Advanced System Building Guide 523
Alan writes "FiringSquad has up an Advanced System Building Guide, detailing how to construct your own rig. The first half deals with hardware selection and even esoteric concepts such as PCI slot placement. The second half is focused on Windows XP, and makes recommendations such as moving the swap file and scratch disk to a separate partition." From the article: "You laugh at the so-called expertise of Best Buy's GeekSquad, and are the one doing the teaching when calling technical support. If this sounds like you, you've come to the right place if you're looking to take your system building skills to the next level."
Speedy Delivery. (Score:1, Informative)
Yes, reducing (Score:2, Informative)
If you can reduce the amount of this wear on your OS and data drives by placing swap and temp on a physically seperate drive, you may prevent major data loss.
I would think this would be obvious, but I guess not.
Re:Yes, reducing (Score:5, Informative)
Re:so sad (Score:2, Informative)
I've had great success with almost every brand out there (those that I've tried, have worked great), and I've seen spectacular failures with most of them.
Re:Take the article with a grain of salt (Score:2, Informative)
If you need the extra performance by moving the swap, moving it to a separate partition will just slow everything down because the head has to move further on the platter to get there. If it's interspersed among your data, the chances it needs to hunt for the right track is that much reduced because it's already pretty close to being there already. If you're not actively using more virtual memory than physical ram, where the swap space is doesn't do a whole lot of difference because you're not doing a whole lot of swapping.
A dedicated drive gives the speed AND longevity.
Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out (Score:5, Informative)
That being said, the hard drives will wear out. Period. End of story. Some might die in a few months, some in a few years, and some might never die before you replace them.
Even more important is the conecpt of multiple spindles to do multiple jobs. If you have one drive that suddenly hits swap because you're doing something, not only will your system grind to a halt because the drive head is loaded with contention (it can only do one job at once, obviously) but you're adding that much more wear and tear.
With the swap on a separate drive (and preferably on a separate IDE channel, assuming that that's what you're doing), the main drive can do whatever it needs to do while letting the other drive take care of the swap. So, not only are you greatly increasing potential throughput and system efficiency, you're dramatically reducing wear and tear on the drive head mechanism.
Re:What the heck is this supposed to mean? (Score:2, Informative)
I just built my system--Lessons learned (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes, reducing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Take the article with a grain of salt (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the extra ten minutes you need to spend going through config dialogs every time you upgrade to a larger hard drive (and how often does one do that? About once a year? Once every two years?) is more than enough justification to subject your system drive to more "wear and tear" every day.
Disappointed. I assumed an article on "advanced" system building would include a lot more work with a soldering iron and tin snips.
Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned (Score:2, Informative)
You don't necessarily have to reinstall if you forget your Administrator password. Check out the following utility:
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/ [eunet.no]Re:Yes, reducing (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on what you're doing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned (Score:2, Informative)
Don't forget the Administrator password. I had to do a reinstall because I forgot it. Luckily, I hadn't transferred any info at the time.
There's a Linux distribution for that. [eunet.no]
Re:so sad (Score:3, Informative)
Ditto. I've got two Maxtors running right now with no problems whatsoever - neither even gets warm to the touch, and they are both inaudible to boot.
Like you, I have had one go bad on me in the past, but then I've also had two WD's and a Seagate go bad on me, and know numerous people who've had IBM's, Samsungs, and other drives go bad too. It's sort of a badge of honor to have a drive go bad - you're not a real geek if it hasn't happened to you yet. But it really doesn't matter who makes the drive; their failure rates are pretty similar (with a few notable and notorious exceptions - the IBM DeathStar drives, for example, though these were simply defective).
I don't think anybody who saw my house, with its four networked PC's, two of which are scratch-built (one of which is technically 15 years old!), one of which is controlling all my media viewing, would question my geek credentials, and I've got no problem with Maxtor at all. It's almost like a form of nerd prejudice if you really think one drive maker is significantly worse than any other - it can't be based on anything real.
Re:Here's what I think (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Um... swap file? (Score:3, Informative)
I did a quite Google of the term and got http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php [bitmicro.com].
I also found a dicussion on Sharky's forums from back in 2001 about this very issue. I doubt we'll ever see one, but you never know what those crazy people in Hong Kong will hack out next.
Re:Take the article with a grain of salt (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Um... swap file? (Score:3, Informative)
It's more that it's good to have it there just in case, because you never know when you will need it (even with 2GB, you can multi-task yourself straight to hell if you're doing image editing, watching videos, and running crap in the background all at the same time), and it doesn't hurt anything to have it enabled. If your system doesn't need it, it just won't use it, so no use disabling it. But that one day when you run out of RAM in a very bad way because you've disabled your swap file could kill you (or at least your data), depending on what you're doing. Windows PC's do not like it when they run out of memory without expecting to.
There's something of a myth that some people believe in that Windows is constantly accessing your swap file even with loads of RAM, and that turning the swap off will force Windows to use your RAM. Well, a) Windows XP is pretty good with memory management, and doesn't use swap when it doesn't have to, and b) even if it did use swap too much, turning it off isn't going to "teach" the OS to use memory properly. It either needs the swap file or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, what do you have to lose by leaving it on?
Re:I just built my system--Lessons learned (Score:3, Informative)
I've almost done this myself a few times, but I googled around and discovered Peter Nordahl's 'Offline NT Password & Registry Editor' [eunet.no], which can just reset the Admin password and avert the problem of reformatting.
Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out (Score:4, Informative)
Re:RAM Drive (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out (Score:3, Informative)
Look at the space shuttle: No single part has an failure rate worse than once in 100K launches (IIRC; it may have been one in a million. It's in the design specs)*
Now, there are some odd million parts. WHOA! No, you don't get a failure every launch, but the failure rate is WAY higher than on in a million -- think the RFP/design specs 'required' a one in 10K chance of failure.
The reason for the discussion was based on some of the 'design requirements' floated about for the next-gen 'shuttle replacement' -- one of which was a 1 in a million chance of failure -- thus necessitating a piece-wise failure rate of around 1 in a billion.
And what in the world does the Monty Hall problem have to do with this?
Try: Math World [wolfram.com]
and:
NASA
And the most directly applicable:
Hotwire article [weibull.com]
Or just consider how they test for MTFB: Take 1000 parts. Run them until all of them die (not really for hard-drives, but this is how you do it for REALLY IMPORTANT things:~} ). Now plot the distribution and take the mean.
Cheers,
* yes, I am a rocket scientist, and this was discussed in classes I took years ago.
Re:Yes, reducing (Score:2, Informative)
However, due to the realities of MTBF, every drive you add increases your chances of a catastrophic failure. If you don't have a real performance reason for adding spindles, more drives is just more points of failure.
Re:so sad (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out (Score:3, Informative)
(1-P) is the probability of a given widget surviving the day.
(1-P)^N is the probability of *all* widgets surviving the day.
1-((1-P)^N) is the probability of a failure within the system on any given day - this may be a single failure, or multiple failure, but is most assuredly a failure.
For a P 1/3 and N 3, the Ptotal is 0.70, which is indeed only slightly above 1/3. This is true. It is also misleading. The complexity gain is much more noticeable with more realistic failure probabilities - given a P of 1/10, and 3 parts, your failure rate suddenly goes to 0.271, near to tripling your failure rate. As you approach the limit of reliability (lower and lower P), your gain approaches the number of parts in the system; essentially, with sufficiently reliable parts, each additional part *does* more or less additively affect reliability. The bound for additive behavior is roughly (1/P) >= 9.6N, for a 5% bound (additive to within 5% accuracy, in other words).
Re:Yes, mechanical parts WILL wear out (Score:3, Informative)
Windows doesn't handle swap that well. (Score:3, Informative)
Since it is going to do it anyway, you'll want a nice, clean, ORGANIZED place for it to do it in.
The problem is that adding a partition usually puts that partition near the spindle which is the SLOWEST portion of the disk. But it will still cut down on fragmentation and crap.
With a Linux system, I put the swap drive down first. It gets the fastest portion of the disk. It should never use it, but just in case
With Windows, if you do that you'll end up installing Windows to D:\, which is fine, but you'll need to make adjustments everytime something wants to install to C:\program files.
Re:The guide is useful for those who don't know... (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, really? [dau-alarm.de]
"Rig" has a long history w/ electronic gear... (Score:3, Informative)