Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
with high-quality components is, in our experience, just finishing an extended
burn-in, and is probably good for several more years. About the only change
we'd make to such recycled components would be to replace the CPU cooler
(or at least its fan) and to remove the memory modules, polish the contacts,
and reinstall them. Alas, none of this is true for typical mass-market systems,
many of which are built with the cheapest possible third- and fourth-tier
motherboards, cheap memory, and so on.
Memory
Crucial CT2KIT25664AA800 PC2-6400 4 GB kit (2 GB
×
2)
The ASRock K10N78M Pro motherboard has two memory slots that support
a maximum of 8 GB of memory. Our normal practice for 32-bit operating sys-
tems is to install 1 GB of memory per core (or per thread, for multithreaded
processors). On that basis, a pair of 1 GB memory modules for a total of 2 GB of
system memory would probably have sufficed. A 32-bit OS recognizes at most
3 to 3.5 GB of memory, so installing more than 4 GB would be pointless.
However, in our 20 years of dealing with servers, we've never heard anyone
complain that a server had too much memory. It's possible that at some point
we'll install a 64-bit operating system on this server, which would effectively
double the memory requirements to 4 GB. A pair of 2 GB memory modules
didn't cost all that much more than a pair of 1 GB modules, so we decided to
install 4 GB of memory initially. We considered installing a pair of 4 GB mod-
ules to max out system memory at 8 GB, but at the time we built this system
4 GB modules were selling for more than twice as much per gigabyte as 2 GB
modules, so that would have been a waste of money.
We chose a Crucial 4 GB (2 GB
×
2) memory kit, using the online Crucial product
selector to ensure compatibility with our motherboard. The motherboard sup-
ports DDR2-533 (PC2-4200), DDR2-667 (PC2-5300), DDR2-800 (PC2-6400), and
DDR2-1066 (PC2-8500) memory modules. Although Crucial offered PC2-4200
and PC2-5300 modules for this motherboard, those modules were priced the
same as PC2-6400 modules, so there was no reason to choose the slower mod-
ules. The PC2-8500 modules were considerably more expensive than the PC2-
6400 modules and would have provided no noticeable performance benefit,
so we settled on the PC2-6400 kit.
HardDiskDrives
Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB (three)
The disk subsystem of our home server must be capacious, fast, and reliable:
capacious because this server will store all of the data we want to keep online,
which is currently nearly 4 TB and growing; fast because when we retrieve a
file we don't want the server slowing things down; and reliable, well, for obvi-
ous reasons. Here are our recommendations:
