It's that time of year...

[Steve]

Somehow, it seems that January/February time, I like to do a bit of upgrading. Fortunately, this time around I'm a uni student and so am obliged to limit myself a little. I intend to upgrade my laptop soon - while I can still sell it for what you might consider a fair price, but my main PC is still fine, except for one thing: storage.

With four 80GB drives, there was a time when I thought I'd never fill it. Of course, that time has now come. So, I've just made use of the wonderful SCAN2HEXUS free shipping (hurrah for the shameless plug,) and bought myself four Seagate 7200.8 250GB SATA drives. That's a TB, folks.

Of course, my avatar doesn't say RAID monkey for nothing. I'll be flexing my RAID muscles with a bit NVIDIA SATA RAID 5. I've had three disks sat in RAID 0 on it and it's blisteringly fast, thanks to not being limited by the PCI bus. RAID 5 is going to add some overhead, but I've used PCI RAID 5 before and the NV RAID should do a better job than what I had before.

Shifting to a new RAID array also brings the benefit of flattening the OS - getting all the crap off of it. Plus I can take that copy of XP x64 edition that I bought nearly 6 months ago for a spin.

So, hard drives aside, what have I been up to? I've done a few HEXUS.reviews over Christmas, but it's back to uni now so I tend to cut back on the reviews and stick to the news, given that my time is precious. The only trouble is that as the site grows, so does the amount of work I have to do - oh dear!

Still, all's good here, and it'll be even better when I decide how to partition 750GB of disk space.

[Steve]

No sooner had I made this post than I discovered that NVIDIA RAID 5 only exists on Intel NF4 systems. It looks that way anyway. Oh well, it'll be RAID 0 + 1 I guess.