A Painful Machine Upgrade

Finally my 4 ½ years old home desktop/server PC died. I've had a PC since 1990, and if I count it right, this last one was my fifth generation desktop machine. Writing about hardware upgrades is boring, but I think these 20 years have given me some perspective. The predominant observation is that PC hardware gets obsolete faster than it breaks down. You recognize that a machine is getting too old when new things perform slowly or are impossible to do, disk space feels scarce, and you need to do tricks to get peripherals working. The reasonable thing to do then is to replace all obsolete components and install a fresh OS at once. It makes little sense to upgrade a processor while keeping the old motherboard and video card, for instance. Memory and hard disk space for data (but not the boot drive) are exceptions, they are incrementally upgradeable. It is always wise to leave memory expansion slots free in a new machine. You can wait for Moore's law to bring memory prices down, but you should never buy expensive memory!

With these guidelines, I have achieved an average age of 4 years for a machine. Each major upgrade has added some new functionality, unavailable to the previous generation (1). This time the new feature would be Full-HD support, made possible by having a capable processor and a HDMI output. Why upgrade so rarely? In the early days I would have preferred to upgrade the machine more often, but didn't have the money to do so. But in the last two generations the reason for holding back has been that the pain of upgrading a home PC overweighs any predicted benefits. And the pain has gotten worse for each new generation, which I'll explain later.

So, when in 2005 I last time bought a machine, I focused on quality. And this machine served me well. It had a brand new AMD Athlon 64 'Venice' single-core processor and the 74GB WD Raptor 10k rpm drive. Later I upgraded the memory to 3GB and bought two 250GB near-line disks for RAID1 data storage. And that was it. To be fair, these components are still fine. It was the cheap PCI Express display adapter that went broke, but I didn't find out that until later.

When deciding what to buy, the first thing to do is to clarify the requirements:

1. The machine is always on, at home

• reliability
• repairability
• low power consumption
• silent operation

2. ...but it is quite rarely attended.

• optimized for parallelism, i.e. for doing background tasks
• occasional surfing, media file management etc
• shouldn't cost too much

3. It is needed for document management

• lots of RAID1 storage , in either internal/external SATA, USB or NAS
• a version control server
• backups every night to an USB drive
• actually, the old machine was perfectly good for this

4. ...and for scanning documents.

• ...as long as paper is used
• scanning with an ADF requires processing power. The old Athlon was too slow.

5. It does background processes,

• like p2p, an ideal background process for a home pc with lots of hard disk space
• I don't want p2p in my work laptop

6. it serves as an Appliance hub,

• USB ports: printer/scanner, iPhone, external hard drives, mouse/keyboard, UPS
• Old motherboard didn't have enough USB ports, had to use extension slots

7. a Media PC,

• Spotify
• video conversions for iPhone, PS3
• iTunes (requires a desktop OS like XP, Vista or 7)
• HD video output (HDMI output + Full-HD capabilities)
• PS3 media server transcoding
• The old Athlon couldn't handle Full-HD or transcoding, and video conversions took a lot of time

8. a Virtual Machine Host

• Memory: 4GB min, with ability to upgrade to at least 12GB
• Windows XP virtual mode + other VM's for experimentation keeps the host OS clean
• The old machine could handle one 512MB VMWare Linux server well enough, but not desktop OS's

9. ... and a Development & Test Server.

• Not a major requirement as I do most development in a work laptop
• Old machine could handle ASP.NET development and SQL Server only in the host, not really in a VM

10. But there are important non-requirements too!

• Not for gaming: PS3 is for that
• Not for media playback: TV, iPhone, and laptop are preferred
• Not for desktop work: I use a laptop for my work (but I could use the desktop monitor and input devices with the laptop at home)

With these in mind I started planning and experimenting.

MacBook / Media Laptop

I have a 2006, Core Duo 1,8GHz, 2GB model, and tried to use it to replace the desktop. It didn't work out.

Reliability:

I don't think the MacBook would have lasted long if always-on.

Repairability:

Not repairable, warranty expired.

Silent Operation:

Macbook was really noisy in even basic use.

Performance:

Slower than the Athlon, doesn't handle Full-HD, no HDMI.

Appliance hub: Only 2 USB ports.

Scanning: functionality was worse than in Windows.

Many of these complaints would hit the second option, a new Media Laptop, too. Peformance would be better, operation would be more silent, and Windows would be helpful with some devices, but in the end it would still be a fragile laptop, not a built-to-last server.

Media PC

A little more integrated than a traditional PC, these small boxes can be put in the living room. With a fast NAS this is all you are going to need, right?

These things cost more than a simple upgrade and much more than a laptop. Laptops are by far the cheapest alternative, even if you don't count the components you don't actually wouldn't need, like the laptop display. Shuttle SG33G5 would have been a relatively cheap and nice barebone, starting at 270€.

But there are technical limitations, like max 4GB memory, no Core i5/i7 support, or option to upgrade the motherboard. The barebone has also limited number of drive bays, only two 3,5" bays and one 5.25" bay. You can't have a fast OS disk, two RAID1 disk and an optical drive. NAS would be a practical requirement for RAID1 storage.

Using a Media PC with a TV screen as an appliance hub is not too intuitive either. Of course, I could have set up ordinary desktop peripherals too. And last, I already have a PS3, so I don't really need another box with the TV.

So I ended up with the simple, conservative option...

Minimal Component Upgrade

• Core i5-750 (190€)
• Intel P55 motherboard, DP55WB (80€)
• 4GB DDR3 RAM (100€)
• Radeon 4350 passive PCI-Express with HDMI (30€)

Total: 400€

For storage, I kept the old drives and got one 2x500GB USB drive, giving the following:

• One relatively fast, if old, system drive (WD Raptor 74GB)
• Internal SATA RAID1 for documents
• external USB 2x500GB for backups and media files

Performace is decent and fits my purposes well:

Migration pains

Ok. I mentioned about the pain of upgrading at the beginning, and the rest of the post is a rant devoted for this. It took about a week to get most of the wanted functionality running. Some of the requirements are still not there, and probably never will, without further hardware upgrades. Here's the story.

Hardware problems

The new motherboard does not have IDE connectors anymore, only SATA ones, and I didn't have a SATA DVD drive. This makes installing Windows little tricky, as you need to use a bootable USB drive. There are good instructions for this, so this is not a big deal. It is actually a good thing to finally leave out the optical media. One DVD drive provided with a laptop is sufficient for occasional use.

Another install issue was that I needed a wired USB keyboard and mouse before I could get the chipset drivers installed and the wireless peripherals working. I can only recommend to have one wired USB keyboard and mouse in reserve.

Windows 7 x64 is cool, but the problems with Vista drivers are still there. I coudn't get WIA or TWAIN drivers working for the less-than-year old Lexmark X9575 scanner, which pretty much makes it impossible to use decent scanner software. I don't know yet if I can ever use anything else but the crappy default apps provided with the scanner. Next time I'll buy a professional document scanner, even if it costs more.

A tip: If you setting up a RAID1 mirroring, use the operating system's software RAID instead of the motherboard's hardware RAID. Mirroring provides fault tolerance but it is your job to do something when disk errors happen. An OS-integrated RAID gives you better tools to detect such issues.

A crappy iPhone photo of the running system

Data Transfer

Data is big these days. Have you tried backing up / restoring a modern 250GB+ hard drive? It takes unbelievable amounts of time, especially if you are doing a file system copy. The problem with a file system copy is the file count, not the size itself. Image copying is much faster. But you need to do a file system copy if you consolidate multiple small disks to a single-partition large disk.

First, I thought that it wouldn't really matter if I used Windows Explorer instead of a bulk copy/mirroring tool like the Windows Robocopy or a backup application like Cobian Backup. The number of files would be the same. Bad choice. For a 200GB, 200k file copy/paste, Windows estimated first that it would take over 17 hours, but I gave up after a couple of hours and multiple confirmation dialogs. Subversion svn folders didn't copy at all. Cobian Backup did the same job during the night and next day in 12 hours. SVN folders worked fine but I got errors for two SQL 2008 mdf/ldf files. I also used Cobian with a 100GB / 100k file drive, and it took about 2 hours and 15 minutes. Altogether it took me one night to install the system and three days to copy data.

I should have expected something like this. I had first-hand experience a couple of years ago when I had to transfer a few hundred gigs of company data to a parent company after a merger. RoboCopy did it pretty well, even over a network, but some files didn't transfer and they had to be manually picked from the old server. I couldn't even figure out why these files didn't transfer, since Robocopy's log file didn't show anything.

I suppose that the fastest file system copy with a modern processor would be to zip everything, transfer only one gigantic file, and then unzip it at the destination. I tried this with WinRAR (with administrative priviledges), but the compression failed to add too many files due to NTFS file permissions and I had to give up.

PC Junk

Every time you change components, something is left behind. You take this stuff and put it in a box, where there's usually old PC junk nicely sedimented. Sometimes, rarely, you need something out of this pile of abandoned PC hardware. It feels wrong to throw it all away, but nobody wants it either. This time I threw away two CD-RW drives, two modems, an analogue TV tuner and old pre-USB devices like mice and keyboards.

There was good old stuff too, things that are mostly needed when you set up a new box:

• PCI video cards (AGP is no good anymore, i recently needed a PCI card from 1997)
• Wired USB keyboard
• Wired USB mouse
• DVD-ROM drives
• Wires and connectors

Conclusion

Switching a machine is great pain. You don't want to do that unless you have to. I can only hope that this new rig will live long, but the next time I'll probably choose a more integrated solution. Hopefully the home server market matures enough so it would be possible to buy an off-the shelf reliable, quiet and fast home server without feeling to get ripped off.

But for this newly built machine, a natural mid-life upgrade would be:

• an SSD Drive for operating system and applications
• 8 gigs more memory
• A single, relatively fast and cheap internal drive for virtual machines etc, backed up once a day
• A high-quality NAS for data files
• Also, I need to get the scanner work as well as before...

-mika-

A short list of new features since my first PC

1990: 286 12 MHz, 1MB RAM with 20GB hard drive

1992: 386 33 MHz , 4MB RAM, disk 40MB to 128MB

• modem
• sound card
• Windows 3

1995: Pentium 100 MHz 8MB, later 200MHz 32MB, disk up to 4GB

• Internet: fast enough (modem, processor, memory) for Netscape and IE3
• fast enough for Doom and decent for Quake too (without 3D acceleration)
• Windows 95/98
• mp3 media

2000: Dual Celeron 400MHz, 128-512MB, 20-60GB

• Windows 2000/XP
• accelerated 3D video
• Ethernet adapter + broadband internet
• USB 1.1
• DivX media
• machine always on
• dual-boot (Windows/Linux)

2005: Athlon 64 1,8GHz, 1-3GB, 130GB-1TB

• USB 2.0 peripherals
• RAID1 for data
• more server software (svn, trac, http, p2p)
• virtual machines instead of dual-boot
• hub for cameras, scanner, mp3 players, mobile phones
• scanning became more important than printing

2009: Core i5 2,66MHz, 4GB, 1,3TB

• Windows 7
• Multi-core
• Full HD support (via DLNA to PS3 or HDMI)
• Virtual machines are fun to work with