Switching Gears With Building PCs

Posted by Jacob Santos on June 7, 2011

I think my problem is that I’ve never had enough money to support more than one PC. This being the case, I think I’m going to switch my focus instead to sticking with one PC that is awesome, a laptop that gets the job done, and a phone that allows me to do more on the go.

In this, I’m going to move away from the dedicated Storage Server idea. I’m going to instead go with a cloud based solution which will support off site backup for my important projects and also allow for off-site backup. Something I haven’t been doing and needed to be doing for a number of years. I’ll need to go over my current files and decide which files will need to be backed up when the time comes. However, better organization will help now, so I’ll probably spend some time doing that as well.

Brother’s Machine

I’m going to transition parts from my machine (motherboard, processor, memory, DVD burner) to build my brother’s machine. It appears that really, all that I’ll need to buy is a case, hard drive, and power supply. I’ll give him my 22″ monitor as well.

This leaves me out those parts in my own machine, which I’ll need to replace. I think I’ll start with buying the case and then when I buy the replacement parts for my own machine, pop the parts in my brother’s case. Well, I plan on building my brother’s machine with a SSD or two and a 2TB drive or 2. His machine should be pretty sweet, and will be better than what I had planned for him.

My New Machine

My new machine will combine my plans for the gaming machine and storage machine. It appears that the new ASUS boards are finally adding extra SATA ports, which should allow me to use them up in better ways. My configuration went from No SSD to 2 SSD, 5 2TB hard drives and 1 Blu-Ray Burner / DVD-Burner combo drive. Combining both of the parts allows me to spend a little bit more.

I planned on buying 2 60GB SATA3 SSD drives. Now, I’m thinking about buying 2 120 SATA3 SSD drives for RAID0 configuration. The drives are rated at 548MB/s Reads and combining them in RAID0 should boost that to at least the max SATA3 speeds. Well, maybe, still be pretty damn fast. Shelling out >$400 for those drives alone.

The 5 2TB drives will be storage and I plan on dedicating most of those drives to storing video from my current and future cameras. Trust me, those probably won’t even be enough after a few years. I also plan on switching to external drives for longer term storage. Backing up to externals and keeping copies will allow me to remove older archives after some point. I might also RAID 5 the drives the drives for backups as well as allowing to replacing drives with higher capacity storage in the future.

The SSD part of my computer will be the gaming part and the 5 TB drives will be the storage part, which is really all I need for the storage. I did like that if I had bought Windows Home Server, that I’d have been able to remote in to get my files. I think that since most of my files will be in the cloud that I work on anyway, that this desire is unnecessary.

I plan on keeping my 23″ monitors and buying 4 25″ LED display port monitors for a total of 6 monitors. The reason, I think is that I plan on using several of them for displaying virtual machines. The 4 monitors will be my main. I’ll need to buy a graphics card to manage the monitors. I don’t think that with the games I’ll be playing that using one card for all monitors will matter. I’ll have to see when Skyrim comes out. However, I want to have all of this done before that game comes out and have the funds available to add a second graphics card for that game.

The new motherboard and processor will be the AMD NB990X or AMD NB970 chipsets. I don’t think I’ll be using the 990FX, since I’m more interested in having more SATA connectors. If ASUS or Gigabyte comes out with a board with 10 SATA connectors, then I’ll probably jump on that board. I’ll be waiting for the new AMD processors to be released to Amazon or Newegg before I buy the board. I’m hoping more ASUS boards come out with more SATA connectors.

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