Monday, November 03, 2003

Server Build

Finally upgrading my old game machine into a server (Athlon XP 1800+). It's already a semi-quiet box, so I went with a pair of 5400 Maxtor 160Gb ATA/133 quiet drives hooked up to the motherboard's Promise FastTrak100 Lite (RAID1) to try and keep the noise down. Now, even though the drive says 160Gb... that's 160,000,000,000 bytes but the Promise FastTrak100 Lite is only seeing 127Gb (ah well... only losing 22Gb). It's an old Asus A7V266-E motherboard, and I don't see any updated BIOS on their website for the raid controller.

It's taking 50 minutes to format 127Gb (or around 43Mb/sec) which is pretty decent performance for only a 5400rpm drive). I'll set it up with a 12Gb boot drive and configure the rest as a storage partition (D:) which should give me net space of 110Gb or so (double the old server that it's replacing).

I still might investigate a quiet power supply, but I think once I close the case I'm not going to notice it. My newer game PC makes a lot more noise (sadly). The mini-ITX boxes are intriguing because they're almost entirely passive-cooling (ultra quiet) - but most of the boxes only hold a single drive and I prefer RAID1 (2 drives) at a minimum.

Oh, and since I started collecting my confirmed spam messages... I now have 4200 spams in my bayesian filter training folder. (The filter is getting *really* accurate.)

posted by Wuphon's at 11:51 AM