Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler A hint if you are installing Windows 7

I'm still leaning toward the Antec P193, though I haven't emailed them about CPU cooler space. I figure I can make it work somehow, though, if it turns out to be an issue.

Hope you got the 64-bit version. With the retail you get two discs 32- and 64-bit. But the OEM you only get one or the other.

I've got my OEM 7 Ultimate sitting here next to me. Just need to find the time to break the RAID mirror set, install Win7 on one of the drives, reinstall all my software, copy the documents over, and rebuild the mirror. Long boring work, but want to try out the final release.

Yeah, 64-bit. Yeah, that sounds like a tedious time you have ahead of yourself. I've never really done anything with RAID. What benefits are you getting out of it?

RAID1, mirroring, nearly doubles the throughput when reading, but slightly decreases the write performance. Since most of the time you write a file once, but read it many times (think installing a program vs. launching that same program), it results in a net improvement. But the real reason for RAID is to prevent data loss in event of hardware failure. Either of the drives in the mirror set can die, and I'd lose nothing.

My system has two 136 GB, 15k RPM drives in RAID1 which hold the OS and programs. Then two 1 TB, 10k RPM drives, also in RAID1 where I store data. I'm waiting for the 2 TB SAS drives to become available as my 1 TB array only has 9 GB left at this point. I have eight drive bays, and an eight channel SAS controller (with hardware mirroring) so I still have room for expansion.

I just noticed one of my drives is dead in my NAS, luckily I am running it mirrored, I guess I better get another disk in there before the good dies too, they were bought at the same time

I've found far too often that drives from the same batch have very similar lifespans.

While my desktop has identical drives in its mirror sets, the servers I build usually have a combination of different manufacturers drives with as close as possible sizes and specs. Usually pairing Seagate with Hitachi. Although the later doesn't have their 1 TB SAS drives out yet, so the 16 TB array I most recently finished is entirely Seagate. Though it is actually two arrays of eight drives in RAID6. That allow for up to four drive failures (two in each array) with no data loss. At the same time it also limits the storage capacity to 12 TB--good thing there are eight more bays left unused in the chassis.