Igor Chudov wrote: > Jon, this is sad, but true. > > So, how would you approach building such a PC yourself? > Based ENTIRELY on my personal experience, I would go with a used Dell Optiplex. One good thing about the used thing is that they come "pre tested". Now, as for how much of their lifetime has been used up, I don't really know. But, I have sold a number of them, and have used them, and hauled some of them back and forth to a number of EMC meetings since 2001. I usually end up junking them due to performance rather than failure. In fact, I have never had a motherboard or PS failure on them. My EMC computers are not run 24/7, but my desktop and server are. I started with a 100 MHz Pentium Classic with 32 MB of memory and a 1 GB disk on my Bridgeport. I now have a 1 GHz Pentium III on the Bridgeport. This is mostly due to Linux bloat and to satisfy the demands of openGL for the Axis interface.
One thing is to stay away from anything built in 2001 or 2002, that was when the capacitor debacle happened. We had one at work that fried the caps, I replaced them and it is still running. > How about an Atom base mobo, SSD and a PicoPSU? Maybe with a space > AC-DC adapter? > I am a little leery of these SSDs. They do NOT have proven reliability. We know what the reliability of a name-brand hard drive (Maxtor, Western Digital) is, but these flash memory drives haven't been out there that long. Some of the mainframe makers have RAM-based SSDs that are likely to be amazingly reliable. They are made from WELL-tested technology, but of course need battery backup and hard drive backup to survive. The flash-based stuff has known problems, although most of that is wear-out from too many writes. I have a SATA drive on my desktop now, with an IDE-SATA adaptor that plugs into the 40-pin connector on the motherboard. So, it needs 5 V power from a drive power connector. This is the weak link! The crappy Chinese AMP-ripoff connectors don't make good contact, and every six months the adaptor loses power. I've fiddled with the connector to try to make a better contact. Next time it happens, I really have to replace the connector with a REAL AMP connector. So, these are the kind of things that can bite you, and it is real hard to get away from these cheap Chinese connectors, cables, etc. when building your own system. The Atom CPU is Intel's latest technology, and therefore the smallest feature size. I have heard it mentioned in the same context with short lifetime, but don't actually know for sure. It IS, however, a 45 nm feature size chip. Long-term reliability is not proven, they just came out with the latest generation in Dec 2009. I'm sure Intel has stress-tested them to gauge long term reliability, and has enough experience doing that that they know what can be expected. I suspect there is something that they have published, if you really want to do the research. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada $10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
