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I have had really good luck with intel boards and you can pick up a decent one for $60 bucks. Add any one of these cpus for $149-$349 plus $45 for 4GB of Ram and you have a pretty fast rig for $254 - $454.

I have had really good luck with intel boards and you can pick up a decent one for $60 bucks. Add any one of these cpus for $149-$349 plus $45 for 4GB of Ram and you have a pretty fast rig for $254 - $454.

O. M. G.

How fucking hard can it be to create a simple, secure voting machine?

Start with this: http://www.staples.com/Amplivox-Aluminum-Truss-Lectern/product_683093?cmArea=SEARCH

Weld a steel box under it, lock one of these in it: http://www.logicsupply.com/categories/mainboards/nano_itx

A simple touchscreen on the top: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824103028

A 2-ply receipt printer: http://www.posmicro.com/RECPRINTERS/SAMSUNG_PRINTERS/samsung_srp_270_receipt_printers.htm (Also locked in a box, with an extra-large roll of paper)

Then, have a secure server in a cage in the corner of the room. Have the voting terminals boot over network from the server. All they need to run is a simple interface that shows the names of the candidates and allows you to touch to select them. Then it prints a receipt for you, keeping the other copy internally.

Sure, there are details to iron out, but come on, it can't be that hard.

Actually I was a bit hasty - the one I own is this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817347017

--It's like day and night. Firewire is better than USB2, but eSATA runs the drive at "native" speed.

--Using Linux + JFS filesystem, I might get 25-30MB/sec writing to Firewire; using eSATA can go up to 50MB or even 100MB/sec burst speed, depending on the drive and SATA card. Well worth the expense of getting a combo external drive carrier like this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817347016

( Disclaimer - I own the above product and am quite happy with it. )

You have to look around a bit. Just a few weeks ago Newegg had this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834146580

On sale for $399 with a $80 off coupon if you paid via Paypal, so I got it for $319. Pretty good deal so far, as the laptop has behaved flawlessly.

Well it is using an AMD 1660-LE so you are talking 40w just on the CPU. If I was building an HTPC for a customer I'd be looking at a Dual Core, so that even when crunching high def video the controls would be smooth as butter. With C&Q enabled my AMD 7550 is nice and quiet, even when running 1080p which is fed to my 4650 GPU for post processing. Of course all of this is in WinXP X64, where ATI has hardware video post processing so I have no idea how it would work in Linux, but I haven't heard good things. Does AMD even HAVE post processing up and running in Linux yet?

No shit an Athlon 64 and Radeon GPU is going to eat the Acer like a too small bag of doritos - because its apples to oranges here.

My first laptop was a Compaq 15" w/Athlon64 3200+ and Radeon 200M. It also weighed about 8lbs (a lot with or without textbooks in college) and sure, I could run Half Life 2 on it - but it sucked the battery out in 2 hours normal use, maybe 1/2 hour on HL2. Which is why I looked at my priorities, and how since it was for school and browsing the web when visiting family, I replaced it with a 12" Gateway Core Solo ULV and Intel GPU - much lighter and longer battery life of up to 4 or 5 hours.

My point is, too many people don't see that the reason for netbooks in the first place is to have a light weight laptop with decent battery life that costs under $1200 USD. Don't give me that "Oh, but they want it because it's cheap!" crap, because they could just as well go get a $400 luggable desktop replacement like the one I had. If they want a cheap fast computer, they could have my old laptop (if it still worked). If they want something cheap, light weight, and long battery life, they just might have to put up with it being a tad slow.

Now, if they **really** want something light weight, mediocre to long battery life, and whatever the current generation of desktop processor is, they will *definitely* pay out the ass for it. That held true for spec to price ratio when I bought my 12" Gateway 2 years ago, it holds true now, and it will more than likely continue to be true another 2 years from now...

No shit an Athlon 64 and Radeon GPU is going to eat the Acer like a too small bag of doritos - because its apples to oranges here.

My first laptop was a Compaq 15" w/Athlon64 3200+ and Radeon 200M. It also weighed about 8lbs (a lot with or without textbooks in college) and sure, I could run Half Life 2 on it - but it sucked the battery out in 2 hours normal use, maybe 1/2 hour on HL2. Which is why I looked at my priorities, and how since it was for school and browsing the web when visiting family, I replaced it with a 12" Gateway Core Solo ULV and Intel GPU - much lighter and longer battery life of up to 4 or 5 hours.

My point is, too many people don't see that the reason for netbooks in the first place is to have a light weight laptop with decent battery life that costs under $1200 USD. Don't give me that "Oh, but they want it because it's cheap!" crap, because they could just as well go get a $400 luggable desktop replacement like the one I had. If they want a cheap fast computer, they could have my old laptop (if it still worked). If they want something cheap, light weight, and long battery life, they just might have to put up with it being a tad slow.

Now, if they **really** want something light weight, mediocre to long battery life, and whatever the current generation of desktop processor is, they will *definitely* pay out the ass for it. That held true for spec to price ratio when I bought my 12" Gateway 2 years ago, it holds true now, and it will more than likely continue to be true another 2 years from now...

This really seems like a very unlikely event to happen to trigger the problem on these drives for most users since from my experience personally and professionally I have yet to see anyone actually know about BIOS passwords, much less about setting a password on the drive using the ATA secure drive password feature. I am surprised that this was even caught by anyone unless it was a complete fluke or there actually are people or companies using this type of a feature for security. (I don't doubt it but haven't seen it.)

I personally own the first generation Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD and I have written about it extensively here on this forum. I heard rumors that the new TRIM feature support will only made available to this second generation release of these drives but I'm unsure if that is really true. I'm on the fence right now whether I should sell my G1 drive and upgrade to the G2 because of this feature and also for a little more performance because I am so happy with the performance of this drive and also the current 8820 firmware that solved the fragmentation and slowdown issues.

If you are one of those folks who is still sitting around not knowing what to do when all of this Solid State Disk news is coming out all over then you are missing the biggest paradigm shift to computing performance since the transfer from floppy disks to hard drives.

With the upcoming re-release of this newly affordable drive around 2009-08-28 from Intel X25-M G2 80GB MLC SSD at ~$230 USD from Newegg or ZipZoomFly you should definitely dig down deep and save a little money to buy one of these drives and experience the biggest performance and responsiveness improvement to your computer that you could imagine.

If you need a primer on the SSD revolution check out my previous post regarding the articles to read.

Required Reading for Solid State Drives (Score 1)

one cannot buy XP retail anymore

Note true. Not only are retail versions of XP SP2 still available, it's very trivial to find legal OEM licenses of Windows XP Pro SP3 available for purchase. I know, I recently bought two OEM licenses of Windows XP in Spanish; they were out of stock so I had to wait a couple of months until Microsoft printed up some more.

As well as XP X64, which is quite nice and lets me use the 5Gb of RAM(4 for the CPU, 1 for the GPU) that I have. Despite the horror stories I heard everywhere thanks to WOW64 it has run every program I have thrown at it, even my 90s games.

You can still buy XP from Newegg. XP Home and XP Professional are there as well as Media Center Edition.

You can still buy XP from Newegg. XP Home and XP Professional are there as well as Media Center Edition.

maybe it was "powerful" in 2005 when it was unveiled. But for today's standards, a Xenos graphics chip is a joke. Xenos GPU was the precursor of the Radeon R600 processor, which was used up to Radeon HD 3400. You can get a Radeon HD 4650 for under 50 bucks, and will totally obliterate Xbox's graphics capabilities.

Problem is gaming companies are making many titles "console only", or their PC ports are crappy emulation (like GTA4) - that leaves gamers with no choice but buying/using a console with outdated hardware.

(Sorry, this is somewhat offtopic, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw the comparison between Windows XP and Windows 7.)

I once saw someone here on Slashdot mention that Microsoft should not have shipped a 32-bit version of Vista, opting instead to push only the 64-bit version. While it seemed like an odd statement at the time (despite the fact that my home XP machine was an AMD64 processor), I find myself agreeing with it on Windows 7.

As it stands today, 32-bit Windows is quickly becoming too small for many business and industrial uses, and it's very affordable to build a high-performance home machine with more than 4GB of RAM. (Case in Point.) In fact, with intensive web applications and sophisticated desktop tools (yeah, some of them are bloated) chewing more memory than ever before, it just doesn't make sense to get anything less than 4GB (nay, 3GB if you're running Windows 32-bit!) except for a few edge cases.

Unfortunately, Windows has been kind of lagging on the 64-bit front. By treating it as sort of a bastard child (like they treated all their non-i386 NT versions), Microsoft managed to ensure that hardware manufacturers wouldn't make an effort to support 64-bit windows in a non-server environment. Which is frustrating as I've started bumping up against that once-awesome 4GB barrier.

In an attempt to turn this into a slightly more useful conversation rather than a one-sided rant, I was wondering if I could get some opinions on using virtualization as a solution? With Windows' poor track record as a 64-bit OS, I have been thinking about running a 64-Bit Unix and virtualizing 32-bit windows for backward compatibility. I've already had some success with virtualizing Windows 7 on a MacBook, and have even been able to get desktop integration working. (Quite spiffy that. Though the two interfaces occasionally confuse my wife. She's the primary user of Windows, needing support for some specialized programs with no real alternatives available.)

Does anyone here have experience with setting up a system like this? Do you use Xen, VMWare, Sun VirtualBox/OpenxVM, or some other solution? What do you use as your primary OS? Linux has come a long way, but the upgrade treadmill is still frustrating. Especially with the seemingly regular ABI upgrades. Does anyone use [Open]Solaris x86_64 as a host? Do you have 3D Graphics completely disabled, or have you found a good way to allow all OSes solid and reliable access to the underlying graphics card? Do you bother with mounting virtual shared drives to move data between the OSes, or do you have a home NAS for storing data? (I'm leaning toward a NAS myself.)

Just a few thoughts, anyway. Thanks in advance for experiences & suggestions! :-)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16875205141

under $35.00 Unlocked.

I challenge you to find a similar PC that is cheaper:

This person did it a year ago. (Wonderful what a little google search can do, isn't it?)

I just threw one together with similar specs for $350 plus shipping, and it even has wireless (g, not n, but who has an n router?). Throw Ubuntu on there and you're good to go. The case measures 11.8" x 5.1" x 8.7", so it's a little bit bigger, but I think that's worth $250 in savings :P

Case (larger than the mac mini)
Motherboard (lacks firewire and wireless n, and has an older video chipset)
Processor (much faster, 2.8GHz vs the mini's 2.0GHz)
RAM (2GB vs the mini's 1GB, but only 800MHz)
Hard drive (500GB vs the mini's 120GB)
DVD-RW (24x vs the mini's 8x)

(None of those are affiliate links, don't worry :P)

Now if you spend a little more time searching than I did, you could certainly get better parts and still stay well below the mac mini's $599 price level. One thing I would suggest is using a smaller case that includes a slimline DVD-RW, as did the person in the ubuntu forums link I started this post with. The case used by the guy in ubuntu's forums measures 6.5"x6.5"x2", the same size as the mac mini.

I challenge you to find a similar PC that is cheaper:

This person did it a year ago. (Wonderful what a little google search can do, isn't it?)

I just threw one together with similar specs for $350 plus shipping, and it even has wireless (g, not n, but who has an n router?). Throw Ubuntu on there and you're good to go. The case measures 11.8" x 5.1" x 8.7", so it's a little bit bigger, but I think that's worth $250 in savings :P

Case (larger than the mac mini)
Motherboard (lacks firewire and wireless n, and has an older video chipset)
Processor (much faster, 2.8GHz vs the mini's 2.0GHz)
RAM (2GB vs the mini's 1GB, but only 800MHz)
Hard drive (500GB vs the mini's 120GB)
DVD-RW (24x vs the mini's 8x)

(None of those are affiliate links, don't worry :P)

Now if you spend a little more time searching than I did, you could certainly get better parts and still stay well below the mac mini's $599 price level. One thing I would suggest is using a smaller case that includes a slimline DVD-RW, as did the person in the ubuntu forums link I started this post with. The case used by the guy in ubuntu's forums measures 6.5"x6.5"x2", the same size as the mac mini.

I challenge you to find a similar PC that is cheaper:

This person did it a year ago. (Wonderful what a little google search can do, isn't it?)

I just threw one together with similar specs for $350 plus shipping, and it even has wireless (g, not n, but who has an n router?). Throw Ubuntu on there and you're good to go. The case measures 11.8" x 5.1" x 8.7", so it's a little bit bigger, but I think that's worth $250 in savings :P

Case (larger than the mac mini)
Motherboard (lacks firewire and wireless n, and has an older video chipset)
Processor (much faster, 2.8GHz vs the mini's 2.0GHz)
RAM (2GB vs the mini's 1GB, but only 800MHz)
Hard drive (500GB vs the mini's 120GB)
DVD-RW (24x vs the mini's 8x)

(None of those are affiliate links, don't worry :P)

Now if you spend a little more time searching than I did, you could certainly get better parts and still stay well below the mac mini's $599 price level. One thing I would suggest is using a smaller case that includes a slimline DVD-RW, as did the person in the ubuntu forums link I started this post with. The case used by the guy in ubuntu's forums measures 6.5"x6.5"x2", the same size as the mac mini.

Newegg has Cat6 in 1 foot lengths for less than a buck: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2050400132%201230513961%20123040283%201230415264&name=1%20ft.

Let's make some wild predictions based on recent price trends. (Trends found here). Over the last few years, flash memory has been increasing in GB/$ at a rate of 185% per year. Meanwhile, hard drives have slowed to only 42% improvement per year.

Based on these trends, here is the estimated cost of 10 TB using either technology:

July 2009: Platter = $750, Flash = $28,125

July 2010: Platter = $528, Flash = $9,868

July 2014: Platter= $130, Flash = $150

July 2019: Platter= $23, Flash = $0.80

July 2024: Platter= $4, Flash = $0.004

In July 2024, a 10 PB flash drive would cost $42! Of course, we can't assume these trends will continue, but it seems a good bet that we won't be worrying about the size of our mp3 collections. The traditional hard drive may only have five years of competitive life remaining.

This isn't a coke vs. pepsi thing. I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram. An ftp socket and script to upload my excel file somewhere for sharing doesn't account for 80 megs worth of space complexity: 400% more resources than the thick client app!

Ok, I just checked NewEgg. You can buy 4 GB of RAM for $50.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166&cm_sp=DailyDeal-_-20-231-166-_-Product

So that's 4096 MB for $50.99, or 1.2 cents per megabyte. (Not dollars, cents.)

Your "memory gap" of 80 MB costs you... strangely, exactly one dollar when rounded. Assuming you have a job, and that you were at that job when you wrote your little boldfaced rant, you probably made well over a dollar in the time it took you to type it out.

In short, you have absolutely NO sense of proportion. Get a grip.

(That all said, there are good reasons to use Excel over Google Spreadsheet-- for example, the fact that Google Spreadsheet has crappy usability and lacks tons of features-- but memory cost ain't one of them.)

Or you could get a 500 GB HDD for under $100 that will still be much faster than the memory stick -- and will cost you 5% of the price per GB, you would really have to be a fool to buy one of those things right now.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314

Also you're better off looking at 1TB if you want best price per GB on the drive.

Okay, I just did that and the price dropped to about 7.5 cents per GB for the cheapest 1TB drive available on newegg.com:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145233

Yeah you write bogus comparisons and believe marketing nonsense with zero evidence and I'm the one that's the jackass. If you believe that there's nothing I can do or say thats worse than what you're doing to yourself.

You really aren't worth the time refuting. None of your arguments hold up.

Where are the bogus comparisons and explain how there is zero evidence for how the media I was referencing works? I works like using a chisel and hammer on a stone, if you cannot understand that then there is nothing I can do for you either. At least I give evidence for my claims, you make claims lacking any evidence to support them and then you disregard the evidence I have presented without explanation other than "you believe bogus marketing and write bogus comparisons and your arguments don't hold up", to argue successfully you need to support your claims by doing something like giving examples of how my claims are incorrect. Since you are uninformed and have no evidence to dispute my claims I can see why you have resorted to just saying it isn't worth your time refuting, in reality there isn't enough time for you to refute my claims since they have a lot of evidence supporting them.

Once again, since you are supposed to be so informed I would love to hear why you don't think their technology is possible and also dispute how even if it could only last 100 years how that would still make the technology less superior to long term archiving on hard drives which last 5-15 years instead. Remember this is data archiving which is writing the data to media and then storing that media somewhere for a long period of time, not incremental backups which you keep confusing with data archiving.

For your simple mind:

How is long term archiving to hard drives better than long term archiving to optical media and what part of the science of the new discs seems like fantasy? Notice I said what part of the science is faulty, not what marketing claims are faulty, there is a big difference.

One: The title is a borderline lie. Yes, you can buy 12x 1TB drives for about a grand. But if I'm going to build an array and bench mark it and constantly compare it to buying a Core i7-975 Extreme, the drives alone don't do me any good! (And I love how you continually reiterate with statements like "The Idea: Massive Hard Drive Storage Within a $1,000 Budget")

Two: Said controller does not exist. They listed the controller as ARC-1680ix-20. Areca makes no such controller. They make an 8, 12, 16, 24 but no 20 unless they've got some advanced product unlisted anywhere.

Three: Said controller is going to easily run you another grand. And I'm certain most controllers that accomplish what you're asking are pretty damned expensive and they will have a bigger impact than the drives on your results.

Four: You don't compare this hardware setup with any other setup. Build the "Uber RAID Array" you claim. Uber compared to what, precisely? How does a cheap Adaptac compare? Are you sure there's not a better controller for less money?

All you showed was that we increase our throughput and reduce our access times with RAID 0 & 5 compared to a single drive. So? Isn't that what's supposed to happen? Oh, and you split it across seven pages like Tom's Hardware loves to do. And I can't click print to read the article uninterrupted anymore without logging in. And those Kontera ads that pop up whenever I accidentally cross them with my mouse to click your next page links, god I love those with all my heart.

So feel free to correct me but we are left with a marketing advertisement for an Areca product that doesn't even exist and a notice that storage just keeps getting cheaper. Did I miss anything?

Add to that, if I my memory doesn't fail that they published the RAID 5 wasn't safe to run with 1TB disks... crap.

For the ads... I see no ads. The old "Proxomitron" takes care of everything

I have found by sticking with Ridata, which seems to be the best of the "cheapo" media IMHO, I rarely have any troubles at all for those less than three years old, in fact I rarely have trouble with the Ridata DVDs at all since I stick them on 50 pack spindles in a cool dry cabinet.

Anyway I have a 733MHz Compaq deskpro EN SFF that is one of about a dozen I got when the school upgraded their secretaries in 05. Since I use the SFF as a monitor riser it is sitting right in front of me at all times. To run a check I simply pick out a 50 pack and feed them to the 733MHz, flipping over to check the results and load the next disc. I have found using this method I can get a 50 pack checked in about an hour and a half while I am surfing Slashdot. Any that are found to have errors I use Elprime on my AMD 7550 with 4Gb of RAM and XP X64 to recover the media to a folder. Then I take a quick look and chunk anything that isn't worth having (like say an old version of Firefox) and then reburn the disc. Since I have a circa 2000 Win2K pro box that I use for a Nettop(which is what I am typing this on) I can devote the full resources of the 7550 to recovery, thus speeding recovery time.

So using this method I can go through the 7 or so spindles I have in about a week and a half of spare time. Since I rarely have any trouble with those less than 3 years I can cut about half of those out and thus save even more time. For anything important, like disc images I have those split in 4Gb chunks and burn those in duplicate with a recovery record. So far the only real PITA with my system is when I made the move to XP X64 the old disc cataloging software I was using totally crapped out on me so I am having to rescan my discs using a pair of freeware disc catalog tools, so I won't have to deal with this problem again. But since with a catalog you only need the disc in long enough to be scanned I have to switch back and forth more.

Since both of my new catalog softwares use standard formats instead of the proprietary crap the last one did (one uses XML and the other uses IIRC OO.o Dbase) I will be able to switch to another easily and having two means if one craps out I still have the other. But all in all I have been using this system for many years and it seems to work. I was even able to quickly find my mom's "must have" Bounce Out game that she bought in 2002 in less than a minute after her favorite PC (It was a Gateway Astro, and I know they suck, but she refused to let go of it or her AoE I) died. if you go to Primewares (bad name, great site) they have nothing but freeware programs, including dozens that will check discs and catalog them for you. It has the best search engine for freeware ever IMHO, that all you do is type in what you need the program to do, and they find one for you.

Anyway I hope this explains my system, and sorry about the length. But working PC repair I know the importance of backups and many folks here just don't have the money or time to deal with USB drives. My system is cheap and reliable and by keeping the OSes on smaller partitions and keeping games and vids on a separate partition I am about to do a full backup of my Win2K, WinXP32, and WinXP64 on 10 discs counting an extra copy per OS. I then keep a copy at my mom's place, and keep a copy of the data for the whole family here. That way in case of fire or other disaster I will only lose what came after the last backup, which is monthly for the OS and weekly for my personal data. At $0.20 a disc for Ridata DVDs it is a really cheap way to do backups and since I only backup new content it really doesn't take much after the initial backup. Again sorry for the length and I hope this explains how I use DVDs for "backup on the cheap" without having to waste a lot of time/effort.

Lack of markup? Last I checked, a USB 1.5TB drive was around $150, tops. Not $600.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148406

After I had yet another Western Digital harddrive die making an 8/11 or 72% failure rate over 5 years, I just ordered parts for a new computer including a hardware RAID from Newegg yesterday.

8x SAMSUNG F1 RAID Class HE103UJ
1x 3ware 9650SE-8LPML
1x 3ware BBU-MODULE-04 Battery Backup Unit

For $1,829.90 to make a 7 drive hardware RAID 6 array with 1 hotspare, but it seems I went with a lot higher quality parts than they did. And I included the price of the controller...

After my horrible experiences with consumer Western Digital drives (6x 250GB PATA and 2x 500GB SATA dead in the last 5 years), I wasn't about to touch these new consumer 2TB "Green" drives or the cursed Seagate 1.5TB drives so I went with the more expensive HE103UJ's. I hope they are worth it since this will be my first experience with a RAID. In the past I just used everything as separate drives since they weren't purchased all at once and I've paid greatly for that mistake.

It's not an ULTRA CHEAP RAID but I think it should be a fairly high quality one at least.

After I had yet another Western Digital harddrive die making an 8/11 or 72% failure rate over 5 years, I just ordered parts for a new computer including a hardware RAID from Newegg yesterday.

8x SAMSUNG F1 RAID Class HE103UJ
1x 3ware 9650SE-8LPML
1x 3ware BBU-MODULE-04 Battery Backup Unit

For $1,829.90 to make a 7 drive hardware RAID 6 array with 1 hotspare, but it seems I went with a lot higher quality parts than they did. And I included the price of the controller...

After my horrible experiences with consumer Western Digital drives (6x 250GB PATA and 2x 500GB SATA dead in the last 5 years), I wasn't about to touch these new consumer 2TB "Green" drives or the cursed Seagate 1.5TB drives so I went with the more expensive HE103UJ's. I hope they are worth it since this will be my first experience with a RAID. In the past I just used everything as separate drives since they weren't purchased all at once and I've paid greatly for that mistake.

It's not an ULTRA CHEAP RAID but I think it should be a fairly high quality one at least.

After I had yet another Western Digital harddrive die making an 8/11 or 72% failure rate over 5 years, I just ordered parts for a new computer including a hardware RAID from Newegg yesterday.

8x SAMSUNG F1 RAID Class HE103UJ
1x 3ware 9650SE-8LPML
1x 3ware BBU-MODULE-04 Battery Backup Unit

For $1,829.90 to make a 7 drive hardware RAID 6 array with 1 hotspare, but it seems I went with a lot higher quality parts than they did. And I included the price of the controller...

After my horrible experiences with consumer Western Digital drives (6x 250GB PATA and 2x 500GB SATA dead in the last 5 years), I wasn't about to touch these new consumer 2TB "Green" drives or the cursed Seagate 1.5TB drives so I went with the more expensive HE103UJ's. I hope they are worth it since this will be my first experience with a RAID. In the past I just used everything as separate drives since they weren't purchased all at once and I've paid greatly for that mistake.

It's not an ULTRA CHEAP RAID but I think it should be a fairly high quality one at least.

One: The title is a borderline lie. Yes, you can buy 12x 1TB drives for about a grand. But if I'm going to build an array and bench mark it and constantly compare it to buying a Core i7-975 Extreme, the drives alone don't do me any good! (And I love how you continually reiterate with statements like "The Idea: Massive Hard Drive Storage Within a $1,000 Budget")

Two: Said controller does not exist. They listed the controller as ARC-1680ix-20. Areca makes no such controller. They make an 8, 12, 16, 24 but no 20 unless they've got some advanced product unlisted anywhere.

Three: Said controller is going to easily run you another grand. And I'm certain most controllers that accomplish what you're asking are pretty damned expensive and they will have a bigger impact than the drives on your results.

Four: You don't compare this hardware setup with any other setup. Build the "Uber RAID Array" you claim. Uber compared to what, precisely? How does a cheap Adaptac compare? Are you sure there's not a better controller for less money?

All you showed was that we increase our throughput and reduce our access times with RAID 0 & 5 compared to a single drive. So? Isn't that what's supposed to happen? Oh, and you split it across seven pages like Tom's Hardware loves to do. And I can't click print to read the article uninterrupted anymore without logging in. And those Kontera ads that pop up whenever I accidentally cross them with my mouse to click your next page links, god I love those with all my heart.

So feel free to correct me but we are left with a marketing advertisement for an Areca product that doesn't even exist and a notice that storage just keeps getting cheaper. Did I miss anything?

the cpu is quick enough for os/x, 2gb is enough for os/x

Great! So you know the workloads that I'll put on it?

How will that 9400M handle today's games?

you can add drives with firewire.

And then have a couple more power bricks and some more cables around.

By point of contrast, my current computer is over 22 months old now -- almost 2 years. For about twice the cost of the cheapest Mac Mini now, I have:

• A much better processor (quad core instead of dual core and better single-thread performance: 2.4 gHz vs 2.0)
• Twice as much RAM (2 GB vs 1 GB; Newegg sells 4 GB of RAM for the cost of the upgrade from 1 to 2 GB that Apple charges)
• An actual video card that almost certainly beats the pants off of the Mini's integrated graphics. (For an unfair test, but still the best I could find, I have an 8800 GTS with 320 MB. In an Anandtech test the 8800 GT with 256 MB of RAM (both a worse GPU and less memory) has 38.4 fps in Crysis at 1600x1200. In another test, the 9400M managed just 30.1 fps at 1024x768. So my 2-year-old GPU manages almost 2 1/2 times as many pixels as the GPU in Apple's only non-super-expensive, non-iMac desktop offering, and I still manage a higher frame rate. Now, the unfairness. In addition to being uncontrolled in the sense of doing different tests, Anandtech doesn't seem to say what else they had in the test rig for the latter tests.)
• Lots of expandability
• The ability to build the system myself (may be a benefit or drawback for you; I enjoy it)
• The ability to carry forward a couple components to my next system to reduce the cost (I expect to do this with the case ($130) and perhaps the power supply ($110))

I don't want to dismiss the mini for some people, but I'm not one of those people. I'd be willing to pay to run OS X... but not that much.

You could have gotten this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121359 and put it in the case with a few mods.
Might have made a nice little hack.

Or get this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121359
You could make a fun little hack with that case and this motherboard.
Run Linux and DOS box and your all set.
Of course it isn't the same as actually getting the old hardware working.

With approx. 8250 128GB flash drives, you would have 1PB storage, and it would only weigh 160KG.
See here.

I'd recommend a Logitech Cordless TrackMan. It has more buttons than are useful, and even has a scroll wheel.

HTC Titan with GPS Chip

I've had the HTC Titan (Sprint Mogul PPC-6800) phone since it came out and it has a real GPSOne chip inside for aGPS satelite reception and not just cell tower ID triangulation for fake GPS. Before that I had the HTC Apache (Sprint PCC-6700) that required a separate GPS Receiver connected by Bluetooth and that also worked great since I only had to turn on the receiver when navigating.

Mount and Charger

I use the cheap Arkon CM929-S phone mount to keep my phone in-front of me connected to an air-vent while I drive and also the Motorola Mini-USB Car Charger for keeping my phone powered up during long trips.

TomTom Navigator 6 and 7

I've been using TomTom Navigator version 6 and now 7 installed on this phone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1, and soon 6.5. I've used my phone to navigate here in the US, Canada, and also in Europe without any problems at all, except for having to copying the 500MB maps to my storage card before I go, since I only had a 1 GB storage card. If I had a large capacity SDHC storage card then I could keep all the maps on it for the entire world.

PPCKitchen BuildOS and Radio ROM Firmware

I've been taking advantage of the phone customization software such as PPCKitchen BuildOS software for creating and loading customized and updated versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system builds on to my phone that allowed me to go from 6.0, to 6.1, and now to 6.5. I've been updating the Radio ROM firmware on my phone with the instructions from XDA Developer Wiki page for HTC Titan to the latest releases to enable GPS functionality on this phone since the original release of the phone did not have the Radio ROM firmware to allow interfacing with the GPS chip until Sprint released it a year after the phone became available.

Little Inconveniences

Since Sprint uses the US only CDMA network cell phone standard I couldn't use my phone in Europe to make calls but I still retained the full GPS functionality. On top of this we use Google Maps software loaded on these phones for locating stores and saving them as contacts so we can then use TomTom to navigate to those contacts. Everything works great except when Google Maps decides to be lazy and not save the zip-code in the address in the contact or when the address line in the contact includes additional numbers such as apartment or suite then TomTom gets confused thinking those are street numbers since they match European address standards such as "16 Main Street Suite 2" to "16/2 Main Street". We then have to manually edit the contact to remove the apartment or suite number and add the zip code, it is a pain and we are waiting for TomTom to fix their software since this bug existed sine version 6 and now with 7.450.

Convenience Through Convergence

My wife also uses the same exact phone since we share the same phone plan and company and she loves the ability to be able to take the car and go anywhere she wants with her friends without worry

could you at least read the TITLE of the post you're replying to?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=Property&Subcategory=20&Description=&Type=&N=2000190020+1309821317+1301919996&srchInDesc=&MinPrice=&MaxPrice=&PropertyCodeValue=3098%3A21311&PropertyCodeValue=3098%3A21317&PropertyCodeValue=1099%3A17865

Also, you won't hit HD until 22" with 1900x1080 res.

Samsung has a 21.5" LCD at 1920x1080. $180 after rebate at newegg. A pair of these decorates my desk.

Other than that, though, I think you're right; they just don't make HD-resolution standalone monitors any smaller.

Been using since January ... simply awesome with my MacBook. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009127

I have a pair of Samsung 21.5" SyncMaster 2233SW monitors on my desk; their native resolution is 1920x1080. I know you said you don't really want bigger than 21", but 21.5" is close ;)

I got them for $180 after rebate on newegg, but no free shipping. Shop around, YMMV.

Asus 16:10 19", 1680x1050 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236056 Samsung 16:9 23", 2048x1152 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001317 Additionally, there are many 16:9 21.5" monitors that are 1920x1080, and Lenovo makes a nice 16:10 22" that's 1920x1200

Asus 16:10 19", 1680x1050 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236056 Samsung 16:9 23", 2048x1152 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001317 Additionally, there are many 16:9 21.5" monitors that are 1920x1080, and Lenovo makes a nice 16:10 22" that's 1920x1200

Here's a few.

Yes, they are more significantly more expensive than 1920x1200 24" monitors. A 24" widescreen isn't that much bigger than a 20" 4x3 monitor, though. Same height, but about 4" wider, and if you really don't like having that much horizontal desktop, set your desktop to have black bars on the side.

There really is nothing in the 17-19â range that can project over 1280x1024. If you step it up to 20â though, they have monitors that go up to 1680x1050 which is quite a nice res.
Hereâ(TM)s a list of a what they have in stock on the egg. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=1106218475&Description=20%22%20monitor&name=1680%20x%201050

On a side note, I think a 17â with a decent resolution will surprise you more than you think. Youâ(TM)re upgrading from an old CRT to an LCD which is a big leap, try going to your local PC shop and have a look at their inventory to get an idea. Also, you won't hit HD until 22" with 1900x1080 res.

Do you really need access to all your spells all the time?

Perhaps with microphones for communication and a good design an MMO doesn't need more than 10 buttons, I've just been playing an fps and that alone used 12 keys regularly without spells or any of that jaz. MMOs arn't my thing but given that there are much fewer console MMOs, id guess that most MMOs don't work well with just 10 buttons (12 button controller -left/right click). OFC there may be many other reasons tbh i don't know.

You'll have to define "few" because modern consoles have a lot of buttons

Few is 10 (although i was originally posting in reply to somebody talking about the wiimote that has just 6), the main problem with RTS isn't just the lack of keys (you could work around that limitation by offering just a few options at a time). The lack of a mouse must be (and the 1 time i tried playing an RTS on a console defiantly was) a major limitation, pointing/scrolling around the map were simply not as easy, dragging to select a squad would be impossible, the lack of modifier keys (shift/ctrl) would also be a bigger problem than just lacking buttons. Sure you can play RTS on a console but im pretty sure for most RTSs aren't as good, star-craft especially!

Microsoft is an anomaly in the market.

Actually that was just a joke given Microsoft have continued their habit of making shoddy products that die quite often.

It's more like every 5 to 6 years for most console gamers

My old desktop is 5/6 years old cost me 400GBP to build (including snafus) and at can play any game you throw at it (albeit at low spec for newer ones), however if i spent nearly as much as a console gamer on it, then it'd be due for an upgrade, $400 you can buy a good gfxcard+processor+mobo as most of the other crap (sound+case+psu+memory) is transferable.

Our PC here is no match for the PS3 as a gaming device (nvidia 7150m), just like our previous PC (Intel 852/855 GME)

I doubt you spent nearly as much on your PC though,the PS3 is quite exceptional on numbers but fails, from what I've read/heard when gaming its only marginally better than an xbox360, which isn't better than the $400 core I listed above. On hardware costs alone consoles lose out, then you add in the increased cost of games and consoles simply cant compete!

Only Microsoft charges for multiplayer. PS2/PS3 owners have free multiplayer, except for MMORPG's of course.

Perhaps most of my multiplayer rants were aimed at the 360 (which seams to be the console with the biggest multiplayer market ironically),

Are you sure the consoles don't have such things? Because they do, at least for some games.

My brother doesn't have a ps3 so perhaps its online gaming is all fine and dandy but the xbox360's and wii's suck. I'm yet to come across a game that can boast the kind of server communities even your smallest mods have on the PC, even Day of Defeat that seams to be in its death throws, gives a better game than halo3 matchmaking does!

For example, if I wanted to batch scale some images from the digital camera it would probably be easier (and perhaps faster) to do so using ImageMagick under Linux on the PS3 than trying to do it in Windows Vista.

Dear god why would you ever try such a thing in windows is beyond me!

As a sibling pointed out "your post is one big compromise on gaming quality", the PC is the best platform for many genres, sure you can fit all you bindings into 10 keys but why bother as it will often ruin the game (e.g BF2 on the consoles is a poor imitation of the pc version). Pc gaming is also cheaper (I have spent less on my entire gamin

Do you really need access to all your spells all the time?

Perhaps with microphones for communication and a good design an MMO doesn't need more than 10 buttons, I've just been playing an fps and that alone used 12 keys regularly without spells or any of that jaz. MMOs arn't my thing but given that there are much fewer console MMOs, id guess that most MMOs don't work well with just 10 buttons (12 button controller -left/right click). OFC there may be many other reasons tbh i don't know.

You'll have to define "few" because modern consoles have a lot of buttons

Few is 10 (although i was originally posting in reply to somebody talking about the wiimote that has just 6), the main problem with RTS isn't just the lack of keys (you could work around that limitation by offering just a few options at a time). The lack of a mouse must be (and the 1 time i tried playing an RTS on a console defiantly was) a major limitation, pointing/scrolling around the map were simply not as easy, dragging to select a squad would be impossible, the lack of modifier keys (shift/ctrl) would also be a bigger problem than just lacking buttons. Sure you can play RTS on a console but im pretty sure for most RTSs aren't as good, star-craft especially!

Microsoft is an anomaly in the market.

Actually that was just a joke given Microsoft have continued their habit of making shoddy products that die quite often.

It's more like every 5 to 6 years for most console gamers

My old desktop is 5/6 years old cost me 400GBP to build (including snafus) and at can play any game you throw at it (albeit at low spec for newer ones), however if i spent nearly as much as a console gamer on it, then it'd be due for an upgrade, $400 you can buy a good gfxcard+processor+mobo as most of the other crap (sound+case+psu+memory) is transferable.

Our PC here is no match for the PS3 as a gaming device (nvidia 7150m), just like our previous PC (Intel 852/855 GME)

I doubt you spent nearly as much on your PC though,the PS3 is quite exceptional on numbers but fails, from what I've read/heard when gaming its only marginally better than an xbox360, which isn't better than the $400 core I listed above. On hardware costs alone consoles lose out, then you add in the increased cost of games and consoles simply cant compete!

Only Microsoft charges for multiplayer. PS2/PS3 owners have free multiplayer, except for MMORPG's of course.

Perhaps most of my multiplayer rants were aimed at the 360 (which seams to be the console with the biggest multiplayer market ironically),

Are you sure the consoles don't have such things? Because they do, at least for some games.

My brother doesn't have a ps3 so perhaps its online gaming is all fine and dandy but the xbox360's and wii's suck. I'm yet to come across a game that can boast the kind of server communities even your smallest mods have on the PC, even Day of Defeat that seams to be in its death throws, gives a better game than halo3 matchmaking does!

For example, if I wanted to batch scale some images from the digital camera it would probably be easier (and perhaps faster) to do so using ImageMagick under Linux on the PS3 than trying to do it in Windows Vista.

Dear god why would you ever try such a thing in windows is beyond me!

As a sibling pointed out "your post is one big compromise on gaming quality", the PC is the best platform for many genres, sure you can fit all you bindings into 10 keys but why bother as it will often ruin the game (e.g BF2 on the consoles is a poor imitation of the pc version). Pc gaming is also cheaper (I have spent less on my entire gamin

Uhhh...I am running XP X64, and like you read the horror stories. Guess what? They're bullshit and I couldn't be a happier little camper. I'm thinking of buying the Win7 Home just to have to play with, but I'll be sticking with XP X64. Everything is smooth as butter, even my old games work, hell everything works. The only problem I ran into was the cheapo Best Buy EasyTV capture card I have doesn't have drivers. Big whoop as I can buy a compatible one pretty damned cheap. But most importantly even my 9 year old disc catalog software purrs like a kitten after I dropped a single .dll that isn't included with X64 into its folder.

If you don't care for Vista/Win7 I would give XP x64 a try. I'm sure you can find a copy somewhere to give it a test drive and see if your hardware is supported, and if it is Newegg can sell you a nice system builders like I got. According to Process Explorer I am barely using 600Mb out of 4Gb with all the bling, lots of tabs in Firefox X64 and Comodo Internet Security going, and more importantly I have full use of the 4Gb and can max out my board at 32Gb without Windows saying a word. With my XP32 dual boot I barely have 3Gb even with PAE thanks to the 1Gb graphics card eating up some of the addresses.

So give it a try, you'll like it. I'll probably pick up one of those $50 copies of Win7 Home just to play with, but I've been advising my customers to stay away from Win7 until SP1 at the least, preferably SP2. They nearly all have new XP machines and simply don't need Win7. Neither do I, but what can I say? I like to play with OSes. But for the foreseeable future I'll be sticking with XP x64. It works, it doesn't bug the shit out of me like Vista did, and it doesn't go running home to mommy every ten minutes to tattle. Tell me Win7 users, does Win7 call home all the damned time like Vista did? Because that irritated the hell out of me.

In Australia, the price of Windows 7 is AU$200. The US equivalent is AU$60.
You do the math.

OK, I will do the math, with assistance from the XE: Currency Convertor

200.00 AUD = 160.921 USD
60.00 AUD = 48.2797 USD
Oh, and one last value from the article since you specifically are talking about Windows 7 numbers:
199.00 USD = 247.314 AUD
AU$200 is less than US$199, not more.

P.S. Where did that AU$60 figure come from? The cheapest edition of Vista purchased from NewEgg (a popular US computer discount website) is:
Windows Vista Home Basic for System Builders) for $89.99 USD ($111.781 AUD).