New desktop

wisemen

wisemen

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Looking at buying a new desktop mainly to use for processing and storage of ever increasing amounts of pictures. I have a budget of approximately 600 quid, much more and the missus will get tetchy. This is just for the box, not monitor.

I have a couple of questions for the more technically minded amongst us.

1, Would I be better with a fast dual core processor or a slower quad core processor.

2, What is the best way of storing the data? Should i get a large HDD and back up to an external drive, or mirror 2 drives in the unit?

Also any other suggestions as to what I should be looking for?

Thanks in advance
 
1 - slower quad
2 - raid mirroring is not a backup

for 600 you could either go with a new i5 core, i think an i7 will be a touch over budget, or an older socket quad core (something like the Q9550) with at least 4GB. other than those 2 parts the other expensive item is the graphics card, are you going to be doing any video work or gaming?
 
Not interested in gaming, ps3 and wii cover that!!!
 
Quick tinker on Ginger6 website geta this for £594 all in, I have always had good service from them

--Intel Core i5 i7 P55 Custom Built PC--
- 00 - CPU - Intel Core i5-750 (4x 2.66GHz) 4.80GT, 8mb
- 00 - CPU Cooler - Standard Intel CPU Cooler
- 01 - Case - NZXT Beta Black Case
- 01 - Case Fans - Standard case fans
- 01 - Power Supply - 450w PowerCool 80+
- 02 - Motherboard Asus P7P55-M - P55 Chipset
- 03 - Memory - 4gb Kingston DDR3 1333mhz
- 04 - Hard Drive 1 - 160gb SATA2 Hard Drive
- 04 - Hard Drive 2 - 500gb SATA2 Hard Drive
- 04 - Hard Drive 3 - ----------------
- 05 - Optical Drive 1 - Dual Layer DVDRW Drive
- 05 - Optical Drive 2 - ----------------
- 06 - Floppy - ----------------
- 07 - Graphics - 512mb Nvidia GeForce GT220
- 08 - PCI Slot 1 - ----------------
- 08 - PCI Slot 2 - ----------------
- 09 - Keyboard & Mouse - ----------------
- 10 - Speakers - ----------------
- 11 - Operating System - ----------------
- 12 - Office - ----------------
- 13 - Antivirus - ----------------
- 13 - Other Software - ----------------
- 14 - Monitor - ----------------
- 14 - Monitor 2 - ----------------
- 15 - Warranty - 1 Year Collect and Return Warranty (Mainland UK ONLY
 
2 - raid mirroring is not a backup ?

Raid Striping is not a backup, raid mirror is although not just files you want it is a backup of your full system

RAID 1 - Mirroring

Definition: RAID 1 mirroring is an arrangement of hard disks that creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. This is useful when read performance or reliability are more important than data storage capacity.

RAID I, for example, writes two copies of the data simultaneously on two separate drives. This is called fault tolerant because if one of the mirrored drives suffers a mechanical failure (e.g. spindle failure) or does not respond, the remaining drive will continue to function. The RAID 1 configuration is performed either by a hardware RAID controller… or performed in software. It is suited to applications requiring high fault tolerance at a low cost and where a duplicated set of data is more secure than using parity. RAID 1 is popular for accounting and other financial data. It is also commonly used for small database systems, enterprise servers, and home PCs where a fairly inexpensive fault tolerance is required.

A RAID device maintains a mirror of all the data in a partition... on another partition. This second partition is usually on another drive (note: in Linux systems the second partition can be on the same drive). There is a small performance hit to be expected when configuring your hard disks in a RAID 1 partition as the data has to be written to every disk in the RAID array.
 
madmackem said:
2 - raid mirroring is not a backup ?

Raid Striping is not a backup, raid mirror is although not just files you want it is a backup of your full system

RAID 1 - Mirroring

Definition: RAID 1 mirroring is an arrangement of hard disks that creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks. This is useful when read performance or reliability are more important than data storage capacity.

RAID I, for example, writes two copies of the data simultaneously on two separate drives. This is called fault tolerant because if one of the mirrored drives suffers a mechanical failure (e.g. spindle failure) or does not respond, the remaining drive will continue to function. The RAID 1 configuration is performed either by a hardware RAID controller… or performed in software. It is suited to applications requiring high fault tolerance at a low cost and where a duplicated set of data is more secure than using parity. RAID 1 is popular for accounting and other financial data. It is also commonly used for small database systems, enterprise servers, and home PCs where a fairly inexpensive fault tolerance is required.

A RAID device maintains a mirror of all the data in a partition... on another partition. This second partition is usually on another drive (note: in Linux systems the second partition can be on the same drive). There is a small performance hit to be expected when configuring your hard disks in a RAID 1 partition as the data has to be written to every disk in the RAID array.
Click to expand...

no no no no...

raid mirroring will NOT protect against:

fire
theft
file deletion

and my all time favourite..

on more than one occasion i have seen raid controllers fail and destroy all data on all attached drives, these were server grade controllers too by the way, forcing a restore from tape (those were a few very late nights/early mornings).

raid mirroring is NOT a backup solution.
 
just to add that I've seen a disk in a software mirror fail and make the entire array unusable. RAID 1 _can_ help guard against data loss but don't bank on it.

I used to think RAID1 was important. It is useful, if you have proper (expensive) hardware controllers. For the rest of us, it sucks up bandwidth and disk space for questionable benefit and for all the reasons Neil points out, is not a backup solution.
 
indeed, RAID1 is useful in a 24/7/365 uptime environment.. and in my opinion thats where its only useful. yeah okay it can keep you running in the event of a drive failure until PC world opens in the morning, but its no more than that.. its a redundancy option not a backup.

if youre concidering software RAID then think again. also in my opinion.
 
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