Have you thought about going back to HDD for primary storage on your desktop?

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BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,699
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my entire system is under 100Gb, and i could get rid of 30Gb of porn (but i can't, because it's a collection of films with Brigitte Lahaie, and you can't find that kind of quality nowadays), so i really don't see the point of using a HDD when
Well, that must be a lot of quickie organisms, or low quality video. But "grainy" works after a few drinks and no prescription lenses . . . .

I just figure I need about that much space for a single OS installation. I'd rather have twice that per . . .
 

UsandThem

Elite Member
May 4, 2000
16,068
7,380
146
my entire system is under 100Gb, and i could get rid of 30Gb of porn (but i can't, because it's a collection of films with Brigitte Lahaie, and you can't find that kind of quality nowadays), so i really don't see the point of using a HDD when

C'mon, man! You gotta call those kind of things "podcasts", "data", "important files", or "media". You're going to blow everyone's cover when they come here asking for help to recover those kind of files when their hard drive starts dying. ;)
 
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WhoBeDaPlaya

Diamond Member
Sep 15, 2000
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tmGrDld.png
 

DigDog

Lifer
Jun 3, 2011
13,444
2,084
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no, im sorry. do you guys even know who she is? im sorry if this thread massively derails but brigitte lahaie is a goddess on earth. none of that vulgar czech porno, this is high class 70s/80s french porn. it's got dialogue. it's got costumes. it's got sets that look better than your house, yo.

find an excuse and go look for it. and for what concerns the pixels, they are all the best quality that you can get, considering the originals were betamax. originally the folder was 40gb but i i only kept those films made by one production unit, which were superior to the other, less "refined" films.

i'm not bashing modern porn, but she had CLASS.




pic not appropriate for a technical forum.


esquared
Anandtech forum Director
 
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BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,699
1,448
126
DigDog -- I have to admit -- you have good taste. Do you remember a young lass from the '90s named Ash Leigh?
 

jhansman

Platinum Member
Feb 5, 2004
2,768
29
91
Better than the translation getting scrambled and the SSD instantly going poof.
Granted, it used to happen a lot more in the earlier days of SSDs, but it's why I never trust SSDs with an only copy of data and mine are always backed / mirrored to spinners.
Fair enough. While I would never boot from a spinner, my goto backup drive is a 2TB Seagate Slim. Snagged it for $60 and it serves its purpose wonderfully.
 

cbn

Lifer
Mar 27, 2009
12,968
221
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Also consider how the drives are arranged.

For example, with a budget of $140 for storage a person could buy a $70 240GB 2.5" 2.5" SSD or 120GB PCIe 3.0 x 4 SSD plus $70 2TB 3.5" 7200rpm drive with 64MB cache like this Seagate Barracuda.....vs. a $140 5TB 7200rpm drive with 128MB cache like this Toshiba X300.

Assuming 1.5 TB total storage is used in both scenarios the 5TB drive would be faster than the 240GB + 2TB drive in some metrics.

Furthermore, I am wondering if RAM is high enough how much less the SSD advantage would be?

An alternative to what I mentioned above ($70 SSD plus $70 2TB 3.5" 7200rpm drive with 64MB cache vs. $140 5TB 7200rpm drive with 128MB cache) would be to use two $70 2TB 3.5" 7200rpm drives with 64MB cache in RAID 0.

In fact, that RAID 0 would definitely be the fastest overall for loading games and other things normally loaded on bulk storage.

EDIT: Below (as a comparison) are some 2TB SSDs capable of handling the 1.5TB total storage needs mentioned in the above example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100011693 8000 600038497&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&order=PRICE

Crucial MX300 2TB is $549.99
Samsung 850 EVO 2TB is $699.99
Samsung 960 Pro M.2 2TB NVMe PCI-Express 3.0 x 4 $1299.99

And here are the prices of the 1TB SSDs if wanting to use two in RAID 0:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100011693 600038493 600082508

^^^^^ Prices start at $249.99 (Sandisk SSD Plus 960GB 2.5" SSD).
 
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JimmiG

Platinum Member
Feb 24, 2005
2,024
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106
I'm absolutely going to be flamed for saying this, but I put equal stock in Samsung and OCZ.

While I still use a few 840 Pro SSDs in various rigs, their f*ckup with the 840 EVO left a sour taste (and prior to that another f*ckup with the Spinpoint F4's silent bit-corruption firmware).

With OCZ, I've had nothing but trouble-free operation, though admittedly I've only used a few models (original Vertex 2, Agility 3, Agility 4, ARC100), but every one of those 20+ OCZ SSDs are still running 24/7/365 to this day.

I recently took out my 2012, 120 GB OCZ Agility 3 from my main system because I bought a cheap WD 240 GB SSD during the holiday sales. It worked fine after 5 years, and if I ever build some kind of secondary system, it could easily be the boot drive. I do remember in the beginning it caused random system freezes for seconds at a time, though that was fixed with updated firmware.

My 850 Evo has also been rock solid so far though. Overall I've actually had very few problems with SSD's or HDD's over the years, and I've used notorious ones like the 60GXP and currently run Seagate 4TB and 8 TB drives in my NAS.
 

Charlie98

Diamond Member
Nov 6, 2011
6,292
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What hard drive was this?

I've used some really slow ones myself.....3.5" with 8MB cache and 80GB to 160GB platters is just terrible.

Either a Hitachi or WD 500GB. One was the OEM drive, the other was the OEM from the previous PC... I put them his new PC as redundant backup drives after I installed an SSD and cloned the initial OS on to one of them as a backup. It wasn't like single-core slow, but it wasn't exactly SSD-boot fast, either.

I recently took out my 2012, 120 GB OCZ Agility 3 from my main system because I bought a cheap WD 240 GB SSD during the holiday sales.

I still have my 60GB Agility3 running in my old laptop... just as solid as ever. It was my first SSD. I won't deny OCZ screwed the pooch, particularly with the Vertex (I think) but they made some decent drives for their day.
 

energee

Member
Jan 27, 2011
55
2
71
Have you thought about going back to HDD for primary storage [...]

Or if not for yourself.....a family member's desktop machine?
No. I care far too much about my family's well-being to do such a thing.
 

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,699
1,448
126
I could post it in the thread I created, but I'll mention it here, per my experiment with a 960 EVO 250GB as a caching drive for both SATA SSD and an HDD. I've had it configured for less than a week; needed to delete and recreate the cache a couple times. It's already got 600GB or 0.6TBW. I think their Pro drives have an expected TBW of 1.2 Petabytes, but this is an EVO.

Sure does speed things up for this type of use. But if you bought a 1TB M.2, the only thing left to cache would be HDDs. You'd lose the need for an SATA SSD boot-system disk, freeing up a port for a small SATA SSD to cache any HDDs.
 

cbn

Lifer
Mar 27, 2009
12,968
221
106
I could post it in the thread I created, but I'll mention it here, per my experiment with a 960 EVO 250GB as a caching drive for both SATA SSD and an HDD. I've had it configured for less than a week; needed to delete and recreate the cache a couple times. It's already got 600GB or 0.6TBW. I think their Pro drives have an expected TBW of 1.2 Petabytes, but this is an EVO.

Sure does speed things up for this type of use. But if you bought a 1TB M.2, the only thing left to cache would be HDDs. You'd lose the need for an SATA SSD boot-system disk, freeing up a port for a small SATA SSD to cache any HDDs.

Out of curiosity have you ever tried to use that SSD as a cache for a HDD as a primary drive?

If so, how well does it work?

Part of the reason I am asking is because Intel Optane memory is coming out for Kabylake systems and unlike the 64GB 2.5" SSDs of old it is pretty fast for a very small capacity M.2 drive:

Intel-Optane-Memory-8000p-3D-XPoint.jpg
 
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BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
15,699
1,448
126
Out of curiosity have you ever tried to use that SSD as a cache for a HDD as a primary drive?

If so, how well does it work?

Part of the reason I am asking is because Intel Optane memory is coming out for Kabylake systems and unlike the 64GB 2.5" SSDs of old it is pretty fast for a very small capacity M.2 drive:

Intel-Optane-Memory-8000p-3D-XPoint.jpg

It would work about as well as an ISRT caching configuration pairing an SSD and HDD -- I would think -- but better for an NVMe caching SSD. But that gets back to the point of the thread topic. I wouldn't put an OS on a spinner and cache it anymore; my OS(es) are on an SATA SSD, and that's cached to the NVMe. The HDD-to-NVMe cache could almost be deemed unnecessary, unless you build your game library on a spinner.

One thing I've done besides the storage of game programs: I've created a "Program Files" (etc.) folder on the spinner, and I installed my Corel Draw Suite on the spinner! If you'd ever worked with Corel recently, or in the last few years, there is a delay in loading it even from SATA SSD. It has an introductory "splash" screen with a delay. Running it from HDD, you'd see it behaving like a slug at load time. But with the NVMe caching of the HDD, not so much less with SATA SSD caching, it seems like it's "right there" -- "blink" -- open a file.

I can appreciate deeply how people want their OS and programs together, or the troubles you might experience if the HDD or secondary SSD holding program files goes down. I've got nightly home server backup of all disks or as I choose them in the configuration. So if that sort of thing happened -- a dead HDD -- the caching task would suddenly appear "empty" in Primo -- no problem there. But I'd simply make a selective bare-metal restore of the disk from the server.

At least with PRimo, you can use it with Windows 10 and Kaby Lake -- which doesn't "support" Win 7. So this Optane drive -- which I apparently cannot use without a Kaby (? is that right?) would probably work even better than your run-of-the-mill NVMe. But from that table, I cannot tell for sure unless the Sequential 128KB Read3 test is comparable to the Optane sequential read spec. In that case, it doesn't seem to do as well as some NVMe EVO or Pro. But you can't get the EVO or Pro in that size.

Further and on the up side of things, you don't need a large caching volume with NVMe. Caching a 500GB boot SATA SSD gives me stunning bench results with only about 38GB of NVMe cache.

My biggest concern is controlling writes to the caching volumes. Trying different things at first, I must have created the caching volumes two or three times. The other night, I thoughtlessly copied files and folders of some 50GB from the cached spinner to an uncached spinner. It's been about a week's time. My TBW is already at 600 MB, partly because of that. So for those large file transfers, you'd "Pause" the cache.

Not so much trouble, but the sort of trouble your average Mainstreamer user would avoid.
 

Fardringle

Diamond Member
Oct 23, 2000
9,184
753
126
Primary storage (files that don't change often and don't necessarily require super fast access)? Sure. Mechanical drives are dramatically cheaper for a lot more storage space.

Primary OS (files that change often and/or benefit from fast access)? The only thing that will replace my SSD is another SSD or some new tech that works even better.
 

bononos

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2011
3,883
142
106
Have you thought about going back to HDD for primary storage on your desktop?

Or if not for yourself.....a family member's desktop machine?

Example: Maybe instead of having a 256GB 2.5" SSD plus random size HDD for secondary storage......a single much larger capacity HDD (maybe even SSHD) with higher density platters and more cache to replace the SSD and the smaller capacity HDD?

The problem is that ssds are good at hiding windows update issues that bog down drive performance.
 

PliotronX

Diamond Member
Oct 17, 1999
8,883
107
106
The problem is that ssds are good at hiding windows update issues that bog down drive performance.
As opposed to those same updates grinding a mechanical drive to a halt? I hate working on systems in that condition. Apologies if you were being sarcastic...
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,226
9,990
126
You should try working on a Windows 7 64-bit PC, using a single-core Core2 Celeron CPU, with a mechanical HDD. LOADS OF FUN, let me tell you, LOL. Bottlenecks galore.
 
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MongGrel

Lifer
Dec 3, 2013
38,751
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I think I might have to purchase a set of 4 higher capacity spinners soon for the hardware RAID card, a couple of my WD RE3's that are really old are starting to puke on me.

They were only 1TB and were the latest and greatest ATT, still have SSD's on another card for the OS.
 

bononos

Diamond Member
Aug 21, 2011
3,883
142
106
As opposed to those same updates grinding a mechanical drive to a halt? I hate working on systems in that condition. Apologies if you were being sarcastic...
I just said that ssds are faster than normal harddisks and better at hiding potential performance issues with updates.
 

PliotronX

Diamond Member
Oct 17, 1999
8,883
107
106
I just said that ssds are faster than normal harddisks and better at hiding potential performance issues with updates.
Well, the way you worded it seemed like the performance of SSD was a deficiency in identifying faulty updates. Never-you-mind then!
 

PliotronX

Diamond Member
Oct 17, 1999
8,883
107
106
You should try working on a Windows 7 64-bit PC, using a single-core Core2 Celeron CPU, with a mechanical HDD. LOADS OF FUN, let me tell you, LOL. Bottlenecks galore.
I do this on the regular! Yes, quite fun. Especially when its a Pentium-D on an ATI X200 board whose only option for the user having a second monitor is a USB 2.0 adapter because it hates every GPU in its lone PCI-E slot. The joys!
 
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ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
37,734
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I still use, and will continue to use high capacity HDD's as storage until SSD's beat them in price-to-capacity. I had 3 2TB's drives. 1 is the main drive, the other 2 are offline backups. I backup a few times per month.

for storing files, playing music, I don't see what the fuss is about.

I've had an OS only disk for about 15 years now. if that disk goes belly up, just reload. Stop imaging years ago...just more trouble. And now, Windows 10 reloads off a USB 3.0 flash drive takes 15 minutes (using a Z170 board)