Quad Core On Its Way !

[mcowger]

Originally Posted by rugby

I take it you're single....

Nope, but she feels the same way about TV - she didn't even have a TV at all before she met me.

[Joey Z]

Well it came in at around 2 this afternoon. All I have to say is WOW. this thing is HUGE! the XPS case is rather large, but not that bad. Ill try to have some pics up this week. I have 6 USB2's and a 500 on it, cant wait for the new season to start up to get this thing running fullblast. Quad core is OVERKILL to say the least, heh. I have officially named it Diablo.

[Joey Z]

So here are some pics, screen cap, and a pic of the monster itself ~!

[Rich A]

We've had this Raid zero reliabilty debate many times in the past.

If you have two 250 GB drives in a RAID zero array and one dies you loose everything.

So what?

If you have ONE 500 GB drive and it dies you STILL loose everything.

That analogy brought up some heavy debate about probability.

Anyway, my HTPC hit three years this past May running a raid 0 for my storage .. that's 24/7 365 days non-stop for three years. Well yes the PC WAS turned off to change a video card or add memory a few times.

Let's face it. A drive is going to fail at some point. And it doesn't make any difference whether it's running by itself or in a RAID array. The probabilty of failure is still the same. Don't worry .. be happy.

[Zaap]

Originally Posted by Rich A

We've had this Raid zero reliabilty debate many times in the past.

If you have two 250 GB drives in a RAID zero array and one dies you loose everything.

So what?

If you have ONE 500 GB drive and it dies you STILL loose everything.

That's a good way of looking at it.

It seems to me, that once one has gone with RAID 0, they should just think of the two hard drives as if they were physically one as well as just acting that way.

Another way of looking at data loss: does it really matter if inside an individual drive, one of 5 internal platters fails, thus effectively taking down the other 4 as well?

Why is dividing up the risk of data loss in a RAID 0 setup by the individual drives any more logical than fretting over the internal platters of a single drive?

[Joey Z]

I might be on the wrong track but here is how I look at the RAID setup.

I look at the RAID 0 setup the same, The Two drive as One. The RAID 0 is my main drive for new shows, I am doing about 6-8 shows at one time, and when the season ramps up it will be more like 12-15. I will also have 4 or 5 users + pulling shows at almost the same time every day. I am looking at the RAID 0 for speed, redundancy is not an issue for me on that setup. The reason I say that is because I also have a RAID 1 array that backups the shows on a daily basis. If my RAID 0 array fails I have only lost one day of data.

I might have to look at a better setup in the future for backups as I am going to need to store about 3,000 hrs of shows per year. RAID 5 maybe ?

[Cal]

Yes, there was a big reliability debate about it.

Heres how I look at it. I don't care about what the exact odds are. At some point your going to lose a drive.

If you don't care about losing a bunch of show then don't worry about it.

I've lost shows before. Yes its only TV but its still not something you want to have happen.

My Take...... go with Raid 5 and then don't worry about it. Hard drives are fast enough that there is no need to sacrifice protection for performance.

[k33p0u7]

RAID 0 is okay...as long as you understand the risks.....main point whether you have a single drive, 2 drives in RAID 0 or 3 drives in RAID 5 is BACKUP all critical data (if you consider your TV recordings as critical be sure to back those up as well)....test your backup files...a backup is only as good as it's restore success, so you should test your files and make sure they aren't corrupted....also...I make 2 copies of my backups (I also run 2 250GB drives in RAID 0)...I keep one at home and one off site in my office....if my house burns down than my files are still saved in my copy at work....another tip for using drives in a RAID array is to use the same make and model, but make sure the lot numbers are different....if you use drives with the same lot numbers than you risk a greater chance of RAID failure (even in RAID 5)...the reason being is that they usually use the same hardware within lot numbers and if there was a problem with one of the hardware components than there is a greater chance of failure....choosing drives from different lot numbers reduces the risk of hardware failure

[jbartlett777]

I have four 500 GB drives in a stripped/mirror RAID. 1 TB of data and no parity slowdowns and still get redundancy.

[jbartlett777]

Oh yeah, I *HAVE* to have redundancy. I have this thing about frying hard drives. I have a stack of drives six high next to my desk that are all bad and five of those drives failed less than one year after manufacture date. Just being within three feet of me cuts the life-span to about a 10th of the duration. Drives that are more than 10 feet away have lasted years.

Buying the no-questions-asked warranties have been worth gold to me.

I even have backups for my backups.

[myktek]

Originally Posted by jbartlett777

Oh yeah, I *HAVE* to have redundancy. I have this thing about frying hard drives. I have a stack of drives six high next to my desk that are all bad and five of those drives failed less than one year after manufacture date. Just being within three feet of me cuts the life-span to about a 10th of the duration. Drives that are more than 10 feet away have lasted years.

Buying the no-questions-asked warranties have been worth gold to me.

I even have backups for my backups.

you do know these drive manufacturers have warranty right?

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by jbartlett777

Oh yeah, I *HAVE* to have redundancy. I have this thing about frying hard drives. I have a stack of drives six high next to my desk that are all bad and five of those drives failed less than one year after manufacture date. Just being within three feet of me cuts the life-span to about a 10th of the duration. Drives that are more than 10 feet away have lasted years.

Buying the no-questions-asked warranties have been worth gold to me.

I even have backups for my backups.

Wow, that's some bad Karma there. FWIW in the almost 30 years I've been involved with the computer industry I can count on two hands the number of bad drives I've had. And we are talking about several hundred drives a year. That being said .. I should point out that includes drives we sold, and replaced. The replacements were for upgrades AND replacement of bad drives .. but the bad drives we replaced were not ones we sold. Like I said, out of thousands of drives we installed, less than a dozen or so have failed.

Of course to be honest, we don't know about the ones that may have failed and not come back to us. I would expect that to be rare however as most of our service and sales are corporate and they certainly track their warranties. We only deal in Seagate and Western Digital by the way.

We track our serial numbers too. In fact a customer came in with his personal computer that had a non-drive related problem. During our testing we found the hard drive was sold by us but NOT to him. Seems that where he works, they upgraded the office computers and gave the old ones to the employees. Pretty cool. A second generation owner ... And the drive was still humming along albeit small capacity by todays standards.

[Joey Z]

hey all. After a few weeks of designing the setup of our new BTV server, waiting for the parts to come, and waiting for DirecTV to install, ITS 95% DONE !

here is my 15 Tuner DirectTV totally automated system.

[queonda]

OMG, can you do a price breakdown. Is this for a business?

[Jakesty]

You should talk to George H. His company was going to pay someone big bucks just to configure something like that. Of course he'll say that you have some kind of a problem with your setup.