Harddrive development

[Klaus]

I'm assembling a little PC today and learned about the M.2 format for SSDs.

I must say I'm quite impressed. These tiny things hold up to 8TB of data. They weight about 7g.

It wasn't that long ago that I used one of these:

That's an 80MB Seagate ST4096. It weights 6.5lbs.

So we have a factor 100,000 in storage capacity and a factor of 42,000,000 in storage per weight unit. All within a time span of around 30 years. I find that rather insane.

[taiwan_girl]

@Klaus What are the costs of those types of hard drives?

I bought recently a new external SSD hard drive (1 TB) on the recommendation of @Axtremus and @George-K (which is working great! Thanks!!)

I think it was about USD $150 or about that.

[George K]

@taiwan_girl said in Harddrive development:

@Klaus What are the costs of those types of hard drives?

Amazon has some 2TB drives in that configuration for about $250. A small enclosure adds about $20.

https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rocket-External-Aluminum-SB-2TB-NANO-BLK/dp/B07XQZPX81?ref_=Oct_DLandingS_D_7ff90c9a_65&smid=A2ELBRY1PH9SPX

[Doctor Phibes]

I've got a couple of those M.2's in my laptop. They completely transform boot and load times for programs with a lot of data. The laptop is nearly 4 years old, and it still runs like shit through a goose.

[Loki]

The gap between the evolution of the brain and technology is so wide it is not unreasonable to wonder when we completely lose free will.

[Doctor Phibes]

Hey, if it's a choice between Donald Trump, Joe Biden and our new robotic overlords, I know where my [BEEP] vote's going.

[Mik]

@Doctor-Phibes said in Harddrive development:

I've got a couple of those M.2's in my laptop. They completely transform boot and load times for programs with a lot of data. The laptop is nearly 4 years old, and it still runs like shit through a goose.

I don't think I want one like that. Really fast would be OK.

[mark]

The new speed champ on the market is the Samsung 980 Pro series.

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-500gb-980-pro/p/N82E16820147789

7,000 MB/sec Sustained Read
5,000 MB/sec Sustained Write

I'm going to use 4 of them in a RAID 0 configuration. They will be installed on a 4 slot m.2 RAID card using PCIe v4.0 which has 2x the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. This is just one of the current advantages that AMD has over Intel at the moment.

The RAID 0 configuration will result in a 2TB disk volume with 4x the Read/Write Speed of a single drive. lol

Up to 28,000 MB/sec Read and 20,000 MB/sec Write. That is absolutely mind blowing performance.

There will be an additional 980 Pro used that will be installed on the motherboard itself and will be in the slot that is connected directly to the CPU, bypassing the chipset of the motherboard. That will be the boot and OS drive. I am hearing tales of "instantaneous boot" into Windows 10. We will see about that.

[Klaus]

You’ll be able to read TNCR and do your email so much faster, Mark!

[mark]

@Klaus

I do so much more than that with my computers.

[Doctor Phibes]

For the amount of money that Mark spends for his flight-sims, he could buy an aircraft

[mark]

@Doctor-Phibes said in Harddrive development:

For the amount of money that Mark spends for his flight-sims, he could buy an aircraft

Not even close. lol. Not just flight sims, but video, audio, photo processing. Astronomical photo processing is intense shit and it just keeps getting more intense as resolutions continue to climb. I fully intend to get back to that hobby sooner than later and my PC is going to be up to the task and then some.

Headroom, man. Headroom.

[Doctor Phibes]

To be honest, I think having a screaming fast PC is worthwhile for it's own sake.

Sadly, I have other things to pay for which I've been told are more important.

[Axtremus]

@Doctor-Phibes said in Harddrive development:

Sadly, I have other things to pay for which I've been told are more important.

I'm telling you, man, it's important that you not let anyone tell you what's important.

[mark]

@Doctor-Phibes said in Harddrive development:

To be honest, I think having a screaming fast PC is worthwhile for it's own sake.

Sadly, I have other things to pay for which I've been told are more important.

My current PC build is 10 years old. An original Intel Core i7 930 @2.8GHz. Maxed out at 12 GB of RAM. I have kept it performing decently enough for that past 4 years or more by installing SSD drives and a newer but not great video card.

I built the fastest computer I could afford in 2010. It is still working but the newer tasks I am demanding of it bring it to a crawl. It is past time for a upgrade.

I intend to make this one last another 10 years.

[mark]

Just ordered 2 of the 1TB 980 Pros. Back-ordered I should say. They limit how many you can order and today's limit was 2. Strangely, they were on sale. I have never seen brand new SKUs go on sale like this. The next 4 I purchase will probably cost more.

Decided against the smaller capacity version for technical/longevity reasons.

New plan is to install 3, 1TB 980 Pros on the Motherboard. First drive gets connected directly to the CPU. The two that are connected to the motherboard chipset will be in a RAID 0 striped configuration. That will create a 2TB drive with twice the read and write speed. I will just have to live with only 14,000 MBps reads and 10,000 MBps writes.