Installation Decision

[foolycooly]

Hey guys,

Sorry if this has been asked a bunch of times...I scanned through recent posts and didn't see anything about it.

I will be receiving my windows 7 upgrade from newegg in 2 days and am unsure of my plan of attack for installing it. From what I understand, there is an option for a transition-style upgrade that will carry all of my programs and files over to the new OS. However, I feel like a clean install would be a better option.

If I chose a clean install, will the install disk guide me through a format? Or am I better off doing a clean sweep myself, then booting to the disc through the BIOS to install, just like I did with vista 64 bit after I finished my build? If I should format myself, can you recommend a method? I have used 'boot n' nuke' before and seemed to have good results.

Thanks for any info as always.

 

[buwish]

I used the upgrade method for the RC1 on my laptop (Vista to RC1) and it seemed to go well. W7 simply saves all of your old files in "Windows.Old." I didn't have any issues with programs not working afterwards, nor hardware. I'm sure the clean install is the best way to go, but it you want something more convenient, there is nothing wrong with the upgrade option.

 

[foolycooly]

On a side note, what do you guys think of adding another WD caviar black 640gb in raid 0 before installing 7? Would you agree that my HDD is the current bottleneck in my system?

i7 920 @ 3.8 ghz
P6T Deluxe V2
OCZ Platinum 6gb
GTX 295
WD Caviar Black 640gb

After noticing pretty low in-game recording speed, I figured an HDD upgrade would help. Any suggestions?

 

[evongugg]

You would have to do a clean install with RAID0
RAID0 is not recommended for home users.
Get a Velociraptor perhaps. You have the option of cloning if you wish.

 

[foolycooly]

Is RAID0 not recommended because of the threat of data loss? If that's the case, I'm not particularly worried, since I can backup my important files regularly.

 

[evongugg]

If you're determined buy 2 RAID edition hard drives.
Error correction in a RAID array is performed in the RAID software and has a timeout factor. On a regular desktop drive, the error correction is performed by the drive and has a different timeout factor. The raid array timeout factor is less. If the time limit is exceeded it can cause a non-Raid certified drive to drop out of the array. Find out more here: http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2579-001098.pdf

 

[hardwaretechy]

Would you agree that my HDD is the current bottleneck in my system?

It depends what you are using it for. With a build like that I'm assuming that you are playing games. Once the game loads, the HDD is out of the picture and not going to cause you to have any lower fps. At worst you might experience a lag blip when a game saves data (single player games do this), but thats unavoidable no matter what setup you have.

After noticing pretty low in-game recording speed, I figured an HDD upgrade would help. Any suggestions?

After this comment, it sounds like you are recording your games with FRAPS or something similar. In this case the HDD is going to bottleneck you pretty big time, depending on what parameters you're trying to record with. A good fast RAID edition HDD running in RAID 0 at this point would probably increase your performance. However I can't imagine that you're playing like this all the time taking that performance hit.

 

[foolycooly]

Yeah, there is no performance issue whatsoever when playing the game. My biggest concern is capturing video. I am indeed using FRAPs, and even while recording at half size my framerates can drop below 30 fps in spikes. I figured a relatively cheap ($75) solution would be to get another caviar black and run them in raid 0. However, I was unaware that they are not good raid drives. As you can tell, I have relatively little knowledge on the subject of RAIDs.

I plan on doing a clean install of windows 7 when it comes, so I figured that would be the best time to wipe/install the raid. If you guys think it's not a good idea, however, I might just do a clean install on my single drive.

 

[bliq]

Not sure why those drives are not good for RAID- I thought just about anything could be used for RAID- didn't even have to be the same size.

If you have 2 drives that are identical, I think you'd be fine. Lots of consumers run RAID 0 (like me) and generally don't have problems. lots of consumer systems are sold with RAID 0 by major manufacturers and the technology is pretty mature and robust. There is the threat of data loss which technically doubles (MTBF is technically cut in half) but you're backing up (good for you).

That said, you do have to do some BIOS and RAID BIOS tweaking to set up and then a clean install, which is what I think most people believe is the best way to install any new OS.

 

[mi1ez]

If you want a faster drive look at an SSD such as the OCZ vertex and use your current drive for music/vids etc.

 

[dannyaa]

+1 on SSD. If you are going to spend money to upgrade an HDD for speed's sake, an SSD is the only way to go. Anything with a modern Indilinix controller is good; Intel G2 is the best... it will depend on your budget. With Indilinix you can get a great 128gb SSD for $350ish, and use your current 640gb for all your storage needs.

All system files/apps, your favorite games, and video capture can go on the SSD. The rest of the installs, then media that needs lot of storage space can go on your 640gb.

Way faster and easier than dealing with RAID, as well as a host of other benefits. If you are going to spend the money to do it, do it right. If you want to wait to save, you could just do an upgrade install for the time being which from what I hear will work just fine.

 

[geofelt]

For such a strong configuration, see if you can swing a SSD. Intel X25-M is currently the safest bet. Research carefully if you want a different SSD; there are only one or two good others. You will get no real performance increase in writing with raid-0, possibly worse. Reading will not be helped much either in most cases. I would put the recording file on a separate drive without any raid.

 

[foolycooly]

I would get no increase in write speed with a raid 0? Isn't that the point of a raid 0?

 

[geofelt]

I would get no increase in write speed with a raid 0? Isn't that the point of a raid 0?

The point of raid-0 is to distribute the file data on two drives that can be accessed simultaneously. A single task will do one thing at a time. It will be writing to drive 1 or 2, but not both at the same time unless the application is written to start a write(or read) before the previous operation is complete. A hardware(not mobo) based raid card can handle that, but they are expensive. Cacheing writes might just do , but then you have a file integrity exposure.