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Buh posted:It's been so long since I had a desktop computer than my last separate monitor was a 15' CRT. Looking now, I can easily afford a 24' LCD with HDMI. If anything it's easier on the eyes. Moving up from a 20" to a 24" was like a 15 minute adjustment, but yeah the real answer is you will place it at a distance where it takes up about the same amount of your field of view.
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Jan 9, 2012 01:21
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Dogen posted:If anything it's easier on the eyes. Moving up from a 20" to a 24" was like a 15 minute adjustment, but yeah the real answer is you will place it at a distance where it takes up about the same amount of your field of view. It took me about an hour to adjust from a 22" to 24" monitor, but I seem to be incredibly oversensitive to that sort of thing. Going between my 15" laptop and my desktop is OK though, because I sit at way different distances.
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Jan 9, 2012 01:25
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Blake- posted:Any experiences with hybrid drives?
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Jan 9, 2012 02:29
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Alereon posted:They're discussed a bit in the SSD Megathread here. The Seagate Momentus XT 750GB is pretty much only worth considering for a laptop where you need the large capacity of a harddrive but want something faster than a slow laptop drive. In a desktop you're better off with a regular WD Caviar Black harddrive. The other hybrid solutions are from OCZ and have the poor reliability that comes with OCZ products. If you have an Intel Z68 motherboard then Intel's Smart Response Technology SSD caching would be a good idea to use. that's the very drive I was contemplating.
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Jan 9, 2012 06:14
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I have only a couple of 2.5" S-ATA drives, but I take it that all of them have the connector spacing and positions standardized, excluding proprietary systems where the manufacturer wants to lock you in?
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Jan 9, 2012 15:06
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Bensa posted:I have only a couple of 2.5" S-ATA drives, but I take it that all of them have the connector spacing and positions standardized, excluding proprietary systems where the manufacturer wants to lock you in? I've had no problems using desktop SATA cables on standard laptop drives.
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Jan 9, 2012 16:06
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Bensa posted:I have only a couple of 2.5" S-ATA drives, but I take it that all of them have the connector spacing and positions standardized, excluding proprietary systems where the manufacturer wants to lock you in?
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Jan 9, 2012 18:21
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This seems the most appropriate thread, if not I'll move it to the Storage thread if asked. Anyway, I need a portable HDD for class. Our computers at school have USB 3.0 and so does my main PC at home, so I'd like to get a 3.0 capable external drive. Only problem is I can't seem to settle on one. I know right now HDD prices are screwed up, so I'm willing to go to a 500GB though I'd prefer a 1TB. I'm looking to spend around $100. So far what I'm considering is a WD drive, but it doesn't advertise what kind of speeds it can do-it says "up to 3x faster than USB 2.0" but shouldn't it be more like 10x faster? Anyway, here's the link for that one: WD Passport Another I've found is also a WD, and this one does claim up to the 5 Gbps for 3.0. Strangely, this one is on sale at Best Buy's site but only for a preorder on Amazon. Link Opinions? Seagate has a drive (Flex something?) that seems good but in addition to it being more than either of these, I'd need to buy a Seagate cable to make use of the USB 3.0. Aside from WD and Seagate, I don't know what HDD companies are good or not or whatever so any other advice would be welcome. Thanks!
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Jan 9, 2012 20:56
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USB 3.0 makes practically no difference for the performance of a platter hard drive. Don't worry about it.
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Jan 9, 2012 21:04
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Wha? USB 2.0 tops out at ~35 MB/s. Even a cheap 5400 RPM drive can do triple that on sequential I/O. Maybe you're mentally subbing in SATA III? Anyhoo, I have a pair of 2TB SeaGate GoFlex drives, and other than being REALLY CLOSE to overheating all the time, they work pretty well. They came with the USB 3.0 dock/cable, too.
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Jan 9, 2012 21:07
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Factory Factory posted:Wha? USB 2.0 tops out at ~35 MB/s. Even a cheap 5400 RPM drive can do triple that on sequential I/O. Maybe you're mentally subbing in SATA III?
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Jan 9, 2012 21:09
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Man, I dunno what to tell you. I plug the drive from my T110 II's native USB 2 ports to the Rosewill/Renesas USB 3.0 card, and my backups finish in a third of the time. Ditto on file transfers.
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Jan 9, 2012 21:11
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I guess I'll to run some benchmarks, since the tests I run on them don't seem to run any faster and their stability is a complete crapshoot, especially under anything that isn't Windows 7. I despise USB 3.0 right now.
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Jan 9, 2012 21:16
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Want me to run a benchmark for the sake of science?
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Jan 9, 2012 21:18
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Factory Factory posted:Want me to run a benchmark for the sake of science?
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Jan 9, 2012 21:21
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Just as well. When I plugged in the drive, it rebooted the machine v v 
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Jan 9, 2012 21:24
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Yeah that sounds like USB 3.0 to me. 
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Jan 9, 2012 21:28
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Dems growing pangs.
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Jan 9, 2012 21:31
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FWx00 offers a performance advantage that can be leveraged because it lets the connected device do DMA if it wishes. Unfortunately, legions of technology sites and idiots over-sensationalize this as a "bug"/security hole/mistake in the FW spec because they're loving morons. A PCIe device hooked up via ExpressCard can do the same loving thing. Yes, it gives the hooked up device a lot of access to your system...but you were the one who plugged in the device in the first place. User accountability  Out of curiosity, what USB 3.0 controllers on the PC side were you each using? (e.g. Renesas, ASMedia)
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Jan 9, 2012 22:30
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movax posted:Out of curiosity, what USB 3.0 controllers on the PC side were you each using? (e.g. Renesas, ASMedia)
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Jan 9, 2012 22:32
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One of these, which I think uses a Renesas controller. Renesas for sure in my desktop and HTPC, but those haven't crashed my whole system as hard yet. For the record, aforementioned crash apparently caused a PCI bus error in the Event log, and it flashed about 5 different combinations of diagnostic light across the server's front panel. I had to reboot the router and then the server in that order to re-establish an ethernet link, too.
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Jan 9, 2012 22:38
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I finally used my USB3.0 port on my P8P67 this weekend when I hooked up a SATA/IDE to USB3.0 with a SATA drive that was dying and it worked flawlessly on my system. Transfer speeds were decent, but I didn't transfer off any large file, I can do some testing sometime this week to see if the speeds really are all they're supposed to be.
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Jan 9, 2012 22:49
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A couple of benchmarks with HD Tune: External HDD with USB2+3: USB 2: 25MB/sec USB 3: 74MB/sec External HDD with USB2 and FW/400: USB 2: 30MB/sec FW/400: 39MB/sec Done on different computers. Apparently the second featured a less lovely USB controller. You've got to laugh at how inefficient USB2 is: 240Mbit/sec of useful data out of a promised 480, and that was the good result.
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Jan 9, 2012 23:43
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74MB/s on USB3 is kinda meh. I think I was able to get ~70MB/s on FW800 to a 2.5" drive.
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Jan 10, 2012 00:05
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The drive can't write any faster than that, it's not representative of the link speed. It would be interesting to see if USB 3 does better in terms of goodput than its predecessor, but I haven't exactly got the hardware to find out. Its theoretical max of 625MB/sec is faster than the PCI-E 2.0 1x slot I have it plugged into, let alone any drives I own.
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Jan 10, 2012 02:10
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Shaocaholica posted:74MB/s on USB3 is kinda meh. I think I was able to get ~70MB/s on FW800 to a 2.5" drive. I've never seen FW800 do anything much faster than USB2, and certainly nothing like 70MB/sec. We do a lot of data transfers of multi-GB files here, and we've used USB2/FW400/FW800/USB3/eSATA extensively. Off the top of my head we see about 30MB/sec off USB2 and FW400. FW800 might get a bit faster, but we're talking 5MB/sec or something. Mind you, that's under Windows - Macs probably see better speeds with better drivers, but I'd be surprised if it gets a lot faster. USB3 and eSATA are very close to each other. I was seeing about 90-100MB/sec with both on my system. The nice thing about USB3 is that I could software writeblock the device. All that is anecdotal, of course, but is at least based on real data transfers rather than theoretical speeds. The files were all very large so you got better performance from less seeking, too. This was middle of last year or so, on 1TB 5.25" drives. Gromit fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jan 10, 2012 |
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Jan 10, 2012 05:14
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Gromit posted:I've never seen FW800 do anything much faster than USB2, and certainly nothing like 70MB/sec. For some reason, a lot of FW controllers were tossed on the PCI bus on some motherboards, seriously kneecapping their maximum possible performance. There are so many variables at play though, it's tough to narrow down what exactly is making GBS threads up the works and murdering your link speed.
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Jan 10, 2012 05:53
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Yeah, we gave up trying to work out the FW800 issues and just went with USB2 or hardware duplicators (it would be quicker to duplicate a whole disk rather than do a file copy in many situations.) Now we use eSATA and USB3.
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Jan 10, 2012 06:31
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:USB 3.0 makes practically no difference for the performance of a platter hard drive. Don't worry about it. I got a WD MyPassport with USB 3.0. If I plug it into my laptop in the usb 3.0 port it transfers at ~55 megabytes per second. If I plug it in the shared USB 2.0/eSATAp port, it only does 30 megabytes per second. Seems way more than no difference to me. Of course if it used eSATAp instead I'd use that.
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Jan 10, 2012 08:25
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I have a new i5 2500k. The turbo boost feature is enabled and will boost the clock speed up to 3.4 ghz, which is the default boost for when all 4 cores are being used. However, it won't go any further. I'm running prime95 on one thread, which should see one core jumping to 3.7 ghz, but it just won't go past 3.4. Google produces many people with the same issue but no resolution that I can see.
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Jan 11, 2012 06:27
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Is your BIOS defaulting to operating Turbo "By All Cores?" That's an overclocking setting and almost always turned on when somebody buys an i5-2500K because it's an overclocking chip. If it is, resetting that to "Per Core" will allow different Turbo rates by load. Also, what are you using to check? Only Intel's Turbo monitor tool and HWiNFO64 accurately show Turbo, in my experience.
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Jan 11, 2012 12:25
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Factory Factory posted:Is your BIOS defaulting to operating Turbo "By All Cores?" That's an overclocking setting and almost always turned on when somebody buys an i5-2500K because it's an overclocking chip. If it is, resetting that to "Per Core" will allow different Turbo rates by load. While I don't have this setting in my BIOS, you got me fiddling around and I found that enabling something called "Intel C-State" (which was off by default) fixed the problem and got me 3.7 ghz for a 1-thread test. The newest version of CPU-Z works fine for this, by the way.
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Jan 11, 2012 18:20
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All this talk of USB 3.0 makes me remember my external drives with eSATA. I'm pretty sure I never got that to work as it seems the drive needed to be attached to the computer at boot and needed to be powered by USB so it was difficult to tell if it was just connected with USB and not eSATA. Is there a way I can use check to see if it is actually using eSATA? Is it worth it? I understand eSATA should in theory be faster than USB 2.0 (about 4x?) but in reality it may not be.
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Jan 13, 2012 02:38
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Red_Fred posted:All this talk of USB 3.0 makes me remember my external drives with eSATA. I'm pretty sure I never got that to work as it seems the drive needed to be attached to the computer at boot and needed to be powered by USB so it was difficult to tell if it was just connected with USB and not eSATA. eSATA should be exactly as fast as plugging it in to a regular SATA port in your computer.
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Jan 13, 2012 02:40
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Red_Fred posted:All this talk of USB 3.0 makes me remember my external drives with eSATA. I'm pretty sure I never got that to work as it seems the drive needed to be attached to the computer at boot and needed to be powered by USB so it was difficult to tell if it was just connected with USB and not eSATA. Are you using Windows? Would the device manager show where it was connected, if you viewed devices by connection?
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Jan 13, 2012 02:41
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Install Gentoo posted:eSATA should be exactly as fast as plugging it in to a regular SATA port in your computer. Taking into account that the chipset that usually powers eSATA connectors is some jmicron garbage.
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Jan 13, 2012 02:44
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Bob Morales posted:Are you using Windows? Would the device manager show where it was connected, if you viewed devices by connection? Yeah 7. I'm not at home at the moment but will try when I get home. Is eSATA hot-swappable like USB?
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Jan 13, 2012 02:54
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Red_Fred posted:Yeah 7. I'm not at home at the moment but will try when I get home. Is eSATA hot-swappable like USB? It is, but on all my boards with the JMicron controller, I've had to install the JMicron drivers before hot-plug behaves properly.
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Jan 13, 2012 03:19
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Red_Fred posted:Is there a way I can use check to see if it is actually using eSATA? Is it worth it? I understand eSATA should in theory be faster than USB 2.0 (about 4x?) but in reality it may not be. Yeah, transfer speeds will be the big giveaway. If it's peaking around 30MB/sec then it's USB2. More like 80MB/sec and more for eSATA.
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Jan 13, 2012 03:35
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Dogen posted:Taking into account that the chipset that usually powers eSATA connectors is some jmicron garbage. Do Intel chipsets not support eSATA natively? Does eSATA need special treatment for hotplugging and power that first party Intel/AMD chipsets don't handle?
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Jan 13, 2012 03:35
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