I have never done this but the first thing I'd worry about would be the drives. You say you want to avoid virtualization because of the cache issue but my understanding is that this is an implementation/configuration issue rather than a problem with virtualization per se. And you'll have the same pr...

945GC... bottom of the barrel stuff (low power efficiency).
Would a single core be enough for your needs? Passively-cooled 945GSE boards (see SPCR's review... and the first answers you got) are not that expensive.
If you're in no hurry, Intel is supposed to release the next generation in January.

I'd be interested to know what resolutions are supported through DVI? 1080p monitors are becoming common but some boards don't support that resolution (officially anyway). My googleing led me to believe that, while the Asus B202 can do 1080p (the resolution), this board can't. Could someone who's ac...

the ones at work are used in large RAID arrays that are constantly slammed with read/writes (image files ranging from small JPEGs to larger RAWs). Can you quantify "constantly slammed"? I've never pushed drives to their limits with large operations for any length of time as the bottlenecks have alw...

dorkus wrote:we run large RAID sets, and our experience has been that most drives will fail after 2-3 years of continuous duty

What are you doing to your drives?

I've got a bunch of 7200RPM 40G Samsungs in workstations that are still going strong.
In non-mobile applications, I think I've only had Seagates/Maxtors die on me recently.

hdparm from a LiveCD?

The I in RAID stands for inexpensive, your card is a sunk cost unfortunately and it doesn't sound like performance would be an issue for your application.

Am I hinting now?

1. If a backup to disk exists and the equivalent tape is off site then I don't have to have someone drive to get the tape. Backup to disk could be reduce the downtime by the time needed to get to that tape. The worst case scenario is the vault tapes are stored in couldn't be opened for a day or two...

dhanson865 wrote:The highest risk of failure is in the first 3 months of use.

Only if you don't keep drives for very long.

dhanson865 wrote:deal with all the configuration hassles with backup exec. It would cost me a significant amount of man hours.

Really? I'll avoid the software at all costs then. Thanks for the tip.

Since we do daily backup to tape the backup to disk is merely for convenience of not having to mount a tape to restore. [...] If the drives are big enough I'll probably just do a RAID 1 this time instead of RAID 0 and call it good. Why are you planning to use RAID at all? Either you're not telling ...

Nothing wrong with compression. Just don't count on it unless you know what you're doing or you might end up unable to backup for lack of space. Don't trust this Acronis thing blindly if you care about your data. It's good practice to try to restore ALL your data in order make sure your backup proce...

You can use SMART with software RAID.

Avoid RAID0 if you care about your data and don't rely on compression when planning backup media purchases.

EDIT: oops!

performance isn't a big issue. I am mostly concerned with reliability So I doubt that performance as slow as the slower of the drives (for some operations) is going to be an issue, unless they are badly matched. I've temporarily put badly matched drives in a RAID1 array on occasion and I don't reca...

And the rationale for getting identical drives in this case is?

Different RAID setups have different requirenments.

Also, I seem to recall reading somewhere that it is recommended that both drives should be from the same company and model. Is that true or should I get two different ones, such as one Western Digital and one Hitachi? It's not true. Best get totally different drives... hopefully they won't fail at ...

My suggestion is to forget general recommendations and to beware of snake oil. The research that could be useful is to determine what the bottlenecks are in YOUR usage. If you don't want to do that research, then my suggestion is to heed to KISS principle and keep your OS and applications on a singl...

Parity isn't magic. Though RAID1 is the gold standard, you're not taking too many chances with two or three data drives and a parity drive. But 8 data drives per parity drive and no backup? n+1 drives means your risk is x to the power of n. I don't know how low you figure x is... This proprietary sy...

Does anyone know if it's possible to fit two drives in there? I guess not.

Too bad: I want RAID1 in my file/mail server.

AZBrandon wrote:Is there any Windows software that does fan control on the T61? It doesn't look like speedfan is able to do so on mine.

I'm late but, for the record, one can use TPFanControl but you can't make it run slower than 2900 RPM except by turning it off.

Software RAID1 usually works fine if you know what you're doing. The most important thing to understand is that RAID is not a backup solution. Although it can help in some data loss scenarios, the main point of RAID1 is to save you time and effort when a drive fails. Is it worth the cost and trouble...

I finally got around to check the dates... surprisingly enough, my old 40G was actually manufactured a little under two monthes after that 80G (which must have been sitting on a shelf for a long time). The 60G is about a year newer. I guess it's possible Seagate upgraded their stuff during those two...

I had an opportunity to buy two cheap 5400.2 (2.5'' Seagates). I thought they'd be quiet based on what I read here. I didn't intend to compare them but the difference struck me and I listened more carefully (I've got no meter that can handle such faint noises): -one of them is a 60G (one platter acc...