Comments on: Episode 519 – Building the Ultimate White Box for under $2000

By: Rayd

Rayd — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:28:53 +0000

four Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drives? in a raid array isn’t that why they have the RE2,3 or 4′s…won’t these drop out constantly? Not sure WDTLER.EXE will work on these newer drives also, let me know if it does, I would mind saving a buck but I don’t need the headache of rebuilding the arrays each time.

By: Rog

Rog — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:18:47 +0000

I realize this is an old episode but I am curious as to the raid type you made with the controller and four drives.
Thanks

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By: Bill Lee

Bill Lee — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:29:00 +0000

You were singing the praises of the Asus P6T motherboard… I was wondering what sets this board apart from others and makes you such a fan?

Thanks,
Bill…

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:47:09 +0000

Good thing for archived show notes. I’m going to be using this as a guide to build, instead of a VM server, a backup server. Throw a bunch of 1TB drives in there, go a bit less on the mobo/proc/ram combo and have a nice box with a crapton of storage to throw backup files on.

By: smith

smith — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:04:00 +0000

Very informative episode on EXSi.

Would you do a followup on your experiences with the box now that it is in production.

What proplems you may have encountered.

What you might have done differently?

Sort of the pros/cons of doing a box in this manner.

I am now building a box similar to this one and such information would be very valuable.

Thank you for the great episode.

By: Question

Question — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:19:15 +0000

And never mind I jumped the gun, just found the forums page….. thanks!

By: Question

Question — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 23:16:32 +0000

Hi,

Great Episode! But I was wondering what you used for a power supply? Off the cuff it does not look like the case came with on and the details about the episode did not list one…. Just wondering.

By: Glitch

Glitch — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:08:59 +0000

Very nice.

By: Darren Kitchen

Darren Kitchen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:29:02 +0000

The song during the build was one off Pronobozo’s Zero = One = Everything album. You can find it at http://www.pronobozo.com

By: DarrenB

DarrenB — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 12:32:54 +0000

What, not using ECC memory in a server? That could come back to byte you in the future.

I think people underestimate the level of soft bit errors that occurs in non-ECC memory, especially in a box that is being aggresively used in a server environment. A soft-bit error is a bit-flip that occurs randomly that otherwise is undetectable as a hard error with tools like memtest86, etc.

I learnt my lesson earlier this year and now believe that with increased memory density, that the probabity for a soft bit error occuring in RAM is similar to the increase in the probability of HDD failures as HDD densities have increased. We all accept for HDD’s, the statement of “It’s not a question of if it will fail, it’s a question of when?”, and as such the case of HDD failure is so accepted now, that in any serious scenario RAID is a defacto consideration for handling the “expected” HDD failure. I trust that soon the same scenario for RAM will eventually transpire, empathsizing the need for ECC RAM.

So, in the end why use RAID with the HDD’s, but not use ECC RAM?