Saturday, June 12, 2004
Major Progress This Week
Well, major progress was made this week and from a hardware standpoint, I'm almost done. As you can see, it still looks like a rats nest, but all the major hdwe components are in place and running stable.
The major milestone passed this week was the installation of the 2 200GB SATA drives and configuring the RAID 1 array. For those that don't know, RAID 1 simply means that the 2 drives are mirror images of each other. This is done primarily for redundancy - if a drive fails, I can replace it and restore it from it's mirror with no data loss. There is a minor performance hit, but for my purposes it's insignificant.
I'm still testing to determine the optimum fan speed to maintain both quiet and cool - that will likely go on for some time. I have found another hurdle that I need to clear - it seems that the 200GB SATA drives don't automatically deliver temperature infomation to the motherboard as does the 80GB EIDE drive. Temp tolerances are some tighter on the SATA drives and I need to be able to monitor the temps. Possibly, it's just a parm setting that I'm missing -- I'll pursue that this next week.
I need to tie-up all the loose cables, and generally just tidy up the beast. Then I just move on to researching the right software/hardware add-ons to provide the desired AV functions.
The major milestone passed this week was the installation of the 2 200GB SATA drives and configuring the RAID 1 array. For those that don't know, RAID 1 simply means that the 2 drives are mirror images of each other. This is done primarily for redundancy - if a drive fails, I can replace it and restore it from it's mirror with no data loss. There is a minor performance hit, but for my purposes it's insignificant.
I'm still testing to determine the optimum fan speed to maintain both quiet and cool - that will likely go on for some time. I have found another hurdle that I need to clear - it seems that the 200GB SATA drives don't automatically deliver temperature infomation to the motherboard as does the 80GB EIDE drive. Temp tolerances are some tighter on the SATA drives and I need to be able to monitor the temps. Possibly, it's just a parm setting that I'm missing -- I'll pursue that this next week.
I need to tie-up all the loose cables, and generally just tidy up the beast. Then I just move on to researching the right software/hardware add-ons to provide the desired AV functions.
