On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 11:34:48AM +0100, Robert Davies wrote:
> On Saturday 27 April 2002 11:20, you wrote:
[snip]
> > So what would people buy? I've looked at SMP, but most of the
> > benchmarks I've seen suggest the gain isn't that great. OTOH, the
> > benchmarks have been carried out under windows which I doubt has
> > quite the same granularity of SMP support. Dual PIII mobos are
> > cheap, but would they really out-perform a uni Athlon?
>
> Not by all that much, but a dual Athlon board might be interesting, if you
> really need the power.
That seems debateable (sp?): I'm not going to be doing major multimedia
work so raw power it would seem is secondary to reliability.
> > What about a high-end chipset like the Serverworks LE chipset? Both
> > Tyan and Supermicro make dual PIII mobos with this chipset. What
> > about dual athlon? Could one really get this within the price limit?
> > Would using SMP mean that microkernels that don't support SMP would
> > not run, or would they only run on one CPU. Could I afford to risk
> > this?
>
> They're very expensive, and as they're less common and you're running many
> OSes you are likely to have more hardware compatability problems, running
> unusual kit.
True, not something I'd realised before.
> > I would prefer to use Maxtor Atlas III SCSI hdds (2 of them in
> > a software RAID 1) for fault tolerance and because SCSI hdds come
> > with 5 years warenty instead of 3:
>
> SCSI only really makes financial sense these days if you are running
> multi-user servers with disks in seperate arrays. Yes, there is lots of
> pro-SCSI advice on the net, a hang over from days of unreliable IDE chipsets
> and drivers, and before strong error detection brought in with UDMA modes.
OK. Still, IDE suffers far more quickly from 2 devices per channel
whereas you can do a lot with SCSI before it really saturates. OTOH,
with inteligent layout, I should be able to have the hdds as primaries
on each channel and not suffer performance problems. In my usage of the
machines I have now, the hard discs are easily the biggest bottlenecks
in the system even though they're 7200rpm drives.
> > I really doubt I'll be able to
> > afford upgrades or replacement parts over the next 5 years being a
> > student in London. So SCSI on mobo or a seperate card?
>
> If this is the case, I'd do the opposite to what you plan, I'd start with a
> cost effective IDE disk, and upgrade later, when I have the money and take
> advantage of later better price/performance.
> If you are playing around with OSes and programming, with an eye for a
> budget, I'd start with building a mid-end cost effective machine, but with a
> nice monitor and keyboard. The software you're running isn't going to need
> all that much power, and if you are considering programming and OS
> development, you'ld probably be better off with 2 networked cheap machines,
> one for 'work' and the other for builds and/or tests.
Yes, that's what I kinda have now. The problem is when I have to clear
out of hall I really don't want to have to lug 2 machines + monitor with
me (plus everything else). Is there any way I can have 2 mobos inside the
same case? If I use PIIIs rather than Athlon then heat shouldn't be too bad,
no?
> You should also consider backup, RAID 1 really isn't of that much help if
> you're living on the bleeding edge of OS development, and switching OSes, and
> toying with code. It doesn't protect against software corruption of file
> systems, which would be a more common failure.
Simon suggested Hardware Raid but that I guess would also cause problems
if the OS can't drive the card. So I guess that limits to basic IDE with
either a spare redundant drive and daily backups or tape?
Thanks for the advice so far,
Matthew
--Matthew Sackman Nottingham England
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