[CentOS] inexpensive / reasonably priced workstation / serverdevelopment box

[Robert - elists]

> 
> Wow, that list of things you want to run on it sound like it could be
> pretty intensive at times.  Your budget for this will definitely affect
> what you can stuff into this new box, but I will go from the stand point
> of being reasonable yet you have sufficient funds to acquire anything
> you need.  For audio/video dev, you will want SAS drives, striped for
> increased throughput, and if you *need* data integrity on that box (i.e.
> hard to or impossible to backup or just plain paranoid) you'll want
> mirroring.  So that means 4x146GB SAS drives, 146GB as raw video tends
> to get big in size and you'll have ~292GB of usable space.  Depending on
> how big the video files are that you will be working with, you'll want
> 2GB-4GB of RAM.  I'd go with a Xeon processor, if only so that you'll
> have a higher available L2 Cache (4MB), although some Core 2 Duo chips
> do have a fair amount of L2.  What kind of virtualization were you
> thinking of doing (VMware, Xen, QEMU, etc.)?
> 
> This might be a good place to start tweaking the specs:
> http://h71016.www7.hp.com/dstore/MiddleFrame.asp?page=config&ProductLineId
> =433&FamilyId=2437&BaseId=23358&oi=E9CED&BEID=19701&SBLID=
> 
> --
> Timothy Selivanow <timothys at easystreet.com>

We use a lot of hp servers...

The idea here is that I want to put centos on the machine, use it mainly as
a high powered workstation with a good video card and I need rock solid
functional reliability as a desktop workstation.

Im thinking in terms of the hardware, yet im concerned about the video
drivers etc.

I am not an expert on video cards and video drivers in the linux community.

Obviously if it is beefy enough it will handle basic server testing chores
too.

Thanks for the input... more? Others?

:-)

 - rh