... > The reason that I haven't yet plunked down the cash for an Infrant box > is that I'm not sure whether I'll be happy with it for reasons having > to do with cpu cycles and noise. Since these boxes are not available > for review at your local Fry's, you basically have to dive in and buy > one before you personally experience it. > ...
noise and speed levels are both highly subjective, edging towards the audiophile territory in terms of unmeasurable nontransferability. I've seen lots of posts, articles, and emails claiming that Shuttle SFF's are quiet enough and Mini-ITX's are fast enough, for instance, which are both inaccurate claims as far as I'm concerned. If you have doubt before even plunking down coin, I'd suggest buying a proper desktop computer and storing it in another room. Furthermore, if you don't want to be troubleshooting some very, very, very frustrating networking issues, I'd suggest doing what it takes to get a length of CAT-5 between that computer and your stereo. Wireless is great when it works, but it works really poorly in most real-world scenarios. > If you've set up a RAID/Slimserver system using linux and you'd like to > comment on what you did wrt software I would appreciate it. > I've done both, but not on the same box :) Software RAID sucks because neither Windows nor Linux will reliably inform you that a drive has failed or reliably rebuild after that failure. Hardware RAID sucks because the board is just as likely to fail as the drives, and every board is incompatible. Whichever one you choose, you will need a backup or else you will lose data -- RAID only buys data security for the lucky, its real purpose is to buy uptime. If I were building a new server box, it would look a lot like my old one (only with more coin dropped on the hard drives). I'd also go SATA instead of EIDE. 1) middle-of-the-road Intel or AMD desktop motherboard with built-in VGA and Ethernet. 2) middle of the road CPU for same 3) as much RAM as the board will hold (can be reduced if you're building a single purpose box, but I much prefer one relatively quiet box running everything all the time to lots of boxes needing updates and TLC). 4) two relatively small hard drives for the OS, say 20GB? RAID1 mirror would be okay, but I'd prefer to put the OS on one and copy it to the other every night. 5) two honking big hard drives for the media, say 300GB. Again, I'd prefer to copy every night. http://www.monkeynoodle.org/comp/tools/backups for a simple "back everything up" solution; I've been using it successfully for years. -- Jack At Monkeynoodle.Org: It's A Scientific Venture... "Believe what you're told; there'd be chaos if everyone thought for themselves." -- Top Dog hotdog stand, Berkeley, CA _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
