RAID

John, are you running XP? If so, how do you take a drive from one box to another without running into problems? Doesn't XP keep track of serial numbers or something so it knows when you are running on different hardware than the installation system? Regards,

Mike Monett

No drive or LAN card serial numbers then. That's great.

Thanks, Mike Monett

I hope that you get many years of reliable service out of them. :)

I'm at home now, running on the just-fired-up HP. XP (and all the apps!) are a direct image of the ones I set up on my newish HP at work. The machines are hardware identical so nothing can tell it's been cloned. All I had to do was change a couple of IP addresses.

I did buy a copy of XP for each machine, so Microsoft should be placated. But I'm actually running the same one on both machines now. If I have troubles with Windows updates - the only way anybody will ever notice - I have three choices:

Install another copy of XP directly on top of my existing XP at home, just to change the ID number, a sort of no-op OS upgrade. That might work and leave all my files and apps intact,

or

Do the updates at work and just re-clone now and then,

or

Don't do any updates!

I did the same thing when the c: drive crashed on my piece-o-crap Dell at home. I cloned the c: drive from work and plugged the copy into my identical home pc. That worked fine, Windows updates and all. It was just a pain to work around the ghastly drive mounting and cabling inside the piece-o-crap Dells.

Oh, did I mention that the Dells were pieces-o-crap?

John

Not an expert, but I think you will find that e.g. the ethernet card MAC addresses are different, as are the hard drive serial numbers.

I believe you did mention that :)

Somebody told me that Windows doesn't check this stuff any more. It was a nightmare when when they tried that; say, somebody plugged a network adapter into a slot on a laptop, or added some ram, and Windows quit working. I think they do check for multiple patch updates from the same os serial number... the "Windows Genuine Advantage" thing.

With RAID, I can swap hard drives four times a day!

No, seriously, they're not very good.

John

Er um, it most certainly is well aware of differences in the machines. For one, the MAC address of the network adapter is used by windos as part of the machines fingerprint. The CPU has a serial number too. It doesn't mean you will have trouble, it just means that M$ *can* tell you have more than one machine with the same product key in use. It also means that if you used windos that needs activation (WPA), you are a little closer to having to reactivate next time you change something about your hardware combination. Just so you know. :-)

Are these Maxtor's made after Seagate bought the company? I've wondered if Maxtor was still junk post the buyout. [I just pay more and get Seagates. ;-)]

I build my own PCs, so I wasn't familiar with that model. The HP clock rate is low, but perhaps the high end silicon makes up for it.

RAID is certainly the way to go nowadays. If you don't mind a slight dip in I/O performace, the software raid works quite well.

The problem with hard drives is not the hard drives themselves, but the way they are transported and the temperature they have to work in.