I like my ASRock Z77 Pro4 (-M, can't remember for sure). 8 SATA, 4 DDR3. Its fast, boots fast and has been stable with both Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Thank you for the suggestion. What I realized is that I actually need 8 SATA ports
and an eSATA port.
It seems that most motherboards are now lacking eSATA ports altogether, having replaced them with USB3 - and if they do have an eSATA port it's running off the same controller as the internal ports, and disables one when you enable it. These boards often have an mSATA port as well, which does the same thing.
My Sabertooth P67 has six Intel SATA ports, two Marvell SATA ports, and a JMicron controller for two eSATA ports.
The last time my motherboard failed it took ASUS five weeks to return it, and I had said to myself that I was just going to buy a new board instead of waiting - this also meant I'd be able to upgrade to a Z series board and gain access to QuickSync and SRT rather than manually managing files on my SSD.
The only board I could find anywhere that was in stock which met these requirements and was able to ship before the weekend was the Sabertooth Z77. (there was also an ASUS Z77 Pro board around the same price which came with a PCI-E card with a pair of USB ports and eSATA)
The cost of that Sabertooth Z77 board was almost the full price of a new Z87 board, which got me thinking about a Haswell upgrade. I'd rather not be spending money on a "dead" platform.
Because I wasn't going to rush into that and look over my options this weekend, I had a hunt around and found my old Gigabyte GA-E7AUM-DS2H with an E5200 installed - I thought I had got rid of that the last time I was clearing things out, but I'm happy that was not the case.
Setting up the board has been a little painful, but it's almost working correctly now.
The biggest problem is that all my drives are now formatted as GPT disks, but you can only boot from GPT disks on a UEFI-based system (which this is not) and "conversion" requires formatting. (at least with the tools that Windows setup provides)
I found an older 500GB drive that I had been using as a backup and was willing to wipe, and after a number of errors, was able to get that working.
For some reason the Windows 8 installer was not able to do the conversion or format the disk, so I had to load up the command line tools and use
diskpart to do that.
And then it turns out that Windows does not like installing to an eSATA drive and gives you a general error rather than being specific about it. After swapping it over to an internal SATA port, I was able to install Windows 8 and then put it back into my eSATA dock.
As an aside; I really wish that Microsoft had made strides to make Windows more Mac-like in this regard. On a Mac, there are no restrictions on installing to, or booting from, external drives.
All your applications appear to be a single file (as far as the user is concerned) that reside in your Applications folder, and all your settings are stored in your user folder.
You can copy the applications folder and your users folder to another machine and 99% of the applications will work as they always did.
On Windows you need to reinstall just about everything, even if you kept "Program Files" in an external location, due to things like the registry.
The Gigabyte board only has five internal SATA ports and one eSATA, but that works out OK temporarily as I am not using my SSD and I can disconnect the optical drives.
Unfortunately,
the board layout was poorly considered, and the SATA ports stop you from using a full size video card.
I might be able to use my GT610, but can't hook up the GTX 570 for full time use. I might disconnect all the internal drives and boot from eSATA just to check that it's not my power supply causing problems with the P67 system though.
This will be my fourth problematic Sabertooth P67 board, so something like the PCI-E ports dying on it doesn't surprise me any more.
EDIT: No problem using the GTX570 with the Gigabyte board (other than having to remove all the SATA devices) it's definitely a fault with the Sabertooth P67's PCI-E slots.
And I know that this number of failures would normally point to the problem being somewhere else, but I can't find anything that could be the cause. I just have really terrible luck when it comes to hardware. (and I used to have a job building custom PCs, so it's not that I don't know what I'm doing)
As for buying a Z77 board, or upgrading to Haswell... I'm undecided. Now that I have a working system, I'm not in such a rush and may just wait for the replacement P67 board. I have asked the shop to see if I can swap it for a different board, and they said they might see if they have a B-stock Z68 they can swap it for. (I'm not too hopeful that they will have one with the same connectivity though)
When looking at the Haswell options in more depth, I'm reminded of all the reviews which were left underwhelmed with Haswell on the desktop. The GPU options are limited, the boards all have high DPC latency, and it's missing things like S0ix. It seems like a great step forward for mobile devices though.
And frankly, I hate working inside my current case (a
Silverstone FT02) and my GTX570 is starting to show its age when running the latest games.
Haswell and the 700 series of GPUs don't quite seem like they are a big enough jump in performance for me to justify the cost of upgrading though, so I would rather wait for Broadwell and the 800 series, and build a new system.
And by then, the new consoles should be out and we'll have a better idea of how a PC with a 4-core Intel CPU, 8GB+ DDR3 and a GPU with 2GB GDDR5 runs games that were designed for the PS4 which has an 8-core AMD APU with 8GB GDDR5.
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Topic: Hard drive failure imminent - best way to clone it? (Read 44848 times)