On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 23:27 -0500, Igor Chudov wrote: ... snip > I am beginning to feel a need to have a PC/server, to run Linux, that > would be extremely reliable and long lasting. ... snip
I am not an expert, but ... I agree with other comments about how equipment is marketed has nothing to do with how reliable it is. I would assume that whatever you get is going to fail at any time and design your system with that in mind. If your computer ends up lasting ten years, so much the better. I would think that in five years any present computer is going to be embarrassingly out of date anyway. I would consider having a very low power server for everyday use, have high quality mains power with backup, data backup for on-site and off-site, and a back-up computer ready to swap in when the primary fails. The back-up computer could be powered up occasionally to do the data backup. By not going with DC supplies, fanless, solid state or small form factor, you can buy redundancy for the same price as fancy. Also look into RAID and on-board diagnostics for the hard drive(s). Heat, dirt and bad mains power I think are the big killers of electronics. High quality or over rated components can tolerate more abuse, but I think most manufacturers generally put in the cheapest parts and adjust the warranty to a tolerable level. The other side of this is that you might have more fun building a system with all the latest fancy parts and hopefully we get the benefit of your experience :). Also, you might consider getting a Kill-A-Watt to get a better idea of where your Amps are going, and how many. An old slow DELL P3 with an old hard drive spun down most of the time may draw less than you think. Another path may be to use an NSLU2 with a pair of 2.5" drives set up in an RAID. I think this would draw about a Watt or two. I have one set up as an SNMP server. It goes down every once in a long while, but a watchdog script that runs from cron every five minutes could fix that. -- Kirk Wallace http://www.wallacecompany.com/machine_shop/ http://www.wallacecompany.com/E45/index.html California, USA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
