I bought the new box with a single WD 250 gb SATA 300 disk. I separately
bought another WD of the same sort and two WD 500 gb SATA 300 disks.
The plan was to install the second 250 in the box to be kept as a backup
for the boot disk, one 500 in the box and one 500 in an eSATA external
enclosure for back-up of the internal one.
My question is about the possible use of RAID 1 for the two 250 gb
disks. The controller on the mother board supports all sorts of RAID
configurations and the BIOS loads RAID support.
Reading the Intel documentation, it looks to me like RAID 1 would be
better than any other ghost/mirror/whatever scheme for backing up the
boot disk. It says that all data is completely duplicated in such a way
that failure of either disk won't even crash the machine, let alone keep
it from booting with no loss of anything. then one may install a
replacement, which will be automatically brought into the array. Read
speed may even be enhanced under some circumstances with a dual
processor where two requests for different data may be served at once
from different disks. They say only occasional, small write speed
penalties should be encountered. Sounds perfect.
Anybody know if they are blowing smoke in any important way such that I
shouldn't implement this as my primary back-up strategy? Yes, I have two
more external drives of 250 & 500 gb for off site backup too.
I had my first ever HD failure in all these years. The first 500 gb
drive started to format, but took forever and I finally killed the
process. It then didn't show up as connected at all. I took it out and
put in the second one, which worked fine. I went on WD's web site and
arranged an RMA for replacement, which arrived quickly and is working
properly. It irked me a little to find that I have to pay the return
shipping. Only $5.30, but still, the thing failed right out of the box.
At least I didn't lose any data. :-)
A word about eSATA. I exercised the replacement 500 gb drive by running
benchmarks on it. As I expected, it runs exactly as fast as the internal
one, there is just no penalty for having it outside the box. I don't
know why there isn't more hype about eSATA. With a newer mother board
with multiple SATA headers, all you need is a connection extension, a
bracket that uses one expansion slot opening, connects to the internal
SATA header and has an eSATA header. There are no electronics in it at
all and eSATA external cases come with it and an eSATA cable. Dead
simple and runs the disk as fast as it will go.
Another troublesome bit. The box has mountings for 3 5.25" drives with
front panel access, if needed and one more being used for front panel
USB, Firewire and audio connections. The 2 3.5" bays with external
access are being used for a flash card reader and a 3.5" drive and there
is one where the chassis mounting anticipates a front opening, the the
panel doesn't have one. One could get a HD in there.
Then there are 4 HD bays, so together with the odd one, there is room
for 5 3.5" drives. But here comes the rub. All the HD bays mount them
with almost no vertical spacing between them. The old box is much the
same - BUT.
This box is much quieter than the old one, I believe the new processors
are more energy efficient, and the processor, poser supply and case fans
are all speed controlled. The result is very low fan noise in normal
operation, very nice. Unfortunately, the temperature sensors for the
fans are on the important areas of the mother board, none near the HDs.
And 7200 rpm drives, let alone 10k drives, run pretty hot.
With the boot drive in the top of the 4 interior bays and the 500 gb
internal 2 spots down, with an empty bay between them, the lower drive
runs warmish, but not dangerous. But the top one runs up close to 60C.
The operating temperature range for these drives tops out at 55C, so I
would be flirting with premature failure. Obviously, different boxes are
going to have different results, but I suggest that anybody with
multiple drives get a copy of HDTune - freeware - and check on their
hard disk temps. What worked on an older box with full time full speed
fans may not on newer set-ups.
Personally, the box is now running with the side off and a little desk
fan blowing on the disks and I've ordered a couple of HD cooling fan
gizmos. When I fire up the second 250 gb disk (Formatted, but not
powered now until I decide about the RAID thing,), I'll have hot little
gizmos in bays 1, 3 & 4. The disk coolers each use up part of the bay
below, so it can't be used for a disk. I'm hoping that one on the bottom
of 1 will cool it and help with 3 by pulling air through the gap between
them. And according to my measurements, there is a dead space of 23 mm
below the bottom bay, so the slightly more expensive, but lower profile,
cooling fan housing only 12 mm deep should have plenty of room to draw
air and cool 4 both for its own sake and so it doesn't heat up 3.
When I need another drive, it will either be external or have to go in
an adapter to mount in a 5.25" bay. At least that way there is plenty of
air space around it.
A lot of blather, but I hope it may be of assistance to other(s) when
they upgrade.
Moose
Old:
2.8ghz Pentium 4
2gb of DDR 433 mhz memory
Boot disk EIDE ATA 100
Windoze XP SP2
New:
2.67ghz Core2 Duo
3 gb of DDR2 800mhz memory
Boot disk SATA 3G
Windoze Vista Home Premium
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