Rock-Hard Stability ?

[LeftEyeNine]

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]

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]

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]

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

[LeftEyeNine]

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.

[naut]

Don't need anything special, couple mates played and recorded on a laptop with a single microphone. It still sounds awesome.

[BDC]

Don't need anything special, couple mates played and recorded on a laptop with a single microphone. It still sounds awesome.

Professionally though you are going to want something where you can record in stereo (at least), mix each feed seperately, etc.

[LeftEyeNine]

Meh meh, Rythmic, get a cheap mobo under that monstrous E6600 and let me see what you'll think afterwards. Do you know how it feels losing your piece of creation due to a bugger blue screen or crash problem ?

Anyways, I've searched a bit and recommended him to buy a DS3 series 965 chipset Gigabyte motherboard. I can still look for favors though.

[Lemur]

the 965 is a good chipset, so you should have no problems there. What's your pal going to use for sound input/output? I know there are some really great (and expensive) sound cards made for dedicated recording ...

[LeftEyeNine]

He's planning to splash around 300$ of cash on..erm..I forgot the brand..

[naut]

Judge only after you have heard:

Link

[LeftEyeNine]

Judge only after you have heard:

Link

You understand what I mean, right ?

[naut]

You understand what I mean, right ?

I understand exactly what you mean. But I'm saying there are always cheap options to get decent results. If your friend wants to, is willing to, spend alot of cash then fair enough.

[LeftEyeNine]

They are academic musicians. When this is their job, I see no reason not to invest in your job, hence yourself.