The replacement RAM, new hard drive and external hard drive enclosure all arrived today on the same UPS shipment – I love it when everything comes together like that. I guess I’ll be playing with hardware this afternoon.

The plan:

1. Install new RAM and make sure it works.
2. Put new Hitatchi HD in external enclosure.
3. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my current RAID HD to the new external HD.
4. Boot from external HD – make sure all looks right.
5. Use Disk Utility to reformat the stock Western Digital HD.
6. Use CCC to copy the external HD to the WD HD.
7. Boot from the WD HD, make sure all looks right.
8. Swap the WD HD and the new Hitatchi HD in the internal/external spots.
9. Use Disk Utility to RAID the 2 internal Hitatchi drives.
10. Use CCC to copy the external WD drive back to the new RAID set-up.

What could possibly go wrong?

UPDATE: That didn’t take long… I unpacked everything and discovered that I can’t put the SATA drive into this enclosure. Doh! Looks like my best local options are a 100GB Seagate HD for $40 after rebate or a 250GB Hitatchi for $130 after rebate. It’s like Scott told me a while back:

We solve these problems, you know, with money.

It’s a business expense anyway…

UPDATE #2: Well, the RAM is installed, and everything came up ok – but I only show 2.5GB of RAM, the same as before I added the additional 2GB. The slots that have the new RAM show as empty… time to call OWC again I guess.

UPDATE #3: Yep, bad RAM… again! Another RMA, etc. Also, I discovered that my Kensington keyboard won’t work for those “hold down the * key when booting up…” situations – I had to use the Apple keyboard.