Dave Sneddon wrote:
For the hardware I was looking at these specs (now these are all listed in Australian dollars. So please convert from US/whatever first before you say "Why don't you get this part cheaper at XXX dollars). Affordability is my main concern. I don't want to spend too much. The only thing I am looking at dropping real money on is the hard drives.
Mobo: $99 - Gigabyte GA-M51GM-S2G (has 4 SATA2 ports and onboard 1000 LAN and video)
You might consider some of the mobos with 6 SATA ports, but in any case, the chipset is somewhat important. There is pretty good support with Solaris for NVidia NForce series.
CPU: $79 - AMD AM2 Sempron 3000 (moderate speed, cheap price)
I'd recommend Athlon64, x2 if you can swing it. You definitely want 64 bits and I've lost track of which semprons are 64 bit.
RAM: $75 - 512MB Generic PC5300 DDR2 HDDs: 4x 320GB SATA2 Seagate 16MB drive (to start with. $139 each) 1x 320GB IDE Western Digital 16MB drive (I already have this) 1x 30GB IDE Maxtor (would be the system/swap/etc drive. I already have this) PSU: $125 - Antec Neo Highly Efficient 2.2 430W (low power = low noise)
yeah, sounds reasonable... just make sure you have plenty of air flow. That many disks can get warm and heat kills disks. It might be a good idea to buy an extra fan for the case.
Case: I am actually planning on building my own out of pine wood. (roughly $80 in materials/paint etc).
Sweet. I'd probably go for quarter-sawn oak with a (homebrew) dye I've been using lately. But oak is perhaps more plentiful here. I've got a yard full of eucalyptus, but as you know, that is too fragile to work easily. OTOH, I scored a bunch of rough-sawn cherry that's aching for a project... the problem is that everytime I go down that path, I get reminded that a case with power supply runs about $30 down at the local swap meet, $5 if you don't mind scrap. BTW, plan on using some sort of ZFS redundancy. I prefer mirrors, others prefer more GBytes/$ and use raidz. You make make other trade-offs, but do something to protect your data. -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
