Battleangel | Personal

Two new Corsair XM2 2 GB sticks and a replacement SATA dvd burner (Sony Optiarc 7240S). You gotta start somewhere.

Since I don’t do much overclocking I thought I’d populate all memory slots for a total of 6GB. At least until this surge in memory prices wears off. Of course, using XP x86 and already addressing 512MB in graphic card memory, I can only use 3.5GB. Installing, and probably dual booting Windows 7, seems awfully close now. I just want a fast SSD (Intel X25-M) to do it right from the get-go. I have one on order, but supply is just dismal, and so I ponder whether or not to pay extra for a retail version of the X25. Seems foolish, and while I’m thinking about it they have probably sold out as well.

Oh and by the way, I thought I was being clever installing the 7240 on the jmicron (JMB36X) controller on the mainboard. As opposed to the Intel (ICH9R) controller. Keeping SATA AHCI drives on one controller and the burner on normal SATA IDE. Imagine my surprise when Windows wouldn’t load. I was not aware that I needed any additional drivers. I’m going to have to look into this, as I’m still seeing crashes on in XP with the 7240 back on the Intel controller.

Addendum: Haven’t seen any more crashes. Seems to have been a passing occurrence. Even did two burning sessions, going as fast as 20x on 16x media. And the drive is on Sata2 (hard drives on Sata0 and 1) with AHCI of course. I guess I will have to continue avoiding the jmicron controller. In fact now that I don’t have any legacy PATA IDE units, I disabled it altogether in the bios. Considering the foul-up they did with early SSD drives as well, this is a company that should be avoided at any cost.

I don’t have much else to say about this drive. It’s fast and reliable. Probably the best overall burner on the market today. It doesn’t look all that sexy (front could use a facelift), and it makes one hell of a racket burning at full speed, but it gets the job done.

RPC1 firmwares can be found here.