Another "What hardware would you recommend?" thread.

[valnar]

Originally Posted by malbec

5) On the RAID thing again, I need some education on PCI Express. The ASUS board comes with two PCI Express slots. The footnote says they are ran in a x16 and x4 configuration. The video card I am grabbing (and most of them seem to be this way) is a PCI Express 16x. The RAID cards appear to be PCI Express x8. Am I screwed here?

Thanks again for all of your help and reat insights! It is much appreciated!

That's another reason for integrated video. You would be "wasting" your PCIe 16x slot for video when you don't need to. Make sure your chosen video card can run in a 4x slot. I don't know if all of them can. You certainly want the RAID card in the 16x slot.

Robert

Edit: Also while the Commando makes a great workstation board because of it's many features, it won't have a single spare PCI-E slot after you use them for video and a RAID adapter. This may limit your expansion as future tuners use PCI-E. If you like worktation boards because of their ability to overclock, you may be better served by one with three PCI slots, but several more PCIe 1x slots. Check out the Excel attachment in the thread here.

[bcjenkins]

3 drives for raid 5.

B

[jprine01]

2) Dumb question, I think someone was politely trying to point out my ignorance. How many drives does one need for RAID 5? Just four?

You need at least 3 drives for a Raid-5. The more drives you add the less you loose for redundancy purposes and the faster your access becomes. (for example 3x 500, 1000usable, 33% lost. or 5x 500, 2000 useable, 20% lost.) The larger your array the more potential for more then one drive to fail, then you can get into raid-6 for double drive failure. Or have a extra drive connected as hot spare so as soon as a drive fails the controller will automatically copy over the redndancy to protect against a different drive failure.

5) On the RAID thing again, I need some education on PCI Express. The ASUS board comes with two PCI Express slots. The footnote says they are ran in a x16 and x4 configuration. The video card I am grabbing (and most of them seem to be this way) is a PCI Express 16x. The RAID cards appear to be PCI Express x8. Am I screwed here?

It says the Pci-express slots are (electrical 16x & 4x) on newegg's site which would mean one is a 4x. But I went to ASUS website and it says "2 x PCI-E x16 (@ x16 and x4 mode)" I sounds like they are both 16, and will run at 4 or 16?? Difficult to say. Zipzoomfly lists it as: 2 PCI Express x16 (x16 & x4 in CrossFire)

If you can find a phone number for asus support just tell them you want that motherboard and will a 8x areca raid card work in those slots, he should be able to tell you without looking it up. I asked DFI about the same thing once.

Also, even if your stuck with 4x. I'm 99% sure a Areca card will run fine in 2x, 4x, or 8x mode. Some brands like 3ware have some 4x cards.

I am not sure without testing as there isn't much online about it. There is a chance you can switch the PCIExpress slot with the video card to 4x in bios, video cards will almost always run at 8x i know, 4x i never tried.

3) I have decided to hold off on the RAID for now and just get a single 750GB Seagate 7200.10. I currently have 2-200GB, 2-160GB and 1-40GB drive in an old Polywell case. I am thinking I can fit all of that on the 750GB drive for now and hold out for a sale later. Also, I have had a bad taste in mouth for RAID in general and am rethinking it (lost everything on RAID 0 a few years back - I understand RAID 5 and the redundancy/back up you get, but the complexity of the recovery has me bothered).

If you hold off on the single 750 for now in 6 months those 750GB drives should be cheap enough to buy a bunch of. You can find them for 199 on sale at various places here and there right now. If you have to pay 230+ I would still go with 2x500 for 30$ more.

With my areca the only complexity has been learning what the options do. I've taken the card out and put it in 2 different systems, unplugged and rearange my drives and plug them back in (without changing my array or going into the setup menu). Not trying to talk you into something you don't need just putting into prospective.. Everyone I know (ok lots of geeky people) has done a raid0 and nobody still uses one, but i know a few people with raid5 cards and they wouldn't dream of disabling it.

[lobosrul]

Just FYI:

You can put an PCI-e x1, or x4 card into an x16 slot. Those numbers refer to the physical size of the connector.

[malbec]

I just wanted to send all of you a major THANK YOU!!!!

I ordered everything from Newegg

1) Corsair PSU
2) 2GB PC2 8500 Crucial memory
3) E6600 Core 2 Duo
4) ASUS Commando MB
5) Seagate 7200.10 750GB HD
6) Cooler Master Centurion 5 case
7) ASUS EAX300SE-X
8) DVD, Floppy (yeah, I did), Zalman Heatsink ... all from my old PC

and I can't tell you how awesome this is!!! This is quite a difference from my noisy, hot old AMD Athlon XP2100+ AMD.

Thank you to all of you for all of your help and advice!!!

[OttoNP]

I guess I'm too late, but I had some problems with Seagate drives, random data corruption. They were SATA 150 GB drives in Raid array, switched to western digital and no problems since (over 2 years with them). The data corruption occured within 1 month. I did a couple google searchs with each hard drive brand, keywords "seagate data corruption" "western digital data corruption", as well as "segate drive failure failed" etc... what I found was higher number of hits for Seagate and Maxtor compared to Western digital, hitachi, samsung, etc...

When it comes to hard drive failures, they are rare and I happened to be one point for Seagate drive failure, but I think Seagate and Maxtor have higher incidences than other brands...

Good luck!

[valnar]

I prefer Hitachi for all my PC's. The "Deathstar" days are long gone and they perform very well now. They are also cool and quiet, though not as quiet as some Seagates.

Seagate drives also erroneously report some SMART errors that aren't there, a problem other manufacturers don't have.

Robert

[malbec]

Sure, shoot the stuff down AFTER I put it together.

I have had nothing but good luck wiht Seagate drives and have found them to be on the quieter side than most. Hitachi was a very close second choice, but I figured I would go with what I knew.

Thanks again for all of your help!

[davephan]

Originally Posted by valnar

That's another reason for integrated video. You would be "wasting" your PCIe 16x slot for video when you don't need to. Make sure your chosen video card can run in a 4x slot. I don't know if all of them can. You certainly want the RAID card in the 16x slot.

Robert

Edit: Also while the Commando makes a great workstation board because of it's many features, it won't have a single spare PCI-E slot after you use them for video and a RAID adapter. This may limit your expansion as future tuners use PCI-E. If you like worktation boards because of their ability to overclock, you may be better served by one with three PCI slots, but several more PCIe 1x slots. Check out the Excel attachment in the thread here.

The link for the spreadsheet did not open. Could you post the spreadsheet here?

I looked around, and did not find any mainboards that had more than two PCI-E slots. I don't know if a PCI-E slot is required for any tuner card. I am also looking for a mainboard to replace my old MSI K7 mainboard that died. The mainboard has to be compatible with the Intel QX6700 quad-core.

Dave

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by davephan

I looked around, and did not find any mainboards that had more than two PCI-E slots.

Mine does (see sig). 3 PCI, 4 PCIe. The only bad thing is the two SATA connectors wasted on the EZ-Backup thing...

[valnar]

Originally Posted by davephan

The link for the spreadsheet did not open. Could you post the spreadsheet here?

Go to the avsforum.com and click on the Sticky thread for "Core 2 Motherboard Complete List - With Hardware Recommendations for a HD HTPC"

It might be down at the moment.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=26

-Robert

[jhendrix]

I don't know why everyone buys high powered computers for their sage servers.
I use an ASUS P4P800 motherboard with a P4 1.7GHz processor and 512MB Ram.
It has 5 PCI slots, 1 AGP, 2 sata ports, 2 IDE ports, gigabit ethernet, and 8 USB 2.0 ports. And you can find them cheap on ebay.
I have 2 HDTV tuners, 2 DVB cards, and a PVR500 dual tuner card. I run 2 instances of MT and everything runs smoothly.
The only issue I have is I get some stuttering if I play HDTV on an MVP (the server is transcoding the HD to SD).

This motherboard will take up to 4G ram and any 278 pin P4.

-Jeff

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by jhendrix

I don't know why everyone buys high powered computers for their sage servers.
...
The only issue I have is I get some stuttering if I play HDTV on an MVP (the server is transcoding the HD to SD).

Exactly, that's why I have a server with power. 4 MyTheatre sessions, plus 4 MVPs and other Placeshifter connections that may need transcoding...generally, buying power is cheaper than buying cheap and then replacing later. As I found out...

[valnar]

Originally Posted by jhendrix

I don't know why everyone buys high powered computers for their sage servers.

....cut....

The only issue I have is I get some stuttering if I play HDTV on an MVP (the server is transcoding the HD to SD).

Well, that's basically the gist of it. Transcoding HD to SD or for Placeshifter clients takes horsepower. Besides, everything is relative. If you build a new server today, I wouldn't recommend anything less than a Core2Duo. A couple months ago that was blazing, today it's common, and tomorrow it'll be slow.

-Robert

[davephan]

Originally Posted by malbec

Thanks again! A few last comments/questions before I seal my fate...

1) I reviewed the MOBO again and am sticking with the ASUS over the DG965WH as the ASUS looks like it is more conducive to overclocking than the Intel board. I am not planning on tackling overclovking immediately, but it seemed worth the extra $.

How did things work out with the Commando MOBO?

I am debating between purchasing the Asus P5WDH Deluxe 975X and the Asus Commando P965. I plan to also purchase a QX6700 quad-core and 2 gigs of memory.

Dave