New Hard Drive

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Guest

I’ve installed VISTA as an upgrade from XP and everything seems to operating
as it should. My VISTA score is 2.4 based on hard drive performance. The
other scores range from 4.4 (processor) to 5.9 (Graphics)
I’m considering the purchase of a new SATA hard drive with improved
performance but I’m not sure if I can transfer my VISTA OS from the old drive
to the new one using the upgrade DVD. I have the motherboard connectors
necessary to leave the old drives in the PC while changing over but I
downloaded the drive’s installation process and it says to install the
operating system from the DVD after formatting the drive and making it the
boot drive.
Is there a way to transfer the operating system using the current
installation and the upgrade DVD?
 
The "larger drive" part worries me. Right now I have 2 SATA 200GB drives in
RAID 0 configuration (I have no idea what that really means) and I'm
considering installing a Western Digital Raptor 150GB drive. The issue
obivously is speed rather than size.
When you refer to ghosting is that as in Norton Ghost? Will I be able to
make the new drive the boot drive without any partitions? I have four SATA
connections on the motherboard (2 in use) but only one free power connector
and drive bay.
 
I would check the speed on the 2 sata drives first. Chances are it is
probably the same speed as the new drive you are going to put in. Just so you
know if you take out the drives you risk loosing all you data. With a raid
setup the data is copied in pieces across multiple hard drives, so if you
take out one you kill both drives. More than likely you either dont have
updated drivers for your sata card or your motherboard. Ghost will not work
with a raid setup just so you know.
 
Thanks...maybe I need to look at this again from the existing drive
viewpoint. The two (WD2000) drives are in a RAID 0 configuration and after
installing VISTA they slowed to a crawl. I though it was a function of all
the indexing and fetching but it is apparently more basic than that. I use
the Touchtone "Driver Agent" sevice and have all of my drivers, including the
Intel ones up-to-date.
I used Passmark Performance Test 6.1 to evaluate the drive and get a sorry
result of 1.5MB/sec Sequencial Read, 2.07 MB/sec Sequencial Write, and 2.22
Random Seek-R/W. They don't have a comparison PC on there that does as
poorly. The end result is VISTA is very slow to boot or restart and is
sluggish in almost all operations. In example; it usually takes just less
than a minute to populate the "My Computer" window, well over a minute to
populate "Control Panel", a minute and a half to pop up that annoying UAC
window/process permission and restart time is about 6 minutes. The whole
VISTA experience is disappointing in respect to this. The disk drive seems to
be in constant operation from boot-up and will often take 45 minutes before
it seems to be just reading things I'm causing it to read.
Bottom line: I hate the thought of going out and buying not only a new hard
drive but a VISTA full up version just to find out there is something else
causing all of this. Don't get me wrong I'm not bashing VISTA but I not
confident its handling this drive configuration the way it should and
although the PC handles the Aero and all other function well the sluggish
performance whenever the disk drive is involved it considerable worse than
what XP was doing.
Any advice or troubleshooting ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
GOT IT FIXED!!!!!!
FYI: This issue was being caused by the Intel Storage Utility. I was running
version 4.5.0.6515. Found Storage Utility 4.6.0.6758, Installed it, and now
have a 5.9 score in the VISTA Index for the disk drive and Performance Test
results of 80.3 MB/sec Seq Read, 95.6 MB/sec Seq Write, 5.8 MB/sec Random
R/W.
After four days of agony, I can spend the rest of this morning seeing what
VISTA is all about, hopefully without further frustrations....... Lord please
save me from further Microsoft OS updates... ;-)
 
It's a good thing that Emory suggested "More than likely you either dont
have updated drivers for your sata card or your motherboard"
 
Further to this thread...

I'm having the same issue. My 200gb ide hd died (xp os) and i was for a
short time forced to use an old 20gb ide drive. (In fact this is the reason
that I decided to install vista)

I now have a 300gb sata hd (installed) which I have formatted and partioned
in half, and am just using it for games/movies/storage.

SteveDH; did you end up using norton ghost?

If so, could I simply ghost the 20gb ide drive; copy (or whatever the term
is) the image to one of the partitions of the new sata drive and then remove
the ide drive?


sorry if this is a dumb question, but i'd really like someones' help! :)
 
Further to this thread...

I'm having the same issue. My 200gb ide hd died (xp os) and i was for a
short time forced to use an old 20gb ide drive. (In fact this is the reason
that I decided to install vista)

I now have a 300gb sata hd (installed) which I have formatted and partioned
in half, and am just using it for games/movies/storage.

SteveDH; did you end up using norton ghost?

If so, could I simply ghost the 20gb ide drive; copy (or whatever the term
is) the image to one of the partitions of the new sata drive and then remove
the ide drive?


sorry if this is a dumb question, but i'd really like someones' help! :)
Click to expand...

What you're talking about is "imaging" a drive, many products do.
Ghost is popular, but a little geeky for a lot of people. There are
more user friendly applications that do the same thing. When you buy a
new drive, many come with a basic "imaging" tool. So that's another
option.

There's a difference between just "copying" a drive and imaging a
partition. In the former you just copy files, when you "image" you are
making an exact sector by sector copy of your old drive. The reason
you need to image verses copy is Windows has several hidden system
files that won't easily copy.
 
SteveDH,

I'm having the exact problem you were, i.e. terribly slow performance RAID 0
drives with Intel controller. You said installing Intel Storage Utility
4.6.0.6758 solved the problem. I've searched the Intel site for it but I
can't find it. Can you tell me (or does anyone else know) where I can get it?

Thanks,
Joey
 
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