I build my own, and I’ve probably replaced my main box five or six times with motherboard, CPU, video card and hard drive replacements. This is probably going to be it for now, though; I’ve got the urge to get a Mac again.
I fourth the recommendation to get a Mac.
I used to build my own computers, run Linux, FreeBSD, all that stuff. Eventually I found that I was sick of dealing with all the hassles, so I bought a PowerBook and never looked back.
Another vendor you might want to check out is ThinkMate.
You can also order a SP2 disk from microsoft for like $4 in S&H if you ever need one.
Good luck with that. Most boards with “RAID” use software RAID. If you want real RAID, you’re going to pay for it.
I’m not going to dig around for you, but you might want to look at Zeon based server boards. That might get you a little closer to what you want. If I were you, and was dead set on having a quality RAID controller, I’d buy a good controller card I can move to future machines.
As a Mac user i’m not laughing at all - in fact I have been considering building a simple windows machine for kicks (once my other bullshit dies down). The grass is always greener on the other side.
Mac problems are high up front investment expense and higher repair costs (3 laptops, 3 kids and a dopey Newfoundland = 2gig knows how to rip apart a laptop)
But seriously, the new 8 core workstation they’re advertising has me just drooling for a lottery win.
Anyone else like to go in the Apple Store and max out everything to see how expensive you can make your computer? Two 30" monitors? Fine! I hit $17k yesterday. Heh heh heh
I cannot for the life of me understand this phenomenon. I don’t mean that in the angry sense (although Og knows I sure have meant it that way from time to time). I mean literally I just don’t understand it.
I have found this with MS problems more than anything else. MS has on the face of it the most extensive and well organised helpdesk system I’ve ever seen: a huge knowledge base, article numbers, cross referencing etc etc. It all looks so good. But if there’s one thing that I have learned in my years of troubleshooting my own computers it is this: MS’s help site may or may not have an extensive, authoritative sounding answer to your problem but if they do it never works.
Every time I have to troubleshoot an MS problem I feel duty bound to go to the MS help site and look up the problem, and quite often there is an “answer”. But in applying their answer I feel like Charlie Brown running in to kick a ball held by Lucy: I know it’s pointless, I * know* it’s not going to work, I know it is basically a certainty that I’m going to be disappointed again, but I just have to try.
Contrastingly, the message board to Gamerdoodz.com may or may not have an answer to your problem but if they do, it may well work.
One approach that I’ve found useful, although I’m not a gamer, is to look at low-end server boxes from IBM and other major vendors. They actually engineer these systems, from tested components, and support is surprisingly good.
Does anyone else find it ironic that the consensus is that, since it is so difficult to build your own PC, the solution is to buy a Mac, built by Apple? Why not just buy a PC from Dell, with a warranty? It’s not like buying a pre-built Mac gives you the same satisfaction as building your own PC.
I can’t speak for anyone else, Fear Itself but my moderately uninformed impression is that Macs are fabulous, but what keeps me from buying one is (a) I’m a build it myself kind of guy and (b) I like fiddling with and customising things and Macs aren’t so good for that.
But if I’m going to give away (a) and (b) and buy something entirely factory built, then there’s no reason not to go for a Mac.
Maybe others think the same way.
I’m going to agree that RAID is best handled by a dedicated card. Motherboard RAID is best used for speed, if that. And never on something important. If you’re going to do RAID, do it the old fashioned way. Mirror for OS, if necessary. A single drive for the OS is just fine. You can reinstall it. Raid 5 for the data drives. On a separate card from the OS.
For one thing, people who make RAID cards have competent support for RAID. I got a Lenovo the other month that has a bios option for RAID… and every time you turn it on, the computer refuses to boot till you reset the CMOS. The whole series does that, we got five of them.
Of course, then it refused to work with the graphics card due to lack of resources when I put the RAID in, and I had to remove it and work off the internal one.
Pain in the ass, because you couldn’t get the internal video to release resources, even if it was disabled. Thank you, Lenovo.
Build it yourself, with a decent motherboard. Get a nice card, and it’ll all just work.
If by “consensus” you mean “what we’re all agreeing on” then that’s not what’s happening here. I (at least) am not agreeing that the solution is to buy a Mac. Stranger on a Train pointed out that **Una **would get a machine with a rock-solid, secure OS. I’ll add that he’ll also have a fair amount of useless software, since (barring installing Boot Camp and dual-booting to Windows, which sort of negates the “more secure OS” thing) Windows software does not run on Macs.
Dell as a solution works for a lot of people. It does not (IMO) work well for those who are used to specifying their own components or doing field upgrades. I don’t want to ask for permission to swap my video card or add a hard drive, thanks.
Why are RAID cards still so expensive? Seriously, that’s the cost of a mid-level MB and CPU. And you know what - I’d buy one, but I have zero confidence of anything working now. Everything I touch seems to not work. But as well, I have to yell out, motherboards have been using RAID controllers on them for years now. Surely someone, somewhere actually spends the time and effort to put a chip on their board that works? Or is this just like the USB horseshit, where it took something like 7 years before USB started working right for more people?
Thankfully, I have other computers I can use for running the software I need, including work-supplied laptops. I’ve given up on running games, since computers keep shitting on me.
Dude, don’t buy monitors from Apple. They’re severely marked up and of surprisingly unimpressive quality.
Dell…don’t talk to me about Dell. We used to get Dells at work as part of our corporate purchasing agreement. They work fine for basic desktops–at least as fine as any Windows machine, which is to say a little slow and inherently insecure, but more than adequate for most purposes–but when it came to high end workstations they often came with the same kind of hardware conflicts and buggy drivers that Una Persson and others have complained of. From my experience with Macs, they are just well-engineered; easy to service and upgrade (we’ll conveniently ignore the MacMini, which clearly was never intended to be upgraded), with rigrous and well-tested hardware compatibility and driver robustness. They’re not perfect, and the small amount of OEM options (often overpriced) is irritating (aftermarket accessories are available, but display the same array of compatibility problems as PC hardware), but if your key requirement is reliable, low maintenance operation they’re the bomb.
Stranger
You realize that a hardware RAID controller is essentially a mid-level CPU, right? Is there a reason that you need onboard RAID as opposed to a packaged off-the-shelf NAS box? DIY is fun until it stops being fun, which is usually half an hour after you should have reasonably been able to resolve the problem, and then quickly devolves into, “Seriously, what the fuck!” land.
Stranger
Well, my goal was to have all computers in the house except for the laptops run RAID so I need never fear hard drive failure again. I went with the onboard RAID because I stupidly figured that major name-brand motherboard makers would have RAID chips that work, or else they would stop putting them on their boards. And I read online all the time the “reviewers” singing the praises of their systems working. So I figured that I didn’t need an ultra high-end server type thing, I mainly wanted all computers to have a safer hard drive system.
If you shop around you can find ~1TB NAS boxes off the shelf for not much more than it will cost you to purchase individual drives, and with a GigE network your effective access speed is going to be about the same as an onboard drive. Plus, your data is centralized and easy to back up, and accessible by machines on the network without having to make each workstation secure; you can firewall the NAS box internally and leave only operating system and local apps on the individual machines. Relatively cheap, and mostly painless. Plus, if you want to take the data someplace else, just pick up the box and go.
Stranger
That’s not why you do RAID.
You do it so that the system can limp along until you have a chance to run/verify a good backup, bring the machine down, put in new drives, new controllers, and possibly new cables, and then restore from tape.
For the home user, software RAID is perfectly acceptable, IMNSHO, and consumer level so-called “hardware” controllers (including the integrated ones) are a waste of money. Like I said earlier - if it needs a driver, it ain’t hardware RAID. Why put another card in there that can have either buggy software or bite the dust at any time? Modern systems have plenty of resources to spare for the handful of extra I/O steps it takes to calculate parity or mirror blocks.
Even REAL SCSI cards are a waste of money/time in many situations, because you need to keep a pile of controllers on hand for when one or more inevitably goes bad.
Hence why I’m the software RAID evangelist where I work. We’re talking 3000+ distributed, standalone systems. The loss of any one of which means a sleepless night for me.
For truly high-performance situations, where you know you’re going to be thrashing the shit out of a system for every nanosecond it’s powered on, and you need huge I/O, spending the extra money on solid RAID hardware makes sense. For everybody else, not so much.
While I understand and to some extent agree with the rest of what you say, this seems odd.
…which is still infinitely better than the other scenario, which is:
- Hard drive fails.
- You pray that the last time you did a backup (which depending on your level of laziness could have been weeks, or months ago) you can actually get the data you need to eventually recover your work.
To me at least that’s a good reason to do RAID, and it’s what I mean when I say not to worry about hard drive failure.
Raids aren’t the only way to get regular real time back up. I have a system with two hard drives and a program called Smart Sync Pro that backs up programs automatically. You can schedule it to run daily or weekly or at start up. There’s a real time option of backing up every time a folder changes as well but I don’t use it. You just tell it a source folder and a destination folder and let it rip. The destination can be another drive or even an online address.
There’s other back up software options out there as well. I believe Norton’s Ghost program can be set for continuous monitoring. If you check download.com for Back Up solutions, there’s plenty of options.
You might also want to consider online solutions, if you’re concerned about hard drive failure. It’d be too expensive for all the movies, maybe, but your everyday work (ie, stuff you change and create frequently) might benefit from it. Mozy and Carbonite are two popular options for example.