Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
AMD Damo wrote:I was looking at real world tests like windows boot times and there hybrid drives tend to beat normal 3.5" drives. Its cheaper to have one of these than a. 120gb SSD and a 1TB HDD but still have quick times.
AMD Damo wrote:Decent storage space with quick windows bootup and app times is the objective
AMD Damo wrote:Decent storage space with quick windows bootup and app times is the objective
Buub wrote:The last round-up of USB 3.0 Flash drives I saw found the mainstream ones to offer an average 30-40MB/s transfer rate, which is significantly less than what you get from a good HD. There are faster ones, but at price points that should make you consider an SSD instead. If you're trying to split the difference and boot time really is the key metric (why?), the Momentus Hybrid might actually be a reasonable choice. However, just using Sleep in Windows 7 might be a better option.What about a good fast big hard drive with a couple USB Flash drives plugged in for ReadyBoost?
UberGerbil wrote:Buub wrote:The last round-up of USB 3.0 Flash drives I saw found the mainstream ones to offer an average 30-40MB/s transfer rate, which is significantly less than what you get from a good HD. There are faster ones, but at price points that should make you consider an SSD instead. If you're trying to split the difference and boot time really is the key metric (why?), the Momentus Hybrid might actually be a reasonable choice. However, just using Sleep in Windows 7 might be a better option.What about a good fast big hard drive with a couple USB Flash drives plugged in for ReadyBoost?
Its for my parents PC and they just want to turn the thing on, have it quickly load up and get into Firefox to check their emails, search up something on google. Thats about it.
Ifalna wrote:Its for my parents PC and they just want to turn the thing on, have it quickly load up and get into Firefox to check their emails, search up something on google. Thats about it.
Isn't a SSD like a total overkill for a usage like that? Hell even my old C2D E6600 Setup doesn't need more than 60s to boot from an HDD.
Flatland_Spider wrote:Yes, you can redirect Downloads (and Videos and Music and Pictures and Documents, which are the other space hogs) very easily in Win7 -- on the right column of Start menu, click on your username (at the top) and then get the properties of each of those locations (There are more advanced ways to do this and more, but that should work fine for this simple setup).If they really need the room, I would use the SSD as the main drive with Windows, Office, and any frequently used application, and a HD to hold eveything else. I believe you can remap the Downloads folder to someplace else other then C:, but I don't remember off the top of my head.
Ifalna wrote:Its for my parents PC and they just want to turn the thing on, have it quickly load up and get into Firefox to check their emails, search up something on google. Thats about it.
Isn't a SSD like a total overkill for a usage like that? Hell even my old C2D E6600 Setup doesn't need more than 60s to boot from an HDD.
Starting Opera with adblock lists and God knows how many open tabs is a matter of 10s.
If your parents have Money to burn sure, use a SSD. But If they don't, use a normal HDD, and tell them to not install every toolbar they see. The system will be plenty fast.
hiro_pro wrote:@ OP. did you see your 750gb hybrid drive is on sale at newegg for the rest of the week?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148837&nm_mc=EMC-IGNEFL041012&cm_mmc=EMC-IGNEFL041012-_-EMC-041012-Index-_-LaptopHardDrives-_-22148837-L0A
$30 off w/ promo code EMCNFJN88, ends 4/16
at $145 i might pick one up (ir)regardless.
I would say no as an SSD eliminates a bottleneck. HD throughput has been inadequate for years, and SSDs correct this problem.
Ifalna wrote:I would say no as an SSD eliminates a bottleneck. HD throughput has been inadequate for years, and SSDs correct this problem.
What bottleneck? They want a E-Mailing/Internet machine. 99.9% of the time any physical drive will just twiddle it's thumbs in that system.
Sure, They'd eliminate the HDD bandwidth bottleneck but what good does it do if they never even use /exceed that bandwidth in the first place?
Maybe I'm missing something here, if so, please enlighten me.
AMD Damo wrote:If your parents aren't going to play games or transcode a lot of videos, the most noticeable performance differences between the existing system and what you have proposed are the move from 2 GiB to 4 GiB of memory and installing a faster hard-drive. My mother's PC currently has an Opteron 175 (2.2 GHz dual-core) and 4 GiB of PC3200. It runs Windows 7 64-bit satisfactorily.It's for my parents' PC and they just want to turn the thing on, have it quickly load up and get into Firefox to check their emails, search up something on Google. That's about it.
Pretty much it's using recycled parts from my old PC, Quad Core Athlon II something, 4GB DDR2 RAM, old Gigabyte motherboard, Radeon 5750 I have lying about.
At the moment it has a 120GB Seagate SATA HDD in it, S939 AMD Opteron 175, Geforce 7600GT and 2GB DDR400 RAM.
AMD Damo wrote:I'd definitely be tempted to go with an SSD for any new build that can stand the cost.Here is what I have in my cart at the moment:
Lite-On iHBS212 12x Blu-Ray Disc Writer A$85
Seagate Momentus XT ST750LX003 750GB A$215
Creative GigaWorks T40 Series II A$105
OCZ ModXStream Pro 600W Modular A$79
SilverStone 3.5 to 2 x 2.5 Drive Bay Converter A$12
Deepcool Rockmaster 5.25in Fan Controller and Card Reader A$25
Arctic Cooling 92mm F9 Fan A$9
Fractal Design Silent Series 120mm Fan X2 A$24
I prefer to get all my parts from http://www.pccasegear.com as I get really cheap express shipping to my workplace.
AMD Damo wrote:Decent storage space with quick windows bootup and app times is the objective
AMD Damo wrote:Its for my parents PC and they just want to turn the thing on, have it quickly load up and get into Firefox to check their emails, search up something on google. Thats about it.
AMD Damo wrote:Does Newegg ship to Australia?
Ifalna wrote:I would say no as an SSD eliminates a bottleneck. HD throughput has been inadequate for years, and SSDs correct this problem.
What bottleneck? They want a E-Mailing/Internet machine. 99.9% of the time any physical drive will just twiddle it's thumbs in that system.
Firestarter wrote:A quad core Athlon II would spend 99% of its time twiddling its thumbs as well. If anything, a small, inexpensive SSD makes more sense for a email/internet machine than the Athlon II CPU, because although they will never be waiting for the CPU to finish anything (unless they're transcoding whatever they record with the Hauppauge), they will most certainly have to wait on the HDD for anything that isn't already cached.
AMD Damo wrote:Pretty much its using recycled parts from my old PC, Quad Core Athlon II something, 4GB DDR2 RAM, old Gigabyte motherboard, Radeon 5750 I have lying about but money needs to be spent in other areas.
Ifalna wrote:I would say no as an SSD eliminates a bottleneck. HD throughput has been inadequate for years, and SSDs correct this problem.
What bottleneck? They want a E-Mailing/Internet machine. 99.9% of the time any physical drive will just twiddle it's thumbs in that system.
Sure, They'd eliminate the HDD bandwidth bottleneck but what good does it do if they never even use /exceed that bandwidth in the first place?
Maybe I'm missing something here, if so, please enlighten me.
AMD Damo wrote:OS: Windows Home 7 Premium 64 bit
I have a question in regards to the fans, they all have 3 pin connectors rather than 4 pin molex ones, do they just plug into the motherboard?
Jim552 wrote:I noticed that your Hauppauge card is gone from this build?
So is there still a need for a 1tb hard drive?
Regarding Hauppauge cards, I do like their cards. I have been using them for years. Their Software QC isn't that good! (Also NOW you must have a CD Copy of their software to install the downloaded upgrades!)
Often times when there is an update features are missing, things don't work right anymore, stability can suffer. SO MAKE SURE that you have a copy of the last known good/stable Hauppauge Software that you liked! That way is you need to you can reload that.
Also, Hauppauge Software will destroy their config files, from time-to-time, if the drive fills up while recording. So it is BEST to record to a separate drive to avoid that. (As far as I have found the only way to fix that issue, is to completely reload the Hauppauge Software once that occurs.)
Why the separate video card?
If this is a 'new build' why not just find a Motherboard with onboard Video?
My current Media PC is using Windows 7 x64, Motherboard with onboard Radeon 4250 video adapter, 6TB of storage, an SSD Boot Drive.
The onboard video adapter doesn't have any problems keeping up with playing videos and/or TV while doing other things or not.
So I wouldn't have any concerns about an onboard Radeon 6000 video adapter being able to keep up? (Or even Nvidia, I have used both.)
Even if you found it didn't live up to your needs/expectations, then you could add a separate video card later.