Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

I too opted for the RAID 0 setup. I was going back and forth on this when I was configuring my Covet. How did I make my final decision? I figured, if I had a single drive laptop and had a bad sector, I would need a new drive anyways and rebuild the OS/apps. If I had a RAID 1 setup with a bad sector on one of the drives, I still have to replace that drive. Either way, I have to replace a drive with the RAID 1 setup being less hassle.

I opted with the RAID 0 to get the added performance. To save time and hassle when one of my drives do go bad, I purchased a license of Acronis True Image Workstation which will take a live image copy of my drive to an external USB drive. In the event one of drives go bad, I can reimage my Covet with the last image backed up.

Also, most of us have different applications and uses for our laptops. For me, I'm going to have VMware Workstation so I will need fast drive performance. This is the first time I'm going with this RAID/Acronis setup, so hopefully I'm going about this correctly, but just wanted to chime in and maybe this might help others with their RAID decision.

 

Interesting.

~100GB apps + ~100GB data = ~200GB

"live image copy of my drive to an external USB drive"

How long would a daily live image copy of 200GB take?

 

USB ~30MB/s, 200GB -> ~2 hrs
eSATA ~70MB/s, 200GB -> ~45 min

 

Yep, and my backups are over a wireless-N network, with an external drive connected directly to the router via cat-5. So it should be quick enough to backup without being intrusive.

 

*shrugs* Then use Intel's Matrix RAID which is a hybrid of 0 and 1. Basically you can put both on 2 drives if you make the system a multiple partition config. Leave the OS and apps as RAID 1 for redundancy and a second partition as RAID 0 for max storage and your files. As long as you back up all you need to do is re initialize the partition, format, and reload your apps from backup. I do a daily backup via script to my home server, but that's me. I think you are being overly sensitive to RAID with something that suggests that DOOOOOOOOM if you use it in the long run. (That is the sense I get from your post, even if it wasn't intended.) I've had RAID on several customers systems over the year and the only issue I've seen has been when the controller drops the RAID settings. Now a days with the RAID configuration stored in multiple locations even that has become a nonissue. It really depends on the implementation and Intel's SATA implementation started off iffy, I do Dell warranty work....trust me...I know, but has really turned into a solid implementation of RAID.

 

The system comes equipped with Intel's Rapid recovery option that is bundled in their Matrix Storage Manager that SHOULD ship with the M6400.

See: add3w'sherebecauseNBreviewsucks.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-026142.htm

Basically get yourself an external ESATA HD, yes they are more expensive then USB 2, that is the same size as your partition and Rapid recovery will do the same things as RAID 1 whenever you plug it into the system.

As a side note: I have yet to use this. However the feature looks very promising from a fast recovery standpoint if a RAID container goes poof.

 

Most of the people I've talked to working in I.T. for my school, have said exactly the same thing about XP-64. In fact they had a pile of machines that used to be XP-64, and they gave up on them and downgraded back to 32. I asked them about XP-64 and they just said "dude, you do not want to administer that." They even offered me to take three or four, when I asked what they were doing with the pile of XP-64 licenses.

I'm not sure what you plan on doing with the machine. I'm in Visual Effects with Maya, and I can verify the following software works perfectly under Vista (I even go to the Vista lab by preference here, mostly for it being 64bit):
Autodesk Maya
" Motion Builder
" Mudbox
Pixologic ZBrush (after permissions tweaking - have to disable UAC, during install only, and Take Control of its program folder.
Adobe Everything
Emulators: Dosbox, Zsnes, Mame I believe too...
Vim works also, with context menu items, despite docs saying it won't.

Those are the programs I use all the time... I believe my instructor used HDRShop with no issues also.

It seems to me most peoples' complaints about Vista have had workarounds, or have just been growing pains that -everyone- will have to deal with in a modern networked computing world. Or they have been people who are basically breaking their own systems downloading every shady free tweak toy, and then they blame Vista. (No [Run...] item in Start? Hit the Windows-R key combo, it's faster anyway.)

You know, just in case you're like a lot of people, and aren't a fan because of what other people said... If you've used it for a while I definitely grant you your opinion. But Vista-64 will still give you less headaches than XP-64.

 

My experience has been that you don't have to pay extra when buying an ESata drive enclosure. If the prebuilt units are more expensive, I'd say it's some exec saying "No, we're adding a feature, we're increasing the price."

It's actually a simpler circuit for ESata than for USB. There isn't even really a bridge! The board just runs the Sata straight into the drive with a minor change in the shape of the connector, and possibly pulling its power from one of the extra pins.

Prebuilt enclosures force you to deal with nonstandard drivers and autorun.inf files anyway. (Trivia: If you delete the autorun.inf information on your WD or Seagate drive, you will be unable to access your data! Same if a bad block happens to appear there.)

My solution: Buy an internal drive and an ESata enclosure. You'll get USB 2.0 along with it and it will cost $30 extra for the enclosure, and everything will work better including your warranty playing along better with hard drive recovery if the enclosure dies.

(Lots of friends, who couldn't get their data back, because it was the enclosure's fault and they would void their warranty to open it and recover the drive.)

 

Thanks. Can the notebook be in use while the image is being backed up?

 

You're serious about the external drives that are already a drive in an enclosure?!?

I've got a Seagate pre-external (don't know how else to put it! ) drive that's a cheaper one that's USB only. It doesn't seem to do anything weird, I mean I didn't need any special drivers, and in fact have it encrypted without issue, and formated it ages ago.

I actually quit using an enclosure I had, as it turned out there was too much space in it, and the drive could pull away from its SATA connections (but it was USB only).