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  1. V

    Areca controllers and 4k sector (advanced format) drives

    As an update, it's been smooth sailing so far with 8 WD20EARS drives in RAID6. The array has been in use for a week (not including the lengthy period to initialize it) without issues.
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    Benches comparing very old to newer cards

    Thanks everyone for the quick responses. I guess I'll put the 6800 Ultra in that rig. Probably for the best, too. If I sold the PC with the 4350 in it, I'd probably have a hard time finding anyone to buy the 6800 Ultra as a standalone part. The 4350 will probably be easier to sell on its...
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    Benches comparing very old to newer cards

    I know that AnandTech Bench is kind of like this, but it doesn't go back as far as I need. Does anyone know where I could find benchmarks comparing (relatively) new low-end cards to high-end cards from generations ago? Specifically, I'm looking for a comparison between a Radeon 4350 and a...
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    Areca controllers and 4k sector (advanced format) drives

    Idle parking is a non-issue. For one, it can be disabled, and two, the drives are never idle. TLER also does not concern me. Like I said, I'm already running WD10EADS drives on this controller. They don't have TLER either, and in more than two years of use under 24/7 activity, they have...
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    Areca controllers and 4k sector (advanced format) drives

    Does anyone have any experience using Areca RAID controllers with advanced format/4k sector drives? Areca themselves have an FAQ that says, "there have no special settings needed for controller to be able to works with them." However, I'm always hearing bad things about 4k sector drives in...
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    Do you have a 8800GTX/9800GTX/280GTX and its variants still working?

    8800 GTX still running fine after about three years.
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    Cloning HDD to SSD

    As to the three points you've made: 1. Please clarify, as I'm not sure why this would be an issue. Windows 7 uses a fixed offset for the first partition (1024 KB I believe) regardless of what type of drive is used, so the current alignment for my HDD is fine for SSDs as well. Or are you...
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    Cloning HDD to SSD

    I'm picking up an SSD for my laptop in the near future to replace the 5400rpm drive - probably with an OCZ Agility, but we'll see what prices look like at the time. I recently did a clean install of Win7 RTM on the laptop and just finished installing and configuring all my apps, so I'd much...
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    New Intel SSD drives are in!!!

    What are you suggesting? Does he have a vat of boiling acid instead of a cooking pot?
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    New Intel SSD drives are in!!!

    What the hell? You shop at NCIX and call NewEgg horribly over-priced? Short of epic rip-off stores like FutureShop, BestBuy or TigerDirect, NCIX is about as over-priced as you're ever going to find across most items. Their weekly sales basically have the effect of putting the discounted...
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    JMicron SSD for pagefile?

    Windows only writes to the page file in relatively large blocks - page file performance is driver largely by random reads and sequential writes. That said, I don't see much value in using an SSD as a page file - adding more RAM would be much better, and RAM is cheap. I guess since the OP...
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    What's the deal with the big hype around "green" hard drives?

    Those are my reasons. I have 11 hard drives in my home file server, so any reduction in heat and noise is appreciated.
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    GT200 will get a 40nm DX 10.1 refresh

    After DX11 is released, there will be NO reason to develop for DX10. I'm sure there will still be DX9 titles sticking around, but DX10 should pretty much vanish off the face of the earth. A game developed for DX11 (either from the outset or 'patched in' later) is fully compatible with DX10, so...
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    Nvidia 190.15 drivers no restarting!

    NVIDIA drivers never require a reboot in Vista or Windows 7 - if you get the WHQL drivers through Windows Update. Vista doesn't require a reboot to install video drivers, so the reboot is there only because the NVIDIA installer software says to do so - this is no different than the many...
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    SSDs, are they worth it?

    In bit-tech's experienceit does not.
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    SSDs, are they worth it?

    This is no longer necessary when flashing the Vertex with OCZ's newer firmware update tool. If you aren't picky about voiding the warranty on the Falcon, it can be flashed with OCZ firmware (using the old updater) to appear as a Vertex, and can subsequently be flashed with the new OCZ...
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    Want to connect 8 SATA HDDs to computer with as little cabling as possible

    But not with multi-lane SAS connectors.
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    nVidia GT300 - GeForce GTX 380 yields are sub-30%

    Speak for yourself :P I'm building a gaming rig not later than November. I'm really hoping that nVidia and AMD both release their next generation of cards by then. It looks like ATI will be first out the door, and that means their pricing will be through the roof while they wait for the...
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    Want to connect 8 SATA HDDs to computer with as little cabling as possible

    That board does have the correct connectors and appears to have the correct cables. However, I'd guess that the controller is host-based. If you're going to be using a RAID level without parity, that's fine. If you're going to use RAID-5 or RAID-6, a dedicated controller card with write-back...
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    Want to connect 8 SATA HDDs to computer with as little cabling as possible

    They're called breakout or fanout cables, or SFF-8087 to SATA cables. Most (but not all) SAS controllers and higher-end SATA controllers use SFF-8087 ports for internal devices. Depending on the card, breakout cables may be included (they are included on my Areca ARC-1222 card). {Edit}...
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    JMicron JMF602 + SLC

    The JMF602 is an MLC controller. Discussion of JMF602 + SLC is a moot point, as it's not possible.
  22. V

    Corsair P256 SSD review

    That would be very interesting if true, as the V series is much cheaper than any current-gen Samsung drives I've seen so far.
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    Why no decrease in price of SSD drives?

    Yeah, if those offer decent performance and avoid , I'd consider grabbing one of the 64GB drives for my laptop.
  24. V

    Windows 7 SSD Performance Overview

    I thought the idea was that Windows 7 supports TRIM natively making utils like Wiper unnecessary?
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    Corsair P256 SSD review

    It's not new (posted on April 10), but Legit Reviews has a review of the new Corsair P256 SSD that I haven't seen discussed here. The drive uses a Samsung controller and Flash, and comes with a 256 GB capacity. It's cheaper than the G.SKILL Falcon and OCZ Vertex drives of comparable size, but...
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    G.Skill Falcon SSDs

    Where's the proof that OCZ had anything to do with it? Indilinx engineers the firmware, not OCZ. You're assuming that OCZ is providing extensive and costly consulting services to Indilinx for free - what are you basing this assumption on?
  27. V

    Are all hard drives this noisy?

    Actually, I haven't spent the 4+ years since I joined lurking, I just never really came here. I've only recently started coming to the forums to scope out SSD discussions, lol. Lokutus' directions on how to do this are fine. I'm not sure off-hand if you can mount a partition in a shell...
  28. V

    G.Skill Falcon SSDs

    Yeah. I actually do my shopping at newegg.ca, and the 120 GB Vertex drives used to be $425 CAD. Then they disappeared for a while*, and when they reappeared they were up to $525 CAD. Supply and demand, I guess. * I hate how newegg.ca often loses availability for items that are still in...
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    G.Skill Falcon SSDs

    They're cheaper. Falcon (64GB, 128GB, 256GB): 209,339,729 Vertex (60GB, 120GB, 250GB): 219,425,799 The G.SKILLs don't have any space set aside for wear leveling as the Vertex drives do, so I'm not sure how close the two products really are. Competition is good, regardless. The 128GB...
  30. V

    G.Skill Falcon SSDs

    I hadn't seen any news or announcements regarding new SSDs from G.Skill, but today I noticed a new line of Falcon drives on NewEgg. They're based on an Indilinx controller and have 64MB of cache - so it looks like the hardware is the same as the Vertex, and the performance should match if the...
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    Are all hard drives this noisy?

    Yes. You can create a partition on the second drive, and instead of assigning that partition a drive letter, you can assign it an NTFS mount point.
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    RAID Controller Card Recommendations

    Any RAID cards at that price point are guaranteed to use host-based controllers. That means all parity calculations for RAID-5 will be offloaded to the CPU - and a Pentium 4 isn't going to handle that very well. You'd do just as well to use onboard RAID-5 or software RAID in Windows. Also...
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    ASUS P6T6 WS SAS Expander

    I think you'd be better off just getting an add-in card. RAID-10 has no parity, so even a cheap host-based controller is fine.
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    ASUS P6T6 WS SAS Expander

    Most SAS expanders are rack-mounted drive arrays, or built into rack-mounted cases with many drive bays. This is the only place there is really any kind of market for SAS expanders. What exactly are you trying to accomplish?
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    Mac RAM? Is it different

    204 versus 240 pin is not a typo. DDR3 DIMMs have 240 pins. DDR3 SODIMMs (laptop memory) have 204 pins. The only difference beween "Mac memory" and other memory is certification (aka Apple Tax) and potentially latency timings. It's conceivable that the SPD timings on an uncertified...
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    OCZ Vertex Review

    It's a new (to the mainstream) technology that has a lot of people interested. Thus, it brings in new members to talk about it. What's why I'm here. I haven't seen any reason for mods to intervene for new members "having an agenda" (though there have been cases where they might have...
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    who here has the most HDs

    I've got: 1 x 13 GB 1 x 30 GB 2 x 120 GB 1 x 160 GB 2 x 250 GB 4 x 400 GB 4 x 500 GB 2 x 640 GB 1 x 750 GB 5 x 1000 GB That's what I have currently in use. The 13, 30 and one of the 120's are about to be put out to pasture.
  38. V

    Cheap SAS controller recommendation

    Well, Promise has shot me down :( I guess I'll just have to spend the extra dough on the HP controller.
  39. V

    Cheap SAS controller recommendation

    Thanks frostedflakes, that's one of the cards I was looking at (won't buy it from eWiz, their international shipping costs as much as the card does). Can you confirm that the TX2650 is compatible with devices other than hard drives? Promise only has hard drives tested in their compatibility...
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    Cheap SAS controller recommendation

    Interesting, can you provide a link to that? Cheapest I see on eBay is $207.93 CAD (plus customs fees) shipped, for a used card with a shipping method that will probably not have the card in my hands for a couple weeks. There's another new card that's in the same price range, but shipping...