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The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Discussion in 'Building a new PC' started by ddp, Jul 16, 2008.

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  1. Estuansis

    Estuansis Active member

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    @Omega,

    That card is PCI-X, not PCI-Express. I highly doubt you've ever owned a system with a PCI-X slot in it. I've seen one and it was in a very high end rackmount server cluster.
     
    Estuansis, Nov 29, 2009
    #9061
  2. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    LOL! That's what I thought. They're generally used in servers.
     
    omegaman7, Nov 29, 2009
    #9062
  3. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    I've noticed that most Controller cards on newegg get bad reviews. Do you think that's because the majority of the people don't know what they're doing? Sure does make a guy hesitate when buying...
     
    omegaman7, Nov 29, 2009
    #9063
  4. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    My board has the following USB connections - 8 rear ports, 4 ports hanging off the mobo headers, a 5 port card (don't use the internal 5th port, i should connect it up really) and the 2 front ports are spare, basically 16 are in permanent use.
    6 onboard SATA ports and a cheapy 2 port card driving my 2 LG SATA burners.

    The Promise TX4 controller is the only SATA card i know of (well other than the cheapy one mentioned above), the TX4 is a 4 port card, don't know of any others myself.
     
    creaky, Nov 29, 2009
    #9064
  5. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Only ever owned the same PCI S-ATA card except for one, and I've had 4 of them - no issues with any but for the fact that they don't come with a driver and there's no driver on the website. Once you track it down (took me 3-4 hours) they work fine. The other was the same Silicon Image system but a 4-port PCIe 1x card, which I got from ebay, and was DOA.
     
    sammorris, Nov 29, 2009
    #9065
  6. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    Just because a card was designed and named for Raid function, doesn't mean it can't run optical drives right? I read a rather unusual review by someone basically stating that even if you don't run Raid, you need to specify raid in the cards bios.

    I worry about buying Pc components on ebay. You just don't know what your getting. I suppose though if they're a really established store...
     
    omegaman7, Nov 29, 2009
    #9066
  7. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    I've been buying PC components off eBay for about 10 years now; apart from cheapy no-name components (though some no-name stuff still works fine, including my SATA controller) i've not had any problems. Most of my existing kit was from eBay in fact.. including some of my main machines - the Dell Optiplexes.. Nothing wrong with the bay as long as you know what you're doing :).
     
    Last edited: Nov 29, 2009
    creaky, Nov 29, 2009
    #9067
  8. keith1993

    keith1993 Regular member

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    I've got a 7300GS kicking about somewhere that was DOA off Ebay. It had FAILED written on the Anti-static bag that had then been scrawled over with felt-tip. The seller said it was working before they sent it and Ebay did absolutely nothing! GRR
     
    keith1993, Nov 29, 2009
    #9068
  9. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    Sorry to hear that buddy. Thats terrible!

    Creaky, yah ebay is good. I guess I should have reworded that. Ebay isn't bad as a whole, but generally it is wise to stick with the well established stores :)
     
    omegaman7, Nov 29, 2009
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  10. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Yeah often times bargains can be had on Amazon and other well known sites in the UK, you US guys have your own reputable online stores to,a lot of my kit is older tech hence why the bay has it's uses for me.
    Obviously i've had my fair share of problems such as DOA etc but i think there's only been a couple of cowboys over the years that've given me grief. I'm not for selling stuff on there too often, i tend to keep stuff long past the time it could be sold for a reasonable amount on the bay, i've always been a bit of a hoarder. Good job really as that's enabled me to have quite a decent fleet of machines, even if most are older and slower.
     
    creaky, Nov 29, 2009
    #9070
  11. theonejrs

    theonejrs Senior member

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    Creaky,
    I got banned from Ebay years ago because I bought a laptop that turned out to be a laptop motherboard. I went against Ebay's rules and called my Credit card company and canceled the sale, as soon as I received it. Ebay wants you to wait for a few days, before doing anything. Ebay just wants the money. Once they have it, it's very hard to get back! They insisted that I still had to pay and then go through the proper channels. Sure, and if you do, chances are very good you will never get your money back! I told them to go suck an egg! :)

    Happy Holidays,
    Russ
     
    theonejrs, Nov 29, 2009
    #9071
  12. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    I hear you, i've just not got into any scrapes other than the couple of cowboys i mentioned, luckily they weren't too drawn out but i do hear you, it can get very ugly indeed.
     
    creaky, Nov 29, 2009
    #9072
  13. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    I'll be honest, the DOA PCIe card is about the only time I've ever had any issues with a component I've bought off ebay, been quite lucky really. I'm quite surprised ebay banned you Russ, but I have to say, if it did come to it, I'd do exactly what you did.
     
    sammorris, Nov 29, 2009
    #9073
  14. theonejrs

    theonejrs Senior member

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    Sam,
    See, that's the thing. Ebay wants you to wait before doing anything. They don't want you running to your Credit Card company. If you wait as long as they say you have to while exploring other channels, your time to do something about it with the CC company will run out and you wind up stuck, not Ebay! Let Ebay fight to collect their money from the one who tried to screw me! Good luck as they vanish into CyberSpace! Funny how it's the same luck I would have had, if I had followed their rules! Imagine that! LOL!!

    Happy Holidays,
    Russ
     
    theonejrs, Nov 29, 2009
    #9074
  15. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    So what do you guys think of the WD20EADS 2TB Drive? Looking at the Positive to negative ratio, in my opinion its approaching hit or miss status! Not a good position for a very important component. Would you take a chance and save money(and have it possibly fail months down the road), or would you spend a little more and buy two of the WD1001FALS 1TB Drives? I really don't like the idea of losing 2Tb worth of data LOL! The FALS drives have obviously proven themselves. But your opinions will no doubt intrigue me :)

    Notice how its also extremely cheap. Wonder why that is...
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2009
    omegaman7, Nov 30, 2009
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  16. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Wow that is cheap. 'Only 5 per customer' is probably why.
    I don't know what to make of such big drives personally. A couple years ago when i bought all my 500GB drives, and saw how long it takes to format one was a clue as to what i would think of such large drives; plus everything i have on one is also copied onto another 500GB drive (not via RAID as most of you know, good old fashioned copy/paste and delete are my trusty companions). Two years later my drives are fairly full,and as i'm out of work i have no way of buying any extra 500's, even though they are quite cheap now, so i've had to be more strict on housekeeping them. No problem as even i hoard more data than i should, we all get lazy from time to time.
    Finances aside it's a good question, would i go for 1TB/1.5TB/2TB ?. I honestly don't know. I'm sure they are probably reliable enough (hard to say when they're so new), they would surely take forever to format (which in itself is simply a pain, though the drive making it thru that many hours of a format would be the beginnings of confidence in said drive), but it's a lot of data to lose if one were to fail. And let's be honest they will fail eventually, that's what drives do, so for me i'd have to have two of each drive, as i do know with the 500GB drives. I'd still be backing up to DVD as well, just as i do know (as i don't trust even two hard drives containing the same data; i'd do exactly the same if the drives were RAID protected btw).
    So i don't know, i probably would being as i use two drives for each data set and backup to DVD. I would be paranoid of the drives for quite a while though :)
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2009
    creaky, Nov 30, 2009
    #9076
  17. theonejrs

    theonejrs Senior member

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    Oman7,
    Well, for one thing, the failure rate seems pretty high, so that might make it cheap! One guy had 3 bad out of 17, and he thought that was good??? One will not be visiting my computer in the near future! LOL!!

    Russ
     
    theonejrs, Nov 30, 2009
    #9077
  18. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Omega: There are two things you need to consider when looking at hard drive reviews on newegg. Firstly, the normal shipping method for newegg (UPs, I believe) are very well known for rough handling of packages. This means that hard drives delivered from newegg often get damaged. A lot of people choose to blame the drive for this, when it's really the shipping at fault.
    Secondly, the WD green range, encompassing all of the drives from the WD5000AACS all the way to the WD20EADS, operate in such a manner that they don't work well with RAID cards unless modified with a TLER utility, meant to be exclusive to 'RAID edition' owners. Of course, all that sets the RAID editions apart are the price tag, a higher MTBF, and the 'legal' ability to use this TLER utility.
    Believe it or not, the WD1001FALS actually "suffers" the same issue. Unless you use the drives in RAID, you will probably never notice the effect. Both the WD15EADS and WD20EADS had a couple of buggy batches very early in their lives, but so actually have most hard drives - the stellar WD5000AAKS, and all of the Samsung Spinpoint F1 range inclusive - the former were known to lose their ability to write, so even if they broke, your data was safe for recovery. The Spinpoints were renowned for failing in large groups - you could conceivably have bought 12 drives and put them in a 4-way redundant RAID61 configuration, yet by the time you may have spotted the drive failure, more than 7 or 8 of them could have failed at once and lost your data. None of the WD range suffer from this
    Given how I now own one of the supposedly 'dodgy' WD15EADS, and much to my surprise [not] it works perfectly.
    The WD20EADS drives have taken a massive price hit recently. There is no underhand reason for it. The cause, is because when the WD20EADS came out it was the only 2TB drive available - the only way of getting 2TB of space within the capacity limits of a single 3.5" disk bay. Since then, Seagate's monstrous 7200rpm 2TB giant has arrived, which will no doubt try and steal all the 'performance' users away, in much the same way 'performance' users would buy a WD1001FALS over the WD10EADS. WD are also selling the 2TB Caviar Black in small batches, though newegg appear not to be selling it at the moment.
    Prior to this price cut, the best $/GB or £/GB ratio was to buy either a 1TB or 1.5TB drive. As you see now, that's no longer so clear cut.
     
    sammorris, Nov 30, 2009
    #9078
  19. Deadrum33

    Deadrum33 Active member

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    I found the tler utility at rapidshare...looks like i will flash my 10eads before inserting it into my array. I have one 10eads filled with the array data backed up (aka creaky style) and I'm going to get another so I can intentionally break my raid5 array to learn how to fix it. Granted I know its similar to initializing, I just havent physically done the work myself.
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2009
    Deadrum33, Nov 30, 2009
    #9079
  20. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    I work at UPS sam. We're not as rough as most people think. Don't worry, i'm not angy. I hear/read this sort of thing all the time ;) It generally boils down to being packaged well. When newegg sets HDD's on top of packing foam, thats really not protecting the drive LOL! I don't know about some of you, but I have received at least 2 drives in this fashion. As well as optical drives. The proper way is to LAYER foam in the package, and triple wide tape it closed. Doesn't come open so easily. You'd be surprised what I see go through the place... Complete ignorance!

    Besides, HDD's are supposed to be tough ;) Thanks for the info. I was not aware of the WD2001FASS yet :D Probably be spendy for a while though...
     
    Last edited: Nov 30, 2009
    omegaman7, Nov 30, 2009
    #9080
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