Would you waste your money on this computer?

A lot of people recommending against RAID 1 in this thread.
I concur that it should not be considered "Back up" but for the extra $80.00 of the cost of a 1.5TB internal HD these days, I am a firm believer of using RAID 1 for up time redundancy.

Hard drives are prone to failure, and when your main dirve with the OS< or even your internal data drive dies, you are immediately faced with some form of downtime.

You may have all your data safe on back up, you may even be one of the rare few that knows how to back up your OS install with all your changes and preferences in a way that you can easily restore it to a machine with a non bootable main HD,. but even in that case, you are S.O.L. right there and then until you procure your new drive, then once you get that new drive, you get to spend the better part of a day getting your OS back up and restoring everything before you can use the brick again. Some may not always be at leisure to lose that day/days getting things back up and running. Some may have the leisure, but are just smart enough not to want to waste that much time anyway when it can be prevented so damn easily.

RAID 1 means when a single hard drive fails, you can keep working while you wait for the new replacement drive to ship, , and rebuild the RAID when it is convenient to you. The Array rebuild is hands off, and fast and simple, easier than restoring an OS.

IMHO this is money in the bank, and a huge relief when a drive fails.

FYI, I have the spare drive sitting in a drawer ready if/when one of the drives on my DATA RAID 1 array dies,. (and of course it is also backed up to external drives.) so I can swap out a dead drive and get my redundancy back in under and hour. that can't be done without RAID 1 involved.

Christ for $80.00 how can you go wrong with that kind of up time guarantee?

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #10743702
A lot of people recommending against RAID 1 in this thread.
I concur that it should not be considered "Back up" but for the extra $80.00 of the cost of a 1.5TB internal HD these days, I am a firm believer of using RAID 1 for up time redundancy.

Hard drives are prone to failure, and when your main dirve with the OS< or even your internal data drive dies, you are immediately faced with some form of downtime.

You may have all your data safe on back up, you may even be one of the rare few that knows how to back up your OS install with all your changes and preferences in a way that you can easily restore it to a machine with a non bootable main HD,. but even in that case, you are S.O.L. right there and then until you procure your new drive, then once you get that new drive, you get to spend the better part of a day getting your OS back up and restoring everything before you can use the brick again. Some may not always be at leisure to lose that day/days getting things back up and running. Some may have the leisure, but are just smart enough not to want to waste that much time anyway when it can be prevented so damn easily.

RAID 1 means when a single hard drive fails, you can keep working while you wait for the new replacement drive to ship, , and rebuild the RAID when it is convenient to you. The Array rebuild is hands off, and fast and simple, easier than restoring an OS.

IMHO this is money in the bank, and a huge relief when a drive fails.

FYI, I have the spare drive sitting in a drawer ready if/when one of the drives on my DATA RAID 1 array dies,. (and of course it is also backed up to external drives.) so I can swap out a dead drive and get my redundancy back in under and hour. that can't be done without RAID 1 involved.

Christ for $80.00 how can you go wrong with that kind of up time guarantee?

I've only had one drive fail and it was in a 10 year old computer that needed to be replaced anyway . So I guess I'm one of those people that gets complacent and says "if it ain't broke don't fix it". Now this is only in regards to my OS drive. All of my data is now on an unRAID server which has a parity drive for redundancy and it then gets backed up to a second internal drive in my photo machine which then gets synced to an external that is stored off site. I guess I never worried about having to reload the OS and software but I can see how time would be saved.

You make a good case for RAID CDS. Most people will have a problem if their OS dies, reinstallation can take a day, and most people will lose at least a little data. For a techie it's not such a big deal, as they can just put their latest OS image back onto another hard drive they have laying around. I'm yet to experience hard drive failure, but I will, some time, when it's most inconvenient of course.

for photo editing, I suggest changing to an IPS monitor. the GPU is fine, but if you're short on cash, you can downgrade it....

I forgot to mention, that RAID 1 also equals usually a significant boost in READ speed,. (variable depending on how the hardware is set up) which doesn't hurt at all!

CyberDyneSystems wrote in post #10750707
I forgot to mention, that RAID 1 also equals usually a significant boost in READ speed,. (variable depending on how the hardware is set up) which doesn't hurt at all!

With a fast CPU doubling your read speed could be a really good thing, if your images are kept on that same drive that is.

When doing read/write operations, your bottleneck is NEVER your CPU, even when using a RAID which needs to calculate parity bits during writes.

i would like to add... not sure how much it will save you.. but i built a computer a few years ago.. yeah a few years... and it is still top notch... pre "i" series cpus..

i built a video editing machine...

so CPU (i series would be beneficial but not needed)

drives... drives in a raid 0 has fastest read and write speed... in my testing...my windows 7 benchmark went up .4 by going raid 0. Now I understand there is no backup at that point.. you could use a external for backups.... or if you are a savy geek like me.. im running windows home server which does duplicate files (kinda like software raid) plus it backs up my computers....

video - heavy hitter in performance.. at the time it was cheaper for me to go dual video card (9600 gts xxx series) vs a nicer card

memory.. of course the more the better


now a big thing to do is build your own.... what i did was a good thing.. i built a machine from newegg and EVERY ITEM had a rebate... yeah it sucked however i got all my rebates...

my machine is really good at gaming and media due to quad core..

Antec 900 case
xfx i780 motherboard
intel q6600 g0 stepping (heavily overclockable)
4 x 4gb patriot extreme
2 x 512mb xfx geforce 9600 gts xxx video
1tb sata
sata dvd burner

machine was $1800 then all the rebates got me to $1200......

Ati Video is better bang for buck these days
Why isn't your onboard sound good enough? I haven't had any trouble with the sound from my onboard sound for years...
go Open office instead of Office

do you really see yourself using all 16GB of RAM? or you only going for that because it looks good? if your PSD files regularly go over 4GB of RAM then i can see a good reason for you going 16GB, but if not, then its wasted..

Avast is free and good AV software

and stear clear of TN panels

I recommend a high gamut 24" color monitor. 8G ram is plenty.