Updating the 'puter for hardcore ownage

[Nystul]

My PSU is not modular. The 520W Corsair is, but also popular and quite a bit more expensive. My cable management is pretty good for how little care I put into it. Most of the excess is crammed behind the back plate.

[Bevock]

I have not been looking at any gaming systems recently but I will probably looking at a new system around the end of the year when my system is three years old.

I had always been a Western Digital Hard drive fan but a number of years back I went over to Seagate because in the States the warranty is much longer. Almost all the Seagate drives have a five year warrantly where the WD's tended to be three years and some models only one.

I would also look for boards that have raid drive ability built in. Last September I got some simple 965G Intel chipset board for work so for the cost of one more hard drive I got backup all the time.

[--Pete]

Hi,

I found a few things in your post mildly amusing, but then I'm easily amused.;) First was the juxtaposition of:

. . . I will probably looking at a new system around the end of the year when my system is three years old.

and

. . . Almost all the Seagate drives have a five year warrantly where the WD's tended to be three years . . .

If you get rid of three year old systems, then what does a five year warranty buy you? And have you ever actually had a HD fail specifically in the 4th or 5th year? Just wondering, since to me the warranty, like customer support, and installation instructions, are non-issues when it comes to HDs. I'm much more interested in the numbers, including the price. Of the dozens of HDs I've bought over the years, the only one that had to be replaced was a Seagate. Do I give them points for good, rapid customer support? Or deduct points because that support was necessary in the first place -- I don't know the customer support quality of Maxtor, IBM, WD, and a few I've probably forgotten because I've never needed it.

I would also look for boards that have raid drive ability built in. Last September I got some simple 965G Intel chipset board for work so for the cost of one more hard drive I got backup all the time.

Sports car vs. dump truck. A game system is all about speed, a business system is about reliability. When I decided to go SATA RAID on my last pair of game systems, I went RAID-0 to get the throughput increase. If either of those systems end up in our business, I'll redo that system as RAID-1 for the reliability. However, I do agree that RAID capability on the motherboard is a plus to look for, although with the availability of cheap (<$100US for 500gB) external hard drives, backup, especially for a game machine, is not a major consideration IMO.

--Pete

[Concillian]

Of the dozens of HDs I've bought over the years, the only one that had to be replaced was a Seagate. Do I give them points for good, rapid customer support? Or deduct points because that support was necessary in the first place -- I don't know the customer support quality of Maxtor, IBM, WD, and a few I've probably forgotten because I've never needed it.

Some hard drives fail. It doesn't really matter the brand. If you get a failure, you're just unlucky. Consumer level hard drives have a higher failure rate than business class drives, it's engineered in... or rather they don't go through the same series of reliability testing or have the same DPPM criteria.

Sports car vs. dump truck. A game system is all about speed, a business system is about reliability. When I decided to go SATA RAID on my last pair of game systems, I went RAID-0 to get the throughput increase. If either of those systems end up in our business, I'll redo that system as RAID-1 for the reliability. However, I do agree that RAID capability on the motherboard is a plus to look for, although with the availability of cheap (<$100US for 500gB) external hard drives, backup, especially for a game machine, is not a major consideration IMO.

I don't really like built in raid for a few reasons:
1) they are software RAID systems, not a huge deal in the day and age where processor speed mostly doesn't matter, even for games.
2) Your points of failure to cause great complexity with retrieving data goes up by about a factor of *10*.

Consider that if your motherboard fails you need to replace it with the same board, or a board with the same onboard raid chip (do you ever see the RAID chip brand and model number on a motherboard box?). If your CPU or motherboard fails after warrantee, you would normally use that as an excuse to upgrade, but if you're chained to getting your RAID back up and running in order to get your data off first, well, you lose that as an option.
3) Any "real life" benchmarks (like booting time, or loading a level of a game) show VERY small gains from running RAID0. My own experience with RAID 5 seems to be in line with that.

I used to run a raid 5 system on my file server. A drive failed and all was good, the RAID kept running. It turned out a re-seat of the connector was all that was necessary, but still it was nice to be able to fix it at my leisure instead of having an issue right then and there.

Since then, I've moved to a different system of always buying 3 drives when I buy for my file server. One for main drive, one to set up a cron job to do incremental backups every night and one to plug into the USB every month, then take to work in case my house burns down.

In this day and age, my life revolves around digital information. I lose an un-backed-up hard drive, I lose my baby's pictures, important information about my dead grandmother and other thing the likes of which cannot possibly be replaced.

I guess I should mention that I work for a hard drive company, but I buy my drives just like everyone else because our employee purchase program gets them down to about the same price as mail ordered from a hardware site.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Some hard drives fail. It doesn't really matter the brand. If you get a failure, you're just unlucky.

Yep. And I doubt that the length of the warranty has much correlation with the drive failure rate. Especially since most failures are early onset or end of life (often assumed to fit a Weibull distribution).

Consumer level hard drives have a higher failure rate than business class drives, it's engineered in... or rather they don't go through the same series of reliability testing or have the same DPPM criteria.

"If you want prime oats, you've gotta pay the price. If you don't care that they've been through the horse, you can get them cheaper." :)

I don't really like built in raid for a few reasons:
1) they are software RAID systems, not a huge deal in the day and age where processor speed mostly doesn't matter, even for games.

Interesting. if you could, would you expand this or give a readable link or two. I guess I fell into the trap that all RAID was pretty much created equal. Since one of the things on my plate is building a server, and I was planing to incorporate RAID0+1 or RAID5, your implication that there are different RAID solutions with trade-offs between them is something I probably should check out.

2) Your points of failure to cause great complexity with retrieving data goes up by about a factor of *10*.

Consider that if your motherboard fails you need to replace it with the same board, or a board with the same onboard raid chip (do you ever see the RAID chip brand and model number on a motherboard box?).

Addressing your last question first, yes I do see those data on ASUS motherboard specs. I can't say specifically on the box, not having an ASUS box handy. More to the point, I think, is finding something with that chip set years after the original purchase.

If your CPU or motherboard fails after warrantee, you would normally use that as an excuse to upgrade, but if you're chained to getting your RAID back up and running in order to get your data off first, well, you lose that as an option.

Interesting. Again, I was under the impression that a RAID1 setup would normally be rebuild-able under any RAID controller since there is no striping involved.

3) Any "real life" benchmarks (like booting time, or loading a level of a game) show VERY small gains from running RAID0. My own experience with RAID 5 seems to be in line with that.

About all that is left *is* small gains. In the early '80s, improvements were of the 4X, 10X, and bigger jumps (consider going from the 4.bahbahbah MHz 8088 of the PC to the <strike>20</strike> 12MHz 80286 of the AT). Not even in graphics processing do we see such great improvements anymore.

In this day and age, my life revolves around digital information. I lose an un-backed-up hard drive, I lose my baby's pictures, important information about my dead grandmother and other thing the likes of which cannot possibly be replaced.

Exactly. Except for games, I don't generate that much data, but I do the weekly incremental, the monthly full, and for irreplaceable info, the archive to disk in a fireproof vault in the storage room. To me, that is the boundary between security and paranoia;)

--Pete

[Concillian]

Interesting. if you could, would you expand this or give a readable link or two. I guess I fell into the trap that all RAID was pretty much created equal. Since one of the things on my plate is building a server, and I was planing to incorporate RAID0+1 or RAID5, your implication that there are different RAID solutions with trade-offs between them is something I probably should check out.

Processing demands for Raid 0 or 1 are minimal, when you talk RAID 5, you have to calculate the parity bit and that takes more horsepower. You can probably find some hardware vs. software RAID comparisons at storagereview.com

Interesting. Again, I was under the impression that a RAID1 setup would normally be rebuild-able under any RAID controller since there is no striping involved.

I'm not sure about RAID1. People using onboard RAID are most usually interested in RAID 0.

About all that is left *is* small gains. In the early '80s, improvements were of the 4X, 10X, and bigger jumps (consider going from the 4.bahbahbah MHz 8088 of the PC to the <strike>20</strike> 12MHz 80286 of the AT). Not even in graphics processing do we see such great improvements anymore.

Yeah, but my point is that you have to consider the gain with the tradeoff in reliability from adding more parts to the failure chain (1 more drive, plus a motherboard that you may or may not be able to replace, plus a processor that when it fails you may have to replace to get at your data before you can upgrade).

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc...i=2974&p=5

shows that rel world performance when loading a gaming level is typically less than 1 second difference. Excuse me if I don't run out and buy drives to run RAID 0. FPS improvements from graphics cards are certainly quite a bit more significant than this, and I'd argue significantly more useful to the end user.

[--Pete]

Hi,

Processing demands for Raid 0 or 1 are minimal, when you talk RAID 5, you have to calculate the parity bit and that takes more horsepower. You can probably find some hardware vs. software RAID comparisons at storagereview.com

OK. Thanks. My error was in thinking that all RAID controllers would use hardware parity and striping, especially since the components for these functions are simple, cheap, and ancient. Guess I've got some homework to do.

. . . shows that rel world performance when loading a gaming level is typically less than 1 second difference.

However, the same review shows that in other file transfer applications, the difference can be quite large, with RAID0 coming close to its theoretical two-to-one improvement in DVD burning and file unpacking and file moving applications. Looking over the test results, it appears that in many of the applications tested, including the game loads, the program was performing some other function to soak up time while accessing the disk. Thus, the test became one of the speed of the other, non-disk, function.

As to the additional cost of RAID0, I really don't see much there. All quality motherboards seem to retail for very similar prices (perhaps $40US difference top to bottom). The cost of two drives is about the same as the cost of one twice as large. For all but the lowest cost systems, RAID0 doesn't appear to be that big a percent differential. A modular power supply will often make a bigger price difference, giving in return nothing that a few cable ties and some technique doesn't do as well. But, of course, that's my opinion, others will see it differently;)

--Pete

[DeeBye]

I don't really like built in raid for a few reasons:
1) they are software RAID systems, not a huge deal in the day and age where processor speed mostly doesn't matter, even for games.
2) Your points of failure to cause great complexity with retrieving data goes up by about a factor of *10*.

I've been reading about RAID and decided against it for much the same reasons, and the fact that you have to hope that whatever takes out one drive doesn't also kill the other. RAID offers a level of redundancy, but shouldn't be used for true backup.

[kandrathe]

I've been reading about RAID and decided against it for much the same reasons, and the fact that you have to hope that whatever takes out one drive doesn't also kill the other. RAID offers a level of redundancy, but shouldn't be used for true backup.

It can also add IO speed when you stripe data over multiple spindles. This is most important for data intensive applications, so not too much concern for gamers. This summer for my work we are implementing 6 iSCSI 16x1TB units in a raid 5 configuration for an application, and speed is a big factor, with reliability and recoverability being 2nd. We are mirroring entire enclosures using DFS, so we'll end up with about 45TB of storage which will never need backup.

[DeeBye]

It can also add IO speed when you stripe data over multiple spindles. This is most important for data intensive applications, so not too much concern for gamers. This summer for my work we are implementing 6 iSCSI 16x1TB units in a raid 5 configuration for an application, and speed is a big factor, with reliability and recoverability being 2nd. We are mirroring entire enclosures using DFS, so we'll end up with about 45TB of storage which will never need backup.

I guess I should have added "... for the average home user.":)

When I want to backup data, I have a 500GB external USB drive and big ol' stack of blank DVDs :P

[kandrathe]

I guess I should have added "... for the average home user.":)

When I want to backup data, I have a 500GB external USB drive and big ol' stack of blank DVDs :P

:) Oh, yeah, the average home user. Me? I have a fileserver, a DB server, and a mess of PC's around. But, I use most of them for work projects.

[DeeBye]

:) Oh, yeah, the average home user. Me? I have a fileserver, a DB server, and a mess of PC's around. But, I use most of them for work projects.

I use my computer to play games and post on the internet:(

[kandrathe]

I use my computer to play games and post on the internet:(

Slacker!

[DeeBye]

Slacker!

Sometimes I use it to send emails to my mom :wub:

[Concillian]

:) Oh, yeah, the average home user. Me? I have a fileserver, a DB server, and a mess of PC's around. But, I use most of them for work projects.

Yeah, you sound like me.

I have 7 computers in my house that can boot right now. One is owned by my employer though. When you get that many machines, you pretty much have to go with some form of fileserver.

Once you have some form of fileserver up though, devices like a squeezebox or media PC at your TV are freaking cool.

[Bevock]

If you can choose between two hard drive (both are very good) for the same price, performance and size why not buy the one with the 5 year warranty instead of the 3 year one?

I've been looking after a small work group for about 20 years and I've only seem a handful of hard drives fail. It is just that as they have gotten bigger they don't seem to last as long.

Unless the guys (it was actually a girl) at Intel lied the Raid 1 actually goes faster than a single drive. I only use it for data protection. You can set up 0 and 1 partions on two drive so you can get the big speed improvement if you want.

[--Pete]

Hi,

If you can choose between two hard drive (both are very good) for the same price, performance and size why not buy the one with the 5 year warranty instead of the 3 year one?

Quite right. If everything else is the same, then by all means go for the longer warranty. The thing is, in my experience, *everything* is not the same. For instance, I just checked newegg for 500gB HD. I used the filter: Home > Computer Hardware > Hard Drives > Internal Hard Drives (x) > Capacity : 400GB - 750GB (x) > Capacity : 500GB (x) > Interface : SATA 3.0Gb/s (x) > RPM : 7200 RPM (x) > Price : $75 - $100 (x) and got (1-9 of 9 Results). When I added 32MB cache, it narrowed it down to one HD (Seagate, as it happened). Warranty never entered the question. That's pretty typical.

I'm much more likely to base my selection on the user reviews, although they are almost always useless and lame;)

--Pete

[DeeBye]

Warranty never entered the question.

The thing about hard drive warranties is that it protects the drive (which is fairly cheap anyways), and obviously not the irreplaceable data. The length of an offered warranty doesn't mean that the drive is going to last longer, it just means that you can get a new drive if yours fails. Big deal - the data is still gone.

If a >3 year old drive fails, it's usually time to upgrade to a bigger and faster drive anyways. I base my drive purchases on personal experience and reviews from reputable sources. And honestly, the most known drive manufacturers like Seagate/WD/Maxtor all produce pretty much equal drives in terms of quality. Everyone always has anecdotal evidence that one is superior to the others, but I bet that the overall failure rates are fairly equal.

Google did a big study about drive failure rate a few years back, but didn't release the statistics of the brand names. I bet that study would be worth a lot of money to marketing people.

I wonder how well a company could do by selling absolute bottom of the barrel crap drives with stupidly long warranties priced about 10% below the competition. Informed people would not buy them, but I'd bet they would sell like hotcakes.

[kandrathe]

If a >3 year old drive fails, it's usually time to upgrade to a bigger and faster drive anyways. I base my drive purchases on personal experience and reviews from reputable sources. And honestly, the most known drive manufacturers like Seagate/WD/Maxtor all produce pretty much equal drives in terms of quality. Everyone always has anecdotal evidence that one is superior to the others, but I bet that the overall failure rates are fairly equal.

Anecdote. I buy Seagate because they are local here in Minneapolis area (a former branch of CDC), and I knew/know many engineers that work there. There have been times when we've had a drive fail in an important server, and after a phone call a Seagate engineer would drive a new one over. It's a luxury to be able to buy the local brew, but they like it when we are brand loyal. I buy PC's every year for work in the thousands, so I've seen lots of failures. It's usually an entire batch that has like a 10% failure rate. The last time we had a bad batch it was Maxtor drives, which does tend to taint your opinion of them for awhile. The thing to remember is that HD are like light bulbs (following a Poisson distribution), some burn out early, some last along time, but most have a defined life that is measured in the industry as MTBF (mean time between failures). Unless you buy enterprise class equipment you won't find the MTBF as the manufacturers don't publish those numbers for consumer grade equipment.

I've been very happy with Seagate, and I think they make a quality product. But, I'm sure some people have been burned too.

[--Pete]

Hi,

. . . (following a Poisson distribution) . . .

Small nit, that should be the Weibull distribution. Or one of its relatives. The Poisson just doesn't do it.

--Pete