Upgrade

Today I was upgrading my HTPC, which turned into a predictably painful experience. I'm upgrading from an Athlon XP 2500+ to a Pentium D 2180, adding a spiffy GeForce 9600GT, and three 500GB hard disks to form a RAID5 array. So I get all the stuff home and realize the motherboard I bought only has two SATA ports, but I need four. D'oh. Back to the store (different one, actually) to pick up a PCI SATA controller card. SATA controller card doesn't work. Double d'oh. Back to the original store to buy a DIFFERENT card. About to break screen when boot up with new card and find it reporting a PCI ID that does not exist. Fortunately, switching PCI slots makes it behave. Finally, all hardware is working. Frankly I think this combination of hardware is also teetering on the brink of my 380W power supply's capabilities, but it seems to be holding up so far. So now the system is checking for bad blocks on the newly created RAID array. 1.5TB of bad block checks takes...a while. I'm estimating five hours at the moment...