Recent Posts
).That's true. But I think that the scales are different. Disc blocks are relatively big. We're not talking about defragging at the byte scale.Defragging is never done at the byte scale, and not even at the sector scale - so yes, relatively large chunks (for my NTFS filesystems, generally 4kb clusters).-CWuestefeld (February 17, 2011, 11:58 AM)
Even if a file has hundreds of fragments, it's not going to make any noticeable (or probably even measurable) difference in the overall access times.Do you know this to be true? Have you measured it? For every possible combination of SSD firmware, file fragmentation level, and application + access pattern?-CWuestefeld (February 17, 2011, 11:58 AM)
So apposed to what is normally (IDE/SCSI/SATA) perceived as a defrag. - accounting for the hardware lieing - Wouldn't that really just be somewhere between damage control and a placebo effect?A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.-Stoic Joker (February 17, 2011, 11:25 AM)
Okay, so disable/move the pagefile, double check to make sure defrag is disabled on the SSD. Any other Windows 7 tweaks I can/should do?None I can remember off top of my head - Win7 disables the "last access time" timestamp by default, otherwise that would've been important to turn off.-Deozaan (February 17, 2011, 11:22 AM)
Yes, I read the review. The Vertex2 did worse than the A-DATA on many of the tests. The A-DATA did very well on many tests but also did very poorly on some of the others.It might've done a bit better in some of the sequential tests, but those aren't all that relevant for SSDs; OTOH, it drops to ~10mb/s in the tests that matter... while this is still a lot faster than the ~100kb/s you'll get from a HDD in the same tests, it's a lot worse than all the decent SSDs on the market. Also, this could mean the drive isn't very good at combining it's writes, resulting in eating up it's limited amount of erase-cycles faster than other drives.-Deozaan (February 17, 2011, 11:22 AM)
Also, to swap it out would mean dealing with RMA, paying return shipping, and waiting longer for the other drive to arrive.I sometimes forget just how nice legislation we have here in .dk (or perhaps it's .eu?) - when ordering online, we have full 14-day money-back no-questions-asked because we when shopping online, one "isn't able to inspect the product before buying"-Deozaan (February 17, 2011, 11:22 AM)
I still haven't figured out a way to safely move the User directory to another drive, and that's the directory that a lot of stuff is stored in these days.You'll want to keep the main Users folder on the SSD, since that's where stuff like the registry hive files are located - they benefit from the fast random I/O.-Deozaan (February 17, 2011, 12:06 PM)
Exactly.I put a Blu-ray burner in my desktop for optical backups.What, there's still people using optical media for backups? O_o-Renegade (February 17, 2011, 06:33 AM)-f0dder (February 17, 2011, 07:31 AM)
I see a lot of SOHO/SMBs doing optical backups ... I've yet to see any of them do a successful restore...-Stoic Joker (February 17, 2011, 11:32 AM)
But if you think about it, backing up a bluray disc will be about 50GB. So a 3TB drive will <only> hold 60 bluray movies.Convert to mkv/x264 and you're down to ~8gig apop with very little visible quality loss - if your main reason is backups and ease of use, that's good enough, and you can store the original discs in a safe and humidity-controlled environment-superboyac (February 17, 2011, 11:40 AM)
I put a Blu-ray burner in my desktop for optical backups.What, there's still people using optical media for backups? O_o-Renegade (February 17, 2011, 06:33 AM)
Reading adjacent blocks of data is no faster than reading blocks that are spread out over the drive. Fragmentation does not affect SSD drive speed.If you look at benchmarks, all the SSDs have different speed characteristics when dealing with linear reads/writes compared to scattered smaller I/O. It can matter a lot for writes, but also matters for reads.
Okay, all the parts arrived today, so if I made some poor choices with the PSU and the SSD, then too bad, so sad, my bad.Meh, does that include the A-DATA SSD? Did you read the review I posted a link to? You'd do yourself a favor to get that SSD swapped for a Vertex2.-Deozaan (February 16, 2011, 11:57 PM)
but if there's a good reason for having 4 partitions (the max for a mechanical drive AFAIK)There can only be 4 MBR partition slots per drive, but that's why "logical" partitions were invented - long story short, you can have a lot more than 4. Not much reason to go crazy, though. You might want to do a partition on the SSD for OS+Apps and the rest for "my documents", but that's only to make windows reinstalls a bit easier - if you want to make your sister's life easier, go with a single partition-Deozaan (February 16, 2011, 11:57 PM)
How many of those HTML 5 "standard features" are finalized standards?Is anything from HTML5 "finalized standards"?-Josh (February 16, 2011, 05:48 PM)
We have a PS3? I knew I was a bit distant at times. But this is getting ridiculous!I've got another set of brothers as well, remember?-p3lb0x (February 16, 2011, 04:19 PM)
XSLT and FOP is useful for presenting (structured) data, generated elsewhere, not being produced/modified from a wordprocessor or something like it. So you're correct in selecting (LaTeX/Any document management system) for maintaining your docs.I just don't really like the LaTeX syntax or the toolset (it doesn't feel "natural" on Windows), and DocBook sounds decent - but when I see it mentioned, it's almost always also involving xslt and fop :/-Ath (February 16, 2011, 04:34 AM)
Read zillions of reviews - alternatively, go for a reputable brand name and cross your fingersAlso, for the PSU: I've never heard of Rosewill. But one thing about PSUs: stable voltages are craploads more important than wattage. Even my quadcore/8gig/GF460/2x10k-rpm-raptor drives doesn't go above ~275W under full CPU+GPU load.How can you tell what PSUs will have stable voltages and which ones don't?-f0dder (February 16, 2011, 03:23 AM)-Deozaan (February 16, 2011, 03:41 AM)