As of lately, I’ve started experiencing hardware failure more frequently than before on my main desktop machine (citadel, Gentoo). The HDD I have in use has been clicking for a while, which means the drive head is having problems. When I upgraded kernels from 2.6.11-gentoo-r4 to 2.6.15-gentoo-r1, I lost my ALi IDE chipset support, so DMA was not enabled. Once I got that working, I started noticing the following type of errors (not my actual errors, the machine is off):

MCE: The hardware reports a non fatal, correctable incident occurred on CPU 0.
Bank 1: 9400000000000151

Apparently, after rooting around the Gentoo Forums for “mce correctable incident”, I came to the conclusion that many people get this problem due to overheating and/or overclocking of the CPU and memory. It may also be caused by a poorly seated processor. I will try to solve this problem later today when I try to setup the dual-layer burner.

Okay, so with all of these hardware problems, I’ve finally resolved that it is time to build a new machine. The one I currently have was built back in 2001 from mostly used parts. I’ve been playing around with some options and I have decided the first thing that I must buy is the storage device. I’m looking for something screaming fast and relatively cheap.

IDE is basically out due to it being phased out of use and it’s slow speeds. DMA helps IDE drives feel more like a slower SATA drive, but still not worth hanging onto a dying technology.

So originally, I looked into the idea of using flash memory for a bootable device. Flash cards currently have a max speed of 20MB/s (still has to go through USB reader). That is unbelievable slow, so that is really not an option. To make matters worse, they withstand a mere 100,000 write cycles. That means the average flash card won’t last much longer than 3 months of continuous writing, if not less (estimation).

So then I thought, well SCSI drives are really fast and have ridiculous lifespans (1.2 million hours MTBF). The problem is, Ultra 320 SCSI drives are not cheap. In fact, the are some 18G drives online that run for about $70. That is still cheaper than the flash card option, which run for about $50 per GB. Ultra 320 SCSI drives also have a max speed of about 320 MB/s, which is ridiculously fast. This is still a viable option.

Then, there’s SATA II drives. SATA II drives are larger and cheaper than SCSI drives, but have a higher failure rate. They also run at about 300 MB/s, which is basically as fast as the SCSI drive. This actually sounds like a better option until you realize that Linux SATA support can be problematic at the least. Most chipset manufacturers make awkward variations to the standard much like IDE. Since SATA is relatively new, this support should get better. SATA II drives are still viable as long as I can find a decent SATA chipset.

Then I heard about i-RAM. This looks very interesting! Basically, it adds a battery to standard RAM which helps maintains the state, effectively turning regular memory into non-volatile RAM. It also looks and acts like an SATA drive. This is definitely something worth looking into. I need to do some more reading about this, but it looks like a screaming fast storage option but may end up being fairly expensive.

So what has everyone else gone with? Mind you, this is desktop storage only as I have network storage that can be extended as needed. I don’t need 200G for my desktop (but would be nice in my fileserver).