Recent content by iBP_James

There's software programs such as Acronis True Image Home, which I've personally used for many of my own computers as well as for clients. There's also Norton Ghost. Both programs do an exact bit-for-bit copy of your partition over to another physical hard disk so you won't have to reinstall...

An eSATA external HDD would be best; they usually come with USB 2.0 connectors as well, but if it also has eSATA support, the more the merrier. :D

Perhaps it is a firmware issue? Has it been updated to the most recent revisions?

Something more important to pay attention to would be the motherboard's Southbridge - X58 utilizes the ever-familiar ICH10R, which for all intents and purposes for RAID 0/1/10/0+1 is pretty good at doing simple RAID functionality like that. :) As for RAID5, well, for hardware-assisted...

Yes, it is only with a few select maps that were initially created as a technology demonstration.

The performance will always be affected by simple disk drive dynamics that they cannot read and write at the same time, as Joe Average described in such detail. :)

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 has long been the performance king within the terabyte realm up until the WD Black topped it - but not by much. The main appeal of the WD Black IMO is that it has a five year warranty, as opposed to the Samsung's three year warranty. If you want to save a bit of money...

The motherboard shouldn't be a problem, but rather, the case you put it in! The motherboard most likely has a PCI-e 16 slot (don't worry about 2.0 spec, the 9800GX2 won't be bottlenecked by full band x16 PCI-e). I personally own an Antec P180 (sweet case :)), and you should have plenty of...

Yes. You will have to find a place to put your data until you set up any kind of RAID array from a simple volume. The process fundamentally changes how your controller handles your disks in your array, any kind of existing file structure and data would need to be formatted as a result of a new...

As far as I know, HD Tune Pro 3.0 and Acronis True Image Home feature disk wiping tools using Zero-Fill, Gutmann, or DoD 5015.2 standard wiping methods. There are probably other alternatives for free software out there, as well. As long as the disk you're using isn't the OS disk (obviously! :p)...

You can use disk cloning software such as Acronis True Image Home or Norton Ghost for a perfect 1:1 copy of your old disk to another disk. RAID1 (mirroring) does this on a real-time basis, but it doesn't protect against user error or malicious software/viruses. If you are backing up your old...

The HD4850s at the moment are all reference, so the main differences really lie in their warranty policies, which you should choose carefully on the ATI side. For Nvidia, their third-party vendors such as EVGA and XFX have been generally very good, though I can't say that the ATI side has many...

HD4850s, which would beat the 8800GT by a healthy margin, and is neck-to-neck with 9800GTXs, can be had for under $200 easily, about $150 after rebates as well. That would by far be your best option for a video card well under $200. :)

You can go into Disk Management utility (Right click "Computer" -> Manage) and extend the partition by right clicking the partition you wish to extend and you can enter a value (maximum of whatever unallocated space is available) to the partition you wish to expand. Make sure any unused...

Maybe it's a partition that was created on the disk a long time ago. You can delete the partition using Windows Disk Management (make sure you back up all the data on this smaller, secondary partition), and the expand your main 37.2GB partition into the 23.5MB partition and it should all be one...