On Thu, 2006-03-02 at 17:56 +0000, James Wilkinson wrote: > In case you get Dell, read these articles: > http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=3243 > http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=3262 > The articles are a few years old now, but the gist is that Dell have > been known to use standard ATX physical power connectors, but wired to > Dell standards. So you can plug them into other manufacturers kit, and > quite possible wave goodbye to both power supply and motherboard. Well that's a piece of information I did not have. Thank you for that. Fortunately the only Dell systems we've had to date have been workstations for email and haven't needed repair, they're just going obsolete. > My experience with name brand systems has been that you need support > contracts anyway -- there's too much custom-designed stuff inside, and > the only easy way to get spare parts is through official support. This is certainly the reason we haven't dealt with name brand pre-built systems yet. Pre-built systems do tend to be proprietary, I think the hope/perception is that they've taken the extra time to certify that the hardware they do put together is 100% compatible and even specifically designed to work as an optimized system. This could eliminate any risk of incompatibilities with custom built systems where tolerance calculations my be just a little out of range. > > As for the original question, I'd be cautious about SATA adapters. In > particular, I understand you can't install Fedora Core 4 using SATA CD > drives or DVD drives (because the libata drivers in the Fedora install > media don't support ATAPI, which CD and DVD drives need). And there have > been some people reporting that the FC4 install media won't detect the > SATA adapters on the latest nForce 4x0 motherboards (nForce 4 seems to > be OK.) Well i haven't heard about that either. I will definately have to remember that. We have SATA systems going and we know that the smartmontools seems to have some incompatiblities with SATA still. Specifically: Mar 2 10:35:20 msi2 smartd[6218]: Device /dev/sda, SATA disks accessed via libata are not currently supported by smartmontools. When libata is given an ATA pass-thru ioctl() then an additional '-d libata' device type will be added to smartmontools. Hopefully this will happen some day soon. > > For what it's worth, my company's experience with the local dealers > ended during the days of AMD K6 processors. They were all buying > motherboards (mostly from PCChips), based on the cheap and *extremely* > tacky SiS chipsets of the day. This cut around £20 off the cost of a > system, and left us with unreliable junk that was *just* about reliable > enough that we couldn't take it back. Until one of the on-board Ethernet > adapters went wrong, taking down the entire network. We ended up > rebuilding the worst four around Gigabyte motherboards with Via > chipsets. > > We found it surprisingly difficult to find suppliers who would > consistently use quality hardware: if you tried to buy more expensive > machines, you'd just get faster processors, larger disks and more memory > on the same cheap motherboards. Since then we've been building our own > systems around "name brand" components (Kingston or Crucial memory, Asus > or Gigabyte motherboards, etc) and have had very few problems. > > But then, you'll notice I'm in the UK too: hee hee hee touche! > > > So either we live in parallel universes or the Chinese are selling > > quality cheap parts to the UK and leaving all the junk for us poor > > Americans (oh no, I've gone political..). >
