Ideal Server Hardware Choice

[David Fletcher]

At 00:54 01/03/2006, you wrote:

>On Tue, 2006-02-28 at 16:39 -0800, Timothy Alberts wrote:
>
> >
> > These systems have been consistently unreliable.  I've been through 3
> > systems that had CPU fans die over night and burnt
> > processors/motherboards.  Several banks of memory, a couple power
> > supplies, NIC cards that don't survive power surges (something we
> > frequently get with a machine shop in the building) and of coarse the
> > ever failing hard drives in the RAID arrays.
>
>
>Sounds like a good UPS would help a lot.
>
>
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I'll second the recommendation for using a UPS. 
I've got three in my house - one for my computer 
system with a reasonably expensive scanner and 
printer attached, one on my son's computer and 
one very small one protecting the DECT base 
station for the phones, the answering machine, 
the cable modem and the router, plus a Belkin 
Gold series mains socket block with phone and 
cable TV surge arrestors, to stop line surges 
getting to the phone equipment or cable modem. 
Since I did this, there's been no trouble at all with any hardware.

So far as purchasing systems is concerned, I've 
not got a great deal of experience, but what I've 
done recently is purchase quality parts from 
known manufacturers - genuine Intel motherboards 
made by Intel, retail pack P4 processors with 
fans supplied, Crucial memory, Seagate hard 
drives, cases and PSUs by Coolermaster and Antec. 
Out of the few systems I've built recently, one 
power supply died at about one month old and was 
exchange under warranty. No other problems at all.

Just because a system is built by somebody such 
as HP doesn't make it immune to surges. In the 
days before broadband, we used to run an HP 
Netserver at work. One day after a thunderstorm 
the night before, the email stopped working. A 
surge had taken out both the modem and the serial 
port built into the motherboard. The rest of the 
machine died a year or two later. So, again I say 
ALWAYS use a UPS. I paid the full price for the 
first one I bought, then realised I could get 
perfectly good, latest USB connected APC units 
from ebay for £20 or £30. A cheap price to pay to 
protect equipment costing many times more.

Dave F