Here's my thoughts on building..

If you're building a workstation i.e. ECC RAM Opterons/Xeons Quadro/FirePro and it's in a zero downtime environment you'd be silly to build yourself. My Dell dude is at our place in less than 45 minutes whenever there is a problem there is no need to futz with parts he comes in replaces what needs replaced and thats it. When your machines produce real dollars or in our case insure communication with the good guys on 3 continents diagnosing and going to the store to pick something up is just not the smartest use of time. I have friends that work for RTL and SAT1 they work on seriously tight deadlines they simply cannot afford to have a system down that where that 45 minute thing comes in the Dell dude will replace your computer so you can continue rendering while he pulls your apart and does what needs done.

Germany_chris cuts interviews and makes pretty pictures/posters/banners/certificates et.al. my personal machine was a Mac Pro because I can hoof it to the Apple store and with business service have it fixed in a couple hours I just don't have inflexible deadlines.

For folks that just want an internet machine I can generally build cheaper and higher quality with more options than the big brands and I provide better support. We all have different usage scenarios and one way is never better applied across the board.

You're also paying tens of thousands of dollars for that privilege, between the ridiculously hiked up cost of the machine and the support contract you have you pay for. So much, in fact, that if you had built it yourself you could just build an additional 1-2 identical machines and have a 2 or 3 way redundant mirrored setup that can seamlessly take over if any machine has a problem, without ANY down time. No phone call required, no 45 minute delay.

If you build it right, it shouldn't be failing anyway. Not a single workstation/server I've built in the last 7 years has failed (apart from the occasional failed HD, which is swapped out seamlessly with hot-swap bays and a redundant RAID setup). By now we would have thrown away somewhere around $100k on unused Dell/HP high purchase prices and support.

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I guess we have to go through this every year when the new workstations come out..to built xeon to xeon ecc to ecc you really don't save that much money.

Except that you do. I run through this exercise every few months, I even posted real prices just a few posts ago, those were valid as of about 2 weeks ago. You typically spend about 2-3x more through Dell or HP versus building it yourself, at least for higher end systems. As I mentioned in my previous post, bottom of the barrel machines are closer in price, sometimes Dell or HP can even be a little less expensive for the SUPER cheap machines.

may have miss read it I thought it was 2 sata drives one usb. I mean if you really want you can just you could use dd but we know that makes the mirror of the whole drive. or
or you can use dd to the usb drive.
but how often do well tell new users of linux to use the dd.
I use it but I also use the other for back up\
and I also use squashfs4 for back up.
the above to just make and image to untar any where you want it.
dontforget to edit your /etc/fstab

Why not just run linux from a USB storage device. I run mine from an SDHC card. With a reader, and partitioned to function within the 16GB that that reader plays nice with on a 32GB card. Even older hardware can boot usb devices, via a grub boot CD or other CD options. But most since 2006 seem to support booting from USB in the bios. The boot time hot key might vary, F12, F1, ESC, F10, DEL, SPACE or whatever key it says on the second-ish long BIOS/CMOS screen.

I have a 32 bit single core 2.8GHz laptop with 512MB of ram that I use. Intel graphics which functions about the same performance wise as my prevous 2GHz laptop with an ATI card and a higher resolution monitor. I have a 64 bit dual core 1.9GHz desktop with 1GB of ram that I use. Not much beyond storage devices that is new since 2007-ish. Still chugging along including 3D rendering and video editing. Although I sort of have to edit videos to downgrade the resolution and bitrates to be playable on this antique. But all of the above work fine for youtube and hulu content.

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