New Computer

Hi Guys I am thinking about in upgrading my rig and building a new PC i'm not a gamer I use my computer as a Learning tool and use the PS3 / Wii for gaming.

I want my new rig to be able to run multiple O/S's in Vmware currently I have a Akasa Eclipse case so have plenty of room for expansion. I was thinking of a Quad Core Intel paired with 4 or 8 gig of ram I'm a bit clueless about hard drive space I want something fast for my main O/S and like 500gig or a terrabyte for Backup.

Graphics card i'm not to bothered about as long as it can run stuff like Aero and Compiz it's all good.

Power supply I need some advice with.

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Pash

depends on your budget.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-209-WD

The WD Raptor series is infamous for speed. Now they got those SATA2 drives which are very quick. One of those and a seagate baracuda 1TB for backup and storage should do nicely.

dynamik

If you're not worried about redundancy, put 2+ drives in a RAID-0/Striped array. Pick up four 250gb drives, and you'll have a TB that screams. The Raptors are sweet, but you could get four 7200 drivers for $75 less than one Raptor. I think that'll give you much better performance with lots of VMs running. If you have the money, go ahead and get four raptors

Also, consider RAID-10 if you need a combination of performance and redundancy.

As far as backups go, get a motherboard that has eSATA or add a PCI card that has it, and back up to an external drive via eSATA. You will never use an external USB drive again. If you already have a SATA drive, you can buy an external eSATA enclosure from Newegg or somewhere similar. I'm in the processes of converting all my external USB drives over.

A 600-700 PSU would probably be sufficient, with room for growth. Get a 1200 watt unit if you want to do triple-SLI

marco71

Four 300-350GB S-ATA hardisks (WD or Seagate ofc) in software RAID5 and you probably forget about an external backup (and get around 1TB)
... and a real 800-1000W PSU

dynamik

RAID-5 has a performance penalty because it has to calculate parity information. I think that'll noticeably affect performance if multiple VMs are running. Good advice for a basic data drive though.

I back all my stuff up externally and put it in a fireproof safe. There's no point in backups/redundancy if the machine's stolen or that area is destroyed by a fire, flood, etc.

marco71

dynamik wrote:

I back all my stuff up externally and put it in a fireproof safe. There's no point in backups/redundancy if the machine's stolen or that area is destroyed by a fire, flood, etc.

you're absolutely right from the perspective of a company ... but for home use, backup normally reduce itself to several CD/DVD media or tapes

astorrs

RAID 5 (which can only survive the loss of one drive) with no backups is called looking for a beating. Try backing up 1TB to DVD, I'll see you in a month.

My desktop for labing stuff at home has 2 x 1TB SATA2 drives in a RAID 1 (hardware) set with a 500GB eSATA drive, a Quad Core and 8GB RAM & Vista 64. Works great with VMware Workstation and performance is fine for lab work. If I was going to run more than about 4 VMs at a time I would probably add another 2 disks and go RAID 1/0, but as it sits I don't have a problem with disk queuing, etc.

ally_uk

Thanks for the advice chaps! My budget is about £500 The Raptor drives look pretty tasty :P

Is 8 gig ram overkill? I would probs be running Vista as my main os although I have some concerns with this as my experience so far with Vista hasn't been that great hence i'm currently running it in Vmware lol. Secondly what's a decent PSU you have to be careful with supplies thesedays as I have read articles on PSU's failing to meet the PSU Output as advertised.

aueddonline

does the sata2 connect to the motherboard using the same cable as just sata or do you need to worry about compatibity

dynamik

Yep. It's backwards compatible. You can connect a SATA-II drive to a SATA-I interface.

8gb seems to be a tad on the high side. I run Vista as my host OS, and I have to be very generous with the amount of RAM I allocate to my VMs to max my system out.

Can you set things up so you can add the other four later, if you need it? I'm assuming you were planning on doing 2gbx4.

Check out the reviews here for PSUs.