So much beauty in the universe, thinking about it too much... it's dusty in here alright?!

Athlon XP's in socket A/462

My first over clocking, first chip melting, first water cooling, so many good memories!!

Nostalgia post

Just finished up a battle with autodiscovery settings and outlook 2013 w/ accounts on two separate exchange servers. My brain is oozing out my ears and I need a beer.

@scottalanmiller said:

OMG, we were throwing put P4HT desktops like six years ago!

"If it's not broken, and it's "fast enough", it stays"

The mantra of low budget IT. The end of XP accelerated their demise but we still have a few malingerers

@Minion-Queen said:

Making steak for dinner for my own Bday. Hmm I think I got screwed.

There's a joke there but it's not mine to make lol

Currently tearing apart my 3rd dead desktop of the day. P4HT 3ghz, all filter caps beside the heatsink popped (both different vendors, both popped extensively in the same place.)

@scottalanmiller said:

New, generally somewhere around $700.

Ohhhhh brutal. The $200 ones just don't cut the mustard? This is for my own personal crap afterall.

@scottalanmiller More derailing: Apologies for not asking my question correctly - at what price point do you get something worth having? I have an old Dell tower that will be my VMware home server, it's receiving 4x 2TB (another 4 later when they're cheaper or I run out of space). It came with an LSI card but it was dead (reason the box was retired.) I'll need to purchase one to replace it and get this server up and running.

Further derailment (ignore at will)

At what point do you get a reasonable controller for home / soho use? (initially 4 drives, expanding to 8 soon)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007607 50001833 50001329

@scottalanmiller said:

I think people often read into what I write. I'm just asking a question here, not attacking a vendor. I should be able to ask support questions too.

I'll take some blame for derailing this, but unless someone out there has made a list of them, or if there is some other way to tell, I really dont see how we can answer your original question.

@scottalanmiller I thought we had all made that assumption before commenting here heheh

Alright. Now that you've destroyed any good feelings I had for any hardware vendors, ever.... The more important questions remain.
What do you buy to setup a "cheap and cheerful" home lab setup. What is a good price for a 4 to 8 port RAID card (previously enjoyed?)? What should one look for?

Edit: Also I think you need to adjust your definition of "common knowledge" lol

@scottalanmiller So the only way to really tell, is to buy the thing, setup RAID in the BIOS, boot to a live CD and see if you see an array or a bunch of drives? There MUST be a better way to know.

Just so we're all on the same page here. Examples.

"hardware" RAID:
http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/chipsets/9-series
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M5A97/overview/

"software / fake" RAID:
http://www.nvidia.ca/object/product_nforce_750i_sli_us.html
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5ND/

I don't see any description or anything that would let me differentiate them here

You blew my mind and I require further reading.

Do you have a link to any specific articles? Is this well known? How could I have been deceived for so long?

@scottalanmiller said:

@MattSpeller said:

Is there specific hardware known to contain this garbage?

The entire motherboard RAID market, for example.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat

Is there specific hardware known to contain this garbage?

@scottalanmiller Never seen that before, wow! That's super cheesy

What do these fake ones look like? I've always had an option just after BIOS to enter the controller

That's freaking awesome