Quad Core On Its Way !

[LionRed]

Would love to see some pictures of the setup....internal...external.

How do you have these HD's setup? Raid? or dynamic disk? Is this beast for a house or an apartment building?

[Joey Z]

Originally Posted by LionRed

Would love to see some pictures of the setup....internal...external.

How do you have these HD's setup? Raid? or dynamic disk? Is this beast for a house or an apartment building?

Hey Lion,
This unit is for a business that works in the entertainment sector. I really cant give anymore pictures than are already in this thread, due to client wishes.

The Raid was originally set up as one large RAID 5 with a HotSpare. It was changed over to 3 separate RAID 5 volumes(3.62TB if i remember). This was done because in order to use one large volume some workarounds had to be done with the current controller card that was used, and it was not worth loosing data over issues that might occur due to the workaround. Getting a different controller card would have solved this but the client could deal with 3 volumes.

[TomasDR]

Originally Posted by Joey Z

Dell XPS 710:
Intel® Core™2 Extreme QX6700 (8MB L2 Cache,2.66GHz,1066 FSB)
Operating System:
Genuine Windows® XP Professional with re-installation CD WPXP
Memory:
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz - 4 DIMMs 4GB64
Hard Drive:
1.5TB Performance RAID 0 (2 x 750GB SATA 3Gb/s 7200 RPM HDDs)
2nd Hard Drive:
500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™ 500SB Optical Drive:
3rd Hard Drive
1 TB Seagate ES
Dual Drives: 48x Combo + 16x DVD+/-RW w/ dbl layer write capable COM6DVR
Video Cards:
768MB nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX NV8800
Sound Cards:
Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ XtremeMusic (D) Sound Card XFI
1 Kilowatt Power Supply
15 Hauppague USB2 DVR's
15 Direct TV D-12 300 boxes

Originally Posted by btvfreak

Agreed. How do you control each of the boxes? Serial cable? If so, then did you need to use the DTV serial control hack? Please give us the details of how you control each box. That system is insane!

Yes could you please give more details on controlling the STBs. I am possibly getting DirecTV and while it won't be the beast you have I will still have 6 STBs.

Any specifics you can give on the serial/usb cards you have installed in the system to control the STBs would be greatly appreciated.

Also you mentioned in a previous post in this thread you wouldn't use USB2s again, what would you suggest?

Thank you

[Savage1701]

FWIW, I use RAID 6 for all wife's shows...You can't put a price on data integrity in that regard...

[Nick Burns]

However, RAID is no substitute for a good backup.

[LionRed]

Originally Posted by Nick Burns

However, RAID is no substitute for a good backup.

What is a good backup...reasonably backup for home users.

I use Raid 10, which is suppose to be a mirror image of the other drive. Family pictures and home movies are on a 3rd stand alone drive. I guess the only best form of back up is....don't put anything on a computer

[blaze818]

i love my AMD phenom II, amd's new quadcores and even the phenom II triple core rocks. im glad that i found this thread im currently thinking about putting my recorded show drives in RAID 0, and putting a 150GB velociraptor in for the OS. ive upgraded everything else on my system but the hard drives. im thinking about formatting the recorded show drive with 64kb clusters. anyone have any input on cluster size for recorded show drives?

does anyone have any thoughts on what i should do about copying my os drive to the new veloiraptor. i was thinking about finding a program that will make a copy of the old os onto the new drive, but i want to make sure i wont mess anything up going from my WD 250 SATA II drive to the WD velociraptor with the same old OS.

[LionRed]

Hirons Boot Disk...Norton Ghost to copy. Is what I use.

Raid 0 for storage...ummm I wouldn't suggest using raid 0...maybe raid 1. If one hard drive goes (in a raid 0 setup), you losing everything! Unless that doesn't matter to you?

[blaze818]

losing everything is not a problem, i have a server i save shows to, so i am only going for performance. thanks for the ideas, i just downloaded norton ghost, here we go...

*edit*
copied the hd and told it to copy the mbr and when i boot it will get stuck on the win xp screen. im kinda at a loss, gonna try another program to copy the hd

[Jakesty]

At work we have purchased maybe 8 of the 150gb Raptor drives with the window that shows the platters over different times. Within the past couple of months 3 have failed.
Hopefully your velociraptor will last better. Although start up should be faster, in reality not that much really happens on the OS drive. Now you're right about the RAID 0 array. It will perform crazy fast especially when you need it like compressing. Otherwise a standard 7200 drive can record multiple streams of HD and SD as well as playback that the speed is not a factor.

At work we got 7 machines all the same and they included WD Velociraptor 300gb except for mine which had a simple 1TB Seagate ST31000340NS. I built one system and ghosted it to each of the computers. The 1TB drive actually ghosted faster than each of the Velociraptor drives, about 10% faster. This is a very small test, and I would hope the WD drive would kick the Seagates ass, but it goes to show you that this simple 7200 rpm drive which was even cheaper performed very well. The Seagate drive is also a Network/enterprise drive I believe so it should have a longer life expectancy.

[jbartlett777]

Originally Posted by LionRed

I use Raid 10, which is suppose to be a mirror image of the other drive.

I'm known for killing drives. Any drive within arms reach of me has it's lifespan reduced to less than a year. That said, I'm a firm believer in RAIDs and backups.

My main PC had a RAID 10 (4x500 GB). However, I had a drive failed and after replacing it, the controller started to rebuild it - until it got to 70% when the controller detected an error on the existing drive and stopped.

Fortunately, the bad spot was in a system recovery file so I backed up everything again and reinstalled Windows on a new set of four 1.5TB drives.

After noticing that disc defragmenting was starting to REALLY slow down, I decided to do the app/data drive setup with 638 GB set to the app drive, 855 GB set to the data drive, and I partitioned out 100 GB as a temp drive where I store my downloaded files, browser cache directories, and the windows Temp directory.

[blaze818]

one thing i dont understand about RAID is, when you get a new mobo can you keep the old RAID arrays setup even with the new mobo and cpu?

[LionRed]

Originally Posted by blaze818

one thing i dont understand about RAID is, when you get a new mobo can you keep the old RAID arrays setup even with the new mobo and cpu?

From what I have read/understand. MB with newer Intel raid chips are backwards compatible with older intel raid chip. I can say as well....I moved a intel raid to a newer MB with intel raid ..justin the last 6 months and was pleasantly surprised to see my raid show up.

I had a raid 10 fail as well (one of the HD was bad). But the HD flagged as bad...wasn't the bad drive and rebuild failed a couple times =(
I also think the HighPoint Raid card didn't help. Things just snowballed from here.
Finally...thinking ahhhh crap lost the data. Imagine my surprise as I hooked one of the drives from the array to another windows system....windows on boot...says blah blah needs to be repaired hit anykey to skip. I let windows repair...poof I get into windows...my data shows up on said drive as just normal everyday files. Which made sense ...as the drives were just mirror images...nothing fancy about how the data was backed up.

I only use Raid 10's from my data...the OS for each system (except my gaming rig) is a stand alone drive. For each system the OS drive has been ghosted to 3 smaller 30-40GB drives. These ghosted drives are of fresh installs of windows/windows patches/the programs ...I would normally install on a fresh install of windows.
Once I knew said install/system is a stable computer.....they got ghosted...then they got put on the shelf.

[blaze818]

so i ended up keeping the velociraptor out of the BTV system and just kept the WD SATA II, and put my two WD 250gb into RAID 0 for recording. everything is working fine, i think i found my bottleneck since i can now run 3d acceleration with no prob. and i dont even know if your drives I/O has anything to do with that.

[Joey Z]

glad to see this thread still active.

Well the place that I made this for is run by either non technical people, or people who's ego's are so big that they want people to think that they know what they are doing. Sad to say that they are about to redo the system. The redo is based on INSANE specs, that in no way do what they need, and will be a huge step backwards.

Sad to see a insane working 15 tuner unit be destroyed. Sad to see my baby get killed, and the person who designed it having no say.

so it goes.