Mini PC Questions!

[TRANSLTR]

Hello... I wonder if you can help!

I'm looking to buy a new PC and I like the look of the mini PC's as space is somewhat at a premium plus I would like the unit to sit on my desk.

My situation at present is as follows.

Last year (maybe the year before) I bought a system from the now-defunct cube247. The system was fine and I was very pleased with it. However... I had it built with 2 HDDs. One was a 2 TB drive but I had a 64 GB SSD for Windows and applications.

The machine was stupendously quick but unfortunately the "User" folders were set up on the SSD, and by the time I had installed all the apps I need I was fast running out of space. So in the end I replaced the SSD with a 500GB ordinary drive.

And now the problem is the fact that it only has 4GB RAM, and with multiple users logged on, it gets really slow as it pages. It's unrecognisable from what it was.

So I think I will buy a new system and cannibalise the drives out of the old one.

I need the following applications to be used:

MS Office 2010
SQL Server
Dragon Naturally Speaking

...nothing intense in terms of graphics although I think Dragon hoovers up RAM.


Here are some questions that I'd be grateful for some help on...

Are mini PCs limited to 8 GB RAM?
Is there any performance gain to be had from building with 2 drives in RAID zero (leaving aside the HDD failure risk)?

Thanks


Jamie

 

[PCS]

Welcome to our forums and apologes that nobody has got back to you before now

1. 16GB of RAM has recently been added to our mini PC configurators. However, the motherboards that accept this memory only have 2 x memory slots (as opposed to 4+ on desktops) and the cost of 8GB memory modules is extremely high. Therefore the cost of 16GB RAM in your system is much higher in comparison to 16GB in a standard desktop PC.

2. The performance gain in RAID 0 is minimal and not worth the risks in my opinion. I would definitely recommend an SSD instead (and SSDs have come on a long way over the past few years).