I have a Tyan K8QW (S4881) systemboard installed in an Addtronics case. I have 12 aluminum SATA hard drive racks installed. I have nine Western Digital Raptor X hard drives installed so far. I will install a total of twelve in a RAID 6 array before the year is out. I have 4 gigabytes of Kingston DDR 400 registered ECC memory that I just received. I have two Panasonic dvd-ram/ dvdrw/dl drives installed. I should have all of the memory installled by October. I am planning on installing four Opteron 890 cpu's. I have a PC Power and Cooling 1KW power supply. I started this project in April 2006 but I recently have tried to really finish this thing. I hope to install a quadro video board, an areca raid controller, an idt firewire board and a digigram audio board. I have Solaris 10 on dvd and I want to install enlightenment as the GUI. Here are some photographs.
http://profile.imageshack.us/user/vspight/

I am now up to 8 gigabytes of Kingston DDR 400 registered ECC memory. I am still on track to have an additional 8 gigabytes of memory before the end of the year.

I just ordered an additional 2 gigabytes of memory. I am still on track. This takes me up to 10 gigabytes of memory.

What exactly do you do with this system?

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AMD Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition
2GB Corsair PC26400 XMS2 DHX
Asus M2N-E SLi
ATi Radeon HD2600 Pro 512MB

With 4 2.6 GHz dual cores, a 12-drive RAID 6 made of 150 GB 10,000 RPM drives, and 10 GB RAM, whatever he wants!

OP: Are you sure you want RAID 6? With 12 drives, maybe running a RAID 50 would be a better idea as you can still have a 2 HDD fault tolerance but the write speeds will be much, much better as parity is written to two disks in different arrays rather than in the same array.

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Wow amazing system! What kind of stuff are you gonna do with Solaris? That's a neat OS.

Wow! Nice system, but what you need all that for I don't think I wanna Know LOL.

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Since my last post I added the last 6 gigabytes of memory that I needed to completely populate the motherboard with memory. Unfortunately, I have been affected by the current economic downturn so I don't really know how quick my progress will be with the completion of this project. At this point I plan to make my next purchase a 2.8GHZ Opteron 890. Although the price has come down some it is still quite expensive. I should have this processor within the next few months. Thanks for the comments from those who have commented.

Edited: 02/17/2008 at 07:49 AM by vspight

I am aware of the slower write speeds but with RAID 6 as compared to RAID 50 but I do not want to set up two arrays to achieve this increase. I may change my mind later. Thanks for the suggestion.

In response to the question of what I need this machine for. I have several specific things in mind. Thanks for the replies though.

Edited: 02/16/2008 at 12:39 PM by vspight

government funding hehe

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I7-975 at 4.2ghz//noctua ND-H14//Gigabye X58-UD5// Gskill 6gb ddr3 at 2ghz// intel x25 80gb// 1 1TB seagate hdd// antec tpq 1200 watt psu// CM stacker 832 case/ ECS GTX 460 1GB black edition



Opteron 165 at 2.2ghz 1.4Vcore//Asus formula HD4770//2gb OCZ platinum 2-3-2-5//Asus A8VE-SE//Seagate 2x 250gb SATA2 RAID0// thermalrock dragon gaming case 5 90mm fans// XP pro SP2//

I like Solaris because it will scale well with 16GB of memory, 4 dual core cpu's and 1.5 terabytes of hard drive space. I will have a secure OS with the trusted solaris extensions. The performance of Solaris is quite good. I feel that Solaris is quite stable or, rather, it can be.

I hope that those users interested in my posts will ignore the negative posts in this space.

Edited: 02/16/2008 at 01:11 PM by vspight

The price for the 2.8GHZ Opteron 890's never came down so I purchased the 2.6GHZ Opteron 885's. I received the first two of four cpu's and installed them. I was not able to power up the system because I forgot to purchase an extension cable for the 24 pin main power cable. The case is so large that the cable was between six to eight inches too short to be able to plug into the systemboard. I am now waiting for the remaining two cpu's to arrive as well as the extension cable. I hope that everything works as it should.

I received the last two 2.6GHZ dual core cpu's yesterday. The Opteron 885's. I received the 24 pin power supply extension today. I installed the last two cpu's, the extension and the last eight gigabytes of memory. The unit powered up and POSTed. I went into the BIOS checked out the settings. The unit recognized all four cpu's correctly as well as all of the memory correctly. I hope to have that areca ARC-1170 Raid controller soon.

I wish Solaris would recognize a wider range of hardware like FreeBSD and Linux do. But then again, that's up to Sun. This system is lookin pretty fresh so far...

I just installed a Panasonic Blu Ray burner, SW-5583-C. I am now waiting for the last one I ordered to arrive. I should have it by next week.

I installed the second Panasonic Blu Ray burner, SW-5583-C. This is all I am going to do with the system for this month. Next month I will install two more Raptor X hard drives. That will take the total up to eleven installed Raptor X hard drives. I am getting closer and closer to the end now.

I had a small windfall so I ordered another Raptor X hard drive. This will bring my total up to ten installed hard drives. I should have the new drive next week. I will get the last two next month.

http://img107.imageshack.us/my...?image=dsc06851xx7.jpg