New Build - Seeking Feedback

Being tormented is part of being spoiled. :::grins::: You're learning and becoming an even greater professional for it. When I got my first X99 work station it was one roller coaster ride before I got things settled. (Took me years.) Incidentally, I'm typing this while logged into Win 7 U. No bangs in my device manager, no hiccoughs, no muss, no fuss. Just purrs, sitting in idle, waiting for some real work. It handles itself well for a machine that is so antiquated it won't support Windows 11. It'll do Win 10 just fine but I don't want to bother contaminating my PC with unsupported garbage like Windows 10. This unit also ran Win 8.1 without a hitch. The thing about all these new operating systems these days is that one has to resort to so much surgery just to get the OS they want. In this respect Windows 10 is even worse than Win 11 IMO. I fully concur with the "if you don't like it change it" argument BUT I really shouldn't have to resort to so much butchery just to have an operating system that functions correctly. Win 7 U was the last Windows OS that really impressed me. 11 is a tad bit better than 10 but not enough to rave about. As far as raves go Win XP was probably the most rave worthy OS in the history of Windows.

kelper said:

You won't be able to see or access any drives.

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So it would boot but no drives would exist in my computer? Or it would just not boot?

I just had a thought. Perhaps machines like this don't support Windows 11 because they were only designed to support operating systems with the capacity to function correctly. lol Hey, it was just a thought. Sorry, I have no clue what CrowdStrike is. Sounds like something out of Star Wars and Storm Troopers. That wouldn't really bother me much since SAFE MODE is for your OS anyway and running an OS in RAID is not really advisable in most cases. Admittedly, this OS is running in RAID 0 on SSD. It does just fine. But then. . . This is a real operating system. Windows used to make them back in the day.

Win711 said:

So it would boot but no drives would exist in my computer? Or it would just not boot?

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I think your drives would still exist but you just wouldn't be able to access them while in Safe Mode. If you couldn't even access your OS in Safe Mode there would be no point to having a Safe Mode and how ABSOLUTELY RETARDED it would be to have a UEFI BIOS that gave you the option to run RAID but prevented booting to the OS defies description.

Win711 said:

So it would boot but no drives would exist in my computer? Or it would just not boot?

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Why not just try? My guess is the computer would boot, but with no drives available, the OS would not load.

kelper said:

Why not just try? My guess is the computer would boot, but with no drives available, the OS would not load.

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He's not familiar with RAID and he installed his OS in AHCI mode. He's just gathering info for the time being.

Scannerman said:

Being tormented is part of being spoiled. :::grins::: You're learning and becoming an even greater professional for it. When I got my first X99 work station it was one roller coaster ride before I got things settled. (Took me years.) Incidentally, I'm typing this while logged into Win 7 U. No bangs in my device manager, no hiccoughs, no muss, no fuss. Just purrs, sitting in idle, waiting for some real work. It handles itself well for a machine that is so antiquated it won't support Windows 11. It'll do Win 10 just fine but I don't want to bother contaminating my PC with unsupported garbage like Windows 10. This unit also ran Win 8.1 without a hitch. The thing about all these new operating systems these days is that one has to resort to so much surgery just to get the OS they want. In this respect Windows 10 is even worse than Win 11 IMO. I fully concur with the "if you don't like it change it" argument BUT I really shouldn't have to resort to so much butchery just to have an operating system that functions correctly. Win 7 U was the last Windows OS that really impressed me. 11 is a tad bit better than 10 but not enough to rave about. As far as raves go Win XP was probably the most rave worthy OS in the history of Windows.

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That's one genuinely sweet pc man! Much nicer than mine because I just bought things and slapped it together but you researched, designed and built yours. Very impressive!

If you want to see how it compares, we could download the same video then encode it using the same parameters then post the time it takes. You'd have to time it manually though, but it's a realworld productivity situation rather than a theoretical benchmark.

I may be learning but it's knowledge I will only use once, plus I'll probably forget lol. I agree with all you said about OSes. Win XP is one I'm still proud to own. I still have the cd and packaging it came in from a place called googlegear.

I didn't like win7 when it first came out. There is still something that bugs me to this day. I posted on stackexchange but was told nothing can be done to fix it.

Try to open a file or folder (like system below) that is only half exposed and it will result in the folder jetting off to the left. I really really hate that. I can see the folder I want. It's right there. But I'm not allowed to open it unless it's first in full view. How stupid.

Scannerman said:

I think your drives would still exist but you just wouldn't be able to access them while in Safe Mode. If you couldn't even access your OS in Safe Mode there would be no point to having a Safe Mode and how ABSOLUTELY RETARDED it would be to have a UEFI BIOS that gave you the option to run RAID but prevented booting to the OS defies description.

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I agree: this is crazy. I want a raid mirror in case one drive fails, but then I can't boot in safe mode? And software engineers are spending time putting the start button in the middle of the screen instead of real problems like raid?

Why can't there be a raid card that displays as a single drive? The OS doesn't need to know how many drives are on the card. The card would split the info to both drives. The whole pc, bios and OS, would be completely clueless how many drives are hiding behind the card. Nothing like that exists?

There are instances where seeing both or all drives in your array is essential. With a card you can see each drive individually via BIOS. On a Windows OS, in disk management (or whatever they're calling it these days) you should be able to read the drive as one drive. This will hold true for RAIDS 0, 1, and 10. This is why I can run more drives in my PC than there are letters in the alphabet and get away with it. (Of course, all that extra work station band width helps) BUT you don't need a card to run Intel's virtual raid.

I should like to caution you should you decide to introduce RAID to your system. I do not advise running your OS in RAID. You are better off with backups and a clone of your OS. Yes, I'm a hypocrite for running Win 7 Ultimate in RAID 0. IF you mirror your OS it will put a significant dent in performance because the drive will have to write everything you do to another drive. You seriously do not want this. Mirroring is for storing Data. So any files you deem precious can be copied to a mirrored RAID array. All my family pictures and videos etc are preserved this way. I can still access these from my OS if need be but they are stored in separate drives.

What with NVMe you no longer need to put an OS in RAID 0 for speed. NVMe is faster. And if you really must go faster then RAMDISK is still king. I get away with Win 7 in RAID 0 because back in the day . . . You could get away with a ton of interesting things. Your OS would do what you told it to do. But I digress. It just isn't practical to run modern day domestic operating systems in RAID anymore. You're better off running your storage drives in RAID. For me, this is where RAID 1 and RAID 10 come into play. RAID 10 is a bit lavish to run because for every TB of physical storage you have you only get to use half. The other half is being used for both striping and redundancy. The advantage is that RAID 10 runs a whole lot faster than RAID 1. (This is where the striping comes into play.) RAID 0 gives zero redundancy so when it crashes, baby it's gone!

I'm a bit curious about how well RAID 0 would do in NVMe (yes, I've seen the videos) and one day I'll likely give it a go. Of course I will need to have a cloned copy of the OS handy before I try it because backups fail and Windows backups almost always fail. This is why there is such an advantage to storing valuable data on separate drives. Operating systems can be easily reinstalled (and very quickly thanks to advancements in hardware) but personal data is another matter. So yeah, in this respect RAID is still a thing IMO. There's no sin in backing up your data to a RAID 1 array. Just know that your backups will be much slower than a backup to a regular drive. That way if the video on drive A vanished because drive A in your mirror died of some unknown cause orchestrated by an alien invasion resulting in a catastrophic system failure you'll still have a copy of it on drive B. (Don't worry about Brink. He's a good alien.)

The above paragraph was purely an example. I wouldn't label any RAID arrays drive "A" or drive "B" in disk management if I could help it. Those are better off reserved for USB sticks and other temporary drives. C is of course your main OS. I try to reserve drive "F" for my fastest storage drive. But that's me.

Anyway you will have plenty of drive letters to chose from and the array will show as one single drive in Disk Management or manager or whatever they like to call it. I couldn't agree with you more on the shallow approach Windows is using to promote their latest operating system. Eye candy only goes so far and I use a desk top. I don't even own a tablet. The start button in the left hand corner of my screen works for me just fine. Hence, tablet operating systems. Like the late grate Windows 8 that grated on everyone's nerves until Microsoft started to wonder if firing the beta testers wasn't such a good idea after all. 8.1 was a vast improvement (But they should have called it Windows Nine because it really was a different OS using different architecture.) I call them tablet operating systems. Win 10 tried to be a upgraded Win 7 wannabe and fell flat on its face because Microsoft got too greedy for data. So now we're back to the Win 11 tablet style OS with the start menu in the middle. No worries, it can be shifted to the left.

Eye candy only goes so far. What's under the hood? Well, it's light weight so that's why everyone is all happy with the performance but is it really lean? Short answer: No. There's a lot of junk in there that few users will actually value. Much of it is more for Microsoft than the end user. That's why people use Rufus to cut the crap out. After this, performance is impressive. Alas, you are the one who has to do the surgery. That is why I say if Microsoft had any brains they'd issue a Bare Bones OS that users could add apps to from the Microsnot store and build as they needed. People on budgets could pay $19.95 a year for a bare bones subscription and add things like OFFICE 365 when they could afford it. Those kiddies over at MS really aren't thinking. What does an activation key cost these days?


Plus. Not all customers want AI. How badly does Microsoft want to keep their customers? Are they really there for the customer? I completely comprehend that the concept of CoPilot generates all sorts of pleasurable tingling sensations in various parts of the human anatomy for some people, but given the algorithms the percentage of the population that are seniors is increasing and seniors have this uncanny predisposition to thinking for themselves and not having arrogant upstarts telling them how to think. (Much less a CoPilot AI bot attempting to do all their thinking for them.)

meh... taking a break

Scannerman said:

I do not advise running your OS in RAID.

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But that's where I need raid. I already have 4 archive disks in addition to C: drive. D and E are identical, mirrors. Everything I copy to D I also copy to E. The other 2 are mirrors for videos. So I don't need raid for backups. I need raid for my OS drive where I'm too lazy to make backups. I've already lost 2 OS drives in my life. I wake up and it just isn't working. $1000 to get data back.

Scannerman said:

IF you mirror your OS it will put a significant dent in performance because the drive will have to write everything you do to another drive.

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Why is that? Isn't it written in parallel?

I don't care about raid striping. I just want mirroring.

Scannerman said:

Eye candy

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Unfortunately most people prefer form over function.

Scannerman said:

I don't even own a tablet.

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I have one just to show people pics and videos. Otherwise I never turn it on.

Scannerman said:

There's a lot of junk in there that few users will actually value.

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I need to go through my services to see if anything can be disabled.

Scannerman said:

Not all customers want AI

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Glad I got my cpu before AI was added on

I'm not really a fan of raid mirroring on your OS drive, especially if you are thinking of it as a "backup". It will save your bacon if your drive physically dies, thus you can still boot up into Windows. But if you accidentally delete something, or get malware, or system crashes and corrupts a file, with a RAID mirror, both instances of the files are usually modified and thus unless you have a backup to restore from, you are out of luck.

Programs like Macrium Reflect surely negate any advantage of a RAID array for domestic users?

pparks1 said:

I'm not really a fan of raid mirroring on your OS drive, especially if you are thinking of it as a "backup". It will save your bacon if your drive physically dies, thus you can still boot up into Windows. But if you accidentally delete something, or get malware, or system crashes and corrupts a file, with a RAID mirror, both instances of the files are usually modified and thus unless you have a backup to restore from, you are out of luck.

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I can't remember needing to reinstall because of a corrupted or missing file since win98, and probably that was because I was playing around with the OS. Anyway, I would just install on the same drive rather than trying to keep a drive on a shelf in sync with the one I'm using now. My problem is I'm too lazy to make backups. On my other pc I bought a small 250gb SSD specifically so it would fill up fast and force me to make backups.

I have had 2 drives fail though. Once around 2005 I woke up and what was in memory was still going but the drive just wouldn't work. Then again around 2015 I left youtube playing all night and woke up to a dead drive. Everything on those drives that I failed to backup is just gone. The 2nd one was a seagate that puts the drive bios (I don't know what to call it) on the plates instead of a chip, so it makes data recovery really hard. I was quoted $900. Needless to say I will never buy seagate again. WD would have been fairly easy to recover. I could buy a new drive then swap the plates.

I need a solution that will back up everything I do on the C: drive. All my screenshots and recordings, favorites, passwords, software Edwin recommends I download lol. I have 40 chrome windows open with projects I want to get back to one day. I don't know of any way to back that up other than copying the URLs to a text file or email draft. But once I do that then it's "out of sight, out of mind" and I never get back to it.

If I had a raid and one drive fails, then nothing changes. All my chrome windows open back up like nothing happened. I'm alerted that a drive failed so I buy a new drive and mirror it over and continue on. Even what I'm typing now would pop back up when chrome reopens.

kelper said:

Programs like Macrium Reflect surely negate any advantage of a RAID array for domestic users?

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I don't know. I used it one time to copy a harddrive to a ssd rather than reinstalling windows on the ssd. It took forever.

My 40GB of stuff takes three minutes to backup with Macrium.

kelper said:

My 40GB of stuff takes three minutes to backup with Macrium.

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So you're taking an image of your drive and storing it on another drive?

Do you overwrite images or are you accumulating them?

I keep a few but it's an external SSD 1TB drive, so lots of room.

My method of backing up is for instance: I download an app to the desktop, then copy the app to my software folder in D and E, then delete it from the desktop. The problem is I don't keep up on it, then the desktop turns into a giant mess, and backing up becomes a mentally challenging problem of deciding where everything should go and whether there are duplicates.