Quote:
Originally Posted by BSDKaffee
I find it more economical to build my own desktop systems.
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Building a system is balancing a number of trade-offs. How important is minimizing I/O latencies to how large a drive should be used; how much memory should be installed, to how fast a processor should be purchased. Back when I built my own systems, I went with SCSI drives
(& ten years ago, IDE couldn't hold a candle to SCSI performance...) which produces very nimble systems, but the overall cost was not competitive. Nevertheless, my last system lasted for nearly eight years & was still competitive performance-wise to what could be purchased at a store today.
A number of these same systems have been moved to different cases, & some components have been swapped out, but a number of these systems are still in use today. It was an expensive past-time, but then I've gotten a lot of use out of those machines, they lasted a long time, & I learned a lot from the experience.
I would recommend that everyone go through the process at least once as it will clarify a number of misperceptions we all hold at one time or another. Just be prepared to see it through to completion; otherwise, you simply have an assortment of parts which may not be in use. Given the short half-life of computer hardware, letting stuff sit around truly is a waste.