Doctor Feelgood
Administrator
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 Posted: Wed, 21 Dec 2005 13:00:23 Post Subject: |
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WOW! One of the most comprehensive posts ever... So much to cover, I'll start with the hard drives.
Presently, SATA 3Gbps drives are the fastest. If you want the best speed for your large file processing, perhaps a RAID 0 array (striping) would be in order. This type of configuration provides no fault tolerance, so you should have this array backed up somewhere, meaning another drive. Or, you could look into a higher level of RAID, perhaps 5, which requires at least one more drive, but gives speed and redundancy.
Having a separate drive for the operating system / applications is a good idea. Most new motherboards will support 4 SATA drives by default, so having a 3 drive RAID array and a stand alone OS drive would not be a problem. The higher end nVidia nForce4 boards have the SATA 3Gbps support onboard.
Firewire is also available on some boards, but not all. Again, higher end nForce4 boards will have it, so you need to shop around. If you find a board without it, it is easy to add via a PCI expansion card.
I need to run... Maybe this will get people talking with more advice...
Welcome... Jason |
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