Buying a new computer

Actually, as far as the gaming/enthusiast community is concerned, they are. Yes, there are small SSD's. There are also large capacity ones, as well..... For your average home user who does nothing but surf the web, yea. But Stile said he had a $1000 budget..... that tells me he wants a nice rig. SSD's=nice rig. Nope. Never said that. I just think they should be a part of a high-ish end build. Where did you get that chart? Which "32gb Crucial"? Was it testing sequential write, 4k random? What? I'll do some benches myself and compare my Spinpoint F3's in RAID0 and my Crucial M4. I guarantee that chart is OLD. I learned something new today. Thanks. I don't follow Intel at all. I'm an AMD guy lol.Your pic didn't work...

Besides that, SSD's are being used for OS drives, so you want to look at anything BUT sequential. Random access and seek times are what count, my friend. Sequential times are for the transfer of large files.My SSD (Crucial M4 64gb running at SATAII speeds) Now my 1tb Spinpoint F3's in RAID0 with 128k stripe. So we see that the ONLY area where a mechanical could possibly have an advantage is in sequential WRITE, and that is with a RAID) array. But, again, when talking about an OS drive, sequential means dick.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

I'll even go one further. Here is my backup hard drive. A 1tb Seagate Barracuda 7200.12. So...and SSD womps the shit out of a single mechanical any day of the week. It's pretty safe to do a 1-1 comparison of my RAID array to a raptor, so for the price of a raptor, an SSD is still the way to go for a main drive.Of course, this is all under the guise that we give a shit about boot times and how fast our browser opens up lol. Do I need a RAID array? HELL NO! But I like it and I like to futz around with this shit.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

I don't think Stile is a "gaming enthusiast." I think he's just a guy who wants a decent system for his wife to work with, and then play DIII on when it comes out next year. You know, because he said that.I'm perfectly happy to have presented our two perspectives. Stile will have to make his own decision as to whether an SSD is right for his system or not. I still like my CPU/motherboard combo better than yours. Even if he dropped in an i5 instead of an i7 to save a hundred, I think the ASUS motherboard is the way to go. It really is a hot shit motherboard, no lie.But, you've got me thinking about looking for an SSD for my ASUS laptop in a year or so. (Got an empty drive bay for it.) Tom's Hardware, I think? I don't immediately recall. Sorry about that, linked it from my old-ass blog. Can you see it at magbast.blogspot.com? Yeah, but the OS drive is where the applications go, too. Like DIII, when it comes out. Loading a game into RAM is a sequential read so sequential throughput matters more than I think you believe. Haha! Well said.Thanks for running the numbers, Hooah. You've moved the needle, I can tell you that. Still don't know that I would recommend it to Stile but now I'm thinking "oo, imagine Win7 boot up and how fast WoW would load if I had all that on an SSD..."

I know he's not. I was saying that because it is, IMO, the gaming/enthusiast community who puts the newest tech through all the rigors. SSD have solidified their role as boot/OS drives. Prices on them are dropping, getting close to $1.50/gb.Secondly, as far as the sequential times are concerned: this is moot with the advent of SATA3, which yields double the speed the SATA2. I admit that what I proposed was a very rough first draft. It was by no means meant to be an end all be all. I also really like the ROG series. I actually almost picked up a Crosshair IV the other day. I would really say that your only limiting factor in waiting should be price. Good god man! Clean up those cables! You do realize that cable management is far from being only for aesthetic purposes? Good cable management promotes better quality airflow.I'd put some pics of mine up, but it is nowhere near complete. I just got my new chip (phenom II X4 840) and cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212+). I also just got my RAID built early last week, so I haven't had a chance to do any cable management myself. Having 4 hard drives and a Radeon HD 5770 in an Antec 300 is no small feat lol. You know, come to think of it, I don't really think a layperson should go with a muli hard drive set up because it is a lot of work. I think it is a better idea to just go with a single large drive for regular joe schmoes until NAND comes down in price. I got my first Spinpoint before I got my SSD (this was meant to be a budget build that went waaayyyy over budget) and had Kubuntu on it. It ran great for being a mechanical. It's been so long since I've ran windows on a mechanical of my own that I can't remember. I'm hooked on SSD's.

I know, I know! And I did. Cable loom and everything. Honestly, it was never a performance build, just my attempt at a "dieselpunk" kind of case. When I built the system for my in-laws, I was much better about cables - cable ties, ran behind the mobo, that sort of thing. Lol, so I see! What kind of RPM would you suggest?

The Samsung Spinpoint F3 is hands down the best deal for a large mechanical hard drive. It beats the Caviar Blacks and is very often on sale for $49.99, which is how much both of mine were. Caviar Blacks are great hard drives, but they are just too expensive.{abe}
7200 RPM, 32mb cache is what to look for. Sure, the Caviar Blacks are SATA3 compatible, but mechanical hard drives can't even saturate SATA2 yet so it doesn't matter.{abe #2}
Here is a good review done at bit-tech. You'll see how the F3 is not only top tier when it comes to performance, but also one of the cheapest 1tb mechanical hard drives, and IS the cheapest when on sale. Bit-tech review of Spinpoint F3Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.Edited by hooah212002, : No reason given.

Seems like I need to do some research.What's difficult about a 2-HD system? I like the idea, but I would like to better understand the concerns before jumping in.I'm an IT-inclined person (my job is to program the PLCs that run assembly lines), and my wife is good with computers as well, but neither of us are qualified to take a job in actual IT or anything like that.With two hard-drives, are we basically talking about just keeping things organized between the two?
That is, make sure applications are installed on the OS drive... and make sure data is stored on the data drive? That's not really too difficult, and I think we could easily handle that. Or are there other concerns we should be aware of?What size is "small" for the OS drive? Like, 250Gb or so?Let's see... other stuff that's come up in the discussion that I remember:-I'm not a gaming enthusiest, although my wife and I both like to play video games.
-The shear coolness-factor of an SSD is making me lean that wayOne thing I don't really understand, though... you say an SSD has the potential to "wear out it's sectors" faster than a regular drive.
In my line of work (Industrial Automation) I deal with relays and such in electrical panels. In this context, SSD is always longer lasting and faster than mechanical devices (they're just more expensive). However, these relays are simply switching a 24VDC signal on and off. They are not dealing with 'saving memory' or anything like that. It's just, to me, it is un-intuitive to think of an SSD piece of equipment as having a shorter life-span than a mechanical system. Are you able to shed some more light on this?Again, thanks for your input.

Thanks Hooah212002,Ah, I see you've already answered one of the questions I just asked Crash... about how big an OS hard-drive should be.
Is 60Gb average for an OS hard-drive?From the last few games I purchased... years ago now... aren't they starting to take up, like, 10-15 Gb per installation?
If I install all applications and the OS on a 60Gb hard-drive... wouldn't it fill up rather quickly? Or am I missing something on how to use the two drives together?A few points of information that have come up:-I am not looking to overclock the CPU. I understand what this does and how to do it, but I won't be monitoring the system and I don't want to get involved with making sure I'm cooling properly and that sort of extra maintenance.
-Is Newegg the generally-accepted best place to purchase computer components?

I know you replied to Crash, but I can respond just the same. Nope, that's about it. If you have any sort of IT knowledge, it's not difficult. That depends on how much you want to spend. My SSD is 64gb, which is plenty for Windows, Office and plenty of programs. My games and whatnot go on my RAID array. I've had mine for ~2 weeks: Says I've got 8 years left.What you need to look for with SSD's is what controller they use, as that is the determining factor when it comes to performance and stability.The last generation Intel X series were top of the line when it came to reliability, but lack in performance. The same is true for this year's models.I can safely say, that with firmware updates, any SSD you pick up will last as long, if not longer, than any other piece of hardware.

It's entirely all up to you and what you feel comfortable with. There really is no "average", per se. Some people want 128gb, some want 250. It just depends on how much you want to be able to put on it. Apps and OS...no, it shouldn't. But that depends on what applications you are talking about. If you have games you want on your SSD, I would recommend at the very least 90gb SSD. What you can do is calculate how much space everything takes up now and figure out how big you need your boot drive to be. Definitely. HOWEVER.....they are not, by any means, the end all be all only place to go. Amazon has some good deals as well. I just found a site called superbiiz and they have good prices too, except the shipping sucks lol. I normally do stick with Newegg though.

So it's just a balance between these two factors?1. On the OS-drive - faster loading/unloading, but the smaller this is, the easier it is for the OS (which is the biggest concern) to do what it needs to do quickly and efficiently.2. On the Data-drive - slower loading/unloading, but lots of room for anything. Any applications/data can go on this drive, they'll just have a somewhat slower load time on them. However, they won't take up any room on the OS drive which may affect the OS performance.Do I pretty much have that right?One more question:Lets say I have system A with 1 standard mechanical drive with all OS and applications on it.
Then I also have system B which has a fast, small OS-drive, and the same standard mechanical drive as system A, but as a data drive.On system A, I load a game on the 1 drive and it will have such-and-such performance.
If I take the same game and load it on the same standard mechanical data drive but now on system B... will system B still load/play the game slightly faster just because the operating system alone is on a faster drive? I'm guessing that yes, it will?Thanks for all your detailed help. I feel like I'm learning a bunch of stuff.

This is true if you short stroke (explanation of Shrot Stroking further down), but not for SSD's.However, for SSD's the converse is true. Larger SSD's perform better than smaller ones because they have more NAND chips (NAND is the storage tech used in SSD's) to write across. With SSD's, you can think of the NAND chips being in somewhat of a RAID fashion and that is why they are faster than mechanical drives. Yes, except that SSD's no longer lose performance when filled up. They perform just as well having all your programs on them as they would if you had OS only. Actually, no. It depends entirely on what type if disk your are loading the game on.You can also do what is called "short stroke". Short stroking is where you take one hard drive, SSD or mechanical, and create two or more partitions. Generally, you create a smallish partition on the front of the drive for your OS, while leaving the remainder for media nd storage. This will also give you an increase in load times for OS and apps.So, if you do decide to go with a single mechanical, you can do a smallish partition on the front of the drive for OS and apps, say ~100 gb, then another for games, say ~300gb, then the remainder for media and storage of stuff. This, of course, is under the assumption you get at least a 1tb hard drive.Or....you get an SSD and a 1tb. You can do the same ~300gb for games and the rest for media/storage/backups/whatever.I recommend AT LEAST a 60gb SSD if you go that route. However, it really all depends on how well you can manage disk space and how much you want to spend. A good 64gb SSD is going to run around $100 and 128gb around $200, so on and so forth.Here is my hard drive set up:

My information is probably out of date on this, but the deal here is that the non-volatile RAM in an SSD has a limited number of "writes" available. At one time this was as low as 500 writes/rewrites; I guess it's more, now. (I've heard as high as 10,000 writes or more, which would probably obviate my concerns.) The current drives do "load-leveling" and exploit their lower seek times to fragment files across the drive, so that no sectors get used up faster than the others.If write cycles have been dramatically improved then, yes, we should expect better reliability from SSD's.I think you could probably handle two hard drives. It's mostly just a matter of keeping track of which is which when you go to install the OS. (Just remember which SATA ports you used for each drive and you should be fine.) Like I say, if you're holding out for DIII - which is supposed to drop next year sometime - then I think it makes sense to hold out on a video card as well. Both the i5 and i7 have integrated graphics that should get you by, maybe even run some older games.

Modern SSD's have a lifespan of greater than 1 million write cycles. Here is an Anandtech article duscussing SSD lifespan:The Intel X25-M is not even a current model and uses an older controller. Plus, this article is from 2009. Technology increases every year.