Gentoo Forums

I am in the process of specifying a new Linux box to replace my Debian-based Intel P4 main box. I have decided on dual core AMD 64. I am looking for advice on specific components. This computer should be a very fast machine consistent with good value. This is not a cost-no-object machine. I already have two boxes running Gentoo full Stage 1 (a fanless Mini-ITX w/ MII12000 MoBo w/ KDE and a legacy Duron 800 w/ Gnome) so I am not a Gentoo neophyte.

My study of the current hardware brings me to the following specifications for this machine.

Box
* Lian Li PC-V1000 Plus
Only alternative is the V1200 Plus. (Difference?)

Mobo + CPU + RAM
1. AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Best value?)
2. Socket 939 Motherboard
3. SATA 3.0 G
4. Gigabit Net (a must)
5. 1 GByte RAM (minimum)
6. RAID 5. (Alternatives?)
7. Memory specs? (Which mem brand? Timing?)
8. Fully compatible with Gentoo.

Memory specs should be consistent with high performance, but I don't want to waste money on a couple percent improvement. Reliability is a plus.

There are MoBos with RAID 5, but I understand that they are part software implementations. With dual core, software RAID 5 may be tolerable, but that would negate the dual core advantages in running apps, etc. If there is a cost effective add-on RAID 5 controller, it may be an option. RAID is something I'd like to do, but may have to defer it if it's too costly.

Video
1. Fast
2. Stable, full featured drivers
3. Good value!!
4. Video tuner (separate?)
5. Fully compatible with Gentoo.

On edit: I'm thinking GeForce 6600GT GPU. Good value/performance (under $150US).

I guess nVidia is the only option here. I will not spend hundreds of dollars on this. I am not a gamer. I run a rather large display at its top resolution, though. I will want TV tuner, watch movies, and want to experiment with PVR. All this absolutely has to work right with minimum messing around with drivers or CVS compiles. X Windows and TV tuner should work out-of-the-box with standard Gentoo emerges. Which model/manufacturer is readily available and is good value for performance. Low cost is more important than performance here. SLI is not needed, but I'll pop for an SLI MoBo if it has other features I want.

Audio Device
1. Onboard vs. add-on
2. Full drivers available
3. High quality audio
4. Full duplex a must
5. Good value

I will be connecting to good audio equipment. Again, I do not want to spend hundreds here. Onboard is okay if it has good audio specs, but I will likely do an add-on. Must have full ALSA support, good audio, and have connection options.

On Edit: M-Audio Audiophile 2496 or M-Audio Revolution 7.1? Both are about $100US (+/-) and provide super fidelity and low noise.

Hard drives
1. Will have more than one SATA drive.
2. Want RAID. (options? 5 vs 0+1)

Regardless of whether I do RAID, I will be buying at least two identical drives. These will likely be in the 100-200 Gb range as those are currently the best value. If I defer RAID to the future I'll want to be able to just add a couple more drives of the same type and convert as painlessly as possible. For RAID, is an additional single non-RAID boot drive a good idea? Want to make use of multiple on-board controllers, if they're available on MoBo

On edit: I need assistance here from RAID experts.

Power Supply
1. 600 W
2. Must have cables long enough for Lian Li box and also must fit w/o modification.

I'm fairly ignorant about these things. What are good brands? I like the CoolMax EZ-Wire system. Something similar would be great if the cables are long enough for the Lian Li. Don't want to spend hundreds here.

on edit: Help please.

I know this is a lot of questions, but I think this kind of discussion might evolve into a FAQ or HowTo. Thank you very much for your input.

Moved from Kernel & Hardware

longship wrote:Box
* Lian Li PC-V1000 Plus
Only alternative is the V1200 Plus. (Difference?)

choice of case is more of a taste thing, Coolermaster Centurion 530 Cases are good build quality and very afordable.

longship wrote:Mobo + CPU + RAM
1. AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Best value?)
2. Socket 939 Motherboard
3. SATA 3.0 G
4. Gigabit Net (a must)
5. 1 GByte RAM (minimum)
6. RAID 5. (Alternatives?)
7. Memory specs? (Which mem brand? Timing?)
8. Fully compatible with Gentoo.

1. Good CPU, but X2's are still a bit pricey, an Athlon 64 4000+ is about the same price but has a 1Mb cache, cache can make a real difference to performance.. but dual-core is desireable (this is what I hate about AMD's model 'rating' marketing, I'd rather see the features of the package and judge for myself what kind of performance I expect, the rating system is more confusing imo, not less). You could argue that each core has its own L2 cache and the package would therefore make up 1Mb total. Its up to you really, portage does take advantage of dual-core during compiles, so that's nice.

2. For a choice of motherboard I'd get an Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra, I can personally vouch for Asus as a stable and good performer (although in terms of performance there's very little variation between boards using the same CPU/Chipset combinations, so stability and features in the main thing here), this satisfies your 1000Base-TX network, and SATA II requirements.

3. Satisified by 2.
4. Satisified by 2.

5. Unless you plan on overclocking this memory will serve you very well: GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5
I belive the GeIL 2Gb DC Kit is roughly 70% more than the 1Gb kit if you think you'll ever need it.

6. No onboard solutions (Note, while the motherboard claims to be RAID 0/1/1+0, this is only a Windows user illousion, RAID processing is done by drivers, which nearly always (partially sometimes) closed source), your only option for a hardware RAID 5 SATA II solution is the 3ware 9550SX. Don't expect this to be cheap, however if you can live with the RAID 5 overhead on your processor then md + your 4xSATA II channels on the motherboard I belive is best suited should surfice. With that said however, the only SATA II hard drives on the market are clumbersome 7,200 RPM models, which their physical mechanics doesn't even push the SATA I interface much less SATA II. 3ware SATA I hardware RAID cards should be quite obtainable on eBay for a reasonable price, these cards are desireable for Linux users since 3ware releases their RAID controller drivers totally opensource, their drivers are also present in the kernel tree, and RAID processing is performed on the card instead of being offloaded to the CPU.. Again a choice for yourself.

7. Covered by 5, the GeIL Value ram has good average memory timings, PC3200 memory is standard for the HTT bus on AMD CPUs, and should provide plenty of memory bandwidth.

8. All the hardware covered here is compatible with Linux 2.6, and Asus should be on at least the second revision of that board, so the kinks will be ironed out.

longship wrote:Video
1. Fast
2. Stable, full featured drivers
3. Good value!!
4. Video tuner (separate?)
5. Fully compatible with Gentoo.

On edit: I'm thinking GeForce 6600GT GPU. Good value/performance (under $150US).

I guess nVidia is the only option here. I will not spend hundreds of dollars on this. I am not a gamer. I run a rather large display at its top resolution, though. I will want TV tuner, watch movies, and want to experiment with PVR. All this absolutely has to work right with minimum messing around with drivers or CVS compiles. X Windows and TV tuner should work out-of-the-box with standard Gentoo emerges. Which model/manufacturer is readily available and is good value for performance. Low cost is more important than performance here. SLI is not needed, but I'll pop for an SLI MoBo if it has other features I want.

The `ATI Radeon X800 GT 128MB GDDR3 VIVO All-in-Wonder (PCI-Express)`, satisfies all your requirements in one go, not all that expensive either. weather the TV-Tuner will be headache free to setup or not is another matter, the X800 GT GPU is even overkill if you're not a gamer (i.e. don't do much more OpenGL than glxgears or GL screensavers). ATI's AIW cards are pretty well supported and I don't expect you to get much hassle from it.

longship wrote:Audio Device
1. Onboard vs. add-on
2. Full drivers available
3. High quality audio
4. Full duplex a must
5. Good value

I will be connecting to good audio equipment. Again, I do not want to spend hundreds here. Onboard is okay if it has good audio specs, but I will likely do an add-on. Must have full ALSA support, good audio, and have connection options.

Creative Labs SB Audigy 2 ZS, cheap, complete ALSA support, outsanding audio quality...

longship wrote:Hard drives
1. Will have more than one SATA drive.
2. Want RAID. (options? 5 vs 0+1)

Regardless of whether I do RAID, I will be buying at least two identical drives. These will likely be in the 100-200 Gb range as those are currently the best value. If I defer RAID to the future I'll want to be able to just add a couple more drives of the same type and convert as painlessly as possible. For RAID, is an additional single non-RAID boot drive a good idea? Want to make use of multiple on-board controllers, if they're available on MoBo

On edit: I need assistance here from RAID experts.

The best way to value a hard drive is dividing its price by its capacity, so if I have a 200Gb HD for £80, then its £0.40 per Gigabyte, or 40 pence. I'd recomment Samsung Spinpoint disks, they're whisper quiet, reliable, and pretty good value.
As for your RAID, RAID mode 5 trashes 0+1 in read I/O any day, RAID 5 only requires 3 disks minimum, 0+1 requires 4, RAID 5 only uses up 1 disk to provide redundency, 0+1 uses up 2. In fact, I'm still trying to fathum a practical application for 0+1.. However this is only if integridy of data is paramount, RAID0 performs nearly as admirably at reads against RAID5. I'll give you a quick run down of the main RAID modes:

RAID0: Striping, read/writes byte blocks in alternate, thus (theoretically) doubling performance.
RAID1: Mirroring, writes identical blocks on both disks, oviously this means if one disk dies, the data is safe.
RAID5: Stripping with polarity, somewhat like RAID0 except polarity bits are written to one of the blocks, so if one of the disks dies, the data is safe, even if reading polarity bits is somewhat slower, once a new disk replaces the dead one the array can be reconstructed back to its former glory.
RAID10: Stripping+Mirroring, kinda like an array of an array, 2 disks are used for mirroring, 2 for striping. (also known as RAID 0+1).
JBOD: Spanning, just fills up a disk, then moves on to another disk, if one dies, the lot is gone, no performance gains either

longship wrote:Power Supply
1. 600 W
2. Must have cables long enough for Lian Li box and also must fit w/o modification.

I'm fairly ignorant about these things. What are good brands? I like the CoolMax EZ-Wire system. Something similar would be great if the cables are long enough for the Lian Li. Don't want to spend hundreds here.

Tagen, Tagen, Tagen, Tagen... I can't recommend Tagen PSU's anymore, they are rock solid PSU's supplying clean stable power, you wouldn't need anymore than 480W.

I would agree with pretty much everything Aidan said, except for the TV Tuner. I don't know about recent models, but up until about a year ago, I had a Radeon 8500 AIW, and I never did get the TV features working.

I now have a Hauppauge PVR-500MCE, which works great. It has dual tuners which are picked up as separate PVR-150s. I picked mine up from newegg.com for about $140US, and the PVR 150 goes for about $67US.

Thats a shame, well I never use TV Tuners myself.. so in that case an X550 + the Tuner you suggested should be a good pair.

longship wrote:I guess nVidia is the only option here. I will not spend hundreds of dollars on this. I am not a gamer. I run a rather large display at its top resolution, though. I will want TV tuner, watch movies, and want to experiment with PVR. All this absolutely has to work right with minimum messing around with drivers or CVS compiles. X Windows and TV tuner should work out-of-the-box with standard Gentoo emerges.

I have been running a gentoo pvr with mythtv for the last couple of years, rarely had any problem out of it. I use a pvr250 with the ivtv from portage, all myth and ivtv packages ~x86. Works like a charm and the WAF is high... Only a few little quirks, like you have to remove the kernel generated msp3400 module or they will conflict with the ivtv module, all explained by the ebuild though...

Definitely not ANY ATI cards! (coming from the mouth of a person using ATI cards for over 10 years in succession now, on the machine I'm typing this too).

So, go nvidia. GF6600GT is really good value, but if you aren't a gamer -> don't need the 3D performance, I'd go for GF6200 or alike to save some pennies. The 2D speed and features (like xinerama, xvmc, composite accel..., which ati lacks completely) are mostly the same across the range.

To my knowlege the kernel does not suport SATAII over the nf4. It still works but you dont get NCQ IIRC.
Also considering the cost of a nice hardware raid controller to do raid 5, you might be better off doing software raid 1 if you want some redundancy, or raid 0 if you want some extra performance.
And I dont recall raid 5 being faster than raid 0 since raid 5 is just raid 0 with additional overhead of calculating parity for recovery.

yeah that RAID stuff is a bit off.

Let's assume that we build a four disk RAID 5 array. We can simplify reality and think of it as three drives with your data on it and one parity drive. So a file that contains twelve blocks will pull four blocks from each drive. In a RAID 0 case your twelve block reads will be coming from four drives or three blocks a drive which is why it's faster. Same thing on the writes though you take some overhead on calculating and writing parity in the RAID 5 that you dont' see on the reads. Generally speaking RAID 5 is pretty good in just about every category, but not the best.

RAID 0+1 and 1+0 are different from each other. Generally I've used RAID 1 mirrors and then stripped them, which gives you better fault tolerance. In a four drive set your writes happen on two drives which is slower than RAID 5. However reads will happen on all four drives so you get pretty much the same speed as a RAID 0, but with fault tolerance and having less usable space.

When do you use RAID 1+0? When you absolutely need the performance and have a big ass budget.

Four disks, which is what most home servers are doing, is sort of a weird spot for RAID. I can do RAID 6 with eight drives, be able to lose two drives, and get 75% usuable space. Or 50% at RAID 1+0. At six drives RAID six sees 60% of the original space. Or 84% at RAID 5. At four drives it's 50, 50, and 75% respectively.

kashani

I'm going dual core. Period. I put a lot of strain on my workstation, running many apps simultaneously. It's worth the bucks to get the second CPU in a dual core. Best price is the 3800+ (Gawd, I hate the way they spec CPUS these days.)

I am currently running an ATI AIW 7500. It works, but upgrading drivers means all sorts of messy special recompiles. The GATOS drivers work, sort of. But there are a lot of features which are still unsupported. I will never again buy an ATI video card. There's no excuse for lack of Linux support. I'll pick either the 6600GT or the 6200, most likely the former. Which manufacturer markets the best nVidia boards?

I'll look for drives that support SATA II with NCQ. I'll just have to run them as SATA I until the kernel dev team complete support. I don't expect that to be a long time. The price diff isn't that much. I'm not going to be buying 500 GB drives. More likely 100-200 GB (2 identical ones) with a small PATA as boot drive (of which I have a few floating around).

I've more or less decided on M-Audio for a sound card. Either the Audiophile 2496 or the Revolution 5.1 card. The former is higher fidelity, the latter has nice features. Both apparently blow away the Soundblasters and have full ALSA support. Price is right, too. The 5.1 is less than $100US!

The TV tuner very well might be the PVR-500MCE. Price is right and it has two tuners. Very cool.

ASUS A8N-E NForce 4 Ultra. NewEgg has it for $109US. But ARRRGH! No firewire! Maybe a Firewire adaptor? Suggestions?

How about the ABit An8 Ultra? It has the same features as the ASUS *and* has two firewire (one back panel and one onboard). It also has a nice heatlane which carries Northbridge heat to the back panel. There have been reports that this board is an "Easy Bake Oven" unless the heat is carried out of the case. This is where I see the Lian Li PC-V1000 Plus as a good choice because it has a heat shroud to carry CPU heat out the back near the same point as the AN8 Ultra's Northbridge heat sink. I like that feature a lot. I've had very good luck with ABit boards (as well as ASUS). This guy is only $114US at NewEgg. Anybody have an opinion? The reviews on this board are favorable.

Re: Power supply. This machine is going to be on 24/7 365 days a year. I will be putting a 600 W supply in regardless of whether a smaller one will do. PS == weak link. Recommendations? Should run cool and quiet, but reliably. Budget $150 max. Must have long enough cables for the Lian Li. I still like the CoolMax EZ-Wire system. It's neat and looks nice. Directron has the 600W version for $102US. That includes 450mm cables. If that's long enough in the Lian Li, I think I have a match.
Any comments?

Please remember that the wattage rating on the PSU doesn't tell you everything. Depends on the model, but most 600W supplies that I know of aren't of very high quality. A quality 500W supply, say Nexus will outperform one both in terms of noise and power.

MBOARD: If you can deal with less pci/pci-e slots you could look at a nForce 6150 based board. They are matx but perform at nForce 4 ultra speeds with an addon video card. They have raid 0,1,0+1, and 5; 4 slots for memory; Firewire; and SATA II w/ NCD. The onboard vid should be good enough for your needs but it would eat some of your ram. This should cost you around $85. The MSI one is currently the best one out there as far as I can tell.

CPU: Get a Opteron 165 socket 939. It is dual core @ 1.8ghz with 2x1mb L2. And cheaper than the 3800. You should be able to pick one up for around 300 online (before shipping).

Video Card: If you want that 16/32/64/128mb that it stole for video pop in a 6200 or better yet spend it on more ram. If the 6150s onboard isn't enough power you will have to get something better than a 6200 because the 6150 does as well. And no matter what get a passive one because the additional performance when you play games (you don't right) isn't worth the screeming 40mm fan they put on those.

Sound Card: First off. The mboard (well the MSI one) comes with an Intel HD compatable audio chipset. It has 8 24b/192khz DACs (Yeah dolby digital live on an onboard) and gets something like 100dB snr on them. I am not sure that it does hardware mixing but I am also not sure about the one you have picked out. If you need more you should probably stick with a creative card. They have the best drivers and decent hardware.

PSU: Get a Seasonic. They run at 80% min eff, are very quiet, and last forever. I think they have a 600W. If not, their highest rated one will out perform any 600W out there.

HD: Since you will have this on 24/7 365, get two Seagate Barracuda 7200.9s They are apperently fast, quiet, and reliable. And as with all Seagate HDs, they come with a 5 year warranty. They also are SATA II with all the features you want.

Overall: I would find passive components if you can. Fans (small ones especially) will fail. All except the psu and cpu. Get some decent system fans. Arctic cooling makes some great 80mm fans that won't kill your ears and will last at least 3 years. If going for something bigger than 80mm I would go to the silent pc review site. They have a decent list. Remeber you have to sit/sleep/etc next to the thing. If you wan't to listen to music and not your whirring fans/hd take some time now and save money later. It's well worth it. Especially if you ever want to use these parts in a PVR.

Also, if you are thinking about it, 4 sticks of ram may actually hurt more than it helps. No board out there afaik can support 4 sticks of pc3200 without killing some of the timings. I don't have much info on this problem other than I know it exists. If you don't absolutly need it I would stick with 2 sticks of 512MB/1G.

Good recommendations from Joey.

joey seems to have a good handle on what hardware you should get, and i have some additions/possible changes to his suggestions

definitely go for the opteron 165 (socket 939), no question about it
for the ram you should be perfectly fine with 1gb, and you can just stick with some of the proven good makes on that: geil, mushkin, ocz, crucial, corsair, gskill, etc (no particular order there)

for the power supply, you can get a 600w, but you wont need it by any means, again there is a pretty finite set of proven good brands: ocz, seasonic, zippy, pc power and cooling, hiper, enermax, antec, tagan/epower
also, though, not every psu from those brands is good
i suggest reading up on the best for certain purposes: http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/s ... p?t=136602

as for the nvidia 6150, ive heard of issues with these chipsets since they are fairly new, so you might want to be careful with them, also, any raid solution you get from a motherboard isnt going to be very solid
if you are serious about raid, go hardware raid and get a card, in your situation i would get some drives now and run a regular setup, then later on get the card and go raid, since you are on a budget

the 6600gts are great cards, i own some myself, and you cannot beat them for the price

as for motherboards, i stick by dfi generally, but another brand i like is epox, great solid boards at a nice price

I had good luck with Patriot brand ram. It was really cheap and with a lifetime guarenty and high quality samsung chips I can't complain.

Good call on the suggested reading. Just remember that noise pollution is harder to fix once you have purchased the components.

For a mboard. You may be able to get a SLI version cheaper than an ultra because of all the new 2x16 SLIs coming on the market. No matter what you will spend at least 80 for a decent mb. Going with any 6100/6150 may be more trouble than it's worth because you really have to look at the individual chips on the boards. I know for a fact that the forcedeath (lan) driver from the nForce 2/3?/4 works on the new 6150s along with the nVidia SATA. The Intel HD audio drivers only work on some (not the Asus). And with the new nVidia glx drivers I hear these boards are supported. As for stability... when are you planning on buying this stuff. If it is right now within the next couple weeks, go with a SLI/Ultra. If not go to the nVidia forums and see how people are doing with some of the 6150s. There should be more information about them written as people get machines together. Sorry for recommending them so heavily but I think they will be a good option for scalability and figured you would be refining your selection over a few weeks. I know I have been selecting parts for well over 4 months now (yeah, I'm a bit ocd).

You might also want to reconsider your case. The Lian Li PV-V1000 and the V1200 are very high quality but if you are running a full RAID setup in either of those cases I think you will end up wishing you had some other case. Both cases are more or less totally open to the outside. So any noise that is produced by your components will be heard. If you don't select each and every component for low noise your machine will be noisy. No two ways about it. I don't think it matters how quite your disk drives are if you are running 4 or 5 of these in one of these cases you will have a noisy machine.

I agree that the Seasonic PSUs are the way to go. Get one of their S-12 models.

My stepson has an M-Audio Revolution 5.1. He is running Windows so I can't comment on Linux support other than to say that it is listed as supported by ALSA. He says it has significantly better audio quality than any SoundBlaster card he has heard but that the SB cards are better gaming cards.

I recently picked up a video card with the nvidia 6500 chip set and so far I am very pleased with it. It was significantly less costly than the 6600 series cards and has more features than 6200 series cards. I am not a gamer. It was easy to install and everything works without being a hassle to settup. Took me a little while to get twinview working but that was mostly because of my learning curve. Now I could setup twineview is a few minutes. I say nvidia is the only way to go for video at this time. I had been running a G450 Matrox but it did not have enough vram to get the color depth I needed and the newer P series Matrox cards have crap Linux drivers. Don't know much about the ATI cards but most posts on this forum say to stay away from them.

its true about the v1000 letting out a bit more noise with its mesh and all, but if you are THAT worried about it, i would still stick with a lian li and grab a 7077 or something similar, you cant beat that

As far as the case goes, I wouldn't put "cost effective" and "Lian Li" in the same context. They're EXPENSIVE!

oggialli wrote:As far as the case goes, I wouldn't put "cost effective" and "Lian Li" in the same context. They're EXPENSIVE!

yeah but its also hard to say a lian li is overkill, its not like its an unnecessary upgrade, i think they are worth it, and it seems like the op agrees

Maybe, but I'm missing their supposed strong points... one can get bigger cases with better cooling cheaper, what's the point? Looks?

oggialli wrote:Maybe, but I'm missing their supposed strong points... one can get bigger cases with better cooling cheaper, what's the point? Looks?

build quality, their standards are unmatched generally, they always have good cooling too, but others have that

The thing about the abit an8 motherboard is that on-board sensors are not supported. Abit doesn't provide the specs to the linux sensors team. That's why I ultimately chose the Asus A8N-E, sensors work fine, and I really like knowing CPU temperatures and fan speeds.

Motherboard: ASUS AN8-SLI Premium. I love ASUS MoBos. I was going to go with the less expensive ABit A8N Ultra, but if the ABit temp devices are not supported by Linux that leaves out ABit. This ASUS board has two SATA controllers. Instead of RAID I've decided to save money and go with twin HDs, one on each controller. I do this with my PATA drives on all my machines and it does improve performance. This MoBo has Firewire, which I want. I like the fanless Northbridge. I will not be using SLI now, but may later if I add more displays.

CPU: I think 1MBx2 cache may be good. Now, I'm between the Opteron 165 Dual core (at 1.8 GHz) and the Athlon 64 x2 4400+ (Toledo core). The former is $330; the latter is $497). If I have some extra bucks I'll get the Toledo.

Case: Lian Li PC-V1000 Plus. I like the cooling zones and the fan noise reduction features. Noise is important, but I do not expect any computer in my office to be quiet. I already have four other machines in here. As none of them are quiet, that just isn't as important than other issues.

Power Supply: Seasonic it is. I'll go with the 500W as people seem to think that this is enough.

Memory: I picked up on the Patriot memory on NewEgg. Fast and not a bad price. Will go with 1 GB of dual channel. If I feel reckless, I may go with 2 GB.

Video: PVR250MCE PCI. Hardware encoding is where it's at.

Hard drives: Seagate access times are too slow. I'll go with Hitachi T7k250's.

Video: I've decided on NVidia 6600GT. Best bang for the buck. Selecting the PNY VCG6600GXPB GeForce 6600GT 128MB.

I'll add a LiteOn media burner (great value) and I'll be done.

Now... About that LCD panel I've been wanting... Arrrgh! This is getting damned expensive. I'll stay with my 21" Trinitron for now.

Thanks for all the assistance.

a reiteration of my opteron suggestion, paying even a little extra for an x2 of comparable specs isnt worth it, let alone $167

the hitachis are good drives, but seagates tend to have fine access rates, perhaps you were looking at their lower end?

MrApples wrote:a reiteration of my opteron suggestion, paying even a little extra for an x2 of comparable specs isnt worth it, let alone $167


the hitachis are good drives, but seagates tend to have fine access rates, perhaps you were looking at their lower end?

The 1.8 GHz Opteron dual core is ~$320, basically the same price as the 2.0 GHz Athlon X2. I'll go with the Opteron because I see that they are better speced chips. I may just spend the extra for the 2.2 GHz Opteron. I know that some might think it foolish, but I push my workstation very hard and the faster chip is over 20% faster, which is significant even if the additional performance is not proportionally priced.

The Seagates I'm talking about are the latest generation 7200.9 drives. All the technical reviews indicate that their access times are slow compared to other drives. I have a couple of Hitachi/IBM drives. They are indeed nice. However, the Seagates have a five year warranty. On the other hand, I've not had any hard drive problems in a very long time. I still have several legacy ATA drives still in service. My computers are all powered on 24/7 so there's not much strain on the HDs.