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priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.
The cache versions of the 32/64GB were very cheap a while back when they were getting cleared out but lol who needs those you can’t even load a AAA game on that anymore.

Cheap as the cost for a nvme drive not even really cheap cost per GB.

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BIG HEADLINE
Jun 13, 2006

"Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"
Yeah, expect I meant the 240GB+ 900 and 905p drives. Those won't get discounted. I'm surprised the 32 and 64GB sticks didn't find their way into cereal boxes.

WhyteRyce
Dec 30, 2001

The 64 is odd because I can't imagine there is a whole lot of overlap between people that waited for the second round release because 32GB wasn't enough and those that didn't want to pay for 128GB

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.
I think there were 16GB ones too which are really ridiculous, probably just meant for some laptop oems to speed boost cache their 5400rpm hdds.

They were handy cheap nvme endpoints though (just x2 and had some issues dying extremely frequently)

priznat fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jan 17, 2021

WhyteRyce
Dec 30, 2001

There was an official formula used to determine whether to use 16 or 32 GB for caching but I don’t know who it was derived

It was funny seeing OEMs label their systems as having 20GB!!!! of memory*

Saukkis
May 16, 2003

Unless I'm on the inside curve pointing straight at oncoming traffic the high beams stay on and I laugh at your puny protest flashes.
I am Most Important Man. Most Important Man in the World.

priznat posted:

I think there were 16GB ones too which are really ridiculous, probably just meant for some laptop oems to speed boost cache their 5400rpm hdds.

They were handy cheap nvme endpoints though (just x2 and had some issues dying extremely frequently)

I considered using a pair of those as the OS RAID for my home server, because they were the cheapest NVMe drives in existence. Pretty much the only reason I didn't do that was that I couldn't verify that it wouldn't disable any of the SATA ports.

site
Apr 6, 2007

Trans pride, Worldwide
Bitch
Sorry if this isn't the right thread for HDDs but I'm looking for an external to keep for storage, comics and movies and the like, not too heavy on the writes after I get everything backed up. Costco is advertising a seagate 8tb for 140 right now, but I was wondering what the word is on Seagate drives? Reliable for long term? Also I like to plug in my current external into my Blu Ray player's usb 2 port to play stuff, is a usb 3 port backwards compatible so I could do that?

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

site posted:

Sorry if this isn't the right thread for HDDs but I'm looking for an external to keep for storage, comics and movies and the like, not too heavy on the writes after I get everything backed up. Costco is advertising a seagate 8tb for 140 right now, but I was wondering what the word is on Seagate drives? Reliable for long term? Also I like to plug in my current external into my Blu Ray player's usb 2 port to play stuff, is a usb 3 port backwards compatible so I could do that?

yes seagate is fine, and yes USB is both backwards and forwards compatible

site
Apr 6, 2007

Trans pride, Worldwide
Bitch
Okay ty!

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost
I wanted to use Optane SSDs for swap space or as a L1 cache of sorts for my MLC and TLC SSD because Optane's read/write cycles are pretty drat good, but evidently adaptive caching is still patented and tech patents suck in practice. So goodbye to that random project anyway.

LaptopGun
Sep 2, 2006

All I'm going to get out of him is a snappy one-liner and, if I'm real lucky, a brand new nickname.
Samsung finally announced the still TLC based 870 EVO

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16433/samsung-introduces-870-evo-sata-ssds

BIG HEADLINE
Jun 13, 2006

"Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"
Yeah, I don't know why everyone's all "but, but, we thought you'd price them competitively!"

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

BIG HEADLINE posted:

Yeah, I don't know why everyone's all "but, but, we thought you'd price them competitively!"

Why would they bother to drop prices? The 860 Evo 1tb is flagged with "#1 Best Seller" on amazon despite being $10-15 more than other TLC drives.

Until people stop thinking that they need to pay more for samsung -- and keep in mind a lot of people who build their own PCs still think samsung is the only option -- they have no incentive.

LaptopGun
Sep 2, 2006

All I'm going to get out of him is a snappy one-liner and, if I'm real lucky, a brand new nickname.
A similar 870 article on a different website also echoed the MSRP’s came out higher than the author expected. Maybe Samsung PR set a somewhat lower price expectation that didn’t happen when the real world got involved. Or comedy option tech sites got used to seeing prices for QLC drives.

The only reason I bought the 860 EVO last year was because you guys highlighted a really good sale and it was slightly better for my situation. You’re absolutely right there’s a Samsung tax..

ijyt
Apr 10, 2012


Looking forward to a price drop on 860 EVO's. Snagged a 4TB for £350 but they've all shot up back to £520+ and I'm honestly sick of my 4TB HDD.

Ihmemies
Oct 6, 2012

I bought a 3.84TB Samsung PM983. It was 540€ so around £480.

M.2 22x110mm form factor TLC ssd. It should be fast enough to replace my 3TB spinner from 2013. That one is slow.. and super noisy. #1 noisiest component in my pc.

QVO is slow as balls and I didn't want to spend on regular sata ssd:s anymore in case they become way too slow in next 5+ years.

Has anyone used Samsung's business oriented ssd's? PM983 at least has onboard capacitors to let the drive write the cache to disk even in case of power failure.

Rexxed
May 1, 2010

Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

Ihmemies posted:

I bought a 3.84TB Samsung PM983. It was 540€ so around £480.

M.2 22x110mm form factor TLC ssd. It should be fast enough to replace my 3TB spinner from 2013. That one is slow.. and super noisy. #1 noisiest component in my pc.

QVO is slow as balls and I didn't want to spend on regular sata ssd:s anymore in case they become way too slow in next 5+ years.

Has anyone used Samsung's business oriented ssd's? PM983 at least has onboard capacitors to let the drive write the cache to disk even in case of power failure.

I've got a Samsung SM953 480GB I got on ebay. It doesn't fit my main PC motherboard because it's 110mm but the motherboard can only handle 80mm. I put it in a PCI riser card and it's in a Dell Optiplex 990 as the boot disk. That's a Sandy Bridge system but Dell put out a BIOS update a couple of years ago that allow it to boot from PCI. Anyway, it works great and has been really reliable. The lack of drive wear shows it'll live longer than I will.

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week
I remember the knock on samsung server / biz NVMe drives a while back, when excess-stock semi-grey-market drives were showing up for competitive prices, was that they didn't use the same nvme driver as the consumer drives. And the generic MS nvme driver, while totally functional, didn't perform as well. I bet that's not a big deal anymore, the current consumer drives don't have a special driver anymore right?

And the other question is whether you'll get warranty service for these drives if you got them from ebay or a source that wasn't supposed to be selling them to regular people. That would make me a bit leery of dropping big bucks on one.


OTOH the onboard caps are cool, and write endurance is infinity. Server class drives are less optimized for power-off data retention than consumer ones, but that's no big deal unless you take a 6 month vacation.

Ihmemies
Oct 6, 2012

I bought it from https://www.jacob.de - I bought a b.die memory kit from them in 2017 and they still seem to be around so they can:t be that bad! Even many shops in Finland sold those, but the prices in Germany were over 100€ cheaper.

I guess I have to get a 22x110mm heatsink though, apparently those drives run quite hot (they probably don't have power saving features).

BIG HEADLINE
Jun 13, 2006

"Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"

Ihmemies posted:

I bought it from https://www.jacob.de - I bought a b.die memory kit from them in 2017 and they still seem to be around so they can:t be that bad! Even many shops in Finland sold those, but the prices in Germany were over 100€ cheaper.

I guess I have to get a 22x110mm heatsink though, apparently those drives run quite hot (they probably don't have power saving features).

The only thing on the drive that could benefit from a heatsink would be the controller chip. The NAND is designed to run hot.

movax
Aug 30, 2008

Rexxed posted:

I've got a Samsung SM953 480GB I got on ebay. It doesn't fit my main PC motherboard because it's 110mm but the motherboard can only handle 80mm. I put it in a PCI riser card and it's in a Dell Optiplex 990 as the boot disk. That's a Sandy Bridge system but Dell put out a BIOS update a couple of years ago that allow it to boot from PCI. Anyway, it works great and has been really reliable. The lack of drive wear shows it'll live longer than I will.

Whaaaaaaaa? I doubt there’s an NVMe boot update for my P8P67, but now I’m going to go check...

PirateBob
Jun 14, 2003
I've just connected my old storage hdd after running my PC with only an ssd for a few days. Blissful silence. The hdd is loud as balls, even when not in use. This sucks. If I had money I'd replace it with a huge ssd.

Is there a way to manually switch a hdd off/on from inside Windows?

Geemer
Nov 4, 2010



PirateBob posted:

I've just connected my old storage hdd after running my PC with only an ssd for a few days. Blissful silence. The hdd is loud as balls, even when not in use. This sucks. If I had money I'd replace it with a huge ssd.

Is there a way to manually switch a hdd off/on from inside Windows?

You can change your power plan. In the advanced power settings, there's a setting for turning off hard disks after an amount of inactivity. You could set this to a very low value.
Downside of this is that Windows will need to spin up the drive if anything thinks it needs to access it and the program that's trying to access will straight-up freeze and be deemed unresponsive until the drive is spun up.

endlessmonotony
Nov 4, 2009

by Fritz the Horse
There's also just silicone washers for the screws for a partial solution.

PirateBob
Jun 14, 2003
Tempted to just buy another SSD and use it for storage and store less stuff. Are SSD prices likely to fall anytime soon?

Rexxed
May 1, 2010

Dis is amazing!
I gotta try dis!

PirateBob posted:

Tempted to just buy another SSD and use it for storage and store less stuff. Are SSD prices likely to fall anytime soon?

It's hard to say for certain but I'd imagine they're going to hold around that $100 for 1TB price for a bit (plus or minus 20 bucks). Prices were much higher just a few years ago when flash memory production wasn't keeping up. Now that it's doing better I imagine covid related shortages will keep things constant for a while.

BIG HEADLINE
Jun 13, 2006

"Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"
RAM is supposedly going up in price "soonish," and the Venn Diagram of NAND and RAM makers is more or less a single circle; even though the processes differ, all the best SSDs use DRAM cache and there's already a history of DRAM cartels gouging and colluding.

SSDs in the 1-2TB range are about as low as they can get now, save maybe $10-20 here and there. 4TB+ drives are better than they were but still not great.

If you were considering getting a 2x16 or 2x32 DRAM kit, now's probably the last chance to get the former for ~$200 and the latter for ~$300. I expect they'll soon be $300 and $4-500, respectively. Make sure your board is QVLed for 32GB sticks or has a BIOS to support them first, though.

BIG HEADLINE fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jan 24, 2021

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

PirateBob posted:

The hdd is loud as balls, even when not in use.

If a HDD makes a lot of noise like that, it's generally because your case is resonating with the vibration of the drive. Sometimes even outside the case -- I've had PCs on wood floors where it was the floor that was producing sound, and putting something soft under the case to break that vibration stopped it.

There's ways to silence HDDs and do vibration isolation but that'll depend on your case. (Recent Corsair cases for example have really crappy HDD trays, so your only option is gonna be to make your own suspension setup or something. I have a corsair case for a guest / secondary PC, that's the one that I have to put a towel under to not produce a constant hum.)


As a side note, 5400 RPM drives are quieter in operation than 7200 RPM ones, and once you have enough SSD space for all your programs, games, and other "live data" you don't really care about HDD speed as much. A 5400 HDD is fine for videos, pictures, music, and other media etc. The crazy data density of modern drives means 5400s aren't even that steep a performance loss in sequential read/write.

PirateBob
Jun 14, 2003

Klyith posted:

If a HDD makes a lot of noise like that, it's generally because your case is resonating with the vibration of the drive. Sometimes even outside the case -- I've had PCs on wood floors where it was the floor that was producing sound, and putting something soft under the case to break that vibration stopped it.

There's ways to silence HDDs and do vibration isolation but that'll depend on your case. (Recent Corsair cases for example have really crappy HDD trays, so your only option is gonna be to make your own suspension setup or something. I have a corsair case for a guest / secondary PC, that's the one that I have to put a towel under to not produce a constant hum.)


As a side note, 5400 RPM drives are quieter in operation than 7200 RPM ones, and once you have enough SSD space for all your programs, games, and other "live data" you don't really care about HDD speed as much. A 5400 HDD is fine for videos, pictures, music, and other media etc. The crazy data density of modern drives means 5400s aren't even that steep a performance loss in sequential read/write.

I exaggerated about "loud as balls". I've just become more sensitive to noise, and now that I have a new PC which is practically inaudible during idle/light tasks (thanks Scythe), the HDD stands out. There's no vibration as far as I can tell. It's a 5400rpm. There's just this constant whooshing, a kind of mechanical noise pollution I'd rather banish from my soundscape. :)

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO
Feb 28, 1985


PirateBob posted:

I exaggerated about "loud as balls". I've just become more sensitive to noise, and now that I have a new PC which is practically inaudible during idle/light tasks (thanks Scythe), the HDD stands out. There's no vibration as far as I can tell. It's a 5400rpm. There's just this constant whooshing, a kind of mechanical noise pollution I'd rather banish from my soundscape. :)

Couple years ago I put all my spinners into a Nas and put it into a cupboard. You could try hdd power switch bays maybe, or drive enclosures like the scythe quiet drive.

But Imo the easiest most effective way to get rid of noise is just not have it happen in your vicinity. I just use SSD drives now locally.

GRINDCORE MEGGIDO fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Jan 24, 2021

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

PirateBob posted:

I exaggerated about "loud as balls". I've just become more sensitive to noise, and now that I have a new PC which is practically inaudible during idle/light tasks (thanks Scythe), the HDD stands out. There's no vibration as far as I can tell. It's a 5400rpm. There's just this constant whooshing, a kind of mechanical noise pollution I'd rather banish from my soundscape. :)

I used an old 250GB WD 2.5" drive in a PC that I had sitting around, thinking for a linux test lab machine, who cares.

It sat there spinning and crunching on my desk. I make it about 4 hours and then just bought a $25 SSD at Staples.

repiv
Aug 13, 2009

Are PCIe4 SSDs not enough of a meme for you? How about a watercooled PCIe4 SSD?



https://www.anandtech.com/show/16460/corsair-launches-mp600-core-and-mp600-pro-pcie-40-ssds

LaptopGun
Sep 2, 2006

All I'm going to get out of him is a snappy one-liner and, if I'm real lucky, a brand new nickname.
Both the regular and the Pro models are still using the Phison E16 and the prices don’t look great even before you through on the water cooler

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.
? Pro is using the E18 and the waterblock is optional.

Once more E18 drives start coming out the prices will drop pretty fast, it’s the differentiator right now.

Well and the TLC NAND

Ihmemies
Oct 6, 2012

QLC nand? Doesn't that have write speeds like 150MB/s but they fake it's faster with a SLC write cache?

Klyith
Aug 3, 2007

GBS Pledge Week

Ihmemies posted:

QLC nand? Doesn't that have write speeds like 150MB/s but they fake it's faster with a SLC write cache?

Are you not seeing the huge heatsink on it????


(TBQH the intelligent SLC cache strategy is good enough for home users 99% of the time. How often does anyone do 100gb full-speed writes at home? If someone made a QLC drive with larger spare capacity so that the cache would stay up in the ~50gb range even when the drive was near full, I'd have zero qualms about them.)

LaptopGun
Sep 2, 2006

All I'm going to get out of him is a snappy one-liner and, if I'm real lucky, a brand new nickname.

priznat posted:

? Pro is using the E18 and the waterblock is optional.

Once more E18 drives start coming out the prices will drop pretty fast, it’s the differentiator right now.

Well and the TLC NAND

For some reason I totally read the Pro specs as saying E16 in error which obviously made no sense. The early listed price of the regular model does not seem a whole lot cheaper in comparison to now having the E18 in the product line. Maybe they are looking for an easy up sell. And that Pro looks crazy with ridiculous heat sink or water cooler hardly seems all that great of a price justification.

Full disclosure I’m the guy a couple posts ago who referenced tech sites not being impressed with MSRPs for perhaps no good reason. Maybe I’m guilty of the same thing.

LaptopGun fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Jan 29, 2021

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.
Yeah MSRPs for drives are usually out the window 2 months after launch so no biggie. The water block version is silly but it isn’t a ridiculous price premium if a hobbiest wants to minmax his water cooler build :haw:

I think the phison controllers do run pretty hot, but perhaps not THAT hot! They’ve done a nice job with an affordable low cost nvme alternative to the big boys who may be more enterprise focused. I see sabrent is coming out with their E18 drive too, XPG and ADATA to follow if they haven’t already I haven’t been paying close attention.

Ihmemies
Oct 6, 2012

The 3.84TB PM983 came. Cloned my hdd to ssd with Acronis, no problems. Now my PC is really quiet, the difference in noise between an old 7200rpm WD and a ssd is unbelievable. Did some basic crystaldiskmarks with my ssd's:

m.2 960 evo


m.2 pm983


sata 850 evo

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LaptopGun
Sep 2, 2006

All I'm going to get out of him is a snappy one-liner and, if I'm real lucky, a brand new nickname.

priznat posted:

Yeah MSRPs for drives are usually out the window 2 months after launch so no biggie. The water block version is silly but it isn’t a ridiculous price premium if a hobbiest wants to minmax his water cooler build :haw:

I think the phison controllers do run pretty hot, but perhaps not THAT hot! They’ve done a nice job with an affordable low cost nvme alternative to the big boys who may be more enterprise focused. I see sabrent is coming out with their E18 drive too, XPG and ADATA to follow if they haven’t already I haven’t been paying close attention.

Your point about having more E18 drives out there is probably right. At the very least they'll be some competition for prices. I do wonder if having more of them out there will be good for everyone with more manufacturers figuring out how best to tune performance to match the potential. Maybe the wider availability of PCEi 4.0 drives will give Sony a nudge to start allowing the open slot of the PS5 to take another drive.

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