My 2nd home built comp. soon to be? I hope. Any words of wisdom?

I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 (I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. as
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pro
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?

"smirks" wrote in message
...
I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 (I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. as
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pro
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?




make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all that new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall

you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chipset
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.

On Mar 17, 7:47*pm, "Jim E" wrote:
"smirks" wrote in message

...

*I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 *(I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
*I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. as
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pro
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?

make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all that new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall

you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chipset
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.

Yea I'm hopen I can use the HD without reinstalling XP, but now I'm in
a real pickle the new mobo has 2x SAS plugs, onboard SAS, I don't know
much about SAS but read it's faster than SATA, so now not sure. OMG?
use 2 new equal same HDD's RAID 0+1, 3 new HD's RAID 5. Geez what
would be best setup for gamer CAD PC. Wish I had knew, been googleing
brains out. lol
TY 4 reply

On Mar 17, 11:30*pm, smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 7:47*pm, "Jim E" wrote:





"smirks" wrote in message

....

*I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 *(I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
*I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. as
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pro
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?

make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all that new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall

you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chipset
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.

Yea I'm hopen I can use the HD without reinstalling XP, but now I'm in
a real pickle the new mobo has 2x SAS plugs, onboard SAS, I don't know
much about SAS but read it's faster than SATA, so now not sure. OMG?
use 2 new equal same HDD's RAID 0+1, 3 new HD's RAID 5. Geez what
would be best setup for gamer CAD PC. Wish I had knew, been googleing
brains out. lol
TY 4 reply- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well after looking into the SAS, no way at this time.My SATA card has
2 pugin's on it, so that kills RAID 5 also I guess.

smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 11:30 pm, smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 7:47 pm, "Jim E" wrote:





"smirks" wrote in message
...
I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 (I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. as
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pro
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?
make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all that new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall
you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chipset
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.
Yea I'm hopen I can use the HD without reinstalling XP, but now I'm in
a real pickle the new mobo has 2x SAS plugs, onboard SAS, I don't know
much about SAS but read it's faster than SATA, so now not sure. OMG?
use 2 new equal same HDD's RAID 0+1, 3 new HD's RAID 5. Geez what
would be best setup for gamer CAD PC. Wish I had knew, been googleing
brains out. lol
TY 4 reply- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well after looking into the SAS, no way at this time.My SATA card has
2 pugin's on it, so that kills RAID 5 also I guess.

When buying a new motherboard from Asus, you download the motherboard manual
first and inspect what is offered.

http://support.asus.com.tw/download/...l=p6t%20deluxe

http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LG..._Deluxe_V3.zip

Southbridge ICH10R

6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports (RAID modes available or individual disks)

Marvell 88SE6320

2 x SAS (RAID 0 and 1)

Marvell 88SE6111

UltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices (i.e. one ribbon cable)

External SATA port (SATA On-the-Go)

Doing a "Repair Install", using your WinXP CD, is how you'd normally
deal with driver differences. The Repair Install offers a chance to
press F6, and install any driver that might be necessary, so the
hard drive can be seen. In the case of your new motherboard, you
might for example, want to use AHCI mode, so that chipset SATA supports
hot plugging. The Repair Install would give you an opportunity to
do that. The Repair Install takes you back to the state of that
WinXP install CD, so would remove any custom IE install you might
have added, removed your latest WMP, and would require a trip to
Windows Update, to get all the security patches and later service
packs again. But the Repair Install preserves your program installations
and user data, so is less work than "flattening" the drive and starting
all over again.

(Repair install basics)
http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/window...airinstall.htm

(Repair install, with lots of colored text :-) )
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Yes, there are recipes for moving a drive from one computer to
another, but they involve special cases. For example, if your
old computer was a Dell, and your new computer was a home-brew,
well, forget moving that drive over... It would be too hard
to repair if there was trouble. I've moved drives using
Win2K, as in that case, there is no activation to worry about,
and I've done it without a repair install. It works, but
not 100% all the time. On one of my transfers, I could
never get the video card to run accelerated in games, and
that one was a disaster. I had to reinstall to fix that one.

Before moving any drive from one computer to another, make sure
you have a backup. I like to "clone" the drive (make a sector
by sector copy), as one means to that end. And I have had to
go to my backup, when something bad happened, so a backup is
a good thing to have. Not all "brain surgery" has a
happy ending. New drives are cheap, so there isn't an excuse
to not have a backup in case of trouble.

HTH,
Paul

On Mar 18, 6:31*am, Paul wrote:
smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 11:30 pm, smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 7:47 pm, "Jim E" wrote:

"smirks" wrote in message
....
*I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 *(I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
*I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. as
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pro
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?
make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all that new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall
you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chipset
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.
Yea I'm hopen I can use the HD without reinstalling XP, but now I'm in
a real pickle the new mobo has 2x SAS plugs, onboard SAS, I don't know
much about SAS but read it's faster than SATA, so now not sure. OMG?
use 2 new equal same HDD's RAID 0+1, 3 new HD's RAID 5. Geez what
would be best setup for gamer CAD PC. Wish I had knew, been googleing
brains out. lol
TY 4 reply- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well after looking into the SAS, no way at this time.My SATA card has
2 pugin's on it, so that kills RAID 5 also I guess.

When buying a new motherboard from Asus, you download the motherboard manual
first and inspect what is offered.

http://support.asus.com.tw/download/...uage=en-us&mod....

http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LG...262_P6T_Deluxe...

* * Southbridge ICH10R

* * * *6 xSATA 3 Gb/s ports (RAID modes available or individual disks)

* * Marvell 88SE6320

* * * *2 x SAS (RAID 0 and 1)

* * Marvell 88SE6111

* * * *UltraDMA 133/100/66 for up to 2 PATA devices (i.e. one ribbon cable)

* * * *External SATA port (SATA On-the-Go)

Doing a "Repair Install", using your WinXP CD, is how you'd normally
deal with driver differences. The Repair Install offers a chance to
press F6, and install any driver that might be necessary, so the
hard drive can be seen. In the case of your new motherboard, you
might for example, want to use AHCI mode, so that chipset SATA supports
hot plugging. The Repair Install would give you an opportunity to
do that. The Repair Install takes you back to the state of that
WinXP install CD, so would remove any custom IE install you might
have added, removed your latest WMP, and would require a trip to
Windows Update, to get all the security patches and later service
packs again. But the Repair Install preserves your program installations
and user data, so is less work than "flattening" the drive and starting
all over again.

(Repair install basics)http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/window...airinstall.htm

(Repair install, with lots of colored text :-) )http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Yes, there are recipes for moving a drive from one computer to
another, but they involve special cases. For example, if your
old computer was a Dell, and your new computer was a home-brew,
well, forget moving that drive over... It would be too hard
to repair if there was trouble. I've moved drives using
Win2K, as in that case, there is no activation to worry about,
and I've done it without a repair install. It works, but
not 100% all the time. On one of my transfers, I could
never get the video card to run accelerated in games, and
that one was a disaster. I had to reinstall to fix that one.

Before moving any drive from one computer to another, make sure
you have a backup. I like to "clone" the drive (make a sector
by sector copy), as one means to that end. And I have had to
go to my backup, when something bad happened, so a backup is
a good thing to have. Not all "brain surgery" has a
happy ending. New drives are cheap, so there isn't an excuse
to not have a backup in case of trouble.

HTH,
* * * Paul- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thank you all good stuff, I have several diff. methods I've found to
try making a good HD transfer, My old comp. was my 1st home build a
Intel DPERLXX mobo can't rem. numbers off hand, 2.8gh. pent. 4 cpu,
the boardbest video slot was a PCI 8, radeon 7000 vid card, was able
to play warcraft online around 35-40 fps on dsl.I thot that was pretty
good for a 9 yr. old pc.I put a new psu, (power supply) vid. card and
the SATA/150 300gb hd in about 3 yrs. ago, also a new 40gb hd. Seems
the psu died and thats when I decided to build a new comp. the old
one served me well, but is out dated. Well I just noticed that my SATA
card has 2 sata plug ins a single IDE, so maybe I could still do a
RAID 5 on it, but I doubt I can find a 7200 rpm 300gb hd with a IDE
connection for the sata card? What I'm really pondering is the best
setup management for this mobo and memory storage. The RAID 5 with
300-500 seems to be best for me, but I'm a real nube as to a good
speed and management setup for this mobo. I may just use the single
300gb HD on the sata/150 card till I can learn a good sound setup
without spending much more. I almost went with the Intel DX58SO till I
found some flaws in the board layout, and the Asus deluxe just seemed
to have so much more options available. Sadly I'm unsure of best and
cheapest use setup.

smirks wrote:


Thank you all good stuff, I have several diff. methods I've found to
try making a good HD transfer, My old comp. was my 1st home build a
Intel DPERLXX mobo can't rem. numbers off hand, 2.8gh. pent. 4 cpu,
the boardbest video slot was a PCI 8, radeon 7000 vid card, was able
to play warcraft online around 35-40 fps on dsl.I thot that was pretty
good for a 9 yr. old pc.I put a new psu, (power supply) vid. card and
the SATA/150 300gb hd in about 3 yrs. ago, also a new 40gb hd. Seems
the psu died and thats when I decided to build a new comp. the old
one served me well, but is out dated. Well I just noticed that my SATA
card has 2 sata plug ins a single IDE, so maybe I could still do a
RAID 5 on it, but I doubt I can find a 7200 rpm 300gb hd with a IDE
connection for the sata card? What I'm really pondering is the best
setup management for this mobo and memory storage. The RAID 5 with
300-500 seems to be best for me, but I'm a real nube as to a good
speed and management setup for this mobo. I may just use the single
300gb HD on the sata/150 card till I can learn a good sound setup
without spending much more. I almost went with the Intel DX58SO till I
found some flaws in the board layout, and the Asus deluxe just seemed
to have so much more options available. Sadly I'm unsure of best and
cheapest use setup.

For the amount you're spending, you should be able to afford multiple
cheap disks connected to SATA ports. The six Intel RAID ports, should
allow you to build a four drive RAID5 if you want. If you use four
250GB drives, the total capacity in RAID5 is 750GB (the other 250GB
holds parity data - parity data is actually distributed, so this
statement is only meant to reflect how to calculate the capacity
available).

For example, I can find a 250GB drive for $48, and four of those
is not that expensive. But you might want to search for something
better suited for RAID.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136113

One benefit of buying four drives, is you can experiment with
RAID5, but you can also throw the drives into RAID0+1 or
RAID10 mode, if you want a different balance between read
and write performance.

They have a 320GB RE2 WD3201ABYS here for $86. RE2 means the time
response of the drive is adjusted so that the drive comes back
before the RAID controller declares a timeout. This is intended to
reduce the incidence of "degraded" arrays in everyday usage. You'd
have to find some reviews for these drives, to understand whether
it is a load of crap or not (try storagereview.com). I'd sooner
just spend the money on a couple extra drives, and eat the occasional
rebuild when it happens.

http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=289985

TLER on a RE2/RE3 type drive.
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....p?p_faqid=1478
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc....p?p_faqid=1397

"TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) stops the hard drive from entering into
a deep recovery cycle. The hard drive will only spend 7 seconds to attempt
to recover. This means that the hard drive will not be dropped from a RAID
array."

If you have the money, there are all sorts of things you can buy.

This is an example of a SAS drive. It is 15000 RPM, so the seek time
will be lower than ordinary drives. This would be better than
a Velociraptor, which is a SATA drive with 10000 RPM spindle.
Both cost in the $300 range for 300GB storage. I don't see
this in the storagereview.com database, so you'll have to look
around for a review.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145247

My personal preference, is to build computers with a single drive,
and preferably, a drive with a single platter inside. The intent
is to gain reliability, by using as little "drive" as possible.
A second drive in an enclosure, can be used for occasional backups.
The second drive doesn't need high performance, and can be a 1TB
for best cost/capacity. The external enclosure should have a fan
for cooling - many prepackaged drives lack this feature, which is
why I build up my own. This is an example of an enclosure with
a fan. It happens to be for IDE drives, but it gives the basic
idea. I have an optical drive in this one at the moment, which
is why I bought a 5.25" enclosure. But this one also takes 3.5" hard
drives.

(Back view of my newest enclosure...)
http://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggIma...604-006-03.jpg

For enclosures, you have to read the reviews on Newegg for some
of them. There is some real garbage out there, stuff not worth
buying. Trays are another option, if you like that sort of
thing.

With all of the storage interfaces on your computer, they
all don't "RAID" together. Your SAS can do RAID0 with two
drives. Your ICH10R can do a RAID5 with at least four drives
(I don't know if all six can be used in the same array or
not - typically the six ports are split, with four drives on one
logical controller, and two drives on a second logical
controller). I don't know right off hand, what you can
do with the 88SE6111, but it looks like it is mainly
for non-RAID usage.

Have fun,
Paul

In article , smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 11:30=A0pm, smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 7:47=A0pm, "Jim E" wrote:





"smirks" wrote in message

..=
..

=A0I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 =A0(I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
=A0I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. a=
s
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pr=
o
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?

make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all tha=
t new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall

you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chips=
et
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.

Yea I'm hopen I can use the HD without reinstalling XP, but now I'm in
a real pickle the new mobo has 2x SAS plugs, onboard SAS, I don't know
much about SAS but read it's faster than SATA, so now not sure. OMG?
use 2 new equal same HDD's RAID 0+1, 3 new HD's RAID 5. Geez what
would be best setup for gamer CAD PC. Wish I had knew, been googleing
brains out. lol
TY 4 reply- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well after looking into the SAS, no way at this time.My SATA card has
2 pugin's on it, so that kills RAID 5 also I guess.
The 2 SAS ports are backwards compatible with SATA.

On Mar 18, 5:29*pm, (GMAN) wrote:
In article , smirks wrote:



On Mar 17, 11:30=A0pm, smirks wrote:
On Mar 17, 7:47=A0pm, "Jim E" wrote:

"smirks" wrote in message

..=
..

=A0I found a package deal Asus P6T Delux X58 with OC palm USB device,
920
cpu, and 3x2GB STT mem. sticks, Acer H233Hbmid
23" LCD Monitor, XFX Radeon HD 4870 XXX Edition Video Card -
1024MB GDDR5 =A0(I had a hard time deciding Nvidia or ATI)
=A0I'm hoping my SATA/150 300GB HD will be enough from my old comp. a=
s
it's less than 2 yrs. old lots space never touched. I also have XP Pr=
o
on the HD, and am gonna partion and put Vista Premium Home 64 bit on
it, if I can?

make sure you get your old xp up and running first because with all tha=
t new
hardware i wouldnt be surprised if xp wants a reformat/reinstall

you might be lucky and it might reconfigure itself but remove the chips=
et
drivers before you remove your hd from the old machine.

Yea I'm hopen I can use the HD without reinstalling XP, but now I'm in
a real pickle the new mobo has 2x SAS plugs, onboard SAS, I don't know
much about SAS but read it's faster than SATA, so now not sure. OMG?
use 2 new equal same HDD's RAID 0+1, 3 new HD's RAID 5. Geez what
would be best setup for gamer CAD PC. Wish I had knew, been googleing
brains out. lol
TY 4 reply- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well after looking into the SAS, no way at this time.My SATA card has
2 pugin's on it, so that kills RAID 5 also I guess.

The 2 SAS ports are backwards compatible with SATA.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I've read the SAS are backward compatible, but I have no idea what
that means? For sata use.

smirks wrote:

The 2 SAS ports are backwards compatible with SATA.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

I've read the SAS are backward compatible, but I have no idea what
that means? For sata use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI

SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drives may be connected to SAS backplanes,
but SAS drives may not be connected to SATA backplanes.

It means SAS can handle both SAS drives and SATA drives.

But you're paying good money for SAS, and have plenty
of SATA ports already. SAS means you have the ability
to use 15K RPM drives, which with other motherboards
would not be available to you. People with SATA only
motherboards, get to play with 10K drives at most
(Velociraptor). There aren't any 15K drives with
SATA interfaces that I've heard of.

Paul