Re: [LAU] HW upgrade - new computer

On Mon, 28 Apr 2014 09:29:47 +0200
Raphaël Mouneyres <rmouneyres@gmail.com> wrote:

> > So far I am very happy with what I have seen. PCI is certainly not dead,
> > though it is getting harder to find. I could not find any Xeon boards with
> > PCI slots for example... even if I had wanted to pay the extra.

SuperMicro still makes them - the company I work for was until recently
selling storage servers based on them.

I recently upgraded my HW as well, and found a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 mobo
with a PCI slot - but only one, so I finally had to give up my paired
Delta 1010s and only run one. (I've migrated to an Alesis Firewire mixer
as my primary interface anyway, it doesn't affect my workflow.)

For the CPU, I put in an 8 core, 4GHz AMD FX(tm)-8350. There's 2 Corsair
Vengeance 4GB 1866MHz RAM sticks in it - this thing compiles a new kernel
in about 10 minutes! Since I'm itemizing, there's 2 120GB SSDs mirrored for
my OS disk, a pair of 1TB drives mirrored as my main storage and a 128GB
SSD as my primary recording storage, backed up to the 1TB drives.

I like the overall setup a lot - I was amazed how slick the mobo looks.
I'm not one to say hardware's sexy but this mobo looks great! Two of my
main criteria for the mobo choice were a FW port and a PCI slot. This
board's got them, but overall it was not a good experience getting Arch
to run on it. I had to essentially choose between having the eSATA and
USB 2.0 ports working or having the onboard Realtek network port mostly
work. The driver for this particular interface is not well-supported and I
had trouble keeping the interface up.

I eventually disabled the interface and dropped an Intel card I had on hand
in, and configured the mobo so that the eSATA and USB 3.0 ports work. Since
then it's been behaving, but I wish I'd done a little more research on its
Linux compatibility before I bought it.

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh@brainiac.com
 Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa
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