http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

$129 for 1TB of data.

The bigger the HDD and the denser the platters the better the overall performance and it pays to never over-fill your HDDs to maximise performance.

Squilliam said: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284 $129 for 1TB of data. The bigger the HDD and the denser the platters the better the overall performance and it pays to never over-fill your HDDs to maximise performance.

Couldn't agree more. I was planning to put in an external raid assembly for all data storage because I want to have one central storage for more than one computer. That way the 500 GB drive is just for programs and sometimes data while being worked, so it should be never near capacity.

I was planning to use two Western Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drives which I have found to be rock solid for $75 each Housed in a SANS DIGITAL  2 Bay SATA to USB 2.0 / eSATA JBOD / RAID 0,1 / Spanning Enclosure  

But thinking about it on second thought in a case with 6 120mm fans and 5 3.5in bays I should probably just get 3 of the WD 640GB drive and RAID two for data and use the third for programs and save the cost of the external housing. I can still netwok the other machines.

I think that may just about do it. Time to order?

Just a quick note about that particular RAM. The advertised speed is an overclocked speed. It actually runs native at 1333mhz or something like that. I still haven't figured out how to get it to run stable on my machine at 1600mhz, but I'm fairly noob when it comes to overclocking.

Personally, I would ditch 6 GB of ram and use that money to go upgrade to the Asus Rampage II extreme Mobo.

RAM is an issue. According to NewEgg the best RAM for the X58 chipset is the Corsair Dominator 240pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600 (PC3 12800) triple channel - $219 for 6GB. That opinion is supported by a perfect 5 egg score by 70 users and a customer choice award. But someone here posted that it wasn't any better than the regular Corsair memory. ???????

Asus makes great MOBOs but the X58 Rampsge is almost $400 and has less than sterling reviews. Is there any real advantage if you're not going to overclock?

No worries.  There is just a lot of uselessness in there and it is to the detriment of my gen and future gens to pay it back.  I would rather spend it productively on infrastructure, clean coal, nuclear fusion, streamlining of biz, lowering corp taxation to bring jobs back here, and the like.  It is not beneficial to waste money on foolishness like $99,600 for 2 person doorbell job and $200,000,000 African-American heritage trail that while touches on that race, is just plain dumb.  Many of my AA friends agree.

@ Grampy with regard to the Newegg reviews/customer choice awards: Remember that the people buying these CPUs are enthusiasts and they like spending money on the highest 'performance' parts. If you do not intend to overclock/overclock more than a few hundred mhz (Stability will thank you if you don't) you probably don't need expensive ram.

Regrettably the way politics work congressmen and senators of both parties will always sneak in pet projects and they make easy targets to ridicule and as a grandparent I think a lot about what we are leaving my grandson. But you are swatting at flies while ignoring the dinosaur. The most “wasteful” civilian program ever invented is a joke compared to military costs. The whole nature of the military, which I served in proudly, is to produce nothing and waste much.

According to one widely accepted figure:

 “The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.
The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.”

Any such figure is an estimate and this one is a year old but it was never seriously disputed and is probably somewhere close. So in comparison the doorknob = 12 sec. and even your African American project is just over one work shift. Hardly statistical noise. I’ve had to watch promising medical research programs shut down by a government trying to hide the cost of war even though they were a few hundred thousand dollars and might well have contributed substantially to the health and well being of all mankind.

And saddest of all, we are talking about a war launched because of weapons of mass destruction which the CIA, DIA, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, NSA and the State Department in an unprecedented show of unity said weren’t there. But the White House alone “knew better” and ignored all advice to the contrary. And in doing so managed to become a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists while creating a new breeding ground for them train in. Unfortunately in addition to the human casualties, the economy and the Constitution also went missing in action.

So you’re right about your future being put in hock but in the immortal words of Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

So when we move our majority of forces to Afghanistan under the SOFA, would you still agree with the then amount of military spending?  Differences aside, that fight is key and most Dems agree with me as it was the original fight.

Edit: I meant the effects of the SOFA as the military will be leaving Iraq and transferring.

@ Grampy...

Please link to me these reviews, I can't seem to find any that say the mobo is nothing more than fantasic.

Perhaps I expressed myself poorly. It would be fairer to say that I didn’t find any review nor did user feedback on NewEgg seem to justify the Rampage’s price, especially if you have no interest in extreme overclocking or triple SLI.

For example, NewEgg lists 27 X58 MOBOs and the Rampage is the most expensive of all and double the price of the least expensive. And yet it does not have particularly great feedback. With 98 responses only 59% gave it a 5. Also some of the negative score were by purchasers that experienced DOA cards and other significant technical problems. For comparison the P6T6 WS revolution had an overall 86% and not a single individual score less than 4.

Now I realize the fact that customer feedback is not a 100% reliable method of evaluation but it does have its place. If I see a product with 150 responses and they are all 5, I would buy it without hesitation. Motherboard responses are lower in number so less exact but for $400 I would hope for better. The plain vanilla P6T did better and is $150 less expensive.

I also read some on-line reviews and in fairness they were generally positive but with the caveat that what they liked were generally the exotic features which I do not plan to use. One site I rely on is firingsquad.com and they had a very recent review of the P6T and indicated it would do everything I need as well as the Rampage.

It was also interesting that in their highly recommended Spring 2009 buyers guide to gaming computers, they assembled what they believed to be the best possible gaming computers for $500, $1000, and $1500 plus one $5000 “dream computer” that they described as not one anyone should actually build but just a fantasy where price was absolutely no object. The one time they chose the Rampage was for this computer which told me that while certainly an excellent board, for most of us it just isn’t a practical choice.