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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."
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.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.