Building my own PC

[TigaSefi]

www.scan.co.uk today got some cheap mobo's from Asrock and MSI, are they reputable brand and which one of the Socket A MSI motherboard would you guys recommend ?

http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/ - Scroll down to 13 and then there a section of AMD Socket A motherboard. I just want to put a Sempron 2800+ and 1Gb of RAM in it.

[dilli-theclaw]

I have never had a problem with MSI motherboards.

I HAVE had a number of problems with asrock. Ranging from non working usb sockets dead mobo's.....

ASROCK = EVIL

Are you still going down the raid mirror route?? Ive got a problem with mirrored hard drives cuz if ones data becomes corrupted or a virus is caught its on both.I personally would stripe the raptors and use something like ghost the newest version of which does incremental back ups in windows,although ive heard this slows the system.You can back up to hard drive or to dvd/cd.Ive searched to see if this has been covered if it has I apoligise

[Ramrod]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

Are you still going down the raid mirror route?? Ive got a problem with mirrored hard drives cuz if ones data becomes corrupted or a virus is caught its on both.I personally would stripe the raptors and use something like ghost the newest version of which does incremental back ups in windows,although ive heard this slows the system.You can back up to hard drive or to dvd/cd.Ive searched to see if this has been covered if it has I apoligise

Interesting point..........anyone else have any comments? .......and keep them civil! (I'm looking at you KP! )

I love ghost,I make new back ups monthly and if my system goes belly up for whatever reason its back to how it was in 5 minute

[Aragorn]

Mirroring does not protect against software failure - even on corporate disk arrays you can, in theory, write zeroes over the payroll database - but it does protect against hardware failure of one disk. You should still do regular CD/tape/network backups of you important data.
Stripping only improves performance - no hardware data protection at all.

If you want to be cautious about your data, I would personally suggest sticking with the mirror, but stick a third cheap IDE drive in as an online backup. You can schedule XP's own backup util to write to a compressed disk file, and also have a second bootable copy of XP on that drive incase you need to restore.

HTH

If he adds a 3rd hdd then back up important incremental data to that and use either ghost or windows back up an image fortnightly say,Then he can get the very best out of his raptors Ghost i know, not sure about windows backup is recoverable through virtual dos

[KingPhoenix]

Ramrod, You are going to be looking after your machine arent you? I.e. Firewall? AV? Anti Spyware etc?????

Providing you look after it in a "system management" sense, then your mirror raid is still the better option If your gonna just fill it with junk and crap etc... and get shed loads of spyware, and download porn, and visit sites mandy says you shouldnt be then yeah.... take a backup...

Personally, i would take a ghost backup of your machine anyway, once you have it the way you want it.... so that in the event you need to do a reload, just restore your image to a "fresh" machine, with all drivers installed (admittedly you would need to update the drivers, depending on how long ago the ghost was taken) but sure saves alot of faffing around...

I wouldnt stripe your raid, as per the discussions me you and nemmy had last night

I see logic in that,mirror will protect if a hdd dies and if its a software problem.Ghost will recover the image and of course in mirror mode will be on both hdds

[Ramrod]

I see logic in that,mirror will protect if a hdd dies and if its a software problem.Ghost will recover the image and of course in mirror mode will be on both hdds

[punky]

If no work is going on the computer, then is there really the need to mirror the drives? Games porn and the like would be a pain if you lost it all, but worth consuming a whole other drive? You have all the disks, and everything else can be downloaded, or burnt periodically. You'd be better off striping them and getting the most space.

[zovat]

For general use - mirroring is great, you get twice the read throughput, but all writes happen twice so you get a small degradation in performance...

Striping will give you better write speed, but will mean that if one drive fails, the whole filesystem will go....

Personally, I see little use in striping, unless you are using very high I/O bandwidth, and even then, I would look at running both mirrored and striped, thus giving you both the throughput of striping, and the redundancy of mirroring (but you need more disks )

If you just want to use both drives, and have all the space, I would have 2 filesystems, as if one drive fails, you only lose the one filesystem.

If you do wish to do both, you can either create a stripe, then mirror it ( 0+1) or create a mirror, then stripe across it (1+0) For redundancy, a 1+0 (also known as 10) is better, as you can lose 50% of the drives (so long as they ar not both sides of 1 mirror) , and the thing keeps going, whereas with 0+1, if you lose more than one drive, the whole thing dies... (IIRC)

HTH

[KingPhoenix]

Yeah zovat, we spoke about Raid10 last night too... personally i still prefer raid5

[zovat]

Originally Posted by KingPhoenix

Yeah zovat, we spoke about Raid10 last night too... personally i still prefer raid5

Yuk, raid 5

Raid 5 (IMHO) is ok if you have a H/W raid 5 array or want to have a large filesystem with only 1 spare disk, otherwise it uses far too much processor power for what it does again, IMHO).

[KingPhoenix]

Originally Posted by zovat

Yuk, raid 5

Raid 5 (IMHO) is ok if you have a H/W raid 5 array or want to have a large filesystem with only 1 spare disk, otherwise it uses far too much processor power for what it does again, IMHO).

The asus boards have hardware raid controllers