The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Sam,
DVD drives run fine in AHCI Mode, and allow hot swapping. They still run as Sata drives in IDE Mode, but no longer allow hot swapping. That's about the only difference. You also can't do a Raid array with ODDs.

Russ

 

Well no, figures But as I interpreted it, he was trying to avoid RAID, not use it.

 

Sam,
I only mentioned it so people wouldn't ask whether they can run ODDs in Raid, a very common question on the net. With the Raid drivers removed, it seems to work, at least with the BD drive. With the two errors he sees, the first one is for the new Sata Controller card, while the second has to do with the USB.

Russ

 

Originally posted by omegaman7:
But now I have to find out how to flash my card to IDE bios.

I guess my confusion was the fact that flashing the card's Bios was mentioned along with setting motherboard bios from SATA to IDE

 

I've only ever had one optical drive in a PC at once. One each in both my PCs currently and both IDE as well. I barely use them so SATA never mattered to me much. And as far as internal drives go the DFI 790FX has 4 onboard SATAs and the Gigabyte X38 has 6 so I've still got a little breathing room...

 

Only reason I have a SATA one is it was going cheap from a friend who used it because it could be used with an external enclosure that only took SATA drives, originally bought for hard disks

The DFI board really only has 4 onboard SATA ports? That's poor in my opinion, even the 965P boards from Gigabyte had 6 for all but the basic boards. My P31-DS3L has 4 and that was almost as low end as you got.

 

Motherboard bios? I don't believe I said that :/

at least I hope I've only spoken of it calling it a card

Allow me to alleviate the confusion. I like to have multiple ODD's. I have my reasons. Though in the future, I may convert 3 of the bays over to 4 Hard drives.

In order to run ODD's on the card, its my understanding that the "cards" bios needs to be flashed to IDE mode. Its simply a communication protocol from what I understand. It doesn't exactly limit the speed Perhaps in some cases? But for the moment, it seems to be fine. I'll probably leave things exactly as they are now for the time being, and see how the BD drive fairs

Seems to be ok. I verified a blu ray disc, via imgburn, at over 20,000Kb/s Love that iHES108 LOL! Nah, its only a C+ grade BD reader... In fact, it's barely better than a lemon

 

I believe someone on newegg said it could be done. Not sure how though. I'm not worried about it myself. It behaves within reason. My drives don't idle. The heads however on the green drive unload. Very slight difference. I only hope its behavior, doesn't cut its lifespan too much

 

Creaky, I believe the following is what I read. 'at the bottom'

Other Thoughts: more information:
Advanced Formating: Uses 4K sectors (rather than 512b) Drives offer 512byte emulation, however causes degraded NTFS performance under XP/NTFS.
Solution: Don't use Win2k/XP or use WD's Align utility http://www.wdc.com/en/products/advancedformat/

Time-Limited Error Recovery: Amount of time a disk will spend recovering a bad sector. Raid Controller erroneously marks drive as bad due to the poor response time.
Solution: Use WDTLER to disable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

IDLE: amount of time the drive is idle before it parks the heads. Default idle too low resulting in excessive head parking.
Solution: Use WDIDLE to disable Idle timeout http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113

 

What are the full set of components that I need to buy to build a fully working PC? Including dedicated sound and GFX card. I have done odd jobs for people like replacing hard drives but I really want to get into this properly.

 

£77.99 usually from better priced stores than Misco (though I don't know what other stores do for VAT free stuff).

Without flashing firmware (which WD are supposed to have blocked) you can't make any WD Green perform exactly like a 'normal' hard disk.
The 4K sector functionality can be disabled through a simple jumper switch - this is only necessary if you're using XP or potentially some Linux OSes. In Windows Vista/7 the 4K sector functionality does not cause any problems.

All drives can be set to spin down after a certain interval, but when they are resumed, you have to wait the 5-10 second period for them to spin up again (3s for raptors), which rapidly gets tedious if they're only used for short intervals. What the WD Green drives do is leave the platters spinning (for a while anyway), and unload the drive heads. This means the drive can be resumed almost instantly, while still idling at less than 4 Watts per drive. The average 7200rpm drive idles above 8 Watts per drive.
It is this head unload process that people whine about.
I personally have not had any problems with it at all, it does not cause lag in games running off one of the drives, it does not cause problems with video playback to a drive, it does not cause problems writing a disc from a drive.
The only problem with the unload system is sensitive software-RAID configs can get confused by it and drop a disk out of the array. In my mind though, people who use cheap software-RAID should expect problems anyway.

There is no 'magic bullet' big drive, for the following reasons:
Hitachi - Questionable long-term reliability (but no proof for this yet), poor Unrecoverable error rate statistics, means errors on disk surface quite likely
Seagate - Questionable firmware (proof on this, but mainly 7200rpm drives), poor unrecoverable error rate statistics, means errors on disk surfacr quite likely - 7200rpm drives are loud
Samsung - Poor mid-term reliability, most drive failures occur after 4-12 months, after the drives have most of their data, but before they're due to be replaced
Western Digital - Poor immediate-term reliability, WD sell refurbished drives as new (and aren't the only brand to do this), so a drive that has any marks on it is likely to be short lived. Long term reliability good, but high DOA %. Plus the head unload issues mentioned earlier.

In my opinion, WD seems the best choice as, assuming you're not using a cruddy RAID array (as opposed to a hardware RAID with a controller and cache, or flexRAID with a parity disk) they seem most likely to survive long term without errors. You just may have a few RMAs when they first arrive.



ps3lvanub:
CPU - Mandatory
Motherboard - Mandatory
RAM - Mandatory
Graphics card - Mandatory unless motherboard offers integrated graphics
Sound card - Optional, all motherboards have integrated sound
CD/DVD drive - Optional
Hard disk drive or SSD - Mandatory for at least one, multiples are optional
Power Supply - Mandatory
Case - Mandatory

 

Thanks sammorris. Want to create a cheap OC'd machine for moderate gaming and office use.

EDIT:Typo

 

Define 'moderate gaming' - what sort of games does the PC need to play? Does it need to futureproof for upcoming top titles, are you after reasonable graphic detail, or will you happily suffer low detail as long as it plays the game at all?

 

As sam said, the WD20EARS doesn't give him any troubles. It's performed better than I expected as well. The unloading of the heads is extremely minor for me as well. Now if it had to spin up...I don't like that I like my drives to always be ready. My WD1001FALS don't mind my running that way. I see no reason why I can't run the EARS drive that way. I heard not long ago, that they use same/similar hardware. If the drive quits though...I'll chock it up to yet another dissatisfied statistic to the WD20EARS drive, and switch to the WD2001FASS drive so quick, that its unreal

 

I guess it just confused me because when I hear IDE mode, i think of the mobo BIOS setting that changes the properties of of your SATA connections. When I heard flash the card, i didn't know you had to do anything special to the card to get it to work.
No, an ODD won't work in RAID. But if your mobo BIOS is not in RAID, and you don't setup RAID array with the software for the new card, then I still don't understand the need to flash but it's your card and I'll assume its got a different setting or special firmware then other cards I've seen.

 

I'm betting that if I were to flash it, the boot screen would change. There would be no more Raid options. And windows would probably see the card as being either something else, or simply different. But as it stands now, by not installing a Raid driver, windows is handling it as an IDE device. I think Russ is correct in this respect

 

Oman7---Sounds good, glad all is well.
Creaky---I'm using some Greens in my

which have been flashed with the WDTLER method and all SMART reports look normal.
Flashing was fun because had to set mobo to IDE mode and found that it only worked on my 2 intel SATA but not my 4 Gigabyte ports. Also Creaky, off topic, check your PM's (please)