Tree of Life

In my efforts to create a lab at home, I thought 6gb would not cut it. I just installed 16 GB (4x4GB) and am ready to roll. (after the "VMWare Workstation or Player RAM Issue under Disk Disguise" incident below). I also converted my 4x1.5 TB RAID 5 to RAID 10 (4 disks for a total of 3TBs - striped and mirrored). You can definitely tell that there is a performance gain and 3TB seems to be pretty sufficient for me .. already have 1.4TB left.

Yes, I admit it, I am a geek, nerd (whatever you call it) and I do have a Desktop PC (and I am proud). I've been keeping its shell ( antec 180 ) the same for the last 10 years or so, but the interior has been changing ever since from P2 days up to Socket 1366. One of the things that remain the same is my old HDDs. I recently (and finally) decided to build a RAID. Reading about it, RAID 5 seemed to be a good idea, where you get x-1 hard disk worth of space. You have a decent tolerance for faults, unless 2 HDDs crash at the same time (which is unlikely). So I had a collection of HDDs separately living in the case. I designated 4 x 1.5 TB disks to become the RAID (called it RAIDer - cheezy I know). I also had another 1.5 TB and 0.5 TB as spare. I did a hardcore cleaning operation and filled the spares with all the data. Research lead me to using physical RAID cards for better performance but I used Intel's Storage Matrix solution. RAID formation reduced the 6 TB diskspace to 4.09...