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PostPosted: Fri Jan 06, 2012 10:22 pm 
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Ordered the case and my gf's dad has offered me a 500 gig hard drive and a 600 watt power supply whats the next thing I should buy?

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 2:21 am 
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DVD rw drive, they are like $15-20.
Nice keyboard / mouse / monitor

I would wait and buy last, all at once: cpu/board/ram/videocard

The final thing is maybe (at some point down the road?) adding a SSD, seriously the largest improvement I have seen in the past 10 years in how fast a computer feels. They are not cheap, buy you can get a nice one for like $150, but it is very important to not get a bad one, there are plenty to be avoided. Think about everything loading 10-1000x as fast.

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Cornholio wrote:
blah thats nothing, i built houses for pirates, then do pirating myself. Then I shoot my self and perform bullet removal surgery on myself. After that I go to boot camps to train kids to kill. Then i go and fight on the Iraq war for both sides. After all i go later and drink some 7up cause ill be thirsty as shit.


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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 6:27 am 
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What is an SDD exactly?

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Stonedar420 wrote:
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 11:01 am 
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SSD.

It''s a Hard Drive made of RAM chips. So, think, no moving platters, just chips. It's considerably faster than traditional mechanical drives.

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 2:07 pm 
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So, am I right in saying this is essentially just RAM or would am I wrong?

Is it an internal component? What is needed to use one?

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PostPosted: Sat Jan 07, 2012 3:22 pm 
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$torm wrote:
So, am I right in saying this is essentially just RAM or would am I wrong?

Is it an internal component? What is needed to use one?


Its flash (not RAM), but similar. RAM requires constant power to hold its memory. While flash powers up a chip, re-writes it, then shuts it down, kinda like burning a sector on a CD, its is a chemical process. Think of it being full of USB memory sticks.

A SSD drive looks just like a hard drive on the outside, but on the inside its completely different
Attachment:
31solidstateharddrive.jpg
31solidstateharddrive.jpg [ 29.73 KiB | Viewed 11556 times ]


A mechanical drive works like a CD or a record player, it has to use an arm to read a specific spot on the platter, and can only read 1 spot at a time, while a SSD has no moving parts and has a separate channel to each chip, so it doesn't have to search for a file. Also a mechanical drive only can perform its job anywhere near its rated speed only in sequential transfers (one large file, laid out in a long line). Most drives do 80-120mb/s max, but when doing random files (like installing a program, loading windows and 30 other programs at once on boot), it chokes, because the arm has to bounce all over the place. You know when you boot your pc, everything is fighting for hard drive time, then after a minute or two things calm down. This is where a hard drive fails, and a ssd wins. The SSD has instant access, does not choke when loaded, and does 550mb/s on sequential.

So it looks like this:
100mb/s vs 550mb/s sequential
2mb/s vs 500mb/s random (seriously, 1000x faster)
50ms vs 1ms access time (time for it to find the data)

My work laptop, from power button to full boot, log in, open firefox and outlook took 5 min, took 55sec after the drive swap. In the real world, you will see a 10x load speed improvement. Oh, since there are no moving parts, there is no drive to crash (now obviously it still can crash from some other defect).

Why does everyone not have a SSD?? Because they are expensive and small ($150 for a 120gb drive). So you put windows on the 120, and you have a large (500gb) mechanical drive for all your other files. Steam is not on my SSD (my steam folder is over 150gb lol). That is what I recommend, windows and all that stuff on your SSD, games on mechanical.

My next computer this summer, I am getting rid of my RAID0 640gb mechanical drives that max at 240mb/s, and buying another 120gb SSD, and RAIDing it, so shooting for 1000mb/s speed of 240gb space when I combine them.

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Cornholio wrote:
blah thats nothing, i built houses for pirates, then do pirating myself. Then I shoot my self and perform bullet removal surgery on myself. After that I go to boot camps to train kids to kill. Then i go and fight on the Iraq war for both sides. After all i go later and drink some 7up cause ill be thirsty as shit.


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2012 4:29 am 
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Interesting. Think I might have to invest in an SSD somewhen soon and use it for windows.

Thanks for explaining it all Cole!

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2012 5:04 am 
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Decided I'm going to go with getting an SSD seeing as i'm going to be reformatting my PC soon - so might aswell upgraded at the same time.

My only question is, what is the best SSD to go for and with SATA 3, is there any specific requirements needed? Currently looking at buying http://www.ebuyer.com/268693-corsair-12 ... f120gb3-bk

Thanks for any help

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2012 12:39 pm 
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SSDs get really complicated, but I will try to not melt your brain :P

Yes you want SATA3, even if your current computer can only run it at SATA2 speeds, its worth getting because all the SATA3 drives are 3rd generation and ALL have better parts inside and will run faster on SATA2 than a SATA2 drive.

Each SSD has 2 components that differentiate them, besides that its just a shell, none of these brands make the actual parts, they just put them together and warranty / sell them.
1) Controller: Like the CPU of the SSD
2) Flash chips: who makes them, size, speed, data type (onfi, toggle, ddr, asynchronous vs synchronous etc)


The major controllers are Sandforce, Intel, Samsung, Marvell, indilinx, and jmicron

Sandforce is the fastest, the drive you linked is a sandforce based drive. On all the SATA3.0 sandforce drives, there are 2 flash options, a entry level (asynchronous) and one that has 2x flash speed (synchronous). Sandforce gets their performance boost from data compression. They take your data, compress it in the controller, then send it to flash, the only problem is, a bunch of files you use are already compressed (game files, movies, MP3s etc), so when the sandforce drives hit a compressed file, they don't get that boosted speed. This is where the 2 different flash types come in, if the file is a compressed file, the better drives are almost double as fast, but a non-compressed file, they are very close in speed.

Im going to use newegg to link some drives just for reference:

Corsair 120gb force3 (you linked this drive): slow flash memory asynchronous
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820233206

Corsair 120gb force3 GT: Fast flash memory synchronous
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820233191

Those are just 2 examples, other brands do it too, while some ONLY sell 1 type of sandforce drives (either the best one, or the lower one)
-Kingston Hyper X SSD is only synchronous
-OCZ Agility 3 (asynchronous)
-OCZ Vertex 3 (synchronous)
etc

You can google the drive you are looking at (or ask me) to see what type of flash chips it has.

There are also other brands with different controllers:

The Crucial M4 SSD is the best selling non sandforce drive out there, this computer I am on at work (plus 2 coworkers, and 2 friends) has this drive. Its not quite as fast as the sandforce though, but is considered more reliable (this can be argued since they both had early firmware issues). And since it does not do drive compression, overall its not the fastest, but it tends to be very well rounded

Intel makes a few series of drives, the 3 series is a SATA2.0 budget drive, the 5 series is the Crucial M4 re-branded, and typically intel drives are more expensive and not worth it.

Indilinx was an early competitor to intel until sandforce came out, the OCZ bought them. Now they are coming back strong. There are some new drives (OCZ octane) that have very good real world numbers, much like the M4 it is VERY well rounded, in fact it tends to be a very promising tech, unfortunately its new, so I would wait for bugs. It also suffers from new memory that is 2x density, which means there are less actual chips, less chips mean less channels, means less speed, Ill bring this up next. All this means is if you want full speed, you have to shell out the cash for a 256gb drive!

Indilinx is also doing something weird and made a small SSD pci-e module, they call everest, and its supposed to be as fast as sandforce, but their ssd will have 2 of them in there, so will be even faster, here is an article if interested. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/22296 It will be called vertex4, and will stomp my vertex3 in random files.



Ok, flash size is the final thing... Most of the drives you will see come in 64, 128, 256, (possible 512) sizes, and the sandforce will do 60, 120, 240, 480. Sandforce drives do have the full size of chips in them, but do "over-partitioning" for wear leveling, as chips wear out, it has spare area, it also uses this area as temp cache for its compression scheme. All with some sizes in-between sometimes (I had a 96gb, there are also 160s, 90s, but these are rare, and normally are the same as the next size up, but missing a chip or 2.

Where this actually matters is check the drive you are looking at mainly the write speed. Each flash chip has a wire from it to the controller, so if you have a drive with 4 chips, vs one with 8, the one with 8 is going to be 2x the write speed, since it has the ability to tap 8 lanes of flash. This is why the 60/64gb drives you will see have poor write times, there just isnt enough chips inside (and the octane drive with 128gb suffers from this too).


In conclusion, I would go for a Sandforce SATA3 synchronous drive (Corsair force gt, kingston hyperx, OCZ vertex 3, and some other brands), or a M4.
I have a 128 M4 in my work laptop, and a 120 Vertex3 in my home computer, roommate has the 120gb kingston hyper X, and Claire has a 96gb Kingston.

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Cornholio wrote:
blah thats nothing, i built houses for pirates, then do pirating myself. Then I shoot my self and perform bullet removal surgery on myself. After that I go to boot camps to train kids to kill. Then i go and fight on the Iraq war for both sides. After all i go later and drink some 7up cause ill be thirsty as shit.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 4:10 am 
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The British One
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Wow, can always rely on you to give me a informative explanation on something IT related. It was a nice read.

Is there a specific way you can tell that they're either asynchronous or synchronous - I did study this on my two year course at college, though we didn't actually go into too much detail about the knowing how to tell or what the full explanation was. (Always nice to learn more about IT bits)

I did notice the different write times between the 60gb and 120gb, I guessed it might be something related to the flash chips.

Just looking at two specs on the Kingston and the Corsair, that you recommended/mentioned at the end of your post, I'm right in saying out of the two that the corsair would be the slightly better one, right?

http://www.ebuyer.com/275834-kingston-1 ... 100s3-120g
http://www.ebuyer.com/273572-corsair-12 ... 120gbgt-bk


I noticed looking for the Kingston SSDs is that I saw a bundle - which had some extra cables and mounting plates, nothing that I actually need (More for external usage it seems?) when I decide to connect up the SSD, I'm guessing I would connect it like any other (mechanical) hard drive?

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 10:24 am 
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The kingston has a kit that comes either with or without a "data transfer kit" you can skip it since you will (I hope) be doing a fresh install. The kit itself includes a data transfer cable and some software. Besides that, the drives will perform the exact same (the hyperx, force gt, vertex3), the small variances in advertised speed are ignorable.

The specific way you can tell that they're either asynchronous or synchronous, is to google it. Or send me a link and I will look it up or give you info about the drive. My main decision on what specific drive to get, is typically whichever one is on sale.

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Cornholio wrote:
blah thats nothing, i built houses for pirates, then do pirating myself. Then I shoot my self and perform bullet removal surgery on myself. After that I go to boot camps to train kids to kill. Then i go and fight on the Iraq war for both sides. After all i go later and drink some 7up cause ill be thirsty as shit.


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PostPosted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 12:05 pm 
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What would you say the "better" one to go for, would be?

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PostPosted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 4:10 pm 
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They are identical, whichever one is cheaper.

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Cornholio wrote:
blah thats nothing, i built houses for pirates, then do pirating myself. Then I shoot my self and perform bullet removal surgery on myself. After that I go to boot camps to train kids to kill. Then i go and fight on the Iraq war for both sides. After all i go later and drink some 7up cause ill be thirsty as shit.


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 8:17 pm 
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Probably will wanna order all my other stuff soon been saving.

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Stonedar420 wrote:
(you know your my skinny rockin english brother right reaper?)

bob wrote:
I'm picking up my toys and going home.


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PostPosted: Mon Jan 23, 2012 11:38 pm 
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Reaper wrote:
Probably will wanna order all my other stuff soon been saving.


3rd Generation I3/5/7 comes out in Feb-April

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Cornholio wrote:
blah thats nothing, i built houses for pirates, then do pirating myself. Then I shoot my self and perform bullet removal surgery on myself. After that I go to boot camps to train kids to kill. Then i go and fight on the Iraq war for both sides. After all i go later and drink some 7up cause ill be thirsty as shit.


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