2 x 8GB vs 4 x 4GB?

[RudeCurve]

Prebuild shot...I'm pretty stoked...been awhile since I've done a complete new build for myself. :smile:

Think I'll start the build and use one of my standard HDDs until I order the SSD. I'd rather be using this new computer during the July 4th holiday break than waiting on a SSD in the mail.

 

[Rurouni]

Nice. Right now I'm gaming a lot with my kaveri rig because of these summer sales. Mostly playing mirror's edge. If the game is made for last gen, I think it can handle it pretty well as long as you stay in the mid setting and 720p with AA or 1080p no AA. The newest title I got is Tomb Raider, and it ran without a problem even when I set the cpu to 45w. Yes,it doesn't hit 60fps but definitely run at an acceptable fps (smooth enough for my eyes).

 

[RudeCurve]

Your posts are tempting me to buy a couple of PC games to try out on this new build. I might even buy some old games to try out too like RE5.:smile:

 

[Grall]

Anandtech has just (well, like, yesterday) reviewed the new, all-singing, all-dancing Samsung 850 series of SSDs, the first drive using 3D stacked NAND flash memory. This means dramatically higher write endurance (as well as read, and particularly, write speed), as flash cell size goes from a tiny 16nm feature size back up to gigantic 40nm, layered 32 times over. So in this particular case, the cake is NOT a lie! And, it's alledgedly very, very yummy too.

Samsung claims to have a 256GB drive in internal testing that kept running after 8PBs worth of writes. Ugh!

 

[Albuquerque]

Anandtech has just (well, like, yesterday) reviewed the new, all-singing, all-dancing Samsung 850 series of SSDs, the first drive using 3D stacked NAND flash memory. This means dramatically higher write endurance (as well as read, and particularly, write speed), as flash cell size goes from a tiny 16nm feature size back up to gigantic 40nm, layered 32 times over. So in this particular case, the cake is NOT a lie! And, it's alledgedly very, very yummy too.

Samsung claims to have a 256GB drive in internal testing that kept running after 8PBs worth of writes. Ugh!

Nom nom nom nom!!

I'm still leaning towards a PCI-E native solid state storage medium for my next rig. Get rid of that SATA interface that's holding us back, go straight from flash to bus!

 

[Grall]

Blah, the idea that SATA is some kind of bottleneck is mostly just a misunderstanding. The vast majority of file I/O is not linear reads and writes of huge amounts of data, but rather small, random-ish I/O in the 512 byte-4k range. In that situation, the flash itself as well as the attached controller is more the bottleneck, or in the case of very high performant SSDs (PCIe based, incidentally ), the host system CPU itself (due to traditional file I/O designed for HDDs being fundamentally poorly suited to SSDs.)

It's doubtful you'd ever notice much, if any performance advantage in a consumer desktop useage scenario with a PCIe SSD vs. SATA. Some SATA drives could actually be better, as space constraints mean some PCIe SSDs have fewer flash channels. They'd have higher - largely theoretical - burst I/O speed, but would perform worse where it really counts, on multi-threaded, small I/O sizes.

 

[Albuquerque]

Let's be honest, I have no "consumer" need for six 240GB SSD's in RAID0 on a dedicated RAID card either, but damned if I don't have that setup running in my (equally superfluous) 4.5Ghz 3930k with (similarly superfluous) 32GB of ram.

It's not about what you need

 

[Blazkowicz]

Check "NVMe" then if you worry about overhead and concurrent use. It replaces "AHCI", which I guess was a nice thing other than "that dreadful BIOS option".

Basically it's about accessing storage a bit more RAM-like than disk drive like - flash is like a weird form of RAM. Much lower overhead is achieved (don't ask me how). More funnily, instead of one queue with a depth of 32 (inherited from the queuing on hard drives) you get 65536 queues with 65536 depth!, which is probably a tad better.

Of course there's a nice minefield : PCIe SSDs can be on SATA Express, M2 or as cards but moreover you can have a PCIe SSD that uses NVMe, a PCIe SSD that uses AHCI and then an M2 SSD which actually uses SATA and is thus not a PCIe SSD at all.
Then chipset and motherboard worries, and Intel moving from PCIe 2.0 to PCIe 3.0 for the "DMI" link between CPU and chipset on a future platform only (LGA 1151).

So for the whole PCIe thing it's probably reasonable to just wait.

 

[Pixel]

Wow that's crazy given that Intel rates those 335 drives at only 22TB. The new Crucial MX100 is rated 72TB so I guess I shouldn't need to worry about flash wear....

http://techreport.com/review/26532/crucial-mx100-solid-state-drive-reviewed

Anyway thanks again Grall and everyone else for the insight. I can't believe how cheap these SSDs are getting.:smile:

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...might-be-the-only-reliable-drive-manufacturer

 

[RudeCurve]

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...might-be-the-only-reliable-drive-manufacturer

That power cycling test is pointless?

 

[HMBR]

A ramdrive can see past 32bit address limitations?

it definitely can, I'm using it like that, if you consider the ram and ramdrive I'm loading almost the entire 8GB of ram on XP 32bit with no modifications (if you don't consider the ramdrive software a modification), as far as I know the only requirement is a PAE enabled bios... which anything 10 years old should have!?