My son, who is into gaming, has been pestering me to build him a windows box. I finally arranged to get it all set up, having downloaded a Win7Pro64 disk on the advice of windows using friends of mine.
This is when I found that a 2.4GHz quad core Intel processor is considered mildly obsolete. It also has a Radeon 4870 and 8GB of ram. The specs are fairly low by modern standards, but they should do. However, Asus, the motherboard manufacturer, no longer provides drivers.
I have found the network drivers, and Windows Update seems to be installing other drivers right now.
Anyway, that project is going swimmingly. I also have a decaying linux box, with a motherboard that periodically refuses to boot. I have found some 10krpm SFF SAS disks (2.5"), five of them, and am going to add them to my system, possibly adding three more later, as raid0, to improve my performance, as I have adopted KVM and need fast storage.
I am going to have to address the machine performance as well. The processors are fast enough, 8 2.9GHz cores, but the ram, 14.7GB, is not enough. It is 14.7GB because of interleaving. Anyway, with two VMs running 4GB each, I'm running out of space.
I also need to address my main storage array, which has precipitated my need to investigate Linux MD raid, which now supports RAID6, online level migration and online capacity expansion.
I have enough ports on my motherboard to connect 14 devices, 8 sas and 6 sata, and I have an 8 port sas controller as well. With 6 sas ports used by the sas hardware, going up to as many as 14 in the future, I will need at least 9 ports for the sata array, for a max of 23. Right now, I am looking at 15 ports, which can easily be done with the higher speed sas controller. I suppose when I get it set up, I will post some performance numbers for both the raid6 software raid array and the raid0 scratch/VM disks.
This is when I found that a 2.4GHz quad core Intel processor is considered mildly obsolete. It also has a Radeon 4870 and 8GB of ram. The specs are fairly low by modern standards, but they should do. However, Asus, the motherboard manufacturer, no longer provides drivers.
I have found the network drivers, and Windows Update seems to be installing other drivers right now.
Anyway, that project is going swimmingly. I also have a decaying linux box, with a motherboard that periodically refuses to boot. I have found some 10krpm SFF SAS disks (2.5"), five of them, and am going to add them to my system, possibly adding three more later, as raid0, to improve my performance, as I have adopted KVM and need fast storage.
I am going to have to address the machine performance as well. The processors are fast enough, 8 2.9GHz cores, but the ram, 14.7GB, is not enough. It is 14.7GB because of interleaving. Anyway, with two VMs running 4GB each, I'm running out of space.
I also need to address my main storage array, which has precipitated my need to investigate Linux MD raid, which now supports RAID6, online level migration and online capacity expansion.
I have enough ports on my motherboard to connect 14 devices, 8 sas and 6 sata, and I have an 8 port sas controller as well. With 6 sas ports used by the sas hardware, going up to as many as 14 in the future, I will need at least 9 ports for the sata array, for a max of 23. Right now, I am looking at 15 ports, which can easily be done with the higher speed sas controller. I suppose when I get it set up, I will post some performance numbers for both the raid6 software raid array and the raid0 scratch/VM disks.
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