Storage

Last time, my budget prevented me from getting anything other than a standard Western Digital IDE 7200 rpm hard drive. Since I knew that was the weakest link, I added a high-performance drive cooler. The system is still running great.

For the current dual Opteron system, I initially went with an 80 GB Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9, the 7200 RPM FDB motor. The Maxtor is a high performance 7200 RPM drive that’s quiet and fast. What I am waiting for is the new Western Digital 73 GB Raptor 10,000 rpm S-ATA drive with FDB motors. The 36.7GB Raptor is currently the fastest desktop drive on the market, outperforming even 15K drives in desktop applications according to our colleagues at StorageReview. The 73GB version will be even faster, and should be very quiet with its FDB motor. My plan to go with the Raptor is for reliability. As a flagship model built for enterprise grade performance, the Raptor features a full 5 year warranty and MTBF ratings of 1.2 million!

The rationale for starting with the Maxtor first is pretty easy. Maxtor’s MaxBlast 3.0 is available as a downloadable CD-ROM ISO. One of the features included is a partition-to-partition copy which will work even with your primary OS. It’s like Norton Ghost with the exception that it is free to use as long as you have one Maxtor drive in your system, and in our experience, the Maxtor MaxBlast 3.0 is actually more reliable than many of the 3rd party applications out there.

Some of you may be sending off that email to me saying that I was a fool not to choose SCSI for its proven reliability. The thing with hard drives is that they’re a KNOWN weak link. You can spend plenty of money on a multi-drive software RAID mirroring setup (to give the extra protection of having each drive connected to a separate controller chip) and still have something go wrong where both drives fail simultaneously. It’s not a theoretical possibility – it has happened. Likewise there are Cheetah 15k SCSI drives with 1.5M hours MTBF that still die after a year of light use. It’s rare, but it happens.

There’s no alternative to good backups. Take the time to backup your documents and email. You will never regret it. The Raptor is a good balance between spending money on reliability, performance, and capacity.

Optorite DD0203 DVD+/-RW Combo Drive

What? No Plextor 8x drive? Why didn’t I go with the bigger brand names of Pioneer, Sony, or TDK? The Optorite DD0203 is a fast low-cost DVD+/-RW Combo Drive featuring Burn-Proof, HD-Burn (>1GB on a CD-R, readable only in HD-BURN compliant drives), and a large 8MB buffer. While the Plextor is faster with CD-R’s and DVD-R’s, we did not feel that it was the wisest use of funds.

Speaking of power…

You know the power supply is important and if there was one thing you should always “overspend” on when building a system, it’s the power supply. In the last article, I went with a PC Power & Cooling power supply, one of the best power supplies in the industry. This time I went with the SuperMicro SP450-RP. The SuperMicro has a redundant fail-safe fan – if the main PSU fan fails, a second fan will engage. The rated power is 12V = 30A. 5V = 26A. and 3V = 30A.

The front fan only activates when the rear fan fails

120mm rear exhaust fan

To improve the power chain, I am adding an extra component: a Monster Power PowerCenter PC1000 with Clean Power Stage 2 v2.0. Why?