>>>>> "OMH" == Ow Mun Heng <Ow.Mun.Heng@xxxxxxx> writes: OMH> 17??? Wow.. WHat sort of box is that? 4U or just normal white OMH> boxes? You can get 48 drives in, what, 5U these days? (That's a weird arrangement with the drives in hot swap carriers mounted vertically within a drawer; more conventional are the 40-drive 8U cases seen here: http://www.rackmountnet.com/rmc/rmc8exp/rmc8exp_top2.jpg.) I use the rackmount chassis made by AIC and have been quite satisfied, although I know Chenbro make good cases as well. OMH> Those must be Maxtor Drives. Maxtor doesn't make 400GB drives. Their 300GB Maxline SATA drives with 16MB of cache are quite nice; I have a few 1U 4-drive servers using those. For 400GB, the newly released Seagate drives seem to be the best bet with the five year warranty. Given the "deathstar" legacy, I might use the 400GB Hitachis if you gave them to me, but only for a non-critical FTP mirror. OMH> BTW, does anyone has any recommendation on Mainboards? Experience OMH> with TYAN mainboards? I use SuperMicro dual P4 boards (currently X5DPE) with 3ware 8xxx or 9xxx RAID cards for my disk and utility servers. For pure computation servers I use the Tyan S2882 dual Opteron boards but have had mixed success when loading them way up with dual Opteron 250s and 8GB of RAM. Out of eight boards, two were unstable right out of the box. After dealing with that the machines have been extremely stable, running (so far) for 216 days under continuous 100% cpu load. And that's in a 1U case with no processor fans. This is all running FC2 or FC3. - J<
