I have a new computer
That’s right, I could wait no longer. I’ve been looking around for about a month now, dreaming of what I’d do if I had the money, so I just cut the knot and went for it. There’s a few things I kept in mind: it had to be cheap (obviously some parts are expensive, but most of them are the cheapest of their kind and/or middle segment of the market), and it had to last.
So first, I started with hard drives. I ended up picking a Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS, 1TB. It’s the cheapest (along with the Samsung F1 Spinpoint 1TB drive), but unlike it’s Samsung counterpart it’s slower and/but/therefor more power efficient (hence the ‘Green’ marketing term). I’ll be cannibalising 4 320GB drives from my old PC for a 1+0 raid for my system drive, so speed is not an issue, just a lot of storage. I ended up ordering 6 WD drives for a raid 6, so I’ll have something like 3.8TB of storage.
Next I wanted a raid card. On-board raid is great (well, it’s not, but it’s free), but it rarely supports raid 6 (any 2 disks can fail and the data’s still not lost) and it’s a foggy area to move it to a new motherboard. In addition, it uses the CPU to calculate the parity and such, so it’s slower as well. It might not matter with a quad-core, but I’m going mid-segment and the PC needs to last preferably 3 or more years. I decided to go with the Promise SuperTrak EX16350 (16x SATA300 RAID, 128MB PCI-e x8). You just can’t beat that price, and with 16 connections for sata drives, expansion space is well taken care of. Furthermore - unlike onboard solutions and some cheaper cards - this card allows on-the-spot expansion. Pop in a 7th drive and voila, it will start using that drive and - after a rebuild, I’m assuming - some hours later your raid will be expanded. With traditional solutions you’d have to back up the data, pop in the new drive, delete the raid array, (re)create the raid array (only now a drive bigger), and copy back the data. I don’t know about you, but I can’t just back up 4TB of data to make it 5TB. Unfortunately the shop didn’t mention that there was no battery pack on the card (which is necessary since - for performance - it use cache), nor does the shop even sell it (and it was the only shop to sell this card). Fortunately, this can be remedied with a UPS. More about that later.
So now I have a PCI-e x8 raid card, which will have to run alongside my PCI-e x16 graphics card (the 10 month old 8800GT will be fine for now). In case I ever get a new gaming PC, I could use this one for HTPC (Home Theater PC) so I want an energy-efficient IGP (Integrated Graphics Processor). If my next graphics card is an ATi, this IGP would also increase my performance a smidgeon (through crossfire). Beside that, the MSI DKA790GX 4 DDR2 slots, 7.1 sound (I use 5.1 at the moment but hey, why not), an AM2+ CPU and an HDMI out (from the IGP). Gigabit Ethernet is of course present as well, as are 6 USB ports (my current amount of 4 is a bit short sometimes so this will be welcome).
Next I needed a CPU to power this baby. I decided on the AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition. The Black Edition is just the same as a regular one, but with unlocked multiplier for overclocking. Now I usually don’t OC, but it was the same price and I might be tempted when the PC comes nearer it’s end-life. Still, same price so why not? Why a 9950? I’ve let myself be told that unrounded multipliers (such as 12.5) have less performance, so the 9850 was out. The 9750 seemed ideal running at 2.4GHz with an HT1800MHz bus (600MHz goes into both). This meant slower memory though (and it was unavailable in the cheaper shops at the moment), so for 10% more I got the 9950 - the current top model from AMD for some solid mid-segment performance.
Now I had to think about memory - fast memory to match the 9950’s bus. After some wikipedia’ing I decided on OCZ Platinum Dual Channel OCZ2P10004GK. Times two. Four DIMMs of 2GB DDR2 memory makes 8GB. Why? 2GB is fast becoming too little, it’d be a bit of a waste not to use my current 2GB, and my current 2GB is slower than preferred. 3GB is uneven, and while it might work in the new Core i7 motherboards (with the X58 chipset most of them have triplechannel, with 6 slots for DDR3 memory), it just seems odd in a binary world. 4GB is nice, but either a lot is lost in a 32bit OS, or some is lost because 64bit addressing uses more memory. 6GB and 12GB… see my 3GB comment. 16GB… would be very cool, but 4 DIMMs of 4GB DDR2 memory cost a fortune. That leaves 8GB, of which I can be proud. Along with my raid 1+0 system drive, that should speed things up quite a bit.
Finally I need a monster to put all this in. None of it should be a problem, but 6 HDs for the raid 6, along with another 4 for the system will be quite a bit. I decided on the Sharkoon Rebel12 Value Black. At first it looks like I’ve screwed myself on this one, but the case was cheap. Also, while the description starts with praising it’s 11 external 5.25″ bays and 1 external 3.5″ bay, if you read on you’ll see it has 6 internal HD bays as well. I figure I’ll put the 4 system HD’s in the 6 drive HD bays (2 top, 2 bottom, none middle for maximum airflow), and somehow fit the 6 storage drives into the 5.25″ bays. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and a 4for3 system will work (4 3.5″ drives in 3 5.25″ bays).Maybe I should just use a 5.25″ bay and applaud myself for getting extra space for cooling. Passive cooling though, I doubt there’s any 5.25″ fans… I don’t know, I’ll just see what happens there.
So there you have it:
Promise SuperTrak EX16350 (16x SATA300 RAID, 128MB PCI-e x8)
Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS, 1TB
Sharkoon Rebel12 Value Black
MSI DKA790GX
AMD Phenom X4 9950
OCZ Platinum Dual Channel OCZ2P10004GK
Total: roughly € 1550. Don’t I wish I had newegg…
