Holy badass, it is awesome... But God, was cost not a factor?!!:eek: Hope you got a good write off. Multitudes of nerds on newegg (myself included) could have built more machine for half the cost. Also, you need more hard drives, at least 3, preferably 5. Still, post a picture of the beast in the workstation thread... and lets have a LAN party!
As I posted earlier, I priced out the components at TigerDirect and it was only a 10% savings which considering I would have to build it myself and have no 24/7 tech support would not make it worthwhile. I would think cost would not be an issue for any successful trader, but those seem to be in short supply on this site.
As to the drives, I have switched from: System Drive: Extreme Performance (RAID 0) - 320GB (2 x 160GB) SATA 1.5Gb/s 10,000RPM 2 x 16MB Cache to: System Drive: High Performance with Data Security (RAID 1) - 300GB (2 x 300GB) Velociraptor SATA 3.0Gb/s 10,000RPM 2 x 16MB Cache Also I have a Maxtor external to back everything up, and will be occasionally burning all my stuff to Blu-ray as a permanent back up.
Success and $ spent aren't exactly correlated. I'd never be where I am today if I hadn't started out as a tightwad... and old habits, like cost-benefit, are hard to break. Still, I'm glad people are there to buy this stuff when it's hot. If you shutdown your machine nightly you could set a shutdown backup to run to your external HD. That way you could keep the speed benefit of a RAID 0 without much risk... The external backup would also serve as a time machine, in case your software got infected of f'ed up. Or if you get another one of those HDs you could run a RAID 5 (if mobo supports), and have the size/speed of a R0 and the redundancy of a R1.