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There's software programs such as Acronis True Image Home, which I've personally used for many of my own computers as well as for clients. There's also Norton Ghost. Both programs do an exact bit-for-bit copy of your partition over to another physical hard disk so you won't have to reinstall...

An eSATA external HDD would be best; they usually come with USB 2.0 connectors as well, but if it also has eSATA support, the more the merrier. :D

Perhaps it is a firmware issue? Has it been updated to the most recent revisions?

Something more important to pay attention to would be the motherboard's Southbridge - X58 utilizes the ever-familiar ICH10R, which for all intents and purposes for RAID 0/1/10/0+1 is pretty good at doing simple RAID functionality like that. :) As for RAID5, well, for hardware-assisted...

Yes, it is only with a few select maps that were initially created as a technology demonstration.

The performance will always be affected by simple disk drive dynamics that they cannot read and write at the same time, as Joe Average described in such detail. :)

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 has long been the performance king within the terabyte realm up until the WD Black topped it - but not by much. The main appeal of the WD Black IMO is that it has a five year warranty, as opposed to the Samsung's three year warranty. If you want to save a bit of money...

The motherboard shouldn't be a problem, but rather, the case you put it in! The motherboard most likely has a PCI-e 16 slot (don't worry about 2.0 spec, the 9800GX2 won't be bottlenecked by full band x16 PCI-e). I personally own an Antec P180 (sweet case :)), and you should have plenty of...

Yes. You will have to find a place to put your data until you set up any kind of RAID array from a simple volume. The process fundamentally changes how your controller handles your disks in your array, any kind of existing file structure and data would need to be formatted as a result of a new...

As far as I know, HD Tune Pro 3.0 and Acronis True Image Home feature disk wiping tools using Zero-Fill, Gutmann, or DoD 5015.2 standard wiping methods. There are probably other alternatives for free software out there, as well. As long as the disk you're using isn't the OS disk (obviously! :p)...

You can use disk cloning software such as Acronis True Image Home or Norton Ghost for a perfect 1:1 copy of your old disk to another disk. RAID1 (mirroring) does this on a real-time basis, but it doesn't protect against user error or malicious software/viruses. If you are backing up your old...

The HD4850s at the moment are all reference, so the main differences really lie in their warranty policies, which you should choose carefully on the ATI side. For Nvidia, their third-party vendors such as EVGA and XFX have been generally very good, though I can't say that the ATI side has many...

HD4850s, which would beat the 8800GT by a healthy margin, and is neck-to-neck with 9800GTXs, can be had for under $200 easily, about $150 after rebates as well. That would by far be your best option for a video card well under $200. :)

You can go into Disk Management utility (Right click "Computer" -> Manage) and extend the partition by right clicking the partition you wish to extend and you can enter a value (maximum of whatever unallocated space is available) to the partition you wish to expand. Make sure any unused...

Maybe it's a partition that was created on the disk a long time ago. You can delete the partition using Windows Disk Management (make sure you back up all the data on this smaller, secondary partition), and the expand your main 37.2GB partition into the 23.5MB partition and it should all be one...

Not unless you value your data - and your sanity - from the Click of Death! :D

If I read your post right, your monitor cable you are connecting to your computer is DVI? The reason why those controls are disabled is because DVI reproduces a "digitally perfect" image, and thus, color options and all those other neat stuff are disabled - because it's not needed to modify...

While they are the same core, it's probably a driver-level limitation that prevents SLI with slightly different cards with the same core. The GPU identifies itself as a certain card model (8800GT, 8800GTS, etc) and the driver would recognize this and prevent any kind of SLI if the two cards...

You shouldn't need to use the FDD cord for anything other than the FDD. All you need for your hard disk is a SATA cable (provided from the mobo box) and the SATA power (provided by the PSU). Personally, I would spend a bit more from your current choice in HDD and get the WD6400AAKS, that's...

It does seem slow, the extra parity set could be the reason.

Usually the drives in those "unknown" external HDD vendors are usually of the major disk brands, such as WD, Seagate, Hitachi, or Samsung OEM drives.

It uses the same mounting holes as the previous ATI generation cards, the 3870, which could mount an Accelero S1, so you should be able to. :)

That is a very nice setup you got there, how much can you overclock? Over here in the office, it's tough to OC those 4870s much past stock unless we start setting the fans at 100%. At that point it sounds like a hairdryer! :eek:

Do you intend to run RAID on these cards (like RAID5) or just hook up your disks to this PCIe card?

For SATA 2.5" disks, you should be fine just plugging in the desktop PSU connectors fine, they use the same standard connectors whether it is a 2.5" disk or a 3.5" disk. For IDE 2.5" disks, they are slightly different and would require a converter.

A single platter 320GB WD or a two platter WD 640GB seem to be very popular for their low prices and great performance due to the simple platter designs with 320GB per platter, allowing for greater areal density and therefore less seek times and faster overall performance. Plus, they run...

RAID5 is more appropriate for long-term storage solutions with some kind of redundancy, I personally wouldn't recommend RAID5 for an OS partition because of the processor overhead in regards to parity calculations. RAID5 is preferably on a hardware solution, with dedicated processors and memory...

Well, RAID levels also pertain to what you plan to use these disks for as well. For raw performance without much need for redundancy, RAID0 with those 320GBs are going to be fine (I am also assuming they are the WD 1-platter disks, which makes their reliability and performance very good). If...

PCI is shared bandwidth with a maximum throughput of 133MB/s, so there can be some bottlenecking going on if you plan to put, say, two controllers with 8 SATA drives connected.

Indeed, these cards look very promising for their performance. I'm sure many of us will be happy with this card's performance when they're released. :)

Have you monitored the temperatures on your card? Also it would help to have more details, like your case, CPU, video card, number of fans, motherboard, and your ambient temperatures. :)

It's somewhat of an unexact science. Hard disks can fail for a variety of reasons, but an advantage that two disks would have over one is that if one disk fails, then there is still another operating disk (assuming you're not doing any kind of RAID0 setup) that still contains data. The...

A lot of these musings about hard drives are based out of personal experience and rumor; I've personally bought eight 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1s and they all work fine; others would have bad experiences with some I'm sure, either as a result of user error or inherent defects. This goes for...

It's best to make the fastest hard disk as the OS drive for the best "zippiness" with loading applications and other hard disk I/O related applications (such as booting) in your OS. :D

You can try checking for BIOS updates to see if there are any compatibility updates for the Intel ICH9R chipset for your motherboard. :)

Hard drives will eventually fail, hopefully you did have backups and/or the data wasn't terribly important for daily life for you. :( The only thing I can suggest is to try to plug it in on other SATA slots or other computers to see if you have any greater luck that you can access the hard...

How does one have bent pins in a pinless processor design? :eek: I've heard of some expandability options and relatively stable software RAID solutions via Linux, so if that seems to be the best low-cost solution for you, feel free to do so. ;)

From the looks on your specs, it seems like you're thinking about doing hardware-assisted software RAID with onboard motherboard slots. You'll be tied down to whichever OS you decide to use, and if it's Windows Server, there won't be any expandability options if you set up a RAID5 array. Also...

Acronis True Image Home does exactly what you're talking about. It can make 1:1 image copies (something that Windows Drag-and-Drop fails at) and lets you copy over your entire 320GB drive to your new drive during a restart cycle (doesn't do it in Windows, so you know you won't have any copying...

Maxtor was bought out by Seagate a while ago, so in all likelihood, it would be a Seagate drive inside. :)