Rock-Hard Stability ?

**LeftEyeNine** · 12-07-2006, 00:01

Hey there fellaz,

One of my friends has decided to build a rig. He is a musician planning to use his rig as a recording apparatus. I already know what he needs for performance technically (realtime stuff will push the PC a lot), however since the general stuff on his PC will be about pieces of compositions and recordings, I have decided that his next best friend will be stability alongside power not to be cursing in the future for any data lost or cut/corrupted in half.

I'll be meeting him tomorrow to gather prices from around, but this lazy ass did not spare time to look for a stable motherboard and RAM (and HDD if you have any particular suggestions). So if you have any suggestions about rock-hard stable motherboard and RAM models, please let me know.

As a bonus question, I'd like to know if he would benefit from having multiple SATA disks on RAID or a single SATA would be better off (regarding the writing performance of HDDs).

**Big King Sanctaphrax** · 12-07-2006, 01:03

As a bonus question, I'd like to know if he would benefit from having multiple SATA disks on RAID or a single SATA would be better off (regarding the writing performance of HDDs).

If loss of data is a concern, you definitely don't want to use the type of RAID array where several disks are treated as one-I can never remember if it's RAID 0 or 1. More disks that can fail, and if one goes then there goes your data.

**Lemur** · 12-07-2006, 03:21

Originally Posted by Big King Sanctaphrax

If loss of data is a concern, you definitely don't want to use the type of RAID array where several disks are treated as one-I can never remember if it's RAID 0 or 1. More disks that can fail, and if one goes then there goes your data.

Seconded. Think about it -- if a disk has a mean time between failure of, say, 100,000 hours, then pairing up two identical disks means you've just doubled the likelihood of a failure well before that 100,000 hours.

As far as HD makes, Western Digital sells server-class hard drives which are meant to have longer uptime than normal consumer HDs. Here's a 500GB example.

SATA has no real downside; configuration and maintenance are much easier than messing with those old ribbon cables. So there's no reason not to go with SATA.

**Xiahou** · 12-07-2006, 08:29

RAID5 will give you both a performance increase and fault-tolerance, but you're not going to see that on many desktop configs.

**LeftEyeNine** · 12-07-2006, 08:37

Wow, so great that I forgot to specify which CPU we'll be preferring so that you could make your recommendations on. I'm Godlike today.

We'll be building a rig with Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU and 2 GBs of RAM.

So what are your recommendations on a good motherboard that will handle that CPU in a very stable way? And which brand of RAM is proved to be more stable than the others ?

Thanks for your clarification on RAID matter, by the way.