After our scare of nearly losing our pictures, I decided to build a new system. I wanted to make sure that our data was mirrored (via RAID1) at all times. This will eliminate my bad habit of only backing up a few times a month. This is something that I've been wanting to do for a long time now.

I purchased everything at Frys, also know as the best store EVER! They always have killer deals, especially on the weekends. I chose an ASUS M2N-E motherboard with an NVIDA chipset because it has on-board RAID controllers. I've also heard a lot of good things about ASUS. I can support up to a six disk RAID array (0, 1, 0+1, 5, and JBOD) . I also purchased two 500GB SATA hard drives which were insanely cheap. I don't have a true terabyte of storage because of my RAID1 setup, but still 500GB is a lot of storage space.

I went with an AMD Athlon X2 5600+ dual-core processor along with 2GB of RAM. I can support up to 8GB of RAM (DDR2 800) but with only 2GB this thing is still smokin' ! I'm sure most everyone doesn't care or is asleep by now, but I know Rick can appreciate this tech talk. :)

Needless to say, I'm very happy with my new rig!