Windows 7 Amazing Installation

I lost one of the two 400 GB Western Digital drives in my RAID 0 array on my home "studio" PC on Sunday. The performance of two mediocre drives raided together has always been impressive, so I was determined to go back to it. This desktop machine was running 64 bit Vista, and was not particularly stable. I was hoping to put either Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 on it, and I was going to wait until fall.

Monday I bought two Seagate ST31000333AS 1TB drives from Antares Computing which arrived yesterday. I recommend both Antares and these drives (both are fast!). I only recommend RAID 0 if you can deal with losing the array (as I could). Reliability will be low - performance high.

So I take out the two old drives and stick in the two new ones. It takes longer than it should - thirty minutes - a little bit of cable manipulation and contortion (I never remove the full tower case from the rat's nest where it lives). Next I stick in the Windows 7 RC disk and boot. I think I had two clicks before it took off, and 20 minutes later it was done.

This bears repeating. Twenty minutes later, Windows was installed into previously unallocated space on freshly installed hard drives. I am sure I will have a lot of playing around to do (but I enjoy that - hit me). Twenty minutes. No formatting. Nothing.