Building a PC is something almost everyone in the world of technology does at some point in time; some do it a lot more then others, and some even take a hobby to it (like myself). Being the hobbyist I am; I keep myself familiar with not only Data Recovery, but with all the latest parts for PCs being released, and all of the latest technologies with processors, graphics cards, motherboards, and all those other components that make up a PC. Recently, I was appointed to build a new Work PC for our Data Recovery Department here at Ji2, and I am going to walk you through the steps that I took to build a good PC for Data Recovery work.

Depending on the amount of cases you see and the way that you/your technicians like to work will play a big part on how much you will need to spend on your work PC; or if you are going to need to purchase duplicate parts to build multiple PCs.

Logical work is always an afterthought in the data recovery community; and I am not sure why because logical recovery is inevitable. No matter if you do a platter transplant or a PCB swap, in the end the goal is to be able to image the drive, and rebuild the files/file system on that drive to extract the data.

A problem I always see in our lab is this: physical work only takes a matter of minutes, but logical work can easily take hours, even days to image and rebuild the file structure. This can cause a major problem to arise; your workload becomes backed up because you have to wait for a drive to image or for your software the rebuild this 500GB hard drive’s file structure. This greatly reduces productivity. All of these things I took in to consideration when building a new PC. I wanted something that was fast, had a lot of expandability, and most of all, reliability. Reliability should be your number one priority. You will be working with customer data on this computer, and you cannot afford for it to crash. This puts customer data at risk, and also lowers productivity.

Alright, so I got started looking for all of the parts I wanted for my work pc. I didn’t really need to research much (I build PCs as a hobby, remember) so I already generally knew what was going to be the best route to go with brand, configuration, etc. Here is a pic of all of the parts after they arrived. Set up all fancy and everything to!

Fancy picture

So, you may be wondering; why did you choose these parts? Why do you need the case with the huge fans on it? The answer is: you don’t. Why did I get the case with the massive fans? Because it was a combo deal with the processor and huge fans mean one thing: huge airflow. Airflow leads to cooler components, and cooler components have longer lives and better reliability. For every one’s benefit; here is a list of all of the parts that I chose, and why I think that this part/brand is important, and if I have any alternative recommendations.

[Processor]-Intel Core 2 Duo e8500: If you have kept up on processors in the last couple years then you surely know that AMD had a big lead with their “Athlon 64″ processors up until about two years ago, when Intel released the beast that is the “Core 2″ series of processors. There is no arguing that these processors deliver, and Intel has been extremely aggressive with pricing. I chose a dual core and not a quad core for a very specific reason; compatibility. At this point in time you may run into compatibility issues with quad cores due to the programming of a lot of software used for data recovery. For that same reason; while a program may not crash while running on a quad core, most programs aren’t designed to run on a quad core and therefore do not utilize all four cores. At this time, a dual core is the best solution for the software DR technicians to use. I recommend getting the highest clocked (GHz) processor you can afford.

[Motherboard] - Asus P5Q Pro: Fairly straight forward; get a board that has a lot of SATA ports, and as many PATA ports as you can; it is hard to find boards with more then one these days. This board I chose because not only does is have 8 SATA ports; but it also has “8-phase power” which essentially helps clean up the currents running to your components; very nice for a DR PC. It also sports “Solid State capacitors” which have much longer life expectancy then standard capacitors.

[Hard Drive] - Samsung Spin-Point F1: For hard drives I looked no further then samsung. The spin-point F1 series is among the quickest 7200rpm drives you can have right now; and it is a general consensus that samsung makes some of the easiest drives to recover, due to their simple, but efficient design. I went with 3 750GB drives, and ran them in a RAID 5. RAID 5 essentially gives you the high read performance of RAID 0, with parity so that if one of the drives fails, it can rebuild itself. Keep in mind that if you want to run a RAID 5 you will need a minimum of three drives (get them identical in size) and that one of those drives is used only for parity, so the total amount of data you will be able to store is the combined total of two of the drives.

[Power Supply] - Corsair VX550: Power supplies get overlooked far too much. A lot of people figure they can go cheap on the worthless power supply to save some money. This is asking for all of your expensive parts and valuable data to go up in smoke. Never go cheap on the power supply. There are a couple things to consider when choosing a power supply. Watts is the most commonly known figure to look for on a power supply. Depending on how much hardware your running in your system you may want to go higher, but ~500watts give or take should be more the enough. The big number you want to look for is the amount of amps on the 12v and 5v rails. This corsair I those can feed something like 50amps into the 12v power rail. In comparison, one of the spinpoint F1 drives uses ~ 2amps on start-up. So you can see how 50amps gives you a lot of head room. The last number you want to look for is efficiency. You want a Power supply that has an 80% + efficiency rating. A lot of people don’t realize that just because your power supply says “500 watts” that does not mean that’s what it can actually output. Depending on heat, and the cleanliness of the current coming into the power supply it usually is much less ~20% less on a good power supply, which gives you your 80%. Keep all of this in mind when looking for a power supply and you should have no problem. Some of my personal favorite brands for PSU are: OCZ, Corsair, Seasonic, Thermaltake, and pc power and cooling.

[Memory] - Corsair XMS DDR2 800 4GB - Corsair has been making great memory for years; it has a lifetime warranty, and it was on sale. Memory is so cheap these days; max it out. On XP and Vista 32bit you will only see ~2.8-3.2gb depending on some variables, but that’s OK, at least cap it out. I would tell you to go with a 64bit operating system, but as with the quad-cores, that is something I would wait a while for because of compatibility issues with data recovery software. Other good brands are: OCZ, Kingston, Mushkin, Geil, Crucial.

[Graphics Card] - HIS ATI 2400pro: Graphics cards don’t do anything to speed up our DR work. Keep it simple and low profile; so it doesn’t use a lot of power. You may want to consider things like the video outputs if you want to run multiple monitors. This card is very solid and was under fifty dollars. Go with ATI or Nvidia, anything else is not very good.

[DVD Drive] - Samsung: DVD burners are only like thirty dollars these days; I picked the samsung, but there are quite a few good brands out there: Samsung, Sony/NEC, LG, Liteon, Asus to name a few. You may want to consider going with a Blueray burner in another half a year or so. With a 40GB capacity, it may come in handy for cheaper delivery media.

[Cooling] - Zalman CNPS 9700LED and Arctic cooling MX-2: As a hobbyist I have learned that keeping your CPU cool will help it live a nice long life. If you can keep you CPU running at around half of its “safe operating temperature” then chances are that processor should last you a good half a decade. The zalman cooler I chose is the most popular cooler on the market for PC Gamers, and games being as strenuous as they are; if you can cool a processor to play games, then you will be just fine cooling it for any other tasks. Arctic cooling MX-2 is what is called “Thermal compound”. This stuff goes in between the processor and the heatsink to promote better transfer of heat. This stuff is ceramic so it is non-conductive, and you don’t need to re apply it for over five years.

Alright, we went over all of the parts; next time I will walk you through the building process and give you some pointers for building a PC.

- The HDD Doctor