Well before Christmas I finally bought myself windows 7, and eagerly installed it. Unfortunately when I did so my computer when to hell, everything became horrifically slow and anything dragged jumped around unpredictably. As you might guess I wasn't exceptionally happy with this so I removed windows 7 from its partition, but even afterward the same problems cropped up.

So I switched to my smaller secondary HDD, and everything cleared up. So I chalked it up to my main drive begining to die particularly as transferring files from it was glacially slow. Now I got around to installing the drivers for Asus Xonar DX sound card and it began having fit and either blew my ears out with horrific static or didn't work at all. Which made me think something was amiss, so I enabled my built in sound card which worked fine.

This left me wondering what exactly was up with my computer, that would take out a HDD and a sound card, well the xonar dx needed a floppy power connector so that got me thinking especially since it was connected to the same line that my failed HDD was on. So I go and order myself a set of 3 Hitachi 1TB deskstars to put in a raid5 and a 1000W power supply as I suspected that might be the problem.

So long delay with the Hitachi drives they had to be special ordered but were strongly recommended by a friend working in a server farm, and the reviews on their reliability blew away Seagate and Western Digital so I figured it was worth the wait.

So finally today I get them and get everything hooked up with some difficulty as I had never assembled a raid before. With a new power supply my Xonar DX is now working like a top which in my opinion thoroughly confirms my suspicion that my old power supply had reached its limit I had heard they gradually decay over time and I had it pretty my running at full capacity plus it had suffered through numerous power outages.

Now I am happy with my new Power Supply and everything working like it is supposed to.

It makes me wonder if 500GB seagate HDD would run properly with a new power supply but I don't feel like risking it, HDD failures suck and I've done enough reinstalling in the past month to not want to poke that sleeping dog with a stick.