> That is true, buy high quality stuff up front for fewer problems down > the road. Not a sure bet, but a better one. In the half dozen systems > I've been running at home for the past several years none of them > have suffered a hardware failure of any kind(fortunately). I've been > running PC Power and Cooling power supplies for about 9 years now, > really high quality PSUs(last one I bought was about 4 years ago, can't > speak for their quality now). So for a top quality power supply for a mission critical desktop machine, which brand(s) would you reccomend? One of the towers I have is a Thermaltake Xaser 3 with lots of room, and I just bought a new Antec Sonata III tower with a 500 watt PS. > So BBU is certainly a nice thing to have but at least in my > experience isn't absolutely critical. Then for a Mission critical desktop machine, if you had to make a choice, would you go with a good quality UPS and/or redundant power supplies, or a BBU instead? > Of course for absolutely critical things I don't use server-based > RAID anyways. Multiple redundant controllers, multiple redundant > paths(to both the disks and to the hosts), is the way to go(assuming > your application(s) aren't built to be able to run on something > like a distributed file system). I've seen that some of the > latest HP servers have dual ported SAS disks, which sounds pretty > neat. I assume they still only have one controller though. As an alternative to RAID1 for a mission critical desktop machine @ home, what would you reccomend? Maybe a bare metal restore solution able to restore to different hardware, (i.e. if a motherboard dies and drive crashes due to power spike or some catastrophe, I'm screwed if I can't find the exact same make - model)? _________________________________________________________________ Connect and share in new ways with Windows Live. http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGHM_Wave2_sharelife_012008