where can i find a good guide for a Hackingtos - It would be interesting to see a OSX run at 4+ Ghz on 12 cores+12HT and 96Gb of ram.
As for Building your own PC, no its not easy to build a good solid PC. You need to have knowledge and know what works with what, just like photography.
I can understand Bernard's wants for support, afterall, we are photographers and computer techs, even though sometimes it feels the other way around. It definately doesn't hurt to know your way around in your computer box.
I am fortunate to have good friends with computer shops, and access to their resources, but its sometimes time consuming. As I also provide support for other photogs in their digital endeavours, I often see photogs struggle with their systems in particular Mac users, as soon as it does not behave as expected its arms up in the air and scream!!!! It happens a lot - despite popular perception that Mac's don't fail, they do as lovely as they are, they do fail, as does PC's they are just not as greacious looking ;-)
Having support is the single most important thing for your computer - down time is expensive, because it always happens when you most need to get something done.
Just going back to some of the previous threads, where the mention of RAID and NAS.
RAID is great for improved speed when using RAID-0, but no redundancy - you need to know that if your RAID-0 goes down its hard to repair, but it can be repaired!!!! and the data can be recovered.
RAID with redundancy, every other RAID but RAID-0, is a good way for a single drive failure to protect your data, there are RAID configs for multiple Disk redundancy as well. However it should not be seen as a Backup.
I do setup Macpro's with two WD RE4's in RAID-1 to give the client two copies of their working data should one fail, but I still insist and impliment secondary Backup devices and strategies, where the client have at least 4 copies, two on side and two off site.
This brings me to NAS, Network Attached Storage, to me the advantage of this is that multiple computers can access this data at anytime and should your main machine fail you can still access this via a second computer. However, not all NAS are created equal, and most are really slow, in particular when you are trying to retrive whole multi-gigabyte jobs.
I don't own myself one of these units but I would highly recommend Synology NAS drives, and get a 8-drive unit, this can also be daisy-chained to multiple units later should your need require this. I know that a lot of photo have gotten the Drobo bug, and though its not a bad solution, it is by no means a great one. Its slow, and rebuild times takes forever. but again alot of Photog/Mac shop are flogging them to photogs who know no better.
So have raid in your box, know what the raid level is providing you and have NAS storage as your back up, plus have another backup external to your premises.
Mac users - welcome to the world of computing! :-) let us know if you need help and we will try to give you the best advise possible at the time.
All the best
Henrik
PS: Macpro R.I.P. you may not have been a fast contender, but certainly the prettiest :-)