I can't decide what to buy

[Gutcheck2009]

I know everybody must be sick of these threads, but here is the deal.

I want to use my PC for work and games, mostly work to be honest.

I have a GTX295 NIB sitting here and my PC has a GTX285 in it. I have the 295 on ebay, but am seriously thinking about keeping it and taking the 285 back. I have an 800 USD budget, and I am getting a 920 (D0 stepping), EVGA x58-LE, and some kind of 6GB RAM kit. I like Corsair, but am open to suggestions.

My main questions is, should I buy a SSD? How big should it be, and how would you RAID up my two velociraptors for games, or use that for the boot device?

I'm so confused.

 

[brblx]

what games are you wanting to play?

personally i think the 295 doesn't have nearly enough performance to back up its price. i'd keep the gtx285 and build your 920 rig.

i also can't help but feel SSD's are still too immature a technology to bother with. high prices and we've yet to see how many years they'll actually last, though manufacturers are promising that the limited number of read/write cycles is more than enough. i guess it all depends on how much of a new tech adopter you are. me personally, i'm happy with the relatively fast 7200rpm large capacity drives, but then again i've never used an SSD. i doubt you'll see much if any performance gain in games, though, as it's not like framerates are typically held back by hdd access times. for work, though, you may notice a huge difference using an ssd as your OS and app drive.

 

[Gutcheck2009]

I play cc2, hl2, l4d, UT3 etc... but not so much. I agree with you about the 295.....

 

[DaveSimmons]

skip the SSD and have the 2 velociraptors as separate drives C: = OS & work, D: = game installs. Then you can use Drive Image, ghost, etc. to easily back up the OS to the D: drive without needing to back up 100 GB of game installs.

Get a 500 GB - 1 TB external HD and use it to store OS backups and a copy / copies of the installs on D:.

 

[Gutcheck2009]

I also have a 1TB Seagate drive. Should I RAID 0 the Velociraptors as my boot drive?

 

[DaveSimmons]

It doubles the failure rate, but does load game levels / maps a bit faster. If you're good at making backups all the time then you won't lose much when they fail.

Edit: if money is no object then Intel SSD for boot drive + RAID0 'raptors will offer pretty good performance. Just be sure to back up any save games you care about from the 'raptors.

 

[brblx]

meh. if i was going to raid them, i'd do raid 1 for backup. doesn't it also increase read performance since it can pull from two drives at once?

50gb and 250gb for os/apps and games respectively would be enough for me, but you may want more. i wouldn't do it at the risk of a single failure wiping all your data, though.

 

[Gutcheck2009]

well i have gotten in the habit of backing up crucial files on the 1TB drive, and I have a ton of, well, media files on there too so I have 500GB of the 1TB full. Basically I want the OS to be on the fastest possible environment, and I don't know if that is 1 VR, a RAID 0 VR's, or a SSD drive (well, given the money and size issue).

 

[Trevelyan]

I'm pretty sure 1 SSD would definitely be faster than RAID VR's....

If you can, wait awhile longer. I bet by the end of the year you could get a 128Gb SSD that has solved a lot of the speed degradation problems for around $100.

If you HAVE to buy something now, I would go for the Intel X-25 80Gb for $300 over the RAID0 Velociraptors...

I spent a lot of time researching, and that was my conclusion. But, I ended up deciding to just wait for the next generation of SSD's.... a lot of new ones have been coming out in just a short time. And with Windows 7 you will get the TRIM command, which will solve some of the problems with SSD's. So that's in October this year.

 

[Gutcheck2009]

Thanks, this is good advice. The thing is, I already own the 2 VR's. I'll keep em. What is this TRIM option? I have Windows 7 RC on my PC right now.

So, RAID or no RAID?

 

[Trevelyan]

Oh, I see you already have the Velociraptor's..... yeah, just keep them until SSD's get a little better/cheaper.

And RAID0 should be fine. I have two old Raptor's in RAID0 without any problems for over two years.... those things are reliable.

EDIT: And I tried having my two Raptor's first just as separate drives, before doing RAID0. What happened is my C: drive filled up too fast while my D: drive had plenty of space. It was just simpler to do a RAID0 and use them both, plus the speed bump was nice, and the reliability never was an issue.

 

[Trevelyan]

Originally posted by: Gutcheck2009
Thanks, this is good advice. The thing is, I already own the 2 VR's. I'll keep em. What is this TRIM option? I have Windows 7 RC on my PC right now.

So, RAID or no RAID?

My understanding of TRIM is limited, but its something built into the O/S that is specifically for SSD's... it keeps track of free space (or something like that) which prevents the write speeds on SSD's from degrading over time. They are still working on it, but it will be in Windows 7. And Intel has hinted that they will release a new generation of SSD's that are compatible with TRIM. In all likelihood, they will release a firmware update for their current SSD's so they can take advantage of it.

But for me, too much is unknown at this point. I'd rather wait at least a few months to see it work in real life.

 

[Trevelyan]

Oh, and for your ram, I just bought these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820227388

These were my second choice, but the cost difference was too much: http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820145224

 

[Gutcheck2009]

Thank you so much!

Your second RAM is the one I have on hold at Fry's. 142 bucks....

To me that is so cheap I can't believe it. When i7 first came out I remember thinking about it and then seeing the RAM prices LOL.

 

[Trevelyan]

No problem!

I'm sure you'll be happy with that ram. For me, I decided to just go cheap and put the savings toward my future SSD purchase