OSF Server - Houston

Great build guys, some great hardware, personally i would have chosen a redundant psu, but eh, also watch for recalls on your p67 board they have south-bridge problems. care to share what hdds you purchased (hopefully 15k.7 seagate sas drives :))

P.S. good to see you shelling out for ic diamond like me too, word to the wise, use very little and apply as much pressure as possible to the heatsink.

Edit: it appears your mobo is listed as affected http://pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2589

Edit2: i would also look into ocz revo drives there was a price drop recently, also consider product lifetime 24 hours a day for 365x2 days = a hell of a lot of usage hours. (17,520)

what coolant are you guys using?

Quote from "NecessaryEvil @ Tue Feb 08

I told them to skimp more on the gpu...do you even need a dedicated video card with sandy bridge? I thought the new generation of cpus do graphics as well.

yes, the new sandybridge chips have gpus. i have seen modern servers, they use rage pro embedded chips, also i would have skimped on the gpu and went for hdd upgrade. one of these to be more specific
http://www.newegg.com

you will also need a controller in that case
http://www.newegg.com/

and a cable
http://www.amazon.com/5M-Mini-sas-SF…s/dp/B000GTW684

Quote from "B-e-t-a @ Tue Feb 08

RAID

That, and it enable other features for drives, such as SAS compatibility, since it is a different interface.
it takes stress of the cpu and processes all hdd i/o operations with a dedicated chip.
it enable battery back up for drives, drive caching, up to 10 levels of raid, 256 hdds, Etc.
i own an Dell sas 6i/r, trust me the difference between 15k and 7.2k drives is outstanding. 5ms average read time, vs a 7.2k drive's 12ms.

Pink = 15k.6 Drive
Yellow = 7.2k Drive
Those are my 2 drives, AHCI mode, No BBU.

Quote from "The_Pope @ Wed Feb 09

first time i see evil with his mouth full

that all means, lower cpu usage, mine was 0% average since the raid card handled all the ops.
lower latency, faster throughput (not ssd level), the graph shows average, max, and min read times, displayed in latency (ms), lower is better.
think of it like ping, lower is better, higher RPM = lower latency.

that is the concept for the velociraptor, but SAS drives are meant for high load, mission critical operations, resulting in higher quality, ideal for servers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_attached_SCSI

Quote from "brossuck2020 @ Thu Feb 10

we have the H70 water cooler, and I play on the server when I'm their on the weekends, so I wanted a dedicated video card to play with. No need for a controller with our motherboard...we plan on placing a raid soon, but funds are short for little upgrades like that right now. We wanted mainly to get the server back up and running.

i agree with that logic, just watch out the server doesn't exceed your max bandwidth allowed from your isp.