New Computer

[Bill W]

Brant....I was in the same boat couple of years ago w/pretty close to the same type of computer use.


I agree w/Daniel & Dr Croubie. I built a new one to my photography specs (after lots of research). But what I did a little differently was to put 2 hard drives in the box; C drive is a 150 gig 10k spin rate and an E drive w/750 gig and, if I remember correctly, a 5800 spin rate.


The C drive 10k allows Photoshop to be very quick (as well as other functions) and the memory allows 6 months worth of pic folders. I keep a years worth of pix on the E drive and back both drives up w/500 gig, 1TB and 2TB EHDs. BTW, my filing system doesn

[Rocco]

Brant,


What kind of a budget are you working with? I second the notion that buying an OEM machine just isn

[Kayaker72]

Thanks for all the suggestions everyone, they have definitely been very helpful. [] I think we are targeting the $500 to $1000range.While it does look like I can get a PC that meets the above specs and had Office/etc for that range, I am curious about building it.So I'll try to take a look at newegg.


Thanks again.


Brant

[Kayaker72]

I have had a little time to research and watch videos. On Tuesday night I had found a HP tower at Best Buy for $480. It has an AMD Athlon II 3.1 Ghz Quad-Core, 1 TB 7200 rpm hard drive, 6 GB of memory, and Windows 7 x64. No SSD that I am aware of, but overall it seems like a big step up from what I have now.


But I am curious about building my own and I

[bob williams]

Well, I can

[HiFiGuy1]

I will only add an alternative to the three HDD backup plan, and that would be a RAID5 array in your main PC and a RAID5 backup system in a NAS drive enclosure. You can relatively inexpensively put together 4TB on the main PC with a 4TB backup in the NAS using six 2TB drives. The RAID5 system allows for a drive failure without losing data on the system. The likelihood of losing two of the three drives at once is very slim, and the likelihood of losing two of the three drives on each of the two machines (main computer and NAS) is almost non-existent. You are probably more likely to be struck by lightning while holding up the winning lottery ticket. Also, the suggestion to use a SSD as your boot drive is excellent. That will make much more difference in the day to day speed of your computer than even a dramatic processor upgrade in most instances.

[Daniel Browning]

a RAID5 backup system in a NAS drive enclosure.

This is a great idea, but only if you have at least two separate, disconnected NAS backups. The reason is that while your primary NAS backup is connected, a simple administration error could easily wipe out both your main data as well as your primary backup. (For example, several times I have copied the backup to the main drive, rather than the other way around).A friend of mine blogged about it recently:http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/a-san-is-not-a-highavailability-solution-47644?rss=1


If you have a secondary backup that is not connected ("air gap") then you are protected from yourself. (I would argue that you need at least several miles of distance between backups, too.)



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