Building a PC

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Originally Posted by markabilly

but it is very fast when you get a proper SSD (some are not so good) and mount it with the sata connection in place of the conventional HD. Speeds up the entire system

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Can't think it would speed it up all that much compared to putting a decent amount of RAM in, but I'm open to the suggestion.

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Have a friend who did it with his older laptop primarily to avoid having data lost when traveling, (as they are far more shock resistant than a conventional), and he just bought a brand new Toshiba with the latest "Sandy Bridge" intell chip and conventional HD....says the old laptop, still out runs his new one, and he will be putting a 120GB SSD in place on the new one to even the playing field

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I hope your friend has seen the link I posted earlier in the thread about the faults with the Sandy Bridge chip.

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Originally Posted by Dave B

Can't think it would speed it up all that much compared to putting a decent amount of RAM in, but I'm open to the suggestion.

I hope your friend has seen the link I posted earlier in the thread about the faults with the Sandy Bridge chip.

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Dam...I will have to tell him. He just bought it from Office max i think about three weeks ago. He told me how he was amazed about the SSD (which i think is like a mere 32 GB on his computer) on his old computer and how the SSD had made a huge difference on his old, such that the old one was still overall clearly faster. I was thinking about buyin the new toshiba he got(about 900 plus or so on sale) as I have an i-3 older HP that does have 6GB of on board memory but boots slower than I thought it should and sometimes takes forever to pull up Word and Excell. So I made the change to the SSD about two weeks ago, and it is night and day.

He said spend 60 for labor and 130 for the new SSD card, go external HD as back up, and you will be happier.
if you are like daniel (and gee I really hate saying anything nice about him) do your own installation and save $60.

me i am pretty ignorant about computer building, so I just bailed on the task

So I saved about $900 based on his advice. Not advocating any particular brand, but the one i linked to is what I have, and it is incredibly amazing. Boots up any program in the blink of an eye, finds files and opens like amazing. It is like having all your programs and files loaded on your ram. For far less money, it was like having a brand new computer.

I have heard that over time, there is some rumor that the SSD loses some of its speed. Not sure if this is anything but urban legend. Could not find anything over the net about this.

The other thing i did sometime back was to buy this padlock ageis, external drive, 500 GB, that has an e-sata connection. It is like 256k encrypted, and if lost, it is impossible for someone to get the data. Using the e-sata drive, it is also very fast, even with the encryption. Indeed, I would say close to equal to my old on board HD disk drive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-085-_-Product

Cost was $130 for that.

I remember that just several years ago, an external HD with 100 GB was at 200 dollars and not portable as you needed a wall plug to make it run......

my prediction is that soon, at least for laptops, the old disk drives will be replaced by these SSD cards




And now based on your advice I will be telling him to save about $300 before he buys the larger SSD for his new puter.....and he should be looking for some type of recall or whatever

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Originally Posted by Dave B

Can't think it would speed it up all that much compared to putting a decent amount of RAM in, but I'm open to the suggestion.

I hope your friend has seen the link I posted earlier in the thread about the faults with the Sandy Bridge chip.

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Originally Posted by Dave B

Can't think it would speed it up all that much compared to putting a decent amount of RAM in, but I'm open to the suggestion.

I hope your friend has seen the link I posted earlier in the thread about the faults with the Sandy Bridge chip.

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SSD's speed up systems stupid amounts. When I turn my PC on and it's booting into windows, the HDD LED is solidly lit till it gets into windows which mean the processor and RAM are there waiting to do their thing but the hard drive is slowing things down.

[youtube]Md_npjJ3-v4[/youtube]


I did consider buying an SSD when I bought my PC, but there are some much faster ones only a couple of months away so I thought the wait was worth it. My current OS hard drive was about the fastest hard drive you could buy at the time when I bought it back at the start of 2004, but now it's very much mainstream and an SSD will really make a difference to this PC.

Tbh a laptop based on the Cougar Point chipset will most likely be alright.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

I did consider buying an SSD when I bought my PC, but there are some much faster ones only a couple of months away so I thought the wait was worth it. My current OS hard drive was about the fastest hard drive you could buy at the time when I bought it back at the start of 2004, but now it's very much mainstream and an SSD will really make a difference to this PC.

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There will always be "bigger, faster, better, more bang for the buck" just around the corner when dealing with PCs. I wish I could get back just half the money I spent staying cutting edge when I really could justify it. These days I just buy when I feel like it's actually a worthy value.

Right now for a desktop system I don't see SSDs being that great of a value. If I was that impatient at boot time I'd just boot once a day and leave the system in sleep mode all the time. The same goes for apps and such. On that embedded video they open and close 14 apps to make the speed point, but a lot of people probably don't open and close 14 different apps in a week, much less in one quick computer session. If they do, it's over hours spent at a system often. Twenty or 30 seconds checking email real quick seems big, losing 30 second over a few hours isn't really a big deal for most people IMHO.

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Originally Posted by airshifter

There will always be "bigger, faster, better, more bang for the buck" just around the corner when dealing with PCs. I wish I could get back just half the money I spent staying cutting edge when I really could justify it. These days I just buy when I feel like it's actually a worthy value.

Right now for a desktop system I don't see SSDs being that great of a value. If I was that impatient at boot time I'd just boot once a day and leave the system in sleep mode all the time. The same goes for apps and such. On that embedded video they open and close 14 apps to make the speed point, but a lot of people probably don't open and close 14 different apps in a week, much less in one quick computer session. If they do, it's over hours spent at a system often. Twenty or 30 seconds checking email real quick seems big, losing 30 second over a few hours isn't really a big deal for most people IMHO.

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I do not know about a desktop, but on the old laptop, opening and closing individual files in a program is just so much faster with the SSD.
I use photoshop a lot, and watching the program operate on 6gb of ram, it was fast, once it was open, but now it is just so much faster overall and saving changes of the photos onto the SSD blows away the old disc. After a session, I then back up or move the file (photos) storage onto the external HD, unless I plan on using it in the near future.

Compared to buying a new computer, the choice was about $1,000 for the sandy bridge (that appearently has some serious potential issues) or $130 for the SSD plus the 60 installation fee I paid. Looks like I got comparable performance or more with the SSD for $800 less

I imagine that in six months, buying a fast SSD of 120GB or more for about the same price of $130, will be easy to do.

There are some issues from reading about these things in that some perform far better than others, so one needs to be careful.

Eventually for consumer applications SSD will replace hard drive technology, of that I don't have any doubt. When that will happen I don't know, but I'd expect in 10 years time if you go into PC World then the majority of machines on offer will have SSD's and not standard hard drives.

On the server side of things individual servers will have SSD scratch disks, which will cut down on maintenance and heat.

Down the line what I predict we'll see is SSD replacing spinning disks in almost every application with the exception of large disk arrays in data centres, where the cost per GB is always going to outstrip that of SSD, at least for the forseeable future.

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Originally Posted by Mark

Eventually for consumer applications SSD will replace hard drive technology, of that I don't have any doubt. When that will happen I don't know, but I'd expect in 10 years time if you go into PC World then the majority of machines on offer will have SSD's and not standard hard drives.

On the server side of things individual servers will have SSD scratch disks, which will cut down on maintenance and heat.

Down the line what I predict we'll see is SSD replacing spinning disks in almost every application with the exception of large disk arrays in data centres, where the cost per GB is always going to outstrip that of SSD, at least for the forseeable future.

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I very much doubt that SSD's will ever completely take over within the next 10 years.

The demand for storage continues to grow and price drops due to moving towards smaller processes is still lagging behind.

I've got a 750gb hard drive in my PC and it would cost a ridiculous amount of money to replace it with an SSD and tbh it'd be pointless because I don't need to fast reads and writes when it comes to some photo that I took at Rally Australia in 2002. There will always be a place for magnetic storage IMHO. You will however find that hybrid drives (where a normal magnetic storage drive has a few gig of flash storage on it) will become mainstream. A true SSD IMHO will quite possibly never become mainstream.

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Originally Posted by markabilly

I do not know about a desktop, but on the old laptop, opening and closing individual files in a program is just so much faster with the SSD.
I use photoshop a lot, and watching the program operate on 6gb of ram, it was fast, once it was open, but now it is just so much faster overall and saving changes of the photos onto the SSD blows away the old disc. After a session, I then back up or move the file (photos) storage onto the external HD, unless I plan on using it in the near future.

Compared to buying a new computer, the choice was about $1,000 for the sandy bridge (that appearently has some serious potential issues) or $130 for the SSD plus the 60 installation fee I paid. Looks like I got comparable performance or more with the SSD for $800 less

I imagine that in six months, buying a fast SSD of 120GB or more for about the same price of $130, will be easy to do.

There are some issues from reading about these things in that some perform far better than others, so one needs to be careful.

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In terms of performance, with computers they're a lot like cars. You could have a Ferrari but if you put cheap rubbishy tyres and brakes on it you won't be able to get the best performance out of the engine and the suspension. By the same token putting F1 tyres on a little hatchback still isn't going to make it an amazingly quick car :)

In terms of HDD heavy tasks I would say your PC would probably quicker than mine, but in CPU/RAM/Graphically intensive use my PC is probably much faster ;)

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Originally Posted by Daniel

In terms of performance, with computers they're a lot like cars. You could have a Ferrari but if you put cheap rubbishy tyres and brakes on it you won't be able to get the best performance out of the engine and the suspension. By the same token putting F1 tyres on a little hatchback still isn't going to make it an amazingly quick car :)

In terms of HDD heavy tasks I would say your PC would probably quicker than mine, but in CPU/RAM/Graphically intensive use my PC is probably much faster ;)

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Yours would also win in the speed of recall! :laugh: (Just joking, at least they are fixing it)

I agree that hybrid drives should become more common, and don't think SSD will become mainstream for quite some time. As time marches on at some point it will be cost effective though. I remember paying $40-45 a megabyte for memory back in the day.

I think Roamys example is one where SSD will have a better market though. By nature the more power hungry processors will often not go into laptops, thus the drive gives a better performance improvement and doesn't kill batteries. On a desktop system more money in the processor will often provide better bang for the buck.

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Originally Posted by airshifter

Yours would also win in the speed of recall! :laugh: (Just joking, at least they are fixing it

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Yup :) **** happens, as long as they fix it I'm happy.

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Originally Posted by airshifter

I agree that hybrid drives should become more common, and don't think SSD will become mainstream for quite some time. As time marches on at some point it will be cost effective though. I remember paying $40-45 a megabyte for memory back in the day.

I think Roamys example is one where SSD will have a better market though. By nature the more power hungry processors will often not go into laptops, thus the drive gives a better performance improvement and doesn't kill batteries. On a desktop system more money in the processor will often provide better bang for the buck.

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I still don't think SSD's will really become commonplace though. Whilst they do have advantages in terms of battery life, they will be nature always be more expensive than magnetic storage.

These days you can get a 1tb laptop hard drive for £90 or so, you'll struggle to get much more than a 60gb SSD for that price. Even if the price does halve every 2 years or something it'll be a while before there is price parity especially considering the fact that magnetic storage goes down in price as well :)

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Originally Posted by Daniel

Yup :) **** happens, as long as they fix it I'm happy.




I still don't think SSD's will really become commonplace though. Whilst they do have advantages in terms of battery life, they will be nature always be more expensive than magnetic storage.

These days you can get a 1tb laptop hard drive for £90 or so, you'll struggle to get much more than a 60gb SSD for that price. Even if the price does halve every 2 years or something it'll be a while before there is price parity especially considering the fact that magnetic storage goes down in price as well :)

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I remember almost spending twice that to upgrade from 5mb to 7mb---that right, 2mb, not 2 gb
but an honest salesman said, you will never need it....

The other thing is my HP does not have a slot to download CF cards from the camera, so I have been using an adapter that plugs into a USB connection. It would take ten to fifteen minutes to download 5 to 8 gbs to the old hardrive......now it takes about 2 minutes or less to put the photos on the SSD using the same old adapter. I will actually pull up the file where the photos are being loaded and watch through the icons, the system puting 5 or more photos that are 12 to 18mb in size like about every second or so (before it was more like one photo about every two seconds or so)( I actually think it would be much faster, except the old 2.0 USB connection is keeping that "slow")

But I think that daniel is right about the processing...once a file is up in photoshop, making all the changes and so forth, I do not not notice any difference except when it is time to save and replace on the hd, where it is a bit faster with the ssd

as to prices, they are bouncing around a bit...when I bought the card, it was on sale for $119, down from $159. Then when I posted the link, it was for sale at $129.
Now it is $139 with a "regular price" of $149

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Originally Posted by markabilly

as to prices, they are bouncing around a bit...when I bought the card, it was on sale for $119, down from $159. Then when I posted the link, it was for sale at $129.
Now it is $139 with a "regular price" of $149

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BTW markabilly, SSD's generally aren't cards. http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...ed=0CBYQ8wIwAA# that's a card, but the one you got is just a normal hard drive type ssd :)

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Originally Posted by Daniel

BTW markabilly, SSD's generally aren't cards. http://www.google.co.uk/products/cat...ed=0CBYQ8wIwAA# that's a card, but the one you got is just a normal hard drive type ssd :)

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I am not all that up on names...what is different is that it does not have the platter that spins around; hence, what i think of as a drive. It does remind many of the "cards" that are used in cameras. I have always called the things in camera usage a card, although it may have other names more technically correct. At one point, there were little hd type platters in CF that operated the same as the conventional platter HD in computers. Because if one dropped them, they tended to break, so they did not hang around very long

"solid state drive"

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Originally Posted by Daniel

I still don't think SSD's will really become commonplace though. Whilst they do have advantages in terms of battery life, they will be nature always be more expensive than magnetic storage.

These days you can get a 1tb laptop hard drive for £90 or so, you'll struggle to get much more than a 60gb SSD for that price. Even if the price does halve every 2 years or something it'll be a while before there is price parity especially considering the fact that magnetic storage goes down in price as well :)

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I doubt they will ever equal out in price, but the SSD prices will drop over a few years to the point they consumer will spend it IMHO. I remember paying $350 or so for a 425 meg hard drive in the mid 90's. At the time everyone thought that we would never see consumers buying drives rated in gigabytes of storage.

As for the laptops, agree on the power issue, though my point was more the fact that the processor power will remain somewhat limited due to batteries, thus the SSD having more effect. If your desktop had only 1/3 or 1/4 the processor capability of your SB, then the extra money for SSD might not have seemed so much.

I'm hoping one of you really smart people here can help me out. I've just built my first PC but its not working out too well as nothing happens wehn I turn it on. I know I'm getting power a the light in the mouse turns on, but thats at. Anyone got any suggestions as to what I can do?

What are the specs of the machine? Is it making any beep noises when you power it up? Do the fans spin up?

Its an AMD Phenom II processor/motherboard/RAM bundle, pre built and tested with the usual HDD and DVD drive and a graphics chip instead of card. I get no lights, beeps or fans when I press the on switch.

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Originally Posted by Sleeper

Its an AMD Phenom II processor/motherboard/RAM bundle, pre built and tested with the usual HDD and DVD drive and a graphics chip instead of card. I get no lights, beeps or fans when I press the on switch.

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Really sorry for not replying earlier, completely slipper my mind. Sounds like probably a dead motherboard or PSU. Are you sure the front panel connectors are connected up right? Have you tried to boot up without a graphics card (if you've got one), without ram and with nothing else other than the power switch connected?

Hope you solved your problems, sleeper.
I've just built another HTPC based on AM3 socket/PhenomII X555. MicroATX Gigabyte MoBo. DDR3. Onboard ATI HD4250 graphics. Works like a charm.

BUT A QUESTION FOR DANIEL, OUR RESIDENT PC GURU:

I've started using an eSATA external HDD for backups (as opposed to USB2) because of the faster transfer speeds.
eSATA is hot-swappable, but is a pain in the arse because you have to tell the PC (Vista x64) to search for new hardware in order to recognise the external HDD.

The problem is this: How to detach the eSATA drive while the PC is running? There is no 'safe to remove hardware' feature for eSATA as there is for USB. Short of putting the PC to sleep and then detaching the drive, how can you 'hot-detach' it without fear of interrupting a read/write?

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Originally Posted by edv

Hope you solved your problems, sleeper.
I've just built another HTPC based on AM3 socket/PhenomII X555. MicroATX Gigabyte MoBo. DDR3. Onboard ATI HD4250 graphics. Works like a charm.

BUT A QUESTION FOR DANIEL, OUR RESIDENT PC GURU:

I've started using an eSATA external HDD for backups (as opposed to USB2) because of the faster transfer speeds.
eSATA is hot-swappable, but is a pain in the arse because you have to tell the PC (Vista x64) to search for new hardware in order to recognise the external HDD.

The problem is this: How to detach the eSATA drive while the PC is running? There is no 'safe to remove hardware' feature for eSATA as there is for USB. Short of putting the PC to sleep and then detaching the drive, how can you 'hot-detach' it without fear of interrupting a read/write?

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Yet another question I haven't replied to!!!!!!

I've actually been hotplugging drives since 2004 with no ill effects. I have had some hard drives die, but that was due to heat back in Australia.

Personally I think eSATA drives should be hotswappable, otherwise what's the point?

This post makes the most sense to me, I remember when SATA came, one of the things that was mentioned was that the connectors were specifically designed for hot swapping.

http://gamers-underground.com/tech-c...tml#post330287

This indicates that you should see whether the controller supports hot swapping.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/206783-14-sata-swap


And here -> http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/.../HotSwap.shtml is a utility which apparently put an icon in the taskbar which allows you to "eject" non-OS drives.

My thoughts are that as long as the backup is finished and nothing is trying to access the drive (anti-virus, spyware scanning software etc etc) that you could just yank the power or data cable regardless of having ejected it and it'd be fine. But of course someone losing data is a serious thing and if you want to be 110% sure then shutting the PC down isn't such a bad idea.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

My thoughts are that as long as the backup is finished and nothing is trying to access the drive (anti-virus, spyware scanning software etc etc) that you could just yank the power or data cable regardless of having ejected it and it'd be fine.

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Are the read/write heads of the drive parked or not when no process is accessing the drive anymore?
If they are not than you better not pull the cables cause that will put the physical integrity of the HDD in danger.

Now we only need to know if the heads are parked or not before a disconnection order is sent to the drive.

to find out, shake it hard after you pull it out :erm: :p : :arrows: :andrea:

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Originally Posted by donKey jote

to find out, shake it hard after you pull it out :erm: :p : :arrows: :andrea:

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I agree :p

Reply to my message on facebook Donks :P

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Originally Posted by edv

Hope you solved your problems, sleeper.
I've just built another HTPC based on AM3 socket/PhenomII X555. MicroATX Gigabyte MoBo. DDR3. Onboard ATI HD4250 graphics. Works like a charm.

BUT A QUESTION FOR DANIEL, OUR RESIDENT PC GURU:

I've started using an eSATA external HDD for backups (as opposed to USB2) because of the faster transfer speeds.
eSATA is hot-swappable, but is a pain in the arse because you have to tell the PC (Vista x64) to search for new hardware in order to recognise the external HDD.

The problem is this: How to detach the eSATA drive while the PC is running? There is no 'safe to remove hardware' feature for eSATA as there is for USB. Short of putting the PC to sleep and then detaching the drive, how can you 'hot-detach' it without fear of interrupting a read/write?

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PhenomII X555 is a good cpu BUT it may be better then you think
http://www.triple3online.com/four-co...black-edition/

The hot swap feature will be a controller option. Not all eSATA drives are hot swappable. For some motherboards and controllers, an eSATA drive looks and appears just like an internal SATA drive. The OS will have some participation with this also. It is best to err as if the drive is a non-removable drive to prevent unintended data loss.

Thanks for the tips.
I do not want to load yet another agent, so I'll just use the 'Sleep' feature when detaching eSATA drives.

Thunderbolt, I was fully aware of the unlocking/clocking capabilities of the X555, but my application (HTPC) demands both power and low heat (fan noise). The X555 offers a decent compromise, given my other components.

IE9 is out today and I'm using it at the moment and it seems a bit quicker.

I'm not cos I'm still on XP :p

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Originally Posted by edv

The problem is this: How to detach the eSATA drive while the PC is running? There is no 'safe to remove hardware' feature for eSATA as there is for USB. Short of putting the PC to sleep and then detaching the drive, how can you 'hot-detach' it without fear of interrupting a read/write?

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In Windows:
Start -> Run ->

Code:

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fsutil volume dismount X:

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where X is the drive letter of your eSATA drive.

Also accessible from Disk Management (right-click on Computer, go to Manage, go to Disk Management) — you can right-click on the volume in the diagram and unmount it from there.

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Originally Posted by Daniel

I remember when SATA came, one of the things that was mentioned was that the connectors were specifically designed for hot swapping.

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Yes, but the controller must be in AHCI mode to enable hot-swapping. In IDE mode (the default on most chipsets) the OS will not pick up the change. (Windows sometimes freezes, too.)

Some controllers behave differently, of course.

Been dealing with Windows a bit recently myself mostly due to soundcards. A particular problem whereby a line in is visible to Windows and other applications but select it in Skype and you just get silence! We've had to replace the internal sound with a USB sound card and that does work.