a good PC?

This is one of those "if you want it done right, you've got to do it yourself" cases, IMHO.

Got an HP a305w computer 'bout 3 or 4 years ago (Christmas sale). The mainboard didn't even have an AGP slot. Swapped out the mainboard for an Asus (with an AGP slot) for about $60. Then my WinXP didn't like the mainboard anymore. Fallback to Win2k.

Michael

On a sunny day (Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:12:36 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Keep detached :-)

You likely need no RAID.

I only bought a complete PC once, it did not work right,

Since then I have assembled my own. Seagate harddisks, now 2 of thse running 4 years! Zero failures (will it ever fail? I installed a new system and moved to new drives last year, but the old one keeps working (all 24/7). Tyan mobo. Asus graphics card. Chinese power supply. Did replace the fans. But my next one will be a PS3 I hope,

1080 progressive, 60 GB harddisks, HDMI, runs Linux now too: And BlueRay drive.

:-) Games too :-)

I always build my own from parts. I like Tyan motherboards, Corsair memory, and Supermicro cases.

As for disk drives, this is what I do: buy two drives of the same size but from different manufacturers. Set them up as a RAID 1 (mirroring) array, so that each drive has the exact same data on it. That way, when one dies, the other has the data, and the odds of them dying at the same time are negligible.

Hello John,

I don't. Question: Does it really have to be RAID? Could you work with an external drive bank?

As to XP, personally I'd be much more happy if I could run NT-Server. IMHO it is a better OS. The reason why one of the PCs here runs XP is that some of the HW drivers are unavailable in NT5. I'd talk to HP about what it would mean for you if it didn't run XP. From an EE point of view I could not think of one application I use that would absolutely require XP.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

Hey John, this works for me,

You select the components and they fab real clean. I use a RAID 1 which they setup for you. Cheers, Harry

I only trust Seagate at this time.

Compaq also have (had?) it's fair share of chassi braindamage. Anyway, avoid any brandname pc's like the plague. If you don't want to run into this kind of trouble.

Avoid brandname pc manufactors. Buy a separate *hardware* RAID card. Possibly you could use some external solution with SCSI or external S-ATA chassi for harddrives.

Come to think of it, I think Alienware makes a pretty reputable brand of computer. Mostly geared towards gamers, though.

If you do go the roll-it-yourself route, make sure to get some Arctic Silver thermal paste for your CPU/heatsink fan. It's much better than the silicone stuff - worth every penny of the $12 or so for the tube. (I was able to overclock a 2.7 GHz Celeron to just over 3 GHz with it; I ran the Prime95 torture tests overnight to see if the CPU could handle the overclocking.)

Michael

Your problem appears to be in the hard-drive. This is very likely transport damage.

That would be Windows 2003 server. The ML350 most probably won't boot from an IDE drive (ATA or SATA). So with these machines you are stuck with SCSI.

Well, that would be Dell or HP. The cheapest & simplest option is to get a Promise RAID IDE controller and 2 harddrives. Works fine in several (Dell) machines over here for several years already.

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Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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In that case you'll really need to know what you are doing and which components can be combined and which can't. Which brands are good and which aren't. Etc, etc. If you buy a PC aimed at professional use (it often goes wrong here because the crappy consumer stuff sells at about half the price), you'll have a PC which will work reliably for years.

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Reply to nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.)
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Roll your own and make sure the drives have moving air. BTW, Maxtor drives have been on the taboo list for DIYers for the past few years. Maxtors don't last more than 1 or 2 years running 24/7. I've also been avoiding IBM (Hitachi) drives since their mess up many years ago. Perhaps they are better now. I've been sticking to Samsung, but other mfgrs make very nice drives.

If you want a good server box, go get one of Asus' 1 or 2U servers. Way cheaper than name brand. Drives are easy to remove from the front panel. Get a RAID controller card which allows you to do hot-swapping and run RAID 1 or 5. The data servers I have built in the past used RAID5 and didn't go down even when a drive crapped out (with the Maxtors in a 5-drive RAID5, we would replace a drive per year per server). We would just jam another drive in and let it rebuild on its own. Simple servers for email, ftp, web, and name used RAID1 since we didn't need much disk space.

If you want a cheap server box, get a mobo with SATA RAID. Lots to choose from between Tyan and Asus.

Be sure to Ghost your installation. Backup data to tape or an external firewire drive. Don't rely on drives inserted into the server as backup unless you remove them. A power glitch or OS/operator messup could damage your backup drives.

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Mark

As others have noted, sometimes the best way is to do it yourself.

I'll assume you must run WinXP for some reason.

Go to one of the online shops (Aberdeen computer comes to mind - I bought stuff from them to make my own 10 years ago and it's still running with the original drives) but there are others. I had an Asus motherboard, but Tyan are good too. One nice thing about buying the m-board yourself is you get the m-board utilities which can really be nice.

Get what you need, including case and power. Takes perhaps an hour to assemble, and costs perhaps 60% of what you pay in the shop.

There is no reason you can't have raid, incidentally, if you get a Serial ATA enabled board. My cousing got one and then begged me to go there and set it up for him; the initial setup is not that easy but once past that, you can have a full RAID machine with whatever specs you want (he runs XP).

Cheers

PeteS

On that note... can anyone recommend good, unbiased reviews for Kingston vs. PNY vs. Corsair for RAM? What about for hard drives...?

Thanks...

Michael

Ten years ago this was perhaps the case, but today *assuming you're planning on buying licensed copy of the software*, building your own PC with, e.g., Win XP and Office is going to cost very close to what Dell sells it to you for.

There is no significant cost savings to building your own PC, especially when your time is valuable. Still, it's very often worthwhile to have the control over exactly what ends up in the box.

RAID is your way to happiness, here. Hardware RAID 1 with a good quality controller (this will mean SCSI). Keep a spare controller (you would need 3 with your home/office setup, one hanging out in an anti-static bag). Use the health-monitoring tools supplied with the controller to keep up with drive health. Buy seagate drives, and make sure they have 5 year warranties.

For this reason, I elect to use IMAP to keep all my precious mail on a redundant, backed-up-nightly server in an environmentally controlled facility. No POP for me...

Check out some utilities which can sync data among multiple computers. Ideally, between your workstation and a server. Linux and Unix make this trivial, using tools like rsync and tar which are included with the OS and transparently viable since in Unix "everything is a file." I don't know how MicroSofties would do it, though...

I always build my own for personal use. I recommend HP for my customers; none of the Intel hardware vendors really have their act together on workstation or server design and support. I'm heavily into IT and I always build my own personal machines. Sometimes I feel like the only reason I'm in IT is for the hardware, so take that for whatever it's worth...

If you can accept an hour or so of downtime, you will almost always come out better financially by using standard components, with a spare or two each "critical" item (power supplies, for example). Reserve redundancy for protecting data integrity. Every time you buy a disk, buy another one exactly like it as an online mirror.

Depending on the quantity of data involved, you really want these daily syncs to be to an offsite location. You might consider burning a daily DVD and mailing it to yourself. Or find an offsite storage to keep copies of your data. Ping me offline, I might be able to help here.

It might be because XP is a desktop OS, and these machines are considered servers? Considered Linux by any chance?

Really reliable? I'd like to understand your needs better. By "really reliable," do you mean:

1. high uptime? Or can you deal with an hour or two of downtime here and there?
2. data protection and integrity?
3. low MTBF?
4. I notice you did not mention cost.

Thanks, Josh

Assuming the power supply does not take them out when it fails... Better put a crowbar circuit on the power supply, or better yet, back up the important stuff on another computer on the network.

On a sunny day (Mon, 20 Nov 2006 16:32:09 -0800) it happened "Joel Kolstad" wrote in :

Are there still people running MS software? I moved to Linux when 0.9 or so came out (SLS Linux). Even the FPGA soft runs on Linux, or some in wine emulator. I did away with big distros too, use grml (

). So that does not really add to the price (but takes some hours to install and modify). Anyways [running] Vista is still illegal in Europe I think ;-)

John asked:

You might not like the Dell drive mount rails, but actually they're pretty nifty compared to a lot of stuff. The cases (at least the corporate sales ones) come with lots of spare rails and they are not hard to track down should you need more.

But... if you want a truly kick-ass case with lots of space for drives and which will take any motherboard you want to throw at them, get the power supply from

and get a monster case (click on "server cases" or "rackmount solutions") from Be prepared to pay several times more than what a whole desktop PC from Dell or HP costs. But the PS and chassis will outlast several generations of motherboards and drives.

Tim.

On Mon, 20 Nov 2006 09:12:36 -0800, John Larkin wrote in Msg.

[...]

In my experience, brands are nothing with PCs. The cheap no-name stuff is built exactly the same (crappy) way as expensive brands, and sometimes worse. I once had a pretty nifty Siemens/Nixdorf PC that worked OK but turned out to be a massive PITA when I wanted to replace some parts and found that they had done everything in some non-standard way.

Buy no-name stuff. Saves money and isn't worse than expensive brands.

robert

I've only rarely had a PS fail. Much more common is HD failure. Once I lost a CPU, too. My latest machine has a PS from PC Power and Cooling, they seem to have a good reputation.

I do that too.

The dual-drive setup is so that the computer is still usable until I can replace the HD. Also, if the drives grow bad sectors, it protects the data until it can be moved to better sectors, which extends the life of the array.

The backup is for (1) major catastrophic failure, and (2) accidentally deleting files.