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The Ultimate Linux Box 2001

Posted by michael on from the 486/33-sadly-out-of-date dept.

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.

2 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Cheap Linux box by reynaert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:SCSI: why? by InsaneGeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Exactly how do you cluster IDE drives??? With SCSI I can share the the same bus with 2 different computers, and can present the same disk to two different systems at the same time.

    IDE is *only* good in a single drive / single controller situation; but at that time (from most drive manufacturers websites) you are only able to push maybe 35MB/sec. So your so called controller latency is NOT an issue. Agreed IDE will perform the same on a single drive system, but as soon as you add another drive onto that channel you've possibly halfed the performance of those two drives, you could add another controller, but really starts getting rediculus (I've got one systems with over 300 drives connected to it, I'd like to see an IDE system keep up with that)

    There also are quite a bit of things in the SCSI protocol that you are looking over. Command Tag Queueing is a very big one, I can send multiple commands down the SCSI chain and the drive can re-order them so that the drive can streamline where it's going to be getting data off of the drive (setting this gives a significant performance boost on our arrays). Along with the fact that IDE is completely and totaly CPU driven, try really pushing your CPU and you are either going to have to give up CPU cycles to your app or give up performance to your drive.

    Could you please provide a link to Google's use of IDE drives for all their storage, I can't seem to find a page saying that their Linux are all running on IDE only.

    http://www.acc.umu.se/~sagge/scsi_ide/#compariso n1 1
    http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/vectors/ata sc si.pdf
    http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/markedi to rial.html?prodkey=io_comparison
    http://www4.tomshardware.com/storage/01q1/010129 /