Any Geeks with Crystal Ballz
 

About next July / August I'm dropping $2000 usd on a mobo, cpu, ram, hdd(raid3 - 3 drives maybe), cdrw(maybe dvdrw), vid card, snd card, power supply.

Any predictions/suggestions of hardware I'll end up with?

I'm sticking it in a pc80 black lian-li case with a senfu II rad, pump, reservoir. Hoping to get some overclock from it. If anyone has a suggestion for a better case, I'm all ears.

pc-6070. $250 of lian-li bliss. basically a pc-60 with a really sweet looking front door and sound deadening material. they tout it as the silent pc case.

eventually i'll get one, but i'm quite happy with my pc60. lian-li is the only case to get, the quality is unmatched. not only that but the things like the mb quick-disconnect rock my world. the new pc60's have the fan speed controller on the outside of the case, as well.

Not really into cases with big doors, but thanks for the suggestion. The case and watercooling i mentioned are not coming out of the $2000 btw. And I'm buying this stuff next year so I'm looking for any hardware predictions for next july's hardware lineup.

Will I still be buying athlon / p4 or will it be a hammer / ???

You'll be getting a SMP Athlon 64 board with dual A64 4000+ 90nm chips, around 400GB in SATA 7200RPM, R400 on PCI-Express, 1GB DDR-II, DVD-R/RW, and an Antec TruePower 650W PSU (trust me, they will come). Your LAN will be a giganic, your sound will be onboard, and your current watercooling kit will be woefully inadequate.

Well, maybe if you wait until September '04 you will have the above.

Pretty close, except for the HDD: I don't see it getting that big just yet, maybe...

Actually, it looks like watercooling could be easier, but I think that Cathar's Cascade is going to be a requirement, if not still the best performance block around.

He said he wanted two or three. 2x200GB SATA = 400GB. 3x120GB = 360GB. ???

Do not doubt in the power of my Ballz. :)

LOL!


Sata 2 might be out next year too ;)

Well, in RAID3, 3 160GB drives would equal 320MB because it saves data striped on two drives and parity data on another drive. It's mirroring and striping with 3 drives instead of 4 basically. Or is it.. :confused:

That's RAID5 no?

RAID5 saves the parity data spread over all the drives.

RAID 5 offers same data redundancy protection as RAID 0+1, the only difference being that for RAID 5 you need 3 hard disks, and for RAID 0+1 you need 4 hard disks.

By data redundancy protection I mean that if one disk fails in the array, you should be able to replace it without losing any data. Beware of other types of RAID arrays that do not offer data redunancy protection.

Then there is ARRAY 1, simple mirroring hard disks which I personally find to be the most useful and economical, and you only need 2 hard disks.

RAID 0+1 controller cards also seem to be a lot cheaper. You should be able to find the popular Silicon Image ATA 133 RAID cards for around US$ 15.00

Awesome RAID Levels explanation.

Upon reviewing RAID3 I realize it's not good for a desktop pc. It says its only good for large data blocks on supercomputers.. RAID10 or RAID5 it is then.. :P

The whole reason I want a RAID is to have enough room for 300GB of mp3 files a friend of mine has! I want easy random access to the mp3s and redundant data protection.

One last piece of advise. Make sure whatever controller you are going to use that is capable of handling the large disk sizes you want to use. A lot of them have a limit max 134 GB per disks.

can the sx4000 handle bigger drives?

According to the specs here it can handle up to 137 GB disks, but should be enough cause this particular controller has 4 channels and is capable of handling up to 8 disks. It's an external controller though.

ok, i don't have acrobat installed. however, it appears i am mistaken. they've actually changed the part numbers on the promise devices (!). the sx4000 used to be a 4-channel version of the sx6000. so, check out the sx6000.. i guess that would be the on i'm interested in now. imma gonna go read their site, see if it says anything.

Or you could do what I do and run multiple PCs with automated scripts to back up the important stuff over the network and keep two copies of an FTP directory containing all the software and drivers you need to do a fresh install. I look forward to catastrophic crashes because it gives me a chance to clean house.

Writing an automated ap that runs every morning at 0200 isn't a hard thing to do, and you'll have more overall HDD space for things that matter like pr0n and mp3s.

I just don't want to lose the mp3 files... 300GB to an ftp is a scary thought :p

Yug, I didn't mean it that way. I just label a directory "FTP" signifying to me that it is nothing but a data dump and should stay hella organized. I guess I should have made that more clear.