In Summary.

I've been very pleased with the result of the build. I love this drive caddy, it makes things so much easier.
The main thing I've needed to do is be a little patient with RAID. Not that it's not faster than single drive, or safer for that matter, just that RAID needs to do finish what it starts before you hammer it again.
Example: whilst installing am application (Picasa2) I got a BSOD and the RAID reported a failed drive on installation. RAID started to rebuild and I gave it a hour (which isn't nearly enough time!) before trying again. This time, another BSOD and again a RAID failure, this time a different drive! Needless to say, the RAID array had failed by now as it had lost two drives over a short space of time before the first rebuild had completed.
In the end I rebuild the RAID and reinstalled - this time, touch wood, I've had no BSOD at all!

Raid

Setting up the RAID 5 was pretty straight forward.
These four 320G drives gave almost 900Gb of capacity.

Loading the hard drives

Spaghetti

It was looking OK until the IDE cable for the DVD drive was added, then things got a little messy ;)

Fiddly Bits

One nice touch on this motherboard are these little dongles that allow you to connect all the tiny connectors for the motherboard into a single plug that you can do outside of the case before slotting the plug into the motherboard in one go.

Graphics Card

It's the biggest one yet!










So bit in fact, it takes up two slot spaces. Wave goodbye to one PCI slot!

Into the case

PSU and motherboard








Memory









CPU

Motherboard

The ASUS P5B-E
It's very SATA friendly !

PSU

With a mountain of cables. Shame it ends up hidden away as the mirrored cover looks quite nice.

ICYBOX in situ

Once the rails were removed the ICYBOX fitted OK, if a little tight.

First off, a bit of case modding

I needed to bend back the CD rail slots on the case to make way for the ICYBOX.
Shame the ICY box doesn't come with grooves already.

Everything seems to be there

Not sure about the Hard Drives wrapped in bubblewrap!














Also comes with a free wireless mouse :) However, it's HP :(

Citylink finally show their faces

They finally arrive at 15:05. Right in the middle of a snow shower.

First hardware arrives

The first bit of the hardware (I already have the OEM XP Pro disk) of the new PC arrived this morning from Overclockers.It's the Icydock 5 into 3 SATA hard drive enclosure.


It's got me thinking whether I'll have enough SATA connectors as I need four. I have two already at home but need another two. I doubt there will be any on the hard drives themselves, so I'm hoping there will be at least two arriving with the motherboard. Failing that it's off to PC world (grrrr).Still, the unit looks a nice bit of kit.

Where it all began.

It's been at least three years since my PC was updated. The AMD 2400 with 1.5G of memory and a X800 graphics card is certainly showing it's age now :(

I originally guessed I'd just wait for Vista then get a pre-installed machine from Dell. However, once Vista had arrived, with all the included ho-ha of problems, missing drivers and the like, I decided to stick with XP for a while longer.

But I still needed something a little better.

The start was a mention on Scan.co.uk of a CPU/Memory combo with a little bit of a discount. From there I searched for a compatible Motherboard (I've always liked ASUS mobo's myself) then from there it all spiralled out of control!

Anyway, here's what I ordered:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, Socket 775 £219.00
• ASUS P5B-E iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), Gb LAN £66.99
• 320MB Palit 8800GTS PCI-E (x16) £157.94
• 600W CoolerMaster iGreen Power SLi £53.39
• Coolermaster Centurion RC-534 Black £28.99
• 320 Gb Samsung HD321KJ Spinpoint x4 £175.00
• NEC AD-5170A Black x18 DVD±RW Dual £15.59
• Icy Dock MB-455SPF 5-Bay Internal SATA Drive Enclosure £67.99

Total of £784.98 (excluding VAT & Delivery).

I'd originally wanted to build a NAS storage drive to run my Showcenter. But now I'm thinking it'd be better to use this machine to do both. The noise of the new PC will dictate whether I end up doing that as whatever machine I use for the Showcenter will most likely be on 24x7.

As the Asus mobo has built in RAID (in fact two raid controllers, although only one running RAID 5) I though now was a good time to try and run a RAID 5 set-up. The 4 x 320Gb hard drives should give me about 960Gb free once it has been build. That's almost the same as I currently have over two machines!

Graphics card is not top notch, I grant you, but the high-end cards are over £300 now and that's just too much for a single component on a computer!

Introduction

This blog will follow my new PC build 2007.