What's the Best Way To Move To A New HDD

[ignoramus]

Benny, give it a few years and plug in graphics cards (like sound cards) will be a thing of the past also...

Doing the big upgrade next year (not so easy with the custom water wall pc). Not buying anything till the last minute as things change so quickly.... Was looking at raid Nvme (so many good raid5 M2 motherboards out there) ... As it turns out, no real difference ... The single Nvme is so fast anyway, the raid overhead soaks up any noticeable difference... That's makes life a little easier anyway...

[bennyboy]

Yeah, about the GFX card, we're just about there already. My new computer is my office computer, and I didn't even get a card for it-- I just use the CPU's built-in functionality. It plays League of Legends and chess like a beast. Unless I'm playing a new RPG and I want to see every bit of dust on a blade of grass, I'm probably not going to be needing a card soon.

[ignoramus]

Dust on grass is the only reason I play games! hehe

plus with 3440x1440, I need to push lots of pixels ...

[bennyboy]

Dust on grass is the only reason I play games!  hehe

plus with 3440x1440, I need to push lots of pixels ...

Yeah, no doubt.

The next step is better VR, which is all that x2, and because of the way they do it, the processing power is even more demanding. If you've tried it with a handphone, you got to go back to the 1960's with the TV scan lines again

I think in about 10 or 15 years, even live video won't actually be live-- it will be instantly digitized and modeled, so that viewers with different eyes will be able to get a perfect 3D picture-- and your pencil or whatever you have in your pocket will be pumping out the horsepower to do it.

[popeyespappy]

The next step is better VR, which is all that x2, and because of the way they do it, the processing power is even more demanding.  If you've tried it with a handphone, you got to go back to the 1960's with the TV scan lines again

I think in about 10 or 15 years, even live video won't actually be live-- it will be instantly digitized and modeled, so that viewers with different eyes will be able to get a perfect 3D picture-- and your pencil or whatever you have in your pocket will be pumping out the horsepower to do it.

We aren't quite there yet, but we had some German PHD who is supposed to be one of the early pioneers of 3D video in our office about a month ago. He was doing a demo of his new glassesless 3D tech for some of our government customers. The technology uses some kind of a film over the monitor that doesn't affect 2D video. It worked pretty good.

[Angrboda]

Benny, give it a few years and plug in graphics cards (like sound cards) will be a thing of the past also...

Doing the big upgrade next year (not so easy with the custom water wall pc). Not buying anything till the last minute as things change so quickly.... Was looking at raid Nvme (so many good raid5 M2 motherboards out there) ... As it turns out, no real difference ... The single Nvme is so fast anyway, the raid overhead soaks up any noticeable difference... That's makes life a little easier anyway...

My experience is that RAID 1 is/was faster on traditional hard disks than on single disks due to rotational latency. Not sure there's much overhead to be concerned with. I know there's CPU overhead, but whether there's any overhead in terms of reading and writing, I don't know. Given that the buffer of one NVME can be filled as a result of queueing while the other is read/written, there might actually be a speed up.

I'm skeptical of the idea that graphics cards will be replaced any time soon. I'm using an older Radeon 7770, but even then, there's a noticeable difference between it rendering streaming content and the onboard video. Graphics simply requires substantial hardware. As long as that remains the case, there will be incentive for differentiation.

[emjay]

I know you aren't really talking about this any more but just thought I'd mention it... I love my SSD and would highly recommend them over traditional HDD's... they're lightning fast and purely electronic so they aren't affected by movement, which is great for a laptop as you can move around freely using it. This is my first SSD, which I've had for a few years now, but one problem I have found with it is sporadically the whole thing seems to freeze up; the access light stays solidly on and it requires a hard reset to get out of. I figure, though this is just a vague guess, that when this happens it's trying to read a specific block or something but can't and is therefore getting caught in some sort of feedback loop. I'm just curious if anyone else has this problem with their SSDs and/or has a better explanation of what causes it? Because other than that I can't find any flaw with them and even with that, the hard reset has never caused any longer term problems that I can see... ie it usually doesn't need Scandisk afterwards, just 'start Windows normally'.

[Angrboda]

I recently fixed an issue with my RAID 5 array. If left idle, the disks would spin down and require a goodly long time to spin up again upon access. As it turns out, the default Windows power profile is to turn disks off after 20 minutes of disuse. Now that I've corrected that, the array is plenty fast. When I bought SSDs a few years back, I worried about their speed, and spent more to get the fastest ones. Anymore, I'm not sure speed is a legitimate concern, so I didn't worry about it when I rcently upgraded my SSD. It's a sata based SSD, but I doubt whether boot up time is a meaningful measure of how significant any difference in speed actually is. I suppose if this were a server delivering up database transactions, I might, but not as a desktop. Concerns in that usage seem overblown. My bootup time is substantial, but that's due to other bottlenecks than the SSD.

My computer has taken to freezing about once every day or so. I suspect that's due to the quantity and kind of USB devices attached, including a portable MP3 player, but I don't feel any desire to make changes in that area. I recently moved the USB 2.0 devices off the USB 3.0 hubs onto a USB 2.0 hub dedicated for keyboards and mice, and that appears to have helped. I've still got two low speed devices on the same hub as a high speed USB 2.0 external hard drive, but that seems unavoidable. This motherboard only has two USB 3.0 hubs accessible from the back, making four ports total (and I don't have a USB 3.0 hub for those ports).

[emjay]

Speedwise I have no complaints at all with my SSD, but I've never tried using RAID with multiple HDD's before so I don't have anything other than single HDD's to compare it to... but nonetheless it still feels space age to me, even after a few years of using it; the novelty of that has not worn off for me. The boot up time is wonderful, and it should not in theory suffer from any of the problems of fragmented files or ever need defragmenting... which might be particularly useful for large media files like MPEGs where fragmentation could effect their playback.

ETA: Sorry, I didn't see you'd added a paragraph when I replied. I doubt very much it has anything to do with USB on my end, since most of the time I only have one USB thing plugged in (a mouse).

[popeyespappy]

Back to NVME... I ordered the parts for the workstation for my project at work.



It won't have any fancy graphics, but I don't need that. Just a lot of processing power, memory and disk space. This will be my first foray into NVME SSD. This thing ought to be pretty damn fast.