Windows 12 ! Already....

Scannerman · Aug 30, 2023

antspants said:
Fred Dibnah would of done it with his eyes closed. This guy was a little nuts.

View attachment 69420

I've known a few electricians in my day. They were all a little nuts. Perhaps he also liked to play with power.

Speaking of playing with power... I have a loose framework set up for my re installation of Windows 11. I like my drives to read in alphabetical order and I'm very OCD about this. When one uses over two dozen drives on a single system board one likes to keep things in order. This is proving a bit challenging with the addition of an IT card running alongside an IR card. Guess I'll just have to save the NVMe for storage and backups but the speed on the ADATA SSD doesn't look too shabby given that it's running off a break out cable.

ADATA VIA LSI CRYSTAL DISK BENCH MARK.png

antspants · Aug 30, 2023

Scannerman said:
I'm very OCD about this.

I’m a little the same. I name my drives by size and order, then partition, then name
3TB1P1_Name (3 Terabyte One. Partition One. Name)
I don’t yet have 2 dozen drives, but I’m getting there. Another two 500GB backup SSD’s on their way today.

antspants · Aug 30, 2023

Some of your drive names are quite long, and they have spaces… goes to show how oblivious I am about what you can do in an OS these days.

Scannerman · Aug 30, 2023

antspants said:
I’m a little the same. I name my drives by size and order, then partition, then name
3TB1P1_Name (3 Terabyte One. Partition One. Name)
I don’t yet have 2 dozen drives, but I’m getting there. Another two 500GB backup SSD’s on their way today.

antspants said:
Some of your drive names are quite long, and they have spaces… goes to show how oblivious I am about what you can do in an OS these days.

Yup, as I pointed out, it's a loose layout. I'll likely be changing those drive labels once I have it all sorted. I type the labels in caps because my eyes ain't what they used to be and I don't like risking my addled brain blurring out on acronyms, thinking I addressed something that was something else. I've been pulling smaller drives for my three daughters and replacing them with larger drives so I might have to order some more myself! :winkt:

What I have right now is suffice for me to get my boot order back. Those LSI HBA cards are tricky to play with but I find they're invaluable for stopping Windows from committing sewer side.

Here's a quick look at what Windows Disk Manager looks like on the Windows 11 side so far:

Sorry I can't fit them all into one window. lol

The project involves a rebuild after a catastrophic system failure compliments of Microsoft (hence the quirky labelling). Once the new Windows 11 install is done it will be the "C" drive in the correct 0,1,2 (A, B, C) order so "X" will eventually become "C". Normally, W,X,Y are reserved for externals and my Z drive is my blue ray.

antspants · Aug 30, 2023

CAPS for sure… sewer side just lol

After the first 20, I got the picture, no need for a lager window

To make it easy on myself, all the drives are the same brands. HDD’s are WD, SSD’s are Samsung EVO’s

spapakons · Aug 31, 2023

What happens if you reach 24 drives? Can you add more? What drive letter it will use? Maybe we can use Greek or Cyrillic characters, don't think so...

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

spapakons said:
What happens if you reach 24 drives? Can you add more? What drive letter it will use? Maybe we can use Greek or Cyrillic characters, don't think so...

I would so love to use Greek characters — especially if they were in the Classical Greek style. This should be sufficient to the task at hand. Technically I'm well over 24 drives already as I'm running RAID 0 on one array and two RAID 10 arrays (2x4) and two RAID 1 arrays (2x2). So I'm guessing that puts me @ 32 not including the blue ray. TBH I have already pushed the envelope on this just to see what might happen. I lose my USB connectivity! :winkt:

That simply will NOT do.

antspants · Aug 31, 2023

Scannerman said:
Those LSI HBA cards are tricky to play with but I find they're invaluable for stopping Windows from committing sewer side.

LSI HBA cards, yeah right. Because it just occurred to me, I only have 10 spots for drives. The one PCI slot has been taken up by the Wirelines/Bluetooth card, the other is blocked by the GPU. I know there are PCI extension cables that will accommodate somehow but I’ve only ever seen a 6 port PCI SATA card. How do you get so many drives onto your board? My math says I can only do 16 unless I raid or remove the wireless/bluetooth. That would give me 22 drives.
Outside the 10 I have, the rest are all in hubs like a couple of these I bought.

https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B0711L68MS/

antspants · Aug 31, 2023

What kind of tricky are they?

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

antspants said:
CAPS for sure… sewer side just lol
After the first 20, I got the picture, no need for a lager window
To make it easy on myself, all the drives are the same brands. HDD’s are WD, SSD’s are Samsung EVO’s

When I trusted Windows Recovery to over write drives C and D (like their pop up said it would) in a naive attempt to recover my lost OS, Windows Recovery over wrote drives C thru P and still failed to recover my operating system. Yup, yup, yup... I know, my own foolishness. Should have used Drive Image, or my Kaspersky. Never saw anything like it in all my Windows decades. All those drives were excluded and I had full assurance stating that C and D would be over written. Silly me for believing you can't get different results doing the same thing you've done before. The result: Massive data loss. All my backups for all operating systems over written, nearly all data drives reduced to what they were when recovery disc was first created, Linux vanished, and over 10TB of data gone. What survived? A: All the data on all the drives connected to the LSI card and of course, my Windows 7 Ultimate running in RAID 0. Win 8.1 and Linux were toast.

So yeah. This time a little extra insurance.

Over time I've learned to respect people's user preferences. They know what works for them. Then again, one cannot fix stupid so one does well to conserve one's energy. Most of us will learn in time. I have little confidence in today's WD mechanical hard drives. Those old Velociraptors you see were manufactured back when Western Digital actually made quality mechanical drives. That's why they still run with zero SMART errors despite their age. I've been slowly weeding out my SMR mechanical drives and replacing them with CMR mechanical drives. Toshiba makes some good CMR drives at a reasonable cost. The HGSTs and the EXOS are helium filled and they seem to work okay. I have one WD Green 3TB mechanical drive in an external enclosure that just refuses to die on me and I'm guessing it's because it's one of the earlier models because I cannot say how many tons of failed WD SMR drives I've seen in my life time — I keep it as a utility drive and will likely give it to one of my daughters eventually.

The thing about Samsung SSDs (apart from the expense) is that they either work or they don't. When they work they work extremely well. I have some EVOs in some other PCs. They're fast and efficient. Samsung did get caught with their hand in the cookie jar during the C_vD Crisis, when the alleged "chip shortage" was going on, and they got a slap on the wrist for this, passing off inferior chips for the good stuff. They weren't the only ones who did this. Even though I still have some working Seagate Hybrids I don't recommend them. Two out of five passed the test of time. When a drive starts clicking or chirping it's time to strip off the data and pull the drive. Seagate Enterprise drives are more reliable and of course, cost more. Crucial SSDs are in their own class and I can only salute Micron Technology for their quality control and standard of excellence. I hope they never change.

I like sampling drives and seeing which ones perform well, which ones have the least issues, and which ones last and keep on running long after the warranty expires. I used to think the days of spinning rust were done. I couldn't have been more mistaken. Still disappointed about what Intel did with Optane but that's... Another story.

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

antspants said:
LSI HBA cards, yeah right. Because it just occurred to me, I only have 10 spots for drives. The one PCI slot has been taken up by the Wirelines/Bluetooth card, the other is blocked by the GPU. I know there are PCI extension cables that will accommodate somehow but I’ve only ever seen a 6 port PCI SATA card. How do you get so many drives onto your board? My math says I can only do 16 unless I raid or remove the wireless/bluetooth. That would give me 22 drives.
Outside the 10 I have, the rest are all in hubs like a couple of these I bought.

https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B0711L68MS/

antspants said:
What kind of tricky are they?

These cards provide an independent interface on the interrupt when you boot up your PC. I'm not one of these people who has to boot to their OS in ten seconds without having an anxiety attack, but I thought I should give you the heads up on that first. These days you can get them cheap on Amazon but they used to cost hundreds of dollars and were mostly used in servers and commercial/industrial applications. You can get them pre-flashed to IT mode (frequently called UnRaid) or, in the standard IR mode (which allows you to configure hard RAID). They can run either SATA or SAS drives. They use something called a breakout cable.

Depending on the card you use you generally can have two ports (meaning you'll need two of those cables to run to your SATA drives) each port managing four independent drives, depending on whether you're using an IR card or an IT card. The IT card will grant you pass thru to your OS so you can treat the drives just as though you plugged them directly into your system board. You'll have to initialize and calibrate your RAID in the provided interface for the IR card. Depending on the drives you use this process can take a while. So a typical two port card will split into 8 drives on a break out cable. You will definitely need a free PCIe slot on your system board, at least a 4X slot.

I highly recommend using a system board and CPU that gives you a sensible amount of bandwidth. 40 lanes should be good. These cards aren't for recreational use. They're for work stations and servers. You wouldn't want to use them for gaming. I just had a peek at your system and you should be able to use an LSI HBA card with that rig without issue. Just remember that the Haswell CPU you're using only leaves you 16 express lanes for your extras so you could be cutting it close if you're already using other cards. I'm familiar with the Haswell 4770K and I've used HBA cards with this CPU before without issue, so I know it can be done. The 4770K does run a little hot, but it's a performer for sure and a good over clocker. I gave mine to the wife because she's a gamer. She's using a Noctua NHD15 also. (Good choice BTW.) Thermals are not an issue.

The reason I can use so many drives on this system is because it is in a workstation/server class. It's an EATX board. I could run a Xeon in it, but I chose the i7 6900K because I wanted the bandwidth and versatility. The kind of "tricky" I was referring to was the ability to move the drives around in the boot order. Technically, these HBA cards run in their own BIOS so this can be frustrating for OCD people like me who want to be able to manipulate the boot order and the order in which the drives appear in Windows Disk Manager. Meh, can't have it all.

I hope this helps.

jimbo45 · Aug 31, 2023

Scannerman said:
When I trusted Windows Recovery to over write drives C and D (like their pop up said it would) in a naive attempt to recover my lost OS, Windows Recovery over wrote drives C thru P and still failed to recover my operating system. Yup, yup, yup... I know, my own foolishness. Should have used Drive Image, or my Kaspersky. Never saw anything like it in all my Windows decades. All those drives were excluded and I had full assurance stating that C and D would be over written. Silly me for believing you can't get different results doing the same thing you've done before. The result: Massive data loss. All my backups for all operating systems over written, nearly all data drives reduced to what they were when recovery disc was first created, Linux vanished, and over 10TB of data gone. What survived? A: All the data on all the drives connected to the LSI card and of course, my Windows 7 Ultimate running in RAID 0. Win 8.1 and Linux were toast.

So yeah. This time a little extra insurance.

Over time I've learned to respect people's user preferences. They know what works for them. Then again, one cannot fix stupid so one does well to conserve one's energy. Most of us will learn in time. I have little confidence in today's WD mechanical hard drives. Those old Velociraptors you see were manufactured back when Western Digital actually made quality mechanical drives. That's why they still run with zero SMART errors despite their age. I've been slowly weeding out my SMR mechanical drives and replacing them with CMR mechanical drives. Toshiba makes some good CMR drives at a reasonable cost. The HGSTs and the EXOS are helium filled and they seem to work okay. I have one WD Green 3TB mechanical drive in an external enclosure that just refuses to die on me and I'm guessing it's because it's one of the earlier models because I cannot say how many tons of failed WD SMR drives I've seen in my life time — I keep it as a utility drive and will likely give it to one of my daughters eventually.

The thing about Samsung SSDs (apart from the expense) is that they either work or they don't. When they work they work extremely well. I have some EVOs in some other PCs. They're fast and efficient. Samsung did get caught with their hand in the cookie jar during the C_vD Crisis, when the alleged "chip shortage" was going on, and they got a slap on the wrist for this, passing off inferior chips for the good stuff. They weren't the only ones who did this. Even though I still have some working Seagate Hybrids I don't recommend them. Two out of five passed the test of time. When a drive starts clicking or chirping it's time to strip off the data and pull the drive. Seagate Enterprise drives are more reliable and of course, cost more. Crucial SSDs are in their own class and I can only salute Micron Technology for their quality control and standard of excellence. I hope they never change.

I like sampling drives and seeing which ones perform well, which ones have the least issues, and which ones last and keep on running long after the warranty expires. I used to think the days of spinning rust were done. I couldn't have been more mistaken. Still disappointed about what Intel did with Optane but that's... Another story.

For external drives these days you can't beat the newer Nvme chips --cheaper than "classic 2.5 inch ssd's and oodles faster even on a basic USB 3 connection with a decent adapter (get those that cover both modes including ssd mode). 1TB stick + adapter (USBC, USB3.1, USB3) around 50 EUR. the size is not much larger than a usb thumb drive -- In fact running Windows as a Windows to go from one of these drives even connected to a USB 3 connector on an older laptop with a "classic" 256 GB 2.5 inch ssd fitted internally) I get better performance than from running Windows from the internal HDD.

The only snag is that if a new version of Windows build comes out currently you can''t update from a "windows to go" device - but that's easy enough to "get round". Clone the windows to go back to the internal disk and using Hasleo wintousb convert the system to "standard" local (non win to go system).

The utility is a bit fiddly as it converts your win to go disk not the internal disk which will still be marked as a "Win to GO" disk so you then need to re-clone it back to the HDD.

Update the windows system and then clone back to the win to go disk.

re-install the bootloader (bcdboot) on the wintogo disk and you are back in busness with updated windows build. - Standard updates work OK - it's just new builds that can't be updated.

to run the bcdboot program assign say the efi partition on the device as "S". Your target windows system say is on drive E then simply as admin run

cd e:\windows\system32
e:\
bcdboot e:\windows /s S: /f UEFI

"Seemples"

Also good if you need a Windows system as recovery etc - works great too as I can have several windows systems with different languages and applications installed. On a 1TB device it's easy to have 6 or even 7 different windows systems. !!

Cheers
jimbo

antspants · Aug 31, 2023

Scannerman said:
They use something called a breakout cable.

Thanks mate

I bought this last year and I can’t remember why… what is it, is it a breakout cable? Memory issues are preventing my recall.

antspants · Aug 31, 2023

jimbo45 said:
For external drives these days you can't beat the newer Nvme chips --cheaper than "classic 2.5 inch ssd's and oodles faster even on a basic USB 3 connection with a decent adapter (get those that cover both modes including ssd mode).

Have been thinking about douing this. Can get some cool external usb-c bays for them also.

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

jimbo45 said:
For external drives these days you can't beat the newer Nvme chips --cheaper than "classic 2.5 inch ssd's and oodles faster even on a basic USB 3 connection with a decent adapter (get those that cover both modes including ssd mode). 1TB stick + adapter (USBC, USB3.1, USB3) around 50 EUR. the size is not much larger than a usb thumb drive -- In fact running Windows as a Windows to go from one of these drives even connected to a USB 3 connector on an older laptop with a "classic" 256 GB 2.5 inch ssd fitted internally) I get better performance than from running Windows from the internal HDD.

The only snag is that if a new version of Windows build comes out currently you can''t update from a "windows to go" device - but that's easy enough to "get round". Clone the windows to go back to the internal disk and using Hasleo wintousb convert the system to "standard" local (non win to go system).

The utility is a bit fiddly as it converts your win to go disk not the internal disk which will still be marked as a "Win to GO" disk so you then need to re-clone it back to the HDD.

Update the windows system and then clone back to the win to go disk.

re-install the bootloader (bcdboot) on the wintogo disk and you are back in busness with updated windows build. - Standard updates work OK - it's just new builds that can't be updated.

to run the bcdboot program assign say the efi partition on the device as "S". Your target windows system say is on drive E then simply as admin run

cd e:\windows\system32
e:\
bcdboot e:\windows /s S: /f UEFI

"Seemples"

Also good if you need a Windows system as recovery etc - works great too as I can have several windows systems with different languages and applications installed. On a 1TB device it's easy to have 6 or even 7 different windows systems. !!

Cheers
jimbo

I've often thought about how NVMe would work in an external enclosure for backup. I've watched a few videos too. It does seem an intriguing option but I'd probably want to run NVMe via Thunderbolt as an external. (Which is an option on this system board.) Thanks for reminding me about Win to GO. I plumb forgot about this option but was rather excited about it when I saw a video on it and talked my wife's ear off about it. She just gave me a nod and a "That's nice, honey" and went back to her knitting.

Alas, I have so many pokers in the fire as it is. I'll make a folder on my desktop and send myself a reminder to put his on my never ending TO DO list.

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

antspants said:
Thanks mate
I bought this last year and I can’t remember why… what is it, is it a breakout cable? Memory issues are preventing my recall.

View attachment 69443

View attachment 69445

Yup. That's a breakout cable. Now get a two port card and another one like it and you're in like flint.

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

The interface after you get it all hooked up will look something like this:

And the configuration utility (after you CTRL C) will look something like this:

A Guy · Aug 31, 2023

spapakons said:
What happens if you reach 24 drives? Can you add more? What drive letter it will use? Maybe we can use Greek or Cyrillic characters, don't think so...

A Guy

antspants · Aug 31, 2023

A Guy said:
A Guy

Very cool, cheers

Scannerman said:
The interface after you get it all hooked up will look something like this:

And the configuration utility (after you CTRL C) will look something like this:

I’m all out of likes, I'm so lost without them… (Air Supply Remix)

Scannerman · Aug 31, 2023

A Guy said:
A Guy

So that video shows someone making a ton of partitions. I wonder if it works the same way with actual, physical drives. Admittedly, I never thought of mounting my USB when I plugged my PC full of hard drives and ran out of room. I'm guessing it probably works the same as I have around 32 physical drives on this unit already.

Windows 12 ! Already....

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