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I just got a Micro Center ad for their Inland Pro SSD, 120GB, for just $24.99, in-store only (and "limit 1 per customer"). I don't know if its any good, but that seems like a crazy price for something like that.
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Jun 10, 2018 16:13
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The built-in diskmgmt.msc in Windows can also resize your boot partition in case you don't feel like mucking around in a 3rd party app. It's been capable of this since Windows 7
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Jun 10, 2018 17:53
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Xenomorph posted:I just got a Micro Center ad for their Inland Pro SSD, 120GB, for just $24.99, in-store only (and "limit 1 per customer"). What controller? Is it DRAM-less? It would work for a kids laptop or something even if it's not that great of a drive.
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Jun 10, 2018 18:07
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Bob Morales posted:What controller? Is it DRAM-less? That's why I was asking about a spec database, for exactly this type of question. Those Inland SSDs are Microcenter's house brand, and they've come up on sale recently for pretty great prices ($26/120 GB, $46/240 GB.) They're manufactured by someone reputable (Micron perhaps, I forget what I had originally found out) and use the Phison S11 controller, which can have DRAM or run DRAMless, so that doesn't help us answer the question although those low prices probably indicate the absence of DRAM. They use MLC though (except for the 480 GB) and at those prices they're still a pretty drat good deal.
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Jun 11, 2018 07:04
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I got an Inland SSD, it's fine. If you're going SATA anyway don't pay more than you have to.
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Jun 11, 2018 08:08
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2TB micron SSD for under $250 from rakuten. Just going to share the Slickdeals link. https://slickdeals.net/share/android_app/fp/395847 This seems like a really good deal for a gaming machine. Anything I'm missing?
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Jun 11, 2018 20:49
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Lockback posted:2TB micron SSD for under $250 from rakuten. Just going to share the Slickdeals link. Have the guys at Slickdeals decided if there's a warranty on these or not?
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Jun 11, 2018 20:53
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Bob Morales posted:Have the guys at Slickdeals decided if there's a warranty on these or not? It's Rakuten so I am pretty sure the answer is no, though your credit card should give you 30 days to protect against DOA
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Jun 11, 2018 21:24
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Bob Morales posted:Have the guys at Slickdeals decided if there's a warranty on these or not? Even if it does have a warranty, it would only be one year which is kinda meh anyways. I would be looking more at using a credit card with good protections. Throw it in a machine and immediately give it a couple TB of writes to stress it -- if that's good then the warranty is likely arbitrary. People on the internet say the 2TB model actually has worse performance than the 1TB, which makes me raise my eyebrows a bit as to what's going on with it. But I suppose if you're looking to go completely solid state, the price is real good.
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Jun 11, 2018 21:26
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Klyith posted:Even if it does have a warranty, it would only be one year which is kinda meh anyways. I would be looking more at using a credit card with good protections. Throw it in a machine and immediately give it a couple TB of writes to stress it -- if that's good then the warranty is likely arbitrary. On one hand it's 80-90% of the EVO 850, but on the other hand it looks stuttery as gently caress  Either way, that's a ton of SSD storage for $250
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Jun 11, 2018 21:39
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Lockback posted:2TB micron SSD for under $250 from rakuten. Just going to share the Slickdeals link. IIRC this was technically as low as ~$230 last week on eBay with that 20% off (max $100) discount although I used mine on a laptop for a friend. Also IIRC, the Micron 1100 is the OEM drive that is sold directly to manufacturers, and is branded for consumer sale as the Crucial MX300. This should be the drive we're looking at here. This line is 3D TLC and does have DRAM, I believe at a 1000:1 NAND:DRAM ratio (i.e. 1 TB SSD with a 1 GB DRAM cache.) Aside from my thought at the bottom of this post, the only real concern with this SSD is as Lockback mentioned, the warranty status, since as I said this isn't intended to be sold directly to consumers: Lockback posted:It's Rakuten so I am pretty sure the answer is no, though your credit card should give you 30 days to protect against DOA For what it's worth (which isn't much) the seller (Platinum Micro, which I've seen around so they're not exactly fly-by-night) posted this at the beginning of the item description: quote:3 Year Manufacturer Micron Warranty (US & Canada only) So, YMMV.  Definitely buy this with a good CC, Paypal protection, etc. I'd find a purchase like this easier to rationalize at a lower cost, e.g. $120-150 for 1 TB, $75-100 for 500 GB, etc.Bob Morales posted:Either way, that's a ton of SSD storage for $250 Indeed, although I'm having trouble rationalizing a huge, expensive SSD over an HDD of the same capacity at a much lower cost. I can understand if you need to have a rugged, vibration-insensitive system, or if you only have physical space for a single drive and need a high-capacity system drive, but if I was building a new system I'd go with a faster (maybe NVMe or just a plain faster/better drive like a Samsung) but less capacious SSD for the OS and then a larger HDD for bulk storage. If you just need 2 TB of storage for games/media then why not go with a same-capacity HDD for 1/3 the cost? Or if you're adding storage to a desktop then you have far better price/capacity options in 3.5" drives.
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Jun 11, 2018 23:19
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Atomizer posted:Indeed, although I'm having trouble rationalizing a huge, expensive SSD over an HDD of the same capacity at a much lower cost. I can understand if you need to have a rugged, vibration-insensitive system, or if you only have physical space for a single drive and need a high-capacity system drive, but if I was building a new system I'd go with a faster (maybe NVMe or just a plain faster/better drive like a Samsung) but less capacious SSD for the OS and then a larger HDD for bulk storage. If you just need 2 TB of storage for games/media then why not go with a same-capacity HDD for 1/3 the cost? Or if you're adding storage to a desktop then you have far better price/capacity options in 3.5" drives. Video games are pretty much the perfect use for something like this. They're enormous these days. (I have a 500 gb SSD these days and have to pick and choose a lot about what games go on it.) And games generally see a benefit* moving from HD to SSD, but no real difference between a mediocre TLC SATA drive and a top-spec NVMe drive. *in loading times
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Jun 11, 2018 23:55
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Klyith posted:Video games are pretty much the perfect use for something like this. They're enormous these days. (I have a 500 gb SSD these days and have to pick and choose a lot about what games go on it.) And games generally see a benefit* moving from HD to SSD, but no real difference between a mediocre TLC SATA drive and a top-spec NVMe drive. I just recently read an article comparing game loading times, and I wish I'd saved it. The gist of it was that most games didn't show a huge difference in load times between the SSDs and HDDs, save for one RPG or something that has very frequent level loads. In general though, I still wouldn't say games are necessary to dedicate to SSD space, both due to the expense of the latter and the potentially massive space requirements of the former. The main game I play (World of Tanks) is another example of one that does benefit from an SSD as assets load mid-match and cause micro-stuttering from an HDD, but the majority of games are probably just fine on a cheap HDD. Also note that the games most likely to benefit from being on an SSD are those with many small files due to random access being much better on the former, but otherwise modern HDDs are quite respectable in terms of sustained transfer rates (especially 7200+ RPM drives, and especially for the price!) Also, keep in mind that because games can be so huge (50 GB or more nowadays) that if you have a decent-sized collection (such as my Steam library) then even a 2 TB SSD can be insufficient (I've got around 4 TB of Steam, VR, and other games installed on this PC alone, and that's after paring down some of the installed content to initially keep them within a 3 TB drive, with far more games not currently installed that could be if space were not a factor,) so you're still potentially going to have to stick some games on an alternate medium, as you're currently experiencing with that 500 GB drive (which is probably faster than the 2 TB one.) There's definitely a use for huge, cheap HDDs for game and media storage. Then, note that the 2 TB MX300/Micron 1100 is actually a bit slower than you'd expect from a larger SSD, meaning you're ceding some of that performance advantage over an HDD for the sake of more SS storage, further clouding the rationale for putting games on such a device as opposed to a much cheaper HDD. I'm sure there's an ideal use-case for a large, modestly fast SATA SSD over an inexpensive (and potentially much more capacious) HDD, but most games don't need to be on the former. I'll reiterate that the best use-case is probably in a mobile device with physical space for only a single 2.5" drive, where it's far easier to justify an expensive SSD that has to hold the OS, games, and media.
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Jun 12, 2018 04:17
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"Most" games are fine on a HDD, but unless you plan on never buying a game again I'd swing for the SSD because you never know what you'll buy that you wish had more speed. Technically you could have a smaller SSD and transfer games to it as you learn what benefits but that's more computer janitoring than I'd like to perform at this point, especially with the I/O bottleneck of transferring between drives and the sometimes issues with installation registries or whatever. Honestly, a 1 TB is sufficient capacity for my current game usage so a cheap 2 TB ought to be more than sufficient for the near future. I'd probably go for it if I was building a new machine right now. e: and even with those performance issues noted earlier in the thread, it should still cream a regular HDD in random reads which is what you're most likely to care about during gameplay. isndl fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 06:11
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Unless I'm playing a game and the fans spin up, my HDD is the noisiest component in my system. Plus I have gigabit internet and torrenting something chockes the hard drive, so I had to set up the unfinished folder on one of my ssds so that it downloads there first and then transfers the file automatically to the HDD. That drive also chockes when downloading from steam or origin, but it only limits the download speed to 40-50 MB/s, while with torrents sometimes it starts making weird noises and grinds to a halt, then picks up again, then it stops again, and so on Anyway, for those reasons I'm looking to ditch my last remaining HDD and go SSD only
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Jun 12, 2018 07:49
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The "never plan on buying a game again" part is nonsensical, because if you have both SSDs and HDDs then moving games between them is trivial, even for as-yet-nonexistent ~future~ games. Transferring games between drives is supported directly within Steam at this point, and I can't think of any other games that have weird registry issues when moving between drives (seriously, we're not using Windows 98 anymore dude.) As previously mentioned, random reads are of course better on SSDs but that's not necessarily of benefit to any given game; it all depends on whether or not the game relies on a ton of tiny files or huge map/texture/whatever files (in which case an HDD would suffice.) It's as simple as installing a game on your HDD, seeing if it causes micro-stuttering (which would indicate random access latency) and then moving it over to the SSD if that's the case. I hate to beat a dead horse here, but it's not like there's much else being discussed in this thread. 3peat posted:Unless I'm playing a game and the fans spin up, my HDD is the noisiest component in my system. Plus I have gigabit internet and torrenting something chockes the hard drive, so I had to set up the unfinished folder on one of my ssds so that it downloads there first and then transfers the file automatically to the HDD. That drive also chockes when downloading from steam or origin, but it only limits the download speed to 40-50 MB/s, while with torrents sometimes it starts making weird noises and grinds to a halt, then picks up again, then it stops again, and so on Aside from the "noisy HDD" complaint (try headphones!  ) this is a good application of SS storage over a spinning HDD. That doesn't obviate the latter for capacious, cheap storage, but for dealing with heavily fragmented files by all means go SS.
Atomizer fucked around with this message at 07:53 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 07:49
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Atomizer posted:The "never plan on buying a game again" part is nonsensical, because if you have both SSDs and HDDs then moving games between them is trivial, even for as-yet-nonexistent ~future~ games. Transferring games between drives is supported directly within Steam at this point, and I can't think of any other games that have weird registry issues when moving between drives (seriously, we're not using Windows 98 anymore dude.) As previously mentioned, random reads are of course better on SSDs but that's not necessarily of benefit to any given game; it all depends on whether or not the game relies on a ton of tiny files or huge map/texture/whatever files (in which case an HDD would suffice.) It's as simple as installing a game on your HDD, seeing if it causes micro-stuttering (which would indicate random access latency) and then moving it over to the SSD if that's the case. Except it's not trivial, because amazingly enough not every game comes on Steam. Transferring a 60gb game to the SSD takes time, transferring it back takes even longer when you decide you want that space back for other things. Registry issues can happen because I'm not exclusively running games through Steam and I have some older titles that I still play. You might not think it's a problem, but I've dealt with juggling between a 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD for gaming and decided it's not worth the hassle myself, my next system would have a 1TB SSD as a minimum. Console ports tend to be optimized for HDD performance, but for PC gaming you have a lot of games that were never given that attention, or you end up installing mods which is almost certainly a pile of loose files thrown into the mix. So your value proposition is going to swing a lot based on your gaming habits - do you habitually buy the latest 60GB AAA title at release, or do you sink more hours into individual games and possibly extend their replayability with mods? My usage definitely trends towards the latter, I'm not maxed out with the 1TB I already have let alone approaching the 4TB you're using.
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Jun 12, 2018 09:15
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Having stuff on SSDs is good. It’s not life changing beyond the OS+browser, but it’s good. See: Subnautica load time and pop ins. You don’t have to overthink it too much.
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Jun 12, 2018 09:25
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HDD still have their place but applications is not one of them and games are fundamentally applications that mess around with data a lot. If you're talking about console load times not having much of a difference, it is because of the very weak CPU chokes on the data and can't load it any faster. It is a side effect of how games are loaded. The data files are compressed not only to save space but increase effective throughput as more data comes out of the CPU than it goes in. Console games also make a lot of effort optimising load times because they have to or else you are going to be sitting there for a very long time, a legacy effect from CD/DVD and the bottom of the bin 5200RPM drives. PC has always been pretty whatever when it comes to loading times. When I switched from HDD to SSD it was night and day as "Whatever" became meaningless. I have games that took tens of seconds to load to seemingly near instantly. Just treat games like an application and store it on the SSD. Arguing edge cases is a waste.
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Jun 12, 2018 11:52
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That 2TB Micron drive would make a great external drive or Time Machine backup
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Jun 12, 2018 12:59
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Atomizer posted:I just recently read an article comparing game loading times, and I wish I'd saved it. The gist of it was that most games didn't show a huge difference in load times between the SSDs and HDDs, save for one RPG or something that has very frequent level loads. This was either talking about consoles, or intensely wrong. The difference on an up to date PC is not trivial. The part where you could argue that a HD is still fine for games is that, for most titles, the most dramatic difference is during dedicated loads. (IE level load, or loading a save, times when the game is re-initializing lots of its memory.) When it's a non-interactive black screen with a loading bar, does it really make that much difference if you're waiting 10 seconds or 15? Some multiplayer games have a competitive advantage from loading in faster, but presumably if someone is going esports enough to care they can put that one game one their ssd. Atomizer posted:I hate to beat a dead horse here, but it's not like there's much else being discussed in this thread. Eh, ultimately this is a still a no right answer thing. The difference isn't so dramatic, and SSDs are not yet so cheap, to be a slam dunk for everyone. I didn't buy that Micron drive because I'm a cheap bastard and I don't need to spend $250 just for some marginal game performance.
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Jun 12, 2018 16:08
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Would be sick to stick one or two of those in a 15" laptop that can take two drives...
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Jun 12, 2018 17:41
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I bought the 2 TB SSD for my home storage and media application server that is running a number of VMs, containers, and decompressing and downloading files at about 30%+ duty cycle. On the 7200 RPM WD Black disk I use, it takes three times as long and with a rash of recent hard drive failures for myself I’d rather stick with SSDs even for lighter usage. This tends to also matter more with a higher bandwidth connection than if I was on some 10 Mbps download link. I only have two real uses for magnetic storage anymore - lowest cost bulk storage primarily for archival uses or for a Kafka broker that is specifically written to perform sequential read and write patterns matching rotational media. Life is too short to bother with slow computers unless cost is a big deal like when money is tight or you’re working at huge scale where compute resources are actually more expensive than people’s time arguing about the resource efficiency.
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Jun 12, 2018 22:07
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Just caught an article on these cheap, extra small nvme drives. Is there any notable hardware that only have the short form m.2 slots? https://amp.tomshardware.com/news/toshiba-rc100-nvme-ssd,37284.html Toshiba RC100 M.2 2242 480GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2 64-layer 3D BiCS TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) THN-RC10Z4800G8 , https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-168-037
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Jun 13, 2018 06:49
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LRADIKAL posted:Is there any notable hardware that only have the short form m.2 slots? Don't have any specific models on hand but probably a laptop of some sort. Thin & Light Ultrabooks are getting to be pretty popular these days.
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Jun 13, 2018 08:22
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Klyith posted:This was either talking about consoles, or intensely wrong. The difference on an up to date PC is not trivial. I saw that first article. Two things to note: only a single game was benchmarked, and look at the performance differences versus the prices of those media. I mean it doesn't surprise me that the Optane is the fastest, but it'd better be for $600! And the 960 Pro is $1200....  You certainly don't have to compare them to the 10 TB HDD (since none of the SSDs have anywhere near that capacity) so you could probably get the same level of performance from a $100 2 TB HDD. So then you end up with a several-second difference between the HDD and the nearest SSD; several second is bearable for a several-hundred-dollar price differential.That techreport article yields similar results. Sure, if you want to load Duke Nukem Forever (lol) levels twice as fast as an HDD, by all means put it on an SSD!  In the end, your last statement is what I've been trying to argue here: SSDs aren't inexpensive enough for everyone to just use them in place of all HDDs, especially when in the case of the 2 TB 2.5" HDD vs SSD the difference is triple the cost (or even quadruple if you consider that that HDD touches as low as $70 and the SSD normally goes for closer to $300.) You don't necessarily get triple/quadruple the value of going all-SS, but some people won't care about the cost and there are of course applications where it's worth it. Regarding the game loading times: I can totally understand if you want to cut down on game-stopping, loading-bar full level loads, but I was arguing that the biggest performance advantage of SSD gaming is when the game in question streams assets during gameplay, such as in competitive shooters that wait until the enemy pops up around a corner to load the models/textures (and an HDD becomes a liability.) necrobobsledder posted:I bought the 2 TB SSD for my home storage and media application server that is running a number of VMs, containers, and decompressing and downloading files at about 30%+ duty cycle. On the 7200 RPM WD Black disk I use, it takes three times as long and with a rash of recent hard drive failures for myself I’d rather stick with SSDs even for lighter usage. This tends to also matter more with a higher bandwidth connection than if I was on some 10 Mbps download link. HDDs are indeed good for archival purposes, but also, in one of my use cases, for storing multimedia for a Plex server. Outside of a many-client scenario (which doesn't even apply here due to limited upstream bandwidth,) HDDs are perfectly sufficient in terms of performance but also cost-effective given the vast storage requirements of serving HD video. LRADIKAL posted:Just caught an article on these cheap, extra small nvme drives. Is there any notable hardware that only have the short form m.2 slots? Some ultrabooks/ultraportables, I'm sure, have 2242 slots. I know some Chromebooks do (e.g. the Dell 13 (2015)) (albeit SATA only.) One upcoming device is the GPD Win 2, however again it appears to be SATA only and not NVMe. That's especially a shame considering there's a very limited selection of 2242 m.2 SSDs in the first place, particularly inexpensive ones >256 GB. I'm intending on settling for this one for ~$90, but I'd totally have been willing to go with that Toshiba for $155 (if it was SATA!) The main disadvantage of the RC100 appears to be that it's DRAMless, which reduces performance and lifespan, although the HMB feature should mitigate that somewhat. Also, the small 2242 size is enabled by the single-chip design, which is still an advantage even if there are few devices that require the shortest m.2 modules because anything that can fit a larger module almost always has the posts to fit shorter ones.
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Jun 13, 2018 09:27
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jfc just stop.
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Jun 13, 2018 09:41
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LRADIKAL posted:Just caught an article on these cheap, extra small nvme drives. Is there any notable hardware that only have the short form m.2 slots? I've seen a few Broadwell era machines with 32-64GB PCI-e ssds in 2242 slots acting as Intel RST cache drives (HP Probook 640 G1 springs to mind)
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Jun 13, 2018 15:00
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I just spent some time diagnosing a really obnoxious slowdown in linux and came to the conclusion that my NVMe is too loving fast. The slowdown was when my swap (on a 960 EVO) was full. I didn't even notice when I had 16GB of memory running effectively off my NVMe. Running out of it was like hitting a brick wall - everything just stops.
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Jun 13, 2018 19:05
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Harik posted:I just spent some time diagnosing a really obnoxious slowdown in linux and came to the conclusion that my NVMe is too loving fast.
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Jun 13, 2018 19:15
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peepsalot posted:Yeah NVMe swap is pretty great and I partitioned about half my 500GB 960 EVO NVME on my laptop for a while to supplement 16GB physical RAM which allowed me to do some particularly memory hungry tasks. I eventually ended up needing a little more disk space so I dropped it to only 128GB swap. I'm going to backup & resize my parts a bit to give myself 64gb of swap, because it's nice to spool up a VM without hitches.
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Jun 13, 2018 20:18
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Klyith posted:I didn't buy that Micron drive because I'm a cheap bastard 4 days later one of my HDDs kicks the bucket, motherfuck me now I'm sitting here thinking, if I had a big fuckin SSD I could re-do my storage system and be set for years
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Jun 16, 2018 07:28
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Klyith posted:4 days later one of my HDDs kicks the bucket, motherfuck me you should have bought a squirrel
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Jun 16, 2018 08:28
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My vSphere cluster is now on all-flash VSAN because why not. MX500 is love. MX500 is life.
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Jun 16, 2018 09:00
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Anime Schoolgirl posted:you should have bought a squirrel for it's superior caching strategy and ability to quickly identify my nuts when I'm being kicked in them?
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Jun 16, 2018 09:05
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Squirrel burying acorns with microSDs inserted would be pretty resilient storage
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Jun 16, 2018 09:19
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Retrieval could be tricky
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Jun 16, 2018 12:17
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Potato Salad posted:Squirrel burying acorns with microSDs inserted would be pretty resilient storage Throw your microSD card down a crevasse of an actual glacier.
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Jun 16, 2018 13:21
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Paint them in titanium dioxide and put em in orbit
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Jun 16, 2018 19:04
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Has anyone tried to RMA a Kingspec drive? They have an online warranty form, but it seems to have gone into the abyss.
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Jun 18, 2018 19:34
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