dencorso

Although this may be seen as somewhat out-of-topic, that isn't truly the case, IMO: You two may find this (KB946932) of interest, in case it still works (notice, please, that the article was retired in early 2008). However, despite the article withdrawal, the necessary App Comp Toolkit remains being offered, and now it has reached v. 5.6, unless I have missed some further update. And here is the apposite recipe for Disabling UAC for Certain Applications in Vista. ...And here're some assorted musings: Win 7 UAC whitelist...

No. The parity data is updated on every write (thus making it slower), but ignored on reading, unless one of the disks has failed, when it becomes fundamental to recreate the lost disk (and that is a relatively slow process, spanning many hours). However, the parity strpes are evenly dispersed throughout all the 6 disks, so that when reading sequentially, even if one in every 6 blocks read is a (discarded) parity block, one is efectively reading from 6 disks in parallel, which should be somewhat faster than reading from just 5, in the most favorable conditions, and just as fast as reading from just 5-disks in a RAID 0, in the least favorable case. But this applies just for reading.

The safest RAID is 6, the next safest is 5. Both use block-level striping with distributed parity, but 6 has two independent sets of parity stripes... Hence, during recovery from a single disk loss, 6 has 5 safety (i. e. can still resist the loss of one further disk), while 5 has no further robustness. That said, let's consider RAID 0 vs 5: on a RAID 0 featuring 5 disks, capacity is the sum of the 5 disk and one reads from each in parallel, so that it can be up to 5 times faster than a single disk; now, a RAID 5 made from 6 disks (not 5) has the same capacity as the RAID 0 made from 5 disks, because the addicional capacity (i. e. the 6th disk) is virtually consumed by the parity stripes, but since the parity stripes are distributed over the 6 disks, instead of 5, the 6-disk RAID 5 will be reading from up to 6 disks in parallel, instead of just 5, being thus up to 6 times faster than a single disk. Obviously, when writing, the 6-disk RAID 5 will still be slower than the 5-disk RAID 0, because of the parity computation; but the added reliability can be seen as making it worth it. Of course, NoelC does disagree with me about it, but most everybody else does not. Then again, the majority opinion isn't necessarily the right one.

Or use 6 SSDs and make it RAID 5, instead of 0... it'll be even faster and much safer.

No. No way. Forget about it. -- short answer. Perhaps, in a very contrieved, roundabout, unsupported way, that may stop working at any point in time due to some update. -- long answer TL;DR: Don't hold your breath.

There's also Handle Software's free Regshot 2.0 Unicode for Windows XP 32 bit/64 bit I use v. 2.0.1.70 on XP SP3. Regretably, I don't have at hand a proper link to it to offer right away. BTW, it's language tab says "Russian", but it's, in fact, Language Neutral (one can select the language inside it). There's a preserved old homepage, which really is in Russian. There are whispers of a Regshot 2.1 Unicode for Windows Vista x86 SP1... it should be in "regshot-2.1.0.28.rar", in case that has ever been released, and if so, maybe further versions have been released for the NT-6.x family, before the developers gave up. I don't know... but this may be a start.

Thanks for your prompt reply! The i7 4820K / X79 is the most recent Processor/Chipset combination reported to be fully functional with XP x86, AFAIK.

Are you running XP SP3 (I mean 32-bit XP) with the Intel SATA controllers in AHCI mode? On which drivers? Fernando1's? And which modified chipset drivers are you talking about? What did you disable? Unless you get more specific, nobody else but you can benefit from the fruits of your hard work...

Which is already almost the case. The FAEX Caviar Blacks are the last non-AF from WD. Their new spec sheet for 2015 isn't out yet, but I bet all will be out-of-production by then. Interestingly the whole roster was: WD1002FAEX, WD1502FAEX, WD2002FAEX, WD3001FAEX, WD4001FAEX, the latter two models being really peculiar, in that they are 512-bytes sectored HDD's having 3 and 4 TB of full capacity, respectively, and therefore unusable with the traditional MBR. In particular, the WD1002FAEX was the 512-bytes sectored SATA 6 Gb/s TB-class HDD produced by WD for the longest time (since 2010), so it should be the easiest of them all to be found, and, in fact, as Dave-H has just shown us, it's already relatively difficult to find, as of now. Here's hoping jaclaz's workaroud works beautifully! @jaclaz: take care not to confuse with laziness a binge of unrelenting consumerism !!!

You've got it right: here are the WD Caviar Black series, from 1 TB up: FAEX are "normal", 512-byte sectored, HDDs, while FZEX are 4-KiB sectored, AF, HDDs. All are SATA 6 Gb/s; the older "normal", 512-byte sectored, 3Gb/s were FASS or FALS.

And if all that fails to work, do take out the processor, clean the heatsink and fan, remove the thermal paste completely, reseat the processor and give it a thin layer of decent-grade recent thermal paste, reinstall the heatsink and fan, and let's see what result this produces.

I do agree with NoelC. More than that, I think all involved are old enough in this game to be able to infer reasonably well (that'd be more than "common sense"... let's call it "geek grade gut-feeling") when such endeavor is bound to become a sea of sorrow, and when there's a minimal chance of all-out success, even if at relatively high cost (in time and effort). Knowing when to avoid confronting a challenge is priceless, and can result in the avoidance of much needless annoyance. Sometimes, lateral thinking (like slicing the "Gordian knot") just works, and can be much more blissful than actually solving the challenge met head-on. Just my 2¢, of course!

That was also my own reasoning. I really think you've taken the right decision. A non-AF HDD must look exactly the same through both interfaces, and you know that for sure, because that's how the previous HDD, which was not AF either (obviously, because they didn't even exist until quite recently), was seen. So I'm confident your decision is a winner. Even so, please, do keep us posted about how it develops.

MemTest86 and MemTest86+ are freely downloadable from their respective developers sites in bootable .iso format... And there is also the Windows Memory Diagnostic, which is misnamed, because it's stand-alone and not a windows application (although the installer must be run inside windows), but that notwithstanding, it is free, it is from MS, and it is useful for memory diagnostic, too... and its original location is preserved here. I normally use MemTest86+ and if it finds nothing but I still think there is something to be found, then I give the Windows Memory Diagnostic a run.

Ponch, with all due respect, both NT-family and unix-family OSes do fully supersede BIOS during the boot process. Hence, unless the machine's chipset does not contain a memory hoist, no matter what the BIOS thinks, those OSes can access all (or almost all) installed memory.

The solution is to buy WD Caviar Black HDDs of the FAEX kind, which are the last non-AF still available (notice there exists 3 and 4 TB versions of them, too!!!)... and then sell, or use only through USB, the Caviar Blue AF 1TB Dave-H already has. Sorry! Of course, that's just my 2¢. Myself, I'm hoarding WD2002FAEX, WD1502FAEX and WD1002FAEX HDDs, in order to be, let's say (literally)... "Zukunftsfähig" WD Caviar Black (512 or AF) 2014.pdf WD Caviar Black (512 or AF) 2013.pdf WD Caviar Blue (512 or AF) 2013.pdf WD Caviar Black (512 or AF) 2012.pdf

No. As I said elsewhere, MS'll end up bought by Symantec, which'll then fade away the brand rather quickly, because of their utter inability to figure out how to make Windows 8+ any worse, even after trying very hard for some time.

I had something like that in mind, when I posted that comment...

I'm sure it's doable. But I think you'll need to wait for jumper, RLoew, Xeno86 (if he's still keeping tabs on this forum) or Tihiy to tell you how to do it properly. But until they chime in, do reseat all memory sticks, just in case, as I've suggested above.

Well... KB189655 would be my 1st guess (Symevnt.386) ... but, before anything, do reseat all memory sticks, just in case.

Is this a real question? Well if he Bios only "half sees" them (in fact I'll edit my 1st post, Windows does say "4GB, 2.87 usable"), there's very little chance that it could solve the problem. I'll send you my Bios as an ascii file and see if you got the guts to patch it. For the video card, there is no menu in Bios to change those 128MB. While he is half-joking, jaclaz is right, it can be done and does solve the problem (<link>), but it's frowned upon by MS.

Even so, they've still got many pearls, you know...

Don't look now, but they've just changed their user agreement because of that (although maybe too late to get off being sued by those, like you, who already got in trouble because of them).

Well, all in all, I'm glad you've recovered all your stuff, and that both disks turned out to be OK. The round thingies having cooper wire wound inside must be inductors, which insulation became brittle due to the heat (a HDD is something really tropical, working at about 44 °C) and crackled, the shed pieces on being removed/manipulated. And, please, do yourself a favor, fork some more money and get yourself a 2 TB WD MyPassport. They do rock, and don't cost too much. And, then, do create, at least, one monthly backup to an external, removable HDD. The MyPassport is USB 3.0, you almost won't notice it's an external HDD at all. And if a PCI-e card is needed to complete the package, be sure to buy something base on a Renesas chip, they're the way to go.

Way to go, xper! Thanks a lot for your hard work!