jrfuda
Active Member
Guy's I had the day off on Friday, after pulling a 26-hour duty, so I had time to tinker with my PC before nap time.
I installed my two 80GB SATA drives in a RAID1 configuration rather easily (after shufling all the drives around to make sure they all had a secure home in the PC's case).
I also upgraded my NIC using a GigaBit card that I've had for several months, and upped my memory from 512MB to 1GB (2x512MB modules in dual channel mode), which was also on the todo list.
I engaged the SATA RAID BIOS on reboot and let the PC boot to the old boot disk, to make sure the memory and NIC upgrades took OK.
They worked just fine, so I rebooted again, this time intercepting the boot when the SATA RAID BIOS prompted flased and instructed it to build a RAID 1 volume. This took about 30 seconds.
I then let the boot to windows proceed. Since I would be using True Image (TI) 9 to image the old drive to the new RAID volume, I also used TI to "install" the new drive, to ensure that it was installed as the type of volume that TI likes, and not a dynamic volume or something like that. TI did it's duty and asked me to reboot.
The drive was recognized on reboot, although Windows asked me to reboot yet again after it recognized the drive.
On the next reboot, everything was fine. I had TI image my boot drive to the RAID volume, using a proportional method (the three partiions on the old 30GB boot drive were scaled to fit the new 80GB RAID1 volume).
I watched some TV as the PC rebooted and TI did it's thing.
I then let windows boot from the old drive one more time.
I then rebooted again and set the SATA RAID volume as the first and only boot device. On reboot, windows started without incident. I then used Acronis Disk Director (DD) to change the sizes of the partions on the new boot disk, to get rid of a partition on this disk, and to make a few changes to the old boot disk. I also moved my swap file to a small 3GB partition on the former boot disk.
Everything is working great. It's probably due more to the increased memory than anything else, but I rarely see the HDD activity light blinking anymore. I think boot time is about twenty seconds faster than before too (from power-on until HS is completely started).
I've also noticed that my RDP sessions between my two GigaBit-equiped PCs are much faster now. The session is opened as quickly as I click the link - barely any time to see the "connecting to" box.
I'm very happy with the upgrades - so far....
I installed my two 80GB SATA drives in a RAID1 configuration rather easily (after shufling all the drives around to make sure they all had a secure home in the PC's case).
I also upgraded my NIC using a GigaBit card that I've had for several months, and upped my memory from 512MB to 1GB (2x512MB modules in dual channel mode), which was also on the todo list.
I engaged the SATA RAID BIOS on reboot and let the PC boot to the old boot disk, to make sure the memory and NIC upgrades took OK.
They worked just fine, so I rebooted again, this time intercepting the boot when the SATA RAID BIOS prompted flased and instructed it to build a RAID 1 volume. This took about 30 seconds.
I then let the boot to windows proceed. Since I would be using True Image (TI) 9 to image the old drive to the new RAID volume, I also used TI to "install" the new drive, to ensure that it was installed as the type of volume that TI likes, and not a dynamic volume or something like that. TI did it's duty and asked me to reboot.
The drive was recognized on reboot, although Windows asked me to reboot yet again after it recognized the drive.
On the next reboot, everything was fine. I had TI image my boot drive to the RAID volume, using a proportional method (the three partiions on the old 30GB boot drive were scaled to fit the new 80GB RAID1 volume).
I watched some TV as the PC rebooted and TI did it's thing.
I then let windows boot from the old drive one more time.
I then rebooted again and set the SATA RAID volume as the first and only boot device. On reboot, windows started without incident. I then used Acronis Disk Director (DD) to change the sizes of the partions on the new boot disk, to get rid of a partition on this disk, and to make a few changes to the old boot disk. I also moved my swap file to a small 3GB partition on the former boot disk.
Everything is working great. It's probably due more to the increased memory than anything else, but I rarely see the HDD activity light blinking anymore. I think boot time is about twenty seconds faster than before too (from power-on until HS is completely started).
I've also noticed that my RDP sessions between my two GigaBit-equiped PCs are much faster now. The session is opened as quickly as I click the link - barely any time to see the "connecting to" box.
I'm very happy with the upgrades - so far....
