The New AMD Building Thread

a 9800GT seems in your price range, or a 9600GT. check them out but check your PSU aswell

 

What do U mean check my PSU? Its a Corsair TX650

 

thats fine then

 

This looks like its more in line 4 my needs
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127412
MSI N94GT-MD512 GeForce 9400 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 HDCP
$49.99 Free Shipping*

 

Well this is what I'm looking at to update my unit
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128387&Tpk=MA790X-UD4P
GIGABYTE GA-MA790X-UD4P AM3/AM2+/AM2 AMD 790X ATX AMD Motherboard 109.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127419
MSI N95GT-MD512-OC GeForce 9500 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready
MSI N95GT-MD512-OC GeForce 9500 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready $49.99

$170.04 with shipping
Does this look like a compatible choice, or are there any added suggestions

 

Second thought might go with this because of the 3yr Warranty
MSI N94GT-MD512 GeForce 9400 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready $49.99 Free Shipping
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127412

 

Chances of a double failure on HDDs are more likely than you think - a dodgy batch of drives could mean two drives you bought at the same time may fail in quick succession, or you could have a power fault that zaps all the drives plugged into a particular connector.
SSDs have no more or less redundancy than HDDs. If you RAID them in a mirror you get redundancy, if you run them solo, you don't...

 

Shaff,
Welcome back!
What do you mean by "performance difference"? The only performance difference possible would be in I/O which should translate out to faster screen loading in games, while getting a Quad Core from a Dual Core would be a huge improvement. Most SSDs are not exactly fast when it comes to writing. Read speeds are good, but write speeds on all but the more expensive ones are easily beaten by any good brand of HDD! Given that the MTBF is based on X amount of writes. They aren't infinite! Theoretically a HDD is since the platters never wear out!

Remember, you are an enthusiast! The majority of the people in the world aren't! They are going to have to get down to HDD prices for SSDs to be mainstream successful! Most people are not going to buy one SSD, when for the same money they can get 6 or more 500GB HDDs!

Russ

 

True, that scenario is possible, but I've done about 60 Raid Mirror set ups and never have had a single problem. While it is theoretically possible, it's highly unlikely!

In theory it looks like a Raid mirror would have the same redundancy with SSDs, as a pair of HDDs, But the media is more fragile and limits the write cycles! They can't be written to as much as a HDD! that's it's Achilles heel as it's life is write cycle limited!

Russ

 

Agreeing with all of you about the theoretical downside of SSD's, I can say this from experience...
Remember the first time someone brought a Vista Dell to your house and said "fix it, its only 6 months old and slowed down" then you change it from 512mb to 2GB of RAM and the speed and performance increase is so obvious they look at you like you just saved the day?
Switching to a SSD is the same obvious performance increase, and after I tweaked it all proper-like It runs so well I think it was worth even more than the 30GB for $100.

 

exactly, mlc flash drives are inexpensive, but naff. the newer generation have much higher write speeds (far better than any hdd outside 15k SAS territory) and will easily last 5x as long as a mechanical drive. All we're waiting for is the price to drop.

 

thing is though, they are guaranteed for atleast 2 years, some 3 years, im not sure about other people, but i dont keep HDDs that long. i havent seen any info that these drives with the samsung, intel, or indlix chips are slower than any HDD.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/06/24/g-skill-falcon-128gb-review/9

check that whole review out. they olbiterate HDDs. and everyday things seem snappier, no real waiting around for stuff.

the only problem i see is the price, but then you pay the most for the best.

there is no need to defrag them. and as for the OS constantly writing to it, win7 is being optomised for SSDs. as for pagefile, that is constantly written too, so id partion a part of my storage drive, about 20GB for pagefile. so my mechanical HDD which is used for strage can do the pagefile.

also why would you use a small HDD for the OS. they are much slowwer than the bigger HDDs, because the of density on the platter, and therefore the head doesnt have to move as much to seek.

 

I semi-retired my WD2500JDs at around 3 years old. The oldest drive I still use at the moment is a 37GB Raptor which is 3 years old, and I only use one of the pair. The main reaosn for retiring the 250s is simply because in the company of several 1TB drives, they just aren't big enough.
The write speed of first generation SSDs is typically 60-70MB/s, which is indeed slower than the better 7200rpm drives such as the Samsung F1 and Caviar Black.
Until I tried it, I laughed at the idea of using a huge 1TB drive for the OS. Now I love it, with only 10% of the drive full, it's easy to defrag and it runs really fast. My XP PC with the 5400rpm drive is much faster than Vista with the raptor, by at least a factor of 2.

 

Isn't defraging a drive hard on it ? Is it not better to just leave it and use SpinRite maybe once a month to check it

 

Shaff,
That's not quite correct! Have you ever wondered why a drive that seems superior on paper like say 32MB cache vs 16 or 8MB isn't always the fastest? Also the density of the platter is not always better on a larger drive than a smaller one. A small hint would be the price difference. The platters are all split down the lines, with the higher dollar higher density platters all being used over the various sizes of the drives. Each has it's own sum of it's parts and technologies. It makes no sense to make all the drives with different density platters, where three different density platters, coupled with either technology or both improve performance as you go up the price ladder! The best models of a given drive size depends on which platters are used along with recording technology and cache technology! That's why certain smaller 250MB drives can compete in speed with the big boys, and are more dependent on the recording technology, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), and cache management, Native Command Queuing (NCQ) to deliver that performance!

The highest density platters are combined with both mentioned technologies, to create a very fast drive, even with only 8MB of cache! WD was right, with the proper tech, there is very little difference in performance between the 8MB, 16MB and the 32MB drive cache models. I'll let you in on another little secret too! To use an example, the Seagate 160, 250 and the 320 are all the same drive! Depending on the drives goodies, it can be the faster of the three for the given technology used! Why? Because all the 160s working space is on the outer portion of the platters, where the fastest part of the drive is. If you think about it the outside portion of the platters starts at it's outer edge and is passing around 10" of disk every revolution, while a larger (fuller capacity) drive needs to use more of the disk, and so when it's nearest to the spindle it only covers about 2.5" each revolution. That's why the paging file is located on the outer edge of the disk, because there's more density per RPM! It's also why with the proper application of the two technologies can render a faster, smaller drive! I have the middle one of the 160s. It only has the Perpendicular Recording Technology, but not the Native Command Queuing! If it did, it would be a very fast drive indeed! Not that it's slow now!

There's also a trade off between having 2 platters, through a maximum of 5. Very large drives use more platters, and so are more mechanically complex, as more things have to move together in a very precise way.

The trick becomes finding the model with the highest density platters, PMR and NCQ, in order to get the fastest model for a particular capacity drive! It's a bit like getting options on a car! The more goodies, the faster it is!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Rick,
Not really. It's still doing the same job, except it's re-defining the space used by moving files and making as many files as it can more contiguous in order to speed up the drive. The less the heads have to move around, the faster it can deliver it's information to the computer!

Russ

 

rick: no more damaging than simply heavy use, loading a game, copying lots of files etc. Defragging is damaging to SSDs, but fortunately it's also pointless.
Russ: I have never seen a 250GB drive get anywhere near the performance of a modern drive unless it's an SSD. All the bigger drives are from one of two lines, the cheaper, older 16MB cache lines like the Caviar Blue, and the faster, 32MB versions like the Caviar Black and F1, and both are faster than the smaller drives, even before the small drives inevitably fill.
The more full a drive is, the slower the data transfer is and I don't mean random seek. The actual MB/s decreases towards the end of the drive, which makes sense to me to be on the inside, as the higher rotational speed of the outside of the platter would be beneficial. No matter how you spin the physics, the more free space a drive has, the better it performs and the bigger a drive is, the better it performs unless there's an extra advantage at play (e.g. higher spindle speed like a raptor, or being an SSD)

 

Sam,
I'm not saying it's so in every instance, but it wasn't that long ago that the Segate 250 with the 32MB cache and the other supporting technologies was the fastest drive you could buy after the Raptors! You are right about the the more free space, but there is a point where the smaller drive performs better as each get fuller, mainly because the track of the heads gets wider as the larger drive fills up and the smaller drive doesn't get as close to the spindle! Fragmentation only serves to make things worse. You do reach a point where the smaller drive has an advantage over the larger one simply because of the smaller arc needed for the heads to move back and forth!

As far as the SSDs go they are very good at transferring larger files, but aren't as good with small files. I suspect that it's because of larger sectors in the drive. It makes sense. Let's say for example that an SSD had 750kb sectors. It would be fantastic at writing large files, but every file written to a sector that's smaller than the sector means a loss of disk space. In addition there are gaps being created that can't be avoided in the time it takes to move through one half empty sector to another. You can speed that up by making the sectors smalled, but then you lose the large file transfer benefits of the larger sectors. I'm not against SSDs in any way, I just think that they are a long ways away from replacing HDDs. Right now there is an awful lot of high priced SSDs that don't come close to being really good drives. That includes drives from companies like OCZ with their $630 Solid Series OCZSSD2-1SLD250G 2.5" 250GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk, which is about the worst performer of all the 250GB SSDs. I'm confident that in time, all the junk will be gone and the prices will come down! There's still a few problems that need solving, but I'm sure in the end the SSDs will win out over the HDD!

Russ

 

th eintel drives, and vertex drives blow HDDs out of the water, just check that link i posted. and once again it shows how the 250GB 7200.10 gets beaten by a big margin by a 1TB. all you have to do is take a partiion on 250GB of the 1TB vs a 250GB drive and see the differnce your self.

 

Do remember back though Russ that the 37GB Raptor is ancient, so ancient it's actually an IDE drive with an integrated IDE to S-ATA chip since native S-ATA drives weren't commonplace then. The biggest drive you could get when the first raptor came out was a 120 or 160 I think.