New HD

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pheonixstorm
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New HD

Post by pheonixstorm »

Picked up a new shiny 1TB drive tonight. Now if I use the current set plus the new one I will have almost 2tb of space on my comp (250gb and 400gb current). Alas, I will probably put the 250 on my dev machine (from 40/40/120 to 80/120/250) and just use the 400 and 1000 on my main machine. That would eliminate all ide drives on my comp. Also only leave my sound card as the only relic (SB Audigy 2 Platinum) to upgrade. Wonder if I will have the money to upgrade to a X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty *drool* pretty pci-e sound card. Oh well... by the time I do that my poost cpu will be nearly obsolete probably.
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JsnMtth
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Re: New HD

Post by JsnMtth »

I was drooling over the 1TB hard drives myself. Decided to go with a graphics card upgrade instead. I had a hell of a time getting Ubuntu to install (playing musical hardware with the family). Got it going long enough to report eminent hard drive failure. Hard-disk died that night, a new 500GB is in route so I can do it all over again. I couldn't spare for the 1TB. Right now I'm using a 40GB IDE, and I don't recommend to anybody running windows 7 on them.

I haven't used a sound card in years (other than on-board). If you get the PCI-E one, let me know what you think.
klauss
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Re: New HD

Post by klauss »

From my experience, onboard sound has poor audio quality. They sell you the 192khz 24bits like "the best thing, and it's onboard! (tm)", but the analog part sucks, the mobo is full of noisy signals, interference sources, and it all adds up to a nice audio load meter ;)

I can hear my DVD/HD drive spinning up and down, I can hear the CPU eating numbers when I load it up real bad, and stuff like that. Of course, my onboard audio is rather old. But new ones aren't much better.

Discrete cards have the benefit of power source isolation - the best will even come with a separate power plug (like GPUs), not for the extra power, but for the extra cleanliness. That or have noise filters in the input stage. Chuck should know this a lot better, I'm probably saying a lie or two... but the effect is there: discrete (be it pci-e or isa) sound cards sound a lot better. Period.

Gamer cards offload some of the audio processing (mostly for environmental effects and hundred-source-mixing) to the audio card, which they say helps. I don't know, it might. Today's processors can handle a chuckload of audio without even sweating.
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Re: New HD

Post by safemode »

meh. sound cards rank below new mouse and keyboard on my list of computer parts. Actually below that because i haven't bought a sound card since the sb live first came out. :)


There's no sound in space. Put all your money in graphics/mobo/cpu/ram/storage :)

If i had the cash, i would so go with SSD for /usr and /lib . Then maybe a raid0 (1TBx1TB) sata setup for /usr/src and a separate 1TB drive that i can hotswap for periodic backups. Mmm. sweet sweet speed.
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klauss
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Re: New HD

Post by klauss »

@safemode, unless you plan on hosting a database server, you're wasting money on HD performance. It helps ever so little.

When I do RAID, I do it for the reliability - usually RAID-10, which has both performance and reliability benefits.

Hot-swap drives are insanely expensive... you usually don't need that, you can have a couple minutes of downtime.

I have used RAID in many situations, and the benefit in performance for general tasks, like compiling, running office programs, games, etc is negligible. In fact, compiling benefits a lot more from a lot of memory and a lot of cores. Pretty much the same with other programs.

Only databases stress the HD enough to make RAID-0 and such worth it, and in those cases you can use RAID-10 instead to get almost the same read performance with a lot more reliability - and databases tend to really really need reliability.

Note: many things use databases. Many MMO servers use databases to store player info. SVN uses a database for the repository, with indexes and everything. Even an HTTP server can be considered as a largely unstructured database. Any app whose active data set doesn't fit in memory - which excludes most ordinary games and ordinary day-to-day apps.

Anyway... whenever I have the money, I'm not buying a 1TB disk. I'm buying 4 2TB disks for raid-10 and 2 500GB disks for RAID-1. :p
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pheonixstorm
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Re: New HD

Post by pheonixstorm »

Onboard sound has lagged behind add-on sound boards though they are getting better. For sound im running an Audigy 2 but want the pcie SB Titanium Fatal1ty :drool:

For pure storage I would suggest going with a network storage device/server. They usually run between $200-800 depending on what you need and how large a drive you need.


My specs:
AMD Phenom II x4 920
4gb PC8500 Viper series Patriot Ram
ASUS M3N78 Pro mobo
Geforce 260
SB Audigy 2 Platinum
5.1 Logitech speakers
An older model Logitech Laser gaming mouse
1TB Cavier Black SATA HD + a 400GB SATA drive.. think its a seagate
Because of YOU Arbiter, MY kids? can't get enough gas. OR NIPPLE! How does that mkae you feeeel? ~ Halo
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