WSLD (What Should Law Do)

[law.of.averages]

Ok guys...here's my dilema...

Fry's had/has a great deal on 160G SATA-II drives. $39.00 each / free shipping. I ordered 2, they'll be here Friday.

Law Zero has 2 250G SATA-I drives. Raid-0 for 500G. Currently I only use about 60G of that space.

My Vista upgrade began on 4/6 and has not been activated yet.

So, from 'maximum hassle' to 'least hassle'

Should I clean-install Vista (and everything else) on the 160G's giving up the (unused) space in favor of speed.

Should I migrate my current Vista install to the 160G's

Should I leave my install, split the 160G's into two external boxes for Me and the Mrs. to use for backup

Should I just refuse the order, as I had no business ordering them in the first place?

[Yrrek]

Is there a link to that? Because that is a sweet deal! As for what you should do, forego Vista.

[Sideous Prime]

i don't have any data to back this up law, but i read on another forum that the difference between sata I and sata II is minimal. don't shoost the messenger, that's just what i read(for all i know a newbie posted it).

to contradict that, basic logic says that 1.5 gbps for sata I compared to 3.0 gbps for sata II is no comparison at all. Although the noticable read/write times won't be twice as fast, the difference SHOULD be noticeable?

also, you're only using 60 of a total 500 gig. WOW. isn't 20 of that the C: partition required for vista?

[law.of.averages]

Is there a link to that? Because that is a sweet deal! As for what you should do, forego Vista.

Yrrek, hit http://www.slickdeals.net look for the segate offer from Fry's ... i got in on a similar Maxtor offer last week.

Sid, Vista already rates my drives at 5.9. Not sure I'd gain anything... though I'd think striped SATA-II would be more likely to reach max transfer than SATA-II on a single drive.

If I don't want to re-use an activation, I guess I've got about a week and a half to decide

[Yrrek]

Cool, thanks Law.

[nonstop]

i don't have any data to back this up law, but i read on another forum that the difference between sata I and sata II is minimal. don't shoost the messenger, that's just what i read(for all i know a newbie posted it).

I told him that already sid.. he doesn't listen.

[Nytefyre]

if u intend on keeping the drives, id say klean install it....

otherwise, dont waste the tyme, or, more importantly, the money, and return/refuse the order...

[law.of.averages]

I think I came up with a plan...

I'm going to do a full image backup of my current setup, then restore to the new drives.

This way, I get moved to the faster SATA drives, but more importantly I give my backup/recovery strategy an end-to-end test.

[law.of.averages]

Update

Well the transfer to the SATA-II drives went off with only mild irritations.

I used Acronis True Image 10.0 to backup to an external USB drive, and create a rescue disk. Swapped the drives, and re-created the RAID on the new drives.

I had some trouble getting the rescue disk to boot, but that was because for some reason my MB was trying to boot the USB drive first. Fixed that.

Restore was good, but again I had trouble booting. I had to manually select the RAID from the boot menu. The first time, Vista came up with no problems...detected the new RAID said "Installed new devices" and asked to reboot.

After reboot was when it got scary. Vista immediately popped up with a problem, saying I needed to run a repair (even told me how) So I did...Aparently all it did was re-create the boot track, since it went very fast (unlike a repair of XP which is a re-install)

Reboot, and suddenly there's World Peace, and Everybody's happy.

While I've not done any benchmarkes, I have noticed that load times both in UT2004 and Anarchy Online are significantly faster than on the SATA-I drives. Though this may be in part because of the defragmentation incidental to the restore process.

I just ordered two Drive Rails from NewEgg. My extended plan is to use the SATA-I drives individually as backup/media drives.