Leafy

iTrader: (1)

And the OS I'm assuming. But if you were to give windows a 32GB cache, it would find a way to fill it and still use 20% of your ram.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I'm just not sure that using an SSD as a swap volume is a good idea. Lots and lots of write operations are not the sort of thing that SSDs excel at.

On my home PC, I simply installed 8 GB of RAM and turned off virtual memory. I occasionally get a "memory is running low" message, which usually just means that I need to close Chrome and re-open it. (I have 27 tabs open right now, and it can occasionally be a memory hog.)

If I were up upgrade to 16 GB, I doubt I'd ever even see that message.


FWIW, 32 GB isn't really enough for Win7 + swap. My first SSD was 40 GB, and it was almost always giving me "device is almost full" warnings. And that was without a hiberfil or pagefile.

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

Yeah if you have 16GB right now you have no need for a page file unless you're using a solid modeling or some other sort of SUPER ram intensive program. This may change in a few years but right now, 16GB of ram shouldnt require a swap file with home usage.

Mobius

iTrader: (2)

It's not used for swap file, it's a general read/write cache for the 2TB drive using Intel's SRT.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

This.

You can tell I dunno things. I just need something better than my i5 laptop here at work to run things like PS and After Effects....

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Huh.

Using any kind of SLC drive as a cache / pagefile / whatever still seems kind of iffy to me. Those suckers just don't like huge numbers of small write operations, performance-wise. That's what RAM is for.

y8s

iTrader: (8)

you ever use the chrome task manager? does it able to can clean up your mammaries?

also:

scott thinks all computers are photoshop what with their "scratch" disks.

blaen99

iTrader: (6)

Loving my Asus Zenbook FWIW. It's handled the worst of my gaming marathons and the worst of my programming compilation marathons as well.

But it was a pig on 4GB of RAM, although once I took it to 10GB of RAM everything worked great.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It's one of the reasons why I prefer Chrome among all the browsers. When Flash goes apeshit or some plugin crashes, it's great.



Not as apefish the drowning willow sings rust.

rleete

iTrader: (21)

I bought this system (Actually, I bought two. One for me and one for the wife):

HP Model Pavilion P7-1267C
Processor Intel Core i5 (3.1 GHz)
Hard Drive 1 TB
Memory (RAM) 8 GB

Gonna get a graphics card later, when I figure out what I want.
Cost me just over 900 bucks, shipped.

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

Anybody want to school me on building a home NAS?
Ive got a foxconn AM3 mobo I got for cheap and a single core AMD sepron Ive had laying around. Im thinking of using that for the basis of an NAS.

What OS should I use? How much RAM would I need? Should I use a RAID card, or can I just connect a few HHDs to the mobo? Can I connect it to a network switch, or does it need to be directly off the router?

Mobius

iTrader: (2)

Whichever you are most comfortable with. I am running Windows7 on the laptop that has become our media server. I have run linux+samba in the past.

Enough for the base OS plus some. Couple gig should be plenty. Home file services don't really need ram.

For your purposes I would think software raid is easiest and cheapest.

Either. Depends on your topology. Gig switches are inexpensive now. My router connects to the switch, and everything else connects to the switch, so my router only deals with internet traffic.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

As to the RAID question: are you, in fact, planning to configure multiple drives as a RAID? If so, what mode?

Many motherboards today naively support at least some RAID combinations via their on-board controllers, and this can be configured within the BIOS screen. Which motherboard, specifically, will you be using?

y8s

iTrader: (8)

in my esteemed opinion, the only proper solution for a home network storage system is:

RAID 1 and 2*n identical cheap drives.
For normal home data storage, 1TB is more than enough for many years (2x 1TB drives).
For **** plus normal home use, you'll need an additional 1-2TB of storage, but since it's ****, it may not require RAID 1. I guess it's up to you if you demand QUANTITY over SECURITY for **** consumption.

The requirement of a configurable permissions system is critical for the **** option as well as for any other sensitive data. You will want to provide limited access to users and devices so that those unaware of the massive volume of **** do not have the ability to type \\secretNAS\backups\december-2001\taxes\securities\busty-bitches-7.avi into their file browser.

also make sure to disable DLNA servers for those locations unless you want teenagers using a PS3 to be able to serve up non-family movies on your 55" plasma screen when grandma is over for the holidays. grandpa may not take issue, but this is not a consideration.

I prefer to use relatively inexpensive 2 disk NAS enclosures from reputable companies with low margins. They are usually cheaper in 2-disk size than the 4-disk size on a "price per bay" basis, even considering the cost of a cheap network switch. Sure it's more configuration work but it's also easier to set restrictions on a whole system than individual share locations.

As for hard drives, ever since gb4less.com's database vanished, just go to amazon and find out what's cheap. Sometimes WOOT has hard drives for cheap (refurb r0x0rz). Just make sure you buy in identical pairs from companies that don't kill product lines too often so you can find single drives of the same type when one fails in a few years.

rleete

iTrader: (21)

Correction! One of the orders didn't go through. Discover card blocked it (over the purchase limit wife had set), so I lost out. Damn.

Or not. Bought this one instead:

Processor: AMD Trinity A10-5700 (3.4GHz)
Processor Core: Quad-Core
Memory: 12GB DDR3 (PC3-12800)
Max Memory: 32GB
Memory Slots: 4 (3 occupied)
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7660D
Hard Drive: 2TB SATA (7200rpm)
Optical Drive: SuperMulti DVD±RW
Audio Chipset: Integrated IDT 92HD73E
Sound: HD 7.1 Surround Sound
Network: 10/100/1000Mbps Base-T
Wireless: 802.11b/g/n

Cost a whole 20 bucks more, which is more than made up for by the fact it has more memory, better graphics and double the HD.

Full_Tilt_Boogie

iTrader: (1)

Im using this mobo:
Newegg.com - Foxconn A88GMX AM3 AMD 880G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
(Not my first choice, but I got it for 20 bucks and I already had a CPU)

Id like to put 1 or 2 of these in it for now, with the ability to add more in the future:
Newegg.com - Western Digital Red WD20EFRX 2TB IntelliPower 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Ive only recently started to shoot HD video, and its increasing in frequency. I need a lot of space for clips and projects. I also need to backup all my photographs which is ~50GB. Finally, Id like to keep a bunch of media on it that I can access from anywhere on the network.

Im not really sure if RAID is 100% necessary. If I can monitor the health of the drives with software, I think that would be okay too.

y8s,
care to burn me a copy of busty-bitches-7.avi?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Ok, so that suggests to me that by "RAID" you mean to describe the idea of "two or more volumes combined into one large volume" rather than "two drives mirroring one another for redundancy."

This is easy to accomplish and does not even require a RAID in the proper sense of the word. Windows has supported "spanning" from within the disk management utility since XP.

One thing to bear in mind is that this method has the potential to greatly decrease the reliability of the array, in that a hard error on one drive typically results in the loss or corruption of all data across all drives. Hence, I would strongly discourage such use unless absolutely necessary.

2TB is a lot of storage. I have a single 2TB drive in my media server, and in three years I have yet to fill it. I am getting close, however, since I started downloading everything in 720p. I'm presently at 112 GB free of 1.81 TB total formatted capacity. I need to do some cleanup...


Also, I hate FoxConn and I want their entire campus to burn to the ground and then be consumed by a black hole. This is why:

Mobius

iTrader: (2)

Joe, you have repressed pins envy.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

That connector, produced by FoxConn, is what Commodore used for the video port on the Amiga.

Now, DB-23 connectors are not especially easy to find today, but it's possible if you search around. But think back to a World before the Wide Web, when one's ability to purchase electronic components was mostly limited to Radio Shack (they sucked less then) and a few major catalog-based vendors.

I tried for years to find a source for those damn things. I drove from one surplus store to another, called ever vendor that advertised in the back of Popular Electronics and Nuts & Volts, and so on. Oh, sure- you could shave down a DB-25 connector with a dremel if you were careful, but it never quite mated properly. But I really wanted to find the Real Deal, and I just never could.