I get home and fire up STEAM and see that it's going to be Midnight or so CST before I can play so I start playing some Rift to pass the time.
A Zone event kicks off in Stillmoore and I run up to a group of invaders and cast a spell, and my system hangs like David Carradine in a Taiwanese Hotel.
As it turns out, one of the Corsair SSDs I was using in RAID 0 for my OS Drive died.
After cursing for 20 minutes or so, I decided to bite the bullet. I went into the Intel RAID BIOS and removed the one SSD drive it could see from the RAID Array, ran tests on it to ensure it was okay, then formatted it and began reloading Windows 7.
Loaded it up, grabbed the patches, then downloaded SP1 and installed it, then grabbed the patches for that, then grabbed the latest device drivers, Firefox, reinstalled all my apps, patched them, tweaked the OS and Firefox, imported all my bookmarks from my backup, and was finally good to go for playing Skyrim...
I decrypt it, then fire it up and it detects my system specs and defaults to "High" quality...I'm thinking WTF?! I know my hardware should run this beyotch in Ultra without breathing heavy so I look around on the internet and discover that Crossfire is AFU for Skyrim...Sigh...
I decided to just get some new hardware to replace the bad SSD, and then I remember the flooding in Taiwan has caused a HDD shortage (grr)
The replacement SSD (Crucial M4 256GB) comes to like $409, which isn't that bad but, when I went to look at the cost for a pair of 2TB Western Digital Drives I nearly crapped myself. I purchased a new WD 2TB Drive a few months ago for under $100 and now they're going for over $270!!!
TLDR = SSD Died. Skyrim is FUBAR on my Setup, and replacement drives are nearly 3x the price they were 2 months ago...
So...it looks like my replacement drives will arrive this week and I'll waste another weekend migrating data and swapping out drives and reinstalling the OS Oh boy...what fun...meh.
