I'm thinking of setting up a small RAID 5 config in my new PC. I'm thinking 3 9.1GB drives. This, if I understand it correctly, would give me 18GB of storage and one drive for parity.

These are the drives I was thinking of getting, as to not hit my wallet too hard.

One question I have is: how will these specific drives compare to and IDE drive? At the moment I've got one 20GB 5400RPM and a 25GB 7200RPM, but IDE, although the second might be busted.

This setup will be for my OS drive, as I have a 100GB drive for files (which is almost filled!).

My other major question is: what card should I get for these things? I'm thinking cheap, here, but I want to get maximum throughput from these drives.

Any advice?

ps-one side question for RAM. what is ECC and is it better with or without?

I'm thinking 3 9.1GB drives. This, if I understand it correctly, would give me 18GB of storage and one drive for parity

Correct. Though the parity is spread across the 3 drives.

These are the drives I was thinking of getting, as to not hit my wallet too hard.

50 pin? Thats going to probably indicate those drives can only pull a maximum of 20mb/s, and probably closer to 10. My 30gb IDE can pull 27.2 real world.

Go with IDE RAID for a PC. IDE raid cards varry on price, any IDE card that can do Raid 5 will be around $200 minimum, but it will be a decent card. To get peformance with SCSI, it costs money. IDE for a PC use will be fine.

one side question for RAM. what is ECC and is it better with or without?

Depends. ECC is an error correcting scheme for memory, allowing simple failures to occur without impacting the machine. Normally a memory error crashes a machine instantly (OS typicially crashes it's self to protect data from furthur harm). ECC is used in almost all servers. As long as your motherboard supports it, and provides some warning when errors have been fixed, I'd say go for it. But if it can't notify you when errors occur, it's not very useful. ECC can generally give signs it's about to fail, and allow you to replace the module before it craps out completly and leavs you with odd blue screens or kernel panics.

I'm with Drakino on this one...you'll get far more bang for your buck with IDE.

But I can't see why you want to place your OS on RAID5, but not your data? OS's are easily replaceable...

Maybe he uses his computer for business, and any unscheduled downtime of his OS would be a big issue, but the loss of his MP3 collection would be a minor problem.

This of course assumes he's going to store his *important* files on the RAID setup, but with 18gb available space, I'd imagine he'd not have a problem doing this...

A.

Thanks so much for the response! You've helped a lot.

I wasn't thinking IDE RAID because I wasn't under the impression that it was very good. But if you think that it's a good idea, I'm perfectly willing to put my money to better use Plus, I'm getting a SOYO Dragon Ultra mobo, and it has IDE RAID built in, so that would be a plus, right?

My reasoning for a RAID on the OS? I was under the impression that it was faster, and I'd get better performance from it. Sure, I'd love to have my data much more secure, and I might go that route. But with your new suggestions, I might have to think up a whole different route I want to go in

My ideal (and I'm sure, the general ideal) would be fast running programs and OS, plus secure data files. I also want to keep my 100GB drive intact with all its files still on there.

Do you think I'd be able to run 2 RAIDs on the same system off the mobo?

*edit* I looked at the mobo's spec page and it says:

R: Embedded Hipoint IDE-RAID chip, providing ATA-133 IDE-RAID 0,1,0+1

Are those the configs it supports? Can someone explain those to me?

RAID can produce some speed advantage over normal disks. Putting your OS on the RAID might speed bootup a bit, but a good chunk of time wasted by the OS is waiting on devices to start, or trying to do a quick new hardware scan. Programs will load quicker off a RAID device, but having more memory is also critical for decent program preformance.

The IDE RAID found on motherboards usually does only support the basic 0, 1, and 0+1. Check out http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491 for info on these, and some tests from last year of some IDE cards. Notice the ones that do RAID 5 are much more complex, due to the necessary chips to do the processing of parity. High end SCSI controllers that do 2 types of parity usually have something like a PowerPC chip on them to help out.

Yeah, the motherboards only support basic RAID, and are generally not very good quality - the main reason for implementing it is to give you 8 IDE devices instead of 4 connectable as standard. (Note, only 4 of the 8 devices can be set up for RAID)

If you're looking for speed alone, there's little point in going for RAID 5, which includes redundancy as well. You'll get optimum performance (at least on low-cost RAID cards) using what's known as RAID 0, which is simple disk striping, where a file is stored across more than one disk and so can be read from two (or more) disks simultaneously.

The motherboard options you have are:

RAID 0, which is up to 4 disks of striping, giving you theoretically 4 times the performance of a single drive (although realistically nothing near this). RAID 0 has no redundancy - any failure will mean virtually all data is lost. In this system, you get the full storage capacity (4 times the single disk size)

RAID 1, which is up to 4 disks of mirroring, gives you only the storage capacity of the smallest disk installed. Each file is written to all the disks at once, potentially allowing up to three failures (if you have 4 drives in this format) before any data loss. A decent RAID 1 system will allow you to swap in a new disk, and will then rebuild this disk so you retain maximum fault tolerance.

A RAID 0+1 system is, as it suggests, a combination of the two - in this case, 4 drives, with files striped (see RAID 0) across two disks, and mirrored across the other two. This gives you up to twice the performance of a single drive (again, theoretically), whilst meaning you can have up to 2 disk failures (although not any two, either the two main or the two backup disks) before data loss. In this case, you get twice the capacity of a single disk, or half the capacity of the total system, available for use.

If you want to stick with the Mobo RAID support, and have faster file access plus some redundancy, RAID 0+1 is probably the way to go - however, you do need 4 disks, preferably all the same size, to go down this route.

As you've gathered, this setup is cheaper in interface cost than a dedicated RAID controller, but more expensive in disk storage terms - with a RAID 5 controller, you could use the 4 disks in your RAID 0+1 system, to get 3 times the single disk size, up to 3 times transfer speed of a single disk, and still have the ability for any disk to fail.

HTH,

A.

*edit: gah, beaten to it!*

Haha, thanks a lot you guys.

For the moment, I think I might try the onboard RAID. Later, with more money, I may god card-based, but for now I'll stick to the cheapest I can

Based on that, I have one more question: is it possible to run two RAID's on the same onboard system? Here is what I'm thinking:

1) buy a second 100GB drive, and use RAID 1, thereby keeping my DATA safer.

2a) buy a couple small, fast IDE drives and run a RAID 0 for the OS and programs. thereby getting a good speed advantage.

2b) forget about RAID for the OS and buy the fastest single drive I can find, for as you said, OS's are replaceable.

So as you may have figured, I'd try 1 and 2a or 2b. But I'm not sure how it works if you want two seperate systems running. Any idea how that would work? I would like to keep the OS and data seperate.

Any ideas on what the fastest single drive I should go for would be?

The western Digital Caviar Special Edition series is hands down the fastest IDE disk out there. With it's 8Mb buffer it can archieve speeds that are equal to (slow) 10.000RPM SCSI harddisks in some tests.

It's very affordable too and is available in 80,100 and 120gb sizes. (see here)

I have one and I've been very impressed with it.

Yeah, that is an excellent drive. I'm sure thinking about that one. It goes for about $120-125 for OEM. Not too bad at all, considering my 25GB WD drive that I bought 2.5 years ago was $250. I also think they're the best drives around.

Plus, at Newegg, I can also get that OEM Win2K software that Rob showed me and I'll feel a little better about the software I'm running on my machine, if you know what I mean

Still, it's a lot of money. I'm going to have to think about this one...

----
Back ot the RAID topic: if I just have this two-drive system for a while and upgrade with another hard drive later, how easy is it to creat a RAID with an existing drive with all its data? How easy is it to isolate the other drive that won't be part of the RAID? For example, say I have that 80gig as my OS drive, my 100gig for my data, and I buy another 100gig drive. How easy will it be to make a 100GB RAID 1 with my data drive without losing that data, and also run my OS drive normally? And is it a software thing or a hardware? Remember, this will most likely be off the mobo.

Sorry for all the questions! You've all been so helpful!!

I have only one recommendation regarding a RAID array (should you decide to get one):

COOL THOSE DRIVES.

When someone stacks several high-speed 3.5" disk drives in a PC case, they don't often realize how much heat they put out. You need air circulation around the drives because they'll heat each other up and the drives can fry if you're not careful. They even make little replacement 5" drive-bay cover plates that have little fans in them. If you don't have air going around the drives already, I'd recommend at least one of these faceplate-thingys on the middle of the three drives.

Actually, the case I'm getting will take care of that just fine, should i eventually go that direction. There's a 5 drive bay cage at the bottom directly behind 2 80mm fans. So at the moment, I'll have 2 drives, each a bay apart, and if I had 3 drives, they would still be a bay apart from each other. Cooling shouldn't be too bad.

I really just am not sure about those other aspects of the array. Cooling was certainly a concern, but I thought that might be enough. Do you think it will be?

Back ot the RAID topic: if I just have this two-drive system for a while and upgrade with another hard drive later, how easy is it to creat a RAID with an existing drive with all its data? How easy is it to isolate the other drive that won't be part of the RAID?

It all depends on the particular RAID controller. The expensive SCSI ones I work with never allow a drive to sit attached to them without being in an array. It has to be at least a single drive RAID 0. They do allow expanding the array by adding new drives. Also, they allow RAID migration, thus going from a single RAID 0 setup to a RAID 1. But again, it all depends on your particular controller. If you have an idea of one, I recommend you go ask in the forms at www.storagereview.com , they seem pretty helpful and do talk about different RAID controllers.

Hmm. that's not too good. Oh well, if I ever want to go with a RAID I could just buy a card, and still run the single hard drive off the mobo.

Oh, and I ordered the Western Digital SE drive. That should be so sweet.

I'm getting antsy waiting for about 10 packages to come into the office here AHHH!

I'm getting antsy waiting for about 10 packages to come into the office here

My bank account is patiently waiting for me to buy my next system. I got the Plextor drive now, but everything else is on hold until my case/motherboard gets released. I'm getting so impatient, and buying the hard drive and such won't help.

What case/mobo are you holding out for?

What case/mobo are you holding out for?

http://www.viahardware.com/computex02sff_1.shtm

The Shuttle SS51. It's an evolution of the SS50 models, it adds some nice features like AGP and I believe USB 2 to an already awesome package. After getting a G4 Cube, I'm hooked on small form factor machines. And lucially, in the past year, standards have emerged. With this case and my LCD monitor, I'll be able to go to LAN parties, and only make one trip from the car.

Damn, now you've got me wanting one.

I'm set up for a single-trip-from-the-car LAN party, too, but I have a full size case and a full size 17" monitor. Adding the handles is what made them portable. So it's one trip, but it's a slow careful trip that makes me sore afterwards.

Does anyone have any suggestions on *external* ide hard drive enclosures for a RAID setup? Keyword: Cheap? I'm thinking something that lets me throw some hard disks in, then get a raid card, and somehow (?) hook the two of them up. My main hard drive with its XP boot partition is dying. I'm going to ghost it over to a new hard drive, but this raid talk has me interested.

Calvin

What you're looking for exists, but I don't think "cheap" enters into the equation.

When I put up my RIAD box it will be a totally seperate machine in it's own box connected via Gigabit ethernet. It'll run nothing but Win2k for mapping. In looking, I found it's the best (and cheapest) way to do it.

Promise makes a 4 Drive and 8 Drive ATA External RAID solution, but it's WAY too expensive. I can build a Dualie Athlon Box WITH the 1.12TB Of space and a 3Ware Escalade 7850 for cheaper then I can get the 8 Drive Promise alone.

Win2K for mapping? Just run a stripped down Linux install with Samba, thus giving you a nice and easy to use web interface built in.

I like linux and all. But I don't trust myself enough with it. And the 48bit support in linux is kinda shotty right now. And the drivers for the 7850 have been tuned for win2k more.. *shrugs*

I've had an MSI RAID board for about a year now, I'm so-so with it all. I was running a pair of IBM hard drives RAID 0 for speed, and about every month had to reformat because so much data was getting lost it slowly got to where it wouldn't even boot up.

I switched to a pair of WD 80's and ran it that way a few months with no problems at all.

Later I bought a pair of the 8MB 120's, and sold one of the 80's, which is where I'm at right now. Even though I finally ahd success running RAID, I ditched it all together.

Currently I have both 120's hooked up individually to the RAID channels. The remaining 80 is off the normal IDE channels, along with a high speed CD ROM, a burner, and a DVD player (so really all I'm doing is using the RAID channels simply to add more devices). The 80 itself has its ground wiresrun to a switch on the front of the box.

Last time I installed (many moons ago), I set one 120 to hold my O/S and all the programs I have installed. The other is just for MP3 and movie storage (nowhere near filled yet overall). The 80 is turned on once in a while just to make backups of things onto and then back off.

I have run my setups at RAID 0 and just normally - and even though the benchmarks showed about a half again performance boost, in real life I could tell no difference at all (partly from a tweaked Athlon 1.4 running ~1550 and a half gig of RAM perhaps). I couldn't rip a CD any faster, I couldn't load a game or the O/S any faster, and I barely could even transfer from disk to disk faster. I timed a ton of different things and eventually decided it made very little difference. Perhaps it's just due to what I use my PC for - when I need power, it seems to be CPU based needs and not hard drive needs.

So now I just use the RAID channels to have 6 instead of 4 devices. And with the 80 on the switch, I have a really reliable backup for home use in case something happens to the main drives.

Lots of babbling, hopefully some part of it was helpful.

BTW, glad you got a big drive, those you linked at the top were really poor in the size / dollars ratio, not to mention slow!

Thanks for the help!

The thing is, I'm probably going with a RAID 1 now if at all. I now have that Caviar SE drive to give me good, uncomplicated speed, and if I do go with a RAID in the future, it'll be to make my data safer. I'm currently taking up about 98GB of my 100GB drive, and while 26GB of that is Dragonball Z episodes (;)), there's still alot of files that I'm going to want to save.

Do you think onboard RAID 1 would be as bad? It looks to me that there might be less room for errors like the ones you experienced, but I don't know. Besides, from what I gather from people here, it sounds like I'll need an IDE RAID card anyway if I want to run the single 80GB one seperately. Oh well, this is all down-the-road stuff.

Nice small case there, Drakino! I, on the other hand, am going the opposite way It should be coming in today, then I'll show you all what I got

I think I now have the opposite case that you're waiting for, Drakino.

I am the proud new owner of a Lian-Li PC75 aluminum case. 15 bays 6x5.25, 3x3.5, 6x3.5 hidden. HUGE side window. 4 80mm fans included, spots for two more.



Yes, I'm insane. My only justification is that I've had a Dell for 3 years, so please take pitty on me.

"Dude, I'm gettin' rid of a Dell!"

I work around big machines all day with tons of fan noise, so I think thats one of the reasons I am going smaller at home. If I need a ton of storage, a server is always somewhere on the network that can have more drives added. And it's noise is isolated to the basement. Plus, all the LAN parties I attend (and some I don't sue to the hassle) will be easier with a tiny case.

As far as RAID 1, the onboard motherboard one should be fine. But, one big disadvantage I see is if it fails, and the motherboard is no longer made, finding a compatible solution to get your data back could be a problem.

But, one big disadvantage I see is if it fails, and the motherboard is no longer made, finding a compatible solution to get your data back could be a problem

Many of the boards use an onboard Promise RAID controller. In the event that it dies, you should be able to replace it with one of their PCI RAID controller cards and be back up in no time.

But, one big disadvantage I see is if it fails, and the motherboard is no longer made, finding a compatible solution to get your data back could be a problem.

RAID is not an alternative to off-site backups, even for personal data. It just reduces the number of events that would cause a recourse to off-site backups.

Peter

Lian-Li PC75 aluminum case

<paul hogan voice>Strewth, mate, that's not a case! That's a case!</paul hogan voice>

Peter

Cool. Yeah, I can definitely see how your case is perfect for your uses. I would also want something that small for LAN parties. But since I don't attend any of those (I suck at FPS's and don't really own any other type of multiplayer games), I don't need to carry it much.

The only issue now is noise. Computer noise has never been much of an issue to me. At school I have an emormous 8 year old office-sized laserjet printer (my dad's office was going to throw it away, I took it ), and that sounds like a 777 it's self. I also had my Dell's cover off for about a month and it was quite noisy like that.

My excitement for my new case will outweigh any noise that bothers me

As I said, I think if I go with a RAID of any kind, then I will definitely buy an IDE RAID card. That would probably simplify things a lot.

The best part is that it's a "mini" server case. I think we should reserve the word "mini" for things that are actually miniature, like mini golf, Mini-Me, and miniskirts.

Well you must admit, that's a different breed of case It wouldn't be too useful for me.

Plus, it has fewer drive bays than mine 13? Bah! Plus, there are no 3.5 bays, so some would be taken up for that. Not to mention the amount of deskspace it would take up! No thanks, my man!

I'm thinking of setting up a small RAID 5 config in my new PC.

A workable alternative to a RAID system (at least, it works for me, but most likely is not what you want) is to have two hard drives: master and secondary.

I use Powerquest's Drive Image to copy the primary drive to the secondary drive whenever the mood hits me (takes about 25 minutes) and I then have a perfect copy that is bootable. If the primary drive fails, just change the bootup sequence in the BIOS and use the secondary until you can buy a new primary drive.

Advantages: Simple, inexpensive, gives you the opportunity to recover from mistakes ("Ooops-- I didn't really mean to delete that file") and highly redundant.

Disadvantages: You have to remember to do the backups occasionally; in the event of a failure, chances are the backup will not be absolutely current.

Like I said... it works for me.

tanstaafl.

I've been doing the 4 seperate drives thing for a while, and it's staring to scare me with all of the data I have.

I'm going to go to an 8 Drive RAID-5 (7 Drives Usable) configuration to help with data redundancy. Being a data pack rat sucks some times.

Hmm, there are some good LAN games like Age of Empires, or Crimson Skies. You still try to whoop on each other, but it's a lot different than your standard fps. But you know if you go to them or not.

I don't think you need a PCI RAID card at all... if you have it built into the motherboard, why not use it? Same controller on it (pretty sure anyway). Perhaps use a pair of (same size) smaller hard drives on the RAID channels for your OS, running RAID 0, and another bigger hard drive for your file storage and your backups?

Okay, I'm getting really confused with the crossed signals. Let me try to phrase my question in the cleanest way possible

Is it possible to have a single drive for the OS, then two drives on a RAID 1, and all of these running off of the onboard RAID controller?

Plus, there's another issue. If I did go with onboard RAID, I don't know how I would configure all the drives physically. At the moment I have 2 CD drives and 2 hard disks. That's four. Where do you get cables that support more than 2 devices? (preferably long, rounded, silver ones )

IDE chanels can only handle 2 devices -- if you've seen a longer chain, it's scsi... Most motherboards with onboard raid that i've looked at have seperate IDE channels that aren't connected to the raid controller, and that's where you're going to want to put your CD drives and other non-raid things...

Matthew

Ahhh. Okay, it's becoming a little more clear now. So would the mobo likely have 4 channels? As in you can hook up four cables to support the 8 drives? I think I'm still a little fuzzy on how this works. Maybe I'll just wait until I get the mobo in before I think about it anymore

So would the mobo likely have 4 channels? As in you can hook up four cables to support the 8 drives?

That's usually how it works, yes. Looking at http://www.soyousa.com/images/800x600_products_mb/kt333_dragon_ultra(silver).jpg it seems that, on that particular board, the normal IDE channels have blue and white connectors, and the RAID channels yellow connectors.

Peter

Ah, thanks So those connectors still only support 2 drives each? So basically, you can have no more than 4 drives in a RAID on this board, right?

So those connectors still only support 2 drives each?

Yes, that's all the IDE cabling spec supports.

So basically, you can have no more than 4 drives in a RAID on this board, right?

Yes. If you want more RAID than that, you probably want http://www.3ware.com -- I haven't used one, but I've heard nothing but good stuff about them. Those cards are PCI64 but will work in PCI32 slots as long as there's nothing physically obstructing them (but looking at your board, that might limit you to PCI slot #2).

Peter

Sweet! Thanks for the link.

Do you think that all drives connected to those RAID channels on the motherboard would be considered part of the same array, or would you be able to specify?

you can specify how you want arrays set up. you have full control over defining multiple arrays, the RAID level of each array, and which drives are assigned to which array.

i use these boards under freebsd and win2k, and find them fast, flexible, reliable, and stable. can't ask for more.

--dan.

I guess you got it by now, but true and true.

For three drives, one with OS and using two in RAID, you'd want to set one drive as master on IDE1, and the other drives would go one each into IDE3 and IDE4. Then tell your BIOS to boot from IDE, not SCSI (It calls RAID out as SCSI in the BIOS for some reason). Your other items - CD ROM and such would become Slave IDE1, Master IDE2, and Slave IDE2. You can't put any CDROM's on he RAID channels, only hard drives. I didn't realize you hadn't even seen the board yet.

So many options! I'll throw one more - you can plug one single drive into one RAID slot, and boot the PC. Tell the RAID BIOS (comes up on it's own screen after the computer POSTs) to configure that one drive as a single drive RAID 0. Then turn off the machine, unplug that first drive, plug your second hard drive into the other RAID slot, and reboot. Do the same - tell it the second drive by itself is a single RAID device. Turn off the PC again and now plug in both drives into their RAID slots. Now when you boot again it will see both drives, and run them completely seperately. The PC will read and think that you have two RAID arrays. But in reality it's just two hard drives, no RAID going on at all. Make any sense?

If you're going to be playing games on it, I'd recommend going with a SS40G instead. They are better suited for gaming, get better performance (which you'll see in the benchmarks), and (I think) look nicer. Plus, Athlon chips are cheaper

I second that motion. I have two of the 120GB drives and absolutely love them. Dell has them for $185 now (I got mine 2 months ago for $145 each), but you can find them other places for around $170.

They are better suited for gaming (...) Plus, Athlon chips are cheaper

I will not be purchasing AMD processors for gaming.

This is due to benchmarks I read which stated things like "Our AMD motherboard was only able to run the Quake3 Timedemo loop for an hour before the system locked up, whereas the Intel motherboard ran it nonstop all day..." , etc... I have seen statements like these in more than one place.

As I understand it, it's necessary to carefully match a given AMD motherboard with proper BIOS versions and drivers and only certain AGP graphics cards, and then only if you carefully set certain key flags in the BIOS setup screen. You can't just slap any old peripherals with any old BIOS and drivers into an Athlon board and expect them to work reliably.

I'm told that the only proper way to buy a gaming system with an AMD processor is to get a complete system from Falcon or Alienware. They have already done all the necessary leg work to get the drivers and BIOS tweaks all working together with all the popular game engines. This is fine, but since I piece my systems together, I don't intend to spend my LAN parties debugging my AGP aperture size setting and video ROM shadow addresses.

I've never had any trouble when piecing together systems based on an Intel motherboard, and I intend for it to stay that way.

Aw Tony! Now you've started something! The good old Intel VS AMD discussion.
But I for one happen to agree with everything you say. That's the exact reason AMD will never find it's way into my PC casing.
For me the bottom line is : if you want to go cheap : go AMD, if you want to go reliable and headache-free : go Intel.

It's more expesive than you thought. Here is the 120GB Caviar SE from Dell. You had it right that it's cheaper elsewhere...

I myself plan to pick up one or two of these in the future when I begin upgrading.

I'm not saying an AMD system can't be reliable. On the contrary, the AMD-based systems made by Falcon and Alienware always get high marks for their ability to run 3D games quite fast and reliably.

It's just that if I'm piecing the system together myself, I have to make a choice as to where I'm going to spend my time. And futzing with the BIOS settings to keep Quake from crashing isn't my idea of fun.

Wow. You made a good point there, Tony. I'm planning to start a major upgrade within the next 6 months and I was considering going AMD. But I do play games here and there... and I don't want any trouble.

Since my new system is definitely going to be a frankenstein... I think I'll stick with Intel myself, too.

Yeah, sorry, I wasn't really thinking about pre-built systems.
I'll just stress on the headache-free side of Intel then!

I think you may be exagerating a bit, though I havn't come accross any of these articles you've read. When I was looking at reviews, everyone building serious gaming systems went AMD, because the price/performance ratio is so much better, and for plenty of things beat Intel. Now, if you're spending all your time ripping and encoding DVD's, you won't have a problem with the P4's 20+ stage pipeline, but if you try doing much else...

Do you remember what articles said they had problems with AMD processors? I'd be interested in seeing it because I've never heard that as a complaint about athlons... There's that whole thermal-diode issue with melting processors, but I don't think that's what your'e talking about.

Matthew

I will not be purchasing AMD processors for gaming.

Great! Because I didn't either

Here is my philosophy when it comes to this system I'm building: I'm building a computer to replace this:
Dell 550MHz
256MB RAM
with this:
AMD Athlon 2100+ (1.73GHz -right?)
1GB PC2700 RAM

I am not running Quake 3 benchmarks on this thing. You want to know my main reason for upgrading? compressing video into wmv format and rendering video in Premiere. It takes all night at the moment for very short files. Of course, that's hardly the full reason for upgrading, but it's a big part.

The only game I have bought in the past year and a half was this past weekend I got GTA3 for PC, and that's only going to be a diversion for me.

What was important for me was price, and if you're like me, for that reason AMD has Intel beat every in every way.

Now we'll see how well this system goes together

I'd like to see them too. I've never used anything but AMD. I'm pretty much a hack, and I never have problems that I don't cause myself. I've thrown multiple AMD chips into multiple motherboards, and varying degress of overclocking, different BIOS's, etc. and never had any problems.

I do (perhaps I "did") a ton of gaming on overclocked systems that I built myself, and with Windows 2000 running I can go forever without problems. I've built dozens of machines for use at work, or by family, friends, and coworkers, and always used AMD systems. Idiot proof and bullet proof as far as I'm concerned. And I don't follow any special rules or fixes to make things work, it's all plug and play.

I'm sure Tony's seen these types of articles, and I'm sure people have had problems with their AMD's. I'm sure you could find people that have problems with Intel too. BUt in my experience, they are 100% trouble free. Makes me wonder what the boneheads writing the articles did? Could the problems be blamed on poor chipsets or motherboard manufacturers?

I'd tend to agree. Anyone who claims athlons aren't very stable obviously hasn't had much experience with them. Yes, I'm sure both Intel and AMD have the occasional bad processor, but I've built dozens of athlon computers and have had very little processor problems. It's important to choose a good motherboard with a stable chipset however. The KT266A and KT333 have been rock solid for me so far.

Also, I've never spent time "futzing with the BIOS settings" and I thoroughly enjoy hours of solid Return to Castle Wolfenstein (quake3 engine IIRC) play.

Huzzah, I've got the KT333 on my new board (which just came to my office- woohoo!)

I am also interested in these articles. It's been quite interesting to see people's reactions to either processor. frankly, I see very little difference in the two companies and the stories of people's experiences with their products.

We've had people say that they build nothing but Intel because all their experiments with AMD have been terrible experiences. Then we've had the opposite and everything in-between. I think that for me personally, the best I can hope for is that my own processor experience will be a good one

Amen to that brotha!

First of all, I'm not saying that AMD processors aren't stable. I'm sure they're just fine. I'm saying that I've heard that they're more picky about drivers and BIOS settings when running 3D games with the latest AGP video cards; settings that I don't want to have to waste time researching.

And for those who asked: the articles to which I refer were printed articles in PC Gamer magazine. I don't have an online link, and I don't remember which issues they were in.

Let me be a little more specific in that last statement. I didn't mean to say that the AMD processors themselves are more picky. I meant that the particular combination of AMD-based motherboard/BIOS and high-performance graphics card causes a situation where reliability is more dependent on getting the drivers and the BIOS settings just right. I'm sure the actual CPU has less to do with it than does the motherboard and BIOS code. And for that matter, it could just be that the people that write video card drivers simply do more QA on Intel platforms. Even if it's got nothing to do with the CPU itself, it's still something I need to consider when building a system.

That sounds more like the state of things 2 or three years ago. That hasn't been my experience any time recently, but your name is in red, so it must be so...

ooh, that kind of didn't sound nice.

Yep, it's come down to the Intel / AMD discussion again. No one wins really, everyone has an opinion they stick to, and when they buy their next processor they go with what has worked for them. No biggie really.

ooh, that kind of didn't sound nice.

He's got a point, though. Just because some magazine had a problem with their particular motherboard doesn't mean they're all that way.

I'm only re-iterating what they said, I've never touched an Athlon in my life. So actually I have no authority to speak on the topic at all. I was just defending why I only use Intel when I build my own systems.

Sorry 'bout that Tony. Hat's off to you for taking the higher ground. That is a good reason to stick with Intel...they've always been reliable.

"...they've always been reliable." - with the right chipset...

I've got a Via chipset based motherboard, and frankly installing the OS & drivers for it was a nightmare (Asus TUV4X). Again, not a scientific sampling in the least, but that was the last time I buy a non-Intel chipset mobo. I still have 'spontaneous reboot' issues in W2k. Starting to suspect RAM - replaced powersupply and am not overclocking or getting too hot. That is a whole other thread though...

-Zeke

Actually, the drive I linked to is the same drive (WD1200JB), just OEM (which is what I bought). As a matter of fact, it's marked down to $157.25!

In my experience with AMD I've never had incompatibility problems like that. With video cards, yes, but those problems had nothing to do with the fact that I was running an AMD chip. To each his own though. Nobody can win the "AMD Vs. Intel" argument, because there are a lot of people that still base their opinions purely on the theory or comments of another person, and therefore have a uninformed bias towards one or the other. Just has to be seen first hand by each person that is up to making the descision, of course, only if they're willing to not be so closed minded. Don't get me wrong, I have both AMD and Intel based machines, but for gaming and a majority of the other things I do, I use AMD.

Sorry, I hadn't realized that... guess I need a little more practice in digging through shopping websites.

Don't be sorry. Honest mistake. Especially since the site doesn't seem to be clearly marked stating that the one for $157.25 is OEM, except for that it is marked as a "Dell System Upgrade."

If you're going to be playing games on it, I'd recommend going with a SS40G instead. They are better suited for gaming, get better performance (which you'll see in the benchmarks)

The SS51 isn't even out yet, how did they do benchmarks with it? :-)

Reasons I like the SS51:
USB 2 and Firewire
SPDIF sound
Heatpipe processor cooling
Newest SIS chipset supporting DDR333, and 533mhz bus

The P4 right now has matured very well, and is begining to show awesome peformance leaps. AMD is falling behind with the Athlon now, and I will no longer consider them until they get the Hammer based chips out. Even with their recent revisions to the Athlon, it's pushes out a ton of heat. I love the competition that AMD is giving to Intel, but for now Intel has the better platform for a system I plan on keeping for a while. If my system wasn't just begging for a replacement, I'd wait on the Hammer.

You could try one of these RAID 0,1 cards from Granite Digital. There are some nice RAID, Firewire and SCSI drive cases and adapters there.

Still would love to try out the firewire bridge boards

"...they've always been reliable." - with the right chipset...

I've got a Via chipset based motherboard, and frankly installing the OS & drivers for it was a nightmare (Asus TUV4X). Again, not a scientific sampling in the least, but that was the last time I buy a non-Intel chipset mobo.

I think meatballman was talking about Intel in his "they've always been reliable" comment. re-read his post and the one he's replying to.

Why would you do that?

Calvin

One reason I could think of is to get more devices than you normally would. 6, in this example.

Yeah, I'm talking about Intel also. I'm just pointing out that I've had trouble with Intel processor motherboards with non-Intel chipsets. Rereading my post (I have to stop posting when I'm really tired) I can see I omitted mentioning that the TUV4X is a Pentium III board.
-Zeke

yeah, but unless i'm missing something, the format-one-drive-at-a-time-as-a-raid-0-array nonsense is completely unnecessary. just set 'em up in "JBOD" (just a bunch o' disks) mode. no raid going on at all, just as in his example.

--dan.

I'm not sure what your question is. Do what exactly?