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

[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.