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Post by Coolverine on Dec 2, 2018 20:09:26 GMT -5
Was digging through a box yesterday and found the box to my old 120GB SSD, this is how much I paid for just 120GB when SSDs first came out, lol....
Wow, you have Microcenter too? Where at? There's one here in Dallas, it's my go-to place for anything computer related. They've price matched so many things for me, I've probably saved many hundreds with them over the years. I also got my first SSD from them, a Crucial M4 256GB for $190 back in 2012. |
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Post by ForRealTho on Dec 2, 2018 21:56:41 GMT -5
I didn't have an SSD till 2015. I kept waiting for 1 tb drives to be reasonable so I wouldn't have to constantly uninstall shit. Cloning my 1 tb HDD to my 1 tb SSD took 5 hours.
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Post by ForRealTho on Dec 2, 2018 21:57:14 GMT -5
Also the first game to make my really wanna go SSD was Dragonage Inquisition. The loadtimes were absolutely brutal on a spinning disk.
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Post by Emig5m on Dec 2, 2018 22:18:56 GMT -5
Wow, you have Microcenter too? Where at? There's one here in Dallas, it's my go-to place for anything computer related. They've price matched so many things for me, I've probably saved many hundreds with them over the years. I also got my first SSD from them, a Crucial M4 256GB for $190 back in 2012. I have a bunch of Microcenters nearby but they're a little bit of a drive. The nearest is in Patterson, NJ (about 50 minutes one way) and I got my new CPU cooler from the one in Brooklyn, NY yesterday (about 1hr30m one way). Yes it's a drive but I'd rather spend two to three hrs of driving and have my stuff right away instead of waiting for shipping, especially stuff that's going to take some time to install to where I wouldn't have time during a normal work week since I can sometimes get home as late as 11:30pm and have to be up at 5am the next day. And yes, their prices have beaten Newegg on my last three builds. I was actually going to create a post about how Newegg has no longer been my go-to place for PC parts for a long while. (I also have a Newegg pickup center in about the same distance as Microcenter). Man the store I was at yesterday in Brooklyn I got a peak inside their warehouse area and it was RXT 2080's stacked from floor to the roof!!! It was an unbelievable sight! I'd love to just have a 60sec free-for-all shopping spree at Microcenter! And their selection of PC cases is off the charts..... like a mile long wall stacked from floor to ceiling at the Paterson store (I didn't bother to look at them at the Brooklyn store). All the water cooling supplies that you would need right in store....it's like PC geek heaven! |
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Post by Coolverine on Dec 3, 2018 0:15:03 GMT -5
Yeah it's a great store. There's also several Fry's Electronics locations around here, they are much bigger stores and also pricematch with online retailers but I still prefer Microcenter. Many times, Microcenter ends up having a better selection despite being smaller.
Many times I've gone to Fry's looking for something very specific, they'll end up having 1 or 2 stock that are opened, and they still want to charge full price. One time it was a monitor, another time a soundcard, and another time an HDMI/RCA adapter. I don't tend to go there anymore.
One of the Fry's locations here used to be Incredible Universe many years back, they had 2 floors and even a McDonald's inside. I remember my dad bought me Wing Commander IV there back when it came out. When they became unprofitable, they were bought out by Fry's.
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Post by Emig5m on Dec 4, 2018 19:42:58 GMT -5
Here's a great video on SSDs!
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Post by Coolverine on Apr 16, 2019 17:30:48 GMT -5
Well my 2TB hard drive finally crapped out, my PC won't even boot up with it connected (still have 2 SSD's, 256GB and a 1TB). Thankfully I had backed up a bunch of stuff from it to an external hard drive, so I didn't really lose anything important.
I'm seriously considering getting one of those 4TB Samsung SSD's to replace it, I just fear that the moment I buy it, the price will drop on it. They have one for around $500 and then another for around $700, the QVO and EVO respectively. Not sure what the difference is.
*edit* I ended up getting the $700 Samsung SSD (860 EVO), unfortunately I can't find any way to mount it so it's just kind of free floating inside of my case. I've bought 2 different 2.5" to 3.5" adapter brackets but none of them have been compatible with my case so far. I might actually have to make my own.
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Post by ForRealTho on Apr 17, 2019 22:19:42 GMT -5
4 tb ssd is nuts. I upgraded my 250 gig OS drive to a 512 gig drive.
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Post by Coolverine on Apr 18, 2019 12:13:24 GMT -5
I think that's the most I have ever spent on a single computer part. Also was able to find the perfect 2.5" to 3.5" bracket for it: www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Internal-Drive-Mounting-BK-HDDH/dp/B00G57BN1M - if anyone needs this kind of product, I think this is one of the absolute best. *edit* Also my PC has all solid state storage now, actually boots up and runs much faster than before even though I've had my OS installed on an SSD for a while now (the 2TB hard drive was just there for storage and backup). |
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Post by Babel-17 on Apr 18, 2019 12:28:15 GMT -5
Well my 2TB hard drive finally crapped out, my PC won't even boot up with it connected (still have 2 SSD's, 256GB and a 1TB). Thankfully I had backed up a bunch of stuff from it to an external hard drive, so I didn't really lose anything important. I'm seriously considering getting one of those 4TB Samsung SSD's to replace it, I just fear that the moment I buy it, the price will drop on it. They have one for around $500 and then another for around $700, the QVO and EVO respectively. Not sure what the difference is. *edit* I ended up getting the $700 Samsung SSD (860 EVO), unfortunately I can't find any way to mount it so it's just kind of free floating inside of my case. I've bought 2 different 2.5" to 3.5" adapter brackets but none of them have been compatible with my case so far. I might actually have to make my own. SLC - MLC - TLC - QLC
Very early adopters paid a ton for their SSD but at the time they were single layer cell, and with the right software, (garbage collection, Trim, reduced amplification) and ram for a cache, a single layer/SLC solid state drive can last a long time, especially if it was made on a process node known for reliability. Until very recently, triple layer cell (TLC) SSDs were the new kids on the block, and only recently has a consensus formed that they can be respectably long lived. Some sites have been testing the hell out of SSDs and they're reporting that the drives are exceeding expectations.
A decent rule of thumb is that a given manufacturer halves the expected lifetime when moving within their lineup from multi layer cell/MLC to TLC. And now that's getting repeated with quad layer cell/QLC SSDs.
With a good controller, and ram for caching (a few budget drives cheap out and don't use any ram), I'd expect a QLC drive to be fine if used mostly for the OS and mostly cold storage (like games and videos). I don't see it as the way to go if you're downloading a hundred gigabytes a day.
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Post by Coolverine on Apr 18, 2019 13:06:07 GMT -5
I found that same article before, basically what I got is that the EVO is faster and more power efficient and should last longer. They also make a PRO one that costs over $900, from what I've heard it's supposed to have even better longevity.
My 256GB Crucial M4 (where OS is installed) is still working great as far as I can tell.
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Post by Babel-17 on Apr 18, 2019 14:02:21 GMT -5
Congrats!
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Post by ForRealTho on Apr 18, 2019 16:19:25 GMT -5
I got my 1 tb 850 Evo in late 2015. I have debated getting a new drive just for longevity, according to CrystalDiskInfo tho it is still 99% good and the wearleveling counter is still at 97%. This is after 3.5 years of very heavy useage.
The 970 Evo I got in like November supposedly is good for 5+ years. It still shows as 100% in CrystalDiskInfo.
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Post by Coolverine on Apr 18, 2019 18:19:24 GMT -5
My Crucial 256GB is from 2012 or 2013, I think it's MLC. Just checked it with CrystalDiskInfo and it's at 94%. I am considering removing it because of its age and making my 1TB M.2 SSD (also Crucial) my OS drive since it's still very new, but I'm in no hurry to yet. One thing I am a little concerned about, my 1TB M.2 runs pretty hot, around 50C normally.
After replacing my remaining hard drive with an SSD, my PC boots up much faster than before and even runs smoother. My PC is all solid state storage now.
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Post by ForRealTho on Apr 18, 2019 18:45:38 GMT -5
My Crucial 256GB is from 2012 or 2013, I think it's MLC. Just checked it with CrystalDiskInfo and it's at 94%. I am considering removing it because of its age and making my 1TB M.2 SSD (also Crucial) my OS drive since it's still very new, but I'm in no hurry to yet. One thing I am a little concerned about, my 1TB M.2 runs pretty hot, around 50C normally. After replacing my remaining hard drive with an SSD, my PC boots up much faster than before and even runs smoother. My PC is all solid state storage now. I remember making my old Bigfoot 8 gig drive my mp3 drive and that thing was slow enough that there was a lag time switching mp3s lol. My NVME drive also runs pretty hot, I put a heatsink on it, only cost $5. Supposedly they are designed to run hot so its no biggie tho. |
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Post by Coolverine on Apr 18, 2019 19:36:16 GMT -5
It probably doesn't help that the M.2 slot on my motherboard is right behind where the videocard is installed. *edit* Even with games playing off of the M.2, the temperature never gets any higher.
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Post by Coolverine on Jul 5, 2019 16:03:51 GMT -5
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Post by ForRealTho on Jul 5, 2019 16:52:10 GMT -5
The 2.5" factor drives are going to continue to drop in price as the form factor while still perfectly fine and functional is completely obsolete and m2 nvme drives are the becoming the norm.
I've been debating getting a new laptop with the smallest Nvme drive they will ship me and replacing it with a 2 tb nvme drive. I just put my 2 weeks in at work and I am starting a new job with a substantial raise so kinda wanted to buy something but getting a Tesla seems kinda silly.
There is literally nothing wrong with my current laptop but its 3 years old at this point. I'm holding out for some new deals this summer. Ideally I would like to be back on AMD and their are a few AMD laptops with desktop CPUs in them.
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Post by Coolverine on Jul 8, 2019 10:24:33 GMT -5
^I bought a first gen Ryzen CPU, the Ryzen 7 1700. Haven't overclocked it yet, wanted to try but never got around to it. I've been very happy with it, seems to handle everything I throw at it. I'm probably gonna get a Ryzen 7 3700X this time along with a new motherboard. The new Ryzen's should work just fine with my current motherboard, but I've been having some issues with the PCI-E slots so I'm gonna look into getting a newer one with the new AMD chipset. I might even just get a Ryzen 5 3600, I heard the Ryzen 5 2600 is great for the price and does gaming just fine. I think AMD seriously has potential to dethrone Intel for gaming, if they haven't already.
Also the M.2 Samsung SSD's are quite expensive, I think they only go up to 2TB too. The last time I looked, the 970 EVO 2TB M.2 doesn't even cost that much less than the 860 EVO 4TB 2.5" but I'm sure it's extremely fast.
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Post by ForRealTho on Jul 12, 2019 10:19:20 GMT -5
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Post by ForRealTho on Jul 22, 2019 11:52:46 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Oct 4, 2019 20:24:40 GMT -5
Some of this guy's tests reveal that the speed of NVME ssd's can be bottlenecked depending on the system. Granted, it's a Ryzen maker board (that runs the same sdd slower compared a Intel i7 PC). The Ryzen he's testing is still a respectable cpu (4 physical cores with max frequency of 3.6GHz). Based on some comments, it seems that read performance from the faster NVME ssd's are cpu dependent. |
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Post by ForRealTho on Oct 8, 2019 9:18:08 GMT -5
Some of this guy's tests reveal that the speed of NVME ssd's can be bottlenecked depending on the system. Granted, it's a Ryzen maker board (that runs the same sdd slower compared a Intel i7 PC). The Ryzen he's testing is still a respectable cpu (4 physical cores with max frequency of 3.6GHz). Based on some comments, it seems that read performance from the faster NVME ssd's are cpu dependent. Outside of synthetics I don't know if people will notice. I've used 4 different SSD setups 1)1 tb Samsung 850 Evo rated at like 550 m/s SATA 2)2 128 gig Lite-On SSDS in RAID0 1,000 m/s m2 SATA 3)Samsung 970 Evo 512 gig Nvme 3,500 m/s 4)Sabrient Rocket 2 tb Nvme 3,100 m/s Those numbers are off the top of my head. In real world use I noticed almost no difference. The 970 Evo was faster in initial load times in huge games with long load times like BFV, Dragon Age Inquisition, etc. Once in the game going from scene to scene was about the same. Boot time and everything else seemed identical. Now if you are working on major video projects using huge files that might be different but for my usage it wasn't. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 8, 2019 11:42:01 GMT -5
It could be that games and/or graphics drivers aren't optimized for SSD's. If you notice any significant load times in your games, then logically speaking, you'd think there should be a difference when one drive is benchmark tested to be over six times faster than another.
Regarding PS4 load times, they say there's not a huge difference between hhd's and ssd's, which indicates that the platform and/or OS can be at fault for not fully utilizing ssd's potential.
Edit: Regarding PC boot times with SSD's, I suspect we're waiting longer for the components to power up & BIOS to post (something a faster SSD can't do anything about). And the work of the SSD, actually loading the OS is perhaps a small % of boot time on modern machines.
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Post by Coolverine on Feb 11, 2020 0:28:06 GMT -5
I think my Crucial M4 256GB SSD might finally be kicking the bucket after 7 years. It all started when I got a new soundcard because my motherboard doesn't seem to like my Sound Blaster Z. I got the EVGA Nu Audio, great piece of hardware but the drivers made my PC crash with BSOD. After it restarted, I tried installing the drivers again but it crashed with a BSOD again and this time it didn't recover.
Long story short, I did a fresh install of Windows on my 1TB M.2 SSD. I'd kind of been wanting to do a fresh install of Windows, the only thing that sucks is I have to find a way to re-import all my Steam games that are still installed on my 4TB SSD. I still have the 256GB SSD connected, I can actually go to it and see all my files, but it will no longer boot Windows and even the recovery tool (USB drive) couldn't see it for some reason.
Might mess with it more later, but I'm just happy to have my system up and running again. I do have a system backup from before but I might not bother with it.
I did try installing the soundcard software again after the fresh Windows install but it was very finicky. It took 3 attempts before it actually installed the software and drivers, which I didn't like so I ended up returning it. I did buy a new motherboard too, but it has this heatsink at the top that partially extends past the board (which is just dumb as shit) and it doesn't fit in my case that way. I'll be taking it back tomorrow to exchange it for another motherboard that doesn't have dumbass heatsinks extending past the edge of the board.
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Post by ForRealTho on Feb 11, 2020 0:34:05 GMT -5
the only thing that sucks is I have to find a way to re-import all my Steam games that are still installed on my 4TB SSD. You should be able to just point steam to the 4Tb SSD. They added that a few years back. |
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Post by Coolverine on Feb 11, 2020 0:38:57 GMT -5
the only thing that sucks is I have to find a way to re-import all my Steam games that are still installed on my 4TB SSD. You should be able to just point steam to the 4Tb SSD. They added that a few years back. Yep, I just discovered that. I went to install a game, pointed it to my SteamLibrary folder on the other drive and it detected all the games in there.  It still has to go through a discovery process, but that's better than having to download them again. It's been 7 years since I did a fresh Windows install. I'm gonna put on Netflix and go to bed now. The only thing that really sucks, I had Fallout 4 installed with a ton of mods and stuff saved and I accidentally deleted it. I had some awesome buildings in Sanctuary and all, one of them took years to build up. I still have the saves, not sure if it saved my buildings though. I just need to remember what mods I was using, but does anyone happen to know if there's a way to check a Fallout 4 save for what mods it's using? |
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Post by ForRealTho on Feb 11, 2020 1:02:37 GMT -5
You should be able to just point steam to the 4Tb SSD. They added that a few years back. Yep, I just discovered that. I went to install a game, pointed it to my SteamLibrary folder on the other drive and it detected all the games in there. It still has to go through a discovery process, but that's better than having to download them again. It's been 7 years since I did a fresh Windows install. I'm gonna put on Netflix and go to bed now. The only thing that really sucks, I had Fallout 4 installed with a ton of mods and stuff saved and I accidentally deleted it. I had some awesome buildings in Sanctuary and all, one of them took years to build up. I still have the saves, not sure if it saved my buildings though. I just need to remember what mods I was using, but does anyone happen to know if there's a way to check a Fallout 4 save for what mods it's using? lol I did the same thing in Skyrim, I have the saves but lost the ~120 mods. There is a utility that will list mods in skyrim save files. I assume there is the same for Fallout 4. |
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Post by Coolverine on Feb 12, 2020 9:08:22 GMT -5
Good news, so apparently I had taken a screenshot of my mods list at some point and saved it somewhere, I just found it. I went with the Asus X570-P Prime motherboard, but still had trouble with the top of the board fitting in my case. Instead of a big heatsink, there's a few capacitors and 2 fan headers that were just barely in the way of my 140mm top fan. I cut the edge of the fan housing off and then grinded it down with a dremel, it all fits now even with a case fan and the CPU fan plugged in. It's very close but it fits and there's nothing pushing on anything. I did order a 140mm low-profile fan (Silverstone FW141) just for peace of mind though. It was hard to find but found it here thanks to Silverstone's website. I guess standards between motherboards and cases have changed a little bit over the years, this case is from 2012. This motherboard has 2 M.2 slots, I was thinking about getting another of the same so I can put them in RAID. Also planning on getting a Ryzen 7 4000 series CPU when they come out this year, supposed to be end of Q1 2020. Might also get some faster RAM. |
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Post by Coolverine on Feb 12, 2020 18:52:48 GMT -5
My new mobo has 2 M.2 slots, I have a 1TB Crucial MX500 M.2 that's still pretty new, so I bought a second identical one and put them in in RAID 0. It was quite a challenge to figure out how to set it up, figured it out but then Windows 10 install wouldn't detect it. Turns out I had to download the AMD raid controller drivers first and point the installer to them on a USB drive. Had to uncheck the option to hide unknown drivers and point it to the RCraid folder then Windows installed just fine. The AMD RAID drivers have folders specifically for M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME.
I hadn't done a RAID 0 setup since around 2005-2007.
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It still has to go through a discovery process, but that's better than having to download them again.