PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

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JohnOC
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Re: PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

Post by JohnOC »

Kommander wrote:Well lets focus on the hard drive for a moment, because that is something actually doable. These hybrid drives, do they work as advertised? I don't turn my computer off and on allot so boot speed is rather unimportant. However having the OS on the fast portion of the drive, or at least important parts of it, might make windows go faster in other ways. However I am skeptical that it would boost game performance, as those tend to consist of upwards of 10 gigs of stuff each these days, far to much to load onto the 6GB SSD portion of that HD. Does it use some sort of preloading in the background or something? I think this warrants more research.

Edit: I am seeing that it is possible to transfer the data from your old drive to the new one (to clone it?) rather than load all my vital stuff from my backup thumb drive and re-download all my games from steam like I used to. Is this a good idea or should I go with a fresh start? (I remember backing up 15 gigs of stuff on CDs. Took hours just to preper for a OS wipe, and hours to restore things.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevange ... ybrid-ssd/

The basic idea is that the 6 or 8 or whatever GB of the most-accessed data, as determined by the drive controller looking at frequency of requests for given sectors of data, is what is cached in the zero-seek area. Its also allowed to change over time. So the stuff you do frequently gets faster the 3rd, 4th, etc time you do it..

My guess is that it'll be a few of the most key OS files, apps that always run on startup, a browser, and the main parts of whatever game you're playing that week.

So it's not going to quite set the world on fire like a pure SSD.. but it still seems like a pretty decent option to me.


As far as transfering things.. I'm a fan of fresh starts, but what you can do after making a fresh OS install on the new drive is hook the old drive back up as a secondary and transfer your important data from it.

If you do want the pure SSD performance, I think steam now supports having multiple library locations..
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/09 ... locations/
Perhaps its possible to keep most of them on the old drive and migrate the one currently being played onto the SSD.
The government that is big enough to give you everything you want, is powerful enough to take everything you have. – Thomas Jefferson
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Yogimus
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Re: PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

Post by Yogimus »

1 terabyte seagate is like 50 bucks

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... derboard=1

Either get an SSD or a regular drive. Drive speed will never slow you down in a meaningful way.
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Yogimus
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Re: PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

Post by Yogimus »

Sidenote with using old drives:

Make DAMNED sure you kill windows on that old drive, or your computer WILL betray you when you least expect it, and try to boot to it, fucking EVERYTHING up as it does so.
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Kommander
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Re: PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

Post by Kommander »

I have enough flash memory laying around so that I can back everything up and do a clean instal, never using the old drive again. However that is a good bit of advice, something I would not have thought of.
Greg
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Re: PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

Post by Greg »

Yogimus wrote:Crucial MX 100 SSD is the best gig per dollar, and outstanding in performance
That's the one I just picked up. Not looking forward to a reinstall, but I'd like to see the results. :)
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JohnOC
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Re: PC upgrade shopping - tight budget edition

Post by JohnOC »

Yogimus wrote:Sidenote with using old drives:

Make DAMNED sure you kill windows on that old drive, or your computer WILL betray you when you least expect it, and try to boot to it, fucking EVERYTHING up as it does so.
Indeed.

A 'safer' way is to get a cheap SATA-USB adapter, take the old drive out, install fresh windows on new drive, then plug in the old drive on USB to transfer data off it. Get everything you care about, confirm your other backups work and format the old drive.. *then* you can reinstall it as a secondary drive and use it.
The government that is big enough to give you everything you want, is powerful enough to take everything you have. – Thomas Jefferson
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