EmeraldFlame

Is the slowness because of how long it takes your raid controller to initialize? If it is, removing the raid might help. But it could be for other reasons too. Some boards just take forever to get through their post, heck my gigabyte x58 board takes forever just because there is a bunch of checks and stuff you can't turn off. If you do remove the raid, don't use rapid mode unless you have a UPS. It's pretty risky without that.

In most cases yes, samsung's rapid mode is very risky, in fact, I would say it's extremely risky, much more so than a RAID 0. Unless you have a UPS, with a UPS it is perfectly safe. Here is the reason. Rapid mode uses a section of your RAM to cache data. So when you write files to your SSD it will actually move extremelly quickly to the RAM, then flush out to your SSD as quick as it can. Which means that for a period of time during write operations, your data will only exist in RAM. If you happen to lose power for any reason during that time, that data is gone and completely irrecoverable. There is no data recovery center in the world that can get it back, RAM is volatile and losses everything on power down. However, if you have a UPS to supply backup power, than it is actually pretty safe. The UPS would give the computer enough time to flush the cache to disk and shut down properly during a power outage event, and then there is nothing to worry about.

To expand on what @alpenwasser said, RAID is considered redundancy not backup. It will protect you in the case of a hard drive failure. It will not protect you from accidental deletion, file corruption, power surges, or other software/user errors. If RAID still seems like that is all you are worried about RAID 1 would likely be what you would want to use. Typically, this does require both drives start completely freshly formatted, with 1 notable exception. A software RAID 1 using Intel's Rapid Storage Technology driver will allow you to create a RAID 1 without wiping your source disk, although that software is highly dependent on whether your MoBo/Chipset supports it or not. If you are looking for an actual backup, I would suggest getting an external drive, backing up to it in frequent intervals and storing it outside of your own home (in case of a fire, flood, other natural disaster). For example I have one friend who rents a deposit box at a bank and once a month he will grab the drive, back up to it, then put it back into the deposit box. If your internet is fast enough there are also options like CrashPlan or BackBlaze that give you cloud based backup solutions that cost around $5 USD a month for unlimited storage.

If the drive shows up in Windows you can use Crystal Disk Info to look at the S.M.A.R.T. values on the hard drive and better determine exactly what is wrong with it. Some motherboards also have a S.M.A.R.T. utility built into their BIOS/UEFI.

IDE: This is the old school Parallel ATA port and instruction set. It is absolutely obsolete at this point. The only reason you should use it is if your hardware/software absolutely requires it for some reason. AHCI: This is a newer instruction set that replaced the IDE one, it is generally, but not always, used in conjunction with SATA ports. It allows for a few more features, like hot swapping, and generally increases performance through various other ways. Most HDDs and 2.5" SSDs use this, along with some, but not all, PCIe based storage. RAID: A special instruction set that allows RAID features, most motherboards today support RAID's 0, 1, 10, and sometimes 5. This allows multiple drives to be combined in various ways to gain redundancy, performance, or both, while sacrificing some storage space. SATA Express: This is the new standard for SATA with it's own new style port that looks like 2.5 regular SATA ports. However, instead of having it's own special band on the chipset, it is PCIe based to achieve higher bandwidth. There currently are very few, if any, devices that actually support SATA Express as everything seems to be favoring other PCIe solutions such as M.2. For your drives specifically, both those run off of a normal SATA III 6Gbps port. You will want these set to AHCI mode for best performance.

I agree with @AcidzDesigns, I'd add at minimum an extra 120 rad of space. If you are overclocking anything 240 or more would be recommended. What you have planned out will work but temps or fans speeds may be higher than you'd like.

Do you know exactly what's wrong with the drive? Doing a repair might help if the partition table or something is a bit wonky. But if the drive is dieing and reallocating sectors it could make it worse.

A linux live boot CD, is simply an operating system on a CD, that runs completely from RAM, instead of a HDD. If you think that there may be harmful viruses on those old drives, plugging them into the computer while it has other drives attached could pose a very serious risk of infecting those other drives. You effectively eliminate that risk by running in a live boot environment. If you aren't super worried about viruses, you can just plug it in and copy your stuff and any minor stuff should be caught by your AV software. It really depends on how badly you believe those old drives may be infected. As far as how to connect it to your computer, whatever is convenient for you. I'm willing to bet that HDD dock your case has is just wired up to SATA anyway so that should be fine. The only thing I would avoid is plugging it into USB 2.0, and that is simply because of the speed bottleneck that would cause.

So first off, not infecting your computer if you suspect there are actually viruses on it. Make a Linux Live boot CD, whatever distro your most comfortable with, Ubuntu should work great. Disconnect all your drives or other storage mediums from the system except for the old drives and the drive you are backing up to. Once booted, go ahead and move your stuff over. Shut down, reconnect your windows drives, boot up, and then scan the backup drive with your AV software of choice, just to make sure. Since you are in live environment, any viruses will just hit RAM and be wiped out as soon as the power goes down, and even that is unlikely since your old drives are likely windows and you'd be running a linux live environment, any viruses on the old drives simply won't be compatible to do anything. As long as you don't manually copy over viruses to the backup drive, you will be fine. This is a bit overkill for most people though, you would likely be fine just having your AV software turned on and plugging the things in too, however if you think there may be really nasty stuff on them, I would do the live boot method. As for the best way, honestly, just copy and paste them. Make sure you check all the user folders, and maybe the root in case anyone decided to add a folder in there for something, but normal users are unlikely to store anything outside their own user folder. At the same time though, I can't tell you what your usage habits are, if you tend to save stuff somewhere else, check there too.

The link doesn't seem to load properly for me, but you would be fine with either brand. In fact Western Digital owns Hitachi, literally the same company. The product lineups under both brands are solid. Edit: Got the page to load. Literally pay no attention to that article. It is a regurgitation of back-blazes statistics that they publish, which are wholly flawed for the consumer market. BackBlaze regularly uses drives that are not designed for, nor have the protections for, the scenarios they use them in which makes any data they collect very unreliable.

In that case I would literally just go to newegg, search for 140mm fans and just grab whatever from a decently reputable dealer that are cheap. Something like a Rosewill (Newegg's store brand), NZXT, maybe fractal design (although those might be a bit more). If you watch for sales/rebates the Corsair AF series might be cheap enough for you too. Brans like Noctua, BeQuite, NoiseBlocker, EK Vardar, would all be significantly better fans in both higher airflow amount and lower noise generation, but they are going to be 2-3x the cost of a cheap brand fan, and since you don't really care about noise, no use in paying for silence. Just grab whatever you find in your budget. Heck if there is a used computer shop around you, check with them. They probably have stacks of no-name fans you can grab from them for next to nothing.

If you are going to run the fans off of the server's PSU, you are going to want to DC fans. In fact, if you are looking at fans branded for computer use, you will only see DC fans. Also a real fan recommendation needs a little bit more information. Are you worried/care about noise at all? Do you need straight up airflow or something with decent pressure too? Tons of people make great 140mm fans, and there is a literal ton of cheap options. The corsair AF fans are a decent price:performance ratio, although they can tend to be kind of loud. Noctua's fans are all around great and better than the corsair AF line, but a tad expensive normally. There are cheap fans like the newegg branded Rosewill stuff that isn't particularly great, but they work and are cheap. I think NZXT makes dirt cheap fans too, just don't expect a ton from them.

I have a feeling you are comparing different model years of drives to each other. Nearly every year WD updates their drives and they are often redesigned to take advantage of new technologies. So comparing a black from a year or two ago to a blue today really isn't fair. According to WD's current official spec sheets (Blue and Black), weights of drives are pretty much across the board the same, as well as nearly all other parameters with very slight differences at the higher end.

Black's will typically have a higher cache when comparing similar capacity drives. Black's also have 2 on board controllers that generally increase performance over the blues, especially on small random IO. They also have a longer warranty. Other than that they are effectively the same. The internals are (or at least they used to be, this may be different now) the same so they make the same amount of noise, it is just the controller board that is different.

He seemed pretty serious. I just kind laughed, explained to him N2O really doesn't have that great of thermal properties (significantly lower than that of natural air with is primarily N2 and 02 seperately). Explained to him that on occasion people do run LN2 cooling, but if someone is saying they are doing that for a home computer that they are lying to him.

I'm an assistant scout master for a boyscout troop and most of the kids know that I'm into computers. I teach various technology merit badges etc. One of the kids came up to me the other day and said his friends computer was NOS (like the racing fuel additive) cooled.

Things like this are normally legit. They just tend to be last-gen hardware or something. Often times big server farms will upgrade a huge chunk of their equipment at once and then dump all the old stuff on ebay for pennies on the dollar to recoup some of the cost. Hardware raid cards are the same way, bought new they are crazy expensive like $500+ for a low end one. But you can pick up used ones from a server for way less.

Finally broke into the top 1000!! Took forever because almost all of my folding is on a mid-range work laptop. Fired up a low end desktop too, neither of which have a good ppd.

You can get 1000ft of Cat6 for around $100, sometimes cheaper (ex: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=8102) For in-wall just make sure it is solid core and not stranded. You'll need the wall plates and keystones which are like a buck a piece or less if you are going with basic ones, more if you want like fancy metal wall plates. You'll prolly need to pick up a crimper for like $20 along with some RJ45 connectors which are cheap. And you'll probably need an 8 or 16 port gigabit switch too if you don't have one already. Honestly should be able to do it yourself for like less than $200.

Exactly this, just make sure you disconnect them properly through windows before taking them out of the dock.

If it doesn't exist you can wire one yourself easily enough. Pin 1 (the right-most pin when the indentations are down) is 12v, which is what fans take, Connect that to pin 2 (the middle pin) on the fan's cable. Then connect Pin 2 of the molex (ground) to Pin 1 of the fan (ground), and everything should work great, although you won't have RPM readout.

Yup, that should work properly with both 3 and 4 pin fans. Most MB headers can supply 1A @ 12V (although this does vary some from MB to MB) and that is enough to run 2 of almost any fan safely, so you should be good.

Ahh it makes sense now. Your fans aren't compatible with a setup like this. 3-pin and 4-pin fan control works differently. In 3-pin fan control the controller varies the voltage it sends over pin 2 to the fan which makes it run at different speeds. 12v is full speed, so if you want 50% it sends 6v instead. With 4-pin fan control the controller sends a constant 12v over pin 2, but sends an on/off signal over pin 4 which tuns the motor on and off at very fast speeds (think strobe light but for a motor). In this way to vary speed it changes how long the fan is on, 100% is always on whereas 50% means it is only on half the time. You'll notice that the MB side connector that you bought only has pins 3 and 4 (speed sensor and on/off signal). It does not have pins 1 and 2 (ground, positive). This means it is getting it's power from the PSU connector instead, which is going to give you a constant 12v that you can't control. 4-pin fans would work, 3-pin fans will run but at max speed with no control. To make this work, you need 4 pin fans. Alternatively, you could get a 3-pin splitter, but running 5 fans off one MB header may draw more power than what the MB can supply and fry the header depending on the fans. Hope that makes sense to you.

Do you have both the molex, which should be plugged into the PSU and is providing additional power, and the 4 pin, which should be plugged into the MB and is supplying the RPM readout/pwm signal, plugged in? If you plug in just the molex power, all the fans will work, they will just run at full speed and not give you any control. You need both plugged in.

Basically RAID is a way of combining multiple physical drives into a single logical one (multiple hard drives show up as a single drive letter in the OS) to improve performance in some way. RAID 0 improves read/write performance but makes data loss more probable. RAID 1 makes data loss less probably because you have redundancy, but does not increase performance and takes up a lot of your HDD space. RAID 10 increases performance and decreases the probability of data loss, but is expensive monetarily to implement. RAID 5 and 6 improve read speeds, may or may not improve writes depending on your exact setup, but also decreases the probability of data loss, while being cheaper than RAID 10. All the different levels of raid are about tradeoffs, where you give up some aspect of performance to make gains in another aspect depending on the situation you are in and what you need.