2 questions

][cEMAN**

I've bought a new machine, and put it together last night (while slightly drunk after a night out).

It went pop! S'ok, was just the neon tube inside - the box for it went pop. Everything else seems fine.

I was wondering if this might be too much of a load on the psu, and the transformer couldn't cope, or if it was too much power from the psu and it couldn't cope.

I'm running a truecontrol II 550w psu.

I have 2 SATA drives (fed off the psu dedicated sata power cables)
I have 2 IDE DVD-RW drives running off a single power cable (2 ends)
I have 4 antec fans - 2 running off "Fan only" connectors from the PSU, and 2 plugged into a spare power cable (2 ends)
I have a PCI-Ex connector going into an MSI 7800 GTX card
I have the 4 port ATX 12v connector in
I have the 24 port ATX connector in.

As I ran out of power connectors, I put the tube (here)through one of the spare power connectors that was connecting direclty into a fan (not the "Fan only" ones). It lit up for a second then the connector box (between the tube and the power button) went pop and started smoking.

I have a spare, so i'm looking to try again but i'm worried if it will go pop again - either because it's a cheap crap one, or because I set it up wrong.

Any suggestions?

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The other question is about raid. I've never setup raid before. I've bought a 74gb raptor SATA drive, and a 300GB SATA drive. Now when I go to set it up in the raid setup I only get the option for 138GB (2x 69GB I assume).

I stopped last night because I had to setup a bootable floppy to load the devices to setup windows, and I was too tired and drunk. Now i'm in work and asking about it.

If I let it setup RAID on these 2 drives and leave it at 138GB, what will happen to the rest of the secondary 300GB HDD? Will I simply be able to format it as a single drive seperate to the RAID setup?

Also, what is the best RAID to use. I want the best performance for gaming, so i'm torn between RAID 5 (supposidly best all around) or RAID 0 (fast, but not secure - I don't care cause it will just be games installed if the rest of the 300GB HDD can be formatted as a seperate drive).

The other option is this - they messed up the order and instead of sending me 1 raptor, they sent me 3 (I can't get charged for it, but they may ask for the spares back - i'm waiting to see).

Would I better in terms of performance and stability to use 2x 74GB raptors in RAID (both 10krpm) or am I OK with the 74GB(10krpm) and 300GB(7.2krpm)?

Will the different speeds mean that the 10krpm is brought down to match the 7.2krpm? Or will it mean instability in the data transfer, or will it be fine?

Thanks for any replies on this - as it's a first for me (case modding and using raid) any help would be appreciated

daywalker

for RAID to work you need to have matching hard drives, same size at least, prefereably same models the reason the pc only showed 138gb was becuase of the mismtach in drives it was taking the HD size from the raptor and using that as the basis for RAID, the remaining space on the other drive would be inaccessible, what you would most likely have to do is buy another raptor for the RAID and just use the 300gb as secondary storage

as for the neon light, try connecting it directly to a spare molex, if possible, maybe disconnect something unimportant for the mo, either the neon was just cheap crap or it was getting the wrong voltages thru the molex off the fan

][cEMAN**

OK. Well I could disconnect a fan and see if it works. Thanks

As for the RAID, if I connect up to SATA1 & 2 seperate 74GB Raptors, and connect the 300GB through the SATA3 connector, would that automatically add the 300GB to the RAID0/5, or would I get the option to limit it to SATA1&2, and then get the option to format the 300GB when I get into windows?

Also with the above load on that PSU, would it be safe putting in a second 74GB SATA drive? (I have 2 more spare SATA power connectors)

daywalker

to check if the PSU has the wattage necessary use the followinng PSU calculators

http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/Power_Supply_Calculator.php?cmd=AMD
or
http://www.casemodgod.com/psu_calculator.htm

as to the SATA 1,2,3, connections im not sure sorry , i think you can limit them somewhere BIOS maybe, my board uses seperate IDE connectors for RAID.