Well I’m not sure yet if I can replicate this or not but it’s been annoying me enough over the last 5 minutes that I thought I’d post about it. System is running Windows 7 Ultimate RC1 (64-bit) and I kept running into issues transferring some files over from another hard drive that also has a boot partition on it where the board kept booting to the other drive. Since I’m also tweaking some BIOS settings and whatnot, the boot order keeps rearranging, so the solution I came up with (clever me) was to switch SATA cables so that the system would always automatically boot from the correct drive.

The drive in question is an OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD, so it’s a plenty fast drive. Man was I ever suprised to see 10,000ms access times in the resource monitor when all I was doing was downloading adobe flash player with literally nothing else open. Switching back to the SATA port that the drive was originally on has everything back to normal, but those 10s response times were VERY noticeable and it was not mis-reporting.

I  also know that the issue was not caused by putting the drive on a different SATA controller. They are both connected to the ICH10R southbridge and drivers are installed for that as well. Very random. I would have taken a screenshot but the system was soooo painfully slow I had to do something. It would respond just fine for about a second (I could type into search fields, click things, etc) but then it would become completely unresponsive for 5-10 seconds.

This is one of those projects that clearly isn’t worth the time I’ve already invested, but it’s more of a “can it be done” adventure than a practical thing. I got my hands on an eVGA 790i board that was damaged in a shipping accident. There’s no insurance, there’s no warranty (eVGA won’t put on a new slot for me), so I’m left to my own devices here. I tested the motherboard and it works fine with a PCI video card, but not with a PCIe video card in either of the other slots. I get an error message telling me to move my video card to the top slot (I wish) for non-SLI operation.

Here’s my first attempt at removing a PCIe 16x slot from a 680i donor board. I figured if I torched it I might be able to remove it in one piece with all pins attached. Also I was hoping the pins would be relatively clean for re-insertion into the 790i board. It worked very well except for that fact that the slot bent from the heat while I was removing it.

Then I tried a more brute force approach and simply ripped off a PCIe slot. I’m currently in the process of re-pinning this one using pins from the other two that I tried to torch off.

As for the 790i board, well, I’m going to have to get pretty creative when it comes to removing the pin nubbs that are left over. If anyone’s got any ideas, I’m open to them. Right now it looks like what I’ll need is an incredibly fine soldering tip, and then something else to poke through and make a hole. Once I do every hole that way, I should be able to insert the new slot and solder it from the back. Wish me luck… I’m not exactly skilled with a soldering iron so the temptation is obviously also there to just run the board with PCIe video in some sort of “non-gaming” machine like the girlfriend’s sister’s media PC or something… It kinda kills me to use a 790i and DDR3 for something like that though………

Now I’ve added an Areca RAID card to the mix. This is starting to look like a worse and worse investment all the time. I wanted to try with a few different cards because I figured “Hey, now I’ve got an Areca, so it’ll just be a matter of 3 different products that function properly, but have varying levels of performance”.

WRONG!

Card #1 (ARC-1210) makes my POST & BIOS screens refuse to show. Windows boots fine, and from there I can configure RAID sets, but that’s not something I can accept as a 24/7 solution.

Card #2 (ARC-1222) boots fine in the machine, allows me to create a RAID set out of the four X25-M drives, gives great read performance, but then takes a big dump on the write performance (far worse than onboard), wavering up and down between about 225MB/s and 50MB/s (no consistency to it)

Card #3 (ARC-1680ix-8) failed to boot several times and simply hung at the “Waiting for RAID card firmware to become ready” screen the first couple attempts. I even left it overnight with that screen up and the little indicator spinning away. I decided to give it one more shot this morning to see what happened and it booted! I was thrilled, but write performance still sucks. Read/write caching are both enabled (as far as I can tell) and I’m almost at the end of my rope here…

I’m far from releasing all of my benchmarks and experiences with this new setup, but I have run into a couple of problems worth mentioning in my quest for the best possible storage performance.

First I attemped my new setup with a 3ware 9690SA-4I and I created a forum thread over at XtremeSystems.org documenting my failure with that… What a waste of time that card was… After that I decided to move on to the Onboard, but there ARE bottlenecks and compromises that have to be made doing that.

I don’t notice the same freezing/hitching or lock ups that some have claimed exist with Jmicron controllers on cheap SSDs, but I *do* notices a sluggishness at times. I don’t think it’s related to the SSDs, but rather to the southbridge. One way to replicate it reliably is the Windows Experience Index. If anyone can shed some light I’m very interested to hear why this happens during the CPU Test…

HAI GUISE,

ALMOST FINISH I7 UPGRADE LULZ XD I CAN USE MY OLD CPU FOR GAMEING?

SEEMS WONT FIT SO I HELPED TO UPDATE THE BOTTOM HALF

I WILL HAVE CPU BOTTLENECK NOW?!?!?!

Well my WHS has finally been put to the test. I sat down to my computer to see this error message pop up

Intrigued, I opened up my WHS Connector Software to discover that the status for one of my Seagate 7200.10 500GB drives was “missing”.

I think that this whole experience could have been made more intuitive for the non-tech-heads that Microsoft is apparently targeting with this product, but without too much trouble I was able to get through the removal wizard.

The process took about 1.5 hours. In that time it was rebalancing the data that was replicated on the 500GB drive I removed and splitting it between the 320GB OS drive and the other 500GB drive that remained in the home server.

There wasn’t enough space for the server to duplicate all of the data on only two drives, so this error came up prompting me to add another hard drive. That was relatively simple, and shortly after I added the new drive, this error message went away.

All in all I’m very pleased. I lost some episodes of Numb3rs and a few old Disney movies that I had saved, but not replicated. Congrats to the Windows Home Server team for making this 500GB hard drive failure as simple as an RMA with no loss of important data!

Well I was having a heck of a time getting either the automatic port forwarding working in Windows Home Server for my web access to my files, and weirdly enough I couldn’t get it working externally even by manually forwarding all the appropriate ports to the home server through my DIR-655 router.

Turns out the problem was caused by having two routers connected on the same network. It was making it impossible for the Home Server to automatically configure the network, and somehow seemed to be breaking it even when I manually forwarded the ports. By unplugging the wireless G router, setting the Home Server to auto-config, then plugging the wireless G router back in, I was able to get my remote access working again. Horay!