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The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Discussion in 'Building a new PC' started by ddp, Sep 13, 2010.

Page 44 of 399
  1. Deadrum33

    Deadrum33 Active member

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    Deadrum33, Dec 24, 2010
    #861
  2. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    omegaman7, Dec 24, 2010
    #862
  3. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Merry Christmas to all.


    Or, Omega, you could just have a second, external drive for each internal drive. I've now stopped using DVDR's as a 3rd backup, far too much data/far too many DVDR's around the place. I find a second, external drive (for each internal) to be more than enough protection, i keep the external drives in plastic 'tanks', hard to source in the UK mind, but i have enough for now ~

    [​IMG]

    I couldn't be happier with the WD20EARS drives, both internally and externally. Nice and cheap too, however we shall see what happens to next years' prices, once the UK's 'Value' Added Tax hits 20% in January. I'd rather not think of what knock-on effects that will have in our own company, never mind elsewhere. Anyways, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all you tech geeks.

    edit- Just checked, 3TB WD green drives are available at our local supplier, £162 exc VAT, no way is £100 for that extra 1TB worth it, i'm happy with the 2TB drives, even though they're filling quicker than i thought they would. As i say i still have 2 internal 500GB drives that will be swapped out for 2TB greens, in the new year or spring at the latest, the boot drive will probably be a 2TB Caviar Black, i don't want to waste the drive bay by having a small but fast SSD.
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2010
    creaky, Dec 24, 2010
    #863
  4. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    You know, I think I'm gonna stop buying blank dvds for a while. I'll just start storing them on Hard drives. Z:\(as seen above) is my second oldest drive. And it shows zero signs of aging. My oldest(WD5000AAKB) resides in my secondary machine. It slaves over BD encoding LOL! That machine really does need a second drive, so it doesn't have to simultaneous read write so much. Storing hard drives sure sounds a lot easier LOL!!! You should see my desk...
     
    omegaman7, Dec 24, 2010
    #864
  5. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    The last time i bought DVD's was in 2007, i only buy in bulk so they last (in fact i'm still struggling to put a dent in the now legendary 'Verbatim TY' i bulk bought back in 2005!). I still have a healthy amount of those spare, plus normal Verbatim and Maxell too, i only DVD's now for movies converted to DVD for the kids so they'll last a fair while before i have to buy any more.
    I still need to find a use for the 9 or so external 500GB IDE's (and a few 500GB SATA's), as i say i might invest in a couple of Netgear Stora chassis and copy loads of music and/or movies for family to have on their networks.

    edit- just noticed that our supplier is doing the 2TB Caviar Black for £106, i'm sure they were £160 or so last week.. Bargain..
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2010
    creaky, Dec 24, 2010
    #865
  6. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    I think my secondary machine may just become a file server. I believe I can fit at least 9 - 10 hard drives in there, properly converted. At 3Tb each, that's a lot of storage space! Heck, even 2Tb each would be impressive. I'd have buddies drooling over it LOL!
     
    omegaman7, Dec 24, 2010
    #866
  7. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Impressive. It's a shame i can't fit an Antec 1200 on my desk, i could have more bays that way. Or i could take out the 3 optical drives and reuse those bays as HDD's, i do have all those external Beng DW1650 writers, that hardly get used now, after all!. But i do have the Supermicro SC-750A case that is begging to be redeployed, that beast can hold stupid amounts of drives. But that's a project for late next year i imagine.
     
    creaky, Dec 24, 2010
    #867
  8. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Creaky: Each 3TB drive requires its own PCIe 1x slot for the dedicated controller you have to use with it. 3TB drives are totally impractical for now.
    You don't actually need to put an SSD in a drive bay, there are no exposed electronics, I just tuck mine among the cables in one of the unused 5.25" bays.
    I moved to the creaky method a while ago, but rather than have an external enclosure for each drive I'm just using a single 'toaster-style' hotswap box. While I copied all the data on the old drives to the new drives, I haven't done another backup since, so I need to get to that, there's probably a terabyte or two of data that needs backing up!
    The NZXT Whisper I use can hold 9 drives as standard, as I'm using it now, 13 with one 3x5.25"->4x.3.5" box, which is how I used it before, and it will actually fit two of such boxes, totalling 17 drives, 18 if you count an SSD you stealth somewhere else in the case. However with 9 drives in it's very heavy, with 13 you can barely lift it, the concept of 17 terrifies me. It would definitely need wheels.
    For now the 5 year old 250GB WD2500JD takes up the ninth drive bay. Eventually it's going to be replaced with an X25-V, and another WD20EARS sit in its place. I'll probably try and last it out as long as possible until I need an additional drive. Probably not long, here's how things stand at the moment:

    [​IMG]


    TV 4 was until a couple of weeks ago unused, waiting to see which content type would use it. When I finally ran out of TV space, I started moving stuff to it. It's only doing W-Z at the moment which doesn't comprise much. Soon I'm going to shuffle the other drives' content along. The letter S alone is 1.5TB!
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2010
    sammorris, Dec 24, 2010
    #868
  9. FredBun

    FredBun Active member

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    That's why I would never save my movies on drives ever, keep them on disc's, after all the work to save and collect, to lose em all at one shot, I would have a s#@t fit.
     
    FredBun, Dec 24, 2010
    #869
  10. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Sam, good point re an SSD not needing a drive bay, i just wasn't clear, i should've said that it's down to SATA connections really. My board has 6 onboard and i drive the 2 dvd writers via a cheapy PCIe card, the other optical is just IDE. I'm out of PCI/PCIe slots but could remove the cheapy PCI USB2.0 card as it's not really needed now that i don't often use the 6 external optical drives. Then i could buy another PCI (not PCIe) card (it'd have to be a 4 port card, i think they're available on PCI only), and that would enable the machine to drive 9 mechanical hard drives, and yes, maybe i could incorporate an SSD drive just for the OS - this is something i will seriously consider in the new year.

    I didn't know that about the 3TB drives and controllers, another design joke at our expense i guess. Well i'm not parting money on 3TB drives, that's for sure.

    LOL at 'the Creaky method' :), though the enclosure for each external drive is only something i did for all the IDE drives, for SATA external drives i just keep the drives bare (i store them in those plastic tanks in the picy i posted up the page) and just pop whichever one that needs changes, into a SATA dock.

    Fred - this is exactly why i've always had a second, external drive for every internal drive, no way would i be amused if i lost 2TB of data. I did used to use DVDR's for a 3rd backup of everything but it just became unmanageable, thousands of optical discs does not a convenient media centre make :); eventually i'll have to find a way to dispose of them all, it doesn't bear thinking of the fumes that would be created from all those discs if ever there was a fire. As i've often posted before, i don't use RAID at home, i just like to do things manually.
     
    Last edited: Dec 24, 2010
    creaky, Dec 24, 2010
    #870
  11. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    I managed to find some 2-port PCIe 1x cards for less than £20 each so I'm running two of those at the moment to augment my 6 onboard ports for a total of 10. The only downside is they don't support SMART, which is sort of a pain. I also have two PCI 2-port cards I was using before to bump the maximum drive count to 14. I think I have a third lying somewhere around as well, but no PCI slot for it to go in. Using only 2-port cards, assuming you have a normal two-slot card and a standard ATX board you can usually fit 14 drives (electronically). 6 onboard + 2x2 for PCIe + 2x2 for PCI. If you had a single slot graphics card you could squeeze a third PCIe card in.
    I looked into 4-port cards but they're considerably more expensive.

    is what I keep telling people but they seem perfectly content with their entire bookcase of DVDs/Blurays that cost them an absolute fortune. Their loss I suppose.
     
    sammorris, Dec 24, 2010
    #871
  12. Deadrum33

    Deadrum33 Active member

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    Its an updated, SATAIII version of the model i have. also i will need to replace my 4x1TB in RAID5 to 4x2TB soon.
     
    Deadrum33, Dec 24, 2010
    #872
  13. omegaman7

    omegaman7 Senior member

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    Hmm, perhaps those 3TB drives are rather spendy at the moment. I'll probably be buying a new board to accommodate the Bulldozer processor. Perhaps that board will address the super size hard drives issue ;) But then, I could care less about my primary having massive space. I just need a file server to contain multiple 3tb babies :D Though I would probably have 1 or 2 of the drives on my primary, for the wonderful internal transfer speeds ;)
     
    omegaman7, Dec 24, 2010
    #873
  14. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Yeah it's an issue that will be part-solved by the dropping of BIOS in favour of EFI. I say part-solved because I don't think any OS can read them as a boot drive yet, though I may be wrong, 64-bit OSes might be able to do it, if you have EFI.
    As far as I know EFI will be standard on both Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer. Quite exciting really, though leaving it up to board managers to design the setup layouts is likely to result in some truly horrific interfaces. Gigabyte EasyTune for windows is disgusting.
     
    sammorris, Dec 24, 2010
    #874
  15. theonejrs

    theonejrs Senior member

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    Sam,
    Who would use Easytune to overclock a computer besides a complete novice? I would use AMD Overdrive to assist in overclocking instead. It's a very useful and far more comprehensive tool when overclocking because it's an easy way to tweak some settings, without having to to keep rebooting the computer by allowing you to make simple changes and evaluate them right from the desktop. You can even tweak the ACC from within it! It even has it's own testing software that lets you do some stress testing without crashing the whole computer. It simply tells you that the testing has failed, instead of Blue screening the machine. It cuts down on the time needed, and you can transfer the changes you do make into the bios setup, with no harm, no foul! I have the latest version, 3.2.1, and it's a big help. I wouldn't want to use it to completely do an overclock, but rather after most of the work is done, to work out any stability issues I might encounter. I've had a number of people ask me for my settings, and I give them out freely. AMD O.D. has helped me understand a lot more about settings that most people do not understand, which has been very helpful to me and to others as well. I'll mention bigwill because he already mentioned it, for one, but there have been a few others as well!

    Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
    Russ
     
    theonejrs, Dec 24, 2010
    #875
  16. shaffaaf

    shaffaaf Regular member

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    shaffaaf, Dec 25, 2010
    #876
  17. theonejrs

    theonejrs Senior member

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    Shaff,
    In some ways the EFI is like the AMD OD. With Overdrive you can set many things in the bios and then transfer them permanently, once you have it set right, when you have achieved stable settings. mostly it eliminates blue screens if you get too aggressive. I particularly like that you can fine tune the cores individually, limiting the weakest cores and building on the best ones with the ACC. I can't wait until I can get the 1090T BE x6 for it. Should drop my encode times to well under 20 minutes!

    Merry Christmas & Happy New Year
    Russ
    [​IMG]
     
    theonejrs, Dec 25, 2010
    #877
  18. FredBun

    FredBun Active member

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    Merry Christmas guys, all stay healthy and safe.
     
    FredBun, Dec 25, 2010
    #878
  19. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Merry Christmas to all, the booze is taking effect so it's time to step away from the keyboards for me :)
     
    creaky, Dec 25, 2010
    #879
  20. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Not the point, well aware of EasyTune's uselessness, but the fact is they designed an interface for it, and it's horrifyingly bad. It sets a bad precedent for what Gigabyte's EFI might look like. Several rumours around that Gigabyte are going to be one of few manufacturers to avoid the introduction of EFI however, sticking with the BIOS for P67 when Asus and MSI will be using EFI. Not going to be too popular if that's true.
     
    sammorris, Dec 25, 2010
    #880
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