I am writing this from Node4 of my render farm. That's right I've installed a motherboard and it is running in-situ. I've got it connected to a mouse, monitor, keyboard and wireless usb stick for the moment just to test it. Four fans are in place and working perfectly. That's right, it works!
I've still got a lot of work to do before it is finished. But such a relief to have made it this far. I've even hooked it up to my new gigabit switch, so cool. I thought I might have to do something to tidy up the metal work around the fan vents, but the fan grills are so shiny you just don't see the shoddy cutting and when the power is on the red fan LEDs look really good.
At this rate I might be able to finish this over Xmas.
Thursday 22 December 2011
Tuesday 20 December 2011
Slowly but surely
Now that I have all the bits I need to build this thing (6 more PSUs and 4 SATA hard drives have arrived). I've started the modifying the case in earnest. So far I've managed to cut out four fan holes, drill the holes for the screws, perforate the top with the blender logo and start etching in the machine name. I've also made some more purchases.
I checked my motherboard manual and they all have gigabyte capable lan ports so I have bought 10 cat5e patch cables and have started looking for an 8 port gigabyte switch. They seem to be going for about £15 on ebay.
I have to say that I am quite pleased with buying parts on e-bay so far. Almost everything has been exactly as described and worked perfectly. The only problems have been memory and hard-drives. I've been caught out by a misleading description for memory (I thought I'd bought 8 cards when I had only bought 2) which is frustrating. The problem with the hard-drives is that they are hard-drives. The most mechanical part of a computer and also the part most prone to failure. Second hand hard-drives are then by their very nature a bit of a risk. I'm sure if I was trying to build the top end machine and buying new hard-drives I wouldn't have had any problems; but I'm not. Well the exact issue is that four out of four of the hard-drives I've received from the seller were dudds and either completely dead or only visible to the bios. The seller has already sent me two replacements which work perfectly with a further two on the way. Still it's a bit of a pain having to wait. The key thing here is to test everything as soon as it arrives.
I checked my motherboard manual and they all have gigabyte capable lan ports so I have bought 10 cat5e patch cables and have started looking for an 8 port gigabyte switch. They seem to be going for about £15 on ebay.
I have to say that I am quite pleased with buying parts on e-bay so far. Almost everything has been exactly as described and worked perfectly. The only problems have been memory and hard-drives. I've been caught out by a misleading description for memory (I thought I'd bought 8 cards when I had only bought 2) which is frustrating. The problem with the hard-drives is that they are hard-drives. The most mechanical part of a computer and also the part most prone to failure. Second hand hard-drives are then by their very nature a bit of a risk. I'm sure if I was trying to build the top end machine and buying new hard-drives I wouldn't have had any problems; but I'm not. Well the exact issue is that four out of four of the hard-drives I've received from the seller were dudds and either completely dead or only visible to the bios. The seller has already sent me two replacements which work perfectly with a further two on the way. Still it's a bit of a pain having to wait. The key thing here is to test everything as soon as it arrives.
Monday 12 December 2011
Mounting Costs
The costs are mounting up but I think I've made my last purchase for a while. There are some hidden costs which I will add onto the end of my list.
Build Costs - New Purchases
Existing Equipment and Parts (not purchased)
Build Costs - New Purchases
| Item | Amount | Individual Price | Postage | Total Price |
| Helmer Cabinet | 1 | £24.99 | £7.50 | £32.49 |
| Motherboard, AMD Athlon 2 64bit processor and 1gb of ddr2 ram | 5 | £30 | free | £150 |
| 300W PSU | 1 | 99p | £4.50 | £5.49 |
| 25 Brass Motherboard Standoffs | 1 | £3.19 | free | £3.19 |
| 120mm red led EVO case fan | 4 | £2.99 | £5 | £16.96 |
| 120mm chrome fan guard | 4 | £1.45 | 40p | £6.20 |
| Q-Tec PSU Power Supply Unit 500w | 1 | £6 | £6.50 | £12.50 |
| 1 Gb Kingston DDR2 240 pin 800Mhz RAM | 12 | £4 | free | £48 |
| Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA Hard Drive | 4 | £10 | free | £40 |
| 0.5M SATA Serial ATA 7Pin HDD DATA Cable Lead LOT 10 | 1 | £4 | free | £4 |
| 24 Pin to 20 Pin ATX Power Converter Conversion Cable | 1 | £1.88 | free | £1.88 |
| 15CM 4 Pin IDE Molex Male to 15 SATA Female Power Cable | 1 | 99p | free | 99p |
| Energy Monitor | 1 | £6.19 | £1.99 | £8.18 |
| 400 piece rotary tool set | 1 | £9.99 | free | £9.99 |
| Total: | £339.87 |
Existing Equipment and Parts (not purchased)
| Item | Amount | Individual Approx. Price | Postage | Total Price |
| Dremel Model 800 Drill | 1 | £70 | £7.50 | £77.50 |
| DRAPER 32580 - 60 PIECE SOCKET AND SCREWDRIVER BIT SET | 1 | £20 | free | £20 |
| Acer Aspire X3200 | 1 | £200 | free | £200 |
| Fujitsu 100gb sata 2.5 hd | 1 | £60 | free | £60 |
| Total: | £357.50 |
Saturday 10 December 2011
Offer Accepted
They accepted my offer of £40 for the four SATA 80gb hard drives which is nice, so I paid for them. I'm definitely going to do that again if I can. I also bought a bunch of other little bits, leads and what not.
I've started moding my case. The back panel is in the garage now. I got my Dremel out from it's place of rest and started cutting. It works quite well except that I've already gone through 4 cutting blades. I estimate at this rate I'll need another 18 blades to cut the air vent holes in the back panel. Cutting blades I will have to replace and consequently also include in my costs.
I've started moding my case. The back panel is in the garage now. I got my Dremel out from it's place of rest and started cutting. It works quite well except that I've already gone through 4 cutting blades. I estimate at this rate I'll need another 18 blades to cut the air vent holes in the back panel. Cutting blades I will have to replace and consequently also include in my costs.
| Item | Amount | Individual Price | Postage | Total Price |
| Helmer Cabinet | 1 | £24.99 | £7.50 | £32.49 |
| Motherboard, AMD Athlon 2 64bit processor and 1gb of ddr2 ram | 5 | £30 | free | £150 |
| 300W PSU | 1 | 99p | £4.50 | £5.49 |
| 25 Brass Motherboard Standoffs | 1 | £3.19 | free | £3.19 |
| 120mm red led EVO case fan | 4 | £2.99 | £5 | £16.96 |
| 120mm chrome fan guard | 4 | £1.45 | 40p | £6.20 |
| Q-Tec PSU Power Supply Unit 500w | 1 | £6 | £6.50 | £12.50 |
| 8GB total 4 x 2 Gb Kingston DDR2 240 pin 533Mhz RAM | 2 | £11.89 | £7.60 | £31.38 |
| Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA Hard Drive | 4 | £10 | free | £40 |
| 0.5M SATA Serial ATA 7Pin HDD DATA Cable Lead LOT 10 | 1 | £4 | free | £4 |
| 24 Pin to 20 Pin ATX Power Converter Conversion Cable | 1 | £1.88 | free | £1.88 |
| 15CM 4 Pin IDE Molex Male to 15 SATA Female Power Cable | 1 | 99p | free | 99p |
| Total: | £305.08 |
Thursday 8 December 2011
An Offer Made
I've just noticed that on some Ebay items it is possible to make an offer rather than just accept the sale price. I find this intriguing and pleasant alternative to the auction process. Hard drives seem to be running very expensive at the moment. I think the flood in Thailand's silicon valley has already forced the prices up a little. So obviously I am looking around for a bargain.
I've found a UK seller with a 'Buy Now' price of £12.99 with free p&p for a used 3.5" Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA hard drive. This seems very steep for a second hand hard drive. It is usually the most overworked part of a PC and often the first bit to fail. So I've just put an offer in for four at £10 each.
If they take the offer they will be effectively selling me four for the price of three. But I would have thought it's better for them to have my forty quid in than keep old stock on their shelves. I suspect you don't put the offer button on your item unless you really want to get rid of it. In the end of the day it's there choice but if they take the offer it will certainly help my budget. Lets see if I'm lucky.
I've found a UK seller with a 'Buy Now' price of £12.99 with free p&p for a used 3.5" Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA hard drive. This seems very steep for a second hand hard drive. It is usually the most overworked part of a PC and often the first bit to fail. So I've just put an offer in for four at £10 each.
If they take the offer they will be effectively selling me four for the price of three. But I would have thought it's better for them to have my forty quid in than keep old stock on their shelves. I suspect you don't put the offer button on your item unless you really want to get rid of it. In the end of the day it's there choice but if they take the offer it will certainly help my budget. Lets see if I'm lucky.
The day after Cyber Monday
I've not made much progress with the software side of the build. I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit server edition and installed it as a persistent live cd on my USB stick. I refused to run as a live cd and only allowed me to install it. Very frustrating. So I downloaded the desktop version, set that up as a live cd with persistence and that ran fine, if a little slowly. The persistence also worked well. It retained my usb settings and let me install new programs. I installed x11vncserver and ran it without any issues or error messages. Quite a nice way to run your operating system.
The problem I had was with DrQueue software I intend to use to manage the queues. It needed to update the system files which are compressed so that they can fit on the usb stick and consequently read only. As a result it wouldn't install. I could make my own version of ubuntu with DrQueue built into it as standard and then make my own iso; but given that I've already taken on more than I can chew in this project I've decided to give that a miss for a moment. Which means I'm back looking for 2.5" SATA hard drives on ebay.
I've made a little progress on the hardware front. I've been watching a lot of items on ebay such as PSUs, DDR2, and now 2.5" SATAs. I'm starting to get a feel for the right price now. It's so easy to get drawn in to a bidding war and inflating the price just to have someone snatch it from you in the last second. A scenario which can be both annoying and costly. I also want to were I can by multiples of the same item as I did with the motherboard in order to make the build more generic. So I intend to work out what a reasonable price is for each item and them in most cases do a 'Buy Now' rather than get into all that bidding nonsense.
Indeed I've already followed my own advice. I've been watching five or six sales of ddr2 ram that started at 99p a couple of days ago. For two 2gb ddr2 sticks they have typical finished at or above £10 plus postage of around £1.50. I've found a 'Buy Now' seller selling four sets of four 2gb sticks for £19.49 including p&p. That's works out at only £9.47 for 2 2gb sticks a pretty sweet deal. Now I realise this is only a hypothetical cost saving. If I'd held out I might have been able to pick up the same memory in an auction for only 99p plus p&p as I did with my first PSU. That said it seems unlikely given what I've observed and at the very least I've saved myself some precious time.
I fell foul of the bidding trap I mentioned. I bought my second PSU which I think I over paid for. The average price of the sales I've been watching is coming out at about £11 each. I paid £6 plus £6.50 p&p coming to £12.50 which is not massively over the average. The problem is that I let myself get sucked into a last second bidding war which I know is a trap. Also it stings a little that I paid £6 for this one when I only paid 99p for the last one with roughly the same p&p price. I might just look for a good 'Buy Now' deal for the rest and get it over with. If I can find a seller selling four for about £10 each that would be ideal.
The problem I had was with DrQueue software I intend to use to manage the queues. It needed to update the system files which are compressed so that they can fit on the usb stick and consequently read only. As a result it wouldn't install. I could make my own version of ubuntu with DrQueue built into it as standard and then make my own iso; but given that I've already taken on more than I can chew in this project I've decided to give that a miss for a moment. Which means I'm back looking for 2.5" SATA hard drives on ebay.
I've made a little progress on the hardware front. I've been watching a lot of items on ebay such as PSUs, DDR2, and now 2.5" SATAs. I'm starting to get a feel for the right price now. It's so easy to get drawn in to a bidding war and inflating the price just to have someone snatch it from you in the last second. A scenario which can be both annoying and costly. I also want to were I can by multiples of the same item as I did with the motherboard in order to make the build more generic. So I intend to work out what a reasonable price is for each item and them in most cases do a 'Buy Now' rather than get into all that bidding nonsense.
Indeed I've already followed my own advice. I've been watching five or six sales of ddr2 ram that started at 99p a couple of days ago. For two 2gb ddr2 sticks they have typical finished at or above £10 plus postage of around £1.50. I've found a 'Buy Now' seller selling four sets of four 2gb sticks for £19.49 including p&p. That's works out at only £9.47 for 2 2gb sticks a pretty sweet deal. Now I realise this is only a hypothetical cost saving. If I'd held out I might have been able to pick up the same memory in an auction for only 99p plus p&p as I did with my first PSU. That said it seems unlikely given what I've observed and at the very least I've saved myself some precious time.
I fell foul of the bidding trap I mentioned. I bought my second PSU which I think I over paid for. The average price of the sales I've been watching is coming out at about £11 each. I paid £6 plus £6.50 p&p coming to £12.50 which is not massively over the average. The problem is that I let myself get sucked into a last second bidding war which I know is a trap. Also it stings a little that I paid £6 for this one when I only paid 99p for the last one with roughly the same p&p price. I might just look for a good 'Buy Now' deal for the rest and get it over with. If I can find a seller selling four for about £10 each that would be ideal.
| Item | Amount | Individual Price | Postage | Total Price |
| Helmer Cabinet | 1 | £24.99 | £7.50 | £32.49 |
| Motherboard, AMD Athlon 2 64bit processor and 1gb of ddr2 ram | 5 | £30 | free | £150 |
| 300W PSU | 1 | 99p | £4.50 | £5.49 |
| 25 Brass Motherboard Standoffs | 1 | £3.19 | free | £3.19 |
| 120mm red led EVO case fan | 4 | £2.99 | £5 | £16.96 |
| 120mm chrome fan guard | 4 | £1.45 | 40p | £6.20 |
| Q-Tec PSU Power Supply Unit 500w | 1 | £6 | £6.50 | £12.50 |
| 8GB total 4 x 2 Gb Kingston DDR2 240 pin 533Mhz RAM | 2 | £11.89 | £7.60 | £31.38 |
| Total: | £258.21 |
Tuesday 6 December 2011
Two steps forward one step back
I've been itching to take bits of Helmer out to the garage and start modding him; but I've resisted. The problem is that I don't have all the bits yet (PSUs and fans ...etc) and I don't want to just cut great big ugly holes. All this waiting around has given me time to think.
My plan at the moment is to mod Helmer differently to the others I've seen so far. I am going to have the large back panel as the front of the unit and add two red led fans to the bottom and the top of the unit and put a sign down the middle saying "Render Farm 01". I will have both sets of fans pulling air in. The theory is that given hot air rises I will vent through the top of the machine pulling in cooler air through the bottom.
I'm not sure which parts of the draws I'm going to keep. I've decided against keeping them in their entirety as that will be just terrible for airflow. I've managed to pick up 1 300W PSU so far for 99p and £4.50 p&p which isn't too bad. I suspect that I'll end up with 5 diffferent types. So I am going to cut cut the shapes I need out of the draw fronts as and when they arrive.
Purchase History so far:
All prices include VAT
My plan at the moment is to mod Helmer differently to the others I've seen so far. I am going to have the large back panel as the front of the unit and add two red led fans to the bottom and the top of the unit and put a sign down the middle saying "Render Farm 01". I will have both sets of fans pulling air in. The theory is that given hot air rises I will vent through the top of the machine pulling in cooler air through the bottom.
I'm not sure which parts of the draws I'm going to keep. I've decided against keeping them in their entirety as that will be just terrible for airflow. I've managed to pick up 1 300W PSU so far for 99p and £4.50 p&p which isn't too bad. I suspect that I'll end up with 5 diffferent types. So I am going to cut cut the shapes I need out of the draw fronts as and when they arrive.
Purchase History so far:
All prices include VAT
| Item | Amount | Individual Price | Postage | Total Price |
| Helmer Cabinet | 1 | £24.99 | £7.50 | £32.49 |
| Motherboard, AMD Athlon 2 64bit processor and 1gb of ddr2 ram | 5 | £30 | free | £150 |
| 300W PSU | 1 | 99p | £4.50 | £5.49 |
| 25 Brass Motherboard Standoffs | 1 | £3.19 | free | £3.19 |
| 120mm red led EVO case fan | 4 | £2.99 | £5 | £16.96 |
| 120mm chrome fan guard | 4 | £1.45 | ||
| Total: | £217.50 |
Monday 5 December 2011
Helmer has entered the building
I've also purposefully not completely finished assembling him. He has been designed quite cunningly with only two screws holding the whole cabinet together (there are 12 screws to attach the handles and 8 screws to attach the feet in the box which I'm not including in my count). What they've done instead is have a series of metal lugs built into the cabinet's sides and draws which you then fold over to keep everything in place. Both ingenious and cheap. Well for the moment I've just not folded all the lugs over so that I can easily disassemble it.
I will need to cut the vents into the back and I also want to drill vents into the top as well. In addition I'm also unsure at the moment whether to mount the motherboards in the draws like the Americans or loose the draws and mount them on the draw rails like Jann. They fit in the draws and having them in there may make maintenance easier. That is when I want to access a motherboard I just pull out a drawer and disconnect the power/network cables. On the other hand even with holes cut in them the drawers will definitely stimmy the air flow which may be a problem as running six motherboards in the same box is bound to create a lot of heat. I'm not actually going to decide for the moment. I'll mull over that one.
I do want to take the top off and add the blender logo like the blender society did. I think I'll do that next.
Saturday 3 December 2011
They're not duds
I've now tested all five of the motherboards (I hooked up a PSU, monitor, keyboard, mouse and debian on a usb stick) and they all work fine. All five booted into Debian without issue. I was a little confused when I noticed the BIOS showed not the 1024mb I was expecting but only 895mb of available memory. But a little research revealed that the rest of the memory had been grabbed by the on-board graphics displaying the BIOS.
Thursday 1 December 2011
Super Big Grin
I'm am super chuffed. I received my first delivery from ebay. The five mother boards and cpu's I've bought. Well I figured I should test them somehow, but how? I've not ordered the PSUs yet or anything. I remember reading in the Helmer blog that he shorted a circuit with some wires in order to start his computer (like they do in American films to start a stolen car), so I decided to try the same trick.
The first big hurdle I faced was were to get a power supply from. Well as I've said before I've got an old Acer Aspire kicking around. It's a perfectly acceptable machine in good working order. So what do I do? Time to get the screw driver out. I'm kind of getting a little nervous at this point. It is the frightening realisation that I'm taking apart something that I may not be able to put back together again. There is also the chance that I may just make a clumsy mistake and break something important; but I ignore those thought the best I can and carry on plugging away at it. Twenty tense minutes later and amongst a rather large pile of other bits (dvd drive, hd ...etc) I've managed to extract the all important PSU. Well I'm looking at this thing and I notice that the socket is four connectors smaller than the one on my new motherboard. Other than that It seems to fit so I try to ignore the discrepancy and hope the motherboard will be similarly forgiving. The motherboard already has the cpu, heatsink, fan, and memory attached so I plug in the keyboard, mouse, monitor and the finally the power cable. I also put a usb stick containing a bootable debian linux OS in one of the USB ports.
A little green light comes on. Other than that nothing. Ok, the whole point of this task is to test that the motherboard, memory and CPU work so surely a little green light is a good thing? You'd think so wouldn't you. At least that proves that the PSU works a little, which is good considering it has four less connectors than the socket it's plugged into! But then again I knew the PSU worked because it came from a perfectly good machine (well it was a perfectly good machine). I play around for a while putting a jumper on random pegs and adding the power source back in. Nothing. I have a good look over the motherboard for any clear signs of which pegs need shorting. All the writing is too small for my old eyes. All I get for my trouble is really tired and achy eyes. I get a little pang of despair at this point. Ok, regroup and think. That's it refer to the manual. Ahh, it didn't come with one. No problem that's what the net is for.
One quick google search for "Asus M2A-VM manual" and it pops up top of the list. Fifteen minutes of intense concentration later and I know exactly what I've been doing wrong. I was trying to start the computer by shorting two prongs of the serial port connector. Ah. This may have shorted the whole board or had no effect whatsoever. I am at this point hoping for the latter. It certainly wasn't the bit I needed to short to turn on the computer.
However now I think I know what I do need to connect. So now I'm looking for the pin 5 and 6 of the 20-8 pin system panel connector. I find them, plug everything back in and apply the screw driver. Nothing, nothing, then suddenly the cpu fan starts spinning lights flash on the monitor and the bios start to load. What! I did it I actually did it! Then no the roller-coaster grinds to a halt. A bios password is required and I wasn't given a password. Ok I've already read about this during my previous fifteen minutes of intense concentration and I'm ready to give it a try. So I unplug the PSU again, pop out the motherboard battery and change the jumper settings for 10 seconds. Put everything back and then I'm ready.
Second time and no bios password. After a little routing around I find that the bios has picked up my usb card and is treating it as a hard-drive. Sweet. I close it all down and nothing again. Then it all kicks off and Debian starts to load. A couple of seconds later and it's all done. The mouse works, keyboard works, monitor works, it recognises the dual core cpu and the memory. A complete success and I am super chuffed.
After patting myself on the back some it occured to me that if all the rest of the motherboards are ok and recognise my usb stick I may be able to get away with not buying any SATA hard drives at all. I could instead use some of the usb sticks I have lying around. If I do this for five out of six motherboards in my server farm I could save ten to thirty pounds each. This would potentially save me buying ninety plus pounds worth of hard-drives, be quicker to load and use far less energy. In I don't need hard-drives because each node would write all it's data to shared disk or an external NAS. The only downside I can see at the moment is that there won't be any disk space available for virtual memory usage. But given that it would be much slower than using actual memory that may not be such an issue. I only have one gig of DDR in each motherboard at the moment, but according to my new manual I can install as much as eight if I use a 64bit OS. This would potentially avoid use virtual memory at all.
The first big hurdle I faced was were to get a power supply from. Well as I've said before I've got an old Acer Aspire kicking around. It's a perfectly acceptable machine in good working order. So what do I do? Time to get the screw driver out. I'm kind of getting a little nervous at this point. It is the frightening realisation that I'm taking apart something that I may not be able to put back together again. There is also the chance that I may just make a clumsy mistake and break something important; but I ignore those thought the best I can and carry on plugging away at it. Twenty tense minutes later and amongst a rather large pile of other bits (dvd drive, hd ...etc) I've managed to extract the all important PSU. Well I'm looking at this thing and I notice that the socket is four connectors smaller than the one on my new motherboard. Other than that It seems to fit so I try to ignore the discrepancy and hope the motherboard will be similarly forgiving. The motherboard already has the cpu, heatsink, fan, and memory attached so I plug in the keyboard, mouse, monitor and the finally the power cable. I also put a usb stick containing a bootable debian linux OS in one of the USB ports.
A little green light comes on. Other than that nothing. Ok, the whole point of this task is to test that the motherboard, memory and CPU work so surely a little green light is a good thing? You'd think so wouldn't you. At least that proves that the PSU works a little, which is good considering it has four less connectors than the socket it's plugged into! But then again I knew the PSU worked because it came from a perfectly good machine (well it was a perfectly good machine). I play around for a while putting a jumper on random pegs and adding the power source back in. Nothing. I have a good look over the motherboard for any clear signs of which pegs need shorting. All the writing is too small for my old eyes. All I get for my trouble is really tired and achy eyes. I get a little pang of despair at this point. Ok, regroup and think. That's it refer to the manual. Ahh, it didn't come with one. No problem that's what the net is for.
One quick google search for "Asus M2A-VM manual" and it pops up top of the list. Fifteen minutes of intense concentration later and I know exactly what I've been doing wrong. I was trying to start the computer by shorting two prongs of the serial port connector. Ah. This may have shorted the whole board or had no effect whatsoever. I am at this point hoping for the latter. It certainly wasn't the bit I needed to short to turn on the computer.
However now I think I know what I do need to connect. So now I'm looking for the pin 5 and 6 of the 20-8 pin system panel connector. I find them, plug everything back in and apply the screw driver. Nothing, nothing, then suddenly the cpu fan starts spinning lights flash on the monitor and the bios start to load. What! I did it I actually did it! Then no the roller-coaster grinds to a halt. A bios password is required and I wasn't given a password. Ok I've already read about this during my previous fifteen minutes of intense concentration and I'm ready to give it a try. So I unplug the PSU again, pop out the motherboard battery and change the jumper settings for 10 seconds. Put everything back and then I'm ready.
Second time and no bios password. After a little routing around I find that the bios has picked up my usb card and is treating it as a hard-drive. Sweet. I close it all down and nothing again. Then it all kicks off and Debian starts to load. A couple of seconds later and it's all done. The mouse works, keyboard works, monitor works, it recognises the dual core cpu and the memory. A complete success and I am super chuffed.
After patting myself on the back some it occured to me that if all the rest of the motherboards are ok and recognise my usb stick I may be able to get away with not buying any SATA hard drives at all. I could instead use some of the usb sticks I have lying around. If I do this for five out of six motherboards in my server farm I could save ten to thirty pounds each. This would potentially save me buying ninety plus pounds worth of hard-drives, be quicker to load and use far less energy. In I don't need hard-drives because each node would write all it's data to shared disk or an external NAS. The only downside I can see at the moment is that there won't be any disk space available for virtual memory usage. But given that it would be much slower than using actual memory that may not be such an issue. I only have one gig of DDR in each motherboard at the moment, but according to my new manual I can install as much as eight if I use a 64bit OS. This would potentially avoid use virtual memory at all.
I wrote this yesterday and failed to publish it. Try, try and try again...
It's all about the purchasing at the moment. I've been watching several motherboard cpu bundles on ebay. Most of them have ended up being sold for about fifty pound. Which is at the upper limit of what I want to spend. Yesterday I came across a lot for an Asus M2A-VM motherboard, Athlon 64 x2 4600 processor and a gigabyte of DDR2 ram for thirty pounds which seemed like a bargain. I looked into it a bit further and just buying the processor separately would have come out at about the same price with the motherboard and memory costing about another twenty. A not insignificant saving. On the negative side it is all a bit old and far from cutting edge. The motherboard made it's debut in two thousand and five. Also it doesn't ship with any manual which may cause problems. Overall though I've decided that it is worth a punt and bought five sets to add to the one I'm not using in my Acer Aspire.
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