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by vardump·12y ago·view on hn ↗
Any serious workstation should have three things:

1) A high quality power supply. Bad PSU guarantees crashes.

2) ECC RAM. It makes the difference between rock solid and crashes/does weird things occasionally.

3) Any kind of storage fault redundancy, like RAID 1.

Everything else is negotiable, but those stand, because they make all the difference in reliability and stability.

2 comments
A high quality power supply.

I remember data from a while ago that power supplies were the #1 cause of failures, but don't seem to be able find it any more. Anyone have info?

ECC RAM

This has become more and more necessary with the massive increase in DRAM capacities we've seen over the last years.

A google study showed "...a mean of 3,751 correctable errors per DIMM per year."[1]

10 errors per DIMM per day is a lot, and several orders of magnitude more than the conventional wisdom says! And if you don't have ECC, all of those are likely either crashes or silent data corruption.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/dram-error-rates-nightmare...

This mac doesn't have RAID, if you want it you'll need the external rack they offer. For $1,500 you get 4 x 2TB hard drives, which will handle RAID 0, 1, 5, 50, 6, 10.

Otherwise you'll need to go find someone else who sells Thunderbolt racks.