Building A New PC

I really want an SSD but the reasonably priced ones worry me in some of their reviews. Any thoughts or suggestions?

~String

 

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If I were going to drop the cash on an SSD, it would be an Intel. Like this one, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167053

I don't like the idea of losing my OS, and any data I've been too lazy to back up, because I went with a company that takes chances with their quality control.

Also, when looking at reviews on sites like Newegg, keep in mind that not everyone takes the threat of ESD as seriously as they should. I really do wonder how many of those DOAs people receive were fine until they were removed from the package.

 

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The idea is you put the OS and programs on the SSD and have a regular harddrive also for your data. Perhaps 2 regular hardrives in mirror RAID.

So if the SSD screws up (and there is a point of a bout 3 years of average use they may start acting odd, because of numerous writes over the same space), you merely have to redo the OS and programs. With windows 7 it's very easy to make a backup(complete) and put it on your data drive, quickly restoring it.

SSDs are amazingly fast, common users running just IE and work processing can even notice a difference. It's the only way to make your OS/programs drive. Raid for this partition is NOT necessary and in fact, kind of a pain in the ass.

 

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I already have a 1tb internal, 500gb external, amongst others for backup.

It's the boot and fetch speeds as wells the zippy scratch disk speeds I'm after.

Not particularly worries about data loss on that drive.

~String

 

Note: nietzche beat me to it.

~String

 

Ya anyway the new intels do seem to have fixed any teething problems from the 1st gen SSDs.

 

I will have it double imaged. So that is the plan.

~String

 

My point stands though: for me, hard drive reliability is paramount in choosing a drive. Intel has the best reputation for reliability on SSDs (that I'm aware of), so they would be my choice.

 

I'm not all that sure what 'double-imaged' means, but I'll share my experience.
I have an Intel SSD which I was for a while using as the root partition of my configuration. There's no question -- it's noticeably fast, read times bench-marked at around 235 mb/s. That said -- I modified it and am now running a raid1 for my root partition. With two relatively basic baracuda 7200 drives it reads around 195mb/s, that's slightly less than the sum total of each drive independently.

I've personally not experienced issues with the SSD's, even on a slightly older Linux Kernel it gave me no hiccups. There is one major consideration for the SSD's... If you're going to be filling up your drive, the SSD is not for you. Typically, any decent SSD will periodically cycle its storage into different memory cells to prevent permanent memory imprints. If it's too full, the drive will go bad faster. Even in this worst case scenario, you're talking years.

With the Raid1 array -- say, 2 raptor drives -- you'll get the best of both worlds. You'll get a back-up drive with near SSD read speeds.

 

"Double imaged" as in I will have a full copy of the OS and all installed programs--activated and ready to go--"imaged" onto two other drives for quick re-copying and installation.

The drive I was looking at was the Intel 64 gig SSD. I would ONLY be using it as the boot partition and for the "my documents" file, which I don't keep more than 5GB worth of stuff in.

I've never actually set up a raid drive. I've actually never thought about it. I didn't know I could increase performance so easily. What about boot times? How does it help?

~String

 

Raid is a great option for spindle disks. It is always a piece of shit on PCs though. Particularly dangerous if you raid 0 only (Striping a single volume using two hard drives thus two spindles to access data at ...well close to double the rate at times). If you want Raid 5(which mirrors for redundancy and Strips for performance) you need a bunch of harddrives(at least 3 unless you get a fancy RAID controller).

For SSD not necessary and offers no value. You can move your my documents to another harddrive. Opening anything except perhaps fancy photoshop movies is going to be nearly as fast.

 

So, wait. Why would I keep the "my documents" file elsewhere? I utilize the files therein frequently, so the speed of opening them is part of the benefit of keeping it in the SSD and not on a traditional hard drive.

~String

 

get a second ssd for shit that does frequent i/o operations
i have my temp/internet caches/page file/my docs on a separate hard drive

do not use a slower drive

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Ever use a USB drive for any of that? I have a 500 gig external.

Still haven't built the new one yet, but the setup will look like this: 64 gig SSD, 1 TB internal, 500 gig external.

~String

 

even with support for esata and usb 3.0.....

I did, however, run some rough benchmarks to get an idea of what we're dealing with. For my devices I used a Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 1TB 7,200 RPM external hard drive with its eSATA port and ran it against a Western Digital My Book 3.0 with a similar drive inside. I attached these to a Gateway SX2802 PC with a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 CPU and 6GBs of DDR2 memory. On this system I was running Windows 7 Ultimate. To enable it to handle USB 3.0, I installed a StarTech 2 Port PCI Express SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Card Adapter.

With this setup, USB tends to be about 20% faster than eSATA at reads, while eSATA was about 20% faster at writing data to the disk. While I make no claims for these to be definitive benchmarks (I used the freeware Crystal DiskMark 3.0 program for my tests), I do think the results indicate what you can expect to see from today's eSATA and USB 3.0 drives.

In both cases the real world results were quite a bit slower than their theoretical bests. With reads, my USB drive averaged 90 MBps, while the eSATA drive came in at 75 MBps. When it came to writing to the disk eSATA still processed data at 75 MBps while the USB drive dropped to 62 MBps. (link)​

...externals are best relegated to storage functions. retain the default fat format for portability.

 

Eh.

Thank ye' sir.

~String

 

Liquid or air cooled?

This is the liquid CPU cooler I'm looking at.
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearc...WCH50-1 hydro series H50 high-performance CPU

To be honest, I have no idea what to look for in air coolers. I'm starting to dig and they all look about the same.

~String

 

Two air cool options:

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearc...s7000b-cu-led pure copper base cpu cooling fa

http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearc...S9900ALED Low-noise 120mm Blue LED CPU cooler

~String

 

Are you planning on overclocking? If not, how important is a low noise level?

I'm assuming you'll go with either i5 or i7. I like Thermalright coolers. Something like this with a large, low CFM fan, would be both quiet, capable of cooling even a moderately overclocked CPU, and less difficult to deal with than liquid cooling. http://www.svc.com/venomous-x-blk.html

I'm of the opinion that liquid cooling is the ultimate for both overclocking, and low noise levels, but I've never bitten the bullet and gone that route.

 

The liquid cooler I was looking at was about the same price as the one you posted. Damn. This is annoying.

~String