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

Sorry, work interrupted me. You can make fun of me now for erasing my barely started post and I'll finish my story later.

"You can trust me" - Mac TV ad for W7

You work?

OK here is a cut and past from an email I sent last night to explain to my buddies why I wouldn't be playing EQII tonight.

Short version is simply
If you are considering replacing a hard drive at the time you are upgrading, Do not install Windows 7 on a secondary hard drive (not currently the master, boot drive.) It will indeed place all the OS files on the secondary drive but it still utilizes the boot sector on the primary drive, thus forcing you to keep both drives in place to keep it working.

Aside from that, the Windows 7 install was actually the most painless install I have ever done. 40 minutes and everything just worked. No hunting for old driver CDS, no struggling to get on the internet to look for even more drivers. It just plain worked. I was very surprised. Even my Mom could do this upgrade.

Most people wouldn't end up with the scenario I got myself in but it took a few head scratches to figure out the best way to remedy it so I thought I would share.

I'm super happy with the PC now. With the 64 bit version installed it's able to fully utilize the 8GB of RAM I upgraded it to and now it seems like nothing slows it down.

I installed a widget to display the utilization of the two processors and memory usage and the only way I was able to max out the processors was to let hoggy ol' iTunes do it's thing to convert the wma songs that it doesn't like, play flacs on winamp, and have two big file copy sessions going. Even with the dual processors redlining there wasn't a single hiccup in the song play and memory usage never broke 65%.

Thanks for warning. I am doing 2 upgrades (one today and one mid next-week).

That was worth the wait.

Debating whether to do it in Boot Camp even though it's not fully supported. I may just do VirtualBox first.

For the first time ever, I can't decide if Tom was being sarcastic or not.
I don't know what to do...

I'm pretty sure he was being honest, since he's likely planning on moving to Windows 7.

I need all the help I can get.

That WAS a pretty stressful 28:05.00, though.

I've got my OEM copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Now I just need the computer to go with it. My processor is on order, and I'll buy the rest when I can get all of the parts I'm wanting. Exciting.

You look excited...

Am I a guy or a girl?

Sorry Charles, just kidding around. And I don't know if that is a boy or a girl???

It's Pat!?!

Nothing to be sorry about Michael, that is funny as $hit, brings back memories. lmao

I thought the same thing!

Charles, have you decided what case you are getting yet?

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.