I spent a fair chunk of my free time this weekend dealing with a jacked up hard disk on my home PC. I have a Shuttle XP for my home box, and it only one drive can fit in the case, so any drive issues are serious - all the cookies are in the same jar!

I had a 160GB Western Digital Caviar disk, which I partitioned into 4 ~40GB drives. I noticed that things were running a bit slow, and figured it may be time for a defrag. When I opened Disk Manager, it seemed that my "F" drive had disappeared. Or,more specifically that everything on it was gone, as Disk Manager was noting that it had 100% free space. Uh oh! This was the drive that held all our digital photos - specifically 30Gb of photos. Thankfully I have a local back up on a USB drive (runs weekly), and an off-site backup @ Mozy.com, so at worst we may have lost a few days of photos.

Right about this time, everything on the machine started to bog down. File Explorer would hang, "cd-ing" in a command prompt was dicy at best. I managed to setup a check disk (chkdsk /f) on the C: drive and rebooted. After a lot of thrashing, XP came back up - slightly more stable.

I was able to copy pretty much everything else that I wanted off the other partitions before the disk failed outright, so that was good.

Anyhow - this was the perfect excuse to get a 10,000 RPM disk, and upgrade to Vista. I popped out to BestBuy and grabbed a Western Digital Raptor, and then started downloading the Vista Ultimate ISO image from MSDN. After about 2 hours it was done, and burned to a DVD. I booted from the DVD, and in less than 30 minutes I had Vista up and running. Smooth as silk.

Now I just need to spend a few hours installing everything!

Just a quick update on getting our office setup. In the last post on Building our Rigs, we were still in Chris Spagnuolo's house. We have since moved into our "temporary" space while our final home is being built-out (more on that as the plans get finalized and construction starts!)

So let's take a look around. As I noted before, we all have 3 monitor setups. It's as good as you'd think. The workstation itself seems really fast, and the other guys have been really happy with the performance while developing. I've been traveling and setting up servers and the network so I'll report back when I've had a chance to really beat on it.

As you can see I'm currently rocking the Home Depot desk. We're still waiting for our Ikea desks to arrive, but a sheet of plywood and some sawhorses work quite well.  Since we went with the very economical Ikea desks we could afford Herman Miller Mirra chairs. Besides being a little less expensive than the Aeron, these are 96% recyclable. We gave these a test run at Rally when we visited them a while back.

Speaking of recycling, setting up an office generates an awful pile of waste from the packaging. We're trying to recycle what we can, but these two bags are full of Styrofoam and other non-recyclable plastics. This pile is just from the packaging for the chairs, the printer and some other misc office supplies.

We have been able to put some of the cardboard boxes to some good use...

We'll get a rack once we move to the new space, but for now our servers have to make do with what we've got. Speaking of servers, we got Dell PowerEdge's with Xeon LV chips - they are supposed to use significantly less power than the standard Xeon chips. We are running 3 physical machines for now.

Our the File Server / Domain Controller and the SQL / Oracle servers have a single Quad Core Xeon CPU, and ~500GB RAID5.

Our App Server has two Quad Core Xeons, 8GB Ram, and two 15k disks. We'll be running AGS and IMS on the base OS, and other stuff as needed in VMs.

We just barely got them up and running last week, but I can say this - they be FAST. And just disregard that tangled mess that is supposed to pass for a "built in networking panel". We''ll be keeping an eye on whoever is wiring up the new space for us, and ensure that we get a patch panel rather than another one of these!

Our server room also does double duty as a separated recycling storage area. Separating this stuff before you take it to the recycling center makes it so much easier.

So that's about it for now. After the new year we'll be getting a serious firewall so we can start hosting demo sites, and other fun stuff. Construction build out will start mid-January.

The Build

For details on building out a system, read Jeff Atwood's posts re: building the Hanselman box (Part 1, Part 2, Overclocking). Since our parts list was virtually identical, his detailed photos and descriptions we're awesome. Here are just a few shots of us putting stuff together.

Jeff & Chris putting the stock heat sinks on the motherboards. The Scythe heat sinks were back ordered, so we're going to wait until they arrive to overclock things...

Board ready to go into the case...

Here's a motherboard mounted just prior to the initial boot to make sure it's all setup correctly.

By the end of Thursday, we had 4 systems built out, and the OS installation started.

On Friday we got our MSDN licenses and received our ESRI Developer Network kits. From there, we got the OS installed on 4 systems, and started running torture tests using Prime95. One of the systems has some stability issues (we'll tear it down Monday when we build up the final system) and it looks like one of the WD Raptors was flaky. Other than that all is well, and everyone had quite a bit of fun. The next "big" thing is getting into a "real" office - but that will have to wait until after Thanksgiving.

While I was out at the ESRI User Conference having a pretty good time talking GIS and software development with all sorts of fun people, my workstation decided that it was jealous, and consequently killed the system disk.

Not apparent reason (power spike, kicking of said system, misc. magnetic fields, UFOs), but upon my return, it was cooked. We tried a few repair options, but it seems that the boot sector was beyond repair, and a new primary disk was on the agenda.

For a while now I've been reading Jeff Atwood's blog - Coding Horror , and his February posting on 10,000 RPM boot disks stuck with me. Quite incidentally, I had also just read Scott Hanselman's posting on "The Ultimate Developer Rig", which also extols the virtues of the 10,000 RPM boot disk.

Since I was now in the market, that's just what I got. Since time was an issue, I had to hit the local bog-box electronics join and paid a little more than would be ideal - NewEgg has the same drive for $169 (after mail-in rebate).

After fighting with the Dell SATA drivers (apparently they were having some issues with their FTP site because the driver I downloaded crashed the windows xp installer! - we had better luck copying the driver from another system), I got the disk mounted, partitioned and the OS installed.

Then I started to install apps. It took about 2 minutes to install all of Office 2003 (yeah I'm going to switch to 2007 but I have not quite figured out all the ribbons yet!). This seemed fast, but I had not done that in a while, so it was hard to tell. I timed the Visual Studio 2005 install at 14 minutes end to end. And I have done this a few times, and that's a pretty big change from the expected 30-40 minutes. I was going to time the ArcGIS Desktop install, but I was doing a bunch of other stuff (work - how dare it intrude!).

I'll report back again in a few weeks with more info on how this impacts my daily work flow, but so far it's definitely faster.

Oh - and the dead disk? Just the boot sector was fried. I was able to mount it as a secondary disk and pull everything off. Ran chkdsk, had it mark the bad blocks and it's good to go. Now I just need to get an external USB enclosure for a SATA disk, and I'll have a local external back up drive.