My next Workstation

[Preston Hagar]

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 10:51 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8 July 2010 16:19, Francisco Diaz Trepat - gmail
> You mean RAID0? Waste of money. Doesn't really help much and doubles
> the risk of failure. If you want disk performance, get an SSD boot
> drive. Disable swap. Keep /home on rotating media. 1TB drives are
> quite cheap now. Consider a motherboard with SATA 6gig.
>

Actually, if you have the money for it, RAID 10 can help both
performance and reliability/uptime.  You will need four drives, but
you will get a performance boost, plus the boost of having to have two
drives fail to go down (RAID isn't a replacement for backups though).

I have used the Syba cards before and they are generally fine for
software RAID (they are fakeraid on board though, so you are better
off just using them as a SATA Controller and using "normal" Linux
software RAID).  That said, most motherboards now have at least 4 SATA
ports, if not 6-8, so you could likely just use the on-board ports to
connect your drives with software RAID.  Really, to get true hardware
RAID that would have performance benefits over software raid, you
would be looking at spending $200-$300 USD on just a RAID card, which
is half of your budget and not worth it anyway.  If you want RAID for
performance, you will need to do RAID 10 with 4 drives.  If you want
RAID for redundancy, you can do RAID 1 with 2 drives (and will get a
small performance hit).  Either way, I would recommend sticking with
Linux software RAID and just using the on-board ports.


>> I am thinking in getting Intel 2 Core Quad 8300 processor.

As a quick note about processors, in general, the latest Intels
(specifically the core i5s and i7s) beat the current AMD offerings
hands down.  That said, they are usually much more expensive, plus the
motherboards are much more expensive.  If you are looking to stay in
the $500-$600 range, then you really want something more middle of the
road, instead of high end like the Intels.  I would recommend looking
into the AMD Phenoms.

That said, depending on what you are doing, you might be better off
going for a little less CPU and a little more RAM.  It really depends
on what you are shooting for though.  DDR2 ram is pretty cheap now, so
I would shoot for more along the lines of 4 GB min.

Hope this helps,

Preston