Critique SFF overkill

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Gawd
Joined
Jan 28, 2005
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I'm looking at building me a SFF. With all the new formats of everything out, I figured an all-out new build is about due.

These are just quick prices thrown together from NewEgg. I could probably do a little better with some searching.

Shuttle SN25P $390.00
Western Digital Raptor 74GB $187.00
Seagate 7200.8 400GB $319.00
Seagate 7200.8 400GB $319.00 (yes, 2; RAID1 in a SFF, a little sick but I like it.)
Corsair XMS Extreme Memory Twin Pack 2GB(1GB x 2) DDR PC-3200 $538.50
AMD Socket 939 Athlon 64 4000+ $545.99
MSI nVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB $412.00

Total (Before tax): $2,711.49

A slimline DVD burner and floppy, and probably a USB TV tuner would probably be added shortly.

So, am I going to kill the PSU? Anything else wrong with this? With the speed of the Seagates should I skip the Raptor and just go for a full size floppy and DVD?
 
The second Seagate is pretty much going to waste...and depending on what you're doing with it you might consider dropping the Raptor. It's SFF after all, the less space taken up and heat generated the better.
 
definitely drop the raptor and get a 6800 ultra. sn25p has the slots on the opposite side so 2 slot cards will fit. it also has 3 3.5" bays 2 in front and 1 above the psu so you can run 2x hd, fdd and dvd w/o messing around with slim line stuff.

look around for reviews on the sn25p to get a better idea of what it can hold then decide what you want to put in it.
 
Raku said:
definitely drop the raptor and get a 6800 ultra. sn25p has the slots on the opposite side so 2 slot cards will fit. it also has 3 3.5" bays 2 in front and 1 above the psu so you can run 2x hd, fdd and dvd w/o messing around with slim line stuff.

look around for reviews on the sn25p to get a better idea of what it can hold then decide what you want to put in it.
Click to expand...

I have... the slimline was because I wanted 3 physical hard drives (Yes, I like my RAID1). Maybe not a Raptor then, but somehow it just makes me more comfortable knowing there's a little system drive I can format any time without losing my data.
 
If you know what it does and doesn't do, and want it badly enough to get a second $300 hard drive...cool. I wouldn't do it because I don't think the marginal gain is sufficiant to justify the cost but it's not my computer we're talking about, is it?

As long as the PSU is good enough for the graphics card, it should be able to take the rest of that in stride. I'm still a bit concerned about the heat buildup especially given that it's SFF and a crowded one at that.
 
True, with a DVD burner, RAID1 might not be as important... dual layer DVDs hold what, 8GB these days? It's more work, but might be better in the long run.
 
Bugger DL, they cost too much. Give it a year or two and that or Blu-Ray should be more reasonable. Then again me == college == small wallet.

RAID-1 is often used under the mistaken impression that it makes your data more secure. The only thing it does there is helps protect against drive failure. If something bad happens to your data, it will most likely not be because of drive failure - not for a good few years at least, and by then both drives will be equally old and quite possibly already replaced for something bigger/faster. If the implemenation is good, you should also get a bit higher read speeds...but for single-user desktop scenario this doesn't translate to a very high % improvement and is probably not going to be noticible.

If you want to make sure nothing bad happens to your data, back it up. I have RAID-5, and I just lost some files a few days ago that I'm still rather upset over. Hit the wrong key, files gone. If I'd backed them up instead of waiting so long to do so, I could just restore them. RAID won't prevent data mishaps. It's good for servers where you have alot of disks and the system has to keep running if one fails. It isn't usually very useful at home.
 
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