Just got meself a new HDD!

[digitalwanderer]

And I couldn't be happier, it's a Western Digital Black 750Gb and it's about bloody time I got some more storage space.

Dumping my 2 200Gb drives on to it now so I can wipe them out, it's soooo nice to have some room to play around!

 

[trinibwoy]

Nice. I'm trying to get an SSD myself but the prices are outrageous. But this is definitely the next upgrade as it will have far more impact than moving to Lynnfield.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Yeah, I'd love an SSD for an OS drive...but the prices are just insane. This is actually a bit of an improvement for me over my two current HDDs, so I'm gonna be doing another reinstall soon to take advantage of it.

A VERY zippy little drive this is, it's really impressing me. No numbers, but it certainly feels fast to me.

 

[V3]

Is 32GB enough for OS drive (Win 7) ?

 

[DuckThor Evil]

And I couldn't be happier, it's a Western Digital Black 750Gb and it's about bloody time I got some more storage space.

I've got the same drive, or actually I have two 1TB models, the other one is not installed yet though. I was thinking of putting them in Raid0, but I probably won't do that, actually I don't even know if the Raid controller on my motherboard supports two separate Raid configurations as I also have two Intel 34nm X25-M as an OS and applications drive in Raid0.

 

[hoom]

Is 32GB enough for OS drive (Win 7) ?

Not really.
Mine is using 31GB with only OS & general Apps installed on that drive (includes ~1.5GB for Sins of a Solar Empire that got put in there accidentally + page file, hibernate file & a couple of gigs of Google Earth cache).

SSDs apparently need a fair bit of spare space or they wind up having to do much more re-writing data at the expense of lifetime & performance.

I've been trying to work out if I can get OS & commonly run games into 80GB without filling it up too much.
With my current gaming habits I'll probably be OK but I think it could get very easy to over-install onto an 80GB drive.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I've got the same drive, or actually I have two 1TB models, the other one is not installed yet though. I was thinking of putting them in Raid0, but I probably won't do that, actually I don't even know if the Raid controller on my motherboard supports two separate Raid configurations as I also have two Intel 34nm X25-M as an OS and applications drive in Raid0.

If it's one of the ICHxR chipsets, then it should do via their Matrix Storage Manager. RAID0 is pretty risky, especially for an OS drive - if you lose one drive, you lose the other one too, so you have to keep regular backups.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

If it's one of the ICHxR chipsets, then it should do via their Matrix Storage Manager.

Yes it's one of those, so it should be fine, but I probably keep them separate for now atleast.

RAID0 is pretty risky, especially for an OS drive - if you lose one drive, you lose the other one too, so you have to keep regular backups.

Well I believe Hard Drives are usually pretty reliable, especially the Intel SSD's, because lack of moving parts, and I don't keep anything on my OS drive that will get me in trouble if I lose it. Ok yeah I will have to install everything again, but it's not that big of a deal. SSD's have a three year warranty, and the Caviar has 5 years, so within that timeframe, I don't worry too much.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Well I believe Hard Drives are usually pretty reliable, especially the Intel SSD's, because lack of moving parts, and I don't keep anything on my OS drive that will get me in trouble if I lose it. Ok yeah I will have to install everything again, but it's not that big of a deal. SSD's have a three year warranty, and the Caviar has 5 years, so within that timeframe, I don't worry too much.

Unsurprisingly, as companies pursue ever faster and larger drives, reliability seems to have suffered. There isn't a single manufacturer that hasn't sent out drives that have failed sooner than they should have. On an individual level, MTBF means nothing if it happens to be your drive that dies at the bottom end of the lifespan curve. There are threads all over about which drives fail most often (let alone the recent Seagate debacle), and really, you can't trust any make fully. Of course, even with a warranty, it's the data loss that really hurts more than the hardware loss.

Interestingly enough, there's also a thread going on over at ExtremeSystems on the lifespan of SSDs and which ones have failed in use - it's more than you'd like to think.

Really, with drives getting so large and data so ubiquitous, you have to have some kind of backup or availability solution (such as RAID1), because the only really reliable way to back up data for the home user nowadays is pretty much with another hard drive.

Honestly, if you'd asked me a couple of years ago if we'd be specifying our home hard drive capacity in terabytes, I would have said no, but with the price drops and hard competition it's here now.

 

[Sxotty]

Yeah, I'd love an SSD for an OS drive...but the prices are just insane. This is actually a bit of an improvement for me over my two current HDDs, so I'm gonna be doing another reinstall soon to take advantage of it.

A VERY zippy little drive this is, it's really impressing me. No numbers, but it certainly feels fast to me.

I have the same drive in my HTPC. It is nice and fast.

I have a raptor (300GB) in my main rig and an intel 160GB SSD in my laptop.

I think that the laptop is choking the SSD though as my desktop is still faster loading large data sets. It is frustrating. Maybe I will get a cheaper SSD and put it in the laptop and transfer the intel one to my desktop where it can really shine.

 

[Davros]

/Davros reads between the lines....

We forgive you for bringing shame upon B3d, the important part is you have recognized your crime and are willing to repent - The Gaming Gods will be watching you....

 

[green.pixel]

@digiw: you should've bought F3 TB, 5$ more for 200+ GB.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I'm almost ashamed to say I have close to 20 TB of HD space.

Granted most of that is in my file server, but even my desktop has 6.5 TB of HDD and 256 GB of SSD for the boot/OS drive.

The SSD uses the Samsung chip, unfortunately it's an older version of the chip so while it's solid, it's not going to win any speed contests for random read/write. Also, not perfect, but in general doesn't feel worse than a traditional HDD. Of course, there's still rare occasions where it definitely does feel less responsive.

That said, it's about a million times better than the Jmicron based 128 GB SSDs I experimented with last year.

For most I definitely recommend waiting for the tech to mature more and prices to come down more.

Regards,
SB

 

[digitalwanderer]

@digiw: you should've bought F3 TB, 5$ more for 200+ GB.

I got mine for $69 with free shipping, and I wanted a WD Caviar Black just because of all the good things I heard about them.

Just got done installing Windows 7 on the new HDD and then went and totally hosed it all up removing my other HDDs and had to start all over.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

For most I definitely recommend waiting for the tech to mature more and prices to come down more.

The prices are nasty and will still take a while to come down, although the Intel drives just dropped pretty nicely with the introduction of the 34nm gen 2 models, which almost halved the prices. I think the tech in Intel's new drives is pretty mature already and they won't slow down that much even when full, atleast according to Anandtech's extensive tests. The new Samsung model is pretty good also, I have one in my Macbook Pro 13".

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah the Intel drives are still best of breed. The newer Samsungs are only slightly better than the one mine is based off. Better garbage collection between useage. It's still generally faster than a traditional HDD even when full, but for the price, generally faster isn't exactly what I'm looking for.

I'm going to wait until mature 6.0 Gb SATA chipsets are out and the next generation (or increment) of SSDs are out before experimenting again. Probably sometime next year.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

Is 32GB enough for OS drive (Win 7) ?

Yes. My Win7 Ultimate full install with day-to-day applications installed only uses 14.3GB of space. This does not include the system swap and hibernate files.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I got a 1TB hitachi drive (as well as upgrading from the lowest sempron to an X2 245.)

It looks really fast now, first tests were seeing the newly installed XP switch to classic mode in about a second, then the ridiculously low Half-Life loading times - it's really become a seamless walk. haha! you thought you were able to make me waste time in loading zones? now I don't give a f***! I can do it 15 times on purpose!
It feels like running doom 2 ten years ago.

Test graphs done by others show the drive to have faster sequential reads than 74GB raptor drives.
The previous drive was a 250GB hitachi on IDE interface, it was nice already. (back then every bit as fast as SATA drives)

 

[RudeCurve]

I got a 1TB hitachi drive (as well as upgrading from the lowest sempron to an X2 245.)

Is your Hitachi loud? For my next HDD I might switch to Hitachi just to be different since the Seagate fiasco scared me a bit.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Well I used it an noisy environment so far, have yet to take it back home . I have yet to enable the noise gestion too (going through the 1987-looking MSDOS tool I suppose)

Anyway I had trouble telling the PC was actually working, because it wasn't noisy enough, fans reved very slow and that huge CRT had to heat up

The older one was nice with AAM enabled.

I wouldn't be scared of Seagate's firmware as it was occured and every vendor has its blunder. I always went IBM/hitachi (but didn't have their worst DeathStar series)