The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Always label your drives. It makes it easier to reconfigure on the fly LOL! Trying to locate my Z:\ drive by using logic. I succeeded, but a letter or number designation would have been much easier. I located a number on the drive which suggested its the oldest 1Tb drive, which is what I want to pull for an external drive. To verify that my logic was confirmed, I ran Auslogics to wake the drive up. Confirmed! LOL! I felt and listened to each drive. Now I'll label each one! I think I understand Sam's designations a little better. Provided he labels them visually as such

I just didn't wanna play the guessing game, disconnecting each drive one by one...

At least I labeled the Sata cables by which port they're connected to. Sata III, sata II etc.

 

Yeah they're all labelled in magic marker physically, as well as logically.

 

I'll just use a Sharpie. Rubbing alcohol should remove it from the metallic shield. I know it works well on Dvd branded discs

 

Yeah! 5% complete on full format. I forgot my sata card has 4 ports! I jump on buying things sometimes so quick, I don't fully know what I'm buying. I know, it's a habit I have to break.
Looks like I'm sporting a new Ride this weekend. Buying my brothers Ford Explorer. Good! Now I can stop stressing about my POS Grand prix. Good vehicles(Engines), but the damn electric stuff makes me nuts!

Hey sam, could you link me to your old post(or create new), where you show your insane hard drive capacities LOL!

Thanks in advance

 

My PC specs page is in my signature
Is out of date actually, I'll update it.

 

I apologize. I should have been more specific. What I mean is, a visual representation (within "My computer") what your drives look like. For example:
http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww302/omegaman7/Mydrives.jpg

 

Oh, that.
Here:

Externals aren't plugged in at the moment, else there'd be two more drives there.

 

Yes, exactly! Thanks. I love the way you label your drives. There's something logical about it LOL!
Curious, when you click on your network location drives, does it have to load for a few seconds? Or is it always ready set go? One thing I hate about windows 7 thus far, is that my network always has to refresh when accessing the drives XP never did that to me!

 

It's ready from the get go unless I request info from a drive that has been spun down at idle. In which case, it will take about 10 seconds for any network activity to the machine to resume.

 

So if you didn't allow the drives to idle, there wouldn't be a problem? I'm pretty sure my drives don't idle in the other machine. Which ever machine I'm on, accessing the network, it almost always has to refresh. Weird stuff.

 

Drives will idle by default unless you turn that option off. [power options -> turn off hard disk after]. I use it because the drives are used nowhere near 24 hours a day, sometimes not once in a day. /Misc is used most as it contains music, as well as all the .torrent files that fetch new downloads, anything I download off youtube and a lot of software I use.

 

I'm aware of how to shut that option off. Clearly, I have some weird issue going on. Perhaps it is time to reformat and start over. This time paying close attention to important details :S

 

intresting article on sandybridge mobos:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4130/the-battle-of-the-p67-boards-asus-vs-gigabyte-at-190

 

The garish colour scheme and Asus' general badness notwithstanding, the P67A-UD4 is as reasonably well specified board (because it's an exact copycat of gigabyte boards past)

Have you seen the ROG EFI interface though? It's terrifyingly hideous. I don't know if the lower-end boards in the series have somethng less horrible, but I certainly hope so. The only thing we really need EFI for right now is 3TB HDD support. Since Gigabyte have got that, no problem.

Both the boards have the same PCIe/PCI usage allowance, with one PCI and two PCIe 1x slots usable if both the 16x slots are filled.
The Gigabyte board has two additional USB2 ports on the rear, while the Asus has two additional SATA3 ports through use of a Marvell controller.
Both the board have the same single USB3 header plus three USB2 headers, I don't know what Anand are talking about that gives the Asus an advantage for that.

What does that tell you?

Auto overclocking tools, are shiny, but a gimmick at best, and the realtek vs intel ethernet debate is meaningless. If you wanted hardcore networking you'd by a proper gigabit card, or more to the point, a fibrechannel card.

At the same price, the P67A-UD4 and P8P67 Pro are specification equals. Which means, it's a grand slam for the gigabyte on quality grounds.



One advantage you do get with P67 over P55 that I didn't realise earlier was that you get PCI Express 2.0 1x slots. On P55, they're only PCI Express 1.0, so 250MB/s per slot instead of 500. Is interesting that Intel marketed them as '8 500MB/s slots' when none can exceed 250MB/s.

 

Yeah, my new WD20EARS drive appears to be in fully working order. I copied over 775Gb of data from my oldest WD1001FALS drive. Took about 4hrs. I thought about running the transfer via USB, good thing I didn't LOL! It would have taken over 3 times as long. Now all I have to do, is decide what I'm storing on my benched drive, and be content for a little while. As well as get the 2 green drives on the same page(Redundancy).

The only weird thing to report is, I'm using close to half the space of the new drive, and Auslogics isn't showing me the used space. It says zero fragmentation, which doesn't surprise me really, but it doesn't graph the used space. I'm really scratching my head on this one. It should be noted, that other programs have trouble with drives that are connected via Sata III ports as well. Usually it's just SMART statistics I have trouble with though.

 

meh sam, i was intrested about their asrock hoice really. We all know everyone else stance on asus gb, that's been over played. But asrock, for a good 25-30 quid cheaper, offering thw same/better features seems like a winnder to me.

 

I make that 54MB/s. Not bad, but a little on the slow side unless there's lots of small files in those 775 gigs. On the whole USB would be about half that speed, not less than a third. Still tiresome though I'll admit

Shaff: The ASRock board is interesting, especially for the price. Honestly though I don't trust ASRock any more than I do Asus, and these are high grade boards. I don't include these in a build unless it's a high-end crossfire game system, and for that, corners I do not cut.

 

When I passed out last night, I saw 71MB/s. I suppose I knew it wouldn't average that though. But my USB transfers average 20MB/s. That's where I pulled the figure. Yes, there are 10's of thousands of files on the drive. 55,000 files. A lot of imagery and adobe PS files. Not to mention mp3's and text files. It's my main archive drive. It houses a variety of files. You name it, it's got it. One of my other drives has thousands of fonts. I imagine that would effect speed too

 

I get 28-31 with USB2, 31MB/s is the maximum. All the small files explain why your speed is lower than the maximum with both interfaces. I can pull 104MB/s off my WD20EARS drives with large (1100MB minimum) files.

 

LOL, yah. I see those speeds regularly with video files, iso files etc. Large files go highly rapidly. Transferring avi/mkv files is a big one