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.