Advanced System Building Guide

Alan writes "FiringSquad has up an Advanced System Building Guide, detailing how to construct your own rig. The first half deals with hardware selection and even esoteric concepts such as PCI slot placement. The second half is focused on Windows XP, and makes recommendations such as moving the swap file and scratch disk to a separate partition." From the article: "You laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy's GeekSquad, and are the one doing the teaching when calling technical support. If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."

Comments

Re:Yes, reducing

[winkydink]

Insignificant in the MTBF calculation. Ask a hw engineer. The rotational assembley that spins the platters (the speed of which is constant) is by far the biggest failure mechanism.

Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[WidescreenFreak]

You need to remember that hard drives are NOT solid state devices. They have bearings and mechanical parts. The first rule of thumb when it comes to PCs or any kind of equipment is that "The question is not if the parts will wear out but when the parts will wear out."

That being said, the hard drives will wear out. Period. End of story. Some might die in a few months, some in a few years, and some might never die before you replace them.

Even more important is the conecpt of multiple spindles to do multiple jobs. If you have one drive that suddenly hits swap because you're doing something, not only will your system grind to a halt because the drive head is loaded with contention (it can only do one job at once, obviously) but you're adding that much more wear and tear.

With the swap on a separate drive (and preferably on a separate IDE channel, assuming that that's what you're doing), the main drive can do whatever it needs to do while letting the other drive take care of the swap. So, not only are you greatly increasing potential throughput and system efficiency, you're dramatically reducing wear and tear on the drive head mechanism.

Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out

[Fizzlewhiff]

Yeah but he's talking about partitioning a drive to save wear and tear. It is still the same drive. Would you partition a drive into two equal partitions and mirror them for redundancy? Makes no sense.

I just built my system--Lessons learned

[angle_slam]

Things that I learned from building my XP system:

• He talks about installing SP 2 after installing XP. That's fine, if you have an SP 1 CD. But if you have a pre-SP1 CD like I do, XP will not recognize any hard drive space over 127 GB. You can't partition it or anything. XP thinks the drive is 127 GB and you're stuck. The solution (and probably a better idea even if you have an SP1 disc) is to Slipstream SP2 onto your XP install disc. Here is an explanation of the process. Basically, you integrate SP2 into XP and burn a new CD. So when you install XP, it is automatically SP2 and recognizes the full size of the hard drive.
• My system would not Standby properly. The fans were still on, which defeats the purpose of putting the system into Standby. You have to go into the BIOS and enable S2 or S3 Standby mode if you want the system to appear off in Standby mode, but still have 5 second startup.
• For some odd reason, my motherboard BIOS didn't have USB 2.0 defaulted on. I have no idea why they would do that. Make sure it is changed to enable USB 2.0 support.
• Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned

[scott_karana]

>Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.

I've almost done this myself a few times, but I googled around and discovered Peter Nordahl's 'Offline NT Password & Registry Editor', which can just reset the Admin password and avert the problem of reformatting.

Re:Yes, reducing

[ashmedai]

I hang out over at StorageReview, and a while ago there was a post where someone did so. The feedback amounted to that:

1. Concentrated seeks from pagefiles etc do not negatively impact the hard drive's life span because the head does not ever come in physical contact with the disk, and in fact
2. Concentrated reads/writes actually increase the hard drive's reliability because it remagnetizes that region every time it is written to.

Re:Here's what I think

[schapman]

I always put my system specs in my sig on hardware forums (a basic one at least) and I do it for good reason. It lets everyone know what I'm using if I'm asking questions, and that I have experience with certain things when answering theirs. I will however, agree with you on the people who list every last litte detail.