The basement workstation started getting more flakey than usual by repeatedly refusing to POST, hanging at the EMT64 message. It’s done this on and off once or twice at a time almost since new 12 years ago. I attributed it to some quirk of the Asus MB, but despite otherwise running flawlessly all this time, it seems whatever is causing that issue is getting worse. Rather than fix a PC that is one of the newer boxes and technically still “working,” I decided to upgrade the oldest one sitting next to it. The object was to have a more reliable, man-cave workstation while getting rid of a basically obsolete system at the same time. The only parts I needed to buy were the MB, RAM, CPU AND a DVD burner I got from Newegg for the Low-Low price of $15. Total cost for the project right around $400. I re-used an old Mylex raid card and drives from the parts bin because I recently learned 60Gb (size of the SSD’s also from the parts bin, being transplanted into it) is no longer enough for a Linux PC with all the stuff I like to have on it. It’s now a beefy, fully redundant high-availability system.
Specs:
ASRock Z97 Extreme3
Core i5, 3.5GHtz
16Gb DDR3 Dual-Channel RAM
2x Corsair 60Gb SSD (Primary sys drive w/hot spare)
2x Quantum U160 74Gb (/var/home/tmp on Mylex Raid1)
3x WD Blue 1Tb (2Tb MDADM Raid5 data volume)
