What's the most reliable 512GB SSD for ~$300?

[AdamK47]

The integrated LSI controller I'm using has 8 of SB-E's 40 PCI-E 3.0 lanes dedicated from the CPU. The remaining 32 lanes are divided between two PLX chips for the PCI-E slots.

 

[UaVaj]

If i recall ruby one showed me a video of a guy on an ARC-1680 controller (old controller btw) encode a move which would take 2 hours normally in about 15 seconds..

2hr on traditional hd. 15sec on ssd. 😱 what was the configuration of the ssd. do tell.

 

[sub.mesa]

Encoding a movie shouldn't be very I/O intensive. Even it it was, processing the movie ought to produce a sequential workload which harddrives are very good at. SSDs are only a factor 2 to 3 faster in this regard.

More than likely this 'guy' is comparing an older system with HDD to a newer system with SSD, and is believing the higher performance can be attributed to the SSD. However, I believe a better explanation would be that the newer system supports Intel AVX extensions which greatly accelerate video encoding. Though cutting 2 hours encoding to just 15 seconds is highly doubtful.

 

[taltamir]

Encoding a movie shouldn't be very I/O intensive. Even it it was, processing the movie ought to produce a sequential workload which harddrives are very good at. SSDs are only a factor 2 to 3 faster in this regard.

More than likely this 'guy' is comparing an older system with HDD to a newer system with SSD, and is believing the higher performance can be attributed to the SSD.

Yep, pretty much all that.

Though cutting 2 hours encoding to just 15 seconds is highly doubtful.

You know, that piqued my interest. At first I said no way but then I sat down and I mathed it out and if his old PC had a 16 year old CPU it would account for the 480 fold increase in speed (applying moors' law).
Other possibilities is a RAM configuration issue that caused HDD thrashing and it gets more exotic from there.
For all we know he could have had the old spindle drive plugged in via USB 1.0 cable 🙂

... although in retrospect, hardware encoding typically uses configurations that optimize speed for a slight loss of quality which massively improves encode speeds. (software encoding gives you a choice so people choose max quality at any speed cost)
And if you look here
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-core-i7-2600k-core-i5-2500k,2833-17.html
the best case scenario shows a 7.82 fold decrease (althogh its important to note any such quality changes as mentioned above will be included in this figure).
Using this adjustment you lower the assumed age of his cpu from 16 to 9. Now add to that older IO, RAM, etc and it shaves off a few more years from how old said hypothetical estimated computer must be to improve speed from 2 hours to 15 seconds.

Oh, and modern processors took a turn to multi processor dies too which benefits encoding significantly while doesn't benefit single threaded performance as much. I have mathed it past the 9 year mark but I am going to guestimate (before going to bed) that all the above things together could realistically shave off a few more years from that 9 figure. And some people really do upgrade their PC only every 5-6 years

 

[AdamK47]

I found some timings for things I had jotted down several months back when I was running the games library off of the 4TB Hitachi 7200RPM drive. Compared them to what I have now.

Battlefield 3 - Loading the first single player level:
Hitachi HDD - 18 seconds
Vertex 4 SSD Array - 5 seconds

World of Warcraft - From character selection to loading inside of Stormwind (outside of Auction house):
Hitachi HDD - 12 seconds
Vertex 4 SSD Array - 6 seconds

Loading of all of the icons for the shortcuts in my games library from the start menu:
See older screenshot here (up to 874 now): http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa168/PointyB/Games/games21.png
Hitachi HDD - 22 seconds
Vertex 4 SSD Array - 1 second

 

[Hugo Drax]

Games... many many of them.

The drives will be on an LSI 2308 controller built into the ASRock Extreme11 motherboard.

You do not need such an over engineered solution for games. One SSD ie Samsung 840pro will provide more than enough to load those games quick.

 

[AdamK47]

You do not need such an over engineered solution for games. One SSD ie Samsung 840pro will provide more than enough to load those games quick.

Too late.

 

[Mfusick]

You do not need such an over engineered solution for games. One SSD ie Samsung 840pro will provide more than enough to load those games quick.

But not 3 TB

 

[AdamK47]

But not 3 TB

Or even 4TB.

 

[AdamK47]

Update!

All 9 of my OCZ Vertex 4 drives are still alive and kicking. 🙂

 

[mrpiggy]

I'm running 8 Crucial 512GB C400's on a LSI 9270-8i 1GB caching controller, so I understand your wanting to do it just for sh1ts and g1ggles because you can. I started out with RAID0 too, but eventually went to RAID5, simply because it's so fast, that in real world usage on a single PC, the hit from RAID5 is unnoticeable. Especially as the system drive is a 1TB Crucial M500 on a hex core 3960x OC'd to 4.6MHz.

Now it's mostly just an expensive stupid-fast storage location for streaming movies to my other PC's, but it's nice as they are quiet and cool compared to HD's. Also pretty fast on ripping video or playing games (which I unfortunately don't really have time to do anymore).

Sometimes you gotta do it, just because you can!