Best laid plans

[unixronin]

Bought two 18GB Hitachi Ultrastar 36LPs (68-pin, 7200rpm) recently from CompuVest Corp. in Renton, Washington.  First one went into babylon5, and it's fine.  I started rebuilding the machine formerly known as llioness today around the other one, with a newer and faster SCSI controller and video card.  Only problem is, the second disk is DOA — the first DOA Ultrastar I've ever had.

Unfortunately they're now out of stock of the Ultrastar 36LP.  But they're issuing an RMA and sending a prepaid return call tag without any argument.  The next 68-pin SCSI disk they have is a reconditioned Quantum for $80, and I'll be damned if I'll spend $80 on a reconditioned disk.

I think I'm going to take this opportunity to consider whether to rebuild the machine around its existing core, or drop in a new motherboard ... the existing board sports an AMD K6-III/450 that's almost ten years old.  It surely can't cost much to drop in something several times faster than that.

(Update:  Yeah, looks like the biggest expense of a complete rebuld will be either memory or CPU, depending which options I go with.  I can get a Biostar PCI-E motherboard with SATA300 for $55, and a Seagate 80GB SATA300 disk for $45.  The smart move CPU-wise would probably be to drop more RAM an Athlon64 X2 into vorlon while Socket 939 CPUs are still available, and push vorlon's Athlon64 and RAM down to the rebuilt box.)

Comments

[tomatoe333.livejournal.com]

Almost anything you can buy these days, even used will be faster than a K6-3/450. I think I sunk less than $100 into an AMD Sempron 2600+ (1.8 GHz, 333 MHz FSB, 32 bit Athlon), and a motherboard for it with SATA ports built in. I dropped about another $100 on 1 GB of memory for it. The 250GB ATA/133 drive in the machine currently was $79, I think, when I bought it. I use it as a desktop, but once I save up the money for a newer Mac, it will become my file server. The current fileserver is an old Dell dual P2-400 that's showing its age.

These days, I would go either ATA/133 or SATA for drives. MUCH cheaper, just as fast (definitely faster than the older Hitachi/IBM Ultrastar 18GB drives), and similar failure rates. If you want to do hardware RAID, look at the 3Ware Escalade line of cards. A simple 2-channel card and a pair of ATA/133 drives of a decent capacity will easily be cheaper than the equivalent pair of SCSI cards and controller. Supported in Linux, and FreeBSD too, if that's your kink.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

*giggle* His kink is OpenBSD. :-) Sort of. He's got a hybrid Slack7 linux install and several Solaris installs and one OpenBSD box. The hybrid Slack7 started as a Slack7 box but it's been updated and patched and what have you that he can't really call it a Slack7 box anymore.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yup ... A few years back I tried to "update" the box to Slackware 9.1

I couldn't do it. It wouldn't work, because so much of what I was doing on it was too new to be supported under Slackware 9.1.

Now that I have a third disk in it again, I'll restart my interrupted plan to migrate the box to Gentoo.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yep, the cheapest AMD CPU I found was a Sempron 2800 in Socket 754. But I think it makes more sense to go Socket 939 and do a push-down upgrade through vorlon. And yes, the disk choice is a no-brainer when I can buy an 80GB SATA300 disk for $45. The Biostar motherboard I'm looking at has two SATA300 ports and can stripe or mirror them in hardware, if I decide to go that route, and it's PCI-E so I can reuse vorlon's old video card on it.

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

Let me know if you find an omgthat'sgood deal. Or better yet, don't that I way I won't be tempted to spend the money :-)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

omgthat'sgood deal on what, specifically? :)

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

Right now the cheapest upgrade I could probably do is getting a new mobo and CPU.

The most urgent purchase is probably a SATA3000 controller but I haven't confirmed the one on leiacat's new computer is bad.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

What sort of price range are you looking in and what kind of capability? What do you want to re-use if possible?

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

I am about to have $150 to spend at tigerdirect. I am already set for a case, PSU and SATA II drive.

That just leaves the minor stuff like the videocard, CPU and MOBO. Or I could sink the entire thing into a kick ass AGP video card or TV tuner card.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Pretty tough to get either a close-to-state-of-the-art motherboard and CPU or close-to-state-of-the-art video card for $150. Especially from TigerDirect, whose stock and pricing tends to be ... um ... not the best.

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

$150 is enough to get a pretty good video card. I think I would have to make too many comprimises to upgrade my mobo.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, $150 will buy you a 256MB or even 512MB GeForce 7600GS card. Try this one (http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=AA50080) for example.

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

I am thinking about the <a href="Http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp? EdpNo=1779348&CatId=318> BFG GeForce 6800 GS OC / 256MB GDDR3 </a>

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'd go with a 7600 card over a 6800, particularly in light of the stability problems I've had with 6x00-based cards. A 7600GS should quite handily out-perfom a 6800GS card, and will support a lot of things a 6800GS won't.

[arasirsul.livejournal.com]

If you can still get your hands on one, I highly recommend a Pentium D-- Looks like Newegg's got 'em for $80, but I'd step to the retail-boxed 820D for $100 to get the fan and the warranty; it's still cheaper than the cheapest dual-core AMD by $35 or so.

Sure, it's not as fast as any of the modern processors, and it's not "real dual core" (it's two Pentia glued together) but it runs circles around what you've got. It also happens to be the same socket as the modern Core 2 Duo, so if you buy a motherboard that handles the new processors you can upgrade to what's currently modern once what's currently modern turns cheap.

Got the Pentium D 805 under the hood of my Linux workstation and is niiiiice. Seems faster than my Athlon 3800 x2, but that's probably due to the fact that the AMD chip's hamstrung with Windows.

At which point, it's the RAM that's expensive...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip, I'll make a note of it.