Note: This post will be updated as I go through the initial set-up process.
All plugged in and… go!
Wow, start up was fast.
Man, this hard drive is noisy… I bet it will be worse when I add another one.
No dead pixels that I can see – awesome!
Ok, everything booted up – looks good. Time to add the second hard drive and set up the RAID 0.
Crap, the current hard drive is a Western Digital – those seem to have issues.
While I’m in here, I might as welll add the RAM too…
How about that, I had my little computer screwdriver out and didn’t even need it.
Ok, all back together – let’s see if she boots.
Ah, what the heck – let’s hook up monitor #2 as well.
Hmm, got the “ding” but nothing else seems to be happening… trouble.
Wow, Adam wasn’t kidding about the jet fans.
Powered off… let’s try bringing it up one more time.
And we’ve got fans – but no display. Time to pull the RAM. Yuck.
Ok, pulled one set of DIMMs – only hooked up the one display this time too; and… go! Here comes the boot sequence… looks good.
Wow, startup is deadly fast!
System Profiler shows both hard drives… good. Shows the stock 512MB of RAM and the 2GB I added… good.
Well, let’s try that RAM one more time and see if perhaps I’d seated it wrong. Powering off again.
Y’know, that tiny little scrolley ball in the Mighty Mouse isn’t half bad.
The top DIMM of the pair really seemed to stick in the slot when I re-inserted the RAM, hopefully it just wasn’t seated right. Booting up…
It’s not looking good… no display again with that pair of DIMMs in there.
Re-seating the RAM one more time and trying again… no joy. One of those 2 DIMMs must be bad.
On Adam‘s advice, I’m moving the 2 DIMMs I think are bad into the 2nd slots and removing the “good” DIMMs – making sure that the RAM slot itself isn’t the problem.
Booting up and… no joy. It must be those DIMMs. Since I was testing the slots this time, I guess the fact it didn’t boot was good news. Time to put the good RAM back in and RMA the bad RAM.
Ok, booting back up… hooked up second display too. So far so good with only half the 3rd party RAM.
And now, time to restart from the DVD to set up RAID 0 w/ the hard drives.
Ok, RAID set-up is now “destroying all information” on my disks. 🙂
RAID all set… now to reinstall everything. Adam says that this “Checking your installation DVD” step takes about 20 minutes. Oh goody.
Installing Mac OS X, time remaining: ~40 minutes.
Looks like I got a copy of Keynote and Pages – cool… 6 minutes to go on DVD 2.
I joked around about how nice it would be to have two 30″ displays, but the truth is I don’t think two of these monsters would fit on my desk.
Installation is done – rebooting now.
And we’re up and running!
Now it’s time to install system updates…
I’ve got to think hard about how comfortable I am with a Western Digital drive as part of my RAID 0 set-up. When I RMA the RAM, perhaps I should buy another Hitatchi drive at the same time. I could CarbonCopyCloner the data to the new drive, the to the WD drive, then back to the RAID’ed Hitatchi drives. $100 now vs. the heachache of having to restore from a backup, etc. – seems like an easy choice.
Guess I may as well start downloading my 3rd party software while I’m getting the system updates.
Even with the RAM issues, it only took about 3 hours to get everything set up, including RAID’ing the hard drives and reinstalling the OS. Not bad.
Software updates all downloaded and installed – rebooting.
If I can’t figure out a way to make clicking the ball do a double-click on this mighty mouse, it’s gonna be gone right quick.
Up and running – excellent. I’ll leave the installs and data migration for the morning.
alex — one of my friends had a problem with 3rd party RAM in his PC. 2 sticks worked fine, but 4 sticks at a time didn’t work because of some bizarre ram speed compatibility. I keep hearing that ram isn’t ram these days, and I believe it. My thinkpad, which has ram that passes memtests just fine, is now running without crashing (i think!) after I replaced 3rd party ram with memory purchased directly from IBM.
I’m only going to buy tested ram from now on — and that means same-brand sold, or crucial.
I used to buy all my RAM from OWC. In the last few years I’ve bought from Crucial exclusively, but the RAM was ~$60 more per stick when I ordered (it’s ~$35 more per stick right now). I do wish I’d spent the extra $$ so I didn’t have to bother RMA-ing this RAM though.
Congrats on your new Quad. The iWork software included is just a trial, from what I remember. You’ll need to have or buy a registration code to unlock the software.
It is about time! Congratulations.
I hope it isn’t too late. But you should go for Seagate’s Barracuda series. The current generation got NCQ which Anand from Anandtech.com discovered was truly excellent for multitasking and made SATA get even closer to SCSI performance.
The Barracudas are among the fastest drives out there(if not…) but they are also still almost noiseless. Under use, you can hear the drive working but otherwise… no 🙂
Seagate also got an excellent warranty.
OWC’s RMA Policies
It may seem strange that I’m recommending OWC after having half the RAM1 I got from them failed last night2. However, the excellent service I got on the phone this morning has them solidly in my good graces again.
The fellow I spoke with on the…
Alex — does the Quad default to 1T command rate timing when 4 DIMMs are used. I was just talking to a friend about his problem with having 4 DIMMS in a computer. The motherboard was running 2T with 2 slots full, and 1T with 4 slots full. He had to slow down the motherboard to get 4 DIMMS to work, because his memory didn’t support 1T.
Something to look into…
2 things:
1. Maybe I missed how you’re configuring your harddrives, but if you’re concerned about the reliability of a drive, you shouldn’t run it in RAID0. Your array will be less reliable than any individual drive in the array.
2. After having countless harddrives fail over the years (of varying brands), I’ve just come to accept that harddrives will fail and are the most likely component to fail. Just design your system (computer/network/workflow/etc) with that in mind. WD may have fallen out of favor amongst those in your blogging circle, but it seems like you’ve forgotten (or was not aware of) the IBM DeskStar (“DeathStar”) flap. Hitachi bough IBM’s harddrive division soon after that.
Tienshiao: I was actually about to mention that as well.
But IBM was selling Hitachi produced drives for a while before they announced the sell of the division. And to my knowledge, they still haven’t gotten an as dreadful track record of truly bad drives as the last Deathstar drives.
So, Hitachi should be in the “ok” zone now 🙂
In a very timely fashion, Anandtech does a Harddrive test of the brands we’ve mentioned 🙂
http://www.anandtech[...].aspx?i=2628
My dear Seagate Barracudas come out with much worse results than I expected 🙁
Damn I want one! I totally agree with the Western Digital thing. I’ve had two of my three WD drives go bad within 2 years. Just a couple days ago, in fact, I lost 250 GB of (ahem) backed up movies, games, and apps :(.Maxtor hasn’t let me down yet.
RAM Install, Take 3
After the RAM failed the first two times I tried to get it all installed, I wasn’t too optimistic when I received my second set of RMA’d DIMMs today. So far, things seem to be working ok with the additional RAM.
My saga went something lik…
Alex… Currently I have 1 250 gb disk for OS and backup. This is also used as my scratch. The second is used for all my Docs. That way the Scratch and Docs are seperated… PS seems to work good. DO you think a RAID 0 would be faster, like you run?
from barefeats.com
“RAID PAIR or INDEPENDENT DRIVES?
Based on the mixed gains of the RAID pairs over single drives, I hypothesized that there are more avantages to having two independent drives as opposed to a bootable RAID 0 pair. Why? Because things don’t happen in sequence. Your normal work flow causes storage events to happen in parallel. To simulate this, I started a duplication of a large file then launched Unreal Tournament 2004.”
http://www.barefeats[...]/hard63.html