Dream computer

[MacaveliMC]

Duel processor motherboard, two 2.2 gig AMD Athlon XP Processors, 2 gigs of RAM, a 450mhz bus, 160 megabyte hard drive, GeForce 4 Ti4600...and of course, the CD-ROM Drive, and floppy for occasional floppy use http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif
laser mouse, keyboard, and "big" moniter

What's YOUR dream computer?

[-D12-_LMN8R]

change the single 160 gig hard drive to a bunch of SCSI harddrives connected on RAID 0+1

You forgot multiple 21" flatpanels!

[Spaceman_Bob]

no no no, this thing called RAID 5..... SO COOL!

Ok it stripes across all the drives that you have (need at least 5), except every 5th byte that it writes is a checksum (kinda like CRC), so that if any hard drive fails, the computer plays a game of "what's missing" from each group of 5 bytes (if a data byte is missing, it can rebuild the byte based on the checksum byte, and if the checksum byte is missing it just re-creates it) so you only get 4/5 of your total hard drive space for storage, but it's REALLY cool. Since you don't have to use (a) whole hard drive(s) for mirroring, you get faster speeds by striping across more drives. yay!

[-D12-_LMN8R]

sweet!

[EvilPlushToy]

Not JUST a CD-ROM drive, but a 52x Reader, a 24x Burner, a DVD Reader, and a DVD Writer... are there enough IDE slots for that?

[Chicken Pluck]

40 speed CD-RW, 19" flat monitor, that raid 5 thing, and uh.. wireless optical mouse.... that would be the mother of all

[Spaceman_Bob]

19" flat? that's it?
I say, plasma display [edit: make that multiple displays] (if you don't know anything about this, this figure will tell you everything you need to know. A Sony 32" plasma display is currently priced at $5,999!!! ). I'm sure if you had the money to buy one of these (not a 32" of course, more like 21 or so), you'd have to money to be able to hook a computer up to it (or to pay for the R&D to make some kind of adapter Â*http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif Â*)

[-D12-_LMN8R]

*Slightly* more reasonable dream computer?

P4 2.53 with 533MHz bus
2 gigs of the fastest ram available (PC3200 methinks?)
Soyo motherboard with the fastest fsb available.
NV30 NVidia card when it comes out, or Radeon 9700 when it comes out, whichever ends up being faster.
4 36 gig SCSI drives on raid 5
48x CD burner, DVD-rom, DVD-R drive (three separate drives)
21" ViewSonic flat-panel
Altec Lansing speakers
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum
TV capture card/tuner/video-in
Cool projector like Justin's http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

That's about it.

[GPeszek]

Ok, for a clarification to Evan's post, I've finally been enlightened as to exactly how RAID 5 works. Here it goes:

Say you have 3 or more drives. You use all except the last drive for data striping (each bit is stored sequentially on the next disk) and the last for parity. Parity is the double check for the first few bits. For example, lets say you have 5 disks (as in Evan's example). The first 4 would contain data and the 5th for parity. The parity bit is nothing more than the answer to the question "is there an even (1) or odd (0) number of 1s in the previous disks?". That way when a drive dies and needs to be replaced, the data can be reconstructed using nothing more than counting all of the 1s on the previous drives and checking parity. If the parity drive dies no big deal, it just recreatets it.

Ok, example:
Disk and data:
1: 0
2: 1
3: 0
4: 1
P: 1
(Where P is the parity drive)
We have that there are an even number of 1s, so the parity bit is set to 1. Now lets say we lose drive 1. RAID goes through and re-counts how many 1s there are (still 2) and sees that it matches the parity bit and thus knows that the data *should* be a 0. If we lose drive 2, there is only 1 other bit that is a 1, so the parity does not match and RAID knows that the missing bit should be a 1.

Hope that was a decent explination http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[GPeszek]

Ok, I stand corrected. What I described was technically RAID 3 (striping with dedicated parity). RAID 5 divides up the parity checks among the disks.

Check out http://www.i-raid.com.tw/raid_level.htm for more info, cool site.

[Spaceman_Bob]

I was just going to say...... RAID 3 is good, but you don't have the speed of striping across all drives, one whole drive is used for parity. Making actually every 5th bit (or whatever number) makes it so that the parity bits are spread out and the get the speed benefits of striping across ALL drives, even though you get the same storage space as RAID 3

[Chicken Pluck]

yeah, raid is pretty sweet. I don't understand is how you set it up... is RAID software??? hardware???

[-D12-_LMN8R]

ya know, my dream computer would actually be simply one that WORKS RIGHT.

The hardware problems alone are totalling up to nearly one hand by now.

GeForce 4 Ti4600 decides to #### out (Alex, if you're reading this, yes, your GeForce 2 MX does work right in my comp)
Floppy controller doesn't work.
Never been able to take more than one stick of ram without bluescreening.

Now Trillian decides to crash every time I load it. I uninstalled it, went to regedit and removed every single registry entry with Trillian in it, reinstalled, and still does it.



GAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[-D12-_LMN8R]

Well turns out Trillian wasn't working thanks to having like 100 people on my buddy list that I never talk to...........

(sorry rosemary!!http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif

[Spaceman_Bob]

Jordan - I've got well over 100 people....... my trill just crashes whenever i finish playing a game, not whenever it loads :-P. Get AOL IM for now so we can talk to you :-P.

Chicken - RAID can be either hardware or software. Obviously, hardware is a better choice so all your processor has to do is send data to your "hard drive" (RAID controller) like normal, and the RAID control handles the striping, mirroring, or parity-ing, or whatever. If using software, your processor, memory, etc. will all be used to do the RAID stuff, which will probably produce a noticable decrease in overall system speed. But in the end, it's your choice.

[-D12-_LMN8R]

nonono evan, I had like nearly 300 people on there, probably half I've talked to once, and most I hardly ever talk to, lol.

{edit: didn't change anything, clicked "edit" on the wrong post, didn't know it would work http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/tounge.gif }

[wzoo1]

I had trillian problems when I was playing a game but usually if you leave trillian minimized and online its no problem. If you are having AIM trillian connection problems like me, you need to get this fix:
http://www.trillian.cc/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19880 (http://www.trillian.cc/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19880)
And about the 2.2gig amd athlon xp cpus you were saying, there is NO 2.2gig amd athlon xp cpu yet... The fastest AMD Athlon XP CPU is the 2200+ which actually technically runs at 1.8ghz but its faster than a compteing Intel Pentium 4 2.2ghz because of AMDs QuantiSpeedâ„¢ architecture technology!
BUT i also want a 21inch flat panel or plasma display!!! raid 5 thing that was the ultrafast hard drive... (200GB) and wireless optical mouse and keyboard. 2gigs of Rambus DRAM(800mhz bus speed!!!http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/wink.gif!
Altec Lansing speakers
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum
48xcdrw, dvdrw, and dvdrom
NV30 nvidia graphic card when it comes out
TV capture card/tuner/video-in
Cool projector

[Black Mage]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (-D12-_LMN8R @ July 12 2002,00:18)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">*Slightly* more reasonable dream computer?

P4 2.53 with 533MHz bus
2 gigs of the fastest ram available (PC3200 methinks?)
Soyo motherboard with the fastest fsb available.
NV30 NVidia card when it comes out, or Radeon 9700 when it comes out, whichever ends up being faster.
4 36 gig SCSI drives on raid 5
48x CD burner, DVD-rom, DVD-R drive Â*(three separate drives)
21&quot; ViewSonic flat-panel
Altec Lansing speakers
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum
TV capture card/tuner/video-in
Cool projector like Justin's Â*http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/biggrin.gif

That's about it.[/QUOTE]<span id='postcolor'>
I like that one!

[Kows]

SCSI allows RAID? I was under the impression that it does not http://campcaen.engin.umich.edu/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif

[-D12-_LMN8R]

I'm almost positive it does, you just need special raid controllers for SCSI

[GPeszek]

Be careful using the terms &quot;SCSI&quot; and &quot;RAID&quot; together in the same sentence...Stan just might wet himself.

Oops...

[Black Mage]

Too late.