New Goodies

[clocker]

Now I just have to decide how to set up the rest of my drives.

[Snee]

Yesterday I picked up a LaCie 1TB external drive at Microcenter.
On sale for only $129.
It's actually quite stylish and silent in operation.
Internet rumor has it that they are either Samsung or Seagate SATA drives inside- I haven't opened it up to confirm (although you can bet I will soon!).
I just looked at the drive with Everest. It shows up as a Seagate TB SATA drive with 32MB cache. So basically, when you buy the LaCie you get a nice drive in a $10 enclosure...all in all, a very good deal I think.

I've got one of those (well, obviously can't be sure it's the exact same model, but a TB LaCie drive, anyhow). Mine's been working fine for the months I've had it, cept for the external psu giving up fairly early on, so I had to get a replacement.

I think it stopped working cos I dropped it, and not very far at that. Can't tell you if they are always like that, obviously, but you may wanna be careful with it, just in case.

Otherwise it's been ace, and stable enough, very reliable in fact. Only complaint I've had were some weird fan noises the other day.

EDit: as for SSDs, you may wanna look into what kind of wear levelling they've got, later ones are getting better and better. But early models allegedly had dodgy durability what with them having no wear levelling.

64 gig sounds like it's gotta be a bit more recent though, prolly does way more than 100k cycles.

[clocker]

I think I'm actually going to remove the drive from the housing and just use it internally.
It's too nice a drive to hobble with the USB interface.

[Acid_death69]

what would the seek time be on a SSD?

[clocker]

On this one, close to zip.
However, it is SATA1 and not the fast memory, so read/write is not great...somewhere in the 40-45MBs range- the fast ones are more than double that.

[Detale]

I didn't realize it was an external. I thought it was internal. Open her up man! USB would choke it up IMHO.

[clocker]

OK, a few pics and a bit of info.

First, a shot of the IBM monitor...


And another in more natural lighting- i.e. darkness...


Now, a bit of a comparison between drives.
First, the Intel RAID0 array that currently holds the OS...


Next, a WD 500GB SATA2 in the external eSATA enclosure...


Last, the Samsung SSD in the same external enclosure...


Obviously, the RAID array is much faster than the other two options but note the difference in random access and CPU utilization between the array and the SSD.
Also note that, as is typical of SSDs (my old iRAM did the same thing), the performance does not decline as the you change position on the disk- mainly because there IS no disk.
Also notice that there is little difference between the "burst speed" and the "average read" with the SSD...basically, what you see is what you get- all the time.

I'm going to use the SSD as the OS/Program Files drive and then install the 500GB and 1TB drive (or maybe just one of them- depends on what case I decide to build into) as internal storage with the 4 x 250GB drives that currently comprise the array relegated to external storage.
Today I think I'll pick up one of those external drive docks (probably the Thermaltake from Microcenter) that allow for easy hot swapping to use for the 250's.

My assumption is that loading the OS on the SSD- which will probably take longer because of the read/write deficit- should result in much faster boot times and smooth and silent internet cruising (which is the bulk of my normal usage).

We'll see how it goes.

[lynx]

I suspect J2 isn't going to like that monitor.

RE the SSD, I'm holding out for the high speed versions to be more reasonably priced. They price isn't dropping much yet, but the capacities are improving.

[Acid_death69]

looks good fella, when are you gonna change the case then?

[clocker]

Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe.

Already have Pro64 loaded on the SSD.
Just seeing what's what.

Going to do some big file transfers to see how much/if it's better than Vista was.