Camera Labs

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Fair point, though as I've now seen two of the old disks and a brand new one being marked as in error (and that on two different ports/cables) in relatively rapid succession by the ICH10R controller/driver I doubt it's a HDD issue. I'll know once the new controller is in but if it offers the possibility of a low level format I might just do that, especially if it can do all four at once.

Bob.

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OM-D E-M5 + ED 12-50mm, H-PS14042E, H-F007014E, L-RS014150E, M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm 1:1.8.
Gitzo GT1541T, Arca-Swiss Z1 DP ball-head.
Astrophotography: TEC 140 'scope, FLI ML16803 camera, ASA DDM60 Pro mount.

Hi folks,

Well, the new Adaptec 5805 RAID controller is now in place and, after flashing the SSD firmware up to the latest revision and doing a secure erase, it now has charge of both my SSD, which is configured as the boot disk, and the original four disks configured once again as a RAID 10 array. The motherboard SATA controller has been relegated to optical drive duties and the motherboard SAS controller has been disabled.

Doing a fresh installation of Windows 7 x64 has totally refreshed the machine with an interval from the end of BIOS initialisation to the Windows Log On screen of just 16 seconds.

With hindsight I've discovered that by hanging the SSD off the Adaptec 5805 I've lost the ability of Windows 7 to recognise the SSD as an SSD so the W7 optimisations to treat such drives kindly are not available, at least not with the current Adaptec firmware. The trade-off is that I can migrate both the Adaptec controller and all of the attached disk drives to a new motherboard in the fullness of time and not lose a single byte of data in the process.

IMHO the difference in disk performance, fully described elsewhere, justifies the cost of the controller, roughly equivalent to a moderately high-end Intel CPU.

Bob.

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OM-D E-M5 + ED 12-50mm, H-PS14042E, H-F007014E, L-RS014150E, M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm 1:1.8.
Gitzo GT1541T, Arca-Swiss Z1 DP ball-head.
Astrophotography: TEC 140 'scope, FLI ML16803 camera, ASA DDM60 Pro mount.