I got my hard drive yesterday. Considering that I ordered it Sunday, Monday was a holiday and it didn't ship until Wednesday, that's fast. Especially when you consider that I didn't pay for shipping.
http://www.amazon.com/WD-Blue-Deskto...093&sr=1-1
I'm not necessarily the biggest Western Digital fan, but I shop by reviews. I brought up Amazon's list of 3.5" hard drives and sorted it by average customer review and this was #1. Plus, it's relatively inexpensive because it's from WD's Blue series. Their Black series is supposed to be faster, but I couldn't see paying $11 more for a drive that's half the size. The drive I replaced is a Samsung 1TB SATA II 3 GB/s 7200 RPM drive with a 32 MB cache. This is a 1TB SATA III 6 GB/s 7200 RPM drive with a 64 MB cache. So, it's the same size but about twice the speed of the old drive. Plus, despite the claims of some reviewers, it makes no noise that I can hear. I even had my case open for a while yesterday and didn't hear the drive over my fans. Those people who heard noise from theirs either have superhuman hearing or (more likely) improperly mounted theirs. (or they just got duds) Mine is secured with 4 screws tightened just right, because I've found that improperly secured hardware can make a lot of noise.
Anywho, it's all good so far. After getting Windows installed and updated and installing my other software, I didn't feel like doing much last night. Installing Windows takes a while, no matter how fast your computer is, and Windows Update is easily the second slowest and worst software update program I've ever used. The only one I've used that's slower is the one in Fedora (Linux.) So, all said it took a few hours to get things back to where they were before the drive started messing up. Of course, there's still lots of games and whatnot to reinstall, but I got the essentials like Lightwave, Gimp and Inkscape installed. And, of course, my web browser, mail client and media player, 7zip, stuff like that (utilities.) So, back to this.
I did the grid lines for the saucer section the other day, but I didn’t want to render on my slow laptop. Now that I have my desktop back and I’m back to sub-two minute renders, here they are.
