SATA OK? (and other questions for a new system

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Tue Sep 13 14:01:53 UTC 2005


On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 08:10:29PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> I'm shopping for a replacement system soon, mainly server purposes for the 
> home network (Samba, Hylafax) but occasionally some KDE desktop stuff and 
> maybe even as a boot server for a thin client.
> 
> So far it looks like it'll be an Athlon 64 mounted in an MSI or Asus mobo 
> mounted in an Antec Sonata2 case, 2GB RAM and a Geforce 6200 video card. 
> There are a few remaining questions:

Well so far I have seen no problems with a VIA K8T800 chipset Asus A8V
Deluxe.  The A8V-E had PCI express network chip onboard which didn't
work until 2.6.11 I believe.  nvidia chipsets in general work rather
well too, although a few features don't have support (NCQ for example),
although for most desktop users the unsupported features don't matter,
and most other chipsets don't have those features either.

> 1) How important is it (given the above tasks) to spend $170 more to expand 
> the RAM to 2GB?

I find 1GB plenty for anything I ever do.

> 2) Is there real value to doing HTML/DNS caching (Squid) for my other home 
> systems?

Depends on your connection speed.  I find using privoxy rather handy,
and squid for caching package downloads on a network with multiple
machines running debian can be handy.

> 3) What are the pros and cons of using Serial ATA drives as opposed to good 
> old ATA-133 drives?

Better airflow with sata by getting rid of another ribbon cable.  SATA
ATAPI support isn't done yet in linux, but will be some day.  Just don't
expect a SATA dvd writer to work right now.  SATA has no jumpers to set,
is supposed to support hotplug although some chipsets apparently don't
support it and not all drivers do either, and has a higher potential
transfer rate (although the raw speed if the disk is not that high on
any current drives).  In the future they will switch to lower voltage
than current drives reducing power use and heat generation.

For harddisks, I wouldn't use anything other than SATA today.

> 4) Would the use of PCI Express for the video instead of AGP cause me grief?

It shouldn't.

> 5) Is Nvidia still better supported by X than ATI at the low end ($75 cards)

Very much at any end.

Lennart Sorensen
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