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The Ultimate Linux Box 2001
savaget points to this Linux Journal article which covers building a superior personal computer for general usage. See if you agree with the choices that Rick Moen, Daryll Strauss and Eric Raymond made in building their dream box.
My budget doesn't allow ultimate boxen... I'd be more interesting in seeing information on ultra-cheap (but still decent and reliable) systems. An older guide exists, but it hasn't been updated in a long time.
I realize the SCSI disks, especially the close to "SCSI 3" mentioned in the article, would decrease disk latency, but is it really that much different than 7200 or even 10000 rpm ATA100/ATA133 drives? An unless you have onboard SCSI, you have to go through the already busy PCI bus. As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth the price difference.
Dell has a relatively interesting cheap box on sale at the moment.
$599 for a P-4 1.6GHz with 256M ram (after rebates, etc).
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
Looking at the top of the referred article text, it states it is also in the November 2000 LJ issue. I assume this is an example of poor proofreading and not a truth?
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
Gimme 30 of 'em and some cat5 and I'd blow that box out of the water! Dream machine schream machine.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Okay, Raymond isn't a millionaire any more, either. But he does have corporate backing, which is a hell of a lot more than I've got. When I feel like dropping 15 large on a personal computer, I think I'll go for an OS a bit more upscale than Linux. Solaris, maybe.
Anyway, "dream" is the key word in the title of the article. No real Linux users (mostly college students, AFAIK) can afford a PC like ESR has designed. And I'm not sure what they'll accomplish by "dreaming" about the "ultimate" Linux box when the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
ITS is the best oprtng system. Why the heck would anyone want more than 6 chars in a filnam?
I am very sorry... but what's new in this article?? "Buy the fastest stuff"... I never thought of that...
The only nice thing about it is the last line about ESR
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
Well, fancy that, SCSI harddrives... Why do I need SCSI? I'm not running a search engine off my machine... So, can someone tell me why I need SCSI harddrives? It's sooo much more expensive, and I rarely notice the difference between taking 4 minutes to relink my kernel or 4 and a half...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
i got a va linux box... real cheap.
you can pick up some bargains thanks to the current recession.
kinda sad, actually...
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
has a budget box building guide. You should check out their general buyer's guide as well.
--
I totally understand the case for SCSI hard disks since they are faster and more reliable but SCSI optical drives? In the article they mention the plextor 12x SCSI burner but wouldn't the new plextor 24x be way faster even if it is ATAPI? and its pretty easy to find 16x DVD-ROM drives out there as well. From a pure purformance perspective wouldn't i be better off with optical drives on IDE (one drive per channel of course) and SCSI hard disks?
Am I missing something?
I know RAID is overkill for most workstations, but so is a DDS drive and seperate home and system drives. If you want fault tolerance, (the stated reason for two drives) having one system drive and one home drive with no RAID means you spend your money only to become twice as vulnerable to downtime due to drive failures.
If you want to avoid downtime, especially if money is no object, get a RAID controller and have a single filesystem mirrored over two physical disks. Not only will it be more reliable, it will be faster too.
But most of it seems to be dead on. The thing I really disagree with is the statement that "SCSI CD-ROMs are a generic item" - A crappy CDROM is a crappy CDROM no matter what interface it uses. At this point, the only brand of CDROM I'm even willing to buy any more is plextor; Even my 40X Toshiba Ultra-SCSI sucks horribly. There are tons of discs it won't read (or will require retries on) that seem to work everywhere else. I find myself using my plextor cd burner as a cdrom all the time in spite of the fact that I have a cdrom specifically to prevent adding up unnecessary runtime hours on it.
My next CDROM will be plextor's highest-speed CDROM drive. They extract CDDA faster than anyone else's drives, read more media, and are just plain faster. My second choice is still toshiba, but I'm less enamored of them than I once was. As a side note, both toshiba and plextor's drives can be jumpered to use 512-byte blocks for use on legacy unix workstations, which can be a nice feature. While I don't actually have any of those systems any more, if someone offers me a Sparcstation 10 (or better) for cheap enough, I'll probably buy it, and I'll want a fast CDROM.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How well does linux support firewire? Does it support it at all? Firewire drives and controllers and devices seem just as fast or faster than scsi, and finally somewhat less expensive than them as well. Why not go with the newer digital format that's giving scsi a run for its' money?
This reminds of ESR's old PC Clone Buyer's Guide. A lot has changed since '93, or whenever he last updated that. He's still stressing I/O performance, which says something about how little has really changed.
g ui de/contents.html
The old guide is at
http://www.double-barrel.be/linux_web/clone_hw_
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
Can you please show us an internal Firewire drive or a Firewire adapter that supports booting of external FW drives?
I'll give you a hint. You can't because unfortunately no one makes either of those yet.
picture tubes suck so bad. try putting an apple cinema display on this "ultimate" box of yours. analog video? how quaint.
At 50MB/s, Firewire is slower than either ATA or SCSI. Linux supports Firewire, but I wouldn't bet my data on it yet. (Not to mention that x86 BIOSes can't boot over Firewire.)
Dude, I respect that you like Linux, but back off a bit okay? You're thinking/philosophizing WAY too much over this. It's an operating system, depsite what you say in sentence #1. The only way I see anyone's life actually changing because of it is in low income areas where Microsoft (or commercial UNIX) products are financially out of reach, and even there I doubt anyone's building shrines to Linux.
The Internet is changing lives. Linux is an OS. Distinguishing the two is important.
Unless I'm blind, he never spelled out what type of NIC card. While PCI 10/100 NIC cards are essentially even more of a commodity item than CD-ROM drives, why no Gig-E? I want to be able to copy the entire drive off to a NAS drive faster than I can compile my kernle, dag-nab-it!
need to get a clue.
What's that...? The P4 has no support for SMP? Well get off your cheap arse and buy a P4 Xeon. Problem solved.
How old is this article? Radeon 64MB is a "high-end" video card? Try a 3Dlabs Wildcat 5110 with 128MB of memory. This is a dream machine after all.
These guys have no idea when it comes to hardware. After all, is there really a "dream machine" when it comes to Linux?
I thought you could run it on your old 386 so you could postpone the inevitable? (throwing the old PC and crap OS in the TRASH, where they both belong.)
I type around 90 WPM if I'm on the Model E. Anything Else, I'm lucky to get 50. The other's just don't give you the necessary feedback when the key is down for your brain to realize it is ok to push the next key.
Also important is the fact that some of the really really cheap newer keyboards have problems where the keys all don't trigger at the same point in their downward stroke. Since I type fast enough that I actually (subconciously, mind you) "overlap" my keystrokes - that is one key is actually going down milliseconds behind the next one - I have seen some really bad keyboards this way that will actually reorder my keystrokes because even though I pushed key B after key A, key B shows up first. Needless to say, this causes some inaccuracies.
Even better, this would be the ULTIMATE BSD BOX! Just imagine BSD... sweeeeeeeeet!
I'm not sure I agree with the eventual decision to go with PC Power & Cooling--they are occasionally ridiculously overpriced and some of their "quiet" is really just achieved by underpowering the fans--some of the Antec PSs will perform just as well. Also, anyone know if PCPC's power supplies are like their cases (i.e. just CalPC cases relabeled and marked up)?
Also, I've heard arguments that a large case is not necessarily a boon for good case cooling w/ low noise: large cases require more fans to move the air effectively within--it's not the fact that there's lots of space in a case that makes for cooling, it's moving the air over and away from the components. Seems like having a mid-tower (given the low-moderate drive bay requirements) with a low-rpm 120mm intake and outake fans might have been better.
It seems to me that the only reason they didn't use a NVIDIA card which is far superior to the ATI Radion is politics of free-beer vs open source. I'm as much of an open source zealot as the next person on /., but I wouldn't never think of using any other than a NVIDIA card at the moment. Pitiful really....
David
"Today's flatscreens also have a really coarse dot pitch with sharp square pixels. As far as I'm concerned, that puts them out of the running for the ULB. I do a lot of writing and, not infrequently, my own typesetting; I want to be able to preview two pages of Postscript at actual size and have the fonts look good."
I'm sorry, but has this guy ever seen a high-end flat panel? I personally own an SGI 1600SW, and not only do you not see the pixels, but you can also preview two Postscript pages side-by-side with its 1600x1024 widescreen aspect ratio. Of course, SGI stopped selling it (*sigh*). But there are other excellent flat panels out there, like the Samsung line that lets you run a TV signal in and do picture-in-picture. I've seen the Samsung ones up close, and they have wonderful image quality. Apple also makes some excellent flat panels (does anyone know whether there is an adapter to run them on PCs yet?)
All I'm saying, is while there are still plenty of reasons to run CRT's, in a "cost-is-no-object" type of article, you should at least consider the high-end flat panels.
P.S. I've seen the dual 1600SW setup, and it is STILL, to this day, the only monitor setup that ever made me speechless with its absolute beauty.
I find it impressive that, after having specified it on a cost-is-no-object basis, the total system cost is nevertheless so low. I can only assume that Mr Raymond sold some of those VA-Linux shares back when they were $300 per share.
an "old compiler jock"? Nonsense. Next this poser is going to claim he's an old "kernel jock" too.
BTW, all his predictions about the near-term demise of M$ have proven wrong. He had some nutty argument about the stock price and options and the motivation of the softies...
How is a dual AMD Athlon machine Intel hardware? It's Intel architechture, but since when were Intel building AMD CPU's?
Well designed controllers like the escalades provide out of order execution, scatter gather, etc at the controller level, and offer a fully switched bus for all data. The 7000 series also have 64bit PCI support (and actually utilize it).
Forget the HPT36x and 37x controllers, as well as most Promise controllers, all the smarts is in the driver software and they suck performance-wise. High-end Adapted controller appear to be ok, but they are pricey compared to the 3ware controllers last time I looked.
One controller with one or two drives may be faster with SCSI, but dollar for dollar, 3ware and IDE walk all over them (particularly with database servers where you want a few spindles to minimize blocking seek activity.
What's interesting is that there are two very different schools of thought on this. I have friends who absolutely love the Model M's and wouldn't dream of typing on anything else. I have other friends who prefer more silent keyboards. (The Model M does tend to keep SO's awake when you're typing late at night, but those of us who use it understand that we have to make certain sacrifices to use the keyboard of the gods. ;)
because they want to show they dont need to be a dumbass and spend thousands to get decent performance.
Where do you want to be, What are you doing to get there.
I see a mention of a 56K modem, but no mention of an ethernet card. Perhaps ESR didn't have enough money to get the "ultimate network connection" to go with his "ultimate Linux box"?
Hmm. That sounds like it came straight from a piece of marketing literature, or a consumer magazine. Honestly, the fact that firewire is digital has no relevance. Of course it's digital. Computers are digital. That's like saying, "Why not go with the newer visual format that's giving eyesight a run for its money." No offense or anything, but there's really no information in that sentence (not that this post is much better so far ;), which is why it sounds so much like marketing material.
Okay, now to get to the real point of this post. I've seen how slow a firewire drive is. At school (high school) we made a Star Wars parody movie, where we blew up a rival high school a la the Death Star. Anyway, after we spent 72 straight hours drawing the light sabers on our intel boxen (which, I might add, looked as good as those in Episode I), the final edit was done on an iMac with Adobe Premiere. They had to copy all the files to an external firewire drive for storage, and then back to the internal drive for editing. This took forever, because firewire is a bit slower than SCSI. (Plug: if anyone from THX is reading, e-mail me at nitrogen@slimetech.com and offer me a job!)
(roll credits, show bloopers, andA solution to the problem with music today
Well I do decode DVD's,mix video,and darn near save every E-mail, so I guess SCSI is out as far as hardrives are concerned. Besides I can get a promise controller (builtin) and a RAID array and get as good if not better for cheaper.
my PC is never idle!
<grub> Reading
> the whole point of Linux is to be able use whatever old, junk hardware you can scrounge.
Maybe that's YOUR whole point in using Linux, but it sure as hell ain't mine! If that's the way you feel, you'd be better off getting some nice DOS 3.11 disks somewhere.
Yes, but will they work with Linux? Promise has "issues" under Linux.
This artical lost me when they all ignore IDE.
They and a lot of other people superficially judge SCSI to be faster than IDE.
If one has $1000 to spend on storage they you will get more bytes and better throughput with an IDE raid than a SCSI raid.
Why compare drives on a unit v's unit basis, there is no reason a computer cant have more than one.
Granted software raid is pretty crappy in linux, it doesnt scale well, but still, 2 7200RPM IDE disks in raid 0 will out perform a 10000RPM SCSI drive, be cheaper and provide more storage.
SCSI is for ignorant people with more money than sense.
but good luck finding any.
I can imagine this article causing more religious arguments than almost anything else recently
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
1) Don't put case fans on the motherboard power connectors unless you have to. Keeping mb voltage levels stable is hard enough without two extra 80mm fans adding stress. CPU fans should be connected to the mb so the fan RPM can be monitored (dead CPU fan == bad news).
:-)
2) We've had IBM Ultrastar SCSI drives break down within weaks on our server at work (emphasis on drives, plural). Granted, this is under a severely punishing workload, but Seagates have been more reliable. Under saner workloads the IBM drives are probably fine.
3) SB Live! series cards are bad news on Athlon systems (as ESR found out), especially if you have other heavy DMA I/O tasks on the PCI bus. They've fixed this with the Audigy, but it doesn't have Linux support yet (AFAIK?). The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is supported; that's what I replaced my Live! X-Gamer with. Now my AccessDTV HDTV PCI card doesn't cause BSODs (Win2000 SP2). Recommended.
4) Modem? Got cable modem. Don't need no steenkin' POTS modem
5) Microsoft Intellimouse Optical. Scratch off the name if you must, but they're GREAT!
6) Word is that the Tyan Thunder motherboard likes Corsair memory best. Dunno why, the board's just picky.
7) An ultimate system should have Sony's 24" widescreen FD Trinitron. Wish I had $2K to spare to buy one. 1080i HDTV would look great on it.
8) Get a tube of Arctic Silver II thermal compound for the CPU heatsinks. Yes, it matters.
For a cheaper config: substitute a Tyan Tiger MP motherboard, PCP&C 400W Silencer (no need for an oddball power connector), IDE drives, and an Ethernet card (Intel or Linksys, I have one of each in my Linux server). Note that faster Athlon MPs are supposed to be announced next week (Tuesday?).
For a way cheaper config: as above, but with a VIA KT266A uniprocessor motherboard (I have a Shuttle mb inbound; newegg.com was out of the Epox 8KHA+ boards that were my first choice) and Athlon XP CPU.
I'm a PCP&C fan too. Antec's no slouch either, but my Silencer 400W keeps the 5V and 3.3V rails hooked up to my 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird within 1% of perfect, which is pretty impressive. Dead-on commentary on the P4. It pained me to spec a P4 for a new engineer because Dell refuses to sell Athlons and stopped selling P3 desktops.
Wow! 90WPM? My record is 134 on a cheap keyboard. But yeah, I fully agree that the old 15 pound tactile feedback clunkers are the best for speed typing. Although there's something to be said about those truly ergonomic keyboards, not those cheap knockoffs of the already painful MS natural keyboard... Gosh I hate those wave keyboards. What's worse, they put some of the keys on the wrong side. I'd like to see a split keyboard that duplicates all border keys on either side.
A solution to the problem with music today
So he gets his dream box for free?!?!!
and
You could build the ULB yourself from scratch. But...you shouldn't. I wouldn't. There are subtle gotchas that can cost you a lot of grief. A good example, Gary tells me, is installing PC coolers...it's pretty easy to use too much pressure and damage the CPU socket, or even crack the CPU itself.
"This design will be available for purchase from Los Alamos Computers...
Plus, he gets a kickback!?!!
I've been building my own boxes, and boxes for friends, for many years, and I am not a rocket scientist. I once fried one of those hard disks with the exposed circuit board on the bottom (it was exchanged immediately by the vendor even tho my fault), but no other hardware casualties.
Do others here really believe that people reading this article (we are talkin' bout the Linux Journal audience) are likely to crack their processors by installing today's cooling units?
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Not only did I waste time reading this article, those guys obviously wasted their time also. They said that they spent dozens of hours trying to track down something that was freezing the system. Turned out to be the SB Live! card driver, and they had to build a new version, etc.
Plus they couldn't get all of the features of all that expensive hardware to work either! WTF is the point? If I spent all that money on hardware, I'd break down and run Windows 2000 on it just to get my money out of it. Jeesh!
for about $25 (really), you can get a cmedia 8738 chipset that outputs REAL literal 44.1k spdif, suitable for piping into an outboard DAC (digital to analog converter).
go to ebay and pick up a used audio alchemy DAC ($100 or so) and the 8738 card and you'll be 99% of what a pro audio card setup should be.
and never, never choose 'soundblaster' for audio quality.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
ATI make a version of the Radion with a DVI interface that will quite happily drive an Apple display
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Any real high-end graphic workstaion would never use LCDs becuase of their color-distortion. Color's change with viewing angles, making it practally impossible to wokr with print work.
I won't be satisfied until I have Linus and AC code morphed ala Max Headroom onto a Crusoe so they can patch my kernel realtime in-situ.
ESR listens to Satriani! Satriani ROOLZ!
(I know, this post has no point and is completely off-topic, but I've been worshipping Joe Satriani from afar for over ten years now and have NEVER heard him mentioned by ANYBODY before.)
Do a Google search on google cluster ide. The third result is an Intel customer profile on Google:
I like two IDE drives (one per channel), plus SCSI for the CD-RW and/or DVD.
Yes, clustering is good, but only to a point, and it becomes expensive to run this...sorry...
It was said in the article that DLT was passed over because of media cost (much like DVD-R*).
I recently built a machine for less than $700 consisting of the following:
MoBo: ABIT KT7A-RAID
PROC: 1200MHz Athlon
MEMORY: 1GB (high density, cheapo stuff)
STORAGE: 2 IBM 60GXP 20GB IDE drives in RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration.
GRAPHICS: ATI XPERT 2000 (32 MB)
CASE: Antec Premium line case w/ 300W PS.
ETC: Sony floppy drive and Creative CDROM drive.
NETWORK: 3Com 3C905 10/100 card.
I know this machine isn't as fast as the ULB, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper, and I would rather have 5 of the above machine ($700 * 5 = $3500, only $100 cheaper than the ULB w/o the "extras") than one ULB. I might even decide to make a Beowulf cluster out of them.
As I've heard other Slashdotters mention many times before, it's not the performance of your hardware, but the performance of your hardware per dollar that matters.
P.S. I would like to know what Tom (from Tom's Hardware Guide) would consider the Ultimate Linux box.
Amazing magic tricks
Anyone think the X-Box will make a good, cheap Linux box?
The price of this computer is simply
frightening. It is simply ridiculous to pay
that much for a desktop.
Besides, most things in the worl (computers fall
under the umbrella) are priced on a logarithmic scale, meaning after a point drastically increased price gives mediocre return, and vice versa going behind a certain earlier point. I always like to build a machine that has it's cost efficiency at a maximum, sitting at a very healthy point in the curve. Buying a Geforce3 card, for instance is ludicrous. Geforce2 MX 400 (Abit siluro for instance) with 64 megs ram is 69 bucks. excuse me? That is cheap as dirt.
IT's always very satisfying, also, to get a
slightly cheaper machine like this and it performs
within 10% of a machine 5x as expensive.
-mateusz-
I'm going to go practice my violin more now
Common! What is the point of this article if no one (except for certain spoilt rich bastards, god I wish I was one of them ;) )has the money to actually get one of these beasts..
Something more useful would be a good system that can be had for cheap.. I can scrounge together a 1.4 T-Bird w/ ide raid and other decent components for under $1000 CAN.. (That's like $2 US for all you yanks!) An article on how to build the most kickass sub $1000 box would be far more usefull..
All of the comments here use only anecdotal evidence to state that one (ide or scsi) is better than the other. I think most people (me included) are not going to spend an extra $200 to $300 for the SCSI solution until we see thorough benchmarks with real-world numbers that show SCSI to make a significant difference.
On that note, what are some ways to generate real-usage benchmarks that would pertain to these I/O systems. Probably it would be good to compare onboard and offboard ultra-wide scsi and udma/13 along with hardware scsi and ide raid (in several configurations). What comes to mind first is database-intensive work. Well Slashdot? What benchmarks would work?
I just followed your link and found the FAQ for the Apple flat panel monitors. According to the FAQ, the monitors can only run with a Power Mac G4 or G4 Cube.
It is incredibly disappointing to see a company come up with great technology and then not devise some sort of adapter for the majority of computers (PCs and older Macintoshes.) I am honestly surprised that Apple wouldn't sell some sort of Apple --> DVI/USB adapter. Guess I'll have to stick with the PC digital monitors. What a shame. :\
I just recently found this guide to be a "dream PC" guide for "normal people," but it seems to make an awful lot of mistakes. In fact, parts of it are so bad that I had to laugh out loud at it. It won't help you build your dream PC, and certainly not an ultimate Linux box, but it'll certainly make you wonder what kind of person could write such a thing!
PCI enabled 486, throw a gigabit PCI nic, a PCI Ultra Wide, or recent fastas hell scsi, gobs of EDO RAM, and a nice and huge disk.
It'd be a rockin' Server and Dev machine. If I want sound and fancy graphics, i'd make it a BeOS/Win2k box with new hardware. Linux isn't multimedia os nor will it ever.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Having 2 screens, if you've never worked that way, is wonderful. One screen for preview, one for tools has saved much wear and tear on my fingers switching consoles, windows, and desktops. Plus two good 19" screens are about the same price as a 22": $1,000. Lots of money, yes, but the screen is one part that you can't incrementally upgrade. Plus you can always buy one now and save up for the next
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
While the statement has some truth, it uses a bad rationale.
How long, during "typical job"s, do you wait for a modern PC usually? 500ms? At most 2s, right?
But |top| typically gives you one value every 5s or so, and only averages. If |top| would show you the peak of CPU usage during the last interval, you would see that during the times you wait for the PC, the CPU almost always has a load of 100% at some point.
Which means that part of the time, you indeed wait for the CPU during typical usage. (Often, that's only milliseconds, but with Mozilla, it can be 1s
If you are interested, I suggest, you use a CPU-load graph tool in your GNOME/KDE/WindowMaker panel, set the interval really low (like 10ms) and make the "contrast" high (black background and bright foreground). This will show you almost every CPU peak and thus show you, when you are really waiting for the CPU (even if it's just ms).
If you say, milliseconds don't matter, then you don't need a top-notch PC for "typical job[...]s under Linux"
There is at least one blatant error(or lie) in the article.. the Silverado HSF was rated at 38 dbA for noise and was tied for THIRD at 37 degrees celisus when cooling, not first as ESR says!!
I don't understand how one can call any box without hardware RAID an Ultimate Linux Box. Yes, it costs money (which is why I've decided on IDE RAID for new systems unless I miraculously get about 20k USD for storage subsystem), but it's better.
Never go for a non-redundant disk subsystem. Disks crash. Go bad. Die.
Also, I need some space to live with. About 200 gigs minimum for my next setup.
So, for ULB it would be a dual channel U160 RAID controller (64bit PCI bus, please), 14 36GB 10k rpm hotswap disks configured as 6 disk RAID5 with hotspare on each channel and mirror over channels, yielding 180GB. Takes one SCSI tower case. Performance and redundancy. And even for the ULB going for 14 72GB disks would be pretty expensive.
Also, to get the best out of CD-ROM/R/RW get Plextor UltraPlex 40 and PlexWriter. Absolutely forget all other CD-ROM/R/RW manufacturers.
Then for DVD get the Pioneer and a DVD-R(G), DVD-RW drive. Note that You still need the Plextors to get the best CD-ROM/R/RW drives available.
Hook all four into an external case, and put the DDS-4 drive there, too.
Now, put the computer case and the drive case away from Your table, take the removable media case onto Your table and be done with it.
I can't afford that setup. So, I'm going for IDE drives and 3ware Escalade IDE RAID controller. Cheaper, and gives me about 240 gigs with seven 80GB drives.
I just picked up 4 Model M's for 25 cents a piece at Boeing Surplus.
DDS and rugged in the same sentence? WTF? who is this ESR guy anyways? damn linux fruitcake
jesus, i wouldn't trust DDS to backup my pr0n
I expected more from the big wigs.
/pixel) = 1718 pixels wide
The "resolution" of a CRT is given by (veiw size)/(dot pitch). Any more pixels than that is literally wasted because the screen can't resolve one from another. The Mitsubishi 21" CRT he suggests has a view area of 20.3 inches and a dot pitch of 0.24 mm which works out to
20.3 in * 4width/5diag *25.4 mm/in / (0.24 mm
And he suggests running this at 2048 pixels wide? Sure memory is cheap, but bus bandwidth is teeny on PCs. Display what your monitor will do and no more. Also if back off the resolution a bit you could bump it up to 85Hz.
On an LCD a pixel is a pixel, and they're sooooo crisp compared to a CRT. They say the pixels are blocky, the rest of us call that clarity. Awesome clarity compared to a CRT.
I hate crap like this because these guys are supposed to be authorities, but they're spoiled brats whose hardware visions are 5 years out of date. Sure I'd like to use SCSI for everything, but get real. Looked at HD prices lately?
And apparently these guys haven't used a Contour keyboard (don't have a link off hand). I've put my hands on one, and you meld wih these babys, no stretching for keys or shifting your hands around, it's just BAM!
Um, you realize that it's a satire article, right?
I think the SGI panels are not the pinnacle of flat panels anymore--it's an older design and actually has less contrast than more modern flat panels. I also don't view the small dot pitch as an advantage--it seems unnecessarily small for normal viewing distances. I think you can get something better and pay less from other vendors now.
I don't see anything in the article or on the site that says it's not legitimate. Satire sites like the Onion at least make it clear that they're satire. It would be irresponsible not to. If Adequacy wasn't legit, it would say so somewhere -- I even e-mailed some of the people in charge to ask, and they said it was legitimate. I guess there are just a lot of misinformed people in the world.
Even if the article weren't legitimate, I don't see how the article could be considered satirical. Satire requires a lot of irony, and as little stupidity as possible.
This is flamebait? Heh.
My box (single Athlon 1Ghz, IBM 7200RPM IDE drive) compiles kernels in 5m 45s (make clean; time make dep bzImage on 2.4.13pre1). Pretty good in comparison, considering that this box cost me ~$AUS2000, or perhaps $US1000. I'm using a nvidia geforce card and the emu10k1 driver, and the machine is rock-solid. It would also be a lot cheaper now - high-speed Athlons have come down a lot in price.
I understand the point of having the *ultimate* (rather than just "good") machine, and I realise that kernel compile speed isn't the most wonderful of metrics, but it does drive home the point that the more you pay, the less of a performance advantage you get. There's a price / performance sweet spot, and it's certainly not at the ultra high end.
The only thing I'd add would be a DVD drive - perhaps another $AUS170 for a cheapie Pioneer IDE model.
Ummm... actually it doesn't. They say to use two disks. At that point you could do mirroring. If you threw in another disk it would barely increase the noise but you would get RAID5 reliability plus a nice performace increase.
I don't think giving money to the DVD Copyright Control Authority is a good idea. Don't they get royalties on every piece of DVD hardware sold? How is giving them money hurting them?
I tend to agree. While I really like by Nvidia based card, I am sick of dealing with binary-only kernel modules and XFree modules. With the latest upgrade I no longer see lockups but it was very annoying for a while. My next card will no be NVIDIA based unless the open their sources (or someone else makes nice open source drivers) soon.
Based on debian ofcoz, and has 2.4 kernel, LIDS with reiserfs. And dont forget about TripWire, now that its opensource.
Enlightenment and Ximian. Sylpheed as a mail client and Xchat.
http://securityportal.com.ar
3DLabs is pushing Unix technology by helping advance openGL. Check dri.sourceforge.net and you'll see the GMX 2000 supported. On eBay, you can get a used, but mint AGP 32MB GMX2000 for around $50. That's 100 fps sustained, which one of nVidia's or ATI's gaming videocards would croak under the geometry load of what's being rendered.
ATI and nVidia are real nice, but lets get some more heterogeneous Linux systems, not a bunch of mono-toned, spit-dribbling babies crying about how good their performance on their nVidia GePhorse versus them not needing open-sourced drivers. Linux was meant to be 100% open-source.
Everyone with an educated brain can see the bugs and give a crack at them if they may: Linux's key to progressive stability. But hey, who said consumers had to be smart to say "nVidia rocks, I don't care about open-source drivers. I play games. Look at the cows and eggs. Aiieeeeeee!"
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
For the all rigorous analysis Raymond undertakes to reduce the noise profile, he excludes that made by the Model M keyboard... (+10dB over soft-touch/membrane models like my Honeywell 102RXi (~50dB), that I use in preference to the Model M I use only for emergencies).
While we're at it, I'm going to post the specs on a more down-to-earth machine that I'll be building shortly. My ultimate goal is to create the ultimate workstation / gaming box that won't sound like a small aircraft when you turn it on.
$189 Seagate Barracuda IV SoftSonic 80 Gig
The 'Cuda IV is probably the quietest and one of the fastest Ultra-100 Drives in existence. A pair of 40-gig platters with Softsonic fluid-bearing motors keep the noise down below 30dB
$757 2x1.2Ghz AthlonMP
2x256 ECC DDR RAM
Tyan Tiger MP
2xThermalTake VolcanoII Cooler
The Tiger is the baby-brother of the Thunder. You get the same performance as the Thunder, without the extras, such as on-board SCSI, & integrated ethernet. You can look up specs at tyan.com.All of these components may be purchased, pretested, from Monarch Computers as an "AMD Pretested Combo;" Monarch produces very high quality boxes (my last three, actually).
$070 SD-M1502 Toshiba 16X DVD Drive
This drive's a fairly good performer, (try a google search for the model number and "review"), but what I am interested in is the noise and vibration factors. Toshiba's introduced a type of balance mechanism designed to handle unbalanced / cheap discs.
$335 Asus GeForce3 Pure 64Meg AGP
At this point, the choice of video card is purely up to the builder; I chose this one simply because it was one of the better performing, and the higher quality cards (google will tell all about this card...)
$85 SB Audigy X-Gamer!
Hey, why not? At $85, it's not a bad deal at all for a new whiz-bang sound card.
??? Speakers?
Up to you.
$014 floppy
Duh. Pick one.
$170? Lian-Li PC-60 Case
Reasons for this part: 1. It's cool. Literally.
2. It's light-weight.
3. Lian-Li cases are extremely high quality, which explains the high price.
$089 Enermax Whisper 431W EG465P-VE(FC) Power Supply
The Whisper is an ultra-quiet PS with variable speed fans. If you look at the Product Page, you can see the various nice specs on this PS.
$214 24X10X40 Plextor CD-RW
Based on various net reviews (again, google), this is the current burner of choice. That'll probably change by the time I finish typing this setence, but that's the nature of the technology.
$80 Wireless Keyboard / Optical Wireless Mouse from Logitech
As a long-time logitech fan, the Logitech Cordless Freedom Optical takes all of the good stuff from their keyboards, mice, and wireless devices and wraps it into one package. Note that RF mice are not very good for games. I've owned one of these for about a month, and can say that I have no problems with either device until I try to play DoD or Q3A, in which case my trusty Mouseman Optical comes in handy.
$1918 Subtotal sans Shipping (If the numbers don't add up, I'm gonna look really, really stupid. Oh well.) (updated price 10-13-01)
Most of my price info came from either Pricewatch or MySimon, fyi.
Michael C. Hollinger
you know, they say reading is fundamental :P
if you actually read a few lines beyond eric's "I always build with two disks" you'd see he specifically elects *not* to use raid. whether eric's reasoning is all that sound in this respect is still up for debate.
I just built two new identical systems for home.. one for my wife and one for me. Each box cost approximately $3800, a bit less than we paid for a 500Mhz G4 Titanium Powerbook w/512mb RAM.
The quick specs:
Lian Li PC60 aluminum case w/window & light kit
300W Sparkle power supply
Tyan Tiger MP S2460 w/dual 1.2Ghz Athlon MP's
Agilent Articoolers for the CPUs
512MB ECC reg. PC2100
Matrox G550 32MB DDR AGP dual
Samsung SyncMaster 170T (x2 per machine)
Seagate Barracuda III ATA100 7200rpm (30gb)
Toshiba 16X IDE DVD-ROM
Netgear FA310-TX
SB Live 5.1
Now, we already had speakers from our previous systems (both sets are Altec Lansing, mine is the ADA880 which supports AC3, surround, etc.).
Reading over some of the comments in this article, I agree completely that SCSI is still the best choice, but for pure desktop systems, it's sheer overkill (unless you are lucky enough to have IBM donating $15k so you can afford at least one drive). And in this case, they left out fibre channel and/or solid state drives. I mean come on! Our previous desktops were all SCSI, but I chose the IDE route again this time, mostly because the type of stuff we do on our desktops is not so I/O intensive as to cause problems. ATA100 is decent as long as you tweak it, but you have to buy the right kind of drive(s). Personally, I've found that Seagate drives are reliable in this regard (others may disagree, just note this is my personal preference and I recommend you pick whatever you feel comfortable with). Also, note that the Tyan Thunder board requires the huge 450W power supply, and it's not a standard ATX connector. The Tyan Tiger MP is the same exact board as the Thunder without all the built-in stuff (for me, built-in stuff is a major no-no for a desktop box as it makes it much harder to upgrade for the future), and it uses standard ATX power connectors. You do still need to be careful about the power supply you pick, though.
So, with our new desktops, I'll tie in what I was getting at above. If you're buying/building the ultimate box to be a standalone, multi-purpose, server and desktop box.. stop reading now. I dunno about everyone else, but I can't settle for that. My desktop is for desktop tasks. I have other systems on my LAN to do the various server related tasks that compliment my desktop system (i.e I try to spread the money around)
I won't go into real specifics here, but I'm not a Linux bigot. I'm a sysadmin, and I think every OS has a niche (well, maybe not all of them.. I'm a UNIX bigot). So with that in mind, I use FreeBSD for our dedicated firewall/router/wireless gateway, Solaris x86 for our NFS, NIS/LDAP, backup server (it's all SCSI with mirrored system and home storage disks), and Debian Linux for our media server, desktops, and home beowulf cluster. Our one Powerbook tri-boots MacOS 9.2.1, MacOS X 10.1, and Linux.
Anyway, the point is that an ultimate desktop box is all well and good, but I think anyone that goes out in search of the end-all, be-all holy grail standalone box is in for a disappointment down the road. And besides.. there is only so much fun you can have with one machine.
Check out our image gallery for pics and stuff.
-phillip
It amazes me the amount of 'software' guys who think they're experts but have no idea when it comes to hardware.
Check these examples out:-
- "Do get a pure PCI-bus machine (not a hybrid PCI/ISA design, you sacrifice about 10% of peak performance with those)."
This is pure humbug - you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports. Now as far as the USB ports are concerned, I'm not sure whether they use the ISA bus or the PCI bus.
- "For the power supply, the three of us easily agreed on a vendor: PC Power & Cooling"
Bloody typical. Yet the reality is that the PC Power & Cooling mob are just 'badge engineers' - they re-sell other manufacturers products with their own own brand markings & inflated prices.
For example their full tower case is just a California PC full tower case with a custom bezel on the front.
Now as far as their power supplies are concerned. I remember when they used to sell a 'Silencer' model 275 watt power supply. In fact all it was was a generic 300 watt power supply, de-rated down to 275 watts so it was understressed, so it would cope with retro-actively fitted low speed 'silencer' fan.
As far as powersupplies are concerned I recommend the Enermax 350 watt EG365P-VE(FC) or 450 watt EG465P-VE(FC) power supplies. They have a push/pull dual fan design (a 80mm exhaust fan at the back & a 92mm intake fan at the bottom), which means the fans can run at a much slower (therefore quieter) speed, without losing any cooling performance. The Powersupply comes with a standard motherboard 3 pin senser connector cable, so you can blug it into a spare motherboard fan header, which means ifyou can see what revs one of the power supply fans are running at in you PC monitor applet in you system tray (& it can warn you with an alarm if it fails). Also the powersupply comes with a thermastat on a connector which can be somehow attached to the heatsink or against the CPU core if its a exposed flip-chip type core (as long as it has no heatspreader like the AMD K6 series has), this controls the fan underneath the powersupply & it only runs when necessary. Consequently these power supplies are so bloody quiet you sometimes think its not running.
- They also recommend the Thunder K7 (S2462) Motherboard, which is a huge waste of money as you can buy a very similar motherboard made by the same manufaturer at a much cheaper price (the Tiger MP (S2460) Motherboard). Also the 'Tiger' has a standard ATX connector, rather than the propietry connector that the 'Thunder' has. Which means you can use normal ATX powersupplies, rather than the inflated priced propietry powersupply that the 'Thunder' uses.
- Also, even though this is s'pose to be a 'Ultimate Linux Box', they fail to mention that both IDE floppy drives(if you are using the IDE bus) & SCSI floppy drives (if you are using a SCSI BUS) are avaliable. Even better one can get the LS120 variety which are compatible with both 120MB 'SupperFloppies' & standard 1.4MB standard floppies.
- They spend 4 paragraphs talking about 'Noise Control and Heat Dissipation' without really saying anything. When all they really needed to say that it's best using bigger fans at slower speeds - such as 12 volt 120mm fans running at 7 volts (positive hooked up to the 12 volt line while the negative is hooked up to the 5 volt line). The quietist fans (all other things being equal) by brand are the Papst Simtec bearing fans, the Sanyo Denki fans & the L1A1 versions of the Panaflo fans.
- They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
Therfore I recommend the Addtronics 'Server Cases' (their full tower cases) - the 7890 & the 7896. They are great cases with their great cooling options, filtered intakes, butterfly doors & slide out 'mainboard & I/O backplane tray'. Supermicro sell their own badge engineered version of this full tower case.
Other good full tower cases are the all alloy ones made by Lian Li. Such as the Lian Li PC-70 aluminium full tower computer case & the Lian Li PC-76 server case
If a mid tower case is more your style, both Lian Li & Coolermaster maker great alloy ones. They are great for LAN parties. In this regard I recommend the Lian Li PC-60 computer case & the Coolermaster ATC-201SX. Both cases are unbeatable as mid-tower cases - they have everything. I Personally thing a midtower case must have 4 5.25inch drive bays; so you can have both a CD burner & DVD drive, plus 2 HDDs in removable HDD pullout caddies.
For a ultimate box it should have the all alloy (better heat dissapation) twin fan caddies that agains are made by Lian Li. The 3 best models appear to be the RH-620 , the RH-600 , & the RH-29
For the motherboard, I'd recommend one with the SIS 735 'chipset'. Preferably it would have a AGP Pro slot, 6 PCI slots, one shared with a ISA slot at the bottom. It would have BOTH 2 DDR slots & 2 normal SDRAM slots. It would have a integrated RJ45 network connector above the 2 rear USB ports, plus integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound (IWill have brought out a couple of boards of late with integrated 'hardware' 5.1 sound, they have the 3 standard female jack ports under the midi 'D' plug at the back, plus the extra connects hook up via a ribbon cable & a slot backplane cover). The board would also have integrated SCSI & Firewire like some of the MSI Pro or Turbo or whatever boards have. Plus an extra IDE controller (Promise, Highpoint, etc) so there's the potential for 8 drives (HDD, CD, DVD, LS120, ORB, etc) rather than the standard 4. The extra IDE controller will also have RAID 0,1 & 1+0 options (most have this built in, though its sometimes disabled). All the integrated stuff must have the capability to be disabled, either via jumpers or in the BIOS.
Twin AthonXP/MP CPUs would be the go (the XPs work fine in SMP setups, they just are not certified/supported for such configurations - that's the main difference between the XP & MP, the MPs are certified/supported for SMP use.
That's enough raving for now.
They failed to mention the Avant Stellar, the best keyboard out there expensive as keyboards go but this this has gone through several coffee and coke spills, a dunk in warm water is enough to bring it back to life, it also has function keys down the left hand side and is fully programable. One mean keyboard.
The inside of the California PC full tower case. If you compare it with the guts of the PC Power & Cooling full tower case, you'd notice they are exactly the same except for the bezel (actually some Aopen & Antec cases are the same except for the bezel).
Strange, I can't find the word 'drool' anywhere in the comments for this article...
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
We've dumped ours and gone for DLT, much more stable (AND expensive).
I know of places where they buy 2 dds drives at a time so they have a replacement for when the first breaks down - and then they dump the broken one and order a new spare. It's not many components where you order a replacement immediately you buy one....
I made a mistake a few years back and bought a dds drive as I figured the low media costs outweighed the high drive costs, sort of OK until the drive died. I then went the other way and bought a cheapish T20 (travan 5- 10/20GB) drive with more expensive media costs, but it's still working.
I know DLT is way too expensive (drive and media) for most people, but the there are better tape solutions than DDS.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
But! You can now buy off-the-shelf parts (here, for example) that all work together and can just be bolted together. You can build sealed systems, removing the risk of spills if you move the machine and meaning you don't have to top the system up to allow for evaporating levels. You can get dinky little 120mm radiators which can be fitted inside the case, meaning the entire system can be self-contained. And if the system is well-built enough, the risk of a joint bursting and soaking your motherboard is a lot less than your HSF falling off and frying your Athlon.
Balanced against that, you can get cooling performance superior to a fan-based system and a hell of a lot quieter. And the disadvantages of watercooling will only get less as they become more and more commoditized.
You win again, gravity!
Nuff said.
Can you please do a tiny amount of research before asking such a blatantly obvious question?
With the price of flat panel displays, RAM and Gigabit ethernet coming down to decent prices, I think the next homewide system for me will be home brewed thin client based.
1Gb RAM in each client to help releive reliance on network (hell in Sydney 1Gb of SDRAM is less than $au250 (4 * 256Mbyte DIMMS)!
With an AWARD BIOS equiped motherboard, I can easily flash an Etherboot ROM image to the mobo BIOS thanks to AWARDS modular design (so no need to burn ROMS for the NICS).
With Gigabit ethernet, when the network is relied upon for block device usage, ~120MBytes/S is very nice thank you very much...
from the server with 160MByte/S SCSI and also 1 or more gig of RAM. Urgh urgh urgh.
With Thunderbirds a plenty and each client with DVD-ROM. ; )
So I can have *silent*, diskless, flatpanel machines that are fast in both bedrooms and the lounge. With one central server with all our albums MP3'ed (145 so far done), central storage for video recorders like Tivo in the lounge and bedrooms also, and allowing quick easy backups of user ~ dirs.
Then add in some IP telephony to allow intercom and speakerphone transfers of incoming calls. All I need is more money!!!
I already have the US Robotics Courier V.Everything. I was sold on it YEARS ago with it was just a V.34, then upped it to V.34bis, then X2 and now V.90, talk about over engineering! What an awesome machine. Anyone know of any undocumented stuff or hacking info for the Courier V.Everything? I liked the old days when I had a MODEM dialing with a DTMF duration of 30mS. It sounded so cool, dialing up BBS' that quick (especially attack-dialing to get onto a BBS line once available), but my Courier won't allow that speed, it is limited to a longer length to appease Telstra/Austel.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Sigh. More sickeningly pompous prose from ESR in a completely useless article. Building a $7000 personal computer is a pointless exercise which almost nobody who reads Linux Journal could afford to do. All of his "insightful research" and "surprising discoveries" is stuff you could easily find out on Usenet or the various hardware enthusiast sites -- the last time I built a machine (well equipped Tbird 1.4 for under $1000, tyvfm), I researched all the bits and pieces before buying them and avoided all of the headaches he's complaining about. And he can't even build the stupid thing himself:
You could build the ULB yourself from scratch. But unless you're either a very experienced hardware hacker or seriously interested enough in having a learning experience to accept possibly trashing some expensive parts, maybe you shouldn't. I wouldn't.
Way to encourage the hacker ethic! Yeah! Let's all run out and pay someone to do stuff for us, because everyone knows work is hard. With hardware prices as low as they are, it's a perfect time for people to "hack" their own hardware and build a powerful machine on a budget even a college student can afford. That would make an interesting article, but this one is simply, to use a phrase ESR seems to enjoy, an exercise in mental masturbation.
There are motherboards out there with special features on the motherboard that can materially improve performance at little or no cost. The ASUS A7V motherboad supports ATA-100 drives. If you use two ATA-100 drives that are identical, the A7V has a hardware jumper on the motherboard that will set them up as RAID 0. A pair of 40G IBM ATA-100 drives gives you what appears to be a single 80G drive and it flies. PS. This motherboard is for the Athlon class processor and uses PC-133 RAM. In all a very inexpensive machine with very startling performance.
TOM
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I work with Solaris (7.0, 8.0, etc.), FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux (debian, Mandrake 7.2, and DEC Alpha Red Hat) every day and can firmly attest that both FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are far, far nicer systems on the software side than Solaris for anything one would want to do on a desktop system, and for most things one would want to do on a server.
Fifteen large would probably mean for me a 50" plasma screen, a $4k Pioneer DVD
authoring system, and recycling my existing hardware (since I've just blown the
$15k budget on the other two items), but then that's me.
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The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
This reminds me of the section they use to have on Mac OS Rumors* (yes, I used to read them :-/) called "Dream Machines". Basically it was the kind of thing a 12-year-old would do. This was like 3 or 4 years ago, and they had things like "Quad 900 MHz G5 with 1024 MB ram" and "25 inch monitor". I guess the main difference between that and this is that this is a "dream machine" that could conceivably exist, whereas MOSR's stuff was complete fantasy. And they had it linked right off the home page. Amazing!
* mosr.net is a Mac OS Rumors parody.
rooooar
seek time is a factor in the size of the platter and the head mechanism.. not the RPM rating of the drive, as indicated in the article. RPM will affect the average time it takes for a given sector to re-appear under the head... but that's not as important.
If you look at single-drive systems, IDE can be arguably just as good as SCSI. Certainly, it's an order of magnituded cheaper.
IF you go to multiple disk systems, right away, you start getting increases in perfromance on scsi, and drastic decreases in IDE. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't tried it.
Now.. I don't know how well IDE performs under such things as the 3ware IDE raid controllers... that may be a different story... (separate channel for each drive, etc).. but that's not that common.
Remember, part of this guy's goal was future-proofing his system. SCSI is more expandable in the long run.. he can add a new drive later. SCSI also has longer-range... so external high-speed devices are not out of the question.
Most poeple building a new 'killer box' will probably opt for some big, fast, cheap IDE drives than the scsi setup given the huge price difference.
The card he mentions is more than just some 'ide expansion'.
It provides a separate channel directly from the card for each drive, and handles IDE stuff itself instead of the CPU.
The article you talk about compares standard SCSI setups with standard IDE setups. This is completely, totally different.
A DDS is for *backup*. Separate from the computer. You don't skip backup, even if you use RAID to the nuts.
Yes... a raid controller may have made good sense... but your logic about 1 drive being better than two is flawed.. that's rediculous. Sure.. you have half the chance of a drive failing, but if it does, you lose ALL your data.. that's the point.
And mirroring doesn't make anything faster, it just provides redundancy.
Plus.. how much increased performance would he get -vs- what he's doing now for the cost?
Except that the sis 735 doesn't support multiple CPUs.
You have 2 choices: 2 CPUs on an AMD 760MP chipset, or 1 CPU on any other sort of chipset.
There's a kernel module for them, so the short
answer is "yes". A slightly longer answer -- I
was getting some corruption problems with the 3ware (kernel 2.4.5), and it appears several others also reported problem. They updated the driver. I'm using 2.4.10 now, and it seems to be working.
In summary, they do work with Linux, there have been issues, and it's an open question (at least as far as I'm concerned) whether the issues have been fully addressed.
Sony's F520 is sweet. It's the only trinitron with .22AG across the entire screen. Sharpness of a shadow mask, color of a Trinitron, and flat to boot. Sure, it's expensive (~$1600) but that wasn't a concern for ESR and I consider it money well spent.
He gave his rasons for not wanting raid, and not wanting lots of drives. Noise.
As for 200 gigs.. I thought about that issue.
I decided that, if I want mass online storage, I will build a file server out of IDE drives for all that data. The fast SCSI drives are there for current work and projects.
I've been having problems with the Thunder K7 hanging under heavy loads when running with 2 processors. Similar to Eric's problems, but I don't have a sound card to blame it on.
It doesn't seem to hang under casual use, but hangs only under heavy load (long make -j2 compiles). I suspected hardware troubles, but everything is running cool and I've swapped all pieces with the same results (NMB power supply, SIMMs, CPUs, motherboard)
Has anyone else had this problem, or found a solution?
jeff
From the bottom of the article:
"Eric S. Raymond is a wandering anthropologist and troublemaking philosopher who happened to be in the right place at the right time and has been wondering whether he should regret it ever since."
Those of us who remember when he stole the Jargon File from the community and sold it as his own think, "Why yes. Yes he should."
--Blair
The premium for SCSI CD-RWs is much less than the premium for SCSI hard drives. You don't need a $300 Ultra160 SCSI controller to drive a CD.
Perhaps IDE burners have improved over the years, but I still get the impression that SCSI burners are more reliable.
I run a plaltry and horribly outdated SMP machine that has dual P-III 866's (I know Runnig hardware that is 9 months old.... I should be publically impaled) that Blows away their Kernel compile benchmark. 1.8 minutes for a REDHAT compile (which means everything is compiled in as modules.. and I mean everything!) althuogh I do bet that they didint use the make -j2 command. even on a non SMP box asking for the -j2 will make a huge difference in everything except deps.
I cant believe they chose a tyan board. I learned the hard way that you use ASUS and only ASUS motherboards, the performance and the reliability are always there... Spacewalker and gigabyte are the worst and I have never had any good luck with tyan.
SMP on linux is plain awesome, and anyone that tries it will refuse to downgrade back to Uniprocessor systems ever again. (anyone make a SMP laptop??)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'll skip the rest of that and just mention that it's most likely that at the time of print there WAS no Tyan Tiger 2640 (it just came out, remember)...
you do not get 10% greater performance by buying a motherboard that has ni ISA slots (like those Asus KT boards). Because the fact is that even if they have no ISA slots, they still have a ISA bus built in the southbridge to support legacy stuff like the printer/parrallel port, the serial port/s & the PS2 mouse & keyboard ports.
For the most part, I would be willing to beleive you on this. However, is it not possible that modern chipsets use PCI or a seperate bus that does not interfere with the PCI bus to communicate with those devices? I'm really not sure; I suppose I'll go home and run lspci on my AMD-760 based sytem to see if there is an ISA bus lurking there.
In any case, ISA is a waste of space. I would take another PCI slot anyday.
They recommend a pretty well generic (though above average) Antec case, but this is s'pose to be a ultimate Linux box.
I would have to disagree with you here. I spent about 3 weeks researching what case to get, and decided on the Antec SX830 because of it's excellent overall design, room for plenty of fans, and well built drive tray. The slide out motherboard tray in the cases you recommend is all but useless to me, personally (other may, of course, disagree). Others by Supermicro, etc, were also discarded, partly on (lack of) certain features, and also because they were overly large.
In this particular case, I would have gone with a nice 2U rackmount case; after all, the Thunder K7 was built for rackmounting.
Your desire for massive amounts of integrated hardware, plus 6 PCI + 1 ISA, plus SMP, would end up, I'm pretty sure, with a motherboard too big to fit into most ATX cases.
Now imagine how much faster it would go if they ran FreeBSD instead!
I just created a page where I post comments about some hardware I used, telling if I am satisfied with it or not.
I suggest that you do the same, so we can all make better buying decisions.
I use emacs all day (and love it) but my hands were killing me. The MS keyboard (the only thing MS on my system) reall did fix things.
By the way, vi is for girls
kidding!
The problem with external ISA bus (as opposed to ISA devices built in the southbridge) is that the southbridge knows which I/O ports are mapped on it, and can respond to a PCI transactions to this port immediately. OTOH, when there is an external ISA bus, the southbridge has to propagate any I/O transaction to the ports unhandled by PCI devices to the ISA bus, which causes a delay in the whole system. So it definitely does matter when you have a system without ISA slot.
-Yenya
--
While Linux is larger than Emacs, at least Linux has the excuse that it has to be. --Linus
Cheap Performance!
Nope.
Some fantastic benchmark numbers didn't add up when I timed kernel compiles between the two. The scsi setup performed consistently better. What's more is that putting my desktop to work on the ide drives (websurfing in particular) is comparatively sluggish compared to the scsi system. Scsi drives feel like a well designed stick-shift auto. Ide is like a minivan with an automatic transmission -- you hit the accellerator and pick up steam seconds later. I think it's more than the "higher quality" of scsi drives. The GXP's hail from a younger, more sophisticated generation.
It's the interface.
Hey, I'll send you my old 386 for free...
You can't possibly beat that kind of preformance per dollar.
It runs Linux... this the only thing I would do with that box is use it for an anchor on my boat.
yes, vim can do multiple buffers. You might want to ":set hidden". That'll allow buffers to be hidden. You should also ":help buffers" for more info. I don't know what C-space does in emacs, so I couldn't tell you want the vim equivalent would be.
No, it's a shame that you couldn't spend 5 seconds doing some research.
:)
http://www.drbott.com/prod/DVIator.html
Could you really work at your old PC with that Apple logo right there on the front of the machine? It's taunting you.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Alternatively, if money is a concern, then why not use IDE RAID? You can do it in software, or you can get a RAID card from Promise. A four drive 80Mb IDE Raid array using the Promise SuperTrak card costs less money than a single 160Mb/s SCSI drive, and out performs it for speed (I believe, anyone got any links to prove it?), and has 3+1 RAID 5 safety.
That same machine is now using W2k software RAID 1 across two 20Gb IDE drives that cost me 50UKP each. Its a server: it has 1Gb RAM, which now costs 70UKP (instead of $500 for 512Mb), and its 100Mbit connection is the rate-limiting step for its major use (file server).
I still use the SCSI CD-ROM and CD-RW, but those cost me $100 and $300 respectively, basically double the price for SCSI. I have run W2k and Redhat linux and had major problems with my SCSI CD-ROM drive. On W2k the Event log filled up with errors on the scsi bus, and on redhat, the kernel locked itself up and kept trying to spin up the drive after repeated bus resets.. Now that my main drive isnt SCSI, I have much less problems. I have never had such a problem with IDE.
At work, we have a single server, with one 9Gb SCSI 160Mb/s drive. That wasnt enough, and we wanted RAID. With RAID, if one drive fails, you just replace it. Only if you lose 2 drives within the same 1 hour window, do you lose data and have to go back to a backup. Having seen the work lost caused by losing a companies data drive, I wanted RAID on our server. Ok, so how much is SCSI RAID?
$300 for a RAID controller, and 4x $400 for 36Gb SCSI 160mb/s drives = ~$2000 for 72Gb SCSI RAID.
$350 for Promise Supertrak IDE RAID controller and 4x$150 for 60Gb ATA 100 drives = ~$1000 for 120Gb IDE RAID. The card behaves like a SCSI card, in that it a) it appears as a SCSI controller to the OS and b) it has a microcontroller on the card and manages all the interupts itself. It has 6 IDE cables, one drive each.
Sure, and IDE RAID 5 system will not be as fast as a SCSI RAID5 system, but its less than half price, for almost double the storage. In fact, to get a 120Gb SCSI system, without raid, would cost ~$1000, and you can always bring down the IDE solution by using smaller drives. The IDE RAID 5 solution is faster than an equal priced SCSI solution, and it is redundent (*three* drives must fail to lose data), while the SCSI solution is not.
At the bottom end, you can always use software RAID. I believe SCSI is better for this, because the bus is better managed. I would not do this using IDE on a workstation. I do it on my server at home because it is basically a file server and so its limited by the ethernet card, and it has 1Gb of memory for buffering. Software RAID can read fast because it can do interleaving off two drives. Writing is slow because it has to write everything twice, and thats why the 1gb of ram.
For workstations, there are several motherboards on the market that come with an on-board Promise IDE Raid0/1 card. This give you either stripping, which gives you speed, or mirroring, which gives you safety. Using striping increases your risk, because if either drive fails, then the data is lost. Again, the controller takes care of the disk access, so it doesnt have the disadvantages (lots of IRQs and higher kernel usage) that IDE has.
Our newest workstations use raid-striping with mobos from gigabyte. Our servers use RAID cards with 3+1 RAID5.
So except for monster Sun or IBM servers that need SCSI RAID5 speed, SCSI is just a waste of money. I have learned not to spend my own money on "top-of-the-line" equipment. It will be average in 6 months, and obsolete in a year. With storage, however, the "cheap" solution is faster than the expensive one. I dont do it with my companies money either.
2000. The article was written a year to year-and-a-half ago. Don't know if that makes much of a difference, but if they were a little behind the times and it's a year and a half old, well, they are talking about ancient times.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
hawk
I use a abit bp6 - 5 PCI, 1AGP (Obviously) and 2 ISA. Check it out here
As part of the thread, yes, the ISA bus hangs off the PCI for keyboard, serial, parallel, etc. The USB bus hangs off PCI. Which is why intel has been working so hard to kill everything but USB. Of course, if it actually worked 1% as well as advertised, it likely would be pretty good. My experience with USB has been pretty sucky.
I am not sure how the multiple pci slots work. I think there is a limit of 2 or 3, then they start using the bridges to get the rest to work, but what sorts of diminishing returns you get, or upper limits to the # of slots, well, I could not hazard a guess. I just wish someone would come out with a agp bridge so I could run dual geforce3's with the dual monitors. Laff.
Rotational latency IS a very important aspect of average access time for a given sector. Here's a quick rundown of how long one full platter rotation takes at various common drive RPMs:
Seeking from one sector to another requires both moving the head and acquiring the sector once you arrive at the track. Hopefully, the drive is laid out so that most common operations (linear reads that hop track-to-track) don't have to pay the rotational latency. Also, if you do a large linear read request to the drive (something I seem to recall SCSI supports better than IDE), the drive can be smart and read the whole track starting wherever the head lands -- thus hiding the rotational latency in certain cases. But for random seeks reading single blocks, there's not much you can do.
--JoeProgram Intellivision!
If you want to snub PC Power & Cooling's inventory, you could contribute something positive by finding the same (or equivalent) PS from another vendor, cheaper or better.
[And for what it's worth, I'm not affiliated with pcpowercooling.com, ESR, or with the mob.]
I believe the last line of that is supposed to be "It's hard to find a place to park."
Dayrll Stuass didn't comment at all in this article, it would have been nice if he had, considering he's the only one who knows anything about hardware! Also, they didn't mention Video, at least they didn't make it a main point, which it should be.
:-)
SCSI? I didn't have any IRQ problems until I added SCSI hardware. In fact, I have free irq's but there's still major lockups when I use my AM12S. You can scream about scsi being faster, but is it really worth it? My ATA66 Segate performs at 7mb/s pretty solid, without even dma33 on. You need to optimize these to get speed out of them. Hdparm is your friend. SCSI has a way of being more than twice the cost, and a reviewer at linuxhardware.org found the Segate ATA Baracuda IV (a 80gb drive for $180) to be the fastest he ever tested, including scsi, this drive is also extremely quiet.
Maybe I should pretend to be Eric Raymond and right a article about a real dream system
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
3ware Escalade controllers are crap. The firmware that ships with the card has DATA LOSS ISSUES in
RAID5 mode. 3ware will not tell you this unless
you email and ask them specifically. They used
to have a bulletin on their website about the
bug but at some point they removed it along with
all references to the issue -- even references
in the driver changelog. Is that the sound of
history being rewritten?
Doubt me? Call them on the phone and see what
they have to say for themselves.
Now they have discontinued the entire Escalade
product line and recalled the 7000 series of
Escalade cards. (But not the 6000s, which also
lose data out-of-the-box.) Never do business
with 3ware; they care more about PR and their
VC's good opinion than your data.
It is a damn shame that 3ware had to stand up
and put a bad face on IDE RAID technology, which
is promising and cost-effective.
The Only time I had a Buffer overflow while burning a CD-ROM was when I had a long SCSI chain. I had 5 HDD, 1 CD-ROM, 1 CDR, 2 or 3 external devices and a mile of cable connecting all of it together...
The rendition at http://www2.linuxjournal.com/articles/style/0013.h tml professes to be the "unabridged version". Sadly, it isn't: It's considerably edited down from the full article, which can be viewed at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/ultimate-linux -box/.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Yeh I forget I was going to go with dual CPUs when mentioning the SIS chipset.