[Chester LUG] A few bits and pieces

[Stuart Burns]

Hi Everyone,

Firstly, does anyone have a usb floppy drive I could borrow. I made the
mistake of getting a iDeq mini system and it has a major issue where if you
try and do any sustained data transfer to a USB device it just crashes out
hard.

I am hoping the bios update will fix it but it can only be done from a
floppy drive. How 1980s is that!

Secondly, and this is where it will get your geek juices really really
flowing.

At work we do a lot of GIS reporting (creating reports based on 3d maps) Now
I was just speaking to the guy who runs these reports (They get a dozen a
week to run or so, depending on what is happening) can't cope.

Until now they have been running on a core duo laptop with 1 GB of ram. I
kid you not. Each report takes 48 hours. I suggested they get a super
machine ;)

The data set (40 GB) comes from a SAN.

Can anyone suggest a high end rig (Money more or less no object) Put simply
each 10% quicker it can go, it could save up to two weeks of peddle to metal
computing per year.

I was thinking along the lines of a top of the line AMD (This program can do
64 bit computing but doesn't do multiple cpus that efficiently)

Around 24 GB RAM
2 * 15K SATA 500 GB in a raid stripe config.
1 GB NIC as the data comes from a fibre
bonded FC4 Fibre cards.
1 GB Dual head video card with onboard acceleration.

Lastly, does anyone have any experience of add in Compute boards. I am
interested to know, but not going to splash out 2.5K on a board that may or
may not improve performance.

 Anyhow, interested to know peoples thoughts.

Stu
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