The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

FYI from other thread.

 

Thanks Sam, I was worried it was only my imagination. I am surprised I have never heard this before - you can bet my last dollar that is the absolute end of my ever using vertical sync in this lifetime.

 

Very true DDP!

 

Hey guys, just thought I would get some feedback on the HDD market here.

I need to pick up 2 new HDDs. I see WD has recently announced a 4TB drive, so I am thinking it might be time to jump on the 3TB band wagon as I am hopping they have matured by now. However, I was already eying the WD20EARX 2TB SATA3 or WD20EURS 2TB SATA2 but question how much of the claims are marketing hype? I have a WD20EARX 2TB SATA3 as it is, and that serves me well, but I only have 2xSATA3 header on my mobo. The WD20EARX uses one, and right now my single X25M-G2 is using the other. I was planning to swap the X25M for a Intel 330 SSD right now, but 2 of my HDDs decided to start to die on me instead. So in this case SATA3 would be good future proofing, but I had no immediate plans to upgrade my mobo right now, and if I did, well not much point unless I make the jump to Ivy Bridge or hold out for whatevers coming down the pipe from Intel. Anyways getting off track here, I am trying to stay as close to $100 an HDD as possible but might splurge a bit if it is really worth it.

 

SATA3 for 5400rpm drives is pretty inconsequential - the cache will respond faster but that's about it. The WD20EARX might be a little faster than the WD20EARS before it, but not by a great deal I don't think. They're fairly solid drives either way, but don't worry about not having a SATA3 interface to plug them into, there's no compatibility issue (at least not with internal controllers), and you shouldn't see any issues from doing this.

 

Thanks for the info Sam. That reminds me I forgot to mention these drives, if it wasn't a bit obvious, are mainly going to be archiving Music on one, and Movies/TV on the other. I do expect I will be doing some encoding jobs from time to time, but mostly minimal stuff like video->DVD or ALAC/APE/OGG-> FLAC.

I am still curious if it is time to upgrade from 2TB to 3TB. I typically stay a bit behind the latest as HDDs are one area I don't want to be a beta tester.

 

SATA2 vs SATA3 HDD's is no real difference performance wise but you could buy a add-on card if you wanted to add more SATA3 ports as they are cheap and work well. Definitely put your SSD on the SATA3 port though.

3T drives are far from beta drives now and I wouldn't worry about going that route besides you'll get a 3 to 5 year warranty with them typically. If you're going to have a video server as one of your drives and/or audio I would buy a enterprise drive or a drive specific for streaming video. If the drives won't be running full time and used occasionally then you wouldn't probably want to spend the extra dollars for a robust and high performance drive.

 

Unless you're serving the files to large numbers of people, the only time you need high performance is when copying from one drive to another.
Even with the fastest CPUs out there you can't really encode at more than a few MB/s, certainly single figures, and the highest streaming bandwidth rate of HD video is also only a small number of MB/s, often less than 1 for ripped content.
The general standard of manufacturing of hard disks has dropped considerably over the last couple of years as manufacturers are feeling the pinch so cutting quality and testing regimes, so it can be seen that the large capacity drives are less reliable than smaller 7200rpm drives - in reality it's more just that all hardware is manufactured to a lower standard these days. I haven't seen much evidence to suggest that the 3TB drives are largely less reliable than their smaller counterparts.
For now, the 4TB HGST drives are too expensive, as will always be the case with the largest per-drive capacity product. Still, someone's got to buy them to bring the price down

 

Enterprise drives aren't just about serving large populations, they are more about serving data 24/7 and the ones optimized for video perform much better in that area of course. Sure you can run a desktop drive 24/7 but it isn't designed for that type of use and will have issues much earlier than a RAID type drive or other special drives. Also Green drives will lag at times when using as a server and are not the best to use in RAID setups of course.

WD HGST's new 4T drive is impressive I demo'd one that a rep had but like Sam said the price is too steep on new drives. From what I've seen 2T drives seem to be the best deal at the moment.

 

I didn't really intend to compare consumer-grade 5400rpm drives to enterprise drives, I was more referring to comparisons between them and high performance 7200rpm+ alternatives.
The price/GB is actually basically the same between 2TB and 3TB drives, so either currently represent the best value, so go with whatever's most suitable from a cost/infrastructure perspective. I've started buying more 3TB drives in favour of 2TBs now at last. The defective drive slowed my uptake of them initially, and one of the newer batch makes far more noise than the others so I suspect it may fail prematurely (on the other hand, I've had unusually noisy drives last a full 5 years without incident before), am still deciding whether I want such a drive in a live or backup role. So far drive 604 (yup, coded by numbers as well as names now to understand what goes where, there's so many!) which was the first, is still operational as a general backup drive, and although 700 failed after a week, its replacement 850 is still going strong so far. These three were of the original 4x750GB variety.
861,862 and 863 (862 is the noisy one) are the newer 3x1TB platter drives.

(Also, FYI I don't own 800 hard drives, think of it as 8.6.3 by purpose)

 

Sam,

A very strange thing happened to my 6 core. The motherboard bios went south, big time! No smoke, flames, or bad smells but it just stopped posting. You get to the end of the boot screen and rarely boots up! This morning after a couple of days of testing, I call GigaByte to request an RMA for the MB, and it suddenly starts to work properly again. Now it will boot up cold, but if you go into the setup and make changes, it reverts back to it's stock settings, because you have to pull the power cord from the PSU, and wait about 8 minutes for all the juice to drain out of it. Then it will post! The good part is that it happened before I changed cases, so I won't have to be doing it all over again for a second time. It would be a dull life if nothing ever went wrong!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

No problems with mine yet :S

*touch wood*

 

faulty BIOS chips are actually a known issue with those high-end AMD boards, I think it was this thread I posted a warning about that to someone else who was considering buying a specific models, there were numerous complaints about it.

 

Oman7,

I usually don't get upset with Gigabyte. They have been very good to me, over the years, but when I call to discuss a problem I'm having, and the tech starts spoon feeding me BS, I do draw the line! his conversational English, was non-existent, and he didn't understand the context of my words! In spite of all of this, he then diagnosis's my video card as the problem, and my brain went "Huh!!" I mean how could it be the video card if it won't post or load the drivers that makes the card work??

Yesterday around lunch time, it started working right again, and I had no problem installing Win7, back onto the Intel 330 SSD, and it ran great for the rest of the day. When I went to shut it down last night, it started doing a mandatory 89 part upgrade, that you can't turn off. If you do, it will only start right back up where you left off and continues loading the software. It took me over 3 hours to get it all done with all the delays getting it to post and re-boot. The 7-8 minute wait so it would continue to load the updates, after each reset was annoying as hell. Over an hour of waiting time in a roughly 3 hour job, is not my idea of having a good time!

I'm going to start taking mine apart later today. I'm going to pre-wire everything before I install the motherboard.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Well to be fair, it's if anything more common for graphics cards to fail in such a way that it stops the system POSTing than it is for them to cause the system to crash when running, so I can understand where he's coming from there. Still though, the fact that it goes wrong whenever you change any BIOS settings should be obvious enough where the problem lies...

 

Sam,

It's funny when you go into the setup and check the settings, they are set for 3.825GHz, but if you run CPU-ID to check, it's only running at 3.2GHz, and the memory is running at 1333MHz, instead of 1600MHz, with timings of 9-9-9-26. Normal is 7-8-8-24. You can no longer change any of the settings, but it always comes up as 3.2GHz.

EDIT:

I know this is off topic, but this is so amazing, I don't think anyone will mind!

http://www.retrevo.com/content/blog/2012/11/video-week-human-powered-helicopter?cmpid=Email

Enjoy,
Russ

 

I have to agree - video card problems can produce strange symptoms.

I had an old ati 9800 with a huge after-market heat sink that Mo, my pc builder, and I had laboriously added to it, more as a lark than anything else, when we noticed that the 9800 ran VERY hot with the stock hsf. When I moved up to my x850xtpe I shelved the card, and then, for some reason, about 5 years ago I moved it to my business machine and I decided that the enormous heat sink we had added should allow it to work passively, so I removed the two noisy 80mm fans we had screwed on. My thinking was that I never went out of 2d mode, and beside that, I had on-board video that would suit my non-gaming needs, so I wasn't too concerned about the health of the 9800 card.

Things were okay for about a year, but then one of my drives would suddenly not activate from time to time. It was the strangest thing.

I was running dual boot, one drive for w98, the other for xp. I started leaving the side panel loose so I could pull and reseat the ide ribbon cable whenever the one drive refused to start. That always worked.

Finally some random BSODs alerted me to a possible video problem. It then dawned on me that the likely culprit of all the strange goings on was the 9800. It couldn't survive without those fans. Sure enough, binning it completely cured my pata connection problems.

Rich

 

Absolutely it could be the video card that was creating the problem and if I was the tech helping Russ it would have been one of the first things on my list however Sam is right onabout the BIOS ruling out the video card even if Russ buys those crappy cards... LOL Just pulling your chain Russ of course.

Stevo