PCA Forums

Thinking about doin it, but I'm wondering if its really worth it or not? I'm not sure on what im planning on using it for. Besides folding, of course. Maybe as a super l33+ file server/folding machine. Slap a nice raid setup in there, too. What do you all think? Can be it done for around $1000?

Larry

i say you are better off going with a faster single processor rig. thats just me though.

Greg

It can be done for far less then 1000.00, look at the for sale/trade forum @ 2cpu.com
Then get that puppy folding for team 78!

Dual CPU and RAID-0 setups offer only limited advantages in some special situations.

I have a dually, but I use it for encoding movies. The cpu's are slow by today standards, as they are 2 PIII-550MHz cpu's, but it reduces the amount of encoding time when copying movies. On a single PIII-550MHz cpu, the encoding would take 10+ hours, but with 2 of them there, it's less than 5 hours using TMPGEnc which supports dual cpu's.

So unless you have specific need for using 2 cpu's, it's probably not worth it. If you insist of having a system like this, buy one used to save money.

Thanks for the tips, guys! Anyone got any suggestions for a cheap raid 5 controller?

Larry

RAID-5 controller and cheap does not fit together. Those cards normally sport a small CPU and some extra memory to increase RAID-5 write performance.
3Ware makes good IDE RAID controller and their new RAID-5 four channel SATA card gonna set you back at least $350.

The only cheap solution would be software RAID and that's only supported with the NT based server versions of Windows (there might be a hack for XP Pro) or Linux.

Figures. Guess I'll stick with a stripe set, then. So much for redundancy.

Larry