hardware Most Supportable and Upgradeable Hardware

[cosmiceggbeater]

Hi All,

I want to get feedback on what the most supportable hardware is for:

1. laptops - which brand has the best after sales support regarding ability to get replacement parts?
2. towers - what is the ideal build to ensure you get the longest life and most upgrades out of it?
3. storage servers (NAS) - which is the best setup to get the longest life out of your NAS?

With all of these, I am aware that the mobo should really be considered a single point of failure, so are there any setups that provide full HW redundancy at that level?

[LogicalDrm]

1) Lenovo and Dell, business/enterprise-grade stuff

2) This can't be answered as its impossible to say how long AMD/Intel support socket/chipset. Other ports and such are controlled by ATX standard, so those will take 5+ years to change anyway. Considering that some dead connections are still present (VGA, PCI, AGP, molex, IDE and so on).

[cosmiceggbeater]

Yeah, I get what ur saying. Thanks.

 

With laptops, well hard to say.

I suppose with towers, you can always replace the motherboard and keep the hard drives - then it would be a case of installing new drivers as needed...

 

I was thinking about whether it would be worth turning the laptop into a virtualization platform just to create an abstraction layer so I could maintain snapshots/backups more easily but also make upgrading or replacing the laptop a breeze buy using a simple VM export and import. The one thing that turns me off this is running two OSs at the same time...from a performance perspective. But maybe that is a cost worth paying for ease of OS and HW management?

[Roswell]

For laptops, I don't think anything really comes close to HP's OEM part availability. That said, if you don't mind used parts instead, just go with any of the major brand's workstation lines. Due to the constant churn of hardware in the business sector, they're all over the place.

[cosmiceggbeater]

1 hour ago, Vitamanic said:

For laptops, I don't think anything really comes close to HP's OEM part availability. That said, if you don't mind used parts instead, just go with any of the major brand's workstation lines. Due to the constant churn of hardware in the business sector, they're all over the place.

Thanks