On 10/07/2012 18:03 Rick Hughes wrote:

On 09/07/2012 22:24, F wrote:
On 09/07/2012 22:05 Rick Hughes wrote:

My concern was getting all parts that work together ... for example many
posts in forums of guys having trouble getting multiple banks of RAM

Just buy 'matched' RAM modules from Crucial?


How do you know they are matched ... see them sold as pairs & as fours
... but they don't claim to be matched

Have a look at the text in red on the left-hand side of
http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/list...0A-UD3&Cat=RAM

It's something they do automajically if you buy pairs of modules.

--
F

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 02:14:00 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 10/07/2012 22:07, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 21:54:25 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

Add to that the point that your 240G drive will contain significantly
more than 240G of flash. So there are plenty of spare cells available to
patch into the linear addressed space by the wear levelling algorithms
as required.

Ah, knowledge! A question for you if I may: A friend has a
recently-purchased SSD and is trying to interpret the SMART values
he's getting. This is as reported by smartmontools, which supports his
specific SSD (OWC Mercury Electra 6g 480gb). Most of them make sense,
though the 25961524s are a bit opaque.

The main point of interest is the Reallocated_Event_Count = 12; in a
HDD I'd RMA this straight away (surface trouble spreads) but what does
it really mean for an SSD which has overcapacity?

I don't have any specific knowledge on how the smart reporting is used
for that particular drive (and there is some inconsistency between
different brands of SSD - to the point a few don't even report smart
stats at all), so it may be worth asking the manufacturer.

He did, OWC's report back was "Oh, most SMART tools don't really
understand SSDs, it's fine, pay no attention". Which is always the
opposite of reassuring, even if it's true.

As a general point however, SSDs are equipped with significant
overcapacity to enable cells reaching their threshold of write cycles
(or any other failure for that matter) to be remapped. Although on a
grander scale, this is not that different from the way in which spinning
drives also have some set aside capacity for the same purpose.

However the significance of some remapping occurring is different. With
a spinning drive, as you mentioned reallocated sectors are often a
warning of more serious impending drive problems. Too many of them also
impact performance since the add extra thrashing to retrieve sectors
that while consecutive in LBA space, are physically in different places
on a disk. Neither of these are true for SSDs. Correct interpretation of
the stats may let you work out the remaining expected drive life.

The 12 hasn't grown, but he doesn't know if the drive came with them
unfortunately. Interpretation is the problem - there's no references
to interpret from, and you've seen the mfr support comment.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic
simulations involving a sledgehammer and a common laboratory frog,
we can assume it will be pretty bad." - Dave Barry

John Rumm writes:

However one thing to keep in mind, is that even with a whole unit
warranty, its not always cost effective to use it. I had someone bring
me about a prebuilt system which had suffered a PSU failure. The company
that supplied it were happy to fix it under warranty, but it had to be
sent back at the customers expense, and also they claimed it would be
restored to default configuration - hence the would need to do a full
backup first and then restore it when the machine came back.

So their choice was jump through the backup and restore hoops, pay for
sending it away, lose it for a few days into the bargain, and then doing
a full restore on it after it comes back, or pay for me to swap the PSU
for them on the spot! They decided the latter carried less risk and
hassle (although I did persuade them to do the backup anyway!)

The VGA output on my cheap PC (intended to be fitted to the back of a
TV, though at the moment I have no TV) just died, so I now have a
similar choice.

Force the case apart, voiding the warranty, and try to repair
whatever's broken without any information or circuit diagram.

Or try to find some way to erase all the data from the HDD.

This PC was used briefly for on-line banking, and while there are
passwords there, they're not bank passwords because I enter those from
memory.

But I don't really know what the manufacturer's repair people might be
able to glean from an assortment of Linux distributions and browsers,
and while I'm sure most will be honest, I'm equally sure that a few
will not be. (What might you expect from someone who might for all I
know have a large mortgage and a wife who's just been laid off?).

If the PC's HDMI output still works and can be used to drive the DVI
input on this monitor via an adaptor, it should be possible to erase
the HDD (no, there are no questionable pictures on it!).

Or if I can set up a memory stick with an OS which allows remote access
of some kind, then by typing 'blind' can boot that OS, it should be
possible to erase the HDD remotely from another PC.

First of all I need to do the backup I hadn't done 'cos it was a new PC
and I was waiting until I had finally chosen what to run on it.

Then I can send the unit for repair.

I've suddenly realised how desirable it is to use encrypted file
systems, instead of just encrypted directories for a few of the more
obviously sensitive bits of information.

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

"dennis@home" writes:



"Owain" wrote in message
...
On Jul 9, 6:56 pm, John Rumm wrote:
The advantage of pre-built is you get someone else to sit through the
tedium of OS installs!

Are you compiling Gentoo from source?

I've done that, its pretty boring.

In about 1993 I compiled the old X windows system, version 6.3, from
source, on a 386SX-33. (A 16 bit machine with a sizzling 33 Mhz clock
speed!)

It was both boring and challenging. Took a week or two to get past all
the compile failures, most of which were the result of configuration
errors on my part, and then another week or two to get something which
would compile cleanly right from the beginning.
(It still works, though outdated, but the 386 finally died.)

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 23:43, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 12:46, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
dennis@home wrote:


"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...

Intel Atom board, no graffix at all :-)

Does a little bit of file serving web serving, dns, backups..
probably draws about 10W.

I'm going to use my Pi for that, just ordered a 64G USB stick for a
drive.
No fans, 5W.

Now how to case it?


well that is the problem. with the Pi.

needs a case, a power supply and and a SATA interface because 2TB of
mirrored disk caint be done with flash

I would have thought USB2 interfaced disk would be adequate for many
home server applications.


Hard to connect that to three computers simultaneously

Don't think you can connect SATA drives to three computers at once
easily either...


that was the point of the atoms server

Sigh.


--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.

On Monday, July 9, 2012 10:37:20 PM UTC+1, Rick Hughes wrote:
On 09/07/2012 22:18, Rick Hughes wrote:
> On 09/07/2012 21:43, geoff wrote:
>

>>> PCI - 2 port FireWire
>> Does anyone still use firewire?
>
> Yep .. me ... for Video capture ... DVI straight into PC from Camcorder
> - avoids use of capture card, and gives you direct DVI files.
> Maybe when Cancorders start using USB3 FireWire will go away ..
> A Firewire PCI cards is only about a £5 anyway.
>

In case I was misunderstood ... I know that USB2 at 480 Mbs exceeds
Firewire 1394b ...

Only in theory, in most cases I've found FW faster than USB2.
480MBs is peak speed and rarely reached. But in relaity there's not that much differnce until you start copying 1000s files or really large single files.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_USB_2.0_or_Firewire_faster

"In tests, however, FireWire 400 delivers a higher sustained transfer speed.. Benchmarks suggest that hard drives connected with FireWire will copy information considerably faster than they would using USB 2.0."

I've actually noticed this as most of my macs have firewire and USB2,
of course 10GB thunderbolt is quicker but few support it and it's expensive..


but many digital camcorders had a Firewire interface.
This was useful as you could use pass through ... feed VHS in and use
the Firewire to provide DVI out to PC.

Maybe pass through to USB also exists ... not sure about that.

Assume they will migrate to USB3 and 5Gbs over the micro USB socket in
the future.

"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...

Hard to connect that to three computers simultaneously

Don't think you can connect SATA drives to three computers at once easily
either...

Its very easy if you can take the network performance hit.

On 11/07/2012 12:41, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 23:43, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 12:46, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
dennis@home wrote:


"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...

Intel Atom board, no graffix at all :-)

Does a little bit of file serving web serving, dns, backups..
probably draws about 10W.

I'm going to use my Pi for that, just ordered a 64G USB stick for a
drive.
No fans, 5W.

Now how to case it?


well that is the problem. with the Pi.

needs a case, a power supply and and a SATA interface because 2TB of
mirrored disk caint be done with flash

I would have thought USB2 interfaced disk would be adequate for many
home server applications.


Hard to connect that to three computers simultaneously

Don't think you can connect SATA drives to three computers at once
easily either...


that was the point of the atoms server

and you can't plug a USB drive into that?

(sorry not really getting your point on this... my comment on USB drives
was not to suggest they would replace the server, but would be connected
to it, and would in most domestic situations not introduce sufficient
reduction in performance for it to be an issue)


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 11/07/2012 12:05, Windmill wrote:
John Rumm writes:

However one thing to keep in mind, is that even with a whole unit
warranty, its not always cost effective to use it. I had someone bring
me about a prebuilt system which had suffered a PSU failure. The company
that supplied it were happy to fix it under warranty, but it had to be
sent back at the customers expense, and also they claimed it would be
restored to default configuration - hence the would need to do a full
backup first and then restore it when the machine came back.

So their choice was jump through the backup and restore hoops, pay for
sending it away, lose it for a few days into the bargain, and then doing
a full restore on it after it comes back, or pay for me to swap the PSU
for them on the spot! They decided the latter carried less risk and
hassle (although I did persuade them to do the backup anyway!)

The VGA output on my cheap PC (intended to be fitted to the back of a
TV, though at the moment I have no TV) just died, so I now have a
similar choice.

Force the case apart, voiding the warranty, and try to repair
whatever's broken without any information or circuit diagram.

The "easy" fix would be to just add a new video card into an expansion
slot, and ignore the onboard one.

Or try to find some way to erase all the data from the HDD.

In situations like this I usually use a USB to IDE/SATA adaptor lead.
Pop the side off the case and plug my adaptor into the drive. Power it
up using the PCs power supply if it still works, or a standalone drive
PSU if not, and then talk to the drive directly from a laptop.

Boot the laptop from something like the universal boot CD, and run a
drive erase program.

This PC was used briefly for on-line banking, and while there are
passwords there, they're not bank passwords because I enter those from
memory.

But I don't really know what the manufacturer's repair people might be
able to glean from an assortment of Linux distributions and browsers,
and while I'm sure most will be honest, I'm equally sure that a few
will not be. (What might you expect from someone who might for all I
know have a large mortgage and a wife who's just been laid off?).

As with all these situations, its a case of deciding on the value of
your data to your "enemy" and estimating their resources for getting at
it. In this case it seems you need to protect against casual snooping,
and anyone finding sensitive personal information that may have resale
value for credit card fraud, or ID theft. A basic secure erase that
overwrites all the data on the drive would seem adequate.

(while recovery of data from an overwritten drive is possible, it
requires very specialist kit, lots of time, money, and determination. So
unless you are doing stuff that would interest spook agencies, you
probably have nothing to worry about!)

If the PC's HDMI output still works and can be used to drive the DVI
input on this monitor via an adaptor, it should be possible to erase
the HDD (no, there are no questionable pictures on it!).

Or if I can set up a memory stick with an OS which allows remote access
of some kind, then by typing 'blind' can boot that OS, it should be
possible to erase the HDD remotely from another PC.

First of all I need to do the backup I hadn't done 'cos it was a new PC
and I was waiting until I had finally chosen what to run on it.

Then I can send the unit for repair.

or swap out the drive for another....

I've suddenly realised how desirable it is to use encrypted file
systems, instead of just encrypted directories for a few of the more
obviously sensitive bits of information.



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

En el artículo , Rick Hughes

and you advise SSD reliability will
be worse.

Rod's full of ****. Any advice he offers is best ignored.

Rod Speed FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/883xp7v


--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

En el artículo , Jaimie
Vandenbergh escribió:

The 12 hasn't grown, but he doesn't know if the drive came with them
unfortunately. Interpretation is the problem - there's no references
to interpret from

Give this a try:

http://www.ssd-life.com/

Has a SMART button which interprets the data a bit more sensibly. Say2
my Crucial m4 is good until Jan 25, 2041 by which time I'll be in a
wheelchair drooling and ****ing myself and past caring.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:18:20 +0100, Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

En el artículo , Jaimie
Vandenbergh escribió:

The 12 hasn't grown, but he doesn't know if the drive came with them
unfortunately. Interpretation is the problem - there's no references
to interpret from

Give this a try:

http://www.ssd-life.com/

Has a SMART button which interprets the data a bit more sensibly. Say2
my Crucial m4 is good until Jan 25, 2041 by which time I'll be in a
wheelchair drooling and ****ing myself and past caring.

I don't think the other chap'll be best happy about having to install
Windows, but I'll pass it on - thanks.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
The advantage of a bad memory is that one can enjoy the
same good things for the first time several times. -- Nietzsche

John Rumm wrote:
On 11/07/2012 12:41, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 23:43, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 12:46, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
dennis@home wrote:


"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...

Intel Atom board, no graffix at all :-)

Does a little bit of file serving web serving, dns, backups..
probably draws about 10W.

I'm going to use my Pi for that, just ordered a 64G USB stick for a
drive.
No fans, 5W.

Now how to case it?


well that is the problem. with the Pi.

needs a case, a power supply and and a SATA interface because 2TB of
mirrored disk caint be done with flash

I would have thought USB2 interfaced disk would be adequate for many
home server applications.


Hard to connect that to three computers simultaneously

Don't think you can connect SATA drives to three computers at once
easily either...


that was the point of the atoms server

and you can't plug a USB drive into that?

(sorry not really getting your point on this... my comment on USB drives
was not to suggest they would replace the server, but would be connected
to it, and would in most domestic situations not introduce sufficient
reduction in performance for it to be an issue)


why have an extra box?

You still have to case the server. Why add boxes and power supplies?


--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.

On 10/07/2012 17:58, Rick Hughes wrote:

What's the teams comments re solid state hard drives now?. As good as
magnetic disc or better as regard reliability?.



end result I ordered today 1 x WD 1TB Caviar Black and a Crucial 128GB SSD
So that wiull be my new starting point :-)

On 11/07/2012 19:32, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:18:20 +0100, Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

En el artículo , Jaimie
Vandenbergh escribió:

The 12 hasn't grown, but he doesn't know if the drive came with them
unfortunately. Interpretation is the problem - there's no references
to interpret from

Give this a try:

http://www.ssd-life.com/

Has a SMART button which interprets the data a bit more sensibly. Say2
my Crucial m4 is good until Jan 25, 2041 by which time I'll be in a
wheelchair drooling and ****ing myself and past caring.

I don't think the other chap'll be best happy about having to install
Windows, but I'll pass it on - thanks.

Laptop with USB/SATA adaptor - just plug it into the disk and miss the
host system out of the equation altogether.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:20:34 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 11/07/2012 19:32, Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:18:20 +0100, Mike Tomlinson
wrote:

En el artículo , Jaimie
Vandenbergh escribió:

The 12 hasn't grown, but he doesn't know if the drive came with them
unfortunately. Interpretation is the problem - there's no references
to interpret from

Give this a try:

http://www.ssd-life.com/

Has a SMART button which interprets the data a bit more sensibly. Say2
my Crucial m4 is good until Jan 25, 2041 by which time I'll be in a
wheelchair drooling and ****ing myself and past caring.

I don't think the other chap'll be best happy about having to install
Windows, but I'll pass it on - thanks.

Laptop with USB/SATA adaptor - just plug it into the disk and miss the
host system out of the equation altogether.

It's buried in an iMac... not the easiest place to dig it out from!
OTOH, it only takes half an hour to get a functional Windows system up
on it, so I have let him know.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted" -- Bertrand Russell

On 11/07/2012 20:12, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 11/07/2012 12:41, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 23:43, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 12:46, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
dennis@home wrote:


"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...

Intel Atom board, no graffix at all :-)

Does a little bit of file serving web serving, dns, backups..
probably draws about 10W.

I'm going to use my Pi for that, just ordered a 64G USB stick for a
drive.
No fans, 5W.

Now how to case it?


well that is the problem. with the Pi.

needs a case, a power supply and and a SATA interface because 2TB of
mirrored disk caint be done with flash

I would have thought USB2 interfaced disk would be adequate for many
home server applications.


Hard to connect that to three computers simultaneously

Don't think you can connect SATA drives to three computers at once
easily either...


that was the point of the atoms server

and you can't plug a USB drive into that?

(sorry not really getting your point on this... my comment on USB
drives was not to suggest they would replace the server, but would be
connected to it, and would in most domestic situations not introduce
sufficient reduction in performance for it to be an issue)


why have an extra box?

You still have to case the server. Why add boxes and power supplies?

If you are worried about that, then the pi is probably small enough to
fit in the drive case if you choose carefully, and will run from the
same 5V required by the drive.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

Owain writes:

On Jul 11, 12:16=A0pm, (Windmill) wrote:
In about 1993 I compiled the old X windows system, version 6.3, from
source, on a 386SX-33. (A 16 bit machine with a sizzling 33 Mhz clock
speed!)

I had one one of them. I even paid extra for 2MB RAM so I could 'run'
Windows.

I think mine got the max (16? MB - I'd need to dig it out to make sure)
because it was paging too much and thrashing the 212MB HDD (soon
replaced by a 6.4 GB drive).

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

John Rumm writes:

On 11/07/2012 12:05, Windmill wrote:
John Rumm writes:

However one thing to keep in mind, is that even with a whole unit
warranty, its not always cost effective to use it. I had someone bring
me about a prebuilt system which had suffered a PSU failure. The company
that supplied it were happy to fix it under warranty, but it had to be
sent back at the customers expense, and also they claimed it would be
restored to default configuration - hence the would need to do a full
backup first and then restore it when the machine came back.

So their choice was jump through the backup and restore hoops, pay for
sending it away, lose it for a few days into the bargain, and then doing
a full restore on it after it comes back, or pay for me to swap the PSU
for them on the spot! They decided the latter carried less risk and
hassle (although I did persuade them to do the backup anyway!)

The VGA output on my cheap PC (intended to be fitted to the back of a
TV, though at the moment I have no TV) just died, so I now have a
similar choice.

Force the case apart, voiding the warranty, and try to repair
whatever's broken without any information or circuit diagram.

The "easy" fix would be to just add a new video card into an expansion
slot, and ignore the onboard one.

It has no slots, nor any kind of standard case. It's maybe 1.5 inches
thick, really intended to be mounted on the back of a TV, and the case
has no screws; Googling tells me that it fits together with plastic
tabs which are likely to break if pried apart (someone did this to add
more memory).
So it seems plain that opening it up would void the warranty.
(Emachines ER1401).

Or try to find some way to erase all the data from the HDD.

In situations like this I usually use a USB to IDE/SATA adaptor lead.
Pop the side off the case and plug my adaptor into the drive. Power it
up using the PCs power supply if it still works, or a standalone drive
PSU if not, and then talk to the drive directly from a laptop.

Boot the laptop from something like the universal boot CD, and run a
drive erase program.

This PC was used briefly for on-line banking, and while there are
passwords there, they're not bank passwords because I enter those from
memory.

But I don't really know what the manufacturer's repair people might be
able to glean from an assortment of Linux distributions and browsers,
and while I'm sure most will be honest, I'm equally sure that a few
will not be. (What might you expect from someone who might for all I
know have a large mortgage and a wife who's just been laid off?).

As with all these situations, its a case of deciding on the value of
your data to your "enemy" and estimating their resources for getting at
it. In this case it seems you need to protect against casual snooping,
and anyone finding sensitive personal information that may have resale
value for credit card fraud, or ID theft. A basic secure erase that
overwrites all the data on the drive would seem adequate.

(while recovery of data from an overwritten drive is possible, it
requires very specialist kit, lots of time, money, and determination. So
unless you are doing stuff that would interest spook agencies, you
probably have nothing to worry about!)

If the PC's HDMI output still works and can be used to drive the DVI
input on this monitor via an adaptor, it should be possible to erase
the HDD (no, there are no questionable pictures on it!).

Or if I can set up a memory stick with an OS which allows remote access
of some kind, then by typing 'blind' can boot that OS, it should be
possible to erase the HDD remotely from another PC.

First of all I need to do the backup I hadn't done 'cos it was a new PC
and I was waiting until I had finally chosen what to run on it.

Then I can send the unit for repair.

or swap out the drive for another....

I've suddenly realised how desirable it is to use encrypted file
systems, instead of just encrypted directories for a few of the more
obviously sensitive bits of information.

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost

On Monday, July 9, 2012 5:10:33 PM UTC+1, Rick Hughes wrote:


I need a new PC at home, I have my spec sorted for a W7 64bit (apart
from case), and just wondering whether it's worth getting all the parts
and assembling yourself.


DIY all the way:

http://s1002.photobucket.com/albums/...rent=Guide.png

http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc

On Wed, 11 Jul 2012 10:39:01 +0100, Jaimie Vandenbergh
wrote:

[reallocated sectors on SSD]

The 12 hasn't grown, but he doesn't know if the drive came with them
unfortunately.

And now it has - it went up to 15 overnight. RMA time, for sure.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"I have an asteroid named after me. Isaac Asimov's got one too.
It's smaller and more eccentric." -- Arthur C. Clarke

On 09/07/2012 17:10, Rick Hughes wrote:
Been a number of years since I have built a PC from scratch .. had to
feed in loads of FD's to load Dos and W 3.1 :-)


Just as a 'close the loop' item, the final spec was:

Motherboard ASUS P8Z77-V LE
CPU i5 7350K IvyBridge
RAM 16GB Corsair XMS3
SSD Crucial M4 128GB
HDD WD 1TB Caviar Black
PSU Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 620W
GPU MSI GTX560 Ti Hawk 1GB / 980MHz
Optical Samsung DL DVD RW
Case Fractal Design Define R3


The GPU & PSU came from Overclockers, the rest from eBuyer.

Total cost in at £878 ... best 'built' price I could get was £1072 ...
so made sense to get the parts in.

To be fair Overclockers only charge £75 for build, but the cost to get
all of parts from them was too high.

On 10/07/2012 22:12, John Rumm wrote:
On 10/07/2012 22:39, dennis@home wrote:



(Not all page faults will require drive writes though... (more to the
point, buying adequate ram really ought to come before trying to soup
things up with a SSD))


Putting in 16GB of DDR3 RAM - Corsair XMS, which has very low latency
and good CAS/Timings score.

On 11/07/2012 10:27, F wrote:
On 10/07/2012 22:39 dennis@home wrote:


Move the page file to a mechanical drive. With a decent amount of memory
installed it won't be used that much.

That is an interesting debate ...
I currently have page file of separate HDD to OS .... to avoid HDD RW
contention.
However the recommendation from those that know their onions say that if
you have OS on an SSD then you should put the paging file on that SSD ..

Or as an alternative put in on a USB3 flash drive ...
However they also add that if you have more than 8GB of RAM you don't
need a paging file anyway

On 12/07/2012 17:53 Rick Hughes wrote:

On 11/07/2012 10:27, F wrote:
On 10/07/2012 22:39 dennis@home wrote:


Move the page file to a mechanical drive. With a decent amount of memory
installed it won't be used that much.

That is an interesting debate ...
I currently have page file of separate HDD to OS .... to avoid HDD RW
contention.
However the recommendation from those that know their onions say that if
you have OS on an SSD then you should put the paging file on that SSD ..

I've always kept the page file on a different drive from the OS and the
advice I've seen with respect to SSDs is to continue to do that.
However, with plenty of RAM installed I think it's of no real
consequence either way as the page file should only rarely be used.

--
F

On 10/07/2012 21:54, John Rumm wrote:
Add to that the point that your 240G drive will contain significantly
more than 240G of flash. So there are plenty of spare cells available to
patch into the linear addressed space by the wear levelling algorithms
as required.

My guess would be a 240 has 256 physical capacity. I just bought a 160,
which I'm guessing is really 192.

The speed is wonderful, and while I no longer see Mr Speed's comments
SSD lifetimes are no longer an issue - the wear levelling algorithms
take care of it for any reasonable lifetime. Unlike a thumb drive,
which doesn't usually have any.

Andy

On 10/07/2012 22:12, John Rumm wrote:
more to the point, buying adequate ram really ought to come before
trying to soup things up with a SSD

I bought one for boot times. The rest of the performance is fine.

Andy

"Rick Hughes" wrote in message
...
On 09/07/2012 17:10, Rick Hughes wrote:
Been a number of years since I have built a PC from scratch .. had to
feed in loads of FD's to load Dos and W 3.1 :-)


Just as a 'close the loop' item, the final spec was:

Motherboard ASUS P8Z77-V LE
CPU i5 7350K IvyBridge
RAM 16GB Corsair XMS3
SSD Crucial M4 128GB
HDD WD 1TB Caviar Black

I'd still go for a 2TB or 3TB myself.

And wouldn't bother with the black given
that you have an SSD.

I went for a 2TB green myself, and I use mine as a PVR too.

PSU Cooler Master Silent Pro M2 620W
GPU MSI GTX560 Ti Hawk 1GB / 980MHz
Optical Samsung DL DVD RW
Case Fractal Design Define R3

The GPU & PSU came from Overclockers, the rest from eBuyer.

Total cost in at £878 ... best 'built' price I could get was £1072 ...
so made sense to get the parts in.

Yeah, that's why I did mine that way too.

To be fair Overclockers only charge £75 for build, but the cost to get all
of parts from them was too high.

I prefer to build my own anyway, then I know its done right.

But then I do a lot more than you do.

"Rick Hughes" wrote in message
...
On 11/07/2012 10:27, F wrote:
On 10/07/2012 22:39 dennis@home wrote:


Move the page file to a mechanical drive. With a decent amount of memory
installed it won't be used that much.

That is an interesting debate ...
I currently have page file of separate HDD to OS .... to avoid HDD RW
contention.
However the recommendation from those that know their onions say that if
you have OS on an SSD then you should put the paging file on that SSD ..

Or as an alternative put in on a USB3 flash drive ...
However they also add that if you have more than 8GB of RAM you don't need
a paging file anyway

That last depends on how you use the system. If you do
much with photoshop or leave the system on 24/7 for
months with lots of large apps open all the time, you
may still use a page file a bit.

En el artículo , Rick Hughes
escribió:

However the recommendation from those that know their onions say that if
you have OS on an SSD then you should put the paging file on that SSD ..

That's very bad advice. The pagefile is best put on a different drive
to the OS, even if it's a mechanical one.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

En el artículo , Rick Hughes
escribió:

SSD Crucial M4 128GB

I have one of those. Excellent drive, boots XP in the blink of an eye.
But before you install anything on it, make sure it has the latest
firmware. Earlier firmware had a nasty data loss on power off bug.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

Mike Tomlinson wrote
Rick Hughes wrote

However the recommendation from those that know their onions say that
if you have OS on an SSD then you should put the paging file on that SSD
..

That's very bad advice. The pagefile is best put on
a different drive to the OS, even if it's a mechanical one.

Not when you have enough of a clue to have enough
physical ram so it hardly ever gets used much, as he does.

In article , John
Rumm wrote:
(there are actually some quite decent studies out there on SSDs now.

They've certainly got a lot better as the wear-levelling algorithms have
been refined (and debugged!).

The general thrust being that in the consumer space you can expect a
more than adequate life from them)

That's true ... though that's not to say that spinning rust isn't
better.

I'm still not using SSDs because:

1. I'm not concerned about the disk speeds of my HDD systems.
2. SSDs are still much more expensive than HDDs.
3. SSDs are not yet available with multi-terabyte capacities.

I will say that SSDs are attractive for notebook/netbook applications
where their relative immunity to shock damage may be important.

Cheers,
Daniel.

On 17/07/2012 15:20, Daniel James wrote:
In article , John
Rumm wrote:
(there are actually some quite decent studies out there on SSDs now.

They've certainly got a lot better as the wear-levelling algorithms have
been refined (and debugged!).

The general thrust being that in the consumer space you can expect a
more than adequate life from them)

That's true ... though that's not to say that spinning rust isn't
better.

I'm still not using SSDs because:

1. I'm not concerned about the disk speeds of my HDD systems.
2. SSDs are still much more expensive than HDDs.
3. SSDs are not yet available with multi-terabyte capacities.

I will say that SSDs are attractive for notebook/netbook applications
where their relative immunity to shock damage may be important.

Yup, all those points are valid. I would only add that a reasonable way
to address them at this stage is by fitting both a SSD and conventional
drive. The SSD to give rapid boot, and application access, and the
conventional drive for its bulk data storage capability.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...

Yup, all those points are valid. I would only add that a reasonable way to
address them at this stage is by fitting both a SSD and conventional
drive. The SSD to give rapid boot, and application access, and the
conventional drive for its bulk data storage capability.

Last week I put two new drives in a tosh 17" laptop for my daughter.
A SanDisk 120G SSD and a 1T Samsung.
Booting into windows now takes about 40 seconds, 25 of which is the BIOS
deciding to actually boot.
The SSD was about £80 and the 1T disk a little less.
I am waiting for her to wreck the system by installing the sims and all the
expansion packs.

On 17/07/2012 20:47, John Rumm wrote:
On 17/07/2012 15:20, Daniel James wrote:
In article , John
Rumm wrote:
(there are actually some quite decent studies out there on SSDs now.

They've certainly got a lot better as the wear-levelling algorithms have
been refined (and debugged!).

The general thrust being that in the consumer space you can expect a
more than adequate life from them)

That's true ... though that's not to say that spinning rust isn't
better.

I'm still not using SSDs because:

1. I'm not concerned about the disk speeds of my HDD systems.
2. SSDs are still much more expensive than HDDs.
3. SSDs are not yet available with multi-terabyte capacities.

I will say that SSDs are attractive for notebook/netbook applications
where their relative immunity to shock damage may be important.

Yup, all those points are valid. I would only add that a reasonable way
to address them at this stage is by fitting both a SSD and conventional
drive. The SSD to give rapid boot, and application access, and the
conventional drive for its bulk data storage capability.

I've recently fitted an SSD Cache. The SSD connects as a normal HDD and
indeed can function as one, but this is not recommended. It comes with a
licence for a piece of software (for Windows 7) which over the course of
a couple of reboots and time running, learns which files should be
cached and uses the SSD to serve them up. It gives a significant speed
boost without sacrificing the large capacity of a HDD.

SteveW

On 17/07/2012 22:44, SteveW wrote:
On 17/07/2012 20:47, John Rumm wrote:
On 17/07/2012 15:20, Daniel James wrote:
In article , John
Rumm wrote:
(there are actually some quite decent studies out there on SSDs now.

They've certainly got a lot better as the wear-levelling algorithms have
been refined (and debugged!).

The general thrust being that in the consumer space you can expect a
more than adequate life from them)

That's true ... though that's not to say that spinning rust isn't
better.

I'm still not using SSDs because:

1. I'm not concerned about the disk speeds of my HDD systems.
2. SSDs are still much more expensive than HDDs.
3. SSDs are not yet available with multi-terabyte capacities.

I will say that SSDs are attractive for notebook/netbook applications
where their relative immunity to shock damage may be important.

Yup, all those points are valid. I would only add that a reasonable way
to address them at this stage is by fitting both a SSD and conventional
drive. The SSD to give rapid boot, and application access, and the
conventional drive for its bulk data storage capability.

I've recently fitted an SSD Cache. The SSD connects as a normal HDD and
indeed can function as one, but this is not recommended. It comes with a
licence for a piece of software (for Windows 7) which over the course of
a couple of reboots and time running, learns which files should be
cached and uses the SSD to serve them up. It gives a significant speed
boost without sacrificing the large capacity of a HDD.

There are also hybrid SSD / HDD drives out there like the Seagate
Momentus. Includes SSD acceleration / caching in the same package as the
hard drive.

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On Wed, 18 Jul 2012 01:32:19 +0100, John Rumm
wrote:

On 17/07/2012 22:44, SteveW wrote:

I've recently fitted an SSD Cache. The SSD connects as a normal HDD and
indeed can function as one, but this is not recommended. It comes with a
licence for a piece of software (for Windows 7) which over the course of
a couple of reboots and time running, learns which files should be
cached and uses the SSD to serve them up. It gives a significant speed
boost without sacrificing the large capacity of a HDD.

There are also hybrid SSD / HDD drives out there like the Seagate
Momentus. Includes SSD acceleration / caching in the same package as the
hard drive.

Having benchmarked them and used a 500gig Momentus XT for quite a
while, they're about twice as fast in practice as a normal 2.5"
7200rpm. Which means they're about the same speed as a 3.5" 7200rpm...

A nice upgrade from a cheesy 120gig 5400rpm Fujitsu in a laptop for
sure, but very second rate indeed when compared to an SSD for speed.

As Daniel says, it's all down to what you consider important and how
big your base dataset is. Being of a 'filer' disposition, I've got a
4Tb NAS that has most of the junk neatly arranged on it, so all my
machines could get by on 120gig SSDs or smaller without squeezing.
They actually have 240gig SSDs (Vertex 3) because I was quite flush
for a time!

And they absolutely *fly*, it's quite startling the difference you
get. Better than double the CPU speed or number of cores; better than
doubling the RAM; better than doubling the GPU tps. Which shouldn't be
a surprise - with a decent SATA3 SSD you're getting x4 or x5 what a
decent 3.5" HD will manage in raw speed, and far faster than that for
small files.

Booting up in 6 seconds is an amusing party trick, given that modern
OSes generally only need to be rebooted for patching, but the speed
that makes that happen continues for everything else you do too.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mr Death?" - e e cummings/Tom Baker

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote
John Rumm wrote
SteveW wrote

I've recently fitted an SSD Cache. The SSD connects as a normal HDD and
indeed can function as one, but this is not recommended. It comes with a
licence for a piece of software (for Windows 7) which over the course of
a couple of reboots and time running, learns which files should be
cached and uses the SSD to serve them up. It gives a significant speed
boost without sacrificing the large capacity of a HDD.

There are also hybrid SSD / HDD drives out there like the Seagate
Momentus.
Includes SSD acceleration / caching in the same package as the hard
drive.

Having benchmarked them and used a 500gig Momentus XT for
quite a while, they're about twice as fast in practice as a normal 2.5"
7200rpm. Which means they're about the same speed as a 3.5" 7200rpm...

A nice upgrade from a cheesy 120gig 5400rpm Fujitsu in a laptop for
sure, but very second rate indeed when compared to an SSD for speed.

As Daniel says, it's all down to what you consider important and how
big your base dataset is. Being of a 'filer' disposition, I've got a
4Tb NAS that has most of the junk neatly arranged on it, so all my
machines could get by on 120gig SSDs or smaller without squeezing.
They actually have 240gig SSDs (Vertex 3) because I was quite flush
for a time!

And they absolutely *fly*, it's quite startling the difference you
get. Better than double the CPU speed or number of cores; better than
doubling the RAM; better than doubling the GPU tps. Which shouldn't be
a surprise - with a decent SATA3 SSD you're getting x4 or x5 what a decent
3.5" HD will manage in raw speed, and far faster than that for small
files.

Booting up in 6 seconds is an amusing party trick, given that modern
OSes generally only need to be rebooted for patching, but the speed
that makes that happen continues for everything else you do too.

But with some styles of use like with keeping the apps that you use
even weekly open all the time, and a 64bit OS and lots of physical
ram like 8GB or more, and only rebooting for updates, the difference
isnt very dramatic at all and I'd rather use the mature technology
instead myself.

En el artículo , Daniel James
escribió:

1. I'm not concerned about the disk speeds of my HDD systems.
2. SSDs are still much more expensive than HDDs.
3. SSDs are not yet available with multi-terabyte capacities.

As has been said many times, use an SSD for your OS and apps and
spinning rust for your data. You get the best of both worlds - the
speed of the SSD plus the storage capacity of the spinner.

--
(\_/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")