Alienware Aurora Desktop (not a DSM I know)

[John Hartman]

it actually took 16 seconds from hitting enter for the whole operating system to be installed?  Obviously not counting updates, etc.

And HDDs are not optical, they are magnetic platters.  Optical is CD, DVD and Blu-Ray.

[Drew Sale]

lol there was supposed to be a / in between those. optical/HDDs are ancient, meaning both separately haha oops!

yep 16 seconds from hitting enter to finished, not including updates. playing SC2 on highest video quality settings and still being at 60+ frames is pretty sweet

[John Hartman]

holy crap I gots ta get me one of those!!!

you guys must have installed it from a hard disc image tho, no way a DVD drive can transfer data at that rate.  Must be a baddass motherboard as well and super fast memory too.  Thats ALOT of data to be moved and written.

[Remi Raymond]

Its not that much data. Now, rebuilding a raid 5 array, that takes time.

[Chad Giffen]

Ya that had to be an image for sure. I reloaded the OS from scratch on my SSD and it took way longer than that. However, it was way faster than on a regular hard drive.

[John Hartman]

Ok Remi, its not AS much data, but its lots for 16 seconds of data transfer.

I have good motherboards, ones that I bought specifically for fast data transfer, one of them even is supposed to do something that eliminates one area that it has to pass thru from drive to drive. I believe it doesn't have to go thru the northbridge or something like that.  Sorry its been a while since I built that one.

I have good quality high speed SATA drives, the correct cabling, correctly setup.  When I changed over to this setup, yes, installing XP Pro was quite a bit quicker, as was just transferring large files, but still, a fresh OS install takes probably 15min without updates etc.

If I could get it down to 5 min, that would be a huge increase.  If I could get it down to 1min that would be a miracle.  But 16 seconds?  Holy crap.

[Drew Sale]

when you look at how much of a system you can buy for $1,000 nowadays you can build a pretty fast system. but when your budget is $3,000 and you buy all the parts yourself and build it yourself? that's some speed goin on, let me tell ya. and yes, we definitely didn't use some crappy dvd drive to transfer that much data that quick haha

[John Hartman]

no shit on how much you can get for a grand!  And 3?  Holy shit!!

I remember when I built my first system.  My first sound card I bought was aSoundblaster16 was $179!!  My first hdd I bought cost me $149 and it was, get this, a 500meg drive!!  It was replacing a 30meg.  I think I payed $99 for a 14.4 modem!!

And RAM?  Don't even get me started, but I think I payed $250 for 4x128k sticks once.

[Chad Giffen]

Drew why not be specific.

I am assuming you transferred the image from another external hard drive. Possibly SSD external?

[John Hartman]

I would think he made an image of the original disc on the same hard disk, then installed it from there.

[Drew Sale]

booting from an external SSD and installing off that SSD onto the internal RAID SSDs