Building a new Computer

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colonydata

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finally decided that i needed a new computer and have decided to build it myself. i have not actually built one in about 8 years and the last time it was a total fiasco RMAd and tested just about every part but could never get it stable, even had other techs look at it.

im working on my mcitp EA so this machine is built to run virtual machines and to do it on a budget of about 600 dollars.

tell me what yall think of these components

Intel Core I5-2400 3.1GHZ 3.4 Turbo
LG DVD Burner 24x with light scribe
Antec EA-500d 500 Watt PSU
BioStar TH67+ B3 Steping Micro ATX mother board
2x Patriot 4gb DDR3 1333(PC3 10600) ram (gonna add 2 more later on for 16gb)
3 WD-Caviar Blue 500gb 7200 RPM Sata 6gb drives (going to run them in either raid-0 or raid-5)
Antec 300 Black Steel case

for a grand total of 643 dollars with shipping.

going to throw in a discrete GPU later

going to use my window 7 ultimate Steve Ballmer edition 64 bit

case will be here tomorrow the rest on monday.
 
Honestly, I am perplexed by your dilemma in using either RAID0 or RAID5. They are polar opposites as far as redundancy. I would not be using a BIOSTAR board as they are on the low-end as far as reliability is concerned.

If data redundancy is important as well as responsiveness, look at implementing RAID10 instead.

I also question why you would ask for advice, after ordering these components. It could be my perception as Ive been sick this week and medication does goofy things.
 
Hard Disk speed is the main bottleneck with any Virtualization setup. The Caviar Blue's are OK, I would have went with some Caviar Black's, or Seagate 7200.12's as they don't cost a whole lot more. As the previous posted stated, if you have any concern over redundancy, then run RAID 10. You will need another HDD though, of identical capacity.
 
go on newegg and see how many H67 motherboards that have 2 PCI express 2 x16 slots on them, and have built in raid and 4 Dimm slots. the answer is 5 and the biostar had more reviews and a higher average rating than any of the others.

as far as the drives go i thought about getting the blacks but it was about 20 dollars more per drive and like i said i am building it on a budget.

as far as raid 0 vs. raid 5 i know 0 offers alot of speed but no fault tolerance, and 5 offer not as good speed, but with more fault tolerance.

fault tolerance is not a major concern with the VMs because its not that hard to back them up to an external drive. that makes me lean towards raid 0

on the other hand it would be a pain to have to rebuild the system from scratch. so that makes me think raid 5

i actually only planned originally to get 2 drives but decided to go ahead and get a third drive to run raid5 in case thats what i decided to do.
 
I would not do RAID 0... Especially across 3 drives. That is just asking for problems.

The Western Digital Black have a 5 year warranty vs. 3 year warranty when you get the Blues. Blacks are also faster drives.

You mentioned this is on a budget. Well, I saw 3 x Blue 500 GB for $40 each (yeah, the blacks are $60 each).

If you get 3 x Blue 500 GB, that would be $120.

You can get 2 of these Black 1 TB drives at $88 each:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

$144 vs. $120... it will cost you $24 more, you will have one fewer drive that can possibly fail, and 2 more years of warranty on both drives, which will also be larger and faster.


Each hard drive also uses about 30 watts of power. At 10 cents per killowatt hour (you more likely pay 12-15 cents), you save 0.3 cents per hour, so you will save at least $2.16 a month on your power bill (if you leave it on), so within a year it will pay for itself anyway.



I would recommend RAID 1. Many people here recommended RAID 10, but you really cannot do a strip of mirrors without at least 4 hard drives and a RAID controller that supports it. You also cannot do a Mirror of Stripes, which is RAID 0+1 without at least 4 drives. With 2 drives, all you can do is RAID 0 or RAID 1... or JBOD!!!! With 3 drives, it is possible to do RAID 5, but this parity calculation of the stripping blocks slows down the motherboard chipset. For a hobbiest computer I would recommend RAID 0 or RAID 1.

Trust me on this one. Do not do RAID 5 on anything but real server hardware. If anything goes wrong, it is too hard to recover data in that your data is NOT on any 1 drive. You would need at least N-1 drives to get your data.


I recommend 2 x 1TB drives in RAID 1. It offers plenty of space and reliability. If a drive fails, you keep working. If you ever need to do data recovery, you can pull one drive out and pop it into any computer in the shop and all the data should be there.
 
Last edited:
NETWizz said:
I recommend 2 x 1TB drives in RAID 1. It offers plenty of space and reliability. If a drive fails, you keep working. If you ever need to do data recovery, you can pull one drive out and pop it into any computer in the shop and all the data should be there.
Click to expand...

i am using a raid array more for performance than for reliability

i know Raid 1 offers no performance boost for write i/o operations because it has to write the data to both drives. does it offer a boost to read operations?
 
colonydata said:
i am using a raid array more for performance than for reliability

i know Raid 1 offers no performance boost for write i/o operations because it has to write the data to both drives. does it offer a boost to read operations?
Click to expand...

The answer to this question is that it depends on the RAID controller. A garbage RAID controller is not going to provide you any increased read speed. A quality controller will generally offer improved read speed.

Either way, if there are any errors, it will immediately read from the other disk, which is good for reliability. I think you will be very happy.
 
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