New Desktop

[Directive]

Seems my Primary HDD and video card died at about the same time. Got a Lenovo K450e desktop. Generic specs in my sig and old specs posted here.

Motherboard - H-RS880-uATX (Aloe) Chipset AMD 785G FSB 5200 MT/s
Procesor - AMD Athlon II X4 630 AM3 Quad 2.8 Ghz @ 4000MHz
Ram - 2x4GB (8GB total) DDR3 PC3-10666 1333MHz
Video card - Nvidia GeForce GTX 560Ti 1GB GDDR5 PCI-E 16x 2.0 256 bit
Display - LG Flatron IPS235 23" LED widescreen HDMI @ 1080P native resolution
TV Tuner Card - WinTV-HVR-1800 high performance PCI Express TV combo tuner
Sound - Realtec ALC888S Audio 8 channel 24-bit w/ Logitech X-540 5.1 speakers
Power Supply - Dynex DX-520WPS
HDD1 - Seagate 1TB Barracuda SATA drive 3.0 Gb/sec 7200 RPM 32MB cache
HDD2 - Seagate 750GB Barracuda SATA drive 3.0 Gb/sec 321MB cache 7200 RPM
NDD - 320Gig LaCie external network drive
RDD - LG - 8x Internal Blu-ray R/RE Disc/Double-Layer DVD±RW/CD-RW SATA Combo Drive
RDD - SuperMulti DVD Burner DVD±RW/CD-RW SATA Combo Drive
Printer - Canon Pixma MG6220
OS - Windows 7 Home Premium x64

[palmboy5]

DVD "Rambo"?

The PSU is the same? No way.

I HIGHLY doubt your two pairs of RAM are running at those two speeds. The system will choose the slower RAM and make everything that speed. Not that it matters.

[Directive]

Yea, the DVD is described as Rambo. Must be a strong drive LOL. I put my old PSU in the new computer. Stock PSU sucks. The higher speed ram is what came with it I think. The other 2 are from my old desktop. Just figured extra 8GB is worth more then the extra speed, no? I just listed the modules off as they are described.
Not a bad machine so far. Out performs my old one. Would love to get a better video card but can't justify spending another 200-300 on a video card after sinking money into this desktop.
I was able to recover 90% of my important information from the dead drive. Just lost about the last year of music, movies and photos. I got most of the music back from my music player and my wife has most of my photos.
So, guess I should be thinking of backups. Any recommendation for backing up my system?

[palmboy5]

I guess you can start with a 4TB drive? They regularly go on sale for $130 and AFAIK still have the best $/GB ratio.

And/or get two so you can have copies on both drives in case either one dies!

There's also:
https://www.backblaze.com/

[Directive]

That is the route I was thinking of taking. Can you suggest a good program to back my crap up automatically? Should I do something like "ghost" my drive or just copy folders over, or both? I know I sound panicked but I had a backup drive and I procrastinated updating it for about 8 months. Knowing what I know about computers I feel like an idiot not keeping up with it.

p.s. I really miss my 560Ti. How much of a performance difference should I expect?

[palmboy5]

I haven't set up automatic "back ups" before because I prefer to hand-pick what I back up.
That being said, my NAS with ZFS does the job acceptably well and I no longer do any sort of manual backups:
- The RAID6 nature of it means I can lose two drives without losing data.
- ZFS checksums everything so bit rot/corruption isn't an issue
- ZFS's copy-on-write paradigm allows very light-weight snapshots to older versions of files

Copy-on-write meaning that when you save, say, an updated version of your Word document, the changes to the file don't overwrite the previous copy of the file on the disk(s) and are instead written as new data taking up other free space. Both versions of your file are still on the disk(s), and you can have ZFS snapshots pointed to both of them. The beauty of this even extends to protecting against accidental deletions. I can delete every single file on my server (or a virus chooses to do that to me) and lose nothing because there will still be snapshots pointed to the prior state of the disk(s), with those files still existing. As per "copy-on-write", writes don't overwrite, they copy.

For the GPU, it's hard to really know since no review site would bother reviewing a Geforce _20 model anything. Best you can find is just...
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.p ... rce+GT+720
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.p ... GTX+560+Ti

[Directive]

OK, so my current video card is a bit less then my old. That is what I found as well.
I should get 2x2TB HDD's for backups. I'll look around for a program that does what your asking. There has got to be something out there that will do that.
I am having a hard time getting detailed specs on my motherboard.
I really hope you don't mind helping me. I feel like a bother sometimes.

[palmboy5]

CPU-Z should be able to tell you information about the motherboard (Mainboard). I think the main thing is to see what Southbridge it has.
http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/cp ... 1.1-en.zip

My knee-jerk reaction is that you set up Intel (software) RAID in that system with the two 2TB. The RAID you need to do is either called RAID 1 or Mirror.
AFAIK, this is the closest thing to ZFS's snapshots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_Copy
I haven't used it at all, though, and looks like they took it out of Windows 8

You aren't a bother! It's refreshing actually - most of the people I talk to now are not particularly techy and I don't get to talk about computers with them.

[Directive]

Is RAID hardware (using something different than the standard SATA 0-4 connectors, or bios setting) or is it software (an instillation of a windows app/program)?
I just got a more bad news. Seems my second drive, the 750GB HDD, gave the following result...

Guess I better start shopping.

I am my employers resident geek squad because I can figure out how to set up a router for remote DVR CCTV viewing. I have been plying with windows and computers since Windows 3.11 with DOS 6.2. I am no computer scientist but I know a lot more then most average users.

Lenovo K450e Chipset Intel Haswell Rev. 06 Southbridge Intel ID8C50 Rev. 05 LPCIO Nuvoton NCT6779.

[palmboy5]

Yep HDDs suck Your mindset should honestly be "buy them and expect them to die"! I can only effectively use 75% of my server's HDD space (RAID 6) just for the purpose of expecting and being prepared to see two die before I can replace them.

Strange what CPU-Z says for the Southbridge, I was expecting to see something like "H97" or any of the others listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_C ... DCAT-POINT

Windows itself can make the RAID 1 setup. Like so (be sure to watch from 1:56): http://youtu.be/LZeMVg0242M?t=1m56s
This is what you would call "software RAID". Also, at 2:50 he says "remember, this is a redundant system, not a backup." which you should make sure you understand. This RAID 1 protects against data loss from either of the drives dying, but does not protect against accidental overwrites or deletion (or corruption) unless you have something like Shadow Copy keeping track of old versions of your data.

[Directive]

So whatever I do to one happens to both. OK.

[palmboy5]

Ideally, for the two drives you buy, you buy them separately. Different brand/model/store/whatever. Just make sure they aren't the same. The reasoning is that when you buy two of the same model from the same place, chances are they were both made at the same time at the same factory under the same conditions and will have the same faults and possibly die at the same time. The point is that if one drive dies, you want the other one to live at least long enough for you to replace the dead drive. Them dying at around the same time is bad news.

Speaking of dying drives, I don't know how Windows would inform you if one of the drives dies... You should probably test it early on with basic things like... unplugging one of the drives while the system is running and see what Windows says.

[Directive]

What if I get the same drive from 2 different places? The videos seems easy enough to follow. I am getting 2 3TB HDDs.

[palmboy5]

The label sticker on the drive should say its manufactured date, you should just make sure their dates are different, at the least.

[Directive]

What you said makes sense. I only ask because I already ordered them. I will check there dates. If they are too close I will return one and get another.