Building a PC

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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?