express bus in the way.

no, i-ram uses a sata connection. it plugs into the pci slot for power. but it is limited to 4gb ddr1 and sata 150.

if the second generation of i-ram will ever come out, you could put 16gb or so on it. that would be enough to have an OS + rip dvds and transcode some video very quickly, much quicker than a hard drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

could you imagine a RAID-0?

raid0 has thus-far proven nearly useless.

Even sata-150 is not as fast as system memory thru the mem controller. just need to properly write something to take advantage of it (and have enough system memory). 64-bit systems make that possible. I’m surprised we don’t see some enthusiast mobos with six or eight memory slots.
11ty/10 would be using readyboost in Vista…

Edit: Assuming it probably damages the flash drive from reading and writing

Probably a waste but who gives a fuck? Cool project.

Screw it. A £10, 2GB flash drive seems to be pretty good. PhotoShop CS3 starts in 3 seconds where it used to take around 10

I can handle wearing out a £10 drive.
why wouldn’t you just use that money to add extra RAM so you don’t have to use your pagefile?

Lexar makes 8GB 300x CompactFlash cards, but not SD cards. CompactFlash will always be the fastest memory card, because it has more electrical contacts and so it has greater bandwidth than cards with fewer contacts.

My board has three RAM slots. I’m using two right now, in dual-channel mode. If I wanted to add more RAM, I’d either have to add a third card and give up dual-channel, or replace the two RAM cards I have right now.

I actually considered what you asked about, and I went on Newegg to price out more RAM. I have 2x 1GB DDR400 right now, so first I looked at that; the CompactFlash pagefile cost about half as much. Then I looked at 2x 2GB DDR400, which is what I’d need if I wanted to upgrade, and Newegg doesn’t even sell 2GB DDR400 cards.

Besides, the point was to see if it would work, and if it would improve performance. I’ve already overclocked my Athlon XP (and by extension, everything else plugged into the motherboard), I’ve already got a hardware-controlled RAID, I’ve maxed out the RAM, I installed extra USB ports inside the case for a memory card reader and a USB hard drive with an internal docking bay, I’ve got a PSU with modular cables to keep things tidy, etc…

Using an SSD was just about the only thing I haven’t done to trick out my machine yet, so it was a natural next step.
you should have saved your money for a new machine. you must be planning that soon.

I was going to get an Athlon 64 machine. Then I was going to get a Core2Duo machine. Then I was going to get a Phenom machine. Now I’m thinking I’ll get a Nehalem machine.

The basic problem is my Athlon XP machine continues to do what I need it to do, and even if the improvements I make to it are incremental and the law of diminishing returns is kicking in, it’s still fun to see if I can eke out a bit more from my old hardware.

Kinda the same reason why I’m dicking around with a 4-cylinder Passat instead of buying a 6-liter G8.

Nope, I have the 1.8t. Much easier to modify, gets better gas mileage, and once modified properly, it’ll make more power than the V6 and still get better gas mileage, because the engine is lighter. 3500lbs. is heavy enough for any passenger sedan, it doesn’t need even more weight.

The V6 is more reliable, but only because it stays cooler. If VW had used silicone hoses instead of rubber hoses, the 1.8t’s heat bath wouldn’t make shit wear out so damned fast.
vw doesn’t know much about reliability except in cases of the utmost simplicity.

this i’ll concur with. i own a 2001 1.8T passat that has had a few reliability issues, although lately it’s been ok.

But that 10 year 100K mile drivetrain warranty make they comfortable.

what is with you mis-using "they" tonight?

vw has only a 5/60k warranty, iirc, as of 2002.

usually, yes. But VW had the old fox, rabbit, and bug.
very cool
i might actually want to try this one out.

also, how come the page file is used so much during boot up? i had no idea that this happened lol
How is this going now deus?

Apparently, you may be better off to use it as an external journal. At least that seems to be the case on Ext3, for fancy RAIDs (6, maybe 5?).

I like these guys.

I might need to do this.

I’m not sure why; I’m not really sure it is used that much during bootup, except to allocate and de-allocate segments of the pagefile as processes get loaded and demand more memory than they’ll ever really use, but whatever the case may be, it definitely is quieter on bootup with the CF card taking some of the hits.

Interesting idea. Not practical on a Windows system, I’m afraid, but for that you can always get one of Fujitsu’s new hybrid HDDs with the built-in FLASH cache. (heh, it rhymes!)

Anyway, it’s still working fine. If there were a way to check what the wear on the card is, I’d do it, but given that I bought a good card from a reputable company, I’m not worried about it wearing out before the end of the computer’s lifetime.

it also seems like it would be pretty easy to swap for a new card if that one burned out, right? there is no data being stored so at worst if it dies during use your PC may crash until you swap it out and redo the pagefile on the new one.
It would probably just throw up a stream of delayed-write failures, at which point I’d hard-off the computer and swap out the card.

The card is formatted, so I’d have to reformat the new card on another computer and use a utility to make a new blank 1.8GB file called "pagefile.sys", but that would take about five minutes. Not a huge loss.

I was forever pronouncing cache as cashay but I’ve known for a long time that that’s wrong. Still took me 2 mins to realise where your rhyme was. I’m still saying cashay.

If I do that external journal thing, I guess a hybrid drive could be very worth it! But does it need to be many gigabytes? 400Mb per partition, therefore 4Gb = loads I THINK. Could get an SSD, down the road. I will need to work it out. Not worrying yet.

I wish for a way to check the wear too.

Once I heard that with wear levelling an SSD can stand AT LEAST (As in the very worst case) one year of pretty hectic writing. There was a very good page that I might link back here if I get to it in the near future. Then again swap space is used a lott.

But I also heard that SSDs don’t do wear levelling accross the entire drive. Actually I think that was just Flash cards, which makes some sense.
Oh yes. I got a link:

Technically speaking, it is pronounced "cashay", it’s just that we Americans usually treat trailing e’s as silent — cashay, coopay, rooay, etc…

I guess it’s not surprising that SSDs don’t do wear-leveling across the entire drive, because the fractal algorithm used to do wear-leveling grows exponentially in complexity as the area covered increases. Eventually you’d hit a point where the embedded controller couldn’t keep up. It’s probably easier to treat the SSD as a spanned disk with multiple separate areas covered by multiple separate controllers running multiple separate algorithms. That SiliconSystems SSD must be pretty pricey if it has a single controller that can wear-level the entire disk at once.

From that description, it sounds like pagefile duty is the best possible assignment for my CF disk — data never persists past a single boot cycle, and rarely persists for more than a few hours, so I should get close to the theoretical maximum lifespan for my money spent.

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…. or this is another pun for P07 since he sackrides gateway?
hm i guess cuz of the length of time that it was sitting on his arm for or was it really just that fucking hto?
honestly, i don’t think that gateways really run much hotter than at least some other laptop brands.

the good news is, soem grad students at MIT are working on mini-refridgerators to put into laptops to bring cooling to a whole new level (or some shit like that).

i own two gateways btw. they’re good, not great. had a HDD failure and the build quality is cheap. i have to jiggle the AC adapter to get it to charge and theres a tiny spot on my LCD thats dimmer than the rest of the screen. the DVD drive also clicks sometimes. its a c2d 2ghz, xpmce, 2gb ram, 160 gb hdd for $740 a year ago. it was a greatttttt deal. that was the only positive thing about it.
Sounds like his computer got stuck in an infinite loop and the CPU was pegged at 100% the whole time. Any computer that’s working properly and can stop the CPU when there’s no work to do won’t get that hot.
gateway is no diff than any other system, including high-end machines…. cpus get hot, it’s transfered to the heatsink, and a fan encourages convection to ambient air…. stick flesh by the exhaust for a long period of time under load, and it’s gonna get burned.

seems pretty fucking retarded to get mad at them for working the way that it’s designed to.
I’m still wondering how you can sleep through second degree burns.

me too. sounds a little strange to me.

i wasn’t really complaining about Gateway so much because i’ve seen my Dell and MacBook Pro get extremely hot as well. it just happened to be a Gateway that he was using.

sounds like exaggeration to me

listen, asshole, this is the shit that makes people hate you. this is the shit that you claim is said without any hidden meaning other than you walking around with your fat head up your ass calling me retarded. never once in my original post did i say that i was angry at Gateway for anything. i just thought it was interesting.

might be, i didn’t see the kid. my brother said he had blisters, but maybe he burned himself on his crack pipe or something.

I agree.

Powerful laptops = shite. I think it was Peyomp made a similar point in another thread recently.

When you’re using the power they’re hot, loud (less important really), and battery last not-very-long. That’s not portable. There is no such thing as real portable power I guess, unless your laptop is acting as a thin client, but that’s just a thin client, you do NOT WANT portable power on your lap.

lmao at the egg frying on the MBP

subnotebooks are the way to go, that is my opinion.

when Wimax takes off (it is taking off according to hype), and especially when most of our populated land masses can get online cheaply and easily, I wonder will all our portables be essentially thin clients (or nearly-thin in that they adapt some UI for the specific device).
in a laptop you wouldn’t even have a DISK to worry about backing up or syncing, that can be done helped by RAID offloaded to a desktop or a server.
i have a dell, it blows out air but i would only describe it as warm, not hot. however, after using it on my lap for a good period of time it has gotten pretty hot, although not hot enough to burn anything.

it seems to me if you were to get burnt it would be from contact though and not the air, cause it’s hard to imagine it blowing out air that hot.
Horseshit. Gateways ARE pieces of shit though and their customer service sucks ass. Never again.

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Build a seperate system, run windows server or linux and run RAID1

found someone selling
P4 630 Prescott 3.0GHz 2MB L2 Cache with Asus P5LD2 motherboard
for $80bucks
Add some ram and i’ll be set.

or

Adaptec SATA RAID controller, model AAR-2410SA for $100

add it to my existing system

I have no clue how controllers work, but everyone raves about hardware raid.

So OT, whats my best choice?
Wait, why are you blaming the RAID? You said iTunes fried your music collection.

on a separate computer, why the hell not?

Hardware RAID for RAID1 isn’t going to be a huge difference. A little bit of performance, but not a great deal. Hardware RAID controllers help substantially when there is parity involved.

why?

RAID1 does not have parity So I’m not sure why you’re talking about the benefits of discrete raid controllers when parity is involved — because that isn’t remotely relevant to raid level 1.

Personally, if you KNOW you’ll never want more than 320gb, then just build a file server, and use a discrete card and a level 1 raid. BUT make SURE you use a decent DISCRETE controller. onboard == fail and aids, unless you’re talking higher-end server mobos.

However, if it were *ME*, I would get some extra drives, and run RAID5.
on a separate computer raid 1 is fine. on the primary computer with a raid card, you should always have a separate backup

I never said RAID1 had parity, I said hardware controllers help substantially when parity is involved, not that RAID1 had anything to do with it. He asked if a hardware raid controller would be beneficial to him, I have him an answer
okay well i think it would have been prudent to specify that you felt that raid5 and an extra hard drive would be benefitital to take advantage of that parity.
I don’t get your hate for onboard RAID 1 solutions – I’m not sure how it can fail so badly that you would have one working drive wors case scenario.

the drive failing isn’t the big downfall of onboard raid solutions — it’s the controller failing.

vhat?
parity = protection against one disk failing or am i wrong?
in raid 1 one data is mirrored against all the drives .. therefore any amount of drives can fail except 1, and you still have all your shit?

im wrong?

yes you’re wrong. what you describe is redundancy. parity is one method for acheiving that redundancy.

so parity implies redundance, but redundance does not imply parity.

ok, what is parity?

ensuring all the data is on at least 1 drive?

no

also, for a raid 1 (for my OSes) what’s wrong with software raid? is it fail and aids? or is it simply slower? by a lot?
how much would a cheap and reliable controller cost?
even if im already doing a raid 5 – I should have 2 raid cards?

i dont think i will setup a raid 1 because i will prob have 3×500gb drives in a raid 5 that ill fit my oses on, but in the future if i begin to find it tight for space, i might buy 2×100gb SSDs (this could be 5 years down the road) to relieve some space in my raid 5 and also do a lot to improve performace.
dont worry today about something you MIGHT do with your computer in 5 years. that’s just stupid.

im trying to understand raid, i asked a question about software raid

edit: still dont get how raid 5 does parity and raid 1 doesn’t. it seems pretty important so i dont think ill do a raid 1, but how does raid 5 have it and 1 doesnt?
edit: im slightly getting it
edit: yes.

raid 1:

A RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. This is useful when read performance or reliability are more important than data storage capacity. Such an array can only be as big as the smallest member disk. A classic RAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks (see diagram), which increases reliability geometrically over a single disk. Since each member contains a complete copy of the data, and can be addressed independently, ordinary wear-and-tear reliability is raised by the power of the number of self-contained copies.

raid 5:

A RAID 5 uses block-level striping with parity data distributed across all member disks. RAID 5 has achieved popularity due to its low cost of redundancy. This can be seen by comparing the number of drives needed to achieve a given capacity. RAID 1 or RAID 0+1, which yield redundancy, give only s/2 storage capacity, where s is the sum of the capacities of n drives used. In RAID 5, the yield is s * (n – 1)/n. Using 1 TB drives as an example, four of them can build a 2 TB redundant array under RAID 1 or RAID 1+0, but they can be used to build a 3 TB array under RAID 5. Although RAID 5 is commonly implemented in a disk controller, some with hardware support for parity calculations (Hardware raid cards) and some using the main system processor (Motherboard based raid controllers), it can also be done at the operating system level using Windows "Dynamic Disks" or with mdadm in Linux. A minimum of 3 disks is required for a complete RAID 5 configuration. In some implementations a degraded RAID 5 disk set can be made (3 disk set of which only 2 are online).

In the example on the right, a read request for block "A1" would be serviced by disk 0. A simultaneous read request for block B1 would have to wait, but a read request for B2 could be serviced concurrently by disk 1.
so if there are parity errors reading, then, i guess the data can be retrieved off another disk and hopefully the parity matches, yes?. are errors reported and how?

it’s good for backup in terms of hard disk redundancy. if itunes fubared his music collection, it would do so on both raid disks. it doesn’t make historical backups.

if you’re making yourself a raid for home and you have 2 extra disks, raid-1 is fine. raid-5 requires a 3 hard disk minimum.

depends on the controller. one of the reasons a good controller > onboard.

parity is used for error checking, as well as to rebuild a data set if a drive fails. errors are generally reported, yes. most controllers have some way of accessing the data. often snmp can help collect data and it can be analyzed with cricket/mrtg or other statistics packages.

Yeah, but what’s the big deal if it does? You buy yourself a separate card and rebuild the mirror?
Okay people, get off the RAID thing. He could be running a server cluster connected to a RAID60 SAN and it wouldn’t matter, because what iTunes does to his music collection is its business; the disk, whatever kind it may be, is just going to do what it’s told to do.

But since it’s a going concern, I might as well throw in my two cents: RAID1 is fine for backups even if it doesn’t have parity, because instead it has a complete second copy of the data. You don’t need parity to reconstruct the data in case of disk failure, not when the entire data is redundant.

The problem is that if the onboard controller fails, what are the chances you’re going to find another controller that can detect the existing array and bring it online again without having to wipe the disks?

I, for one, use a RAID so I don’t have to make backups of non-important files, but if the controller fails and I can’t just swap in another identical controller and I end up having to wipe the disks and make a totally new array, then there goes my evil plan.

(I also use it for speed, but that’s not the issue here.)

But iTunes can still kill his music in the same way? = not a good backup plan.

Plan I’m liking is to get 3×500Gb drives in a RAID5. 1Tb storage = loads, to store my OSes, backups of my OSes (including laptop) updated weekly (+1 old to keep incase), my downloaded shit that I will probably find somebodies external harddrive to backup to, but backing that up isn’t worth worrying about, and my important stuff with 4 or 5 spares locally (will be just a few dozen MBs max), and as many as fills my quota at off-site storage (it isn’t my hard disk and I don’t need to listen. I might shop around and pay, or get off a friend, maybe do a deal) – this done nightly or on shutdown.

So I don’t have to fuck around too soon I might fit one hot spare. It doesn’t draw power and can’t piss me off, right?

Anyhow, OP do RAID 1 but if you wanna come back from another iTunes fuck up with your ratings etc (your iTunesDB I would think), you need to back it up. That doesn’t mean mirroring it, when stuff is deleted on a mirror it is deleted on all mirrors I would think (is this right dues?). I suggest you automate copying it to a seperate location on ur RAID 1 with your music, I’m sure there’s programs to do that.

Don’t see the need for a new system.
I agree that any kind of RAID is inappropriate for backing up important files; it’s just a good way to prevent data loss due to disk failure. Nothing can keep you from deleting something by accident, after all. That’s why I said he shouldn’t blame the RAID controller for losing his music in the first place.

Regarding the hot spare — it’s called a "hot spare" for a reason. Yes, the hot spare is on and spinning whenever the computer is on, unless you have some fancy RAID controller that’s smart enough to spin down the disks when it’s not using them.
all this confusing shit wont matter when we’ll switch to solid state drives in the next 2 years.

bullshit. RAID will be as important as ever.

That’s a bit shit. How fancy does it need to be to know that a configured hot spare isn’t needed until there’s a fail?

Even I know that!

lmao

you’re an idiot. it’s a hot spare because it can be kicked into service on-the-fly, and without user intervention.

hard drives CAN spindown when not used.

True enough, but a broken mirror can still be read by another controller – hell even a non-raid controller. You’d have to rebuild the mirror, but that’s a pretty moot point.

Not by themselves. They only respond to commands from the controller.

I’ve got a hotspare in my file server, and I just went into the server room and yanked it. When I tilted it side to side, I could clearly feel gyroscopic action from the spinning platters.

The RAID controller in my file server is a PERC6/i, so that should give you a benchmark. Those cards cost $1000 apiece.
Wow I thought my thread died, so never checked back.

I ended up getting the raid card. I know itunes can still fuck it up, I will keep another copy on an external periodically.

One question about raid 5, I have two matching 320gb right now. Can I add another 320gb from another brand? Cause I can’t find another of the same model that I have.
You can’t do RAID 5 with only two drives, so it’s a moot point.

Edit: Whoops, thought you were adding it later. Yes, you can add a diffferent model. In fact, it’s probably better that the drives are not from the same batch anyway.
It’s better to use the same model of hard drive, because they will respond similarly. 5Gen’s right about avoiding the same batch, though, because that will keep them from failing similarly as well, at least in theory.

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but my PC doesn’t need a better PSU and it has used this one for a good couple of years or so.

post specs
does it happen to any video file? an HD vid can stress out cpus
have you tried different media players?

uninstall/update drivers?
any other vid card you can try out?

appears to happen with all video files, youtube etc work fine though

tried several players

might have a go at stripping codecs, drivers and directx and starting again

no other card to try out

your rig should play most vids but would work its ass off with HD content.
do try updating the drivers and shit. use drivercleaner if you can.
also check your temps (cpu/vid card). the hang reboot can also be caused by overheating.

That doesn’t mean it’s not dying.

True, any suggestions on methods of creating a load elsewhere on the PC? (Yea HD content never did work too well) I can’t find a sensor on the GFX card but the CPU temp is fine even throughout the spikes. Even loading a shitty FLV locally kills it.

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I can’t really reuse any of my current parts other than my PCI Wireless-G card. I also will be moving my RAID drives from my main PC to the HTPC (5 Seagate ES 320GB 16GB Cache SATA-II drives). I plan on getting 5 Seagate 1TB SATA-II drives and keeping my current LSI RAID controller with my main PC and using the second one I have for the HTPC, if I build a RAID. If I can find a setting for the RAID to initialize as the computer boots, not before, I will use the RAID controller… otherwise the RAMDisk is pointless. I am out of space on my main PC’s RAID so I will be getting the 1TB drives either way. I may sell a few of the 320’s though, haven’t decided.

So, my current list-o-crap to buy:
- Intel Q6600 > $209.99
- > $239.99 **FIXED 7/14 4:41PM CST
- > $58.00
- > $164.99 **CHANGED 7/14 5:23PM CST
- > $145.99
- Some optical drive > ~$30
- Arctic Cooling MX-2 > $7
- Haven’t decided on the case (not a HTPC case) > ~$100
- Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 MCE > on its way… **ADDED 7/14 4:41PM CST

This next section will be for my OS. I will run a mobo based RAID-0 to increase the capacity to 8GB… data loss is irrelavent and the logical drive will be imaged for fast/easy reload if necessary.
- > $149.99 ea = $299.98
- > $94.00 ea = $376.00

This next section will be my storage. Will be RAID-5 if I do it, otherwise just a few 320s.
- 5x Seagate ES 320GB 16GB Cache SATA-II drives > already have
- LSI

Then in order to steal my RAID drives from my main PC I need to replace them with:
- > $239.99 ea > $1,199.95

TOTAL COST ~ $2,800

The computer will be required to do video compressing, video playback, and act as a DVR. Fast boot time and cpu power is what I care most about with this one.. well, faster and more powerful than my P4 1.8GHz.

Thoughts? Opinions? Degree of overkill statements?
Good lord.

If you’re going to go that overkill, at least add a Blu Ray drive.

I didn’t even think about that. I really can’t justify it as much as the other components right now though. Maybe down the line.

I just realized a problem though. I ran out of PCI slots not thinking about a TV Tuner. So, I suppose I’ll have to hard wire the HTPC into the router. Not a big deal, just strait through the wall behind it and there is already a hole in the corner for the cable wire.

Well crack-ass… I added the wrong one to my cart. Fixed now….
looks like you need a psu with more sata power connectors
should have bought a tuner with ATSC/QAM
minus whale get an aftermarket cooler
don’t need a 4850?

I figured that it gives out enough juice and I have several Molex to SATA adapters around that it would be fine. Though the 620 version isn’t too much more expensive and has plenty. I might upgrade to it. (assuming I have a RAID in this box as well, otherwise I’ll probably switch it back down)

Eh, thought about it but not too big a deal for me. I didn’t really plan on doing scheduled recording. I might someday or I might regret it, we’ll see.

Didn’t really put much thought into that since I wasn’t planning on OCing. But I guess in the scheme of things, they aren’t too expensive… What do you recommend?

Not gaming. I don’t need that much GPU. Cyberlink lists the following as recommended (not just minimum) for blu-ray playback: ATI Radeon HD 2400, 2600, 2900 series, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400, 3600, 3800 Series ….. I think I’ll be fine
molex is only +5v and +12v
sata power = those two and +3.3v
even if you use an adapter on the molex, there will still be no +3.3v
some drives require the +3.3v (e.g. hot plugging)
if this doesn’t apply to yours, using the adapter should be fine

the wintv-pvr-500 will need a converter box to work after feb 2009

cooler,…. depends on your case. arctic freezer 7 pro or one of the zalmans if you don’t want those large ones. if you will not oc, the stock cooler is fine.

i’d still get the 4850, but that’s me.

As for the PSU, I think if I do a RAID I’ll get the one thats in the list now with plenty of SATA cables, if not then I’ll go back to the other.

As for the TV tuner, I have cable boxes for both of my TVs and will probably run the cable from the box to the computer.

As for the coolers, I’ll check those out.

As for the video card. I won’t be purchasing this beast for a month or so. I have time to think about it. More so just getting a price estimate right now and thinking about wether I want to spend the money.

Get a DVB-C (QAM) w/ NTSC card (maybe with ATSC if you like antennae, otherwise fuck ATSC)
You never know what your cable box situation may be in the future
fast boot time and cpu power are what you care about…. wtf? boot time? throw a linux distro on there and never (almost) reboot again. it’s an htpc for crying out loud… i think you’re on overkill by quite a bit. what video compressing are you going to be doing all the time? especially since you dont even plan on doing scheduled recording??
Why do you need to spend $800 on an 8GB iram setup? IMO a complete waste of money for an HTPC.
also, you’re getting a $5.5k loan…. not a grant. why are you blowing loan money on a $3k HTPC when a $1800 would suffice (including those 5Tb harddrives)?

I actually turn off my computers when they are not in use. Leaving them on makes no sense to me unless it is a server, its just more electricity used and more wear on the components. As for linux, I thought about that when I first setup the one I have now but decided against it. Reason being that I like Windows and secondly I’m not the only one using it (live with my girlfriend) and I want it to be as user friendly as possible.

As for video compressing. I told my parents a while ago that I would put their VHS’s and home video onto DVD (they have quite a few VHSs and old analog home video… not really compression so much as just encoding but similiar idea). My girlfriend would like me to digitize her movies as well (she has around 300).

Just a dream. Whether it turns into reality, I haven’t decided if it is worth the money to me or not yet. I had downtime at work yesterday and have been thinking about upgrading/building a new HTPC so I speced out my dream HTPC. I’m sure it will change quite a bit before I build it, if I do, and I would like to get an idea of my high end costs.

I understand this. I have the money now but would wait for the loan money to come in just so I don’t have to worry about cash. I work and make more than I spend monthly so I know my savings would be replenished just fine so I can pay the loan back in full when the first payment is due. My current HTPC suffices as well, but I use it more than I thought when I first set it up and have been thinking that it would be worth the money to upgrade it. The computer that is currently acting as my HTPC is just my old desktop. I have put money into re-usable peripherials for it but nothing in the computer itself since it has been replaced as my main computer. It was a retail Sony from 2002 so my options are limited on what I can do with it. I’m fine with the TV right now as I can see someone saying that is where I should spend my money.

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I picked up another Twinx pair today, 2×2G 800MHz. When I added the new RAM the system booted up reporting one of the 1G sticks as 256MB. I have the newest BIOS.

If I swap the 2G sticks to channel B with the 1G sticks in channel A the system wont boot.

I’m starting to think there is a problem with the mobo.

Any thoughts?
Figured it out. My RAID card isnt playing nice. If I pull it the system boots up showing the proper amount of RAM.

Weird.

Do you really need 6GB of RAM, though?
Yea it seems to wreak havoc with the 4th DIMM socket on some chipsets.

I was using all of the 2G I had and the 2×2G pairs were on sale.

lulz

Yep. 4 gigs would have probably done the job just as well, but like I said, 4 gig kits were on sale. That and I don’t have any other computers that use DDR2.
Hmm. That doesn’t explain the other missing 512MB, does it?

How much RAM does your video card have?
Using onboard video

Either way I fixed the issue by masking pins B5 & B6 on the PCIe connector (SMBus pins). I guess its a problem the Perc 5 has with most Intel desktop chipsets.

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Looks good to me, the only thing I’d change is the motherboard. The P35 chipset is good, but the P45 is the new one and has a few improvements over the P35.
This is a good one.

I’ve got the same case and PSU, both of which have been great. If you’re looking for a big overclock, you may also want to look for a different heatsink, the Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme is a great unit, and takes a 120mm fan that you have to buy seperately, but will let you customize it, so a slow moving 120 that will be super quiet, or a faster moving fan to move a ton of air and keep things really cool. If you’re not overclocking at all, then the stock heatsink from Intel is really good.
If you are overclocking, then you may also want to look for some faster ram, upgrading from PC6400 to PC8500 won’t cost much, and will give you a bit more room for overclocking.

what do you recommend

He recommends an Intel P45 board. Others (including myself) will agree on an Intel, Gigabyte, or Abit P45 based board. Personally, I have a P35-DS4 Gigabyte board and like it and would therefore suggest the P45-DS4.

Also, I never liked LG but others say they are fine. Either way, optical drives are so cheap anyway that it isn’t a big deal.

I also really like Corsair PSUs, especially the HX models. It would almost double your PSU price after rebate so thats up to you. I don’t personally know anyone with an OCZ one so can’t say much about them.

The rest of the components look fine. I would consider getting a 32MB Cache hard drive though. I have been biased toward Seagate for some time but WD would be fine as well.
LG optical drives are junk. get a lite-on if you want to save money, otherwise plextor has been king for over a decade.

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I could use some larger drives soon this is good news for me….

EDIT: So apparently if I just search for "1.5TB Seagate" I get a bunch more results than searching for the part number. Anyway, from the Seagate press release they stated "Shipments of the Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB are set to begin August 2008"

this is good news for me, my 400gb drive for video in my server is filling up. this means that prices for terabyte drives will drop

Samsung F1s are already down to $150. Pretty damn cheap if you ask me.
every time i see anything about terrabytes it makes me think back to microsoft’s terrabyte server back in the day. it use to be such a big deal
anyone heard anything about the release dates of the 74GB/150GB WD Velociraptors?

I’m waiting on those. The OCZ SSD Core Series still ain’t worth it, imo.
too much money and heat for very little speed gain — and the shittiest of the shit in terms of capacity. Better off with some 32MB cache seagate drives. RAID 3/5 that bitch if you want performance.

The 150GB VR is listed on NCIX. Says it should be in stock within a few weeks. I don’t see why they would even make a 74GB VR and personally I don’t think they will. They will have to create a new platter, and this doesn’t make sense for one drive. I am in the same boat though. I’ve thought long and hard about the OCZ Core, but it just doesn’t perform all that well yet. I just want a small good performing boot drive.

yeah, I too doubt the 74GB VR. maybe it’s just rumors.

just checked NCIX.
around $200??

i’d probably still hit it
the 300GB VR is just too big for my OS drive.

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i noobed myself by trying to let the mobo handle the raid.
mobo raid from most consumer mobos is fail and aids.

the only mobos that do decent raid are server-grade boards.
here’s my recommendation… assuming you mean SATA-II and you have a PCI-Ex4/8/16 slot available.

I have a rocketraid card and I love it. I would recommend them as well. I think P07 was the one who recommended it to me in the first place and I’m glad I got it.

I’d rather have an Adaptec/HP/Intel… but those are all 3x the cost…. For most people (including my personal workstation) the RocketRAID cards are an excellent value!

SATA-II
PCI-E

dunno about the other stuff.

would be nice to find one that is easy to expand and swap drives.

——
P07, how long would you guess it take to transfer a 4gb file from your desktop to the raid setup (on your workstation)?

.
thanks!

x8 and x16 slot compatible

how would you expand it out to 16?

it’s a x4 card…. so it will only use 4-lanes regardless of what slot you put it in. But a x4 card will physicall fit (and work) in a x8 and x16 slot — although there is no performance benefit for doing so.

kinda sorta. Think of a highway. Each car represents data. The more lanes you have, the more cars you can keep moving quickly, and the more throughput you have.

PCI-Express lanes provide approx 1.5Gbit/sec of usable bandwidth. As a result, a x4 card has a theoretical bandwidth of 6Gbit/sec or 768MByte/sec. That’s more than sufficient for a RAID controller.
Are PCI-Express lanes truly parallel, or can they combine?

parallel lanes essentially imply bonding.

Parallelism in general does not imply bonding. That’s why I asked.
i am not thinking of an instance where parallel would not imply bonding… I think you’d have to explicitly say that it didn’t if that were the case, as bonding is by far the norm.

but to directly answer the question: yes.
are you maybe confusing parallelism between discrete cards vs parallelism between lanes used to access a single card?

they are two different concepts.

Even with 8 3gb/sec drives, this is enough bandwith to not be a bottleneck? Could you explain this a little more or point to a good article?

Also, whys a discrete card > onboard RAID?

a SATA-II interface supports a maximum bandwidth of 300MByte/sec. The reality is that drives cannot actually obtain that speed.

Toms Hardware (I know, I hate them) found the FASTEST drive to be a WD VelociRaptor 10k RPM 16MB cache drive, and that could only get 102MByte/sec read performance.

The very highly recommended Seagate 7200.11 32MB cache drive (my personal favorite) only sustained 81.9 MByte/sec.

The popular Seagate 7200.11 8MB cache drives rated only 63.4 MByte/sec.

So lets assume you used the Seagate 7200.11 drives… 8 drives at 81.9 MByte/sec only use 655.2MByte/sec of bandwidth (max… assuming all drives are running at redline). So the RAID controller still has a nice margin on it.

onboard raid controllers use system ram. Many discrete controllers use their own, and some even allow you to insert a stick of memory in them. onboard raid solutions are almost exclusively the shittiest software-based implementations available. Even the "better" onboard raid solutions are shitty promise controllers. EMF, inductance, and refraction are common problems with onboard raid controllers, so performance is often much less than with a discrete controller. onboard raid controllers are also an extremely common failure point for mobos. replacing the mobo means a new controller, which means you generally lose your raid arrays. discrete cards make it easier to replace components without losing data — even if the controller goes out, you can often get a new one. you also get advanced features such as NCQ with many discrete cards — something that’s not generally available onboard (many mobos have ncq on non-raid channels, but not for raid.

i’m surprised to see you endorsing highpoint

but yeah they make some cool shit for a good price from the little experience i have had with their product. thats what i’d be looking at.

Are Raptors and VelociRaptors the same thing, or is the VelociRaptor a newer model?

velociraptors are new, been out for like a month or so IIRC
Hmm. I wonder how much better they are compared to my Raptors.

I’d like to see a 10krpm 2.5" SATA drive. I know they have them for SAS, but I’m not that rich.

EDIT: Oh shit, it is a 2.5" drive! Now allz I need is four of them plugged into this bad boy:

meh I’m not interested in 2.5" drives for desktops…. I like the 3.5" formfactor. It’s not too big, yet allows more capacity, and more importantly — better cooling over 2.5" drives.

According to that benchmark, the old 74GB 16M cache 10k RPM Raptors actually did WORSE than a basic 7200.10 Seagate

The 7200.10 did 79.8 MByte/sec
The Raptor did 75.3 MByte/sec

To add insult to injury, the Western Digital Caviar 750GB 16M cache drive did 75 MByte/sec….

It seems the VelociRaptor is legit, but the older Raptor was a marketing scam (which coincides with my personal results that showed a Raptor wasn’t worth the cost diff and lack of space).

Not really. The smaller something is, the better its area:volume ratio is. Heat can escape better from 2.5" drives, you just don’t notice in laptops because they have such shitty ventilation. The enclosure I posted has integrated cooling fans.

Not to mention, 2.5" drives have smaller platters and smaller motors, so they use less power and generate less heat in the first place, and the smaller platters also means the reader arm needs to travel less in a worst-case read scenario (i.e. arm on the inside circumference, data on the outside circumference, and v/v), which contributes at least a small improvement in random-seek speed.

So other than that, and the fact that enterprise systems are uniformly moving towards 2.5" disks as a result of those advantages, you’re completely right.

no. SURFACE AREA makes a huge difference. Making things smaller (such as processors) help because less power can be used to get data from a>b. But with hard drives, having a bigger surface area helps.

Take a processor and install a small heatsink…. runs hot.
Take that same processor and install a big heatsink…. runs cooler.

Enterprises are moving towards 2.5" disks for physical SIZE and POWER considerations. Notice they’re also moving towards blade datacenters. But they also run hotter than their 3.5" counterparts. That’s why cooling is also being increased.

That’s sustained-read speed. There’s not much improvement to be had over that, because you can’t cache reads and the bit-density of the platters has more effect on the throughput than anything else. I bought my Raptors to improve random I/O speeds, and my tests with those drives installed showed a marked improvement over the Seagate I had before — 3200 to 5700 PCMark points on the HDD subscore, despite the RAID controller sucking data through a PCI straw.

I’m sorry, but you really don’t know what you’re talking about. The area:volume ratio is paramount when transferring anything (be it heat from a heat source or sugar into a cell) through a barrier, which in this case is the surface of the hard drive.

Yes, if everything else is equal, if the drives make the exact same amount of waste heat and it’s all in direct contact with the outer casing of the drive, then the bigger drive will cool off faster due to more surface area. But everything is not equal; the smaller drive is cooler and the smaller size puts the heat sources closer to the casing, so the smaller drive will dissipate heat better.

You lose. Try to deal with it.
random I/O speeds has more to do with seek time than anything else. The 10k rpm is what gives the raptor it’s advantage in that. Go with a 15k SAS drive and it’s even better.

I don’t see why Seagate doesn’t release a 15k version of it’s high-capacity drives.

Too much heat will increase the platters’ suceptibility to superparamagnetic corruption, and then all that data is gone.

Well I just went to Seagate.com and they list the operating temperature to be 5 degrees celcius HIGHER with the 2.5" version of their 7200.3 2.5" drive (current model) compared to the 3.5" ES2 "enterprise" model.

Same company. Same capacity. Same speed. both recommended for enterprise workstation/servers…. The smaller drive runs hotter.

can’t be any more than a velociraptor…. i mean what I want seagate to do is the same concept.

Then they’ve done something to improve the heat conductivity of the larger drive, perhaps by equipping the larger drive with a single platter instead of two, or something like that. Physics does allow for that, but it’s just a loophole in the rule that if you have two black boxes, one larger and one smaller, with equal heat sources at their centers, the smaller one will stabilize at a lower temperature because the heat can escape more easily.

The Velociraptor will make less heat, though, because its motor is smaller. To do the same with a larger drive equipped with a larger motor, you’d have to decrease the bit density to prevent heat-related failure.

seagate has 2.5" drives…. WD expanded their 2.5" offering to something that was too tall to fit in a notebook, and enclosed it in an aluminum heatsink to bring it to standard 3.5" desktop drive specs. I don’t see why Seagate couldn’t do the same.
Its really annoying that ZFS is there and available so this guy doesn’t need a RAID card – but Sun keeps it locked up by making it GPL incompatible. Then media could be hosted on a linux storage appliance and he could access it however.
i fail to see how ZFS would solve his problem. care to elaborate?

RAID solves three issues:
1) Redundancy — drives can fail, and data is not lost. In fact system keeps going while you replace the drive.

2) Capacity — you can fit much more data on a volume than is typical from a single drive.

3) Performance — you can read and write data faster.
ZFS solves all three of those issues for a home setup. Look up ZFS.

I know the basics of ZFS. It has many cool characteristics. My issues, however, revolve on it’s "RAID-Z" being software-based… Which signifigantly reduces it’s usefulness for various operating systems. There are also performance concerns that I would have — although I don’t know where ZFS ranks on that. Also, my understanding is that there is no quota system…. lame. Also, I don’t think you can add a new disk and grow a RAID-Z implementation.
ZFS doesn’t have the problems that traditional software raid does. And yes, you can grow a raid-z array.

i recall it being a problem that you couldn’t add drives once it was created.
Worth it to take a look on eBay for Perc5/i pulls. Those are just badged LSI MegaRaid 8408s. Pretty easy to find with BBU and cache for $120 or so.

SATA?

Yes, SAS/SATA

I have 2

The ZFS Boot project successfully added boot support to the OpenSolaris project in March 2007.

But its not in Solaris yet, I don’t believe. You would expect ZFS using appliances to run OpenSolaris. Or BSD. Or even OS X when that port hits. Probably the mac mini will allow you to have a zpool for your media storage eventually.

But ogre is right: you can’t dynamically grow a raidz zpool just yet. You can with JBOD/mirrored ones, but not striped.

SATA and SAS. You can get 15K SAS drives for $200 bucks, 3 of those in a RAID-5 screams, I sustain 200MB/s R/W.

why don’t i see any ports on the card(s)?
There should be two ports in the rear. You need 1 or 2 breakout cables to plug in your drives, 4 drives per cable.

EDIT: Looking at the ones I see on eBay, they either have external ports or on the top behind the memory.

So you know, breakout cables can be pretty expensive.

Adaptec has some out for <$20 for 1m. They’re pretty nice.

I’m running a Perc5/i too.

Damn. I know that when I got my cards, the one I couldn’t use had one 2 breakout cables with it. The other 2 I have didn’t come with any cables and when I was looking online I was seeing ~$100 per for cheap ones. I ended up just getting some nice but long as hell ones from the place I got my cards at for free.
With the perc5, I will have to run the breakout cables from the back of my tower (the ports only appear to be on the outside), back into the tower to connect to my drives?

Not necessarily. They have ones with external and others with internal connections. Just get an internal one. I’m not positive but looking at eBay it seems the Perc5/e is the external and the Perc5/i is the internal ones (gotta love the logical naming). Just check the descriptions, it should say.
The Perc5/i has no external ports. The Perc5/e has external ports only. The Perc5/e is usually significantly more expensive than the 5/i too.
so why do you need a raid card? im running my 1st raid0 setup with my Asrock motherboard and its worked ok say far……besides if its raid0 couldn’t it bottleneck at the PCI ports? running multiple drives?
running raid5 with four 500gb WD drives using the raid setup on my motherboard. want a nice card so i can expand the raid when needed.

shit is slow to say the least.

Because onboard RAID uses the CPU instead of bringing its own processor to the party, and because if it dies, good luck finding another controller that’s compatible.

With crazy numbers of cores happening – how long before RAID cards are obsolete? Why NOT do RAID calcs in one core, or several, if we’re going to have so many? Yet another reason why ZFS is so darn neat.

There’s a couple of reasons why general-purpose hardware will never replace dedicated hardware:

1. General-purpose hardware is less secure. I don’t want my RAID controller to jump from core to core as the operating system sees fit, I want it to keep its head down and do its thing, undisturbed by anything else going on in the system. You can just imagine how much fun hackers would have trying to write viruses that fuck with ZFS RAIDs, or RAIDs running Microsoft’s inevitable proprietary clone of ZFS.

2. General-purpose hardware is slower. Yes, CPUs are getting faster, but why would I want to give up any of my processing power to what should be a transparent background process, and why would I want to run that transparent background process on something that gives me lower throughput than a dedicated card would have?

3. General-purpose hardware is less stable. Remember WinModems? Yeah.

4. You can’t boot from a software RAID; the array needs to be a black box as far as the OS is concerned, otherwise there will have to be a non-redundant partition that contains the RAID drivers. I’m not interested in such nonsense.
This sounds exactly like an argument for a mini-computer. And 4 is just plain wrong.
thanks for all the help.

i ordered the Perc5/i, cable, and scored three 1tb drives.
I am thinking about grabbing a Perc5/i tomorrow.

That type of cache/ram does it use?

Does Vista include needed drivers for the card?

And is there different types of Perc5/i or are they all the same?

Also what type of cables does it use?

Correction: The only way you can boot from a software RAID is if the boot loader, the kernel, and the RAID driver can fit in a single stripe on a single disk. Which is to say, it’s a hacked solution.

As evidenced by the built-in hardware microcontrollers that ALL hard drives use nowadays, it’s better for storage management to be delegated to something that doesn’t have anything else weighing on its tiny silicon mind.
Yeah. And Math should be done on a math co-processor. Its OBVIOUS, isn’t it?
You guys take too long to reply, so i ordered it anyways

DDR…forget what speed

Doubt it

There are two types. Perc 5/i and Perc 5/i Integrated. The vast majority on ebay are the integrated type. Functionally they are the same.

SFF-8484 -> whatever your backplane or drives use. Generally it will be SFF-8484 -> 4x SATA fanout cable. Adaptec makes a couple of those cables that are pretty nice for quite cheap. I have an extra one I’ll sell you.

I believe it uses DDR2 according to the other sources I found…

I bought this cable, will it work?

Where would I find drivers for the card?

You’re right it does. I just remembered and was about to edit my post.

Yes that is the type of cable you want.

Dell has them. They’re listed under PowerEdge 2950 if you need Win 2k3 drivers or Precision 490 if you need XP or Vista drivers.

It is done on a math coprocessor. Math coprocessors used to be separate, but even though they’re on the same die as the CPU nowadays, they still consist of dedicated circuits that do nothing but whatever the hell math coprocessors do.

If you design me a CPU with an integrated storage processor and 64MB of dedicated RAM, I’ll consider using it.

Sweet. Thanks.

I don’t have to design it. You’ll be getting the functional equivalent in a few years from Intel. And ZFS or a child of ZFS is the filesystem you’ll be running.
No, it won’t be the filesystem I’m running. Because I won’t be running a filesystem that will be redundant with my dedicated RAID controller, regardless of whether it’s on the CPU die or in a PCI-Ex slot.

i paid around $30 for the same cable!

correct 490 driver?

or

The first one is a Windows Server 2k3 driver. The second is a firmware update for the card.

Dell’s support site just started acting up for me or I’d give you the R numbered filename to look for.
if install a new OS will all the data on the raid be safe?

the card was real easy to install and setup!
The data on the RAID will be as safe as the data on a single drive. The only thing you need to worry about is whether the new OS will have a driver to talk to the RAID controller. Even if you don’t have a driver, though, that won’t cause the RAID to fail, it’ll just make it inaccessible until the driver is installed.

I have an old Raptor and did some stress testing. A lot of poor mechanics that made the drive fail back and the day. Not to mention big heat issues.
It’s definitely a hot little bugger, but no hotter than comparable 10krpm SCSI drives. The biggest problem it has is that it was sold to people who didn’t realize that a high-performance disk would need actual cooling, and so a lot of the poor things just overheated and died.

I was one of them, to be honest. Fortunately, I wised up when I saw my case temperature readout, and I bought a hotswap rack with a dedicated exhaust fan. They’re still hot, but they’re at least stable now.

Back to this fight.

I started looking up software RAID on Linux and I found a writeup on the matter of software raid vs hardware from a linux engineer that makes good sense. There is no one solution to rule them all, but software raid seems appealing enough for me to seriously consider.

I might try it on this comp to see about the performance impact, I mean, I don’t have to spend. My trouble is however that my disks have irregular sizes, and I need to sort the bastards out aswell.
On a side note. I wonder if FDE (full data encryption) drives will come to the consumer market in the next few years.

I read the link. Thing is – ZFS isn’t software RAID. Its an evolution of raid and filesystems. Its a big leap forward. Thats why duex doesn’t get it, and its why we’ll all be using it or one of its descendents in the future. Read up on it. Its really neat.

"Equipped with a hi-speed 9500RPM double roll ball-bearing cooling fan"

wtf steroid fan?

9500 RPM is no big deal for a 40mm fan
Yeah, it’s not going to make much noise; it’s too small.

Size of the fan doesn’t matter when it comes to motor noise. I don’t give a shit how big a fan is, but a 9500 is going to be loud as fuck. Just from google, the NMB and Delta ones I’ve found are around ~42dBa, which is pretty damned loud.

Check out Sunon’s fans. They’re surprisingly quiet.

In any event, you can always put a slower fan in there if it bothers you too much.

there are plenty of SW /linux/open source based units and solutions out there.. FreeNas, Drobo, etc,etc..

My FreeNas unit is kicking ass for over a year on R5 and 8 drives now..

HMM you are right enough, I just read this about RAID-Z (VERY NICE):

I’m gonna setup a software raid, tidying my disks now. I feel pissed off about still the small possibility of corrupting much of my data explained in that blog. Will have to see if there’s anything I can do.

Although I do agree that it’s not the typical software raid logic, it’s not evolutionary by any means. Been done before on tru64 with advfs which is now open source, fs’ on vms, and wafl on netapp NAS’ (which is why there is a lawsuit).

i’m still not satisfied with it yet. i’m still telling everyone to stick to veritas, lvm2, and disk suite here.

All I want is my data to be safe, so what would you recommend to me?

I didn’t know lvm2 could do anything for me..

safe from what

Safe from disk failures, power outages, disk corruption and the like.

disk failures: raid 1, hardware or software

power outages: ups that tells hosts to perform a graceful shutdown after x minutes

disk corruption: chronic backups to another media, offsite if it’s important.

and the like: good admin habits.

They’re already here. Check out Seagate and Fujitsu.

If it’s the filesystem to end all filesystems, then I’m still going to wait for a native hardware implementation. I see no reason to waste CPU cycles doing something that every computer is guaranteed to do, when I could be using those CPU cycles running programs that only I care about.

EMC DMX + UPS + offsite = maybeeeeeeeee

no such thing in life as "guarantee" except death… (no taxes here)

There are many things every computer to a high degree of accuracy does and you’d be waiting a long time for hardware implementations. e.g. in the realm of the internet: html, javascript, xml decoding.

I prefer the idea of software raid because 1. no spending on raid card (Money spent on a raid card can go into memory and cpu upgrades), 2. disks don’t need to be equal size – as the OS can work on the partition level, incredibly useful. ZFS can work on it’s filesystem level for extra-cool data recovery (explained in that blog post).

I’m just unsure about performance impact and hardware bottlenecks.

thank you crontab. I might invest in a UPS.

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