Re: New machine spec: any comments?
I don't know know if you have a choice of who you're buying from or not
already, but if you do, you should check out www.pricewatch.com. You'll
be able to get some 450MHz PIIs and 128MB sticks cheaper than anywhere
else.
In my experience and the experience of many others it seems that
contrary to what one might expect or assume, Intel motherboards can be
problematic and can have not-too-intelligent BIOSes with regards to
recognizing and assigning IRQs and the overall quality of the boards
seems to be lacking. For the best recommendations, go to
www.tomshardware.com.
As for the 512 vs. 1GB of RAM question, unless you purchase Pentium II
XEON processors, it is supposed to be not practical to use more than
512MB in a Pentium II system because they can not cache more than that.
And since nearly all PII motherboards have 4 DIMM slots at most, and the
price of 256MB sticks is 4 times that of 128MB sticks. Unless the
workstation REALLY needs more than 512MB it's obviously not
price/performance effective to go with 1GB, especially considering that
a 512k cache 400MHz (450MHz for these isn't even around yet) PII XEON
processor costs almost twice as much as a 512k cache 450MHz PII, and
will deliver less system level performance than the 450MHz processor in
nearly any type of non-enterprise server system.
A lot of people don't know this or refuse to believe it, but modern DMA
bus-mastering EIDE hard disks use just as much if not less CPU overhead
as the best SCSI disks unlike the old days, and can perform within 15%
of the some of the best SCSI disks to. If you have more than one disk in
your system though, then the story is completely different, because you
can only access one device on an IDE chain at a time unlike SCSI. So if
you only require one disk to perform well and don't need to
simultaneously use multiple devices, EIDE does make a lot more sense. To
find out more about EIDE vs. SCSI and to help decide on what drive to
get, check out www.storagereview.com. FWIW, I use and swear by SCSI,
even though 99.9% of the time I'm only using a single disk and don't
really benefit at all from it. This will change soon though once the 2.2
kernel comes out and I play with data-striping with my old 7200RPM and
5400RPM SCSI disks.... :)
As for your partitioning question, in order to have more than 4
partitions on a disk, you must use logical partitions within an extended
partition. If you select to make logical partitions within cfdisk, the
extended partition will be created for you automatically.
As for the parity vs. normal RAM question, I wouldn't know what to tell
you. They say that for normal Pentium computers that a single bit parity
error has a mean time of occuring only once every ten years from certain
forms of radiation from the sun bombarding enough energy upon a single
memory cell to charge it enough to change it's state. Even if this does
happen, there's only a ultra minute chance that it actually causes
corruption to any file or system process anyways. The more RAM you have
though (512MB vs. 32MB), and the more you torture it (enterprise server
or GCC compiler vs. net browsing), then I suppose your chances do
increase a good bit to possibly even more than one error per year.
Enterprise servers always use ECC RAM because of this.
Tony Robinson wrote:
>
> I'm planning on building several Debian/Linux compute and disk servers,
> the aim is for maximum remote "workstation" performance with no frills.
> The target hardware is:
>
> * Dual processor PII 400MHz (450MHz if they were available)
>
> * 512Mbyte or 1Gbyte RAM (likely to be limited by 4 slots at 128Mbyte)
>
> * IBM 16.8 Gbyte EIDE disk (these are nice)
>
> * SMC EPIC100 100 Mbps ethernet (if not on motherboard)
>
> * No video card/monitor/mouse/keyboard except at installation
>
> To note:
>
> * The aim is a fast and cheap machine - the cheaper they are the more
> that can be bought.
>
> * There is no SCSI drive: My assumption is that with this much RAM
> Linux will cache any frequently used executables. Most of the time
> I expect the system to be compute bound.
>
> * My experience with Sparc Ultra is that a running job is lost if you
> really need more RAM than the physical memory - disk just hasn't kept
> pace with CPU performance. Under such conditions swap is only useful
> for stopped or infreqently used processes, so perhaps it doesn't
> matter if it is a bit slower than SCSI.
>
> * I'll need many 128 Mbyte swap partitions under 2.0. I've only ever
> created primary partitions and there is a limit of four - will I have
> a problem in creating 8 * 128 Mbyte partions on one disk?
>
> * I've got a Dual PPro system (2.0.35) going at the moment - both
> processors run fine with long CPU bound jobs. I've just (today)
> started seeing NFS problems when writing to the internal disk from a
> Solaris machine - I see 8192 byte blocks corrupted from "similar"
> files. I've yet to track down the cause.
>
> * The disk is mostly for external use. I'm not sure it this requires a
> 2.1 kernel for the new NFS support.
>
> * I'll probably go for an Intel motherboard for safety. However, this
> (with the CPUs) is the majority of the cost.
>
> * Parity on RAM used to be considered at very important - there doesn't
> seem to be all that much concern anymore - is this justified?
>
> Breakdown (from http://www.woc.co.uk unless http://www.transtec.co.uk or
> http://www.dabs.co.uk)
>
> Motherboard GBP1219 Dual 400MHz Nightshade 100MHz Server scsi/network
> Memory GBP484 4 * 128MByte 168 PIN 100MHz SDRAM
> Case GBP111 Full Tower ATX case, 235W ATX, K/B
> FDD GGP15 3.5", Teac 1.44MB floppy disc drive + cradle
> HDD GBP300 IBM-DTTA-3516800 16 Gbyte hard disk (transtec)
> NIC GBP45 EtherPowerII 10/100 PCI (dabs) m/b includes this
>
> All prices exclude VAT (17.5%).
>
> I post this for general comment - no doubt it will go out of date very
> soon indeed, but I've spent some time researching this so any discussion
> will probably help me and others thinking of very cheap compute/disk
> servers - not so long ago I paid this much for just the disk!
>
> Tony Robinson
>
> --
> http://www-svr.eng.cam.ac.uk/~ajr
>
> --
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