Lian-Li PC75 aluminum case

<paul hogan voice>Strewth, mate, that's not a case! That's a case!</paul hogan voice>

Peter

Cool. Yeah, I can definitely see how your case is perfect for your uses. I would also want something that small for LAN parties. But since I don't attend any of those (I suck at FPS's and don't really own any other type of multiplayer games), I don't need to carry it much.

The only issue now is noise. Computer noise has never been much of an issue to me. At school I have an emormous 8 year old office-sized laserjet printer (my dad's office was going to throw it away, I took it ), and that sounds like a 777 it's self. I also had my Dell's cover off for about a month and it was quite noisy like that.

My excitement for my new case will outweigh any noise that bothers me

As I said, I think if I go with a RAID of any kind, then I will definitely buy an IDE RAID card. That would probably simplify things a lot.

The best part is that it's a "mini" server case. I think we should reserve the word "mini" for things that are actually miniature, like mini golf, Mini-Me, and miniskirts.

Well you must admit, that's a different breed of case It wouldn't be too useful for me.

Plus, it has fewer drive bays than mine 13? Bah! Plus, there are no 3.5 bays, so some would be taken up for that. Not to mention the amount of deskspace it would take up! No thanks, my man!

I'm thinking of setting up a small RAID 5 config in my new PC.

A workable alternative to a RAID system (at least, it works for me, but most likely is not what you want) is to have two hard drives: master and secondary.

I use Powerquest's Drive Image to copy the primary drive to the secondary drive whenever the mood hits me (takes about 25 minutes) and I then have a perfect copy that is bootable. If the primary drive fails, just change the bootup sequence in the BIOS and use the secondary until you can buy a new primary drive.

Advantages: Simple, inexpensive, gives you the opportunity to recover from mistakes ("Ooops-- I didn't really mean to delete that file") and highly redundant.

Disadvantages: You have to remember to do the backups occasionally; in the event of a failure, chances are the backup will not be absolutely current.

Like I said... it works for me.

tanstaafl.

I've been doing the 4 seperate drives thing for a while, and it's staring to scare me with all of the data I have.

I'm going to go to an 8 Drive RAID-5 (7 Drives Usable) configuration to help with data redundancy. Being a data pack rat sucks some times.

Hmm, there are some good LAN games like Age of Empires, or Crimson Skies. You still try to whoop on each other, but it's a lot different than your standard fps. But you know if you go to them or not.

I don't think you need a PCI RAID card at all... if you have it built into the motherboard, why not use it? Same controller on it (pretty sure anyway). Perhaps use a pair of (same size) smaller hard drives on the RAID channels for your OS, running RAID 0, and another bigger hard drive for your file storage and your backups?

Okay, I'm getting really confused with the crossed signals. Let me try to phrase my question in the cleanest way possible

Is it possible to have a single drive for the OS, then two drives on a RAID 1, and all of these running off of the onboard RAID controller?

Plus, there's another issue. If I did go with onboard RAID, I don't know how I would configure all the drives physically. At the moment I have 2 CD drives and 2 hard disks. That's four. Where do you get cables that support more than 2 devices? (preferably long, rounded, silver ones )

IDE chanels can only handle 2 devices -- if you've seen a longer chain, it's scsi... Most motherboards with onboard raid that i've looked at have seperate IDE channels that aren't connected to the raid controller, and that's where you're going to want to put your CD drives and other non-raid things...

Matthew

Ahhh. Okay, it's becoming a little more clear now. So would the mobo likely have 4 channels? As in you can hook up four cables to support the 8 drives? I think I'm still a little fuzzy on how this works. Maybe I'll just wait until I get the mobo in before I think about it anymore

So would the mobo likely have 4 channels? As in you can hook up four cables to support the 8 drives?

That's usually how it works, yes. Looking at http://www.soyousa.com/images/800x600_products_mb/kt333_dragon_ultra(silver).jpg it seems that, on that particular board, the normal IDE channels have blue and white connectors, and the RAID channels yellow connectors.

Peter

Ah, thanks So those connectors still only support 2 drives each? So basically, you can have no more than 4 drives in a RAID on this board, right?

So those connectors still only support 2 drives each?

Yes, that's all the IDE cabling spec supports.

So basically, you can have no more than 4 drives in a RAID on this board, right?

Yes. If you want more RAID than that, you probably want http://www.3ware.com -- I haven't used one, but I've heard nothing but good stuff about them. Those cards are PCI64 but will work in PCI32 slots as long as there's nothing physically obstructing them (but looking at your board, that might limit you to PCI slot #2).

Peter

Sweet! Thanks for the link.

Do you think that all drives connected to those RAID channels on the motherboard would be considered part of the same array, or would you be able to specify?

you can specify how you want arrays set up. you have full control over defining multiple arrays, the RAID level of each array, and which drives are assigned to which array.

i use these boards under freebsd and win2k, and find them fast, flexible, reliable, and stable. can't ask for more.

--dan.

I guess you got it by now, but true and true.

For three drives, one with OS and using two in RAID, you'd want to set one drive as master on IDE1, and the other drives would go one each into IDE3 and IDE4. Then tell your BIOS to boot from IDE, not SCSI (It calls RAID out as SCSI in the BIOS for some reason). Your other items - CD ROM and such would become Slave IDE1, Master IDE2, and Slave IDE2. You can't put any CDROM's on he RAID channels, only hard drives. I didn't realize you hadn't even seen the board yet.

So many options! I'll throw one more - you can plug one single drive into one RAID slot, and boot the PC. Tell the RAID BIOS (comes up on it's own screen after the computer POSTs) to configure that one drive as a single drive RAID 0. Then turn off the machine, unplug that first drive, plug your second hard drive into the other RAID slot, and reboot. Do the same - tell it the second drive by itself is a single RAID device. Turn off the PC again and now plug in both drives into their RAID slots. Now when you boot again it will see both drives, and run them completely seperately. The PC will read and think that you have two RAID arrays. But in reality it's just two hard drives, no RAID going on at all. Make any sense?

If you're going to be playing games on it, I'd recommend going with a SS40G instead. They are better suited for gaming, get better performance (which you'll see in the benchmarks), and (I think) look nicer. Plus, Athlon chips are cheaper

I second that motion. I have two of the 120GB drives and absolutely love them. Dell has them for $185 now (I got mine 2 months ago for $145 each), but you can find them other places for around $170.

They are better suited for gaming (...) Plus, Athlon chips are cheaper

I will not be purchasing AMD processors for gaming.

This is due to benchmarks I read which stated things like "Our AMD motherboard was only able to run the Quake3 Timedemo loop for an hour before the system locked up, whereas the Intel motherboard ran it nonstop all day..." , etc... I have seen statements like these in more than one place.

As I understand it, it's necessary to carefully match a given AMD motherboard with proper BIOS versions and drivers and only certain AGP graphics cards, and then only if you carefully set certain key flags in the BIOS setup screen. You can't just slap any old peripherals with any old BIOS and drivers into an Athlon board and expect them to work reliably.

I'm told that the only proper way to buy a gaming system with an AMD processor is to get a complete system from Falcon or Alienware. They have already done all the necessary leg work to get the drivers and BIOS tweaks all working together with all the popular game engines. This is fine, but since I piece my systems together, I don't intend to spend my LAN parties debugging my AGP aperture size setting and video ROM shadow addresses.

I've never had any trouble when piecing together systems based on an Intel motherboard, and I intend for it to stay that way.

Aw Tony! Now you've started something! The good old Intel VS AMD discussion.
But I for one happen to agree with everything you say. That's the exact reason AMD will never find it's way into my PC casing.
For me the bottom line is : if you want to go cheap : go AMD, if you want to go reliable and headache-free : go Intel.

It's more expesive than you thought. Here is the 120GB Caviar SE from Dell. You had it right that it's cheaper elsewhere...

I myself plan to pick up one or two of these in the future when I begin upgrading.

I'm not saying an AMD system can't be reliable. On the contrary, the AMD-based systems made by Falcon and Alienware always get high marks for their ability to run 3D games quite fast and reliably.

It's just that if I'm piecing the system together myself, I have to make a choice as to where I'm going to spend my time. And futzing with the BIOS settings to keep Quake from crashing isn't my idea of fun.

Wow. You made a good point there, Tony. I'm planning to start a major upgrade within the next 6 months and I was considering going AMD. But I do play games here and there... and I don't want any trouble.

Since my new system is definitely going to be a frankenstein... I think I'll stick with Intel myself, too.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't really thinking about pre-built systems.
I'll just stress on the headache-free side of Intel then!

I think you may be exagerating a bit, though I havn't come accross any of these articles you've read. When I was looking at reviews, everyone building serious gaming systems went AMD, because the price/performance ratio is so much better, and for plenty of things beat Intel. Now, if you're spending all your time ripping and encoding DVD's, you won't have a problem with the P4's 20+ stage pipeline, but if you try doing much else...

Do you remember what articles said they had problems with AMD processors? I'd be interested in seeing it because I've never heard that as a complaint about athlons... There's that whole thermal-diode issue with melting processors, but I don't think that's what your'e talking about.

Matthew

I will not be purchasing AMD processors for gaming.

Great! Because I didn't either

Here is my philosophy when it comes to this system I'm building: I'm building a computer to replace this:
Dell 550MHz
256MB RAM
with this:
AMD Athlon 2100+ (1.73GHz -right?)
1GB PC2700 RAM

I am not running Quake 3 benchmarks on this thing. You want to know my main reason for upgrading? compressing video into wmv format and rendering video in Premiere. It takes all night at the moment for very short files. Of course, that's hardly the full reason for upgrading, but it's a big part.

The only game I have bought in the past year and a half was this past weekend I got GTA3 for PC, and that's only going to be a diversion for me.

What was important for me was price, and if you're like me, for that reason AMD has Intel beat every in every way.

Now we'll see how well this system goes together

I'd like to see them too. I've never used anything but AMD. I'm pretty much a hack, and I never have problems that I don't cause myself. I've thrown multiple AMD chips into multiple motherboards, and varying degress of overclocking, different BIOS's, etc. and never had any problems.

I do (perhaps I "did") a ton of gaming on overclocked systems that I built myself, and with Windows 2000 running I can go forever without problems. I've built dozens of machines for use at work, or by family, friends, and coworkers, and always used AMD systems. Idiot proof and bullet proof as far as I'm concerned. And I don't follow any special rules or fixes to make things work, it's all plug and play.

I'm sure Tony's seen these types of articles, and I'm sure people have had problems with their AMD's. I'm sure you could find people that have problems with Intel too. BUt in my experience, they are 100% trouble free. Makes me wonder what the boneheads writing the articles did? Could the problems be blamed on poor chipsets or motherboard manufacturers?

I'd tend to agree. Anyone who claims athlons aren't very stable obviously hasn't had much experience with them. Yes, I'm sure both Intel and AMD have the occasional bad processor, but I've built dozens of athlon computers and have had very little processor problems. It's important to choose a good motherboard with a stable chipset however. The KT266A and KT333 have been rock solid for me so far.

Also, I've never spent time "futzing with the BIOS settings" and I thoroughly enjoy hours of solid Return to Castle Wolfenstein (quake3 engine IIRC) play.

Huzzah, I've got the KT333 on my new board (which just came to my office- woohoo!)

I am also interested in these articles. It's been quite interesting to see people's reactions to either processor. frankly, I see very little difference in the two companies and the stories of people's experiences with their products.

We've had people say that they build nothing but Intel because all their experiments with AMD have been terrible experiences. Then we've had the opposite and everything in-between. I think that for me personally, the best I can hope for is that my own processor experience will be a good one

Amen to that brotha!