Hard Drive Suggestions

[zippyjuan]

As I have said a couple of times, my Athlon XP system is showing its age of nearly six year. I am considering building an Intel i7 system depending on the cost- the motherboards I have seen so far are arround $300! but the chipset is supposde to be about $275 for the entry model and memory about $120 for three gigs (it uses a triple channel memory system). Video card I will worry about later (don't really game anymore but do have a couple I like once in a while).

What I was wondering about is a quiet and efficient hard drive. There are many more than there used to be. I have a few ATA (or are they SATA) 7200 rpm drives and may use one of those as a second drive in the unit but may consider a new one for the primary drive. I certainly don't need something 500gb or larger.
What is a 3gb/s drive vs a standard drive? How about a 10,000 rpm Raptor? Reliablity and performance?

Next I will also have to figure out how much power I need (power supply). The people here were very helpful with building my current system so thanks again for any suggestions and tips.

[DarkFury]

Honestly, if you are looking for "bang for the buck" I wouldn't recommend a Raptor... yes Raptors are very fast, however many of the current generation SATA 1TB drives come very close and in some cases exceed some of the specs of a Raptor (definitely in the department of the older Raptor versus the newer Velociraptor).

Personally, I recommend the Seagate 7200.11 SATA drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274

These are very fast, economical and give you tons of storage space.

[Airencracken]

If you want something quiet and fast for your primary drive, you might want to consider a SSD.

[DarkFury]

If you want something quiet and fast for your primary drive, you might want to consider a SSD.
Honestly, SSD are still much too pricey for the benefits they can deliver.

Personally, I'd wait on buying one of those... Also, I've seen reports where the SSD drives weren't performing way above regular drive technologies and they are limited on storage capacity.

I'm sure that they will improve in the near future and gain capacity, but for now, it's just relative to your budget I suppose. :)

[Devhux]

The big problem with SSDs right now is that many of the inexpensive ones use a JMicron controller that has had many issues (such as random freezups and reduced performance).

I'd second the notion for the Seagate 7200.11 drives -- great performance and cost. If you demand the maximum performance though, the Velociraptor is the way to go (but you sacrifice capacity there).

[Airencracken]

Eh, I was just floating it. I know that the Intel drive has been getting really good reviews. I'd wait for Intel to release their SLC drive though. I think even the MLC drive is close to saturating SATA II. Still not at theorectially fast as iRAM, but that device is only SATA I. I'm surprised that no one has updated that technology.

[zippyjuan]

Eh. I saw the price of a Raptor and it is not worth it. I was just about to ask about the .11 thing when I looked at the drive linked to and it seems to explain it there.

Thanks for the suggestions. I am trying to figure out what I may want vs what I can afford. Definately have to keep the whole thing under $1000. Everything. Case, power, HDD, CPU, video card, motherboard, memory.

At this point, (subject to constant modification of course!) I have been looking at an Asus P6T motherboard (about $300- ZipZoomFly is the only place listing it right now), an i7 920 processor (about $265? not released yet), a 3gb package of Corsair triple channel DDR3 (3x 1GB) $130, an Antec Sonata case with 500w power supply (included) about $140. Vid card? Was checking out some GeForce 9800 GTX 512mb models for under $200. I can pick up a DVD drive for about $25- 30 with lightscribe (a BluRay drive would not be worth it). Getting close to that $1000.

[nate el bueno]

9800gtx should run well under 200, closer to 150, sometimes dropping lower. There's a 9800gtx+ as well, which was shrunk to 55nm. That one is usually in the 165 range. I don't know if this is an issue to you, but unless you buy the extreme edition i7 proc, you won't be able to overclock it. All but the 1000 dollar one has a locked multiplier. From what I've read, the performance gain from i7 is about 25% greater than that of processors at the same clock. However, with the new ones out, the old ones should drop in price significantly as intel tries to empty the inventory. Just a though. The i7 is definitely going to be "new" longer, but who knows how cheap the other stuff could get.

[Devhux]

You can indeed overclock the non-Extreme i7 CPUs -- you just adjust the BCLK speed (essentially the front-side bus). Sure, you won't have quite the flexibility as you would with an unlocked multiplier, but with i7 processors currently hitting a barrier of 4GHz anyways, it's no big deal.

Of course, these chips do run fairly warm as well, so I'd advise sticking to stock speed (esp. if using the stock Intel cooler).

[nate el bueno]

I stand corrected :)

[Jeffbx]

OK, here's my $0.02. NEVER buy brand new technology out of the gate. You'll way overpay for what you're getting.

Also, uneless you have a love of figeting or really want to overclock, I'd recommend this -

Go to the Dell Outlet (http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/topics/global.aspx/arb/online/en/InventorySearch?c=us&cs=28&l=en&s=dfb)& look at the refurbished Precision T3400 workstations. For what you do (Photoshop type editing, light gaming, what else?), you need a solid & affordable low to mid range graphic workstation.

For under $500 you can get into a basic, but complete system:


Precision Workstation T3400 Mini-Tower: Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 (2.40GHz/800MHz/2MB L2) 375W
Genuine Windows XP Pro with Vista Business License

System Price : $489.00

Operating System
Genuine Windows XP Pro with Vista Business License
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Memory
1 GB DDR2 NON-ECC SDRAM 677MHz (2 DIMMs)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hard Disk Drive
160 GB SATA 3.0Gb/s and 8MB DataBurst Cache
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Video
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia NVS 290, Dual Monitor DVI Capable
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Media Bay
16X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability


Now you have the complete machine, the OS & a THREE YEAR ON SITE WARRANTY (woohoo!), plus another $500 for upgrades.
Pop in a faster drive as your primary boot, OS and application disk (I'm partial to the Raptor myself). Use the drive from Dell as file storage or backup.
Pop in an additional 2GB RAM from Crucial (about $30).
Get yourself a nicer video card. The MB is SLI ready, so get a single SLI card & you have a slot open to expand in the future.
When you need to, you can expand the processor up to a quad core extreme.

If you buy the components from Dell (which I wouldn't recommend unless you find them on sale) you can add them to your machine's warranty.

[zippyjuan]

Thanks for the information. I still have lots of research to do before I decide on anything (including what my real budget may be). I have no intentions to try to overclock but am not afraid to do the build myself. The price difference between the new chip coming out and the previous generation is only like $20 which is what is causing me to consider it (according to early reports). The big price difference is in the motherboards at this time. There will certainly be lower priced ones out later.

ZipZoomFly had a 500gb 7200.11 HDD on sale for $59 this week (two days only) and I almost jumped on one.

[zippyjuan]

Well, I went a bit crazy today (maybe the excitement of finally getting a new computer and the idea of going for the latest so that it would hold me for quite a while again) and I placed an order for an Intel i7 920 setup. I did go just a bit over my $1000 target but not by a lot. The CPU was a bit more than I expected at $319 which almost made me change my mind. I intend to transfer my retail version of Windows XP over for the OS. I will have three gigs of memory (Corsair XMS) and went with an Asus NVidia 9800 GTX+ video card for $160 after rebate ($30 rebate) and a Western Digital 500gb 7200.11 hard drive with 32mb buffer. I was hearing reports of failures in the Seagate one although Seagate has a five year warranty while WD is only three. Adding a Lite-On DVD burner with Lightscribe (thinking towards making DVD slide shows for people if I do event shooting with my photography- I did one for a wedding shoot I did and am working on one for my parent's anniversary party they had). Everything is coming from NewEgg which put up their listings on Sunday night with the official release Monday.

The total price is close to what I spent on my Athlon XP-2400 system although that included the OS. My desk will be a mess for a while as I try to get the new system going and take things from the old one- leaving it hooked up as long as possible in case I need to check on things over the internet.
Yes, I am sure I could have built a "pretty darn good computer" for less. Am I starting a bit of buyer's remorse already? I hope not.

It should be quite a lot faster than what I presently have- which can freeze up if more than two processes are going like say if Norton decides to check for an update or do an automatic scan- then everything else can freeze sometimes which gets annoying. This should handle multiple processes more easily. With a quad core and hyperthreading I believe it counts as having eight(!) processors.

[Devhux]

Hope you enjoy your new setup. Also, don't fall under the belief that you have 8 processors -- Hyper-threading helps in apps that are optimized for it, but it's not as efficient as adding another core.

Still, I'm sure the setup will work wonders for you -- be sure to keep us updated on how it goes. :)

[Jeffbx]

Nice... new computers are always fun!

One suggestion however - dump Norton! Get something much lighter, like Avast. Free & faster.

[Airencracken]

Nice... new computers are always fun!

One suggestion however - dump Norton! Get something much lighter, like Avast. Free & faster.


Heh. I'd say dump Microsoft in general. I know you do a lot of photo work, so do I. I dual boot between XP and Ubuntu. 90% of the time I'm just surfing or writing stuff and not using a specific program like photoshop, I'm using Linux.

[zippyjuan]

Might give Avast a try. Most of the problems I seem to encounter with the current set-up are conflicts with Norton- like email.

As far as trying another OS- maybe it is just lazyness, maybe just because I know how to use Windows and am used to it.

I see that ZipZoomFly is a little cheaper on the processor- just under $300. According to the tracking numbers, everything but the power supply could be here later tonight.