Building my first computer & What up with SSD?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by HalifaxDrunk

I would also suggest checking out www.directcanada.com out of British Columbia. **You may be able to pricematch from NCIX.**

Direct Canada IS NCIX. It's the same business in the same warehouse but it's their "cheaper" storefront.

In the end, since NCIX has such a good price matching system (heck, sometimes I have pricematched a cheaper and crappier version of an item on newegg with a more expensive and superior version of a similar item on NCIX and have gotten it) just do all your ordering at NCIX and add the price matches from direct canada and newegg and infonec and whatever you want.

That way you maximize your savings between NCIX sales, newegg sales, and the Direct Canada regular prices, etc. with all the other webstores in Canada. Before you choose any component, goto www.shopbot.ca and search for it. If you see a cheaper price, price match it @ NCIX! (or Memory Express).

[HalifaxDrunk]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Direct Canada IS NCIX. It's the same business in the same warehouse but it's their "cheaper" storefront.

I did not know that, thanks!

[Old Yeller]

Originally Posted by Vulcan

I'd also get an SSD hard drive for the operating system.

When I build in a couple of months I was seriously looking into doing just that for the OS and commonly used apps/games/whatever.

But I read some article where there's no true way to defrag these and over continued use they'll get slower and slower until they're no faster than your regular old 7200rpm HD.

This article doesn't say that, but it does indicate slowdown is inevitable:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...wn_inevitable_

Thoughts? Anyone chime in really, I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, but the main bottleneck on systems now a days is HD read/write/seek times is it not? (maybe this should be a new thread)

[Hack&Lube]

An SSD is not something I would recommend a budget build (he's building a gaming computer for $700 total!) or even a mainstream user.

There is really no advantage for the everyday computer user with current SSD technology and limited capacities. SSD optimizing and tuning also requires a bit of homework and advanced knowledge.

SSDs are really not worth it at this time when a Western Digital Black Edition drive is blazing fast enough for even most gamers. For the price of a single SSD, you can get two WD Drives in Raid 0 with about 20 times the capacity. True, you won't get the 200+MB/sec read but you will get close (100-140MB/sec) and way more under budget with more capacity.

http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Is...5M--X18M-SSDs/
Talks a bit about the fragmentation issue and firmware Intel issues to minimalize this.

I almost bought an SDD last night but I know from history repeating itself that memory only gets better and cheaper for those who wait and right now, SSD technology is still in it's relative infancy and the price to performance/capacity ratio is not really worth it.

***
RW99, instead of the Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive, I would pick this:
http://www.directcanada.com/products...20Digital%20WD

I have both the Seagate and WD Black drive in my system. The WD Black drive destroys the Seagate, over 80MB/sec faster in Burst Speed

[RW99]

I was looking at NCIX and Memory Express, but I was having too much of a hard time trying to match up the components to the build I made in Newegg. I just don't know this new stuff enough to be able to comfortably interchange them.

In the end, all I wanted was a system that could handle games like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Mass Effect 2, handle all the media I threw at it, some USB 3.0 and something that is somewhat easy to update in 2-3 years when I do my next upgrade

I've been living off a laptop with XP and an internal video card for over 3 years now

[Vulcan]

Yeah RW99, it can get pretty confusing ordering a computer. For me I know little about AMD builds, so I try and stick to Intel.

Anyways what I do is look around for the cheapest part preferably on sale, without looking to hard at the brand name, except for a couple of things like the PSU and the MB where I'll only consider a few brands.
I just bought a new video card because I want one capable of playing HD audio with the latest HD video capability while using very little power because it will be a second card on a system with only a 500 watt PSU. Anyways I found a Sapphire 5670 (only the 5xxx series cards to HD audio) at Newegg for $95 whereas NCIX wants $105. The thing is they will both charge me shipping and taxes (PST because I live in BC) bringing the Newegg product total to $117.

Memory Express is doing a free delivery deal for a few days and I found the same Sapphire 5670 at $100 but because it doesn't charge PST, being in Alberta, the total came to $105. I saved $12 which doesn't sound like a lot but if you can do the same on a $1000 rig, by looking around you can save 10% or upgrade your parts for the same $1000.

I would have price matched the Newegg price at Memory Express but I didn't see that option at the M E net checkout. NCIX has that option, so try and use it if you go through them.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Vulcan

Yeah RW99, it can get pretty confusing ordering a computer. For me I know little about AMD builds, so I try and stick to Intel.

Anyways what I do is look around for the cheapest part preferably on sale, without looking to hard at the brand name, except for a couple of things like the PSU and the MB where I'll only consider a few brands.
I just bought a new video card because I want one capable of playing HD audio with the latest HD video capability while using very little power because it will be a second card on a system with only a 500 watt PSU. Anyways I found a Sapphire 5670 (only the 5xxx series cards to HD audio) at Newegg for $95 whereas NCIX wants $105. The thing is they will both charge me shipping and taxes (PST because I live in BC) bringing the Newegg product total to $117.

Memory Express is doing a free delivery deal for a few days and I found the same Sapphire 5670 at $100 but because it doesn't charge PST, being in Alberta, the total came to $105. I saved $12 which doesn't sound like a lot but if you can do the same on a $1000 rig, by looking around you can save 10% or upgrade your parts for the same $1000.

I would have price matched the Newegg price at Memory Express but I didn't see that option at the M E net checkout. NCIX has that option, so try and use it if you go through them.

Yeah, I think Memex only does price matching in store. NCIX's online price match is a really nice feature. Sometimes I have price matched different items and they've let it go through too

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

There is really no advantage for the everyday computer user with current SSD technology and limited capacities. SSD optimizing and tuning also requires a bit of homework and advanced knowledge.

I call baloney on this. The fragmentation/wear levelling issue is overblown - no matter how close to parity with a mechanical drive the SSD drive comes to on write performance due to the wear levelling algorithm running out of unused space, it's all about seek time and rotational latency - there is, for all intents and purposes, none on an SSD. I've been using an SSD for almost two years now, and even a WD Raptor feels slow in comparison.

Everyday computer usage is exactly where you want an SSD - most users spend far more time reading data through their everyday activities than writing, and minimizing latency when performing random read I/O is where the SSD shines.


Every person I know who's used an SSD for any length of time at all, comes away astounded at the difference it makes. I don't wait for my OS to boot. I don't wait for apps to load. When I'm running two OS's concurrently via VMWare, I don't feel my system lagging due to disk contention. My machine is also silent, no chattering drives or that whine from a high speed drive. It's wonderful.

That being said, the economics of SSD's do dictate that they are not suitable for budget machines, as you correctly noted. As an upgrade, or to soup up a basic PC build that you want to spend a bit more money on though, I would say they are the most significant single upgrade you can make (assuming you have enough RAM, which any machine with 2 gigs or more does for typical desktop usage patterns, and that you've already got a graphics card that meets your desktop & gaming needs, whatever those are).

[Vulcan]

Since we've gone a little off track,
here's a review of the G.Skill Falcon II 64GB 2.5inch Solid State Disk on sale today for $180 from NCIX and a comment about fragmentation degradation.

When it comes to performance it appears there are some tradeoffs that come with the 1819 firmware, but in the long run Windows 7 users should find TRIM more appealing than an initial performance boost that will degrade over time. TRIM will allow your Falcon II to reclaim lost performance and stay within 90% of what you observed when the drive was new.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/302...k/index10.html

here's the NCIX link

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=46519&promoid=1146

[Old Yeller]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

I call baloney on this. The fragmentation/wear levelling issue is overblown - no matter how close to parity with a mechanical drive the SSD drive comes to on write performance due to the wear levelling algorithm running out of unused space, it's all about seek time and rotational latency

I'm not sure what you mean by this - can you dumb this down for me? Why is fragmentation issue overblown if over time it degrades the performance of an SSD?

(again no expert, I've just read a few articles)

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Old Yeller

I'm not sure what you mean by this - can you dumb this down for me? Why is fragmentation issue overblown if over time it degrades the performance of an SSD?

(again no expert, I've just read a few articles)

SSD's lose write performance over time because they write data in chunks that are larger than a normal hard drive sector due to limitations of MLC technology. So, for example, if you want to write say 1KB of data, on a brand new drive, it finds a 8KB chunk that has never been written to, and slaps down your 1KB of data in one shot. If there isn't a virgin spot to stick that chunk, it has to read an 8KB chunk of data, modify 1KB of the chunk, then write that 8KB chunk back.

The thing is, this additional overhead exists only on writes, and even then, drags performance down to the kind of performance levels you see on mechanical hard drives. You still get all of the performance benefits from an SSD's complete lack of seek times (the need to position the head on a conventional hard drive to the correct spot), and the lack of rotational latency (the time required for the data to arrive underneath the head as the platter spins). So read operations remain completely fast, and the random read/write performance of the drive remains very, very good.

In a normal desktop usage pattern, its fairly rare to generate long, sustained, high output write operations, so the performance degradation is only really apparent in synthetic benchmarks. Or, if for example, you were saving out graphics files that were hundreds of megabytes each, you might notice that it only performs on par with a mechanical hard drive. But you would also notice that the graphics load quicker, and that Photoshop itself loads in 2 seconds instead of 15.

Edit: another thing to consider is that the degradation has a baseline - at some point, without TRIM support in the OS, every write will require the read-modify-write cycle to complete. At that point, performance won't ever get any worse, and the performance of the drive remains consistent. With TRIM support, deleting old files at the OS level will tell the drive which sectors are no longer in use, allowing it to identify chunks that can be written to directly because the previous contents are no longer needed, restoring performance to near-new levels.

[Old Yeller]

Great explanation, thanks sclitheroe.

I'm reading about TRIM support now. Am I confusing the issue, or is TRIM support built into Windows7 as well as being built into the firmware of some SSD drives?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Old Yeller

Great explanation, thanks sclitheroe.

I'm reading about TRIM support now. Am I confusing the issue, or is TRIM support built into Windows7 as well as being built into the firmware of some SSD drives?

Correct, you need TRIM support top to bottom - OS, drivers, and hard drive. My understanding is that the MS supplied SATA drivers in Windows 7 implement TRIM.

Here is how you'd enable TRIM on a support machine under 7: http://ssdtechnologyforum.com/archiv...thread-42.html

[photon]

Some drives also come with a TRIM utility that you can run manually, while some drives had to be wiped completely to restore performance.

Basically the performance degradation issue has been mostly addressed in some drives given the right OS, there'll still be performance degradation over time but not what it used to be (significant percentage, or order of magnitude in some cases).

[Hack&Lube]

Why is it that you cannot trim 2 vertex drives if you raid them? Is it only the OCZ drives that suffer this limitation?

[photon]

With a RAID array, there's something else in between the OS and the actual drive; the RAID controller. So while on a normal drive the OS can see the file system directly, on a RAID drive it can't, it just gives commands to the RAID controller and the RAID controller decides what to do with them.

So in the case of TRIM, part of the process of the command is filling up unused space and then deleting that file again (or something like that, I forget exactly), but to do this it has to have intimate knowledge of the filesystem (the drive itself doesn't know). But with a RAID array the OS doesn't have that intimate knowledge, the RAID controller does.

Eventually RAID controllers will be made that are smart enough to report a spindle speed of 0 to the OS so the OS knows its an SSD, and is smart enough to accept TRIM commands and translate those TRIM commands so they work properly for the SSDs in the array.

SSDs are game changing, but they're still very young and I expect there'll be a lot of challenges like this yet.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by photon

With a RAID array, there's something else in between the OS and the actual drive; the RAID controller. So while on a normal drive the OS can see the file system directly, on a RAID drive it can't, it just gives commands to the RAID controller and the RAID controller decides what to do with them.

So in the case of TRIM, part of the process of the command is filling up unused space and then deleting that file again (or something like that, I forget exactly), but to do this it has to have intimate knowledge of the filesystem (the drive itself doesn't know). But with a RAID array the OS doesn't have that intimate knowledge, the RAID controller does.

Eventually RAID controllers will be made that are smart enough to report a spindle speed of 0 to the OS so the OS knows its an SSD, and is smart enough to accept TRIM commands and translate those TRIM commands so they work properly for the SSDs in the array.

SSDs are game changing, but they're still very young and I expect there'll be a lot of challenges like this yet.

That's why I am still hesitant to adopt them. I was an early Raptor adopter and it only hurt my wallet in the end when I know SSDs can be so much better (and cheaper) only 1 or 2 years down the road.

[sclitheroe]

I wouldn't honestly worry about TRIM support all that much. In a year and half of heavy use, on an OS that doesn't even support TRIM (OS X), I can tell you that I still get excellent write speeds. It's really not as big an issue as everyone would like it to be.

Look here at the benchmarks on drives with and without TRIM: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...spx?i=3667&p=7

And take a look at the 4KB random write max latency graph here:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3631

The performance advantage of ANY ssd is insanely good. I think anyone interested in improving their PC's performance today would be silly to wait. The biggest downside? Once you've tried ssd, you won't be able to go back. It's that good.

[Hack&Lube]

I would love to run an SSD as my primary but the larger capacities are a little too expensive for me right now as I' had hoped to try running Server 2008 with Hyper-V virtualizations of Windows 7 and I'd probably need 100GB.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

I would love to run an SSD as my primary but the larger capacities are a little too expensive for me right now as I' had hoped to try running Server 2008 with Hyper-V virtualizations of Windows 7 and I'd probably need 100GB.

Yeah, 100 gigs is gonna be tight for Server 2008, not to mention a couple VM's