freeze gremlins!

Over the past few months, I had intermittent freezes... wasnt really an issue until over the holiday break, the freezes were frequent and eventually, my baby stopped booting altogether.

Now I THOUGHT it was one of my raptors failing... I had replaced the cables on them and was convinced it was them.

Nope... after some troubleshooting I had found it to be my 750 gig drive causing the problem. I disconnected it and things were fine.. hmmm

So... I disabled raid, reformatted and used the disaster recovery kit (which worked perfectly BTW!) Installed Vista on the second Raptor and yay... things are happily moving along (and a lot faster too... I had been putting off a reformat for months now but after 15 months... windows needs to be fresh!)

I still needed more storage though... I figured I would call DS about the drive later and went to Frys (I hate frys but sometimes they have some good prices).
Came home with a Maxtor 1 TB for $104... hard to beat that at a retail store :)

I plug the drive in to the same cable as the "bad" drive and after 5 min... FREEZE! I actually laughed... mainly because now I really knew the prob... bad cable or bad port on the board.

Opened my DS box o extra cables, fished out some SATA and power... 20 min of carefully trying to match DS's amazing wiring job and things are perfect now!

lol go figure... one little bad cable caused all the issues.... On the bright side, I have a squeaky clean install, 3 TB now connected to the rig (2 TB internal, 1TB external) and like-new performance again.