Adventures in a 64 bit world – Part 2

Posted on September 10th, 2006 by Mark Sheppard

It’s now been almost 3 months since I purchased and built my monster desktop and I’ve had quite a bit of excitement with it.

To start with, the SATA II RAID 5 controller on the ASUS motherboard wasn’t up to spec. It just about worked until I wanted to perform more than one disk operation, then it just died. For example, say I was copying a large file across the network at 100Mbs and wanted to do something else at the same time, the LUN would grind to a halt and windows would error.

To get round this I configured the system to have a RAID 0 LUN instead, forgetting the reasons why I wanted RAID 5 in the first place.

This worked well for a couple of weeks until S.M.A.R.T. started reporting that one of the disks in the system was bad! To be honest, I was surprised at this because Weston Digital run each and every one of their disks in a lab before selling them, but they it was: Disk is about to fail messages and the Windows log full of errors when the disk system stopped.

This is the exact reason I specified RAID 5 when coming up with the specification for the computer. So I decided to implement RAID 5 whilst the failed hard disk was being RMA’ed with Weston Digital – an excellent and hassle free service by the way, I completed a form on their web site, keyed in my credit card details (insurance only) and WD sent be a new HDD within a couple of day. I then had 30 days to send the defective drive back to them else they’d chare by credit card.


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Adventures in a 64bit world Part 1 - Hardware

Posted on June 15th, 2006 by Mark Sheppard

Historically I’ve upgraded my computer quite often, a pattern that changed when I purchased a my Dell workstation almost 4 years ago. At the time I thought that the 2 x 2.4GHz Xenon processors, its 1GB of RAM and its 2 x 80GB HDD’s would last for a good couple of years. And it has, I’ve upped the HDD’s to 200GB ones, added a DVD burner, upped it to 2GB RAM and gave it a SATA upgrade in the process.

Fast forward to now and I’ve been itching to upgrade to something with a lot more snap in order to meet my requirements, which are as follows:

  • Have at least 2 monitors plugged in – If you haven’t tried it yet two monitors rock from a productivity point of view and you get a free workout moving your mouse over bigger distances.
  • Run Visual Studio 2005 – My primary role in life is to write code and integrate systems, so this is a given.
  • Run at least 2 virtual machines (hosted with MS Virtual Server 2005) all the time – A domain controller and a TFS server.
  • Allow for the creation of 2 additional virtual machines at any point in time for evaluation and test purposes – for playing with Longhorn Server and Office 2007 server products.
  • Allow general PC usage – Office (using 2007), Internet Explorer, blog reader etc.
  • Allow my partner to access and author content in Japanese (‘cause that’s where she’s from)

Click here to continue reading Adventures in a 64bit world Part 1 - Hardware.

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