Hardware suggestions welcome

This machine, shiningsilence.com, is having some issues.  I had to power down because of unrelated problems, and the system couldn’t find the kernel on the next boot, though the issue disappeared on the next boot.  That’s enough of an excuse to build new…

Any hardware recommendations?  I’m interested in hearing what chipsets/disks/RAID setups/etc. and/or hardware suppliers worked well for people.

4 Replies to “Hardware suggestions welcome”

  1. Heh. Were I in such a position, I’d be looking to buy whatever it is that Matt uses…

  2. Phenom 2 dual core X2 550 Black Edition (HT 4000MHz) clock-speed 3.1GHz – The quad core chips seem to have a lower HyperTransport of 2000MHz.

    Either that processor or an Athlon 2 Socket AM3 (if you want to save some money).

    Gigabyte make the best motherboards.
    Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P – quite cheap board for socket AM3 – oh and it supports ECC Memory, so buy some ECC Memory for it.

    (all modern computer systems should have ECC Memory to protect against bit-flips due to background radiation).

    1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1 7200 rpm 32MB cache 8.9ms NCQ.
    This is a cheap + big hard-disk.
    I’ve gone off Seagate (for hard-disks) due to the firmware bugs they had in their hard-disks not so long ago.

    And finally for a power supply:

    Be Queit! Dark Power Pro 650W (highly recommended PSU according to PC magazines in the UK).

    BTW I live in the UK and I keep an up-to-date list of the best computer hardware, for a PC I am planning to build when I can afford it ! :)

    Cheers,
    Robin

  3. I went to a Microcenter store and bought a Dell Studio XPS 435T for less than the cost of similar components from Newegg. It has room for 24G memory and more disks. It may have been an in-store special, because the website is more expensive.

    I would think a hosted website would be more practical, though.

  4. If you’re just running this site on it and not much else than some low-end hardware off ebay is probably the way to go. You can buy a decent rackmount server for under $300 that would run this site (and probably 100 more at the same time). I’d recommend HP stuff, a G3 at least, they seem to work with any of the BSDs very well.

    if this is something in your house, get something with an atom processor that is quiet, a site like this doesn’t really use anything in the way of resources.

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