As a longtime user of IBM hard drives, and a recent buyer of a brand new pair of 80GB 120GXP's, I would pick some other brand if I were you.

Ahhha! Ok, thankyou Nick! I have heard mixed reviews on IBM drives, but people I work with (I am a programmer for an IT firm) swear up and down by IBM drives. I was thinking about going WD, but I have seen lots of people (particularly in the ANUS spec) going for Maxtor. Any reason for this or is it just personal preference? I will now stay away from IBM drives.

Vlad

Yeah, stay away from the IBM HDDs. There are a lot of people having major probs with them. Go with the Ultra ATA133 Maxtor drives with the Fluid Dynamic Bearing Motors, in their D740X line.
http://www.maxtor.com/Maxtorhome.htm
They're a little more expensive than some others, but they're well worth the few extra bucks, especially for audio, because they're noticeably more quiet.

Agreed on the hard drive issue...stay away from IBM as there are more horror stories regarding these than any other brand...I have yet to have a Western Digital or a Maxtor die on me..IBM, two went bad on me.
If you are going to do dual procs I would reccomend the Asus board over the Tyan..but that's my own personal opinion. Others have gotten that board to work where others have not. Same thing with the Asus board. Dual proc setup can be a PITA in the long run
Opus

Ok! No IBM for me then! You guys rule. I'll take a look at the Maxtors, SOS. How important is the buffer size on the drives? I've seen some WD's with 8MB of buffer, while others I've seen with only 2MB. SHould I consider that, or does it make no difference for a DAW?

As for Tyan vs. Asus... I love ASUS myself, but I have read up on the performance benchmarks, and it did not do so well. Also, USB is not suported on-board with the ASUS board. Plus the Tyan Thunder K7 has all 64bit PCI slots, 2 onboard LANs... However, i dunno if it's worth deviating from what i know... Asus works. I'm no expert, nor have I built a whole lotta machines, (4 to be exact) but I know a good thing when I see it. Deffinetly some food for thought.

Thankyou so much guys for your responses! I really appreciate all the help. :)

Vlad

8MB buffer drives are brand new...in fact only Western Digital has them right now...
You will see a performance boost with that obviously...it can buffer data a hell of a lot quicker!
Personally..do you need two LANs? What are you going to put into the 64bit card slots? Nothing...at least audio related!
Look at it that way...
Also, what do you mean USB is not supported on board?
Opus

Originally posted by etheriagtr:
Ahhha! Ok, thankyou Nick! I have heard mixed reviews on IBM drives, but people I work with (I am a programmer for an IT firm) swear up and down by IBM drives. I was thinking about going WD, but I have seen lots of people (particularly in the ANUS spec) going for Maxtor. Any reason for this or is it just personal preference? I will now stay away from IBM drives.
Vlad

I had very good performance out of my old GXP60 series 20GB drives for about two years, and then started hearing the occasional clickity-click thing happening. They're still working to this day, but I began getting fearful of them. I always run a matching pair of drives as raid-1 on a promise card, so I feel confident that I won't lose my data.... but this prompted me to buy a new pair of 80GB drives, yep IBM GXP120's... which then in turn caused me to lose the rest of my sanity and charge the hell out of my credit card to buy the rest of the parts to build an ANUS. I've been running the pair of 80GB's (again off a Promise Fasttrak raid card, I'm a paranoid sob) for several weeks right now and one or both of them occasionally clicks loudly a bit too much for my comfort. I distrust them. Also the "official party line" of only recommending 333 hours max per month operation is a turnoff that I found out about after the purchase. IBM even recently divested themselves of their hard drive manufacturing division in some deal with Hitachi for whatever reason, the story was all over Slashdot as well as the mainstream news media. That really helps to instill great customer confidence, eh? Now after having said all that opinionated drivel, I do have to say that my drives are performing very fast and other than the occasional clicks are very quiet. They also run very hot and I've mounted an 80mm cooling fan in the front of the case to blow over them, otherwise you could cook a pizza on them. The fan keeps their cases cool to lukewarm.

Opus, the Asus A7M266-D which is the board you suggested does not have on-board USB. They had Chipset issues with USB ports on the motherboard, so they give you a PCI card to make up for this... Now, that is probably fine, however it eats up one of my slots already, before I put anything else in there. This is the whole reason I looked at something other than Asus in the first place. Prior to reading this, my decision was very simple. As for the dual LAN... Well... lol, so you got me there as far as audio applications go, but I would imagine that in the near future we will see some 64bit cards. If I am not completely off the mark with that prediction, and I might be, I would imagine some audio stuff will move to that format. You know more of this than I do so I take yer word for it if you say otherwise! I am not trying to sound like I know it all. I will be the first to say that I actually know very little in the grand scheme of things, so if you see that I am making mistakes, please tell me so. I'm just going on what I;ve read, while you guys are going on experience, which to me is much more credible!

Nick, I actually asked around today, and apparently a whole lot of people have been having these problems and I just did not hear about it. I spoke to people outside my office and they looked at me like I had 2 heads when I mentioned IBM and Hard Drive in the same sentance. Apparently a friend had had 5 drives die on him in a RAID system over the last 4 years. So there is no way I will ever buy an IBM drive, and I will spread the word to other mislead souls of this evil!

Flashed through your new setup. I didn't bother to read through the whole thread because I'm a lazy asshole. I currently own a dual proc Tyan Thunder K7 AMD blah blah that I built about 8 months ago or more right when they first came out. If you HAVEN'T bought it yet, then let me know and I'll tell you my findings.

teddancin... please do tell! I for one would be interested in your findings.

theDuDe

tedancin, I have not bought anything yet. So like theDuDe said, please do tell! I am infact looking for a true honest testimony from someone that has dealt with this setup before, so that would be perfect. As I had said to Opus, I am not married to this spec that I provided so if there is a reason that I should not be buying the more expensive mobo, all the better!

Vlad

Haha, ok, here goes.

If I had it to do all over again, I think I would NOT have bought the Tyan Mobo. It's a really good mobo, don't get me wrong, but I don't think I like Tyan much as a company.

1. They don't support their stuff worth shit, and good luck trying to install ANY of the Motherboard drivers that come with the thing (I did with a couple, and it kept giving me "parity" errors whenever I'd boot into 2k, so I ended up having to re-formatt my OS partition just to get rid of those drivers). That really sucked, especially when I knew my ram was fine.

B. You HAVE to buy ECC registered RAM for this motherboard (I tried to skate around that little fact, and when I install my RAM, it was WAY screwey). I really like ECC registered RAM now. I have Mushkin DDR2100 (1gig) and it is SOOOO stable. The only possible bad thing about it for you is that if you weren't planning on buying it, it is a little more expensive than the NON ECC registered stuff.

III. SIZE.. this f'n mobo is HUGE! I mean seriously! I bought this bastard and a SPECIAL case to put it in because the form factor is ExtendedATX. So that means that it's like 20 times the size of a normal ATX. I could barely even cram it into it's "Special" case. Once there, every thing got way jumbled and hard to install becuase every last inch of the case is taken up by BEHEMOTH motherbaord!

FOUR. Power. It requires a special power supply (though now I think you can buy some special adapter where it'll work with a normal 350 watt PS). The power supply that it requires is made by a few different companies (mine is NMB) and it HAS to be 460 watts. Seriously, I pay more on my electricity bill than I thought I would ever pay because I'll occaisionally leave this computer on. A little exageration, but I DO notice a decent increase in my elec. bill.

+. 25 degree angled RAM slots. It's nice if you're using your mobo in a small rack mount, but if you're not, and you probably won't, it just makes instalation of RAM THAT much harder.

18. Running a dual processor machine isn't all it's cracked up to be. Most things can't even utilize the second processor at all. It's only even seen by the OS if you're running 2kpro or NT, or XPpro or corporate editions. I'd definately go for a single AMD proc using the Claw/sledgehammer achitecture because it utilizes the .13 micron technology like the new p4's, and it runs at 333fsb and 166 PCI bus, making it capable of taking full advantage of pc2700 ddr ram, AND it supports onboard USB2.0 and ata 133. A lot of good stuff. That's what I'd pick if I had to upgrad very soon.

OK, so now onto the good stuff, and the stuff that doesn't matter.

Gud stuff -

Two onboard Lan cards. These are really nice because I can connect to DSL AND network with a computer I'm fixing for some one at the same time without sweitching cables. Pretty convenient. The only problem with this is that if you'll notice on Tyan's website it says the mobo is only compatible with win2k and NT (maybe it says XP now too), well, even though I laughed when I read this, they kinda weren't kidding. They just didn't bother to make any drivers for 98 or any other OS besides the said 2 above. BRILLIANCE! So if you run 98 right now and aren't thinking of upgrading to 2k (I hope you would anyway), the LAN cards won't even work for you.

You get a nice chipset on this bastard. They're not ALImagic or whatever, and they're not VIA, they're just AMD, and I wouldn't have anything else other than maybe intel or something big and reputable like that. So you DON'T have to worry about weird hardware stuff being incompatable.

When you do get everything going and you DO know all the ins and outs of this mobo, it's pretty rock solid and fast.

If you're not going to install a video card, there's a decent ATI video card built in with like 4 megs of ram... maybe 8, I don't remember, but if you're only running audio, that's all you need. If you're not running the built in video card, then you have to set jumpers on the Mobo to disable this device so it'll use your AGP vid card. ALSO, you have to set jumpers so the whole mobo will run at 266 fsb, just kinda a pain.

Stuff that doesn't matter -

AGP pro slot - I have a geforce3 from Nvidia in there right now, and it only utilizes the AGP2x part of it. I don't even think the new geforce4 4600 ti's utilize more than AGP2x. The only way you'd use the PRO slot (and again, if this is for music, you'll NEVER buy one) is if you buy one of those 3d OXYGEN cards or something, which suck for anything else other than SPECIFIC work with 3d environments like MAYA or Lightwave or whatever.

64 bit PCI slots - I do more than audio with my computer, and the only thing that I could ever see using with these is a 64 bit RAID card, but I think the 64 bit cards are only SCSI. I've never used either of them in 8 months.

===ALL in all, this board is just a little too much hassle for my liking. If I had to do it over again, I'd just buy an ASUS and run dual athlons on that, or just buy a single proc AMD board that runs the 333FSB. Most things never utilize dual processors anyway. And somethings run slower with dual proc machines. The kewl thing about the dual proc'ies is that they can multi task to the end of time (I often listen to mp3's and play a game while I'm burning a CD at 24x with NO skips or any audio problems on either the game, the MP3's, or the burned CD). Also, if you do mpeg encoding with something like Flask, then that cuts the encoding time down to litterally half, same with rendering in lightwave and/or maya.

I'm sure I've left something out, but oh well. I hope what I have said has helped you at least a little. Good luck with the system, and if you have any questions, just let me know.

teddancin - DUDE! You rock! That was a wealth of info and I thank you for it!

I actually plan on running XP on this box because I think it has some stuff that actually takes advantage of the dual-proc architecture better than 2K or NT. And yeah, the Registered DDR is a pain, but I was aware of it so I alloted for that in my price estimate.

I too use my machine for more than just audio... I wish I could leave it as a dedicated machine just to ba a DAW but, that's not quite feasable at the moment!

A friend of mine has his heart set on this setup, and will be building it very soon, so I will see what comes of his, and I'll let you guys know how it worked out, or didn;t work.

Once again, thankyou all so much for your feedback! I really appreciate all the help. You guys rule!

Cool, I'm glad I could help. If I were you though, I'd stay as far away from XP as possible at least until they get a good service pack for it. Especially with this board and all. The AMD power management upgrade for XP from MICROSOFT (you know, when you use WINDOWS UPDATE in your start menu) completely crashes your system constantly. Then, if you're lucky enough (like I was), one day you'll go to boot into XP, and even though it was running fine yesterday, it won't get past the booting splash screen. Until they DO get some service packs, I'd suggest not doing ANY of the updates. That's the ONLY way I've got it to run on my computer properly.

PS. 2k does the dual proc thing just as well as XP, and if you read the above info and are like "well, he runs XP.. he just said so", yes, I do run XP. ONLY for games and stupid shit though. I dual boot 2k and XP, and 2K's where all my good stuff goes like video and sound apps and all that important professional stuff. Just keep in mind. I've run 2k for about 8 months on this computer WITHOUT 1 crash. I installed XP, and it crashed about 8 times in 2 weeks, then wouldn't even let me boot into it until I reinstalled it.

some good stuff there ted...(by the way...gud? are edumecated? :p )
I fully agree with everything but one thing..Xp is actually really decent. The difference being that I run it on a machine solely dedicated to audio..no internet, no networking and XP is one hell of a stable system..no crashes at all..and I've put it through it's paces too!!
XP Pro Corporate edition is what I am running. Go through my tweak guide on my site(it's in Support/Articles pages) You wont be disappointed after going through that tweak guide..in fact all of Steinberg uses my guide..just found that fact out the other day when I was at Universal Music Production Group.
Opus

Haha, Opus. I be totally Edumacated! Gud... that's gotta be the way that swedes spell good... right?! Hehe, anyway.

As for the XP thang, did you do any of the updates? That's what made mine all screwey. I run a lot of stuff on my XP and it's definately NOT as stable as win2kpro. Yes I also run XPpro corporate edition. It's a quick install with that one... for XP anyway. Maybe it's fine for running JUST audio, but I'd never touch it for anything that I REALLY was serious about (at least until I saw some good service packs or sumpin up'n hea!). Tha fakt dat it ready crashed bout 8 times more than 2grand pro fo' me, tells me dat it's just nawt as stable. How do you like that Grammar?! hehe, sorry, that was uncalled for.

NE way, thanks for the input Opus. I'm glad that you got all your XP tweaks figured out, and that you now have a stable DAW OS working for you, that's awesome!

No...no updates done...no need to since it dont touch the internet and I dont use Messenger..in fact I believe that messenger is the killer for XP...I would uninstall it if I were you.

Yes, it is great grammar...I'm an engenemeer wit an edumacation!! lol

Opus

IBM HDDS I've replaced three in the last 18 months. It's great practice. In fact last night my third one started to do the HDD death rattle.
ggrrk,grrrk,grrrk.

Originally posted by strings:
IBM HDDS I've replaced three in the last 18 months. It's great practice. In fact last night my third one started to do the HDD death rattle.
ggrrk,grrrk,grrrk.

I love that death rattle sound...can you sample it for me!! lol!
Opus :D

I can do better than that I'll you send one of my old drives. :D