New RAM and SSD

[sil3nt]

Have been ordered.

Crucial M4 128GB SSD - $155.99 USD

Kingston Technology HyperX Blu 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 - $41.04 USD

Amazon converted it to NZD and it came to $250 for both. Their conversion seems a little expensive but no big deal.

$40 NZD shipping to get it here next week.

Total in NZD = $292.

Cost of the drive alone in NZ = $280+

Can't wait!

[SMOKEU]

Damn that's a pretty sweet deal. I've heard a lot of good things about the M4. Post some SSD benchmarks here when it arrives.

[pzkpfw]

Wow. Not wrong: http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=873561

$281 is lowest shown just for the drive.

It's like bike parts, dunno how the locals stay in business.

[sil3nt]

Damn that's a pretty sweet deal. I've heard a lot of good things about the M4. Post some SSD benchmarks here when it arrives.

Not much point when they are all on youtube. Plus my mobo is only 3GB/s SATA and the drive is 6GB/s so I am losing a bit of performance.

[SMOKEU]

Time for a motherboard upgrade then.

[sil3nt]

Time for a motherboard upgrade then.

Really do not want to waste time researching which mobo would be best. Went through all that couple of years ago when I built this machine and its not fun!

[SMOKEU]

Really do not want to waste time researching which mobo would be best. Went through all that couple of years ago when I built this machine and its not fun!

I know exactly what you mean, took me ages to find all the best bits for the price when I built up my 2600K rig last year. You'd still get sequential read speeds of around 275-285MB/s with the SATA2 controller so it's still going to be pretty damn fast as a boot drive.

[p.dath]

For those on more of a budget, and wanting some decent storage capacity, I recently tried out one of the Hybrid drives, a "Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid Drive". The are basically a standard drive with some flash built in to improve the performance. Not as fast as a SSD, but achieves a lot of the performance of one with a lot more storage.

They are really good. I recommend them.

[sil3nt]

Maybe if your buying a new system. If you already have a HDD lying around then you might as well just get an SSD.

[SMOKEU]

For those on more of a budget, and wanting some decent storage capacity, I recently tried out one of the Hybrid drives, a "Seagate Momentus XT 750GB Hybrid Drive". The are basically a standard drive with some flash built in to improve the performance. Not as fast as a SSD, but achieves a lot of the performance of one with a lot more storage.

They are really good. I recommend them.

Is that just like a normal HDD with extra cache? What kind of sequential read/write speeds did you get from it?

[sil3nt]

Is that just like a normal HDD with extra cache? What kind of sequential read/write speeds did you get from it?

[Madmax]

I have a 500GB Momentus XT in my current laptop
it makes the loading times a bit faster under XP
but not much on Win7
Overall its a good trade off
It kind of learns stuff you load all the time

[p.dath]

Is that just like a normal HDD with extra cache? What kind of sequential read/write speeds did you get from it?

I never measured sequential throughut, but I did give it a brutal test using sqlio which is normally used for measuring SQL performance on enterprise class drives. Below are the results I got from a laptop from the Hybrid drive versus the standard Maxtor it ships with.

sqlio block size___________________2_______4_______16_____32__ ____64

Seagate 750GB Hybrid______IO/sec__3955____4800___2500____1700____1316
________________________MBs/sec_7.7_____18.89___39.74___53______82
Maxtor 500GB_____________IO/sec__7957____208____114_____130_____149
________________________MBs/sec_15______0.81___1.8______4_______9.33

Also the testing machine had a 3Gb/s SATA2 connection, so couldn't take advantage of the Hybrid's SATA3 interface.

I have a 500GB Momentus XT in my current laptop
it makes the loading times a bit faster under XP
but not much on Win7
Overall its a good trade off
It kind of learns stuff you load all the time

Those were a generation 1 hybrid. The generation 2 drives are up to about tripple the speed.