View Single Post
Old 1st February 2009
Carpetsmoker's Avatar
Carpetsmoker Carpetsmoker is offline
Real Name: Martin
Tcpdump Spy
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Netherlands
Posts: 2,243
Default

Quote:
On the Antec case you would like to buy, I'd ask CS. If he has had success using it, then by all means go for it. I tend to reuse equipment for many years, and having the extra capability of the Solo is worth it to me. For example, I am reusing one to put together a "new" computer from existing parts. It will have a bunch of SCSI drives in it, and they really vibrate like mad. The Solo will really help for that. Such a thing may not be important to you.
I don't think it matters that much, from what I understand BroodjeGehakt is looking for two normal desktop PC's which will sit under his (and his wife's) desk for many years very boringly without any tinkering.
Most cases (Including the Antec) will do just fine.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DrJ
On the disk issue, computer people tend to make a big deal about small performance differences. I'd bet you could not tell the difference in performance between any of the SATA drives you are considering if they are of comparable vintage and rotational speed. The differences really come when you compare those drives with SCSI, SAS or the 10K RPM SATA drives like the Raptor family. Within a particular drive class, I'd look for longevity/reliability, warranty, and noise. The differences in power consumption are not that big a deal for a desktop, and the performance differences usually are not large.
I would tend to agree, although I have never done any benchmarks, I have never really noticed any difference in overall system speed with different disks unless doing serious I/O stuff (Like extracting an archive) ... And I often use old/slow disks (I have a working 20MB disk for example, although I don't use it very often ).

Especially in desktop PCs, disks are idle 90% of the time.
1. You click a program, stuff gets loaded in memory, this requires disk I/O.
2. You do some work, usually there is very little I/O here.
3. You save your work, some disk I/O required.

Step 2 is where you will spend most of your time, most programs don't write stuff to disk that often, MS Office/OpenOffice.org may auto-save every 5 minutes ... But who cares if this takes 1 or 1.05 seconds?
__________________
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
Reply With Quote