Build To Order Computer

daArch

Thanks for those links. I already use some of the software as recommended by Spyware Forum when I had a tad of trouble.

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Wallcovering Installations by Bill Archibald|paperhanger|Eastern Mass|Greater Boston Area|Dover|Wellesley|Franklin|Sharon|MA

ProWallGuy

Cool link.

Who can tell me what "raid" is?

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gideond

RAID is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Usually after I get a PC set up the way I want it, I use Acronis True Image to make an image on a set of DVDs so I can restore from the image to exactly how it currently is in about 20-30 minutes. That's for all systems I make. On my own I run Acronis on a regular basis, making a full monthly backup and incremental backups weekly to an external HDD.

daArch

I find that Acronis is very useful too. Tried to get a freind to use in on the kids' computers. They were constantly downloading viruses and other malware, and he would spend hours each month reformating and reconstructing. But alas......

My problem is doing the monthly back-ups - I do however back up computer data regularly on an external HD.

My LUGNUT bro in Houston has talked about RAID often - saying they ought sell HD's in blister packs of 3 or 4 at a discount.

Too much for me. But I wasn't weaned on a punch card.

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Wallcovering Installations by Bill Archibald|paperhanger|Eastern Mass|Greater Boston Area|Dover|Wellesley|Franklin|Sharon|MA

L. B. Condulet

I'd like to highly recommend Newegg as well. Building your own PC will not save money, but you do get exactly what you want.

Also, stay away from Windows Vista. Get XP or maybe switch to a Mac or a Linux machine...

daArch

I am very ready to believe this, but only from a basic mistrust and rumors I've spread.

What are YOUR reasons ?

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Wallcovering Installations by Bill Archibald|paperhanger|Eastern Mass|Greater Boston Area|Dover|Wellesley|Franklin|Sharon|MA

KentWhitten

Oooo, RAID. Now I almost bought one of those high end high RPM drives and someone mentioned to me, stick it in a RAID for speed. I got (4) 250 gb HD's from western digital and placed them all in raid 0, which is iffy. You don't want to be storing all your good data in something like that. One drive goes down and it's all toast.

RAID 0 effectively adds the rpm and disc size. So, (2) 7200 rpm 250 GB hard drives will look like (1) 14400 rpm 500 gb hard drive. Mine is 28800 rpm at 1 terabyte and I tell you, it flies. And for $280, it's not going to be beat for price and speed.

RAID 1 mirrors one drive, so if one fails, then you have the backup data without any sleepless nights. RAID 0, if one drive goes, all your data is lost forever. I back my data up to another computer in our house. I have everything important elsewhere. I use alot of flash drives and backup computers to make sure of my data.

Then there's RAID 5, 10, 50 and JBOD, which I sorta know, but would have to look it up to give you accurate info.

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Custom Cabinetry - Portland, Cape Elizabeth, Scarborough, Kennebunkport, Yarmouth, Falmouth, Cumberland, Ogunquit, Maine

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L. B. Condulet

Vista is *so* annoying. They've arbitrarily reshuffled all the icons so that finding anything is maddening. Tasks that once took 3 mouse clicks now take 5 clicks after hunting in vain for where they used to be.

Being constantly asked if you *really* want to install software is very aggravating.

The new windows explorer interface is deliberately confusing and non-intuitive.

The Start > Run option is no longer available.

Vista is so bad Microsoft is now allowing PC makers to offer computers with Windoze XP (a 5 year old OS).

Driver support / compatibility is still a problem.

Here's 65 more problems:

http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/28/65-more-windows-vista-mistakes/

daArch

Your reasons are much more pertinent than those 65...er....67 of that whiner.

I mean come on. Here's a sampling:

Are these real ISSUES ??? Or a poor attempt of Micr$haft bashing ? I think Gates published this so people would think, "are these the only issues people have?"

The last one is a PLUS. I use Opera, which loads PAINFULLY slow on Win2K. Maybe on Vista it will be good

I will give it a try, and if needs be, dump it and load win2K. I've never been a fan of XP and from what I've heard, XP is just Vista-lite But thank-you for the input. Your opinions are helpful.

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Wallcovering Installations by Bill Archibald|paperhanger|Eastern Mass|Greater Boston Area|Dover|Wellesley|Franklin|Sharon|MA

GregS

That's kinda one way of looking at it, but not entirely accurate.

The easiest way of saying it is it can read from 4 drives at once to bring your data in, instead of just 1. In theory it should increase your throughput by the number of drives you have. nDrives*throughput

In reality, there are a number of other things that come into play when you start trying to organize data coming from multiple drives at once instead of just 1. It will plateau at a certain point.

Anyways,

RAID0 will offer some increases in speed, but it increases your probability for data loss with each additional drive you add.

RAID1 will reduce your probability for data loss. It adds redundant drives to the system so in the event that one fails, the other presumably is still working fine. It will be faster than 1 drive for reading, but slower than 1 drive for writing since it has to write the same data multiple times.

RAID5 is somewhat of a balance between the above and employs some pretty cool math.

Then you can mix the above. Have two identical RAID0 arrays in a RAID1 setup.

I have a number of SCSI RAID cards if anyone is interested

Mike Finley

Okay, I know all your computer guys like to 'nerd out' with all this raid stuff, but seriously...

How about the Windows XP back up setting that comes free with XP?

You set it to back up what you want once a month, once a week, daily, hourly... tell it to back up to an external drive, a networked drive, a second drive on your computer...

What am I missing for why you wouldn't just do that before going to all this raid headaches?

Let me have it if I'm missing some super obvious downfall to the Back up feature of XP.

GregS

Typically people have one hard-drive in their computer. This computer not only contains all their data, but it's also their system drive that has Windows on it.

Using the method you mentioned, if your hard-drive were to stop working, your system stops working. You would then have get a new system drive, re-install Windows, and then copy your data back on from the backup drive.

With a redundant drive system (RAID1) if one of the drives die, you still have an identical mirror of the entire hard-drive, system and data, that you can still run from without any significant down time.

L. B. Condulet

You can buy inexpensive motherboards with built in RAID. SCSI drives are not required.

Mike Finley

Right, but we aren't talking about a single hard drive. If you're going to a raid you're installing multiples in your computer or on another one. That's why I'm asking instead of going to a raid why not just use the built in back up feature in XP and buy either 1 more internal drive, or back it up to an existing networked drive on another computer or a very inexpensive external hard drive. Seems cheaper and just as effective as going to all the trouble and expense of setting up a raid array.

When you are comparing the two I can't see the raid being anymore effective or less expensive.

Yes, from the pespective of a hard drive failure on your main system the raid system would be easier to get back up and running.

But in 20 years and at least 10 different computers I've never had a single hard drive ever fail. I can't realistically believe the average contractor is really concerned with a total system failure which is temporary as long as you can recover your historical data that has been backed up. My concern is always historical data, my business data, my customer files, my accounting files. If my system crashed due to a hardware failure I can get it back running in 24 hours or so, as long as all my data is somewhere else that's really the only realistic concern.

KentWhitten

It does happen though. You may be a very lucky person. If you have a hard drive that makes a ticking noise, it's going to be any time now. It can be ever so slight of a noise. I've had one go like this and it still works, but not for very much longer.

Windows backup is fine, I've never used it or tried it out. Maybe I should, but I just save my stuff when I close or save, not really needing to backup regularly, I just back up as I go. then about once a month, I just copy a folder to another place.

RAID 1 what they say is that you really need not worry about it. it's mirrored. One drive goes, open up the case, wire the second one where the first one goes and you're back up and running.....in a general sense. Course there's more to it than that.

Building Homes is right, I just didn't want to throw in any more confusing stuff is all. Hard drives all have a throughput that will bottleneck things along with a few other "hey, this helps or hurts performance" type things. I should have said theoretically, not essentially. I'm screwing words up lately. I should keep my dictionary handy or my mouth shut.

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Custom Cabinetry - Portland, Cape Elizabeth, Scarborough, Kennebunkport, Yarmouth, Falmouth, Cumberland, Ogunquit, Maine

Salmon Falls Cabinetry

A W Smith

over the years Ive had a maxtor fail and a western digital that was in a raid 0 array fail. I pulled that array out and still have the good drive and the failed drive. No way I know of to recover that data. it was part of two separate raid arrays i have on this comp. I replaced with a single drive with twice the storage. I don't think I will be going back to raid again when I build my next computer. it seemed fast but over the curse of many updates this p4 2.2 system and its on-board raid has slowed down I have had to change the power supply as it failed about a year and a half after I built it. This is one of two computers that are never shut down in our house. the other three are booted when needed. It was cutting edge when i built it years ago. at the time the fastest processor in the market. since then I have lost track of the market and what actually would be a cutting edge computer now days especially with the change in marketing processor speed.

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daArch

OK, while I have the attention of all you who have far more experience than I with these beige boxes, I got a question. I understand it may be difficult to answer without full diagnosis, but I'd appreciate a stab at it ..... and I won't hold you to the answer.

To start, one reason I just bought another computer is that the one I was GOING to move onto in my new office just died. And i'm not talking HD failure.

It was a Dimension 8100 that I saved from disposal by another. Shipped out in may, 2001. Hard drive was fried. I replaced it with a Hitachi Deskstar 160. And I put a few more $$$ into it, like 1 Gig of the expensive RDRAM and a 16X DVD dual layer burner. It was running good.

Processor is a P-4 1.3 Ghz

I was using it off and on as a spare. No problems.

Then, couple of weeks ago, I had some minor issues when booting, mainly no mouse or keyboard, but re-boot would fix it. Then I got a couple of weird error notices on boot up - did not write them down.
THEN, no display at all during boot up. No signal to monitor, not even briefly. I went to another computer on the network, and no indication the 8100 was on-line. A few lights DO show on the mother board, DVD drive will open, HD spins, and fans work.

Anyone have any idea of what died?

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Wallcovering Installations by Bill Archibald|paperhanger|Eastern Mass|Greater Boston Area|Dover|Wellesley|Franklin|Sharon|MA

GregS

You have been extremely lucky then. Hard-drives are one of the few mechanical devices inside a computer and all mechanics wear down over time. There isn't any sort of maintenance or anything that you can do to a hard-drive to prolong its life other than just leave it turned off.

I've probably had a dozen drives die on me in the last 10 years. Along with countless others in my professional computer career.

The last job I had was as a project manager for a tech company and one of the things we did was make external hard-drives. We had hundreds of drives at any one time just going through testing. And at least 1 of every model died somewhere along the way.

If I need to keep it, I RAID it. If I really need to keep it, it goes on a CD and into the safe.

GregS

Any beeps?

Try making sure all the cards are firmly seated in their slots.

A W Smith

DeArch try re-seating the memory. also make sure the cpu cooling fan is working along with any fan on the graphics card.

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Al Smith
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