That's a good point; keep in mind that 1GB is rapidly becoming standard and 2GB will probably be the standard when vista comes out. How much further do we have to go before we hit 4GB?
Not long.
At least as long as memory prices keep falling steadily. Which I think is the primary driver. 1GB chips used to be a bit pricey and 2GB chips were astronomical. Now the 2GB chips are cheaper. For systems that we're currently building, 2GB is already the standard (it's only an extra $50 for 2x1GB instead of 2x512MB).
Not sure if older, smaller chips get more expensive with time. I could envision a situation where it's cheaper for an OEM to put 2x1GB modules into a system rather then 2x512MB because the 512MB parts are becoming scarce. Dunno how soon that happens or whether it happened in the past with 128MB or 256MB modules.
Anyone with a complicated job who needs to multi-task with multiple projects or tasks that may take a few days to resolve. Especially if job duties also include interrupt-driven tasks such as putting out "fires".
At a minimum, I always have at least 3 Firefox windows open with half a dozen tabs in each one. One for our intranet apps with the timecard, list of what jobs are active, list of what requests are assigned to me, and typically one tab for each task that I'm working on along with the project page. One window for each task that I'm working on, especially if it requires web searches or reading product documentation on the web. Those windows can be open for a week at a time until I finish doing what I need to do with that task.
Then there are the non-firefox apps that are currently running, like a few SSH2 windows, various office documents, 2 mail clients, text editor, version control software, calc, remote terminal windows...
I typically run 2-3 weeks between reboots. It mostly depends on how often MS pushes updates to my WinXP laptop. I don't bother to shutdown at night because I would just have to spend 30 minutes opening everything back up the next day.
I've never understood why people with 1-2GB of RAM freak out when applications actually use some of that available memory. What good is a ton of memory if it's not being used? Firefox is a memory pig, yes, but it's giving it back to Windows should other programs actually need it.
Because the default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers with 1GB of RAM is too aggressive (it's something like "8" when a smaller value like 2 or 3 would do fine). With the default value of 8 (due to using -1), Firefox rapidly consumes 300-400MB of my 1GB of RAM. Which, along with everything else that I'm running, pushes me right up against my 1GB memory limit.
That pushes me into the swap file as soon as I try to do something else, which slows everything down (especially on a laptop with a 4200 or 5400 rpm drive).
But if I manually force browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to be a value of 2, Firefox stays at a sleek 120-180MB of RAM, which leaves me plenty of memory for other applications. Keeps me from instantly digging into swap. I prefer to have a running load of no more then 75% of available RAM with the last 25% reserved for intermittent use.
(Running load being the amount of RAM used by programs that I leave up and running for days at a time.)
One last note. I just built a system this week using a pair of 10k Raptors and put those Raptors inside of that 2-bay 80mm fan bay cooler. Left a nice gap between the two so that the fan could move air across the top and bottom of the upper and the top of the lower one.
Idle temp is 30C (ambient in the room is around 26C) and the temperature only goes up to 33C under load. These drives feel nice and cool to the touch, even when both are chattering away under load. (I'm running a 24-48 hour burn-in at the moment.)
The temp delta between idle/active is probably another measure of how good your cooling system is for your hard drives. The less the temp changes the better. Usually I can keep it down to a 5C delta.
Gee, thanks... I thought I had blocked that from my consciousness.
There were a bunch of those repeat N times within 30 seconds on CNN headline news this past week. Thank goodness the only time I watch TV is when I'm away on business.
Hmmm... looking at the prices more closely. With the AM2 motherboards, I pay $10 more for the same board (Asus A8N-VM CSM vs Asus M2NPV-VM) but the 2GB of RAM price is a bit less (2GB of DDR400 is around $172, 2GB of DDR2 533 is only $137). Saves me $25 per system after the difference in cost between the two boards.
Maybe I will go ahead and switch to the AM2 boards after all. At least for the X2 systems with 2GB of RAM (~$400). The 939 Athlon64s with only 1GB cost the same either way (~$250).
First, I wrote that article right after I posted to another forum, where people have a tendency to buy parts and then wait for deals on other parts to complete the system, instead of buying them both at once.
Aye, I can understand that.
Personally, I've become quite fond of motherboard bundles where the store puts together the CPU / RAM / MB for me for a few bucks, then fires it up to test it prior to shipping it. Less worries about finding a chip to go with a particular MB, I don't have to stay (as) current on what fits with what, and I'm less likely to get a bum chip / motherboard. The time savings is also nice (both on research and install time). For $9, I'll probably never install another CPU by myself.
I'll probably still build half a dozen to a dozen more 939 systems this year (using the 3800+ 939) until I can no longer get the parts. That will give me good prices and I'll have a bunch of systems that share the same motherboard. Fire sale prices just make things nicer for me because the machines don't need to be top-of-the-line. I'm already planning on switching from Athlon64 3000+ chips to the 3800+ X2 chips now that the price is only $150 for the X2.
DDR memory prices long-term are a mild concern (we kit out with 1GB or 2GB at the start). But there's a large enough install base of DDR systems out there that I should still be able to get 1GB modules 5 years from now. I may start putting 2GB into these units (+$80) to lessen the need to upgrade memory 6-8 years from now.
My Samsung 300GB Drives (in Redundant raid mode) hit 70C at some times (like a simple NTFS defrag)... hot enough to cook an egg. So can these 500GB drives make toast if I slide some bread in the 3.5" bay between them?
At 70C, your drive lifespan is probably going to be measured in weeks...
I'd peg it at a desireable temp is anything under 45C. And anything over 50C will likely kill the hard drive within a matter of weeks or months. Even if you take a drive that was running at 50C for a few weeks and cool it back down to 40C in a new environment, it's still very likely to fail in the short-term. As always, some drives are more susceptible to heat failure then others.
It doesn't take much to cool drives (fortunately). A small amount of airflow across the drive is enough to pull the hot air away from the unit and replace it with cooler air from outside the case.
My personal preference for difficult-to-cool systems are bay coolers where you take up 2 or 3 5.25" bays and install a kit with an 80mm (2 bay) or 120mm (3 bay) fan and put 2-4 hard drives into the unit. The 80mm units work well as a 2-drive cooler because you get a large air channel between the two drives and the fan moves quite a bit of air over the drives. Putting the full 3 drives into the 2-bay cooler results in insta-cooked drives if the fan stops (but with only 2 drives in the cooler, you have some leeway). Bay coolers do make it harder to swap drives after a failure, but most failures I've seen are heat-induced so it's a wash.
Ideally, HD temp should be roughly 5-10C above ambient (30-35C in a 25C room).
Alternately, you can use a good quality case with dedicated fans blowing over the hard drive mounting points. Or simply use a larger case which spreads the components farther apart (so that your CPU isn't heating up your GFX card which is then heating up your hard drives).
The motion required to turn the pedals made it very difficult to use a mouse and read the screen. I wonder if a treadle might have similar issues.
I'm guessing that you've never seen a treadle in use or used one. The motion required to work the treadle is very gentle, mostly relying on calf muscles / lower-leg movements. Which allows the seamstress or tailor to make fine movements to orient and align the fabric as it passes through the needle area.
MWave's motherboard bundle page also shows the price cuts. Which is nice because I order a lot of bundles through them. (Now I can take the same amount of money that I was using to buy a single-core Athlon64 and purchase an X2 instead.)
Also, I wouldn't buy a 939 mobo right now. AMD is killing off 939 rapidly. AM2 is a smarter idea. You can buy a 939 mobo on fire sale, but better get it quick or you might find yourself unable to get an X2 chip for it.
Depends on your planned usage pattern. If you don't plan on upgrading the CPU down the road (merely adding memory), then a 939 board is fine (just get PCIe).
Over the last 10 years, I think I've only ever upgraded a single CPU... maybe. That's out of a few dozen systems that I've built. In general, by the time newer CPUs have gotten fast enough to make the upgrade hassle worthwhile, RAM and MB technology has also changed quite a bit. So it makes more sense to upgrade the MB / CPU / RAM as a single bundle rather then trying to simply swap out the CPU.
I was considering Opteron anyways, and their prices have dropped unbelievably low at this point.
Opteron prices haven't changed (and weren't planned to change). At least not that I see in a quick check of the usual places. Where have you seen price drops? The Opteron 170 is still ~$400 (the only chip I know pricing for off-hand).
A lot of forums are either too narrow (which means you don't go visit them unless you're already in the trade or are seeking specific knowledge) or don't have the same volume as/. (posts and readers)
I think that's where some of the draw of/. comes from. There's a wide selection of technology being discussed (some days) along with readers of a wide background. When those two things mix, sometimes you get knowledgeable comments.
It ain't perfect, but it works most of the time. And sometimes you learn things that have no practical value in a personal sense, but are still interesting.
I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30.
The going rate for 1GB SD cards seems to be around $24, including shipping. The 2GB SD cards are $44ish. Those are prices from places like NewEgg. So I'm not sure I'd believe that you can get a 1GB SD card for $10 (at least, not a name brand).
(I have a Canon Powershot SD550 because I have a Toshiba Tecra laptop that has an SD card slot.)
Good information to know. I hadn't gone the extra step of going through Tyan's RAM matrix to see what prices were on the 2GB modules (or looking at the manuals).
Staying on top of CPU and RAM technology sometimes feels like a full-time job. Which is why I favor vendors that offer MB/CPU/RAM bundles that are already spec'd to work together (some vendors even pre-assemble and test).
Gee, I simply put my discman in a travel pouch and hung it on the passenger side of the transmission tunnel. Left the opening of the travel pouch unzipped and the controls were always accessible. That was back when I owned a 1986 Ford Crown Victoria LTD (a big beast of a vehicle).
Nowadays I simply have an MP3 CD player with 8 or 9 MP3 CDs stored on the dash visor. (My lifestyle doesn't mesh well with an iPod. I'm either listening to music in my home office with the laptop or in my car. A network share folder does well enough for the former and MP3 CDs do well enough for the latter.)
He got a dual processor, dual core system with 16GB of RAM. That was pushing $10,000. A lot of that cost was RAM, but even excluding the RAM it was probably around $3000 just for the system.
Hmmm...
Thunder K8SRE (S2891) $900, Thunder K8SE (S2892) $500, or Thunder K8WE (S2895) $450. All three take two Opteron 2xx CPUs with dual-core along with 8 slots for RAM (so you can use the less expensive 2GB DIMMs). And I'm sure there are others. Opteron dual-cores are $500 for the 270 or $700 for the 275s. RAM is roughly $425 each for Corsair 2GB PC3200 registered ECC.
Figure $400 for a good extended ATX case, $150 for a hefty PSU, $400 for misc parts such as drives.
$500 motherboard
$1000 (2) Opteron 270
$3400 8x 2GB RAM
$550 case + PSU
$400 misc parts (DVD, HDs, cables)
-----
$5850 base hardware costs
At that point, the Opteron 275s are probably worth the extra $400. And/or spending $500 on SCSI drives instead of less expensive SATA-II. The RAM price is the kicker (although the 2GB sticks are not terribly expensive).
Ah well, satisfied my curiosity for what it might cost.
Maybe because VBScript is simple enough that it's easily documented?
Not sure whether that's a joke or not...
Alternately, I suspect that the documentation is better because VBScript was (at the time) going up against other scripting languages for mindshare back in the late 90s. Poor documentation might've slowed uptake of the new language.
Can you wait 2 weeks? (Maybe even one?) Most articles I've seem indicate that the price changes will be announced on July 24th (next week). Not sure whether they'll immediately change in the retail channel though.
So you might be right that it's not worth waiting.
One tiny problem, but it more than tips the scales IMHO: Boards. Hop over to newegg and look for boards with full support for the C2D's capabilities. Not just "if you plug it in it will boot", but meeting the FSB speed, DDR2, plenty of slots and plugs, etc. The variety is lacking and untried. The E6300 looks -very- appealing right now, but until there is more choice among boards (and until they've had 3 - 6 months to work out BIOS kinks), C2D is not something I'll be giving much consideration.
Aye, that's a significant consideration for any systems being built within the next 2-3 months. Do you want to live on the bleeding edge (and doing the bleeding due to immature BIOS, drivers and chipsets) or wait a few months and let them shake out some of the bugs?
I suspect that, if the X2 price cuts are as expected, that I won't have any qualms still using the X2 in new systems for at least a few more months. I may change over to Conroe come October/November but not right now. (Most systems that I'm building in the next 3-6 months are desktop workstations. Cheaper X2 prices for the low-end X2s are great for our costs. The Conroe prices are likely to be too high to put into these systems.)
Still, I'm interested in seeing how things work out over the next few months. I think Intel has done a very good job with Conroe. Heck, I'm simply happy that Conroe is going to push older dual-core prices downwards after almost a year of stagnation.
On my work machine, I run windows and Lotus Notes inside my Linux machine and don't even notice the extra OS. We'll see how that holds up as I put SQL Server on there.
I have some practical questions:
- What virtualization software are you using on the machine? (VMWare?)
- Can you copy-n-paste information between the two systems?
(I really need to spend some time getting up to speed on VMWare and virtualization.)
SAN seems to be very expensive (doesn't seem to matter what flavor). iSCSI might be less expensive, until you look into the pricing of the iSCSI PCI/PCIe cards. I suspect, for companies who have less then a dozen servers, that SAN is not the way to go.
I suspect the original poster was referring to the scenario where you can fit everything onto a single disk (500GB or 750GB) of content. In that particular scenario where you can afford a few hours of downtime, why not take the 2 disks and make one a backup of the other rather then a RAID-1 mirror drive?
That way, if the primary disk dies, you simply put a new one in and restore from the backup drive. And if the primary disk gets corrupted, the backup shouldn't be affected. Under linux you could even keep the backup drive offline except during backups to protect against fumble-fingers or other corruption.
I do something similar on my video editing box. I have (3) disks... primary, mirror and trash. Once a day (or as needed) the data is copied from the primary to the mirror drive. Any outdated or deleted files are moved to the trash drive (keeping the past 3 revisions). The added bonus is that during transcode work, I can use the mirror drive as my "source" drive and write the output of the encoding to the primary drive. That puts all of my reads on one spindle and all of the writes on a different spindle.
I tend to treat MTBF as "interesting information" but not something I worry overly much about. They are probably useful in separating out the consumer-level 40hrs/week use drives from the ones that are capable of running 24x7.
Instead, I make the assumption that the drive will fail and at the worst possible time. Which means RAID + hot-spare + rotating/generational backups for anything important.
More important to me is the warranty period on the drives. Three years is nice, but five years is nicer. With a 5-yr warranty, assuming that the drive kicks the bucket in year 4, I get almost 10 years of life out of a single purchase.
(And the length of warranty also serves as a useful bit of information to separate the consumer-level drives from the 24x7 drives.)
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That's a good point; keep in mind that 1GB is rapidly becoming standard and 2GB will probably be the standard when vista comes out. How much further do we have to go before we hit 4GB?
Not long.
At least as long as memory prices keep falling steadily. Which I think is the primary driver. 1GB chips used to be a bit pricey and 2GB chips were astronomical. Now the 2GB chips are cheaper. For systems that we're currently building, 2GB is already the standard (it's only an extra $50 for 2x1GB instead of 2x512MB).
Not sure if older, smaller chips get more expensive with time. I could envision a situation where it's cheaper for an OEM to put 2x1GB modules into a system rather then 2x512MB because the 512MB parts are becoming scarce. Dunno how soon that happens or whether it happened in the past with 128MB or 256MB modules.
Who does this?!?
Anyone with a complicated job who needs to multi-task with multiple projects or tasks that may take a few days to resolve. Especially if job duties also include interrupt-driven tasks such as putting out "fires".
At a minimum, I always have at least 3 Firefox windows open with half a dozen tabs in each one. One for our intranet apps with the timecard, list of what jobs are active, list of what requests are assigned to me, and typically one tab for each task that I'm working on along with the project page. One window for each task that I'm working on, especially if it requires web searches or reading product documentation on the web. Those windows can be open for a week at a time until I finish doing what I need to do with that task.
Then there are the non-firefox apps that are currently running, like a few SSH2 windows, various office documents, 2 mail clients, text editor, version control software, calc, remote terminal windows...
I typically run 2-3 weeks between reboots. It mostly depends on how often MS pushes updates to my WinXP laptop. I don't bother to shutdown at night because I would just have to spend 30 minutes opening everything back up the next day.
I've never understood why people with 1-2GB of RAM freak out when applications actually use some of that available memory. What good is a ton of memory if it's not being used? Firefox is a memory pig, yes, but it's giving it back to Windows should other programs actually need it.
Because the default setting for browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers with 1GB of RAM is too aggressive (it's something like "8" when a smaller value like 2 or 3 would do fine). With the default value of 8 (due to using -1), Firefox rapidly consumes 300-400MB of my 1GB of RAM. Which, along with everything else that I'm running, pushes me right up against my 1GB memory limit.
That pushes me into the swap file as soon as I try to do something else, which slows everything down (especially on a laptop with a 4200 or 5400 rpm drive).
But if I manually force browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to be a value of 2, Firefox stays at a sleek 120-180MB of RAM, which leaves me plenty of memory for other applications. Keeps me from instantly digging into swap. I prefer to have a running load of no more then 75% of available RAM with the last 25% reserved for intermittent use.
(Running load being the amount of RAM used by programs that I leave up and running for days at a time.)
One last note. I just built a system this week using a pair of 10k Raptors and put those Raptors inside of that 2-bay 80mm fan bay cooler. Left a nice gap between the two so that the fan could move air across the top and bottom of the upper and the top of the lower one.
Idle temp is 30C (ambient in the room is around 26C) and the temperature only goes up to 33C under load. These drives feel nice and cool to the touch, even when both are chattering away under load. (I'm running a 24-48 hour burn-in at the moment.)
The temp delta between idle/active is probably another measure of how good your cooling system is for your hard drives. The less the temp changes the better. Usually I can keep it down to a 5C delta.
Gee, thanks... I thought I had blocked that from my consciousness.
There were a bunch of those repeat N times within 30 seconds on CNN headline news this past week. Thank goodness the only time I watch TV is when I'm away on business.
Hmmm... looking at the prices more closely. With the AM2 motherboards, I pay $10 more for the same board (Asus A8N-VM CSM vs Asus M2NPV-VM) but the 2GB of RAM price is a bit less (2GB of DDR400 is around $172, 2GB of DDR2 533 is only $137). Saves me $25 per system after the difference in cost between the two boards.
Maybe I will go ahead and switch to the AM2 boards after all. At least for the X2 systems with 2GB of RAM (~$400). The 939 Athlon64s with only 1GB cost the same either way (~$250).
First, I wrote that article right after I posted to another forum, where people have a tendency to buy parts and then wait for deals on other parts to complete the system, instead of buying them both at once.
Aye, I can understand that.
Personally, I've become quite fond of motherboard bundles where the store puts together the CPU / RAM / MB for me for a few bucks, then fires it up to test it prior to shipping it. Less worries about finding a chip to go with a particular MB, I don't have to stay (as) current on what fits with what, and I'm less likely to get a bum chip / motherboard. The time savings is also nice (both on research and install time). For $9, I'll probably never install another CPU by myself.
I'll probably still build half a dozen to a dozen more 939 systems this year (using the 3800+ 939) until I can no longer get the parts. That will give me good prices and I'll have a bunch of systems that share the same motherboard. Fire sale prices just make things nicer for me because the machines don't need to be top-of-the-line. I'm already planning on switching from Athlon64 3000+ chips to the 3800+ X2 chips now that the price is only $150 for the X2.
DDR memory prices long-term are a mild concern (we kit out with 1GB or 2GB at the start). But there's a large enough install base of DDR systems out there that I should still be able to get 1GB modules 5 years from now. I may start putting 2GB into these units (+$80) to lessen the need to upgrade memory 6-8 years from now.
My Samsung 300GB Drives (in Redundant raid mode) hit 70C at some times (like a simple NTFS defrag)... hot enough to cook an egg. So can these 500GB drives make toast if I slide some bread in the 3.5" bay between them?
At 70C, your drive lifespan is probably going to be measured in weeks...
I'd peg it at a desireable temp is anything under 45C. And anything over 50C will likely kill the hard drive within a matter of weeks or months. Even if you take a drive that was running at 50C for a few weeks and cool it back down to 40C in a new environment, it's still very likely to fail in the short-term. As always, some drives are more susceptible to heat failure then others.
It doesn't take much to cool drives (fortunately). A small amount of airflow across the drive is enough to pull the hot air away from the unit and replace it with cooler air from outside the case.
My personal preference for difficult-to-cool systems are bay coolers where you take up 2 or 3 5.25" bays and install a kit with an 80mm (2 bay) or 120mm (3 bay) fan and put 2-4 hard drives into the unit. The 80mm units work well as a 2-drive cooler because you get a large air channel between the two drives and the fan moves quite a bit of air over the drives. Putting the full 3 drives into the 2-bay cooler results in insta-cooked drives if the fan stops (but with only 2 drives in the cooler, you have some leeway). Bay coolers do make it harder to swap drives after a failure, but most failures I've seen are heat-induced so it's a wash.
Ideally, HD temp should be roughly 5-10C above ambient (30-35C in a 25C room).
Alternately, you can use a good quality case with dedicated fans blowing over the hard drive mounting points. Or simply use a larger case which spreads the components farther apart (so that your CPU isn't heating up your GFX card which is then heating up your hard drives).
The motion required to turn the pedals made it very difficult to use a mouse and read the screen. I wonder if a treadle might have similar issues.
I'm guessing that you've never seen a treadle in use or used one. The motion required to work the treadle is very gentle, mostly relying on calf muscles / lower-leg movements. Which allows the seamstress or tailor to make fine movements to orient and align the fabric as it passes through the needle area.
MWave's motherboard bundle page also shows the price cuts. Which is nice because I order a lot of bundles through them. (Now I can take the same amount of money that I was using to buy a single-core Athlon64 and purchase an X2 instead.)
Also, I wouldn't buy a 939 mobo right now. AMD is killing off 939 rapidly. AM2 is a smarter idea. You can buy a 939 mobo on fire sale, but better get it quick or you might find yourself unable to get an X2 chip for it.
Depends on your planned usage pattern. If you don't plan on upgrading the CPU down the road (merely adding memory), then a 939 board is fine (just get PCIe).
Over the last 10 years, I think I've only ever upgraded a single CPU... maybe. That's out of a few dozen systems that I've built. In general, by the time newer CPUs have gotten fast enough to make the upgrade hassle worthwhile, RAM and MB technology has also changed quite a bit. So it makes more sense to upgrade the MB / CPU / RAM as a single bundle rather then trying to simply swap out the CPU.
I was considering Opteron anyways, and their prices have dropped unbelievably low at this point.
Opteron prices haven't changed (and weren't planned to change). At least not that I see in a quick check of the usual places. Where have you seen price drops? The Opteron 170 is still ~$400 (the only chip I know pricing for off-hand).
A lot of forums are either too narrow (which means you don't go visit them unless you're already in the trade or are seeking specific knowledge) or don't have the same volume as /. (posts and readers)
/. comes from. There's a wide selection of technology being discussed (some days) along with readers of a wide background. When those two things mix, sometimes you get knowledgeable comments.
I think that's where some of the draw of
It ain't perfect, but it works most of the time. And sometimes you learn things that have no practical value in a personal sense, but are still interesting.
I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30.
The going rate for 1GB SD cards seems to be around $24, including shipping. The 2GB SD cards are $44ish. Those are prices from places like NewEgg. So I'm not sure I'd believe that you can get a 1GB SD card for $10 (at least, not a name brand).
(I have a Canon Powershot SD550 because I have a Toshiba Tecra laptop that has an SD card slot.)
Good information to know. I hadn't gone the extra step of going through Tyan's RAM matrix to see what prices were on the 2GB modules (or looking at the manuals).
Staying on top of CPU and RAM technology sometimes feels like a full-time job. Which is why I favor vendors that offer MB/CPU/RAM bundles that are already spec'd to work together (some vendors even pre-assemble and test).
Gee, I simply put my discman in a travel pouch and hung it on the passenger side of the transmission tunnel. Left the opening of the travel pouch unzipped and the controls were always accessible. That was back when I owned a 1986 Ford Crown Victoria LTD (a big beast of a vehicle).
Nowadays I simply have an MP3 CD player with 8 or 9 MP3 CDs stored on the dash visor. (My lifestyle doesn't mesh well with an iPod. I'm either listening to music in my home office with the laptop or in my car. A network share folder does well enough for the former and MP3 CDs do well enough for the latter.)
He got a dual processor, dual core system with 16GB of RAM. That was pushing $10,000. A lot of that cost was RAM, but even excluding the RAM it was probably around $3000 just for the system.
Hmmm...
Thunder K8SRE (S2891) $900, Thunder K8SE (S2892) $500, or Thunder K8WE (S2895) $450. All three take two Opteron 2xx CPUs with dual-core along with 8 slots for RAM (so you can use the less expensive 2GB DIMMs). And I'm sure there are others. Opteron dual-cores are $500 for the 270 or $700 for the 275s. RAM is roughly $425 each for Corsair 2GB PC3200 registered ECC.
Figure $400 for a good extended ATX case, $150 for a hefty PSU, $400 for misc parts such as drives.
$500 motherboard
$1000 (2) Opteron 270
$3400 8x 2GB RAM
$550 case + PSU
$400 misc parts (DVD, HDs, cables)
-----
$5850 base hardware costs
At that point, the Opteron 275s are probably worth the extra $400. And/or spending $500 on SCSI drives instead of less expensive SATA-II. The RAM price is the kicker (although the 2GB sticks are not terribly expensive).
Ah well, satisfied my curiosity for what it might cost.
VBScript has better documentation.
Maybe because VBScript is simple enough that it's easily documented?
Not sure whether that's a joke or not...
Alternately, I suspect that the documentation is better because VBScript was (at the time) going up against other scripting languages for mindshare back in the late 90s. Poor documentation might've slowed uptake of the new language.
I'm currently running a 2x Opteron 275 system
Which motherboard are you using? (I'm always curious about people who have multi-CPU systems.)
But can I wait until August???
Can you wait 2 weeks? (Maybe even one?) Most articles I've seem indicate that the price changes will be announced on July 24th (next week). Not sure whether they'll immediately change in the retail channel though.
So you might be right that it's not worth waiting.
(Now where did I put that crystal ball?)
One tiny problem, but it more than tips the scales IMHO: Boards. Hop over to newegg and look for boards with full support for the C2D's capabilities. Not just "if you plug it in it will boot", but meeting the FSB speed, DDR2, plenty of slots and plugs, etc. The variety is lacking and untried. The E6300 looks -very- appealing right now, but until there is more choice among boards (and until they've had 3 - 6 months to work out BIOS kinks), C2D is not something I'll be giving much consideration.
Aye, that's a significant consideration for any systems being built within the next 2-3 months. Do you want to live on the bleeding edge (and doing the bleeding due to immature BIOS, drivers and chipsets) or wait a few months and let them shake out some of the bugs?
I suspect that, if the X2 price cuts are as expected, that I won't have any qualms still using the X2 in new systems for at least a few more months. I may change over to Conroe come October/November but not right now. (Most systems that I'm building in the next 3-6 months are desktop workstations. Cheaper X2 prices for the low-end X2s are great for our costs. The Conroe prices are likely to be too high to put into these systems.)
Still, I'm interested in seeing how things work out over the next few months. I think Intel has done a very good job with Conroe. Heck, I'm simply happy that Conroe is going to push older dual-core prices downwards after almost a year of stagnation.
On my work machine, I run windows and Lotus Notes inside my Linux machine and don't even notice the extra OS. We'll see how that holds up as I put SQL Server on there.
I have some practical questions:
- What virtualization software are you using on the machine? (VMWare?)
- Can you copy-n-paste information between the two systems?
(I really need to spend some time getting up to speed on VMWare and virtualization.)
SAN seems to be very expensive (doesn't seem to matter what flavor). iSCSI might be less expensive, until you look into the pricing of the iSCSI PCI/PCIe cards. I suspect, for companies who have less then a dozen servers, that SAN is not the way to go.
Unless, of course, money is no object.
I suspect the original poster was referring to the scenario where you can fit everything onto a single disk (500GB or 750GB) of content. In that particular scenario where you can afford a few hours of downtime, why not take the 2 disks and make one a backup of the other rather then a RAID-1 mirror drive?
That way, if the primary disk dies, you simply put a new one in and restore from the backup drive. And if the primary disk gets corrupted, the backup shouldn't be affected. Under linux you could even keep the backup drive offline except during backups to protect against fumble-fingers or other corruption.
I do something similar on my video editing box. I have (3) disks... primary, mirror and trash. Once a day (or as needed) the data is copied from the primary to the mirror drive. Any outdated or deleted files are moved to the trash drive (keeping the past 3 revisions). The added bonus is that during transcode work, I can use the mirror drive as my "source" drive and write the output of the encoding to the primary drive. That puts all of my reads on one spindle and all of the writes on a different spindle.
I tend to treat MTBF as "interesting information" but not something I worry overly much about. They are probably useful in separating out the consumer-level 40hrs/week use drives from the ones that are capable of running 24x7.
Instead, I make the assumption that the drive will fail and at the worst possible time. Which means RAID + hot-spare + rotating/generational backups for anything important.
More important to me is the warranty period on the drives. Three years is nice, but five years is nicer. With a 5-yr warranty, assuming that the drive kicks the bucket in year 4, I get almost 10 years of life out of a single purchase.
(And the length of warranty also serves as a useful bit of information to separate the consumer-level drives from the 24x7 drives.)