What seems to kill PCs these days are bad capacitors and bad power supplies.
Hard drives simply wear out after a while. A SSD with wear leveling gets rid of that problem. Server grade hardware seems to last a long time - SuperMicro boards in particular seem very well built. I sold a customer over 20 systems and not one motherboard has failed in 3 years. However they have lost some power supplies. That said, you can buy several D510MO boards for the price of a SuperMicro motherboard and CPU. I would install a fan in the chassis. A really good one, preferably a large fan that runs at a low speed. If the fan costs $3.00 keep looking. ;-) That will help minimize board hotspots and keep the temps down. Put a filter on the fan intake or plan on blowing out the computer to get the dust out every year or so. With good parts - 3-5 years should be easy and 7 years or more likely IMO. The trick these days will be finding a power supply that is made to last. If you can find a mini-itx board with premium capacitors - you be in even better shape. Dave On 10/22/2010 12:27 AM, Igor Chudov wrote: > I apologize in advance that this is somewhat off topic. > > I am beginning to feel a need to have a PC/server, to run Linux, that > would be extremely reliable and long lasting. > > I would use it for > > 1) Holding a personal CVS repository > 2) Running a nameserver > 3) SSH port tunneling > 4) Possibly serving files from an attached external storage device. > > None of the above tasks requires a great deal of CPU and file writing. > > I will not need a GUI on this machine. > > My own thinking about this includes: > > 1) A SSD to hold the data (as I said, I do not anticipate a lot of > repetitive writes). > 2) A fanless power supply > 3) A very low power consumption CPU, like Intel ATOM. > > The objective here is low power, cool temperature, and absence of any > rotating parts. > > Any thoughts on this? > > Thanks guys, and again, sorry for the OT post. > > i > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest > Create new apps& games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada > $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing > Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store > http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
