On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 04:41:14PM -0600, Gerard Beekmans wrote: > Hi guys, > sorry for the late reply, turns out my postfix config was inadequate once I switched to mutt, but the spam filters only caught me this week :-( > > Obviously no longer sufficient for what LFS needs today. > > 1 GB of RAM will be the absolute minimum but I'm looking toward 2 GB so > we don't bottleneck ourselves too soon. As for hard drives, we don't > truly need tremendous amounts of space. The current 18 GB is a bit tight > so we'll want more there. I was thinking dual 80 GB drives in a RAID 1 > configuration for safety. 80 GB usable space is more than plenty for us. > > SCSI vs. SATA. I'm a SCSI fan but I've had lots of good success with > SATA too. Plus sides being that we can get more space for much less money. >
The thing to remember is that you get what you pay for - a lot of SATA disks are for the consumer market, and they don't always expect to be heavily used. Logic says SATA is sufficiently fast for most uses, but make sure the manufacturer regards the drives as "enterprise class" and is willing to give them a long warranty! Beyond that, cooler is usually better - a quick froogle for enterprise SATA drives found some maxtor (no experience of their SATA) and WD (I like the raptor in my desktop, but it's not on 247) who claim their caviar drives are cooler. As ever, I wouldn't trust the advertising, but I'm sure there has been a test somewhere. > As far as CPUs go, we have some options. Pentium 4, Pentium D, and Intel > Xeons are my three choices at the moment (I'm still not an AMD fan but > I'll consider it too) as they offer nice amounts of speed for reasonable > prices. The question is if we really need dual CPUs or not. They are > nice and will help with some of the work we do, but are they needed. At > 2.8 to 3.0 GHz, there's plenty of speed that dual CPU could be > considered money we don't really need to spend. I'd rather put it into > more RAM or larger hard drives. > I've not used intel newer than PIII, I have to keep an eye on power consumption and heat - for a desktop box without a gee-whizz graphics card, athlon64 with cool'n'quiet generates significantly less heat than intel's finest, particularly when it is only lightly loaded. But, I won't be surprised if a 3GHz system is not as fast as you think! Sure, the memory (PC3200, or 2700, or DDR2?) is faster than what I guess must be PC100 in the old box, but the cpu will need more clocks per instruction. It will definitely be faster in the short term, but maybe not providing as much room for growth as you hope. Anybody got any server benchmark results for old/current kit ? Ken -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
