Time for an upgrade

Nobylspoon

I have pushed my mobo to it's limits. Years ago, I maxed out the CPU with an AMD 64x2 4200. Years later, a BIOS update allowed me to upgrade to the 6400 Black Edition. Then an update came for Phenom processors. I almost pulled the trigger on the 6 core Black Edition when I decided this board was ready for retirement.

Tired of dealing with AMD's excessive temperatures and poor benchmarks compared to current Intel chips, I made the change back to Intel.

I am keeping my Thermaltake Armor case and power supply along with my existing 4TB storage but I ordered the following:

Gigabyte Z68X Mobo
[Second Gen] Intel Core i7 2600K
16GB Vengeance RAM
1 120GB OCZ Vertex3 - Boot drive
1 120GB OCZ Vertex3 - VMs
EVGA Superclocked GTX460

(Plus a new DVD burner. Was just going to use existing one. I knew IDE was legacy but I didn't realize it was completely removed from current boards...)

I am still on the fence about my SSD config. I have considered a RAID-0 with them. The main concern is I ordered the second one after placing my order and might have to wait an extra week for it. My other components are arriving today and I don't know if I can resist the urge to wait on the other SSD before installing the OS...

Then again, with those drive speeds, it's not like it would take very long for a reinstall...

Anyone currently using RAID0 on SSDs that can chime in. I have been reading a lot of mixed reviews on stability with this configuration. However, the benchmarks have been AMAZING!

SteveLord

Honestly, you'll never experience the RAID0 speeds unless you are moving large files regularly. For everything outside benchmarks...you won't notice it at all.

I initially setup my Vertex 3s in RAID0 and then redid them without. Mainly because I didn't want to be completely hosed if one of them went bad. And lately, there is a lot of issues with Sandforce drives.

So far so good.

ASUS P67 Deluxe
INtel 2600k @ 4.5ghz
8GB Corsair Vengeance 1866mhz RAM
ATI 6950 2GB
2x Vertex 3 120GB
1x 1TB WD Black

Tackle

SteveLord wrote: »

Honestly, you'll never experience the RAID0 speeds unless you are moving large files regularly. For everything outside benchmarks...you won't notice it at all.

I initially setup my Vertex 3s in RAID0 and then redid them without. Mainly because I didn't want to be completely hosed if one of them went bad. And lately, there is a lot of issues with Sandforce drives.

Bingo. Now, we all know there is a risk when you go with RAID0. But that risk is greater since you are talking about SSD's that seem to have quite a few DOA's and failing within a few months (read newegg reviews and you'll see...I have been on a Vertex2 with no issues since Dec. though). My single SSD blew the 5400rpm laptop drive out of the water in a read/write comparison with crystal disk.

I wouldn't take the risk by putting them in a RAID 0. I think you'll be amazed with a single drive.

Ahriakin

The main issue with RAID and consumer level SSDs is you lose any kind of garbage collection (TRIM etc.) so the performance of each drive will diminish over time. Enterprise class controllers and drives do have their own custom mechanisms for this. Also their true dominant characteristic is super low latency so while they do have greater throughput than individual HDDs they can be quickly outpaced by HDD RAID for large file operations.

Personally I found a good price/performance/capacity mix to be SDD for the OS and HDD Raid for the primary storage.

My HDD Raid bursts at 800MB/s +, sustained at ~450MB/s, but latency is around 10ms.
The SDD runs at ~210MB/s (for both, a nice thing about SSDs is the throughput speed is constant), latency is around 30microseconds.

The SDD is absolutely faster for the OS (I had run it on the RAID previously) since it relies on relatively small file operations, but fell behind on tests with larger files.

jibbajabba

Don't forget - any Raid level - 0 or otherwise - is rubbish unless you use a dedicated raid card (instead of the horrible onboard fake raid)/

Nobylspoon

Thanks for the responses. I think I will just skip RAID0 and save myself any headaches.

One other thing. My current system is using IDE as the SATA controller mode but I am going to be using AHCI on this new build. The old boot drive isn't going to be used but I will be using my existing storage drives. Are there any data loss concerns when importing my old drives?

I came across a few issues of users being forced to format their drives when moving them to systems using AHCI but it sounded like it was not the norm.

I could play it safe and put them on the other SATA controller and just have that one using IDE but that one also contains my eSATA and I don't want to lose hot swap capability on those ports.

SteveLord

jibbajabba wrote: »

Don't forget - any Raid level - 0 or otherwise - is rubbish unless you use a dedicated raid card (instead of the horrible onboard fake raid)/

Actually, the Intel ICH10R chipsets perform really well. Well enough to avoid dumping hundreds of dollars on a solid card.


As for speed, I can tell you 1 game that is dramatically faster with an SSD. Total War Shogun 2. My buddy and I have identical systems, minus my SSDs vs his HDD. This game has long load times as it is, but I spank him every game we load up by about 20-30 secs. With DX11 graphics, we're talking double to triple that. So we play in DX 9 since it is just a better overall experience.

Nobylspoon

I decided to keep one Vertex3 for OS and the other for my virtual machines. Even without RAID0, the speed is amazing. Windows boots before the logo finishes loading.

WEI is 7.6/7.9 I'm going to do some OC'ing this week to see if I can't max that score

Tackle

Nobylspoon wrote: »

I decided to keep one Vertex3 for OS and the other for my virtual machines. Even without RAID0, the speed is amazing. Windows boots before the logo finishes loading.

WEI is 7.6/7.9 I'm going to do some OC'ing this week to see if I can't max that score

Glad your happy! SSD's are an amazing upgrade for most laptops/desktops. In MSCONFIG you can disable the Windows logo, may shave off another second or two during your bootup.

WafflesAndRootbeer

jibbajabba wrote: »

Don't forget - any Raid level - 0 or otherwise - is rubbish unless you use a dedicated raid card (instead of the horrible onboard fake raid)/

Anyone reading this, keep in mind that dedicated RAID really means a RAID card with a CPU and dedicated memory on the card to do the heavy lifting. Those are expensive cards and you won't find them outside of high-performance servers and workstations as they are very expensive due to the memory. The average off-the-shelf RAID card is a simple storage chipset just like your on-board one is and such cards usually don't have a significant difference in performance because they rely heavily on the host CPU and memory just as your on-board storage chipset does and they typically use low-bandwidth interfaces to boot. I only say this to avoid confusion as many people call any RAID setup run off of a controller card "dedicated RAID" or "hardware RAID", which is highly misleading.

tpatt100

Sometime around Christmas I would love to upgrade my computer. Probably going to build my own this time *shudder* I have not built one in probably a decade. Reason is it seems Dell likes to pretend your system never existed once the warranty runs out. So anything new I put in like a video card I hope my BIOS will not give me any issues.

MentholMoose

tpatt100 wrote: »

Sometime around Christmas I would love to upgrade my computer. Probably going to build my own this time *shudder* I have not built one in probably a decade. Reason is it seems Dell likes to pretend your system never existed once the warranty runs out. So anything new I put in like a video card I hope my BIOS will not give me any issues.

If you're going to build a new system in 4-6 months, consider buying the RAM now. DDR3 prices have dropped dramatically in the last year, and 16GB of brand name DDR3 is under $100 now. As an example, I bought a Mushkin 8GB DDR3 kit for my laptop this time last year from Amazon for $230, but now that exact kit is $57.

RAM pricing tends to fluctuate, so DDR3 prices might drop even more, but it also could increase, so to be safe you might want to buy now to lock in the current low price. $100 for 16GB of RAM is already amazingly cheap!

WafflesAndRootbeer

MentholMoose wrote: »

If you're going to build a new system in 4-6 months, consider buying the RAM now. DDR3 prices have dropped dramatically in the last year, and 16GB of brand name DDR3 is under $100 now. As an example, I bought a Mushkin 8GB DDR3 kit for my laptop this time last year from Amazon for $230, but now that exact kit is $57.

RAM pricing tends to fluctuate, so DDR3 prices might drop even more, but it also could increase, so to be safe you might want to buy now to lock in the current low price. $100 for 16GB of RAM is already amazingly cheap!

The downside of buying and keeping it around unused is that you don't know if it's any good until you test it, but so long as you can give it a good burn-in before you pack it up again, you won't lose any sleep over it.

MentholMoose

WafflesAndRootbeer wrote: »

The downside of buying and keeping it around unused is that you don't know if it's any good until you test it, but so long as you can give it a good burn-in before you pack it up again, you won't lose any sleep over it.

Yeah that's true, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it. All brand name RAM has a lifetime warranty so at worst the build would be delayed for a few days while the RMA goes through. The chances of all the sticks being DOA are pretty low so if you went with 16GB (4 x 4GB sticks), at least one should be good and you could limp along with only 4GB while the rest are RMA'd.