On Sep 4, 2013, at 6:45 AM, Christian Gagneraud <chgans@...> wrote:

On 04/09/13 07:22, Chris Tapp wrote:

On 3 Sep 2013, at 00:29, Christian Gagneraud wrote:

On 03/09/13 10:16, Chris Tapp wrote:

On 2 Sep 2013, at 22:45, Christian Gagneraud wrote:


On 03/09/13 00:35, Burton, Ross wrote:

Hi Ross,

On 2 September 2013 06:05, Christian Gagneraud <chgans@...> wrote:
So right now, I'm thinking about:
- CPU: Xeon E5, maybe 2 x E5-2670/90, for a total of 16 cores (32 threads)
- Hard drives: 500GB, 1 TB or 2 TB (ideally with RAID if it can speed up the
builds)

RAID-5 seems to be what i am after.

Hi Chris,

Isn't RAID-5 going to be slower, especially if it's software? RAID 1
is probably better as you'll potentially double the write speed to disk.
I use a couple of Vertex SSDs in RAID 1 giving a theoretical write speed
near to 1GBs. Write endurance is possibly a concern, but I've not had
any issues using them on a local build machine. I would probably look at
some higher end models if I was going to run a lot of builds. A lot less
noise than hard drives ;-)

Thanks for the info, i will have a look at RAID-1, as you can see, I know absolutely nothing about RAID! ;)

Did you see my correction to this? I meant to say RAID 0. Sorry for the confusion.

No problem, at least it forces me to look at RAID-5, RAID-1 and now RAID-0, thanks! ;)

Sorry, my setup is a RAID0 striped SSDx2 configuration as well, not RAID1. I have a 3TB standard drive for performing backup, since I can lose data anytime, if any one of the drives fail.

The cooling solution is from Corsair, and it's easy to install.

I think, CPU motherboard, SSD, RAM, case, power supply, etc was well within USD$ 1500.

The apple display was the most expensive component.

The Mac Pro, when it comes out would be a perfect build server, though, with PCIe SSD, XEON CPUs, etc.

Elvis Dowson