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The joys of procrastination

Sun Aug 07, 2016 9:39 am

So my migration off of my ancient Ubuntu 12.04 system (I put the replacement build together this past winter) took so long that 16.04 was released in the interim. Rather than start over with 16.04 (given that I typically tweak things quite heavily, and I dislike being an early adopter), I decided to forge ahead with 14.04 anyway. For a variety of reasons, after the hardware came together the project got back-burnered multiple times and the system has just been sitting here, partially built and configured.

I finally got back to this last weekend, and I'm nearly done. I've synced all of my files over from the old system, and as of today I'm switched over to the new box as my daily driver.

The only remaining task is getting the crazy-ass audio stack I use configured. I prefer to run JACK as my audio stack, but many applications (e.g. web browsers, music players) require PulseAudio/ALSA support. So in order for everything to co-exist peacefully, JACK needs to be slipped in underneath PulseAudio, with PulseAudio configured as a JACK signal source. For now, I am just running vanilla PulseAudio.

The specifics, if anyone cares:

Case: NZXT Source 210
PSU: Corsair CX 500
Motherboard: Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0
CPU: AMD FX-8350 (running stock clock, but with a Coolermaster 120mm tower HSF instead of the stock one)
RAM: 32GB ECC DDR3 1600 (also running stock)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 720 (passively cooled)
Audio: Asus Xonar DSX
System volume: 2x Crucial BX100 250GB, RAID-1
Storage volume 1: 2x Seagate 7200.14 3TB, RAID-1 (/home)
Storage volume 2: 2x Samsung 840 EVO 250GB, RAID-1 (had the EVOs sitting around, figured they'd be great for hosting VMs)
Optical: LG M-Disc Blu-Ray drive
Miscellaneous: NEC-based PCIe USB 3.0 controller (to avoid using the crap onboard Asmedia); hot-swap dual 2.5" SATA bay; hot-swap 3.5" SATA bay; Marvell-based PCIe SATA controller (since I ran out of SATA ports to connect all of the above); Sabrent USB 3.0 4-port hub with individual power switches for each port; rear panel bracket to bring out the legacy COM port

OS is Kubuntu 14.04, configured for EFI boot from a software RAID-1 volume.

CPU and case fans are throttled way down using the BIOS controls unless the CPU gets above 48C; the system is decently quiet unless under heavy load. I've also got a custom monitoring script set up to perform a clean system shutdown if the CPU temp ever reaches 65C (which would be indicative of a failed CPU fan).

It is by no means bleeding edge (some would even argue trailing edge, I suppose...), but for me it hits the "power user" sweet spot on a budget, using many bits and pieces I already had on hand.

I did not realize how much the Radeon HD 6450 in the old system was holding things back. Even for basic desktop use like web browsing, the GT 720 just feels a lot smoother.
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Convert
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Sun Aug 07, 2016 9:51 am

I was hoping for a story of when procrastination was advantageous. I was going to share the story of when I had finally gotten around to a work project, everyone it pertained to had been fired :lol:

What were you upgrading from? VMs on SSDs is bliss!

When it comes to RAID on SSDs I go commando on my personal systems.

I wonder how the 6450 was holding you back? Do you think it has more to do with the drivers/vendor?
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Sun Aug 07, 2016 10:01 am

Convert wrote:
What were you upgrading from? VMs on SSDs is bliss!

Previous was an FX-8320 (so similar CPU-wise), with half the RAM and RAID-1 2TB mechanical HDDs as the only internal storage. I had started using SSDs in an eSATA drive dock for hosting VMs, which is what gave me the idea of having a dedicated VM hosting volume on the new build. The 840 EVOs had been pulled from a couple of laptops when the slowdown issue was discovered, but with the latest firmware I figure they'll still be way better than hosting VMs on mechanical storage, and less risk/hassle than using the eSATA dock. I can still use additional SSDs in the hot swap bays if I need more storage for VM images.

All of the laptops in the house have been SSD for a while, so I was way overdue on the desktop. Thing is, boot times were decent even with the mechanical HDDs, and unless there were a lot of disk writes happening (e.g. massive file copy), I didn't notice much of a slowdown during normal operation either. Having 16GB of RAM helped (actively used data tended to stay in the file system cache), and the RAID-1 helped with anything read-intensive (Linux MD will distribute the load across all of the drives in a RAID-1 set for reads, effectively halving the seek penalty when you've got multiple things reading from disk simultaneously).

Convert wrote:
When it comes to RAID on SSDs I go commando on my personal systems.

Yes, I considered doing that. But I figured "what the heck, go for it, SSDs are getting cheap". :wink: (And since I was planning to keep using mechanical for bulk storage, I did not need large SSDs.)

Convert wrote:
I wonder how the 6450 was holding you back? Do you think it has more to do with the drivers/vendor?

Drivers, most likely. I had ditched the AMD binary driver a while back because it was too unstable, so I was using the Open Source driver. So far so good with the NVIDIA binary driver on the new box.
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Sun Aug 07, 2016 10:22 am

Since I don't run Linux, and trust my RAID to dedicated hardware controllers when done, I think the only reason I don't do it is that I don't want to lose TRIM. Also losing the ability for the SSD software to interface with the drives isn't always ideal.

Ehhg, mechanical storage! How is the jump to SSDs on Linux? With Windows it's such an obvious improvement that using mechanical storage becomes physically painful to me. Is the transition on Linux less noticeable due to its already efficient nature?
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Sun Aug 07, 2016 11:08 am

Convert wrote:
Since I don't run Linux, and trust my RAID to dedicated hardware controllers when done, I think the only reason I don't do it is that I don't want to lose TRIM. Also losing the ability for the SSD software to interface with the drives isn't always ideal.

Linux software RAID-1 supports TRIM pass-through, and you can still go around the RAID driver to get at the individual drives (e.g. to retrieve SMART diagnostics). So I don't lose those capabilities by going RAID-1.

Convert wrote:
Ehhg, mechanical storage! How is the jump to SSDs on Linux? With Windows it's such an obvious improvement that using mechanical storage becomes physically painful to me. Is the transition on Linux less noticeable due to its already efficient nature?

Boot time is not changed enough for me to care; even with the mechanical drives it is reasonably quick (as noted above, I think the RAID-1 helps here, since a decent RAID-1 implementation can effectively give you RAID-0 performance and halve your effective seek times for reads). The main difference is when there's a lot of writing going on. Linux's I/O scheduler does not handle heavy write loads to mechanical storage well; latency can go through the roof as the I/O queue gets backed up, causing some pretty bad stalls for other applications that need to access the disk. SSDs mitigate this issue.
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Tue Aug 09, 2016 9:49 am

The only thing that jumps out at me is all the storage redundancy; most notably on the SSDs. I've found RAID to be.....not really worth the effort for what I do (especially on a boot drive), but you're likely doing more important things than myself. It certainly makes sense on those Seagate 3TB's, which were the worst model tested in one of last year's Backblaze reports.
 
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Tue Aug 09, 2016 12:17 pm

Seagate seemed to hit a rough patch a few years back. Presumably the problematic drives at Backblaze were from then. Mine are newer than that. I will definitely be keeping an eye on the SMART diagnostics though, just in case.
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Wed Aug 10, 2016 12:11 pm

I procrastinate regretting that I procrastinated.
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Fri Aug 12, 2016 3:28 am

I guess it was at least partly procrastination that kept me from redoing my Linux system, that forced me into my experiments with Debian and Mint. That dragged on just long enough for Slackware 14.2 to appear and solve my problems.
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Fri Aug 12, 2016 4:12 am

I'm not going to lie. My dirty mind misread the title as "The joys of procreation" and was quite confused at first.

I'm curious, what do you use that system for? Is that your daily driver or more of some kind of workstation?
 
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Fri Aug 12, 2016 7:38 am

Daily driver. But I do software development (both for Linux and embedded), use VMs regularly, and do other generally power-user-ish sorts of things. :wink:

The goal was to put together a system that can be my daily driver for the next couple of years. I wanted to bump RAM and disk capacity up a notch, provide dedicated SSDs for hosting VMs, and eliminate the cable clutter from having multiple external drive docks sitting on my desk. I believe I have succeeded in creating a system that is well-suited to my use case, without spending a ton of money.
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Re: The joys of procrastination

Sat Aug 13, 2016 9:42 am

Got JACK installed and configured with the LADSPA plugins I use. This was a lot easier than it was on 12.04 LTS; I was able to get everything working without resorting to the use of third-party repositories. (IIRC in 12.04 the package that provides the PulseAudio -> JACK connectivity was busted, among other things...)

The hardest part was probably remembering the names of all the packages that contain the signal processing plugins I use. This time I made a list and saved it in the directory where I keep all my JACK-related stuff. :wink:

The Xonar DSX card was recognized out-of-the-box with no action required on my part; it "just works". The only glitch so far is that the audio stack has the side and rear outputs of the DSX swapped. Not a biggie, but did cause some initial confusion since my normal setup is to run the front out to my headphones, and configure JACK to clone the front out to the rear out to drive my 2.1 speakers (I do things this way because I apply different EQ settings to the headphones and speakers).

Edit: Seems like I don't need to tweak the bass up as much to get things to sound good. Guess the Xonar has better bass response than the onboard in my old system did...
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