It's been a month now of playing around with Gemini. I finally solved the problem of the I/O Hub overheating by installing a new fan in the side of the case - it's the transparent fan in the middle of the side panel. I searched around the web reading up on fans, reading reviews, reading product specifications, etc. Finally I settled on the Antec Tricool 120 DBB, mainly because it has a three-speed switch and I did not know how much cooling I would need. Once I got it installed I found that the fan cools adequately well on the lowest setting. Before I could install the fan I had to find a way to cut a hole in the pexiglass side panel. Fortunately Deena remembered a plastics company (Dimension 3 Plastics) that did fabrication and machining. At any rate, I now have Gemini upstairs in the study where it belongs instead of spread out across the dining room table. Deena was getting pretty tired of eating in the living room by then.
While Gemini runs well and is nice and powerful, I still cannot get the file system configured the way I want. I have five 2 TB disks in a RAID array configured to appear as one large 10 TB disk. Unfortunately I cannot access more than 2 TB right now. The reason is that the disk array is layed out with the Master Boot Record (MBR) partition table. This is the standard PC partition layout, but it only supports disks up to 2 TeraBytes in size. The GUID Partion Table (GPT) layout is newer and has no such limitation, but Windows does not support booting from a GPT disk with the BIOS firmware. Windows does support booting from a GPT disk if your system uses the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). As it turns out the S5520SC motherboard I have supports both BIOS and EFI, but for some reason you cannot use EFI with the built-in RAID feature. This is especially dumb because the S5520SC is a server/workstation board, and you would expect people to use a large RAID array.
My other option is to configure the RAID as two virtual disks, one small one for booting Windows, and one large one for all the data. Unfortunately the new motherboard I have will not allow me to configure two virtual disks. It's frustrating that with my previous motherboard I was able to configure two virtual disks, and now I can't.
I've been in contact with Intel technical support for over two weeks now trying to find a solution to my dilemma. Finally we had to esclate the problem to their Engineering department. I had to fill out a long detailed report for the Engineering people, and I'm still waiting to hear back from them.
I think I've installed Windows about a dozen times now because I keep trying to find a way to configure the disk array the way I want it. Needless to say every time I do this I have to reinstall all my applications again. At least I am able to run Windows 7 fine, and I continue to get more exprience with it. I still have more work to do on the hardware - mainly I need to clean up the rats nest of wires and cables inside - but I can do that any time.
