Quote: "Pretty sure around that price mark you can get 4GB RAM..."
Quote: "I take your 29$ and raise you $23.62"
Ha! Have you ever shopped for
anything in Australia? Trust me, $29 is darn cheap for RAM.
Quote: "But do look for 4GB seriously, it will make all the difference..."
Possibly, and I do fully understand the importance of RAM, but we really don't have the budget for 4GB (esp. since the cheapest 4GB we can get costs $45 and is Kingston ValueRAM, which is generally crap AFAIK). We're leaving room for expansion, though, so we can always add more later.
Quote: "I think the power usage of that AMD CPU will cost you more than the whole thing in a single year...
Find a solution with maybe core i3 or Intel Pentium/Celeron"
Yup, we're considering that as well. Bear in mind the currently proposed specs are in flux and subject to change. They're just the most basic, cheap parts we could find.
Unfortunately, Intel is quite a bit more expensive, but we're definitely looking into that as well.
Quote: "Your 5300 there is just dual core as well... what on earth does it need that much power for? [Unless it includes that GPU duh] whereas the Celeron has HT giving you four threads for the two cores... with a saving of 10W TDP..."
Because it's AMD and they have no sophistication whatsoever. Intel and NVidia, on the other hand, produce more powerful processors and GPUs that consume less electricity.
Quote: "Yes I am an Intel Fan boy and proud to be
[Started with an Intel Celeron 433 moved to a Pentium 3 350 and sadly onto AMD for a brief period and then finally and forever back onto Intel ever since, never using AMD ever again]"
I LOVE YOU!
lol, my brother and I have a similar history to you. Intel users for years, bought AMD laptops, never buying AMD again.
Quote: "I say so because you said this was a backup system, so the fancy 128 stream GPU is not something you need unless you plan to use it as a render unit"
Well, it's a storage system mainly, but yeah backups as well. I didn't even know it had such a comparatively fancy GPU; we only selected it for its cheapness. And no, I don't plan on having a dedicated render box
Quote: "if this is to be your BACKUP/LIVE ARCHIVE system, I suggest you get a very good case"
Very good case? What for?
Quote: "good board, and especially a decent PSU, otherwise say bye bye to your data"
We're only looking at boards we know are going to be decent, and
Quote: "Regarding the Cannot delete anything... [Mind you if any of your caddies are branded like WD, be careful not to break the caddies when extracting, you WILL regret it...] before extracting a HDD from a case, backup the files to another drive, then extract the drive and test that it mounts without losing the data..."
Every single one of our external drives are WD, except for the two latest additions which are Seagate. Don't worry, I'm always extremely careful when removing drives from their enclosures.
Quote: "[Buy another 2TB drive for this purpose if needed, they are cheap these days...]"
Cheap
er. We don't have $102 to spend on another drive. However, I was exaggerating a bit when I said we didn't have another drive to copy data to, as Dad still hasn't unpacked his second 2TB Seagate drive from its box yet, so we actually have a spare 2TB drive anyway.
Quote: "DO NOT place any drives in hardware RAID as you need to build them for RAID... which deletes all data..."
Haha I'm well aware of this fact. No, we plan to use purely software RAID. Hardware RAID is pointless, inflexible and difficult to work with.
Quote: "Also Clonkex, I am so envious of you and your brothers relationship, I hope you know you are darn lucky!"
Haha we know it
Quote: "OH AND you are in AUS, GET A GOOD PSU FAN! A BIG MEATY BEAST OF A FAN!"
lol we don't live in that hot an area
We're up on the Northern Tablelands, which is a comparatively cool area of Australia. We won't be sticking a 3rd-party PSU fan on it, but the case we're getting has very good air flow and it'll be kept in a cool room
---------
I just spent the afternoon researching how the software side of things will work, and I believe I've finally worked it out.
We'll be using SnapRAID for the RAID solution, and I recently discovered mhddfs, a Linux util, that can pool multiple mounted drives as one, yet allow the pooled drives to still be accessed as separate drives (necessary for SnapRAID to function). Guaranteed compatibility with SnapRAID, but still not 100% sure if it'll do exactly what we want, so more research is required.
Greyhole is another pooling thingy that may work, but again this all still requires research.
ARGH, why are Intel CPUs/mobos so expensive?!
