Topic Title

Ok so I had a spontaniuse purchase moment yesterday. Two SSD 120's, one SSD 250, one 3TB sata, and one USB3 docking for old harddrives to back up. old drives are two 1.5TB not raid. was planning on removing and keeping in case of OH SH?? moment. Then I figured mit as well get 24 GB ram as it may not be this cheap again or available.

Now for the help ?????

the plan was a backup ssd to not be down any time if failed. (Then found the 250 ) Then Tech suggested stripping the two for boot. Ok so I had to go get a USB 3 card

can I get two 1TB sata and strip them and mirrior both raids to the 3TB?

Or would I be better off mirroring the two 120 SSD strip and mirror to the 250 SSD and just use the 3TB as I have the 1.5TB?? (Ok I am old school old drives where one split into 3 (c:,d:,E) and one used as network drive whole)

Ok so 12 gig ram up grade is not overnight shipped as the others are.

Any advice would be helpfull as some times my expermints some time get to costly...........

[Mark F. Madura]

While striping drives results in faster data transfer, if one of the drives dies, you'll lose the data on both drives (learned from personal experience).

Mirroring two drives (RAID Level 1) avoids this problem.

ok rethinking . after 9 hours of learning about SSD's. I think they are cool. Not able to reinstall Windows 7 yet. (I can not remember how the upgrades worked) I did learned about RAID, maybe!

Thinking of dual boot using the 240 SSD for second system of Windows 7 and the two 120 SSDs for ready boost and or running VM inside either machine. Sticking with Data stored on none system disk, and copies on second disk. I keep saying this then go oh this one program will not hurt. Over time I have said that to many times it appears. My next new machine will have an SSD boot drive

Ok so next question anyone have good registry clean up of old program junk??? After coming to understand programs I have loaded played with and removed are more registry clean up. I think spring cleaning better then trying to reload three years of stuff from scratch.

Mark

Thank you for sharing your experience of RAID. It seems much more for large libraries then the every day DATACAD user one man office/machine. And unless you have many hard drives to risky for me. I may have run Datacad all in ram back in dos days but all ways only would loss the one file working on if power brown out during autofile save. Oh the days when I felt young and smart.........

With the speed of good SSD's on a GOOD PCIx Sata III controller, there is not much need to raid 0 anymore, but if you raid 0 2 SSD's there would be a significant boost, just not as much of a jump as compared to when we raided 0 on HDD's and as Mark eluded to, you have to keep a good system image handy and your data either on another drive or make sure your backups are reliable and available.

If you meant to add the 2 SSD's to an existing system that the OS is installed on a HDD & if your running 6 GB's or less of ram, moving your pagefile to one of the SSD's and then setting up the second as a ready boost drive would probably be your best bet. If you have 8GB of ram or more you can disable the pagefile altogether as it's not needed for Windows 7 anymore and either set both SSD's as ready boost or one for ready boost and then the other for specific application temp/swap/scratch files. Once you get the system onto a SSD, then you can ditch ready boost as it wouldn't make any difference at that point.

As for reg cleaners, I'll leave the argument of if they are snake oil or not out and suggest CCleaner. I use it and I check the entries it removes and they are legit at a glance so I let it do it's thing. I don't know if I ever saw any speed increase but I'm OCD and it makes me happy.

Well update. Windows index of 7.0 due to GTS 250 limit.

I found that the 240 did not like to be system disk so loaded new windows pro 7 on one of the 120 and plan to use the 240 and other 120 as Josh suggested.
Should be able to dual boot eighter old system or new system while migrating stuff from three year old system to clean SSd system boot.
the 24 gig is not here yet, maybe tomorrow

The plan

old system has C: D: and E: on one drive, and Drive P: stand alone. (two Drives both 1.5 TB)
The plan is to use the SSDs as this 120=C:, SSD 240=D:, and SSD 120=E: with backups to drive p: stand alone same location both systems. While getting comfortable with SSD
(the trick is labeling the drives to make sure I can identify and access them drives in both systems)
So I can back eighter system up with out being on that system.

The end resoult will be SSD boot C:, D: and E: harddrive, F: and G: SSDs for those VM and other stuff needed to be fast (scratch drives), P: still stand alone

Ok so this is begining to look like once again some body had a better plan and I am begining to understanding it as I go.

Thank you Mark and Josh for helping me understand!!!..........

well now I have done it deactivated my Datacad on old system! And you guessed it will not activate on either system.

Sorry Datacad

Call them in the morning with your license & password and they'll get you going.

I would stay completely away from RAID in a workstation - as the controllers are very unreliable. Also, I have yet to see a a test that showed anything more than an incremental improvement in performance. Again, it seems the RAID controller is the limiting factor. Good, reliable controllers are quite expensive; and the ones on motherboards are "free" and worth everything you pay for them.

An SSD itself is already much faster than even 10K RPM hard drives.

Well swapping between systems may not be able to be done the easy way "Changing Boot order in BIOS"

So rethinking again!!!............ The New system is FAST and GREAT if I just had programs loaded !!
I did find license for Sketch up so that is all the new system has for now? I mitt be getting all that junk in new system, loading unloading and so on??

The adventures I get my self into. Mark any way this counts as extreme beta testing?????


Neil,

Thank you I caught that in another post of yours and was pretty sure not going there and Mark and Josh just supported your thinking. It was the computer tech at store that suggested it, and even got me thinking just maybe. Thank you, Josh, and Mark from keeping me out of that quick sand.

Back up and running on old system.. ??? not sure I will deactivate till migration is done.

Thank you Datacad staff!

Ok so now thinking holt..... Till I save up to replace video, MOB, case and power supply. then put all the old memory, old drives, (if I take them out) back in and build all new system rather then migrate........twice
Removing old programs not using or updated seems to cleaned machine up a little??????

Of course till then use the new stuff.......