Hard drive upgrade epic fail

jennidc · 4 Sep 2011 at 12:06

I finally had a day off today to fit my 2 new drives which I've been looking forward to sorting for a while.

The first is a Crucial SSD 60gb I got refurbished elsewhere for £45.

The second is a second F1 500gb SATA drive I got to raid 0 with my other drive which I got for £15 from the members market.

All went well at first - I successfully backed up my data to my USB hard drive as I was planning to install Win 7 on the SSD and then Raid 0 the 2 x F1's once installed.

Unfortunately I had not realised I had no SATA power connectors left on my PSU - I only have 1 DVDRW and 1 SATA HD connected :mad:

I thought no problem I'll mount the drives in the case anyway - then realised SSD's don't fit in my drive bay argghh its one of those days :mad:

Anyway OC has come to my rescue I've ordered a 3.5 to 2.5 drivebay for the SSD and a 4 pin molex to 2xSATA Power splitter lead and also treated myself to a 300mb wifi card all at very reasonable prices - thanks OC :cool:

Azarathal · 4 Sep 2011 at 12:23

Bit of a crap day by the sounds of it, I kinda like it when things like this happen though because you're forced to treat yourself

madsin · 4 Sep 2011 at 14:56

I have those days frequently and call em normal

ExecutorKevin · 4 Sep 2011 at 15:04

jennidc · 6 Sep 2011 at 17:05

All the stuff from oc arrived today so I set it all up.

First I installed the TP link wifi card, the SSD in the caddie and then in my drive bays.

I then spent ages trying to get to the sata slots on my motherboard - I had to use the edge ones (as my 5850 blocks 1 SATA port). I ended up removing the front of the drive bays so I could get my hand it at the right angle (I could also then see the slots). I connected up the 2 new drives with the sata cables and added power by installing the new splitter.

Whilst I had the drive bay off I dug around in my box of tricks and found an old but clean 120mm fan - so I installed that behind the 2 hard drives to keep them nice and cool.

I booted and the BIOS recognized the two drives and the new fan span up ok.

I then got out my Windows 7 Home Premium disk and installed a fresh copy to my SSD which I set as the boot drive.

Win7 installed in record time I also installed SP1 and some other updates.

In Windows I loaded Computer Admin and went into the drive admin software. I deleted the volume on both F1 HD's and created a new striped array over the 2 x 500gb volumes - creating a raid 0 array.

After rebooting I set a permanent page file on the SATA raid drives of 12gb (2.5 times sys ram). I then turned off paging on the SSD.

I then had to reboot - I now seem to have a startup time of around 12 seconds which is fab and everything seems snappier.

Everything worked first time which is a bonus. I'll probably just leave it in this state until I can upgrade to either BD or 25k dependant on the Bulldozer reviews.

I'm now off to research ideal settings for the SSD in the BIOS as everything is on auto for it at the mo - if anyone has any tips let me know. Cheers.