Upgrade time

Greetings all!. First off I'd like to say Happy, Merry Holidays to all!. I know I have been a stranger here of late, but life has been handing me a few curve balls recently, if I may use the baseball vernacular. Needless to say, I do pop on here often and see what's up with you all. The reasons for my absence are pretty typical.
First.... I left Los Angeles and re-instated myself in the great Northern california wild. I now live smack in the middle of small forest community at the 4200 foot level about 30 miles south east of Redding, california.
Second.... I believe I posted awhile ago about my CPU dying and I simply could not find reliable replacement parts at the retail level, plus I could not afford much in the way of upgrades, so I put some band-aids on my rig and basically survived without gaming for awhile.
Third.... I am back in Los Angeles working,(Some of you old timers might remember that I work in the Motion Picture industry) and while down here I rent a room from the Parental units so I don't really have a gaming space while I'm down here either. The good news is that I have the cash now to build a new rig, which is why I'm posting this tonight.

I have just this evening purchased the final components of my new rig and I have a couple of technical questions.

Now, the rig:
Chassis=Cooler Master CM Storm Trooper
CPU= Intel Core I7 2600K
CPU Cooler= Corsair H100 Liquid cooler
RAM= 16 GB Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Low profile 1600 megahurtz
MB= Asus P8Z68 ProV
Graphics= MSI HD6950 Frozer II (X2 in Crossfire)
Storage= Corsair Performance pro 128GB SSD (X2)
.......= 1TB Black Caviar 7200 RPM HDD (X2)
Disk Drive....Asus BW12B1ST Blue ray writer
PSU.... Cooler master Silent pro Gold 1200 Watt
OS.... Windows 7 Professional

Here's the deal. I want to run the SSD's in a RAID 10. Is this wise?, even necessary?

My main requirements of this rig will be gaming and music creation/storage.
I am returning home next week end and I would like to have this machine up and running before I leave. Any suggestions you braniacs might have as to set up and configuration would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance for the advice!

Hey good to hear back from you!

I just woke up so please don't mind me, but I am confused, are you in Los Angeles now or in the Northern California? Thought I should ask before I am going to say something that doesn't make sense

Have you been doing alright though?
I'm afraid I cannot answer your question, one of the other guys will have to come in and help you there.

But, a Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you!

---

Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Is there really a point in using RAID with solid state at all? Outside of redundancy you're not going to get any of the speed advantages you'd like due to duplicate data. There's no spin up time or even a need for sequential data.

You're talking about a technique made to secure data and enhance disk performance ... but there's not even a disk now ... so ... why?

Also ... this is absolutely ridiculous, but I think disk based drives are still cheaper per gigabyte even with the recent hike in prices due to the floods in Thailand. Though ... that's just a rough guest, I haven't actually calculated it out to see if it's 100%, but it seems that way. (considering that 60GB SSD is $100 ... and 1TB HDD is $250 ... Yeah SSD there is $1 something per GB, the other drive is about 20 cents per gigabyte ... still cheaper a 1TB SSD is $450 :S)

Unless the OS just ... treats the SSD like a standard HDD still (in which case you'd be massively wasting your money for little to no speed improvement)

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

You get faster load times with SSD's but the size of drives versus cost makes you wonder if it's worth it.
One SSD drive is all you need for the OS and a few apps but the rest should go on a regular drive. I don't think you'll notice that much difference running apps otherwise.
Raid I've heard actually isn't a viable option with SSD drives. A lot more problems than it's worth as they don't take well to it.
And BTW that's almost the exact machine I'm building right now, except I went with a gigabyte MB, Vengeance 1866mhz mem and different drives.
Also I think drive prices are coming down and soon should be back to reasonable pricing before too long.

---

Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

My impression of SSD drives, is if you're going to get one, you should get one of the hybrid SSD/HDD drives that combine the SSD's speed with the HDD's reliability with the tried-and-true nature of the HDD.

I imagine that kind of drive would just use the solid state memory for cacheing huge portions of data.

Yeah I was going to wonder if RAID is even possible with SSD ... but considering they crammed them into a SATA interface ... I figured they made a sloppy workaround for that too.

I just don't see any advantage to that setup. It has none of the benefits of RAIDing drives together. (To be honest ... I'm a big proponent of partitioning your drives. If something happens ... and in Windows something always does ... if there's a separate partition table, or better yet a separate drive, it's much easier to recover data. And ... even though it's not as easy as some other platforms, partition resizing is a viable option later. It's just in Vista and 7 you have to go into diagnostic mode and run that tool so it'll shut the hell up and boot properly after you've done it)

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I've never been a big fan of Raid setups. It seems to be a waste of good HD space and it's a pain when it's not working right. Best thing is to back up and create regular restore points so as not lose things.
I always create dual partitions also on my drives for that exact reason.
I did the best thing I could think of was to take one of my old machines and made a storage server. I keep all our files backed up to it.
You can either use Windows Home Server or Ubuntu or whatever Sever OS you want to back them up. This keeps your main machine cleaner and your data safer.
You can also off site storage, I'm thinking about that for the wife's business. A little redundant but nowadays it's worth it I think.

---

Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

I keep thinking the same thing after reading this thread (about every other year)
What are you doing with the old parts?

I still try to rebuild machines for kids at Christmas but its harder than ever to get parts. (hint hint)

Seriously though, Your machine stats look great bud.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

To be honest, the data security RAID offers when using mirrored modes is unparallelled. It's absolutely worth the extra price of the drive to do so.

The issues arise when you use it with Windows (and frankly most people use RAID to make larger partitions ... which is a bad idea ... it's the worst RAID option)

In system environments where it's properly implemented (:3) it's a very convenient and rather life saving utility.

Having the viewpoint of "oh, the space is more important" is actually kind of short sighted. Saving your data so there's no interruptions is much more valuable.

Though, on a personal system, RAID 1 is about as far as you should go. Sure, it seems "wasteful", but it's paid in security. The point is you don't have to go looking for backups. And if a drive goes, you just replace it and you're back.

Generally speaking, data is more valuable than HDD space. It might not apply 100% for the consumer area of computers ... but if you do any sort of important work on you machine ... it'd be a good idea to think about this kind of setup ... just ... maybe not on Windows >_>

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I used to have spare parts for a crap load of computers. Got rid of alot of it though, what do you need I may have something you could use.
Be more than happy to let you have it.

---

Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

sgtfly said:
I used to have spare parts for a crap load of computers. Got rid of alot of it though, what do you need I may have something you could use.
Be more than happy to let you have it.

Its too late this year bud but I'd be glad to pay shipping for next year.

I need everything. As long as its modern enough to support at least the last two windows versions.
I honestly dunno how much longer winXP will be updated so making machines that can only use that opsys is not very realistic.

A great friend of mine turned me on to a win7 32 bit and a win7 64 bit that doesn't require authorization so I can use it to get them functional.

I piece the machines together and donate them to kids. It used to cost me a small fortune because invariably, nobody gives the hard drives away and I had to buy them.

The last year I was in Jonesboro, a bank donated 7 pc's they used in the bank but the cut the HDD in half.

That was the last major donation I had.

Back on 02 I think, a few Snarkpit members game me machines. I paid all the shipping. The furthest was from Portland.

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

See what i can do. And have a happy Hoiday, that goes for everyone.

---

Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Take your time bud. I'm in no hurry.
You ain't posted any news about that grandkid in a while. Traded it off yet?

---

The best things in life, aren't things.

Nah, we're gonna keep her. Last time we got a 2 for 1 deal and that's been a little crazy so...
Leaving tomorrow to go visit them for Christmas. She's changed so much since then, I'll get some pics up when we get there.

---

Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.