Dear Claudia,

    I use Ubuntu and I am happy with it, cannot say if it is
the best. It is relatively easy to maintain which is what you
want.

    As for HD, try and determine how much space a typical project
would need and how many concurrent projects there might be. Data
from images would be the most space consuming, software would
probably not amount to much. This then gives you a minimum size
of HD. The speed of the disk is perhaps less important because writing
to disk is always slow. It is important to have enough memory so that
programs can be held entirely in memory. Having to use swap space slows
the whole machine.

   Disk partitions (of the same disk) is something worth discussing. If
you have everything on one partition there is a danger that it will be
filled and that this will impact on the performance. I always have
the "/" partition separate which need only be 5-10GB, a "/usr" partition
which could contain most of the software (30GB on the machine here) and
a "/home" partition (for user accounts). You also need a swap partition,
this should be 2 to 3 times the memory size. Maybe somebody knows the
optimum size.

   The most important thing which is easily overlooked is backups. Having
a mirrored disk or a RAID array is one way of reducing corrupted data.
Hot swapable RAID arrays can protect you against disk failure. However
if the building burns down and there is no offsite backup then you are
screwed. Certainly having a second disk on which hourly/daily backups
are done is a good idea. Getting some offsite backups, whether tapes or
networked disks, is a must.


Adam




On Mon, 24 Aug 2009, Claudia Scotti wrote:

>
>
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> Dear List,
>
>
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> I'm planning to migrate soon from Red Hat Linux 7.0 on an HP xw6000
workstation with dual Xeon processor.
>
>
>
> Please, any suggestion for the best Linux flavour to get the most out of
today's crystallographic software? I've seen that both Ubuntu and Fedora
are quite common.
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> Also I'm in doubt about the following: will it be safer to use two
mirror hard disks (as I'm doing now) or to use one HD for the software and
one for the data?
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> And, finally, please, what HD size is today most reasonable (big, but still
fast enough)?
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> Thanks a lot,
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> Claudia
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> Claudia Scotti Dipartimento di Medicina Sperimentale Sezione di Patologia Generale Universita' di Pavia Piazza Botta, 10 27100 Pavia Italia Tel. 0039 0382 986335/8/1 Facs 0039 0382 303673
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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