Consolidating my many hard drives

[intenso]

Hi guys

What do you think my best approach to this is?

Currently on my system (in sig) I have 2 36GB raptors running in RAID0 running WinXP. Then I have a 160GB on a USB IDE caddy, an 80GB and a 160GB on a PCI IDE card, then a 120GB and a 400GB on the motherboard's IDE1 Channel. I also have a 160GB SATA drive on the motherboard.

I have an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe, and i'm sick and tired of the BSODs and amount of trouble that having so many different hard drives have, they are all getting old and are differing brands.

To cut a long story short, my PC isn't booting atm, once I get that up and sorted (i MAY have blown my AMD 64 3200 + but not sure yet) i want to get rid of ALL the drives apart from the raptors and the 400GB have a more simplified machine, and buying 2 more big drives (SATA).

What do you think brings the best bang per buck? I was thinking 2 samsung spinpoint 250GBs, but maybe 2 300GB Western digitals would be a better bet?

Also, is it worth forking out the extra for SATA2, and does my motherboard support it on all sata connectors?

Nick

[Slamdog]

you are better off buying a couple of 300 western digis than the 250's. Saying that, if you can stretch to it get a pair of 400's and then you will easily have the extra capacity.

it will also give your psu a bit of a break, not having to power the pci card and all the extra drives as well.

[Fireblade]

I'm personally think 300GB drives currently offer the best VFM in GB per £. But there's not enough of a difference between them, to be put off buying either smaller capacity or larger capacity drives... and in your case (just going on what you were using previously)... I'd say larger would definitely be better

As for the prolems with the others: Even if they were all made by the same manufacturer... with so many drives, in such a varied mixture of IDE, SATA and USB... I'm not really surprised you were having problems

Anyways... good luck in getting your problems sorted... and I sincerely hope you haven't blown that Athlon 64 3200+ What did you do to it? Push it too far/hard OCing it? Fit it incorrectly (however unlikely)? Dodgy HS+F

[intenso]

well, you may have seen my other thread on RAM instability. Basically, I installed another 2 sticks of Corsair 4400. I was playing around with the settings and trying to get it stable. The ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe as i'm sure you've come across famously doesn't like running at 1T above 230FSB, so i tried, just as a test running at 1T at 220FSB. But for some reason this doubled up to 440 FSB, just for a moment. So i was running at 4400mhz !

I had to reset CMOS twice when i did this, and now i'm getting major instability even when running at stock settings, either i've b0rked the winXP installation on my raptors (I have an Acronis true image backup which I hope to use to restore at least back to a reasonable snapshot from about 3 months ago !), or the CPU is fried

Oh well i'll have to get a new opteron 144.

Thanks for the advices

Nick


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An update - I managed to get my PC up and running again. I reinstalled the motherboard chipset drivers and it seemed to sort it all out - the drivers running the software RAID and the IDE controllers in windows were screwed.

Its now running just on 2 x 512MB RAM now and i'm keeping it that way.

I think I'm going to stick with my current hard drive configuration for the time being seeing as i'm not that loaded and can justify spending £300 on hard drives just because its more organised !