[Ford] Hardware

[Jonas Meyer]

On May 5, 2004, at 2:45 PM, Staf Verhaegen wrote:

> If one would go for the lower spec machine I think the MSI K8T Master2
> is a better choice. Saw a review somewhere that compared the high end
> Tyan, the low end Tyan and the low-end MSI and concluded to go for
> either high end Tyan or the low end MSI. (Forgot where I read this
> review). The MSI seemed to perform better than the (low-end) Tyan for
> memory access.

I saw that also, however, I still decided to go with the Tyan for the 
reason that it had more SATA slots (and the performance difference was 
only a few percent).  Also, I think I read that the broadcom linux 
ethernet driver support wasn't as good, although that may have been 
resolved by now. (A google search for "BCM5705 linux support" turns up 
discussions from last July about how it was buggy).

We should also remember that we can (and undoubtedly will) mix and 
match between the two configurations, based on how much $$$ we get.  If 
we can get the extra dough, I think the high end motherboard should be 
the first thing we improve about the low end box, followed by upgrading 
the memory to DDR400, followed by another Gb of memory, followed by the 
better processors, followed by another 2 Gb of memory, and doing the HD 
last.  This assumes, of course, that people like both those configs as 
ends of the spectrum.

What are people's feelings about how much disk space we'll need?  If we 
get the high end motherboard, we can drop the total disk from 500 to 
140 and go with 10,000 RPM SCSI disks that have about half the average 
seek time for the same price.  If we are truly rich, we can get the 
15000 RPM drives, but those are $7 a Gb, before we mirror them.  Note 
that 140 Gb is still 10Gb per person (prolly more like 8 after we take 
out some for the host system and public file spaces).  We can also mix 
and match, perhaps figure out a way to make each /home live on SATA (or 
even EIDE) drives, while hosting all the kernels off of SCSI?  How much 
performance will this buy us?  Is it easy (possible) to do?

Jonas