Advanced System Building Guide

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."

Take the article with a grain of salt

[winkydink]

You should always have a dedicated partition for your temp files and swap file. It's tempting to actually put this on a separate physical drive to reduce the wear and tear on the main drive, but the disadvantage is that upgrading to a larger hard drive a more involved process.

Reduce wear and tear? Really? I've heard many reasons why one should do this (improving perfmance & reducing fragmentations which he mentions later), but reducing wear and tear?

Also, I'd love to find a pointer to building an inexpensive (not cheap, there's a difference), reliable machine... much more interesting to me anyway.

Re:GeekSquad?

[boingyzain]

I actually worked in Best Buy out here when I was 16 years old and they started the "BAY TECHNICIANS" at $7/hr. It was sad... Then the geek squad came in. Man, I have never seen so much advertising for a crew that works on computers. I did not join the Geek Squad because I didn't want to wear a uniform that rivals Burger King... But the customer line speaks for itself, and everyone in that line wasn't happy. I started dropping off my card to people telling them to call me if they wanted a better deal. Well.. Best Buy is a big company and they sure can sell a product. Too bad that they cant sell the service too.

Hmmm

[2names]

It has been my personal experience that the armature fails on drives much more often than the rotational assembly.

Your experience may vary, but I'll stick with seperate drives for temp and swap.

sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

if by "advanced" you mean "really, really, basic" then, yes, this is the most advanced article I've read on this topic,

signed
disgruntled goat

First step in building a machine...

[gosand]

I have built my own systems since I don't remember when. But my first rule of thumb when building a new system - research all the technology that changed since the last time you built a system.

To put it in perspective, all of my systems at home have PC-133 memory in them. The last time I built an entire system from scratch, 80 gig drives were expensive, DDR memory didn't exist, 12x CD-RW drives were getting affordable, and we were just breaking the gigahertz barrier in CPUs.

Now I have sort of been following things, but not enough to know off the top of my head what to grab off the e-shelf to build a system. I have found that this has been the biggest challenge in building new systems.

Re:Um... swap file?

[stratjakt]

Not possible for many of us. My system can't support enough RAM for some of the DB stuff I'll do. I had a 7 gig swap file last week as my poor box choked through 25 gigs of data.

What I want are 5-10 gig or larger "drives" that are made up of cheaper 66mhz SDRAM modules, yet have an IDE/SATA/SCSI/(Whatever) interface, and use one of those for swap.

Do they exist? If not, why not?

Re:GeekSquad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently heard an employee at Best Buy use the term "Geek Squad." The irony was overwhelming, so I had to ask.

Turns out that "Geek Squad" was a small company in some middle-sized town (Columbus, maybe.) They were competing with Best Buy. So Best Buy did what corporate giants always do. (No, they didn't study the competition and analyze it's strengths. Funny suggestion, though.) Of course, they just bought them out.

And, to add insult to table salt (or whatever), they decided that the one part of the company they would actually use would be the name.

hey now

[Menotti M]

As a part time Geek Squad agent (in the summer and during intersession), I kinda resent the author's disdain for us. True, you may run into some who don't know their ass from their elbow. But, in general, the in-store agents have much more expertise than the sales people, many have at least some certification, and the agents who do field work (Double Agents) go through a pretty legitimate training and testing period. Even if you considered Geek Squad members to be useless, the article does not provide a ton of information for individuals who "built dozens of desktop computers on your own and for others and consider yourself a seasoned system builder." The author has a bias towards Maxtor, for example, without providing any empirical evidence beside the fact that he's had good experience with them. Personally, I've had pretty good experiences with Western Digital drives too, but those aren't mentioned. He also arbitrarily comments on things like adjusting the page file, justifying his recommendations by "thinking" they are good settings. Yes, there are many great points in there, but the author has a bit too much confidence with him/herself and not enough data to back up some his more specific recommendations, not to mention some unfounded commentary on Geek Squad representatives.

Why build? An alternative view.

[Niet3sche]

I'm going to studiously ignore saying anything about the article. If you can benefit from it, that's great. If not, that's fine too. Here's the meat of my post: with prices coming down and package / rebate deals on new boxes all the time, it might be tempting to ask why should I build my own box at all?.

My personal take on this (yes, I build all my boxes) used to be cost-effectiveness and component picking, but now it is simply that I can dictate exactly which components I want in my system for the same price as buying something bundled. There is no longer any real cost savings here, but I do like to maintain control over what I put in my machines (up very very very nearly 24/7 thanks to this, with downtime only to upgrade or blow out dust). So there is still merit in "rolling your own" box, as far as I am concerned.

I wanted to beat the cries of, "why would I build when I can buy for the same price?". ;)

Re:GeekSquad?

[SynapseLapse]

Just outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota as a matter of fact.
A co-worker of mine used to work for them.
Best Buy purchased Geek Sqaud a few years back, (Although, if you ask any of the original Geek Squad crew, they formed a "Strategic Business alliance) and they still run independent of Best Buy which is the main reason their competent. At least, here in the twin cities they're still really good. I can't speak for the rest of the country...

Re:Advanced system building

[FortranDragon]

I don't know which is funnier, your spoof or the '+1, Interesting' mod you got. :-D

Ignorance

[operagost]

Can we stop it with the system guides from people who don't want to let actual facts get in the way of their superstitions? Putting your page file on a separate partition? Pure rubbish. Do you like having your hard disk seek over a large fraction of its surface every time it has to page? If fragmentation is a concern for you, then set your initial page file size very large (two times the size of RAM, perhaps) on a hard disk with lots of free space. It will be contiguous, and will stay that way unless you have a serious memory leak. As for a partition for "scratch" space -- even dumber. A scratch disk? Yes. In fact, scratch disks are one actual GOOD use for stripe sets (RAID0). The reason this guy gives for having these items on one disk instead of separate disks is that it's easier when you get a bigger disk. Why? Must you upgrade ALL your disks at once? What's stopping you from keeping the disk with your page file and scratch space? Replace it whenever you like! It's more expensive to buy two disks, I'll admit that. Oh yeah, and he tells you to disable System Restore on the system disk (where you need it) and leave it enabled on the scratch disk (where it is useless).

To be frank, this article is actually better than the usual. One of the worst I ever read was about four years ago in 2600 magazine, if you can believe that.

Re:Um... swap file?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a system with 1GB of ram, which is plenty for everything I do (mostly gaming and coding). I don't use a swap file under WinXP since it is noticeably slower than using only physical ram. If I turn the swap file on restoring minimised windows and using the start menu have noticable delays even tho my system is only supposedly using ~300MB of 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?

By default Windows XP will place as much memory as possible for any minimised application into swap. Don't believe me? Load up task manager and add the Mem usage column, this shows actual physical ram being used. Now load up a ram hogging program and minimise/unminimise it - see how the Mem usage drops when you minimise it and comes back up with the window is restored, thats windows paging the apps memory to swap file even tho it doesn't actually need to. Windows of course then makes the memory available to other apps and as soon as something overwrites it, to restore the minimised app requires disk thrashing swap reading and noticable delays with a system that has 70% of its memory still available.

Linux may do this the proper way I, I haven't tested it since I don't use a swap file with linux either because its not required for any of the linux boxes I have setup or run (all for home use nothing real serious).

As long as there is enough physical memory for everything required of the system, I cannot see how its possible for a swap file to make a system run faster.

Re:Yes, reducing

[glesga_kiss]

The rotational assembley that spins the platters (the speed of which is constant) is by far the biggest failure mechanism.

Not that you can do anything about that anyway. On any OS, there are enough services and daemons to make sure that the drive NEVER powers down. I haven't seen a drive do that on anything other than a laptop in years, don't know why I bother enabling it on desktops.

Besides, the best reason IMHO to have two drives for the OS is fragmentation, or lack of.

One thing I have wondered, and perhaps someone can answer me; what effects does the data placement have? Say you have a 10G drive, 1G swap, 1G /tmp and the rest as root. (this works for windows as well). Would having things in different places e.g. root | tmp | swap be any different from say swap | root | tmp?

I'd always thought that the seek time was the bottleneck in any armature based data storage. However, with multiplatters I'm not so sure if this matters so much. That depends how the data is striped onto the platters, and if the arms move indepentantly. I know nothing about working drives, having only disassembled a dead one! I'd pay for a clear one just to see how the little bugger worked!

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

I wish this guy did more research.

[unsigned integer]

Uh, placement of PCI cards / sound cards because of RFI interference from graphics cards? Uh?

I'm more worried about the placement of sound cards because of IRQ sharing / dedicated IRQ's depending on the PCI slot. Some cards don't IRQ share well. Simply leaving this small, yet important piece of information out really makes me question his tech knowledge.

Uh, and he contiunes to use IE? My first step with a new XP install is to : go get a better browser. Firefox, Opera, whatever. Well, after I turn off all the lameness that is XP (Color scheme, menu styles / animations, etc)

Oh, and he turns System Restore off. Um, while I don't like XP all that much, if something totally fucking trashes your registry, this is a handy thing to have.

Re:Depends on what you're doing

[temojen]

I edit my 35mm photos at 4680x3120, 48bit colour, which is 85MB, so 16 would take ~1.3GB, not including undo, alpha, layers, etc.

I'm hopeing to start scanning my 6x6 images soon, and they'll be about 7200x7200, or about 297MB each. I'll only want to edit one of them at a time. Even if I had several GB of RAM It'd be slow loading & storing it.

For me, 1600x1200 is a size I might scale a picture down to for display on a monitor, not a size I edit or print at (and I don't even have as high resolution of scanner as I could use with velvia or provia).

Re:Hmmm

[meatspray]

Given, I've only been in this since the early 386 days, but I've had the chance to work at several big installations, wharehouses, a few pc shops and the occasional help desk. Every time I see a new type of problem, I conduct a post mortem on the drive. (I'm more after magnets these days)

Most common problems I've seen:

#1 Media has an electromagnetic defect that appears over time: (new regular bad sectors without physical signs of dmg on the platters)
Until 1996, I had seen more of this than anything. Some cases might have been heat or one of the next few problems but far too many succombed to this fate for it to be a symptom of another physical problem. I haven't seen this in quite some time.

#2 On drive controller board failure:
This also used to happen quite frequently, I've seen a few cases of this recently, It's the failure I see most often today.

#3 Spindle bearing failure:
I've seen a few handfulls of these only. They generally get replaced when they get noisy before the failure is complete. The best part was removing a siezed drive from the pc and giving it a whack flat on it's back to watch the user in amazement when you put it back in and it spins up.

Armature failure:
I've seen a few cases of this only. Some of the media defects might have been this in disguise. The best armature failure I ever saw was an old full height SCSI drive that probably got too hot, the heads caught on the platter and over the years whittled themselves down to stubs while cutting through the platters. It was a QNX box that was perfectly content to boot from the master server after it's hard drive failed. The platters ended up being razor sharp rings of death. Nice christmas tree ornaments through.

Re:Yes, reducing

[budgenator]

We used to partion drive so the swap was in the middle, the next two most likely to be used next to the swap, and unlikely to be used on the outside. I don't think you can do that now as cylinders have so little to do with physical location on the platters now-a-days.

Shit now a disk drives has a bigger ram buffer cache than the machines we used to do that with have. the rule of thumb was 4 Mb for linux, 4 Mb for X Windows and 4Mb for each user; now we just slap in a half gig and call it good enough.

I did see a site where the guy ripped apart old hard disks and hooked them up to his stereo so the platters would spin and the heads twitch back and forth to the beat of the music. interesting thing to do to those old sub-Gigabyte drives in every computer geek's junk drawer!

Re:You builder, you.

[mkw87]

What about the fact that he refers to it as a "rig"

I am by far a geek, but I am also a technical person and when I hear the term rig I automatically think of a truck or drilling machine. Maybe this is because I have worked in the oil fields on an actual rig....but calling a computer a "rig" is strange.

I guess thats what you get when hicks get into the technical world a bit too much.

Re:Yes, reducing

[aaronl]

On modern systems it's not really an issue. Drives seek fast enough for it not to be noticable, and have sufficient memory to rarely need swap.

It used to be enough of an issue that in OS/2's HPFS all the FS structures were located in the middle of the partition to speed up access. It was a discernable gain in performance.

What kind of idiot posts this?

[xenocide2]

Placing the swap file on a dedicated partition can indeed improve things. Why?

1. You don't have to go through an intermediary filesystem, with associated overhead.

2. You can give the swap partition priority or at least balance in queuing on a single disk.

3. I'm sure there's a third reason that also validates my theory, given that pretty much every linux distro I know of makes a seperate swap partition. We'll call item #3 the "appeal to authority" argument.

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that you have indirectly insulted the engineers behind the Linux VM improvements. I realize this article was mostly about innane tweaks to windows XP, but the slander is inconsistant with my views of their work.