Firstly, I’m in the middle of a remote connection to work, also running an AVG virus scan in the background.
I go away to do something, ( windows-l to lock the computer) come back and unlock it.
Now my ‘u’ key starts the windows ease of access center. In hindsight (after reboot 1) it seems the windows key was permanently on.
So I decide to go post a GQ about this problem (not knowing at the time it was a windows key thing) but it’s not just u. it’s other keys… so I do a reboot.
Back on… I log back into my remote session at work, bring sdmb back up, ten minutes in my internet dies, for the second time since I downloaded SP1 (it dies in a most spectacular fashion - cannot restart it, windows won’t soft-shutdown as the process has hijacked things… even though I 'end task’d it)
Reboot number two.
It’s now 8:22pm and I’ve missed all the important TV I was going to watch.
Or rather, wiped the two HDs, configured them as raid-0 since the manufacturers had not bothered to set them up in a raid configuration (for the speed. I care not about data protection since this is merely a machine for fun) then partitioned them, then installed the two OSs
I bought a new laptop just after Christmas. I got an excellent price, BUT it came with Vista. I saved over $1,000 on the laptop, but had no choice really on Vista.
Am I dumb? Really?
Sometimes you get what you get, either say something useful or fuck off.
So I’m dumb for taking the advice of my IT colleagues? They led me to beleive that data stripping is supposed to double the speed of my hard disk access.
You know, I used to be totally set against Vista, and would not recommend it to ANYONE. I even beta-tested the damn thing for Microsoft, and stuff that I assumed hadn’t been included or fixed since it was a beta version turned out to be actual FEATURES.
However, I realized where I went wrong, and where everyone else is surely going wrong. Vista will suck if you put it on your computer. That’s the key - you need to have a computer MADE for Vista, and then it runs quite nicely. So the thing you should be stupid for is shelling out the money for hardware new and powerful enough to run it. Of course, if you’re buying it anyway, you might as well use the OS that the hardware was made to run with.
I think he improved the read/write speed but lost reliability.
Striping is faster but splits the data on to two disk, so the loss of either disk ruins all the data. Mirroring is slower but a crashed HD doesn’t lose the data.
Neither choice is a dumb decision if you do it for the right benefit, security or speed.
RAID-0 won’t improve access time at all. If anything, it’ll slow access down because of lag from the RAID controller. Access time is based on how quickly the drives get to the first bit of the data, which is more a function of the spin speed of the drive.
All RAID-0 improves is improve transfer speed. In reality though, it’s buggered by the overhead involved in reading both drives except for extremely large files. You’ll dominate synthetic benchmarks, but I’ve never seen RAID-0 provide anything but a marginal improvement in real world applications. Dozens of benchmarks exist, but this is a good set with a much better explanation than I wrote.
I take back what I said. Sounds like your IT colleagues are the problem, not you.
Gaining 2% isn’t worth giving up the redundancy of RAID-1.
As I said, though he also has the benefit of full storage capacity, and since he is only using the setup for fun, it would be stupid for him to go any other route.
How can you possibly say that? Different situations call for different things. If he is only using the system for fun and games, what is the purpose of redundancy? RAID 0 is a viable option for a number of reasons.
Also, 2%? I am in a room right now with 3 IBM Shark systems. Two are running RAID 5 and the last is running RAID 0. We also have several other systems using RAID 0 because it provides speed and space benefits, and we don’t happen to need redundancy on that system. We are getting MUCH better than 2% speed over RAID 5 with that setup, I assure you. If RAID 0 offers no benefits, then why is it even a storage architecture option?
Yes.
There are plenty of companies out there that let you ‘customize’ your ‘custom-built’ computer with the OS you want. You could have bought from one of them.
I would seriously question the competence of a custom-build company that restricts their customers to only vista.
I never said that, but the methodology is the same, and Lobsang’s setup is precisely the way I would have gone given the parameters of what he needs from his system.
Personally for my own home use, I prefer to have an external drive that I manually back the internal disk to once a week. This way if a catastrophe (flood, fire, etc.) were to occur where I am pressed for time, I can just grab the external and walk out the door.