POST YOUR SPECS

[samm]

Oh, risky purchase there with the OCZ Vertex 2... It's not only OCZ Ram that craps out, you know http://www.hardware..../881-7/ssd.html

Edited January 1, 2013 by samm

[Deraldin]

Oh, risky purchase there with the OCZ Vertex 2... It's not only OCZ Ram that craps out, you know http://www.hardware..../881-7/ssd.html

 

Quiet you! It's fine! There are no quality problems with my OS drive!

 

*knock on wood*

 

I bought it before all the information about their reliability came out.

[Bokishi]

OCZ should be a good brand

[Bokishi]

or let me elaborate, my last ddr2 ram sticks were ocz and they still work perfect in my backup rig

[Humanoid]

RAM (and PSUs) you can just rebrand, but SSD controllers are in a completely different league, and to an extent it's not unfair to say that OCZ's engineers have been coming up a bit short in that regard. Still, we need to keep the big picture in mind in saying that one is still far more likely to not notice any problems no matter what product you pick - the scale of any issue is still far smaller than say, the notorious IBM Deathstars.

[Pidesco]

I have an OCZ ssd (vertex plus) that was supposed to give loads of problems to users, and it has never given me a hint of trouble.

[samm]

[edit] put the following into spoiler-tags, as it's quite off topic. sorry for that!

Well, even the worst in said list (OCZ Petrol 64 GB) "only" has a 40% return rate, which means one still has a better chance to have a working drive than a non-working one xD For the worst Vertex-es, the rate is already down to < 10%. I'm happy for all of you that your drives haven't failed yet, and you're all part of the majority of customers according to this statistic. Still, if a single company holds not only the top spot in overall SSD failure rate, but also all the places in the a top ten indivdual drive model failure rate by a big margin, it's not a company I'd recommend buying products from

 

Humanoid: It's not just the controllers they use, it's also the NAND (Flash) chips. And the scale of the issue *is* horrendous - the worst return rate of any HDD was at that point 7.something %, which is already high enough that the company cannot possibly make money with this drive (RMAs are not for free for a company). I've even had an IBM DTLA something, 30GB, that did not die while in my possession - lucky me^^

 

 

 

Bok's rig, 2013 as pretty as always Nice to see you're also still using a dedicated sound card, tis a dying breed of computer accessory, and I really whish it weren't so... Can't abide the onboard stuff with its sorry EM-shielding, complete lack of sound processing, and refuse to stop playing the old games still profiting not only from the superior parts compared to the few cents an onboard codec is worth, which is noticable in any game, but also can use the processing power.

Edited January 6, 2013 by samm

[Humanoid]

Well there was the incident, think it was with that Vertex 2, in which they switched to a slower NAND - on a smaller node to save costs - without telling anyone. To add insult to injury, changes to overprovisioning meant it had reduced capacity as well. It was only found out when users found speeds were significantly below those in prior reviews and did some digging to get to the bottom of it. Not so much a technical issue as much as business ethics.

[Bokishi]

@Samm - Hey, thanks. Yeah integrated sound will never ever match dedicated sound cards ever! Here's more recent pic with the new x-fi hd and blue ram sticks

 

[Gorth]

Current parts:

Lian Li Black PC-D8000 (new)

Antec TruePower Quatro 1200 PSU

Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 Motherboard (water cooled)

12Gb (6x2GB) Corsair XMP DDR3 (running at 1600Mhz)

Intel I7 960 (3.2GHz) with EK Waterblock

Creative PCI EXPRESS X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series

Samsung 30" SyncMaster 305T+ (same model as the 'dead' one)

Koolance RP-1005 (Reservoir and pump)

EVGA GeForce GTX 590 Classified Hydro Copper

DAS Keyboard ('S' as in "silent")

SteelSeries Sensei Professional Mouse (new)

Saitek X52 Pro flight stick

AVerTV CaptureHD True HD 1080i TV Tuner (new) (finally got something to use Windows Mediacenter for )

 

Corsair Force Series GS 240GB SSD as system drive (new)

 

External EK Radiator

External 4TB Hitachi HDD (USB3)

 

Windows 7 Ultimate

 

A mishmash of old and new HDD's. Trying to get stuff consolidated on fewer, larger SATA3 from numerous small/tiny SATA2 drives (installing several new Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB drives).

 

To-do:

Get external 7.1 amplifier plus subwoofer

Get replacement 30" for crappy Samsung monitor (waiting for Dell '13 version)

[WDeranged]

On the subject of the Vertex 2's, I've been using mine for about two years and it's seen heavy use, so far I've not had any problems and it still gets the proper benchmarks when freshly formatted 

[Katphood]

M5A97-LE R2 Asus 

AMD 6200 6 core 3.80 Ghz

AMD Radeon 7770  1 GB Sapphire Ghz Edition

Acbel 560 W

Cruise RAM 1600 4 GB

Seagate 1 TB  HDD

LG LED 32"           

Rapoo wireless mouse & keyboard

Edited March 18, 2013 by Astiaks

[Bokishi]

While SSDs are king, I still think there's life left in mechanical hard-drives, especially when they come in capacities like this (I'm at 8TB storage now)

 

 

 

[LadyCrimson]

Space vs. price is still the reason I don't use SSD. The old style is still fast enough for my needs. They're also great for any use that still requires a ton of constant disk writing (eg, lots of wear and tear/constant fragmentation potential). Maybe for my next PC. 

[Humanoid]

I made the mistake of loading up on 2TB drives before and am sort of capped on space on my HTPC without disposing of some of the drives - but upgrading them to 3TB drives is too little gain for the effort. Impatiently waiting for either vendor to release 4TB 'slow' spin drives, or indeed 5TB if the price is within reason - they're due near the end of the year last I heard.

 

I've filled barely half of the 800GB on my desktop spindle drive, yet have filled the full 12GB available to my HTPC, with about 50+ Blu-rays in the queue to be ripped as soon as I acquire more space.

[Jarmo]

  yet have filled the full 12GB available to my HTPC, with about 50+ Blu-rays in the queue to be ripped as soon as I acquire more space.

 

No wonder. 12GB's only go so far when ripping blu-rays...

.. eh heh haa.. snort.. hoh..

[Humanoid]

Dammit. Oh well, I might have, er, half of a lazy single-layer transfer then.

[LadyCrimson]

I've filled barely half of the 800GB on my desktop spindle drive, yet have filled the full 12GB available to my HTPC, with about 50+ Blu-rays in the queue to be ripped as soon as I acquire more space.

Yeah, I don't have too much on the main C drive, even with all the games (maybe 155GB) but the storage drives are another matter. Videos (mostly gaming in my case) are the worst. Can't believe how much space we "need" these days.

[Keyrock]

New lappy:

 

i7 3630QM (2.4 GHz turbos to 3.4 GHz)

8 GB DDR3

Geforce GT650M 2GB GDDR5

17.3" 1600x900

1 TB 5400 RPM Hard Drive

 

Borderline gaming laptop, powerful enough to play many games at 1600x900 on high (or even ultra) settings, graphical beasts like Crysis 3 and The Witcher 2 on medium-ish settings.  Should be future proof for at least 3 or 4 years.  I don't foresee anything in that time span that it won't be able to play at 1600x900  on at least low settings.

Edited April 4, 2013 by Keyrock

[marelooke]

Intel i7 930 @ 2.8Ghz

8GiB DD3

Nvidia GeForce  GTX460

2x1TB 7200rpm HDD (Win 7 / Gentoo GNU/Linux)

[Keyrock]

I gotta say that I'm pleasantly surprised by this lappy.  I figured it would be fairly good, but it's exceeding my expectations.  I've pretty much been able to max out everything I've thrown at it at 1600x900 (I only do 4X MSAA and 4X Anisotropic because I honestly can't tell the difference when compared to 8X or higher, even if I go over it with a fine toothed comb) so far (limited selection of games), with the exception of The Witcher 2, and that game I've pushed beyond Medium settings into borderline High settings and it still runs nice and smooth.  I knew the GT650M was pretty good, I didn't know it was this good.  I've also read that the GDDR5 version that I have overclocks well with very little extra heat to basically GTX660M levels, but I haven't really had the need to even go down that route yet and doubt I will anytime soon.

[AwesomeOcelot]

Space vs. price is still the reason I don't use SSD. The old style is still fast enough for my needs. They're also great for any use that still requires a ton of constant disk writing (eg, lots of wear and tear/constant fragmentation potential). Maybe for my next PC.

Fragmentation is not a issue with SSD. Write wear isn't that bad on SSD, especially since if you're writing enough data to be a problem you'd also soon fill the drive up anyway, that's an unlikely use case for most users. For those tasks that would warrant SSD and lots of writes, like a webserver that is constantly updating and serving many people, you'd go with the more expensive SLC, or over-prescribe space helping the wear sharing.

 

Everybody should be running their OS on a SSD, it's an incredibly cheap performance boost, but some people will need to use HDD as well. For games, it's certainly worth it in terms of load times but it's a luxury as games get bigger. For laptops, the power and shock resistance is good. For storing lots of media, and for editing media so writing more than 30GB a day, HDD is the only choice.

 

I recommend people upgrade to SSD for their laptops, any SSD even the cheapest will be a massive performance boost. Get a 2.5" enclosure and have a portable HDD, that's around $100 for the best of both worlds.

Edited April 7, 2013 by AwesomeOcelot

[Humanoid]

I read that sentence as "SSDs are great for constant disk writing". Anyway, saw that Amazon UK have the *960GB* M500 for under $600, though it's on backorder (in the sidebar, ignoring the 3rd party sellers). Good god that's tempting, especially considering I paid $400 for my old 120GB one.

[AwesomeOcelot]

I read that sentence as "SSDs are great for constant disk writing".

SSD don't write to disk. They're faster at writes, especially the larger capacity ones, but if you're doing a ton of writes constantly they won't last unless you buy larger than you need and don't format a section, or buy the expensive SLC SSD that are mainly used for enterprise purposes.

[Keyrock]

I've been messing around with overclocking my GT650M since there are two versions of the card, a higher core clocked version with slower GDDR3 memory foung in 15" and under lappys, and a slower core clocked version with much faster GDDR5 memory found in 17" lappys (this is what I have).  I figured I should be able to raise the core clock to that of the GDDR3 version with no problem seeing as it's the exact same chipset, save the memory.  In fact, word round the campfire is that the GT650M with GDDR5 can essentially be turned into a GTX660M, since it's the exact same chipset at different speeds.  Well, so far I've cranked up the core clock +135 MHz and the already quite fast memory clock +350 MHz, which resulted in a temperature raise of exactly ZERO degrees when running Unigine Heaven again and again to stress test it.  I figured I could overclock this chip, I didn't know I could overclock it this far this easily.

Edited April 20, 2013 by Keyrock