I feel as though I have yet again been missing in action blogwise! For those of you who aren't interested in all things computer, feel free to leave now. For those who would like to benefit from the experience of others, read on!
The last time I built new computers for my photography business was about two years ago as a result of my then current primary workstation going completely dead. It was a case of my PC-DL motherboard dying while under warranty. That was a very painful lesson as I had to finally buy a new PC-DL motherboard and move all the components from the failed motherboard to the new motherboard in order to demonstrate to ASUS that it was the motherboard that was bad ... they finally sent me the replacement but, of course, I already had one. But since I couldn't put my business on hold for a month while screwing with that computer, I built one, and then another for backup, to replace the PC-DL. I used ABIT AN8 and KN8 motherboards.
First I built the ABIT AN8-Ultra. All went well until my first big image download via a USB port. About 6GB in to the transfer the system locked up ... just froze. For two years I simply endured these lockups because I couldn't figure out what was wrong. They finally started getting worse and worse. In the meantime I had built the KN8-Ultra system (as my backup box) and just started downloading there and transferring across my intranet. I'll short circuit this story to say that it turns out that ABIT released this board with a significant design flaw making running USB with dual CPUs very unstable. Never a note on the website. Never an email to registered users. Nothing. Nada. They just let everyone suffer. Of course, this is typical motherboard manufacturer style. I was finally able to get perfect stability by running with only a single CPU enabled ... but it made the box very slow with the Athlon 4400+ CPU only running one core.
The KN8-Ultra box with an Athlon 4800+ processor was my backup box (both backup in the sense of data backup and in the sense of being available if the primary box should die) and will remain so into the near future. It is reliable but doesn't seem to want to take a big video card upgrade to support my Dell 30" monitor.
With those two computers having various issues I decided to build a new machine and optimize it for Photoshop. In my mind that means as much memory as Windows 32 bit XP Pro can take, a powerful CPU and at least three separate RAID arrays. After much research (you cannot do enough research no matter how much time you put into it so just accept that) I decided on an ASUS P5E WS Pro motherboard. This motherboard supports two PCI-E x16 video cards so it should be able to drive the 23" ACD, 30" Dell and the Wacom Cintiq 21ux ... I haven't yet put the second video card in as I am using it in my about to be decommissioned AN8 box. In addition, this motherboard has a PCI-X slot and I happened (due to a total brain fart on my part) to have an LSI MegaRaid SATA 300-8X raid controller card which makes it a great fit ... but, the PCI-X slot turns out to really be just a PCI-E X1 slot with a different adapter so I can't really get full performance out of it, sigh. And, of course, this isn't revealed up front by ASUS!
The big Gotcha's! First, the P5E has two onboard RAID controllers, one of which has e-SATA connectors. That's wonderful except the Marvell driver doesn't seem to support ACHI which is necessary for e-SATA hot swap. And since the 'e' in e-SATA stands for 'external', not having hot swap is rather stupid. Also, the Marvell controller supports IDE and there is an IDE adapter on the motherboard ... but its unadvertised restriction is that if you use it for non-disk use, such as with my IDE CD-ROM, you will be sorely disappointed when after doing a complete install of Windows and try to do the reboot, the BIOS will be unable to find your boot disks! Oh, how easy it would have been if ASUS had noted that you must use a SATA CDROM! What a waste of three days of my life trying countless variations. It was only by virtue of my boss using his Linux Rescue Disk that we discovered this cleverness! I have disabled the Marvell hardware since it is clearly a half-assed and useless addition to this motherboard. And finally, the wonderful RealTek audio chipset and driver won't install under default Windows XP ... it will run the full driver install until the last instant and then fail for no obvious reason. After days of searching via Google I found that there is an incompatible system device, the UAA driver, that must be disabled and then uninstalled before installing the RealTek drivers ... but once you have discovered that "feature" (that ASUS doesn't publish)the sound support appears to work well and the driver is very friendly for those of us who are audio challenged.
Anyway, this new box is finally up and spinning as my primary business computer. I have an E8600 3.33 GHz dual core CPU, 4GB DDR2 memory, three RAID arrays: 2x250GB RAID1 for system disk, 2x250GB (soon to be replaced by 3x320GB) RAID0 scratch disk, and 3x750GB RAID5 work disk. It has two 1G NICs although it would be nicer if it had WiFi instead or even Firewire-800. I migrated the last of the applications and data from the old box to this one over this weekend. And here let me put in a BIG plug for MozBackup ... a shareware utility that will export/import your Firefox and Thunderbird profiles including email, registry settings, add-ons, etc., etc. I had read about several add-ons that supposedly did this in Firefox but none had good ratings and a complex solution for doing it by hand with Thunderbird and even though I am moderately computer literate, no manual system seemed to work properly ... MozBackup did exactly what I wanted, creating my old environment on my new box using the principal of 'least unexpected result' perfectly! I have already PayPal'd them their requested Shareware donation.
Phew, I am now on my new box with Adobe CS3 Web Premium, LR2.1, Corel PIX3 & Painter X, PhotoMechanic 5, and other odds and ends and expect to get back to doing useful Blog entries once again. Certainly one thing you can learn from my blog is that almost nothing goes as expected in small business and most of the unexpected events are not good! :-)
Be Safe!
Dwight
No comments:
Post a Comment