Can I trust AMD with my mother?

S

Squilliam

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I was thinking of building a PC for my mother and essentially the two main foci for me is the capability of playing Civ 5 adequately and external backup with RAID which is seamless, so I figured an external RAID exclosure attached via external SATA.

Heres what I have:

Please don't freak out at the prices they are in NZ dollars with 15% tax inclusive.

AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Box CPUs $184.00
Antec Sonata III 500W (Black) Midi tower chassis $210.00
Asus M4A88TD-M EVO/USB3 Motherboards $153.00
Intel X25-M G2 80GB Solid state drives (SSD) $292.89
Kingston ValueRAM DDR3 PC10600/1333MHz CL9 4GB DDR3 memory sticks $82.43
Lite-On iHAS324 DVD burners $31.56
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Eng (64-bit OEM) Operating systems $145.38
Samsung SyncMaster BX2440 TFT displays $347.30
Sapphire Radeon HD5770 Lite HDMI DisplayPort Dual-DVI 1GB Graphics cards (PCI Express) $215.05
Silverstone DS221 External enclosures $114.71
2 x Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD2500BEVT 8MB 250GB 2.5 inch S-ATA hard disk drives $64.17

Is it good overall? Any suggestions? Also whats the best RAID external storage for ease of use?

Finally can I trust AMD with my mother?
 
Check the status of the RAID stuff with WD drives. They are a bit notorious recently for removing TLER settings from their consumer drives to force you to buy their much more expensive enterprise drives.

What this means is that if a drive is busy doing something and doesn't respond to the controller, the drive can drop out of the array. You used to be able to raise that timeout level, but WD removed that feature from their consumer drives and basically said the consumer drive aren't for RAID, buy the more expensive enterprise drives. RAID won't stop or save your Mom if she accidentally deletes the whole drive.

Note that RAID is about high availability, redundancy, and (in general) a bit of a speedup depending on what you are doing and how your array is configured. This is quite different from from backups.

You might want to check out some of the other Antec cases. Their gaming Antec cases (like the 300) are very good and very cheap. Terrific airflow, which means you can make them very quiet with a few big fans.

Take a look at the Asus M4A89 series motherboards. These are newer and have some future proofing in things like USB 3 and SATA 3. I built a system with a M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 890GX (with the onboard graphics but they do one without graphics), and it's been rock solid.

You might want to get a little faster CPU. There's not a lot of price difference to go to 3.4 ghz Phenom Black quad core, and Civ 5 seems to be very CPU hungry.
 
Yeah, thanks for the info on the RAID.

Shes not computer illiterate (err how you spell again?) so user error isn't an issue. What im thinking about is the easiest way to have the whole system backed up in a reduntant way without needing to be baby-sat. Im pretty noob when it comes to options here, what are the good ones?

The reason for that case it by the time I look at a cheaper Antec with a decent PSU the cost comes to around the same as the Antec and that Antec Sonata seems to be a better case. The other Antec cases look a bit blingy, remember this is for a 50 year old woman.

I'll check out some faster CPUs and the motherboard but since this one has eSata and 6Gbps SATA and USB 3.0 quite cheap im quite fond of it. Does micro-ATX shorten the longevity of a motherboard?
 
If you don't want to have to manually or automatically back things up, easiest and most fault tolerant way to have data redundancy would be a mirrored array. However, it also uses the most HDD space (1:1 copies of everything).

But considering you only have 2 HDD's that's going to be the way to go.

Does she really need a SSD? That seems a bit extravagent for someone that may not even notice that it'd be faster in certain activities. But if you can afford it, lucky Mom. :)

Micro-ATI or even Mini-ITX isn't going to shorten the longevity or stability of a MB. It's all about features versus price versus size.

As well does she really need the external enclosure? That seems to be another extravagence unless she absolutely needs a portable drive array. After all if a drive goes bad in a raid-1 array, you're going to have to replace it either way. So having it external doesn't make it easier for your mother. :) The MB supports raid and even if it didn't, Windows software raid has been perfectly fine, IMO, for home use.

Additionally, if the external array is going to be on whenever the computer is on, it's going to be another point of failure in the system. And when the small fan gets a little old, it's going to start getting noisy. As well she'll have to remember to turn it on/off whenever she turns the computer on. Leaving it on 100% of the time is going to shorten it's lifespan even more, and thus greatly increase the chance of catastrophic HDD failure (if the fans fail and HDDs overheat for too long).

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
If you don't want to have to manually or automatically back things up, easiest and most fault tolerant way to have data redundancy would be a mirrored array. However, it also uses the most HDD space (1:1 copies of everything).

But considering you only have 2 HDD's that's going to be the way to go.

Does she really need a SSD? That seems a bit extravagent for someone that may not even notice that it'd be faster in certain activities. But if you can afford it, lucky Mom. :)
Click to expand...

Actually the external drive is an array external drive so it is already Raid 0 or 1. I just figured that it would cover most eventualities such as an internel power surge, theft etc and it would give the data storage system 3 legs rather than two if you consider internal SSD and external mirrored raid 1 backup + media storage.

What are some other good backup strategies? Its really the storage system which seems to give me the most problems when trying to think of something which is both cost effective and easy to use. Maybe go internal and not worry about the whole idea of an external backup? That ought to be able to save about 5-10% of the overall budget.

Is raid even required? Is it possible to have a few folders automatically sync between two drives because with an SSD and HDD theres already redundancy built in. Maybe the best bet is to sync things like emails and photos which are considered important between the two drives and then tell them to do an offsite if possible DVD backup?

Regards,
SB
Click to expand...

Regards to you too.
 
There should be programs that would allow you to do automatic backups of selected folders/drives. I use WHS in my home so I haven't really looked at other backup options in years now.

Unless you're going to be storing the external drive in a secure location, then it'll be subject to most of the same things your desktop will be subject to (theft, fire, etc.) while introducing another mechanical point of failure.

Going internal you may as well go with 3.5" drives which should be cheaper for same storage size. And then just do Raid-1 for data redundancy. If you need offsite/off computer backups, an external solution may still be worthwile. You'd just have to get your mother into the habit of backing up the REALLY important/priceless data (say family photos and whatnot) onto external storage devices if you're afraid of catastrophic damage. And then store a rotating backup in a bank safety deposit box or fireproof safe in the home.

But that's getting rather elaborate. It all depends on just how paranoid you are about losing stuff on computer due to something catastropic (fire, flood, earthquake, plane crashing into your house, whatever).

Also, I would recommend either buying the 2 HDDs to be used in Raid-1 either from different locations or different brands or at different times in order to try to avoid having them be from the same manufacturing lot. Sometimes HDD problems are endemic to a certain production lot.

Regards,
SB
 
Is having a backup really needed?
i'm sure if you lose your pictures of london boy he would send you more
 
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