The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

LOL! Yah, I probably won't install OS's with other HDD's connected anymore. I've found that regardless of my installing it on a particular drive, it uses at least one other drive for tiny bits of information. Don't know why it would do that. As an OS has no need for multiple drives. At one time, I disconnected one of my storage drives, and the MBR was affected. Totally unacceptable. Windows 7/vista/XP should have no need to use the storage drives in that fashion! I'm quite comfortable installing OS's with other drives installed. I'm careful in a way you've never read about LOL!

 

ahh my bad russ. Understood. Never really had more than 1 drive connected when i do reinstall an os. Wonder why sata does that?

 

Hey! Big brother can't keep an eye on you all the time, otherwise! ROFLMAO!!

BTW! I'm really liking this AVG Internet Security AV! Nothing slows down, and it catches everything. Makes boot up a little slower, but other than that, you only know it's there when it flags something.

Russ

 

Sam,
All I can say is in more than 16 years of using IDE Drives, it never happened once. It never happened with SCSI either, or a mixed combination of SCSI and IDE! The only IDE cables I ever had problems with were the round ones. They just don't seem to last! I've had to change a number of the flat IDE cables because an ATA-133 or an ATA-100 drive wouln't work properly using a 40 wire cable.

Russ

 

Ok sweet I feel much better

Seems to be working fine to me. Fair bit of seek noise but not overwhelming like my older 250GB. Gonna install an OS on it and see how well it goes after a week or two.

Haha that's exactly what I do. One single IDE DVD-RW per machine with an XFX brand black round cable. Got 3 of them from a burnt 680i board and they work awesome. I'm not too worried about the speed or responsiveness of my ODD. As long as it works the precious few times I actually need it, I'm gonna stay IDE

 

I have never had that issue at all, but I always make sure to unplug other drives when I'm installing an OS just to make sure I install to the right one!
Never had any issues with my S-ATA DVDRW as of yet, not that it's used that often

 

i was just talking with a gigabyte tech about useing the G-Sata ports for your OS. he said the G-sata ports are slower than the intel controller,

Since swaping back to the intel ports i can tell a difference in how quick the OS loads now. havent really tried anything else with it yet. i did have to put my AD7200S on the GSATA port. so we will see how that effects burning and such.
i did them SMART test with speedfan on my 4 drives this is what i got. i take it these are acceptable??

this has my main OS on it(xp) that i use daily


this has W7 on it. havent used it much lately.


these 2 are my backup drives(storage)

 

All looks good, your WD5000AACS has the load cycle count bug that most WD Green drives suffer from, but it's well within tolerance at the moment.

 

LOL! Why not? I've had less trouble on 7. I had XP and 7 running side by side for a time. Xp encountered bugs first...
I'm not an M$ fanboy, I'm simply impressed with how windows 7 behaves. And most importantly, GAMING! Gaming is so much better on 7, that it's unreal LOL! Surely it isn't because a software incompatibility? I've not encountered one...

 

you hit the nail on the head. i cant see tossing out a couple of printers because W7 wont recognize them. plus my sons mp3 isnt compatible with it either.

 

Sorry to hear that. I would die if I had to revert back to XP. My epson R260 was somewhat challenging to get running at the BETA release of 7. But I poked and poked around, and found a way to get it running Vista drivers work, in a pinch. Perhaps not always though...

I can't win with the Sata 3.0 ports. Since they're in use, I still encounter slight bugs. I had a bug yesterday for instance. Was trying to burn a dvd. Clicked burn, then started a Usb transfer almost exactly simultaneously, and imgburn got stuck with writing leadin. Though it never did the leadin. THANKFULLY LOL! Saved me a disc. I believe the problem was because a 3.0 sata port was in the middle of a process, and didn't want to pause for the undivided attention that imgburn requires for the first 20 seconds of a burn. Though I must admit, I haven't had to worry about the initial burn for quite some time...

Remedy? Buying a Sata 2.0 card, and being done with 3.0 until they can get the bugs worked out. Probably at least a year. Which is fine, I had a feeling something like this could happen. Rarely anything works perfectly in its infancy

I'm VERY open to suggestions on which card to buy. It needs to have AT LEAST 4 2.0 ports

 

I bought some of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132008
(Though Lycom branded instead of Rosewill)

Unfortunately, you can only buy 2-port cards at reasonable cost. With extra ports, the cost rises exponentially unless you're buying a RAID card. Two of these 2-port cards came to £35. Just one 4-port card would have been £70. 8-ports are only available in RAID form, which is at least £220!
As long as you have two PCIe 1x slots to spare, these things seem pretty good.

 

what board is it that you have taht has the sata 3.0 ports. i thought you was talking about the GSATA ports at first. thats why i took my OS off of the gsata ports.

 

Nah, newer Core i5 and AMD boards have S-ATA 3 ports, usually marked in white. The MA790XTA-UD4 is one such example.

 

Sam must have looked at my sig. That's what I own. Good board, unfortunate about the current 3.0 predicament though.
Thanks sam. 2 cards with 2 ports each sounds like a better idea. Though I'll have to eliminate my ethernet card. Currently not using it though, so no biggie.

 

If you aren't willing to put your graphics card in the lower slot, then buy one PCIe version of the card, and one PCI version. Simple!

 

My GPU is in the lower slot. I may be able to get by with only one card anyway. I was thinking 4 though, so I have 2 extra sata ports. I don't like my board being full up LOL! I think a board should have at least 10 ports myself, but that's just me Perhaps I should buy a server board LOL!

 

I don't really see why you'd remove your network card just so you could have an empty slot... There's ample room there!

 

Because I'm not using it. And since the network switch does everything I want it to, I no longer require the network card. Its using milliwatts LOL! I've seen devices that could use them, but I don't own one, soo....

 

Seems fair enough. Quite pleased with my new switch, it's improved R/W speeds to my server over the other switch I own quite substantially. New modem was ordered yesterdy afternoon at 4pm, didn't bother getting up early today expecting it to come tomorrow - turns out they tried to deliver it this morning! Ah well, at least with normal postal service I can just wander into town to get it from the post office rather than have to arrange a redelivery.