RE: [OT] (ish) Help looking for mobo recommendation

["Paul Gordon" <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's a couple of years old, currently running a Gigabyte GA-81945P-Pro
with an Intel Pentium D 3GHz, and seven hard drives. The PSU was also
the stock one that came with the case rather than a new 85%+ rated one.
Those Pentium D's weren't exactly renowned for running cool &
efficiently!

I'd hoped to reduce energy by replacing the mobo, and CPU with a core-2,
using a newer 85%+ rated PSU, and dropping the HDD complement down to 5
(whilst simultaneously increasing storage capacity from 2TB to 5TB). So
far that hasn't gone too well, - I don't appear to be able to get a
build of Vista to install on the Highpoint SATA RAID controller volume -
Windows can only boot from MBR style partitions, and those are limited
to 2TB. I have 5 x 1TB disks that I wanted to build into a single 5TB
(4TB useable) RAID 5 array, then create a small boot partition for the
OS, and a large GPT style partition using all the remaining space. It
all works up to the point that windows install starts copying files to
the system partition, it does 1% then reboots. It seems to be a common
problem from what I've subsequently read. Because of that, I think I'm
going to have to stick to separate drive(s) for the OS, running off the
mobo SATA RAID as a mirrored pair. Thus I've bought a couple of 120GB
laptop 2.5" 5400rpm drives, since I reckon they'll be a little more
frugal that the drives I was using before.

Paul G.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of Steve Morgan
> Sent: 11 January 2009 17:15
> To: UKHA Group
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] [OT] (ish) Help looking for mobo recommendation
>
> It'd be interesting to know what the spec of your existing box is.
>
> The new Fujitsu RX300 server that I got the other day averages about
> 195W
> but that's a dual quad-core Xeon, 16GB RAM, 4x250GB RAID 0 and a
> plethora of
> fans. I thought the power consumption wasn't too bad given that it's
> running
> Win2K8 with Hyper-V, 3 Win2K8/SharePoint VMs, 2 Win2K8 Active
Directory
> VMs,
> 2 Win2K8 SQL Server VMs in a cluster and an OpenFiler (Red-Hat based
> iSCSI
> SAN) VM!
>
> Steve
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf
> Of
> Paul Gordon
> Sent: 11 January 2009 16:42
> To: UKHA Group
> Subject: RE: [ukha_d] [OT] (ish) Help looking for mobo recommendation
>
> I *could*... - but I'd have to buy one... Which would be a shame since
> I've
> got a fairly recent core-2 sitting here idle...
>
> Also, I believe the Intel CPU's currently still have the (perhaps
> slight,
> perhaps even imaginary) edge in both computing performance, and (more
> importantly to me), in TDP. One of the main reasons for rebuilding
this
> box
> is reduce its power consumption from the current (frankly ludicrous)
> 200W to
> something a bit more sensible...
>
> Paul G.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------
>
>
>

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