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To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (170136)	8/27/2002 10:58:31 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: Why the Asus motherboard? The VAR I deal with is a big fan of Asus boards, and has a lot of experience with a lot of boards. In the course of building systems for us and others, he's run into problems with 2 Tyan boards during testing and configuration (out of fewer than 50), that required their replacement prior to their being shipped to us. The systems we've received (I'm typing from one now) have been superb and 100% reliable, but they cost him some time. I've had good luck with the reliability of Tyan systems and have used them in servers from the dual Pentium 100 days. But I've also seen some quirks in Tyan systems, and that goes way back, too - that Pentium 100 system, for example, couldn't use more than 64meg of RAM due to cache limitations. He's never had any trouble with the Asus boards, they're about the same price, so our most recent system purchases have been Asus based, on his advice. If I can help him keep his costs down, he can help me keep my costs down. We've used Adaptec 3100s and 3200s RAID controllers, and 19160 and 29160 SCSI controllers as well as the on-board IDE controllers and 3Ware Escalade IDE RAID controllers. All have worked well. We did run into a problem with IBM SCSI drives and the Adaptec controllers which required a flashing of the bios on the hard drives (has nothing to do with chips or boards) which led us to switch from IBM to Seagate as our preferred SCSI drive source. The IBM drives were actually OK, but we had to go to an inordinate amount of trouble to get them to send the new bios - I still don't see why they didn't just post the fix on their website. The experience caused us to switch drive sources. P4 is good at some things, but not many. If you can possibly test your actual workload on the systems you're evaluating do so - you might be as surprised as we were. Maybe P4 systems will end up being best for your applications, but it sure wasn't for ours.

To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (170136)	8/27/2002 11:45:45 AM
From: Dan3	Respond to of 186894

Re: Since we use a separate DB server, I think we can get away with a couple of 15K drives - maybe with larger cache (32M?) That sounds good, and should give great performance. I've been staying away from the 15K drives on servers because they run pretty hot. OTOH, we've used a few of them in workstations, where they probably run even hotter (since they're in smaller cases, with poorer air flow) and we have yet to see a 15K failure. All our 15K drives, so far, have been Seagates, none are more than a couple of years old. We've had some older 10K drives that ran too hot to touch, year after year, so I suppose that isn't really an issue. The 7200RPM drives on the Escalade controller run just about at room temperature (they're in a server case, in sleds with coolers). If you do any application tests, please let us know what the results are. There is no better data than what real system Admin/Architects see on real applications. Regards, Dan