[Ford] Re: Ford Digest, Vol 1, Issue 3

[pyng at spam.averse.net]

On Thu, 6 May 2004 ford-request at whoopis.com wrote:

> Also I prefer the higher specced machines for the following reason:
> - It has PCI-X interfaces with the HD controller. The lower spec machine
> has a 33MHz 32bit PCI bus and probably this bus can probably be
> saturated with heavy disk and network traffic.

Tyan's website
http://www.tyan.com/products/html/thunderk8spro_spec.html (unless
I'm looking at the wrong board) states that the SATA controller is
connected to legacy 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, though.

> 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.

Is there consensus that this is the best upgrade path from low to high?
I agree on choosing the higher end motherboard for expansion flexibility,
but thought that more RAM and more RAM should come before anything else,
followed by faster (10kRPM) disks, faster cpu, and better RAM coming in
last...  but I've not yet implemented a real UML system so I don't know
which aspects of the system they're most greedy about.

Also, how many drive bays are possible in that chassis?  Are there any
plans for filling up the riser cards?