It’s now been almost 3 months since I purchased and built my monster desktop and I’ve had quite a bit of excitement with it.

To start with, the SATA II RAID 5 controller on the ASUS motherboard wasn’t up to spec. It just about worked until I wanted to perform more than one disk operation, then it just died. For example, say I was copying a large file across the network at 100Mbs and wanted to do something else at the same time, the LUN would grind to a halt and windows would error.

To get round this I configured the system to have a RAID 0 LUN instead, forgetting the reasons why I wanted RAID 5 in the first place.

This worked well for a couple of weeks until S.M.A.R.T. started reporting that one of the disks in the system was bad! To be honest, I was surprised at this because Weston Digital run each and every one of their disks in a lab before selling them, but they it was: Disk is about to fail messages and the Windows log full of errors when the disk system stopped.

This is the exact reason I specified RAID 5 when coming up with the specification for the computer. So I decided to implement RAID 5 whilst the failed hard disk was being RMA’ed with Weston Digital – an excellent and hassle free service by the way, I completed a form on their web site, keyed in my credit card details (insurance only) and WD sent be a new HDD within a couple of day. I then had 30 days to send the defective drive back to them else they’d chare by credit card.

After reviewing my options, I decided on a Areca ARC-1210 SAT II PCI Express card to fill the other PCIe x16 slot on the ASUS board. The decision to use this card was mainly based on the requirement to use PCIe and not PCI-X (as my board doesn’t have any PCI-X slots on it) and because Tom rated it very highly (http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/01/02/safer_6_for_raid_controllers1/page12.html). One of the frustrating thing about being a single person on a budget is that the option of buying several cards for different manufactures and testing them yourself is not an option! Because of this, I rely heavily on sites like Tom’s Hardware that benchmark items against its piers and report the results. The downside is that don’t test for compatibility – which is the wall I hit next!

I received and installed my shiny and new RAID controller card and proceeded to fit it into the system – by this point, I had already copied all the data to another machine on the network so was ready for a clean install. The machine booted fine, went through POST where I hopped into the RAID controller’s BIOS and built a RAID 5 LUN spanning all 4 disks, saved, rebooted and proceeded to install Windows Longhorn x64 Beta 2 for a play before setting up the machine for real use. Then the fun started!

Windows completed the first stage of the installation and then rebooted, it was supposed to boot from the RAID LUN and finish setup, but errored in Boot Manager (something about not finding NTOSKRL.EXE). All know that this is bad, without the windows Kernal, no device drivers can be loaded, no user mode and be started and windows just fails.

Oh well thinks I, I’ll go back to Windows 2003 x64 and then Windows 2003 x86, Windows XP (x64 and x86) Vista Beta 2 and all had the same error.

After a week of very frustrating support emails from ASUS on this issue, I concluded that the board and the RAID controller had issues together and replaced the ASUS board with a Gigabyte board – then everything worked fine.

The board I went for in the end was the GA K8N Pro which sports the nVidea Northbridge chipset as after weeks of testing the ASUS board, I concluded that it was the ATI northbridge that had a problem with the RAID controller card.

It’s been in this configuration now for about a month and everything is working fine – and yes, I did get longhorn Beta 2 on for play , but concluded that it’s not ready for real use just yet. Maybe the newly released Beta 2 Refresh will be better? I’ll put it on and have a play to find out.

Performance of the system with this RAID controller in is outstanding, for operations involving data under 128MB, it’s blindingly fast, files bigger then that cause an amusing effect that results in things happening very quickly until the RAID controllers cache is full and then you see is slow down a little.

So what’s the point of this post? I suppose I’m here to tell you that onboard RAID controllers suck and that if you require (or even desire RAID 5 like me) then you need to invest in a good controller card. I suppose RAID 1 was OK with the onboard RAID, it that’s limiting in terms of what you can do.

Historically I’ve upgraded my computer quite often, a pattern that changed when I purchased a my Dell workstation almost 4 years ago. At the time I thought that the 2 x 2.4GHz Xenon processors, its 1GB of RAM and its 2 x 80GB HDD’s would last for a good couple of years. And it has, I’ve upped the HDD’s to 200GB ones, added a DVD burner, upped it to 2GB RAM and gave it a SATA upgrade in the process.

Fast forward to now and I’ve been itching to upgrade to something with a lot more snap in order to meet my requirements, which are as follows:

• Have at least 2 monitors plugged in – If you haven’t tried it yet two monitors rock from a productivity point of view and you get a free workout moving your mouse over bigger distances.
• Run Visual Studio 2005 – My primary role in life is to write code and integrate systems, so this is a given.
• Run at least 2 virtual machines (hosted with MS Virtual Server 2005) all the time – A domain controller and a TFS server.
• Allow for the creation of 2 additional virtual machines at any point in time for evaluation and test purposes – for playing with Longhorn Server and Office 2007 server products.
• Allow general PC usage – Office (using 2007), Internet Explorer, blog reader etc.
• Allow my partner to access and author content in Japanese (‘cause that’s where she’s from)
• Have multiple sessions open on the host operating system at once (my other half often uses it for general PC usage and I Terminal Service in from a remote laptop, or vice versa. Sometimes I’m playing a game or utilising both screens on the desktop for development and she wants to check email, browse the web etc. all in Japanese so an RDP session is great because she gets access to her personalised, Japanese enabled desktop)
• Exist for at least 2-3 years without being replaced. This means that it’ll run Vista, Longhorn Server and the Office 2007 product line (including server components) before I next replace it.
• Support playing the occasional game – I don’t own an Xbox and don’t intend to, so I rely on my desktop for this task every 6 months or so when I decide to load a game up and play it for a couple of weeks before I relegate it to a shelf, never to see the light of day again – yet alone CPU clock cycles.
• Hardware support for RAID 5 to protect my data

So, with all the above in mind I set about the task of researching the computer that I’ll buy.

Things soon took a turn for the worse, I decided on an AMD x64 platform (more on why later) and went to Dell looking for one. But was disappointed – Dell don’t ship AMD based workstations, so I decided to build the first PC I’ve built in ages.

CPU choices

Processor options available fell into a few of categories:

1. Intel EM64T based Pentium
2. AMD Opteron – the first x64 chip and still highly rated for server work
3. AMD Athlon – good all rounder and much better on the desktop side of life
4. Intel Conroe – not yet released

Reading about the differences between the AMD and Intel, the AMD chips outperform the Intel ones every time because of the changes to the chip architecture that AMD made. It seems that AMD have done several clever things on their 64 bit line of chips, including reducing the traffic on the front-side buss (FSB) by adding a memory controller directly in the chip so all memory requests don’t have to be relayed across the FSB to the North Bridge.

The Conroe chips from Intel look great and Tom’s Hardware has rated them very highly based on some early benchmarks against the quickest that AMD make. But I didn’t want to wait the extra month, nor I suspect could I have afforded one of these chips on the day they ship to retailers from Intel, so I dropped this idea before it had completely formed.

So it looked like AMD was for me, but which one? Because of my carefully though-of-after-the-event requirements above, I know that only the Athlon will do for me because of the game/Vista requirements. That didn’t stop me thinking about a dual processor, dual core solution for a total of 4 cores though.

In the end I brought an AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 chip. The FX-62 looks nice, but at an extra £250, I felt the increase in performance wasn’t worth the extra cash.

Motherboard

Phew – the chip decision was taken care of, onto the motherboard.

In the end I settled for an Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe SKT939 RD580 Crossfire ATX board mainly because it had better features around RAID and onboard NICs. I wasn’t intending to use the SLI features on the boards and I think that one graphics card is enough for any but the most hardcore gamer – in other words, I felt it wasn’t for me so didn’t have to get into the whole nVidea vs ATI thing.

Memory

It turns out that all RAM isn’t the same! In tests the Corsair RAM performs better than the rest, so this became a no brainer for me – I’ll have 4GB worth (4 x 1GB slugs).

The interesting thing here is that my motherboard choice means I can only have 4GB of RAM in the machine, so filling all the DIMM slots up isn’t going to matter further down the line. I’ve since discovered thought that when the board is fully populated with four DIMM’s, it reduced the FSB speed down to 333MHz instead of 400MHz. Of cause, you can over clock it back up, but I guess they had their reasons for this. If I had known this up front, I’d have got 2 x 2GB DIMM’s.

Also DDR-400 (PC3200 specification) is what the Athlon requires, so that’s what I got.

Graphics card

Strangely enough, when I sent my original parts list to a friend for review/input, he pointed out that I forgot to spec a graphics card and the motherboard chosen didn’t have one built in – that’s how much I worry about this subject

As a good general all rounder I picked a Sapphire X800GTO 256mb GDDR3 PCI-E VGA/TVO/DVI card because it should last me a couple of years and enable me to turn all the Glass features in Vista (and play the occasional game).

Case (and cooling)

I did put a little thought into the case, but not from the point of view of prettiness – it’s going to end up on the floor of my office tucked under a desk where I can’t see it and band my head every time I want to insert a DVD – but from the point of view of noise! My Dell is noisy and as my computers never get turned off, I wanted to give consideration to a quite PC – not that consideration is not a requirement but was used to tip the scales of any case/cooling choices.

Being mindful of this, my brother recommended that I really cool the CPU down with a heat-pipe. So I did, with an Arctic Cooling (AC-FRZ-64P) Socket 754 939 940 CPU Cooler with Heat pipe cooling. When it arrived, I was amazed at its size, but it fitted and does the job.

Like I said, I don’t care what the case looks like, so I got an Arctic Cooling T1 Silentium 450W Seasonic figuring that if Arctic Cooling are making good CPU coolers, the must have thought about the issue at a case level. And they have. The Silentium series of case has some very nice features that result in air getting into the case and around the high temperature areas to keep everything cool. In addition, the 4 case fans are really quite.

Hard Disk Drives (HDD) and other media devices

You’re probably wondering what I intend to do with a 450W PSU, well wonder no more as all will be revealed.

I want RAID 5 for my data (min 3 disks) and when I saw the price of SATA 2/300 drives I just ordered 4 (that max the case can host). Originally I was going to order the Seagate 250GB ones, but ended up with the Weston Digital 250GB ones because they run cooler than others. My general rule of thumb is never to buy Maxtor (too many failed Maxtor disks lie in my past).

For those that are interested in the exact model, I got 4 x Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 16MB Cache. Once RAID 5’ed I’ll have three quarters of a terabyte to play with

I also intend to transfer the 2 DVD drives from my Dell to this new system for optical storage (reading and writing).

With all the above in the case, I knew I wouldn’t have room for a floppy disk drive, so I didn’t even bother to order one.

Ebuyer

I don’t usually give out free advertising, but Ebuyer did a cracking job on this one, having placed the order at about 12:29 all the components arrived the next day before 10:00 – you can’t beat that for a delivery time can you? – so I had the thing built a ready to go by the middle of the afternoon for some early performance tests…

Part 1, does that mean there’s going to be more on this?

Yes, I’m going to make you read more on this subject with a Part 2 - first impressions which will be posted in a day or so.

Today I scripted a SQL Install Task Sequence for Automated Deployment Services (ADS) for a non-default instance.  Part of the sequence does a DIR on the SQLSERVER.EXE item in the SQL Server folder which in any instance other the the default is in the \MSSQL$INSTANCE folder.

I created the sequence and went to test it so I tried to run it and the ADS Management console came back with the following error:
Code: 80040861
Description: Failed to validate the command syntax in the task sequence XML document.

Because ADS uses $ (dollar) signs to mark a device variables, putting a single $ in somewhere in the sequence forced it to break.

To work around this issue, you need to escape the single $ sign with $$ (dollar dollar).

With this change I was able to finish my Task Sequence to install SQL Server and SP4 and now have a daily build test environment being build and completly configured that consists of 4 IIS applciation servers (2 load balanced pairs) and a SQL Server 2000 servers.
The whole environment, including all custom applications to be installed takes about an hour to build on a Virtual Server. :)

You can speed up your image deployments with Automated Deployment Services (ADS) by adding the parameter -nonetencrypt to the /imaging/imgbmdeploy.exe task as shown in the following example:

<!-- download images -->
<task description="Download image">
  <command>/imaging/imgbmdeploy.exe</command>
  <parameters>
    <parameter>imagename</parameter>  <!-- image to be deployed-->
    <parameter>\device\harddisk0\partition1</parameter>  <!-- deploy to partition1  -->
    <parameter>-r</parameter>  <!-- specifies deploy mode  -->
    <parameter>-client</parameter>  <!-- required parameter  -->
    <parameter>-nonetencrypt</parameter>  <!-- turn off encryption -->
  </parameters>
</task>

Of cause, this does mean that images are deployed without encryption, so only use this if you trust the LAN in your data centre.

One final caveat with this option is that there is no interface in Sequence Editor to support it and setting this option (using Notepad or similar) results in Sequence Editor freaking out when you try to open the sequence.

I have noticed a 60% deployment time reduction with this switch on and a massive drop in CPU usage on my Image server.