Date:         Fri, 21 May 1999 09:13:48 -0500
Reply-To:     Dave <dave@251.ORG>
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Dave <dave@251.ORG>
Subject:      Re: Gerry is ill - suggestions for a server upgrade
Comments: To: Vanagon@vanagon.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

This sounds reasonable, except for the hard drives.  I've had bad luck
with drive failures and have found Maxtor and IBM drives to be very
reliable.  Fujitsu just doesn't come across as a quality drive.  I would
like to recommend an IBM Ultrastar series 4.5GB.  They are comparably
priced to the Fujitsu and offer the same 5 year warranty.  As for drives
that I would avoid I'd never buy a Western Digital, we've had more than
one fail at work, I had one fail about a month ago on my personal system
and have heard other similar stories.

I like the choice of the Asus MB, I have found Asus to be the best
available and have always performed flawlessly, even when I cooked one
(a TX97) after a fan failure which fried a Seagate HD and the power
supply.

Although I am not a big Intel fan I would agree with the processor
choice.  I would not get a PIII because they offer no tangible
performance advantages for our server, the PII should be adequate.

dave

     >>
     En-Light mid tower case with 230W power supply
     Asus P2B-DS ATX style mainboard (Intel 440 BX, Adaptec 2890
     chipsets)
     Built in Ultra 2 Wide SCSI controller
     Pentium II 350MHz CPU (upgradeable to dual CPU for $325)
     Qty 4 - 128MBMB (total of 512MB) of PC-100 SDRAM
     Qty 2 - Fujitsu 4.55GB Ultra Wide SCSI Hard Drives in RAID 1
     array
     Mitsumi 1.44MB (3.5") Floppy Drive
     Asus 40X IDE CD-ROM Drive
     S3 Trio 3D 2X AGP Video Adapter with 4MB
     D-Link 10/100Mbps Network Adapter
     3 Year Hardware
     System price:   $2650 CAD or aprox $1800 USD
     <<