Hardware What Hardware Should I Buy? - Nov 2008

It's called 'feature creep' or 'budget creep' or something where for a few dollars more...

Point is, with a budget build recommendation you have to draw a line. If the reader has a slightly bigger budget, he can add the extra bell or whistle, but he's gone outside the original remit.

As one example, Ars Technica pick an Antec NSK4480 for their budget box, around £55 inc 380W Antec PSU and perfectly adequate, plus a saving of around £23 on the Bit CM330/Corsair VX450 package; at the end of the day the reader is free to shop around and personalise the suggested systems.

 

Over 100GB of photos is not all that hard when using a DSLR with both raw and jpg output. Now add panorama photography with a 30 file raw image converted to TIFF in a poster size and you can see why 64-bit systems are necessary. I have single images like this that are well over 3GB by themselves when in finalized format and saved to disk. Fortunately I don't do this too often or I'd stress the NAS too much...

 

It's rather sad to see the respective "Green Team"s losing out in this (That being nVidia in nV/ATi and AMD in AMD/Intel).

It seems that both "appear" to be resting on their laurels (I'm sure they're really not, but that's the appearance), as nothing really mind blowing has come from either (If ATi can come up with an X2 card, why not nV? They did it before, after all).

nVidia did get the advantage for the time (weeks) they had before R770, and all AMD is coming out with at the moment is a 45nm die shrink of a now quite long in the tooth CPU. K8 is several years old now, isn't it about time they got the next rev. out of the door? And just what the heck is happening with Socket 1207 (Socket F)? It's still got nowhere near the support or acceptance that 939 had, and for multi-processor AM2(+) won't cut it.

 

I'll eventually build something like a mixture between the high end and premium... i7 920 is a must, so that will set me back about $550 with a motherboard, so it shouldn't be tough to keep it under $1500 with a 4870, and a smaller memory kit.

 

I like this being a regular feature. Thanks once again.

 

Have to say. I like the idea of testing harddrives, but how much can you actually say about them? If you decide to do such an article i think you should do a roundup style review instead. And why not a Thermalright Extreme with a Noctua fan or two for the high end??

@ Action: How about buying a set of TB drives and a box to keep them in. For a monthly backup you could connect one via eSata, do an incremental backup of the entire system and put it back in the box. Put said box somewhere cool, dark and preferably safe. maybe in a vault of some kind. Backup would surely not fail for a few years if only connected once a month.

 

True there are many options for data backup. I have two RAID 5 4 drive NAS units, one purchased as a backup NAS after a two drive failure of the primary RAID 5 NAS. Hard drives are not archival in the slightest, even in RAID scenarios. They are convenient and fast and work well with data that is being constantly changed, but that is about it and it not a terribly good long term storage scenario. A good RAID setup is more expensive than the budget box yet for the performance box you are willing to go with SSD drives in RAID 0 yet unwilling to go with $200 more for a Blu-Ray writer? Seems a bit shortsighted to me. There is not another semi-archival medium out there in the near term with anywhere near the speed and capacity, yet there is a recommendation to go with an SSD setup that will likely be significantly surpassed by developments within the next year? Tape? Try to find a tape setup to handle large capacities that is anywhere near as fast as Blu-Ray and is anywhere near as cheap, there isn't such a beast. SANs? This is an enterprise setup, not enthusiast. Cloud storage is a good solution, however some archival setup is still needed.

I'm not seeing any other relativley inexpensive solution for semi-archival setups to a fast Blu-Ray writer. These are now reaching 8x speeds (yes, media might only be 6x or 4x in terms of writing at the current time) and prices are still high for 50GB fast media, but prices will come down over time. The volume of data for many users is such that DVD is not a viable solution. NAS is being touted as a solution, but it is expensive and not really archival in the slightest (see above mentioned 2 drive failure of a 4 drive RAID 5 NAS).

I guess that I'm surprised that there would be such resistance to a superior technology that is backward compatible with so much semi-archival capability. Oh yes, I do own a Blu-Ray writer and would not want to give it back!

Still, the budget box is very interesting and the choices are thought provoking.

 

You do know that with a halfway decent SSD drive, it has an expected data retention of 50 years. That's a larger capacity than Blue-Ray, and a MUCH longer data retention rate. Oh, and near indestructibility.

So, for backup purposes, stick a 2.5" SSD in a USB enclosure, schlep your data onto it, and toss it into a safe. Or put it on a shelf. Or wherever. It's faster, more secure, can take more punishment, is easier to maintain and easier to carry than a (stack of) DVDR/BD-ROMs, and will outlast most (If not all) of your requirements. And if you want to get really paranoid, RAID1 a couple of them together, and put one in a safety-deposit box.

 

Now how much would 300-600GB of SSD drives be? Cheaper than Blu-Ray disks? Sure SSDs have some long term storage potential that is pretty amazing and may ultimately be a good solution, however it is in the 3 NAS+ range of cost which is apparently a part of the push back that is leading to this discussion. We are talking about $200 extra dollars for a Blu-Ray writer that performs all that a DVD writer does + writes up to 50GB of data on a single disk. You can even use it to watch Blu-Ray content, although I have never bothered. This is not even the price of a single SSD drive. If flash drive manufacturers would make 300GB flash drives (I have many 16-32GB flash drives), they don't have to be fancy or terribly fast for decent archival storage, but no one has done this yet.

Now give it a few years, SSD drives will be comodities with much larger capacities. However, Blu-Ray disks should be much, much cheaper by then and the price benefit difference may still be there.

Why is there such entrenched resistance to Blu-Ray? It's not that its a bad optical storage medium and its the largest, fastest, and the only one that is on the near-term horizon. Drives are no longer $1K, they are ~$350 or less for the fastest available (8X) and ~$275 or less for 4X drives. This is not a huge increment over alternatives that include Blu-Ray playback.

 

I believe Buzzons' referring to the Samsung Flash/JMicron Controller problems AnandTech uncovered in their Intel X25-M review a while back. This is not about the fact that MLC SSDs are per se slower than SLC SSDs (Intel demonstrated that MLC can be fast with a good controller), but an incompatibility between those two specific products (Samsung and JMicron).

Basically, sequential writes are very fast with acceptable latencies, but as soon as you start writing randomly, latencies explode (from 0.36ms sequential to 244ms random). Having an I/O queue higher than 1 only pours oil into the fire, with latencies topping 2s (SECONDS!) for random writes with a queue depth of 4. More details in the article.

I was wondering actually - do you know which flash memory and controller are used on the Patriot Warp V2? If they don't use that deadly flash/controller combination, they might be worth a closer look...

 

just bought the following your article saved me alot of research many thanks

Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB GDDR5
Asus P5Q-E Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600
Corsair TX 750W ATX2.2 SLI Compliant PSU
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-Bit
2x OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2
Akasa AK-966 Blue Aurora (Intel LGA 775)
Thermaltake VA3000SWA Tsunami Dream SuperMidi Aluminium Tower - Silver


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