Best HDD setup

[roliath]

Here' what SSD's can do (if you can ignore the gay music)

weak

give me 4 more vertex 3's and i'll crush their results.

[Lason]

gotcha, what exactly is the benefit then?

Stupid fast performance. Raid 0 like Roliath said, stripes the drives and basically put half the info on one drive and half on the other. So both drives work to open one file but each one only has to open half of it, making it work faster. Only issue most will point out is if one drive crashes all the info is gone. IMO, its no different than one drive and having it go down though so I dont consider that a con.

[Lason]

weak

give me 4 more vertex 3's and i'll crush their results.

I just ran that same benchmarks and my results look different on the higher end. Maybe because your running more drives than my current 2?

[GTBrian23]

Stupid fast performance. Raid 0 like Roliath said, stripes the drives and basically put half the info on one drive and half on the other. So both drives work to open one file but each one only has to open half of it, making it work faster. Only issue most will point out is if one drive crashes all the info is gone. IMO, its no different than one drive and having it go down though so I dont consider that a con.

Is this something an average joe can setup? Im very computer savvy, but only when it comes to the basics

[roliath]

I just ran that same benchmarks and my results look different on the higher end. Maybe because your running more drives than my current 2?

that's an adaptex 6805 + 4 vertex3's. I screwed up and ran it @ 256mb. The results are a "bit" better when I run it at 1GB with QD of 8 as it lets the drives really work.

EDIT: with the cache enabled, I was able to hit 3gb but the results were real wonky. I also find it funny that it writes faster than it reads.

[line-em-up]

...

weak

give me 4 more vertex 3's and i'll crush their results.

Nice! What kind of raid are you running them in?

[line-em-up]

....

well all that wont really fit into my budget haha, if I get one 80ish gig SSD and then a nice 500 GB-1TB normal HDD what all exactly should go onto the SSD drive to get the most benefit?

If you are on a budget, but still need a lot of space (don't we all?), then a hybrid is a nice compomise. I have tested and know of a few people that are really happy with their hybrid. Though the hybrid only has 4GB of SS memory, it monitors what you do and loads the frequently used stuff on the SS part. My coworker is a creative and uses photoshop a lot. He can boot up his macbook and immediately start working with photoshop instead of waiting for a minute.

Here is an article from June 2010 comparing drives. Now, you can get a 50GB drive much cheaper.

[GTBrian23]

If you are on a budget, but still need a lot of space (don't we all?), then a hybrid is a nice compomise. I have tested and know of a few people that are really happy with their hybrid. Though the hybrid only has 4GB of SS memory, it monitors what you do and loads the frequently used stuff on the SS part. My coworker is a creative and uses photoshop a lot. He can boot up his macbook and immediately start working with photoshop instead of waiting for a minute.

Here is an article from June 2010 comparing drives. Now, you can get a 50GB drive much cheaper.

Yeah I saw the benchmarks for one of the Hybrids and compared to the standard HDD they were lightyears ahead, but not close to the true SSD's. I wont be on a super tight budget, like $2000ish but I want to focus most of that on the GPU, MB, and RAM for gaming. plus I want to do dual monitor or triple and I have a feeling that will eat up a decent chunk of that money.

[line-em-up]

...

Yeah I saw the benchmarks for one of the Hybrids and compared to the standard HDD they were lightyears ahead, but not close to the true SSD's. I wont be on a super tight budget, like $2000ish but I want to focus most of that on the GPU, MB, and RAM for gaming. plus I want to do dual monitor or triple and I have a feeling that will eat up a decent chunk of that money.

If you wanna play, you gotta pay. I'm on a tight budget too. Otherwise, I would have already jumped to SS. I think the Hybrid is the best value/compromise for size vs price. You'll get the most value and speed out of concentrating on the CPU/Memory and GPU for now (especially the GPU). Those things are hard to swap out and upgrade because the technology changes so quickly. With a hard drive, you can always upgrade and still be able to use the old one as a secondary drive. I'd like to know more about roliath's RAID setup. Though, I'm guessing it would cost close to $1000 to put together.

[Lason]

I had two of those hybrid drives in a laptop I ended up returning for other reasons. It had two 500gb hybrid drives in Raid 0 and that bitch was very fast. I wouldnt hesitate to use them at all.

[GTBrian23]

I had two of those hybrid drives in a laptop I ended up returning for other reasons. It had two 500gb hybrid drives in Raid 0 and that bitch was very fast. I wouldnt hesitate to use them at all.

I think this is the way I will be going, unless prices on SSD drop pretty drastically in 7 months. From what you notices was it pretty good about what it added to the SSD portion? Could you manually designate something to it if you wanted?

thanks for all the info!

[GTBrian23]

If you wanna play, you gotta pay. I'm on a tight budget too. Otherwise, I would have already jumped to SS. I think the Hybrid is the best value/compromise for size vs price. You'll get the most value and speed out of concentrating on the CPU/Memory and GPU for now (especially the GPU). Those things are hard to swap out and upgrade because the technology changes so quickly. With a hard drive, you can always upgrade and still be able to use the old one as a secondary drive. I'd like to know more about roliath's RAID setup. Though, I'm guessing it would cost close to $1000 to put together.

Yeah that is kinda what I am thinking as well.

[Lason]

I think this is the way I will be going, unless prices on SSD drop pretty drastically in 7 months. From what you notices was it pretty good about what it added to the SSD portion? Could you manually designate something to it if you wanted?

thanks for all the info!

You could not designate what ran on the SSD and the first few boot ups were not very fast but after a while the drives "learned" what I used and then the boot ups were very SSD like.

[roliath]

If you wanna play, you gotta pay. I'm on a tight budget too. Otherwise, I would have already jumped to SS. I think the Hybrid is the best value/compromise for size vs price. You'll get the most value and speed out of concentrating on the CPU/Memory and GPU for now (especially the GPU). Those things are hard to swap out and upgrade because the technology changes so quickly. With a hard drive, you can always upgrade and still be able to use the old one as a secondary drive. I'd like to know more about roliath's RAID setup. Though, I'm guessing it would cost close to $1000 to put together.

SSD's are easily the cheapest upgrade you can "feel," definitely the snappiest upgrade you can make for a pc/laptop.

[ceyko]

Like putting 4.10s in an automatic mustang.