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

Take the article with a grain of salt

[winkydink]

You should always have a dedicated partition for your temp files and swap file. It's tempting to actually put this on a separate physical drive to reduce the wear and tear on the main drive, but the disadvantage is that upgrading to a larger hard drive a more involved process.

Reduce wear and tear? Really? I've heard many reasons why one should do this (improving perfmance & reducing fragmentations which he mentions later), but reducing wear and tear?

Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.

Hmmm

[2names]

It has been my personal experience that the armature fails on drives much more often than the rotational assembly.

Your experience may vary, but I'll stick with seperate drives for temp and swap.

Re:Hmmm

[meatspray]

Given, I've only been in this since the early 386 days, but I've had the chance to work at several big installations, wharehouses, a few pc shops and the occasional help desk. Every time I see a new type of problem, I conduct a post mortem on the drive. (I'm more after magnets these days)

Most common problems I've seen:

#1 Media has an electromagnetic defect that appears over time: (new regular bad sectors without physical signs of dmg on the platters)
Until 1996, I had seen more of this than anything. Some cases might have been heat or one of the next few problems but far too many succombed to this fate for it to be a symptom of another physical problem. I haven't seen this in quite some time.

#2 On drive controller board failure:
This also used to happen quite frequently, I've seen a few cases of this recently, It's the failure I see most often today.

#3 Spindle bearing failure:
I've seen a few handfulls of these only. They generally get replaced when they get noisy before the failure is complete. The best part was removing a siezed drive from the pc and giving it a whack flat on it's back to watch the user in amazement when you put it back in and it spins up.

Armature failure:
I've seen a few cases of this only. Some of the media defects might have been this in disguise. The best armature failure I ever saw was an old full height SCSI drive that probably got too hot, the heads caught on the platter and over the years whittled themselves down to stubs while cutting through the platters. It was a QNX box that was perfectly content to boot from the master server after it's hard drive failed. The platters ended up being razor sharp rings of death. Nice christmas tree ornaments through.

First step in building a machine...

[gosand]

I have built my own systems since I don't remember when. But my first rule of thumb when building a new system - research all the technology that changed since the last time you built a system.

To put it in perspective, all of my systems at home have PC-133 memory in them. The last time I built an entire system from scratch, 80 gig drives were expensive, DDR memory didn't exist, 12x CD-RW drives were getting affordable, and we were just breaking the gigahertz barrier in CPUs.

Now I have sort of been following things, but not enough to know off the top of my head what to grab off the e-shelf to build a system. I have found that this has been the biggest challenge in building new systems.

Re:Um... swap file?

[stratjakt]

Not possible for many of us. My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do. I had a 7 gig swap file last week as my poor box choked through 25 gigs of data.

What I want are 5-10 gig or larger "drives" that are made up of cheaper 66mhz SDRAM modules, yet have an IDE/SATA/SCSI/(Whatever) interface, and use one of those for swap.

Do they exist? If not, why not?

hey now

[Menotti M]

As a part time Geek Squad agent (in the summer and during intersession), I kinda resent the author's disdain for us. True, you may run into some who don't know their ass from their elbow. But, in general, the in-store agents have much more expertise than the sales people, many have at least some certification, and the agents who do field work (Double Agents) go through a pretty legitimate training and testing period. Even if you considered Geek Squad members to be useless, the article does not provide a ton of information for individuals who "built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder." The author has a bias towards Maxtor, for example, without providing any empirical evidence beside the fact that he's had good experience with them. Personally, I've had pretty good experiences with Western Digital drives too, but those aren't mentioned. He also arbitrarily comments on things like adjusting the page file, justifying his recommendations by "thinking" they are good settings. Yes, there are many great points in there, but the author has a bit too much confidence with him/herself and not enough data to back up some his more specific recommendations, not to mention some unfounded commentary on Geek Squad representatives.

Why build? An alternative view.

[Niet3sche]

I'm going to studiously ignore saying anything about the article. If you can benefit from it, that's great. If not, that's fine too. Here's the meat of my post: with prices coming down and package / rebate deals on new boxes all the time, it might be tempting to ask why should I build my own box at all?.

My personal take on this (yes, I build all my boxes) used to be cost-effectiveness and component picking, but now it is simply that I can dictate exactly which components I want in my system for the same price as buying something bundled. There is no longer any real cost savings here, but I do like to maintain control over what I put in my machines (up very very very nearly 24/7 thanks to this, with downtime only to upgrade or blow out dust). So there is still merit in "rolling your own" box, as far as I am concerned.

I wanted to beat the cries of, "why would I build when I can buy for the same price?". ;)

Re:GeekSquad?

[SynapseLapse]

Just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota as a matter of fact.
A co-worker of mine used to work for them.
Best Buy purchased Geek Sqaud a few years back, (Although, if you ask any of the original Geek Squad crew, they formed a "Strategic Business alliance) and they still run independent of Best Buy which is the main reason their competent. At least, here in the twin cities they're still really good. I can't speak for the rest of the country...

Re:Advanced system building

[FortranDragon]

I don't know which is funnier, your spoof or the '+1, Interesting' mod you got. :-D

Re:Yes, reducing

[budgenator]

We used to partion drive so the swap was in the middle, the next two most likely to be used next to the swap, and unlikely to be used on the outside. I don't think you can do that now as cylinders have so little to do with physical location on the platters now-a-days.

Shit now a disk drives has a bigger ram buffer cache than the machines we used to do that with have. the rule of thumb was 4 Mb for linux, 4 Mb for X Windows and 4Mb for each user; now we just slap in a half gig and call it good enough.

I did see a site where the guy ripped apart old hard disks and hooked them up to his stereo so the platters would spin and the heads twitch back and forth to the beat of the music. interesting thing to do to those old sub-Gigabyte drives in every computer geek's junk drawer!