Same comment as I made last month - swap the Pioneer BluRay reader for this LG HD multiformat drive: http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4XKQ Same price as your choice, but also adds in HD-DVD capability. And seeing as HD-DVDs are so cheap right now (£3 a title from HMV.com) its a sensible choice for anyone wanting 1080p movie playback on their PC.
Just a quick comment about the premium hardware recommendations. I'm a bit surprised that something like a Blu-Ray burner was not recommended, even as an alternate selection. With the new Sony and Buffalo drives out, the overall speed of backup of 50GB of data easily surpasses that of any DVD backup (of course the media costs are quite a bit higher, but how much time does it take to make a backup of ~600 albums encoded in flac on a Blu-Ray setup vs. that of a DVD setup?, it's a no brainer for relatively quick archival of large generally stagnant data). While a burner is quite a bit more expensive than a reader, it is not outrageous, and for those with a large volume of media files (video or music or photos that deserve to be archived) its hard to argue against writeable Blu-Ray as being a huge step up from DVD. Blu-Ray players are much less compelling for those that are not building a media player setup, which these recommendations do not address. If nothing else a burner should be listed as an alternate selection for premium hardware.
Otherwise a nice selection of hardware, particularly at the lower end. I never considered the EP31, but for 32 bit systems it looks to be quite a value. I second the comment on having two drives and would also suggest a UPS for higher end systems.
those cases in the premium end, in my mind for sheer class the lian li wins hands down, simple looks but beautifully finished, the antec just looks cluttered with the air vents on top, that pop usb/audio thing on top and then the cover for the front fan being outset from the rest. Whilst i always get the feeling that bit tech favour antec everytime, in a contest where you have to look at something for several hours everyday (due to the notable size of each of these bohemoth cases) i just cant see why someone would want the antec, even for the few extra degrees cooling it gives.
oh to have the doller to go splash out on a premium end pc that includes those items mentioned in the article, that would be faaaaaaaaantastic!
Nice article. Have started pointing friends looking for buying advice to these articles.
Went for the gtx260 myself over the ati 4870 despite paying a little extra, as benchmarks showed it to have higher minimum framerates in the games I value/prefer.
Any possibility of dropping in a recomendation for AM2 compatable coolers for the low and mid range? Maybe in the alternative section, you cover the processors but leave no recomendation of what to strap onto them.
Originally Posted by Action Just a quick comment about the premium hardware recommendations. I'm a bit surprised that something like a Blu-Ray burner was not recommended, even as an alternate selection.
backup to DVD - 4 cents per gigabyte and you have to swap disks every 4.3gb.
backup to blu-ray - 35 cents per gigabyte you have to swap disks every 25gb.
backup to hard drive - 12 cents per gigabyte and never have to swap disks, plus you preserve your folder structure and keep your flexibility. you are financially better off to have 3 500gb disks in raid5 AND an external copy on a 1TB disk than you are backing up 1TB onto blu-ray disks.
Originally Posted by cpemma With anything over a budget box I strongly recommend two hard drives for data security, even if you don't RAID1 and just copy to the second drive in between "proper" backing up to DVD. A couple of 640Gb at £50 each would be my choice for the higher end system.
In the mid system maybe, or a 640 and a Terabyte. The terabyte disks offer undeniable value for money at just £20-30 more for ~360GB.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mrb_no1 Whilst i always get the feeling that bit tech favour antec everytime, in a contest where you have to look at something for several hours everyday (due to the notable size of each of these bohemoth cases) i just cant see why someone would want the antec, even for the few extra degrees cooling it gives.
LOL no actually we were complaining about other people being Antec fanboys earlier today - Aesthetics are purely personal - we rate cases on functionality, build quality, cooling and design. Li-li are great, but their build quality has dropped several points in the last year imo. Antecs have generally great build quality, a good price and good design, yet Cooler Master have really pulled up their game in the last 6-12 months too making some awesome cases.
Blu-ray burners - no demand for them, generally high cost of backups and slow write time. One 50GB BD-R disk versus two/three 500/640GB/terabyte drives in RAID1/5? There are about 500 ways to do data backup - we could include tape, SAN, buying into Cloud storage, NAS - too many to list.
Valver - Again good call, sorry we missed it again!!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Buzzons Just to point out -- there's no point in recomending anything other than the Intel SSD at the moment - the rest all fail under slightly greater than small I/O and the wait times to write rocket up.. not something you want really. The Intel one, even though it suffers from the same issue, it doesn't suffer anywhere near as bad
I haven't heard this at all before, the Seagate CEO mentioned something like it this, this afternoon, however I mostly put it down to PR against competitors product. We'll look into it, however you can't deny the theory of performance and zero access times are certainly appealing.
We'll be reviewing SSDs later this month and we will certainly test this.
I'm a little annoyed that this still doesn't list US options for CPU cooler to go with the "Affordable" system, or CPU cooler or power supply for the "High-end" system. The summary tables at the beginning of each section make this more obvious with the "N/A" cells.
you only recommended the normal gtx260? what's wrong with the Maxcore version? it's similar price or a £10 extra for OC versions, while beating the ATI card in most games (except GRiD and Source engine).
another vote says p182 have dust filters. at least my one only costed £86 from OCuk a year ago have dust filters.
Originally Posted by supertoad [
backup to DVD - 4 cents per gigabyte and you have to swap disks every 4.3gb.
backup to blu-ray - 35 cents per gigabyte you have to swap disks every 25gb.
backup to hard drive - 12 cents per gigabyte and never have to swap disks, plus you preserve your folder structure and keep your flexibility. you are financially better off to have 3 500gb disks in raid5 AND an external copy on a 1TB disk than you are backing up 1TB onto blu-ray disks.
Blu-Ray writeable disks are up to 50GB now. I have a RAID 5 NAS with 4 1TB drives as backup (and another NAS as a backup of the primary NAS with 4 300GB drives), however a NAS is not archival storage. Blu-Ray is much closer to archival. With ~200GB in flac files, that is 4 Blu-Ray disks. On DVD, that'd be closer to 45-50 disks and a huge pile of time swapping, labeling, and storing that number of items. DVD as a storage medium for large file types is a dead end. Jpgs and RAW camera files are similar, I've got well over 100GB of these files in under a year of DSLR use, Blu-Ray is a far superior solution for archival storage of large numbers of large sized files.
Originally Posted by Action Blu-Ray writeable disks are up to 50GB now. I have a RAID 5 NAS with 4 1TB drives as backup (and another NAS as a backup of the primary NAS with 4 300GB drives), however a NAS is not archival storage. Blu-Ray is much closer to archival. With ~200GB in flac files, that is 4 Blu-Ray disks. On DVD, that'd be closer to 45-50 disks and a huge pile of time swapping, labeling, and storing that number of items. DVD as a storage medium for large file types is a dead end. Jpgs and RAW camera files are similar, I've got well over 100GB of these files in under a year of DSLR use, Blu-Ray is a far superior solution for archival storage of large numbers of large sized files.
100GB of shots from ONE YEAR of photography.
Jeez. I take photos every single day and my work folder of 4 years old is 20GB.
BD-Rs last as long as CD/DVDRs - 5-10 years in a cool dry place. If you want archival then you want Chrome Oxide tape drives.
Your archiving needs are quite obsessive I have to say. A good server with a good controller + RAID 6 + spare would have cost you just as much.
Originally Posted by Denis_iii Wouldn't the [insert name here] be a better choice for budget case?
yes it is 10-20quid more but...
It's called 'feature creep' or 'budget creep' or something where for a few dollars more...
Point is, with a budget build recommendation you have to draw a line. If the reader has a slightly bigger budget, he can add the extra bell or whistle, but he's gone outside the original remit.
As one example, Ars Technica pick an Antec NSK4480 for their budget box, around £55 inc 380W Antec PSU and perfectly adequate, plus a saving of around £23 on the Bit CM330/Corsair VX450 package; at the end of the day the reader is free to shop around and personalise the suggested systems.
Over 100GB of photos is not all that hard when using a DSLR with both raw and jpg output. Now add panorama photography with a 30 file raw image converted to TIFF in a poster size and you can see why 64-bit systems are necessary. I have single images like this that are well over 3GB by themselves when in finalized format and saved to disk. Fortunately I don't do this too often or I'd stress the NAS too much...
It's rather sad to see the respective "Green Team"s losing out in this (That being nVidia in nV/ATi and AMD in AMD/Intel).
It seems that both "appear" to be resting on their laurels (I'm sure they're really not, but that's the appearance), as nothing really mind blowing has come from either (If ATi can come up with an X2 card, why not nV? They did it before, after all).
nVidia did get the advantage for the time (weeks) they had before R770, and all AMD is coming out with at the moment is a 45nm die shrink of a now quite long in the tooth CPU. K8 is several years old now, isn't it about time they got the next rev. out of the door? And just what the heck is happening with Socket 1207 (Socket F)? It's still got nowhere near the support or acceptance that 939 had, and for multi-processor AM2(+) won't cut it.
I'll eventually build something like a mixture between the high end and premium... i7 920 is a must, so that will set me back about $550 with a motherboard, so it shouldn't be tough to keep it under $1500 with a 4870, and a smaller memory kit.
Have to say. I like the idea of testing harddrives, but how much can you actually say about them? If you decide to do such an article i think you should do a roundup style review instead. And why not a Thermalright Extreme with a Noctua fan or two for the high end??
@ Action: How about buying a set of TB drives and a box to keep them in. For a monthly backup you could connect one via eSata, do an incremental backup of the entire system and put it back in the box. Put said box somewhere cool, dark and preferably safe. maybe in a vault of some kind. Backup would surely not fail for a few years if only connected once a month.
Originally Posted by Bindibadgi Blu-ray burners - no demand for them, generally high cost of backups and slow write time. One 50GB BD-R disk versus two/three 500/640GB/terabyte drives in RAID1/5? There are about 500 ways to do data backup - we could include tape, SAN, buying into Cloud storage, NAS - too many to list.
True there are many options for data backup. I have two RAID 5 4 drive NAS units, one purchased as a backup NAS after a two drive failure of the primary RAID 5 NAS. Hard drives are not archival in the slightest, even in RAID scenarios. They are convenient and fast and work well with data that is being constantly changed, but that is about it and it not a terribly good long term storage scenario. A good RAID setup is more expensive than the budget box yet for the performance box you are willing to go with SSD drives in RAID 0 yet unwilling to go with $200 more for a Blu-Ray writer? Seems a bit shortsighted to me. There is not another semi-archival medium out there in the near term with anywhere near the speed and capacity, yet there is a recommendation to go with an SSD setup that will likely be significantly surpassed by developments within the next year? Tape? Try to find a tape setup to handle large capacities that is anywhere near as fast as Blu-Ray and is anywhere near as cheap, there isn't such a beast. SANs? This is an enterprise setup, not enthusiast. Cloud storage is a good solution, however some archival setup is still needed.
I'm not seeing any other relativley inexpensive solution for semi-archival setups to a fast Blu-Ray writer. These are now reaching 8x speeds (yes, media might only be 6x or 4x in terms of writing at the current time) and prices are still high for 50GB fast media, but prices will come down over time. The volume of data for many users is such that DVD is not a viable solution. NAS is being touted as a solution, but it is expensive and not really archival in the slightest (see above mentioned 2 drive failure of a 4 drive RAID 5 NAS).
I guess that I'm surprised that there would be such resistance to a superior technology that is backward compatible with so much semi-archival capability. Oh yes, I do own a Blu-Ray writer and would not want to give it back!
Still, the budget box is very interesting and the choices are thought provoking.
Originally Posted by Action I guess that I'm surprised that there would be such resistance to a superior technology that is backward compatible with so much semi-archival capability. Oh yes, I do own a Blu-Ray writer and would not want to give it back!
You do know that with a halfway decent SSD drive, it has an expected data retention of 50 years. That's a larger capacity than Blue-Ray, and a MUCH longer data retention rate. Oh, and near indestructibility.
So, for backup purposes, stick a 2.5" SSD in a USB enclosure, schlep your data onto it, and toss it into a safe. Or put it on a shelf. Or wherever. It's faster, more secure, can take more punishment, is easier to maintain and easier to carry than a (stack of) DVDR/BD-ROMs, and will outlast most (If not all) of your requirements. And if you want to get really paranoid, RAID1 a couple of them together, and put one in a safety-deposit box.
Now how much would 300-600GB of SSD drives be? Cheaper than Blu-Ray disks? Sure SSDs have some long term storage potential that is pretty amazing and may ultimately be a good solution, however it is in the 3 NAS+ range of cost which is apparently a part of the push back that is leading to this discussion. We are talking about $200 extra dollars for a Blu-Ray writer that performs all that a DVD writer does + writes up to 50GB of data on a single disk. You can even use it to watch Blu-Ray content, although I have never bothered. This is not even the price of a single SSD drive. If flash drive manufacturers would make 300GB flash drives (I have many 16-32GB flash drives), they don't have to be fancy or terribly fast for decent archival storage, but no one has done this yet.
Now give it a few years, SSD drives will be comodities with much larger capacities. However, Blu-Ray disks should be much, much cheaper by then and the price benefit difference may still be there.
Why is there such entrenched resistance to Blu-Ray? It's not that its a bad optical storage medium and its the largest, fastest, and the only one that is on the near-term horizon. Drives are no longer $1K, they are ~$350 or less for the fastest available (8X) and ~$275 or less for 4X drives. This is not a huge increment over alternatives that include Blu-Ray playback.
Originally Posted by Buzzons Just to point out -- there's no point in recomending anything other than the Intel SSD at the moment - the rest all fail under slightly greater than small I/O and the wait times to write rocket up.. not something you want really. The Intel one, even though it suffers from the same issue, it doesn't suffer anywhere near as bad
I haven't heard this at all before, the Seagate CEO mentioned something like it this, this afternoon, however I mostly put it down to PR against competitors product. We'll look into it, however you can't deny the theory of performance and zero access times are certainly appealing.
We'll be reviewing SSDs later this month and we will certainly test this.
I believe Buzzons' referring to the Samsung Flash/JMicron Controller problems AnandTech uncovered in their Intel X25-M review a while back. This is not about the fact that MLC SSDs are per se slower than SLC SSDs (Intel demonstrated that MLC can be fast with a good controller), but an incompatibility between those two specific products (Samsung and JMicron).
Basically, sequential writes are very fast with acceptable latencies, but as soon as you start writing randomly, latencies explode (from 0.36ms sequential to 244ms random). Having an I/O queue higher than 1 only pours oil into the fire, with latencies topping 2s (SECONDS!) for random writes with a queue depth of 4. More details in the article.
I was wondering actually - do you know which flash memory and controller are used on the Patriot Warp V2? If they don't use that deadly flash/controller combination, they might be worth a closer look...
Comments 26 to 50 of 50
ReplyOtherwise a nice selection of hardware, particularly at the lower end. I never considered the EP31, but for 32 bit systems it looks to be quite a value. I second the comment on having two drives and would also suggest a UPS for higher end systems.
+1 I'm really glad you guys decided to make this a regular. It helps out sooo much and thanks for listing US final prices as well. You guys ROCK!
This really makes me want a new graphics card... I hate you. :p
oh to have the doller to go splash out on a premium end pc that includes those items mentioned in the article, that would be faaaaaaaaantastic!
peace
fatman
Went for the gtx260 myself over the ati 4870 despite paying a little extra, as benchmarks showed it to have higher minimum framerates in the games I value/prefer.
backup to DVD - 4 cents per gigabyte and you have to swap disks every 4.3gb.
backup to blu-ray - 35 cents per gigabyte you have to swap disks every 25gb.
backup to hard drive - 12 cents per gigabyte and never have to swap disks, plus you preserve your folder structure and keep your flexibility. you are financially better off to have 3 500gb disks in raid5 AND an external copy on a 1TB disk than you are backing up 1TB onto blu-ray disks.
In the mid system maybe, or a 640 and a Terabyte. The terabyte disks offer undeniable value for money at just £20-30 more for ~360GB.
LOL no actually we were complaining about other people being Antec fanboys earlier today - Aesthetics are purely personal - we rate cases on functionality, build quality, cooling and design. Li-li are great, but their build quality has dropped several points in the last year imo. Antecs have generally great build quality, a good price and good design, yet Cooler Master have really pulled up their game in the last 6-12 months too making some awesome cases.
Blu-ray burners - no demand for them, generally high cost of backups and slow write time. One 50GB BD-R disk versus two/three 500/640GB/terabyte drives in RAID1/5? There are about 500 ways to do data backup - we could include tape, SAN, buying into Cloud storage, NAS - too many to list.
Valver - Again good call, sorry we missed it again!!
I haven't heard this at all before, the Seagate CEO mentioned something like it this, this afternoon, however I mostly put it down to PR against competitors product. We'll look into it, however you can't deny the theory of performance and zero access times are certainly appealing.
We'll be reviewing SSDs later this month and we will certainly test this.
another vote says p182 have dust filters. at least my one only costed £86 from OCuk a year ago have dust filters.
Blu-Ray writeable disks are up to 50GB now. I have a RAID 5 NAS with 4 1TB drives as backup (and another NAS as a backup of the primary NAS with 4 300GB drives), however a NAS is not archival storage. Blu-Ray is much closer to archival. With ~200GB in flac files, that is 4 Blu-Ray disks. On DVD, that'd be closer to 45-50 disks and a huge pile of time swapping, labeling, and storing that number of items. DVD as a storage medium for large file types is a dead end. Jpgs and RAW camera files are similar, I've got well over 100GB of these files in under a year of DSLR use, Blu-Ray is a far superior solution for archival storage of large numbers of large sized files.
yes it is 10-20quid more but get a higher quality sleek silent case with modular higher output psu with 83-88% efficientcy.
100GB of shots from ONE YEAR of photography.
Jeez. I take photos every single day and my work folder of 4 years old is 20GB.
BD-Rs last as long as CD/DVDRs - 5-10 years in a cool dry place. If you want archival then you want Chrome Oxide tape drives.
Your archiving needs are quite obsessive I have to say. A good server with a good controller + RAID 6 + spare would have cost you just as much.
Point is, with a budget build recommendation you have to draw a line. If the reader has a slightly bigger budget, he can add the extra bell or whistle, but he's gone outside the original remit.
As one example, Ars Technica pick an Antec NSK4480 for their budget box, around £55 inc 380W Antec PSU and perfectly adequate, plus a saving of around £23 on the Bit CM330/Corsair VX450 package; at the end of the day the reader is free to shop around and personalise the suggested systems.
It seems that both "appear" to be resting on their laurels (I'm sure they're really not, but that's the appearance), as nothing really mind blowing has come from either (If ATi can come up with an X2 card, why not nV? They did it before, after all).
nVidia did get the advantage for the time (weeks) they had before R770, and all AMD is coming out with at the moment is a 45nm die shrink of a now quite long in the tooth CPU. K8 is several years old now, isn't it about time they got the next rev. out of the door? And just what the heck is happening with Socket 1207 (Socket F)? It's still got nowhere near the support or acceptance that 939 had, and for multi-processor AM2(+) won't cut it.
@ Action: How about buying a set of TB drives and a box to keep them in. For a monthly backup you could connect one via eSata, do an incremental backup of the entire system and put it back in the box. Put said box somewhere cool, dark and preferably safe. maybe in a vault of some kind. Backup would surely not fail for a few years if only connected once a month.
True there are many options for data backup. I have two RAID 5 4 drive NAS units, one purchased as a backup NAS after a two drive failure of the primary RAID 5 NAS. Hard drives are not archival in the slightest, even in RAID scenarios. They are convenient and fast and work well with data that is being constantly changed, but that is about it and it not a terribly good long term storage scenario. A good RAID setup is more expensive than the budget box yet for the performance box you are willing to go with SSD drives in RAID 0 yet unwilling to go with $200 more for a Blu-Ray writer? Seems a bit shortsighted to me. There is not another semi-archival medium out there in the near term with anywhere near the speed and capacity, yet there is a recommendation to go with an SSD setup that will likely be significantly surpassed by developments within the next year? Tape? Try to find a tape setup to handle large capacities that is anywhere near as fast as Blu-Ray and is anywhere near as cheap, there isn't such a beast. SANs? This is an enterprise setup, not enthusiast. Cloud storage is a good solution, however some archival setup is still needed.
I'm not seeing any other relativley inexpensive solution for semi-archival setups to a fast Blu-Ray writer. These are now reaching 8x speeds (yes, media might only be 6x or 4x in terms of writing at the current time) and prices are still high for 50GB fast media, but prices will come down over time. The volume of data for many users is such that DVD is not a viable solution. NAS is being touted as a solution, but it is expensive and not really archival in the slightest (see above mentioned 2 drive failure of a 4 drive RAID 5 NAS).
I guess that I'm surprised that there would be such resistance to a superior technology that is backward compatible with so much semi-archival capability. Oh yes, I do own a Blu-Ray writer and would not want to give it back!
Still, the budget box is very interesting and the choices are thought provoking.
You do know that with a halfway decent SSD drive, it has an expected data retention of 50 years. That's a larger capacity than Blue-Ray, and a MUCH longer data retention rate. Oh, and near indestructibility.
So, for backup purposes, stick a 2.5" SSD in a USB enclosure, schlep your data onto it, and toss it into a safe. Or put it on a shelf. Or wherever. It's faster, more secure, can take more punishment, is easier to maintain and easier to carry than a (stack of) DVDR/BD-ROMs, and will outlast most (If not all) of your requirements. And if you want to get really paranoid, RAID1 a couple of them together, and put one in a safety-deposit box.
Now give it a few years, SSD drives will be comodities with much larger capacities. However, Blu-Ray disks should be much, much cheaper by then and the price benefit difference may still be there.
Why is there such entrenched resistance to Blu-Ray? It's not that its a bad optical storage medium and its the largest, fastest, and the only one that is on the near-term horizon. Drives are no longer $1K, they are ~$350 or less for the fastest available (8X) and ~$275 or less for 4X drives. This is not a huge increment over alternatives that include Blu-Ray playback.
I believe Buzzons' referring to the Samsung Flash/JMicron Controller problems AnandTech uncovered in their Intel X25-M review a while back. This is not about the fact that MLC SSDs are per se slower than SLC SSDs (Intel demonstrated that MLC can be fast with a good controller), but an incompatibility between those two specific products (Samsung and JMicron).
Basically, sequential writes are very fast with acceptable latencies, but as soon as you start writing randomly, latencies explode (from 0.36ms sequential to 244ms random). Having an I/O queue higher than 1 only pours oil into the fire, with latencies topping 2s (SECONDS!) for random writes with a queue depth of 4. More details in the article.
I was wondering actually - do you know which flash memory and controller are used on the Patriot Warp V2? If they don't use that deadly flash/controller combination, they might be worth a closer look...
Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB GDDR5
Asus P5Q-E Intel P45 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600
Corsair TX 750W ATX2.2 SLI Compliant PSU
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-Bit
2x OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Vista Gold Series DDR2
Akasa AK-966 Blue Aurora (Intel LGA 775)
Thermaltake VA3000SWA Tsunami Dream SuperMidi Aluminium Tower - Silver
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