Next Grex Hardware

Feb 17 17:16 UTC 2003

At Saturday's meeting, STeve Andre proposed that Grex purchase hardware for
the next Grex system now, and that the remaining development work be done on
that system.  Most people seemed to be willing to buy that idea, so there was
quite a bit of discussion of what hardware to get.  I want to move that
discussion on-line.

First, universal agreement was reached on using an x86 system, not a SPARC.
A number of people strongly prefer an AMD Athlon over an Intel Pentium, and
nobody really objects to this, so we are likely going that way.

There is a lot of concern over quality.  I believe that in recent years the
PC marketplace has shifted from competition based on performance, to
competition based on price.  It used to be that new desktop machines held
price steady at a bit over $1000, while the performance steadily improved.
But lately the prices have been falling (while performance has still steadily
improved).  This has placed substantial pressure on all manufacturers to cut
cost where they can - power supplies and cases have been getting crappier,
mechanical components of drives have gotten less reliable, and so forth.

The feeling was that this trend had impacted a lot of companies that used to
produce good stuff.  Dell's servers, for example, aren't as solid as they sued
to be (though they are more powerful).  The best approach to acquiring a good
new computer was to carefully buy separate components and integrate it
ourselves.  STeve Andre is likely to take the lead on this, though there are
other staff members with plentiful experience building systems (Dan
Gryniewicz, for one).

STeve brought to the meeting a draft suggestion for a system.  He is still
working on refining this.  His suggestion was:

   Athlon XP 2800 (I think this is 2.2 GHz) - about $400

   Motherboard - STeve wants to buy two, keeping one as spare.  I don't think
   a particular model was discussed.  About $145 each.

   RAM - buy lots.  It's cheap.  Say 1.5G for $270 or so.

   Case/Power Supply.  STeve like Antec.  About $250.

   Misc parts, fans, etc.  STeve wants lots of cooling.  About $100.

   NIC - STeve likes Intel.  100 mbit.  $33

   SCSI controller.  Ultra 160 at least, ultra 320 if possible.  About $200.

   SCSI drives, two 18G ibm.  About $142.

   CD rom, floppy, this and that maybe $250.

Adding up to around $2000.  STeve also include in his list a monitor and
keyboard, but Dan says he can probably donate these.  He also suggested an
80G IDE drive for about $100.  This has lower performance and reliability
than the SCSI drives, but is fine for stashing non-critical or rarely used
data.  With this, and various additional slough factors, we were mostly
talking about something in the $2500 range.