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CommonShore posted:https://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147674 Newegg.ca makes me think you're in Canada? If so, the posts above won't work for you. I'm not sure what the Canadian equivalent of Slickdeals is, but here's a reddit I dug up which has parts deals. Looks like they have the 1TB WD Blue for $150 which isn't bad in CAD. https://www.reddit.com/r/bapcsalescanada/ Otherwise either of the drives you linked will be fine. Prices are fairly similar to those linked by the two posters above once you convert from USD to CAD.
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Feb 18, 2019 21:58
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I need to buy a new SSD relatively quickly since my old one died out of the blue. I assume the OP's recommended Crucial MX500 is still a good value? Looks like it's one of the cheapest options for me at about 80 euros for the 500GB model. I'd sort of prefer to move away from Crucial but Samsung's 850 Evo gets a bit too pricey for me at that size. Also, I have a backup in the form of a Windows created image of my current installation. Is there a way to reinstall that whole pile onto a new SSD without the hassle of having to reinstall everything and losing files? Most of my files are in the cloud but there's some which were only stored locally and backed up to my external drive by Windows then now and again. Note that I can't access the old SSD at all so I can't use a third party tool to clone it anymore.
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Feb 19, 2019 14:27
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Ruflux posted:I need to buy a new SSD relatively quickly since my old one died out of the blue. I assume the OP's recommended Crucial MX500 is still a good value? Looks like it's one of the cheapest options for me at about 80 euros for the 500GB model. I'd sort of prefer to move away from Crucial but Samsung's 850 Evo gets a bit too pricey for me at that size. The Adata 800 is often cheaper and is within the same general performance range, but has 2 years less warranty. That's currently the thread's recommendation for people looking to save money. quote:Also, I have a backup in the form of a Windows created image of my current installation. Is there a way to reinstall that whole pile onto a new SSD without the hassle of having to reinstall everything and losing files? Most of my files are in the cloud but there's some which were only stored locally and backed up to my external drive by Windows then now and again. Note that I can't access the old SSD at all so I can't use a third party tool to clone it anymore. Instructions here: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-make-full-backup-windows-10#restore_system_image_windows10 Looks pretty automatic. If you have access to another PC, all you need is an 8gb USB stick to make the Win10 installer.
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Feb 19, 2019 14:49
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Right, thanks. I figured the Windows installation should be relatively painless but I somehow failed to find confirmation. As it turns out, WD's offerings aren't even available here for some reason and the Adata costs about the same at 500GB (and given I was bumping against the limit with my 256GB Crucial M4 I basically have to upgrade) so Crucial it is. Luckily as I understand the M4 is the last one they made with random chance of dying from sudden power loss. Now if only Windows had finished its backup cycle so I didn't have to go back a month for all my files, but oh well. I'll probably be backing up difficult-to-replace stuff manually now too just in case. Running the full cycle weekly is just overkill because it's painfully slow to do with my external drive.
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Feb 19, 2019 15:13
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Ruflux posted:Now if only Windows had finished its backup cycle so I didn't have to go back a month for all my files, but oh well. I'll probably be backing up difficult-to-replace stuff manually now too just in case. Running the full cycle weekly is just overkill because it's painfully slow to do with my external drive. You should look at changing to an incremental backup program so that you can do weekly backups of the poo poo that matters, and only do the full image every couple of months. The windows system image utility isn't a great backup method. The main advantage is keeping the OS setup and all installed programs if you need to restore, which is nice but probably not an irrecoverable loss for most people. If it's at the cost of more frequent backups that's not a great tradeoff. There is a backup thread which is mostly talk about cloud backups & professional scale stuff but has good info.
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Feb 19, 2019 19:18
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How poo poo is QLC? I'm looking at picking up an 1TB drive and an Intel 660p NVMe drive is about the same price as a WD Blue SATA one around here. I'd expect the NVMe drive to be a lot faster when it comes to linear reads/writes, but in this review the 660p looks like rear end when it comes to random reads/writes. This would be mainly for putting games on.
TheFluff fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Feb 20, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 02:03
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TheFluff posted:How poo poo is QLC? I'm looking at picking up an 1TB drive and an Intel 660p NVMe drive is about the same price as a WD Blue SATA one around here. I'd expect the NVMe drive to be a lot faster when it comes to linear reads/writes, but in this review the 660p looks like rear end when it comes to random reads/writes. This would be mainly for putting games on. I wouldn't use one for a boot drive or to store important data, but as a Steam drive? 
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Feb 20, 2019 02:11
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TheFluff posted:How poo poo is QLC? I'm looking at picking up an 1TB drive and an Intel 660p NVMe drive is about the same price as a WD Blue SATA one around here. I'd expect the NVMe drive to be a lot faster when it comes to linear reads/writes, but in this review the 660p looks like rear end when it comes to random reads/writes. This would be mainly for putting games on. The 660p is probably best described as "adequate," and that you're likely not going to be able to tell what kind of SSD you're using once it's installed in your system. I'd still suggest a good TLC drive like the SX8200 for your OS, but the 660p (or the Crucial P1) is perfect for bulk storage (media, games, etc.) QLC is technically inferior to TLC, but it should be good enough for most people and you're not likely to experience the raw QLC speeds by exhausting the caching in all but the worst-case scenarios. These QLC drives at their best are roughly comparable in performance to [lower-end] TLC NVMe SSDs, and at their worst are as slow as SATA SSDs or even HDDs (the sequential speeds may be as low as 100-150 MB/s,) but you're most likely going to be satisfied with the performance, especially for games. The real problem with it is that QLC should be cheaper than other options, but it generally isn't, on top of the fact that QLC should enable higher-capacity drives, but is still only available in typical 500 GB - 2 TB options. The 2 TB has been as low as ~$250 after tax & shipping, which makes it the best deal if you need that much storage, but the other 2 capacities haven't been priced as competitively. The 500 GB in particular would probably need to be ~$60-65 (which it has approached, especially if you can take advantage of those first-time Google Express codes) since the 480 GB SX8200 is frequently as low as $75 (via Adata's storefront on Rakuten, with frequent discount codes,) and that's a better drive period, never mind the fact that a 500 GB QLC drive isn't really that useful in the first place. As far as your specific scenario, the similar pricing on 1 TB drives is what I'm getting at above, where I'd almost suggest going with the WD since it's TLC, but the major difference is the interface. If you're lucky enough to only have to deal with SATA/NVMe combo slots, then it doesn't really matter, but if you're at all concerned about future repurposing of your hardware, this is something to keep in mind. NVMe will probably be more universal in the future, with SATA deprecated, however SATA-USB adapters/enclosures are cheaper and more available, so you could more easily convert a SATA SSD into fast external storage.
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Feb 20, 2019 09:04
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BIG HEADLINE posted:I wouldn't use one for a boot drive or to store important data, but as a Steam drive? Why not important data? As long as it's backed up!
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Feb 20, 2019 11:03
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TheFluff posted:I'd expect the NVMe drive to be a lot faster when it comes to linear reads/writes, but in this review the 660p looks like rear end when it comes to random reads/writes. This would be mainly for putting games on. It is poo poo for server grade workloads, and those tests are 15k user database workloads. Likewise, an IBM System Z DB server is quite poo poo at running Crysis. Extrapolating from a test to a different job is dumb, don't do it. QLC is much worse than TLC because it's noticeably slower to read, not just for writes. If the drive was 100% QLC it would be down in the HDD performance zone. They solve this by using a lot of QLC in SLC mode as both a write cache (like previous drives) and for general storage of in-demand data. The more predictable your workload, the more the drive behaves like SLC instead of QLC. Desktop apps and video games are very predictable. Large databases are not. That said, I agree with Atomizer in that I wouldn't buy a QLC drive until I was getting some kind of discount vs TLC for it. The 660p is cheaper than other NVMe drives, but even that is more marketing gimmick than advantage. I'd rather have a big QLC drive on SATA.
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Feb 20, 2019 13:12
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Klyith posted:If the drive was 100% QLC it would be down in the HDD performance zone. They solve this by using a lot of QLC in SLC mode as both a write cache (like previous drives) and for general storage of in-demand data. Well, it would still have way faster random access.
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Feb 20, 2019 13:28
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I went for a 2TB EX950 for OS (kinda wish I got the Corsair), and a secondary 2TB 660p. I've read the biggest drive has enough cache for it to not be an issue. I did get it at the absolute minimum price though (as mentioned above) so it's hard to be mad if I should below average. It was $300 AUD cheaper than the next cheapest 2TB NVMe
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Feb 20, 2019 14:04
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesJYKkhHMA Summary: Windows installed in 5min on NVME, 5:32 on SATA SSD, 8:37 on SSHD and 12:47 on HDD, the rest of the tests have similar results. Is this a good video for judging SSD performance? My PC's SSD is a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO on a SATA 2 interface, I'm thinking about upgrading the interface. I think I have two options, either a SATA 3 PCIe card, or a NVME PCIe card and a new SSD. Cost wise, the smarter upgrade would be a SATA 3 interface card, but with an NVME upgrade I could use the new SSD on a future motherboard so it's not a real loss. Performance wise, just going by the youtube video, I doubt I would see much difference between SATA3 and NVME, if anything my old CPU and GPU (Phenom II 840 and Radeon 7970) are probably the bottlenecks. My only goals are to improve Windows boot/update times and how fast Chrome launches since I don't game a whole lot and don't plan to install games onto my SSD.
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Feb 20, 2019 17:37
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Klyith posted:It is poo poo for server grade workloads, and those tests are 15k user database workloads. Likewise, an IBM System Z DB server is quite poo poo at running Crysis. Extrapolating from a test to a different job is dumb, don't do it. Good explanation, thanks!
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Feb 20, 2019 17:50
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Crotch Fruit posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesJYKkhHMA Read times are more important than write times for your purposes (as you're going to be doing a whole lot more reads every day than writes), and random reads are where you'll see the biggest gains over HDDs. NVMe has the largest bandwidth, but I doubt it'd be bottlenecking you over the baseline read/write performance for simple boot times and web browsing. You might shave off a few seconds on launching Windows from a cold boot but nothing particularly significant. As a general rule, SATA performance is perfectly fine for consumer workloads. NVMe is better, but usually not worth the price premium for the rare occasion that you do saturate your bandwidth (do you really care if you save 30 seconds installing Windows once or twice in the lifespan of that drive?). If you can get the NVMe drive at the same price as the SATA drive then go for it, but keep in mind that you also need the appropriate slot on the motherboard which you probably don't have if you're trying to upgrade and old machine.
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Feb 20, 2019 18:12
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Crotch Fruit posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesJYKkhHMA You'd probably be better off keeping your current SSD and upgrading your CPU instead. Even a Ryzen 2200G would blow your current CPU away. Also keep in mind that booting from NVMe drives requires firmware support and I don't think any AM2 or AM3 boards support that so you couldn't use an NVMe drive for Windows even if you wanted to with your current system.
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Feb 20, 2019 18:15
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Just to be sure, my BIOS would not treat an NVME card as a controller? Like if I install a SATA RAID card, it will have it's own BIOS/ROM to boot from, but an NVME card will not? I'm somewhat OK with the idea of a slower boot time if it would mean having faster loading of programs and a more modern SSD for when/if I finally upgrade my ancient CPU and motherboard, but it sounds like I would not be able to put my OS on NVME with my current BIOS based system. I'm still tempted to get a SATA3 card since it might be a tiny bit faster than the SATA2 interface (I doubt I would really notice it) and the right card would allow me to have eSATA ports. I have a dock that can use either eSATA or USB 2, I currently use it with a bracket that makes an internal SATA into an external SATA, but I don't believe it supports hot swapping.
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Feb 20, 2019 22:33
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It won't boot from nvme, unless you can find or create a modded bios.
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Feb 20, 2019 22:53
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BurritoJustice posted:I went for a 2TB EX950 for OS (kinda wish I got the Corsair), and a secondary 2TB 660p. I've read the biggest drive has enough cache for it to not be an issue. I did get it at the absolute minimum price though (as mentioned above) so it's hard to be mad if I should below average. It was $300 AUD cheaper than the next cheapest 2TB NVMe Just to emphasize what I was getting at with the 660p: the 2 TB is the one I recommend because there's nothing close to it in price (the WD Blue was next cheapest at $330 the last time I checked.) The 1 TB version is iffy, I've seen it around $120 but that's around what decent TLC drives (e.g. the oft-mentioned SX8200) go for. The 500 GB version isn't really worth your time. Systems with 2 m.2 slots are perfect candidates for a [high-end NVMe for the OS] combo with a 660p 2 TB for bulk storage. Keep in mind what I said, though, about the interface differences, because you may very well run into slots that are one or the other, which will narrow down your selection. Crotch Fruit posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BesJYKkhHMA That's actually a pretty good representation for the performance differences between those media. SSDs will always be faster than HDDs, and for most people SATA will be fast enough (and that's not even a good SATA SSD that he's using!,) but as I've said recently if the price is right by all means go with NVMe (system compatibility permitting, as above.) The difference between the two HDDs is less clear, because he appears to be using 3.5" models that I'm less familiar with (I'm not sure if the desktop FireCuda is SMR or PMR which would impact density and thus performance, and who knows how old that 500 GB Barracuda is and what model it is) but in general you'd expect an SSHD with some NAND flash to be a little more performant than a regular HDD. The most significant performance difference in daily operations will be in random access, which is why you never want to run your OS on an HDD anymore.
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Feb 21, 2019 08:13
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GRINDCORE MEGGIDO posted:It won't boot from nvme, unless you can find or create a modded bios. I've been thinking about this, wouldn't it be possible in windows to create boot partition on secondary disk (e.g. tiny thumb drive) and store the windows partition on the NVMe drive? Has anyone tried this or can come up with any reason why it wouldn't work?
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Feb 21, 2019 12:17
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makere posted:I've been thinking about this, wouldn't it be possible in windows to create boot partition on secondary disk (e.g. tiny thumb drive) and store the windows partition on the NVMe drive? This is absolutely possible, but it's stupid and fragile. It will absolutely be slower to boot than a SATA SSD, because loading the NVMe-aware EFI is an added step. And it's a good way to end up with a non-bootable system the second something goes wrong. On linux, where you can spread chunks of the OS onto different disks, I think it would be possible to put /boot on a SATA drive and rest of the important stuff on the NVMe. Windows isn't so flexible. But again, what's the point? If you have an application that actually takes advantage of NVMe speed, put that on the fast drive. Finally there's the part where putting an NVMe drive into a system old enough that it can't boot from it is a dumb way to spend money. Buy a cheaper SATA SSD if you don't have one already, save your money toward a new PC.
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Feb 21, 2019 14:18
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I don't have any plans to not ever have a big platter drive in my system, sure my 500GB SATA SSD is big enough but I want more space. I think putting the boot files on a different drive is risky, dangerous, and slow to boot, but on the other hand the windows installer has done similar things if you leave multiple hard drives in the system during the install. I still think it's stupid, just not completely wreckless and dangerous. I might look into it further if I find a good deal on an NVME SSD mainly just because I think it might be a fun project. Money wise, the NVME SSD wouldn't be a waste since it could work in a future system, and the NVME to PCIE adapter is fairly cheap. Upgrading my motherboard CPU and RAM is the correct answer, but that costs a lot more than an NVME SSD, which I would also want if I upgraded the board.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:16
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Chrome will still lag on that chip, test it with a ramdrive. I ran one for a while on my phenom 2. It's just weak.
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Feb 21, 2019 19:36
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I just ordered an IDE SSD (Transcend PSD330) to replace an aging 40 GB 3.5" hard drive in a 533 MHz VIA Cyrix3-powered embedded PC that runs an old piece of scientific equipment. The embedded PC runs Windows XP SP1. It's a goofy SSD - draws about 1.2W and is completely powered off the IDE connector. http://us.transcend-info.com/products/images/modelpic/512/Product%20Sheet_PSD330_520_1228.pdf Any suggestions and or hopes and prayers?
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Feb 25, 2019 20:38
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Enjoy being the guinea pig! Follow up with a trip report, and maybe give us video of XP's performance on an SSD. EDIT: Does the old 40GB drive stay on 24/7? If so, you'll want to clone while it's running, in case you shut it down and it doesn't spin back up.
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Feb 25, 2019 20:47
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TITTIEKISSER69 posted:Enjoy being the guinea pig! Follow up with a trip report, and maybe give us video of XP's performance on an SSD. The 40GB drive does run continuously, but the instrument had spent quite a bit of time powered down (sometimes months at a time) over the last 14-15 years (date on the drive is May 2004). The power supply (more of a DC-DC converter) failed recently and so the drive was down regardless. Loss of the drive would be catastrophic, since no backup or system image exists and the software and drivers to run the instrument aren't just lying around. Plan is to swap the power supplies with something comparable, image the 40 GB drive, and then bring everyone back up by sometime next week.
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Feb 25, 2019 21:00
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Naffer posted:replace an aging 40 GB 3.5" hard drive in a 533 MHz VIA Cyrix3-powered embedded PC that runs an old piece of scientific equipment. The embedded PC runs Windows XP SP1. Naffer posted:Loss of the drive would be catastrophic, since no backup or system image exists and the software and drivers to run the instrument aren't just lying around. The only way this could get better is if the person who is in charge of this piece of equipment is the kind of person who will come back and say, "It worked fine before Naffer touched it!" if anything goes wrong.
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Feb 25, 2019 21:38
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I would seriously making imaging the PC the first step, before even shutting it down. Get that image backed up first before anything else, at this point a shutdown runs the risk of catastrophic loss.
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Feb 25, 2019 22:52
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It sounds like the power supply is dead, so doing it pre-shutdown is out the window. That said, I agree that if you can get the HDD out and can connect it to a normal computer, you should do so and pull an image off it ASAP. Last thing you want is to swap in a new power supply and find out that it's faulty and power-surge-kills the system when you turn it on the first time.
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Feb 25, 2019 23:07
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Speaking of the product itself,Naffer posted:It's a goofy SSD - draws about 1.2W and is completely powered off the IDE connector. I don't think that's too crazy -- you could do the same thing with Compact Flash cards, using just a physical adapter to plug them into an ATA header. The cheap adapters didn't even bother with a supplementary power plug, and they worked fine as long as the card was the only thing on the cable. Ancient buses were happy to push lots more power around, compared to today's. The thing that draws all the power in a normal SSD is the controller. Since this thing is a custom job, and only pushes data at a fraction of what a SATA3 or NVMe SSD is capable of, I can totally believe it. (Sequential read performance isn't comparable because it's capped by ATA, but the random 4k read is awful by SSD standards. Like worse than 1st generation SSDs from 2012. That's the weedy little <1W controller right there. Still 20-50x better than a HDD though!) Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if that thing actually was a souped-up compact flash controller in a fancy box.
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Feb 25, 2019 23:56
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Naffer posted:I just ordered an IDE SSD (Transcend PSD330) to replace an aging 40 GB 3.5" hard drive in a 533 MHz VIA Cyrix3-powered embedded PC that runs an old piece of scientific equipment. The embedded PC runs Windows XP SP1. It's a goofy SSD - draws about 1.2W and is completely powered off the IDE connector. OWC makes the Aura legacy
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Feb 26, 2019 02:01
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DrDork posted:It sounds like the power supply is dead, so doing it pre-shutdown is out the window. Yup, it's down already. Here's a photo of the old power supply (above) and a replacement I sourced (below). Takes in 24V DC and makes 12V, 5 V and 3.3V just like an ATX power supply. The old one is truly smoked. It pegs my bench power supply at very low input voltages. My hope is that it didn't take anything (like the hard drive) with it.
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Feb 26, 2019 02:23
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Klyith posted:Speaking of the product itself, You can still get these things; I see one at Monoprice for $5. One of those and a CF card is probably sufficient for his application, actually.
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Feb 26, 2019 07:11
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Atomizer posted:You can still get these things; I see one at Monoprice for $5. One of those and a CF card is probably sufficient for his application, actually. I'm skeptical about the write lifespan of CF cards, USB sticks, SD cards, basically all the cheap removable flash drives. If it's some kind of expensive scientific instrument, better to do it the right way IMO. If you aren't booting an OS from it, and it's only temporary storage, CF etc are fine of course. There's this product niche for devices which emulate a 3.5" floppy disk drive (same connectors on the back, same mechanical form factor) and provide sockets for a CF or SD card where the floppy opening would have been. The controller built into it accomplishes the interesting job of electrically emulating a FDD and redirecting the accesses to a floppy disk image file stored on the flash media. Very useful for anyone maintaining old equipment that had a floppy built in for data interchange, such as oscilloscopes which could save traces to a floppy, or old MIDI keyboards that used floppies to load and save things.
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Feb 26, 2019 11:02
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Klyith posted:Speaking of the product itself, Atomizer posted:You can still get these things; I see one at Monoprice for $5. One of those and a CF card is probably sufficient for his application, actually. I had actually thought about this option, but in the end convenience won out over saving $20-30 since this transcend "SSD" could be sourced directly from one of our approved suppliers. I hadn't noticed the abysmal rated random read and write speeds. Still, it should feel like a dream compared to a 15 year old 40GB drive. Bob Morales posted:OWC makes the Aura legacy
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Feb 26, 2019 13:42
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We have these industrial PC’s that run Windows from a Cfast card which is like a compact flash card but different interface, and I think longer lasting memory
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Feb 26, 2019 14:53
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DrDork posted:It sounds like the power supply is dead, so doing it pre-shutdown is out the window. Update 1: Disk successfully imaged. I hacked off the connectors on the old power supply and spliced them into the new one. The system now boots up with the old drive in. Plan: I'm going to leave the old drive in the system for a few days until the SSD gets here, then move the image over and try to get rolling.
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Feb 26, 2019 16:56
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Atomizer posted:You can still get these things; I see one at Monoprice for $5. One of those and a CF card is probably sufficient for his application, actually. Yeah but then did you look at the prices for the CF card itself? Those aren't cheap these days. Naffer posted:I had actually thought about this option, but in the end convenience won out over saving $20-30 since this transcend "SSD" could be sourced directly from one of our approved suppliers. I hadn't noticed the abysmal rated random read and write speeds. Still, it should feel like a dream compared to a 15 year old 40GB drive. Nah you made the right choice. Assuming your science instrument is writing data it collects to the drive, you want something more robust than a random flash card. And that drive isn't stupidly priced for a low-demand specialized product. Now you have to worry about is all the caps on the VIA mobo drying out and needing to be replaced. 
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Feb 26, 2019 17:23
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Naffer posted:Update 1: Great to hear! My dad works with a ton of very expensive scientific instrumentation, and the number of them that fall into the category of "if the 10+ year old budget computer hardware in this thing died, it would be nearly impossible to revive this piece of $50k+ equipment" is astounding.
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Feb 26, 2019 17:29
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I once worked customer support for a video card maker, and one of the guys got a call from a university needing Windows 95 drivers for the old video card in the PC that was hooked up to a multi-million dollar electron microscope.
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Feb 26, 2019 18:35
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