Sunday, October 08, 2006

Damocles Still Hanging Around


Spent the weekend on the construction of a new server. Objective was to build a system with large RAID 1 space for archiving, that would also double as a fast render engine for Truespace. System was speced out to inlcude:
  • Thermaktake Tsunami VA3000BWA
  • ASUS A8N5X w/ nForce4 Mobo
  • AMD Athlon 64 processor 3200
  • Thermaltake CL-P0200 Silent 939 K8 CPU Cooler
  • Radion X1600 Pr PCIe 512M Graphics Card
  • Corsair XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
  • SilverStone Strider ST60F 600watt PSU w/ modular cables
  • Seagate ST3200822A-RK 200 GB ATA Internal Hard Drive (IDE Master)
  • 2 x Seagate 500 GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATA Internal Hard Drive (500Gb Raid 1)
  • Pioneer DVD R/W (Reclaimed from another system)
The 200Gb IDE drive is the boot drive. The two 500Gb Barracuda's are built into a single RAID 1 array. I went overkill on the Strider PSU. 600w is way more than I need right now. I do, however, expect to add two more 500Gb SATA drives to take total capacity to 1Tb RAID 1. I will also take the PATA drive space up to 500Gb. The lights on the the Corsair RAM are cool + I really like the ASUS mobo - it's temperature monitoring and fan management is nifty. Oh yeah - I also went overboard on the CPU cooler -- it's just that there is no way I can trust the crap cooler that AMD ships with the processor + I plan to do a little overclocking....

Oh the name of the new system is Damocles - hence the title of this post. Move along now.

29 October 2006 Update: Added 2 x 320Gb SATA drives last week. Configured as RAID 1. System is now 720Gb RAID 1 (give or take a Gb). Total disk space in the cabinet is 1.84Tb. And to think, the first PC I had with a hard disk was an IBM PC XT with a whopping 10Mb drive.