Re: Advice on quiet but powerful hardware for Debian
Dave Howorth wrote:
Tom Allison wrote:
Chris Evans wrote:
So questions I have are:
1) Can anyone recommend any company or consultant who puts together
Debian based systems in the UK?
2) Assuming I do it myself I'm telling myself that it's probably time
to go to SATA, to use at least RAID0 mirroring to minimise risk of
losing things, to push the CPU power as high as I can (dual
processor?) and the RAM up to 1G at least and perhaps to add some DVD
writer for backup (though currently I can get the all the things I
need to backup onto a CD).
A Dual CPU machine would give you the great benefit of balancing the
work. When you start into your intensive R-calculations, you may lock
up one CPU pretty hard, but you still have the other one available for
the rest of the functions.
But they're kind of a premium $$$.
For item one.
Take your existing hard drive and copy it over to another disk. You
have a working installation that you are happy with, why change it?
Even if you are migrating from 10GB to 200GB you can do this.
This won't work if the hardware is significantly different. A Debian
woody system for example won't work with SATA drives without
modification. But it's an excellent idea if the hardware is compatible.
for item two.
I'm not aware of SATA having any marked advantage over EIDE right now.
But I haven't been paying too much attention to that. The disks are
more expensive (at least in the US) by ~10%.
Here in the UK, the price difference is more like 5%. As to advantages,
SATA have a 150 MBps interface instead of 100 MBps for PATA/EIDE and
they can be hot plugged. And the wiring is a whole lot easier/prettier.
There are also some 10,000 rpm drives but I don't know much about those.
The biggest negative is finding a controller/driver/kernel combination
that works reliably. google this list and the suse list for sata.
Well, that's why we are using Debian, isn't it?
We don't like to go "Bleeding Edge" and get Cut.
I know SATA _should_ be capable of much better then the 100Mbs for EIDE
but I didn't know that had hit 150 already. I suppose in time it will
be a great thing to have. But for now it's new technology that I'll let
the Windows neophytes suffer with until the vendors actually figure out
what they are trying to do.
However, please note that 10,000 RPM and "Silent" don't typically go
well together.
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