Buying a New PC

[viper37]

Never tried no.

I should try that, next time I upgrade.

It's not worth the hassle.
The gain in speed is negligeable.

[Grey Fox]

Yeah, I was looking it up & I think I remembered why I never bothered.

[Caliga]

Well, I've got the new hard drive in and am formatting it now.

Question: Can I install Vista on the new HDD and then just copy shit over from the old one at my leisure?  Will MS balk at two instances of Vista with the same key on the same PC?

[viper37]

Hey Caliga, what kind of raid you want? For speed or for back up?

If I have to choose, I choose backup.

RAID 0+1 will give you both, but as I said, it's not worth it.  And it's not really a backup.

RAID 1 will copy your data on a second hard drive so that if one fails, you still have a copy on the other one.  However, you can't operate with just one hard drive, you need another replacement before restarting your system, and then you need to rebuild the RAID array.

RAID 0 will give you extra speed by splitting the data accross 2 hdds and having them work concurrently.  So when you write&read data to your hdd, instead of loading one big file, it's as if you were loading 2 small files.  That's for theory.  In practice, you'd never get 2x the speed.  Maybe gain at most 5% more speed, in the best possible conditions (moving large chunks of data, like one of those gigantic blu-ray ripped porn movies ).
The inconvenient is that if one drive fails, you lose everything.  You will have to reformat your new hard drive and the old one before you can rebuild a RAID array.

RAID 0+1 gives you the best of both world for 4x the price of one HDD as you now need 4 identical HDDs (ideally) to operate your system, but still, if one fail, you'll have to format everything.

Everyone makes the same mistake of thinking RAID 1 is backup, but RAID is not backup.  It does not replace backup.  It can be used as a complement to backup.

For the forum server, RAID can be useful, but for a gaming/any personal computer I don't recommend it, based on personal experience and past misconceptions...

[Caliga]

Yeah, I was just kinda idly musing on the RAID thing.

[Grey Fox]

Should be fine Caliga re: Vista.

I multi-boot XP-Vista-7 in both 32 & 64 bits on the same system at work.

[Caliga]

I figured it prolly would be, but doesn't Micro$oft track your hardware changes and if you make too many changes with the same license, require you to call in or some other such annoying junk?

Otherwise, it's not like both copies can run simultaneously.

[Grey Fox]

I think it's all about the Mobo.

[Caliga]

Yeah, that makes sense.

ARGH, why didn't I just do a quick format on this new HDD?  I always forget to do it that way.

[Grey Fox]

5h Format sucks, eh?

[Caliga]

Well, it's 42% done and been going about an hour.

[Faeelin]

Jesus, you're not buying the drinks in a bar are you?

Course I am. She just turned 21 

[The Brain]

Jesus, you're not buying the drinks in a bar are you?

Course I am. She just turned 21 

Make them yourself in your home if you're a man.

[Iormlund]

2500$?

Dude, this isnt 2001 anymore, a decent gaming computer is barely 1k$.

evidently, he'll get more than decent

Or a Mac.

[grumbler]

Yeah, I was just kinda idly musing on the RAID thing.

RAID really only works well when you have a separate RAID controller.  You can run it off your main processor, but all you are really doing is sucking up system resources to support a useless feature.

If you are going RAID, get the separate controller and go RAID 5 on three 1TB disks.  If you are not running a server, though, this is way overkill.