New Build Soon... 2 Questions.

Hansanter

Hi All,

I'm planning on upgrading my PC soon.. so first stop is on here to see where's the best place to buy from... so I figure Mindfactory.de is the place ? I had a look on there and not surprisingly it's in German... I can't find an english language option.. do they have one ?

I'd like to use an SSD drive or two for the first time... what's the best option for these.. 'M.2' etc ? and how do they interface with the Mobo ? I've read stuff about PCIe plugin cards... M.2 connectors ? So I'm a little confused about these.

Any help/suggestions appreciated.

H./

BloodBath

If you use Chrome you can just right click on the page and translate it to English.

Are you building a new system or just a few parts?

Hansanter

I'm upgrading my current system so I don't need a case, PSU etc. I envisage purchasing a Mobo, CPU, RAM, one or two SSDs and a Video Card. I'll probably go for an Intel i7 KabyLake and mid range ASUS motherboard, DDR4 RAM and an nVidia 1070 or similar... need to find out more but particularly so regarding the SSDs.

H./

K.O.Kiki

Hold on for AMD Ryzen benchmarks; I'm hazarding the R7 1700 will be a better buy than Kabylake i7.

scamalert

some mobos now come with m.2 slot,its supposed to be faster since it uses pci links rather then sata,but that said if you never had ssd few ssd's in raid 0 is like more then enough speed that you could possibly need.

minitrue

If you want more then 1TB of ssd space it might make sense to buy 2 instead of one bigger one. You have to have a very unusual set of needs to want to raid-0 ssds though!

M.2 is just a socket on the motherboard which "might" be able to take a pci-e x4 based SSD (cheaper boards only have sata in the m.2) which can be quicker then sata, but again unless you have unusual needs and want to spend a lot of extra cash sata SSDs are going to be ample (whether m.2 sata or normal 2.5" drives).

scamalert

id say raid 0 wouldn't be that unusual many people still use single drives,since if doing raid its quite expensive option to sacrifice extra drive given costs of ssds,since speed is what ssds are good for as backing up its cheaper to get 1tb hdd drive on the side.

minitrue

Just use one ssd (no raid) which is already faster then probably any raid-0 you could assemble from spinning rust, or if you really really really need to spend more money for marginal gains use a super expensive pci-e ssd as part of a tiered storage system.

raid-0 is only meant for temporary stuff you really don't care about losing and it was always an insane kludge to work around the problems of spinning disks in performance critical situations where you had no other choice.

Now if you had said get one 4TB disk to backup to and had a hard requirement for 4TB of ssd appearing as one drive it might make sense to do raid-0 as after 1TB ssds €/B starts going through the roof. But if you are talking about <1TB of space ...

If raid-0 on ssd's isn't unusual the world is much crazier then I thought

Hansanter

Thanks for the info guys. My current setup is two 1TB 'spinning rust' HDDs both partitioned to 50/50 so effectively I have four 500GB drives, Win7 being on the C: drive (obviously). This suits me fine and I expect to continue that way.. so I don't require all the RAID stuff. I also have a third spinning HDD for backup stuff. I mainly do 2D and 3D graphic development for gaming so I need something capable, reliable, powerful and with a bit of life in it. I've always built my own PCs but the technology has moved on a bit since my last build about 2.5 yrs ago and I've become a little out of touch regarding the latest SSDs and what is the current best solution to suit my needs. Perhaps, initially, I'm overkilling it a bit in thinking about replacing all my spinning drives with 500Gb SSDs ?? Is that actually required or beneficial ? Certainly it's a good move for the C drive (Windows etc) but for the graphic dev stuff... Photoshop, 3DSMax etc.. I dunno..or.. I think so ?
H./

minitrue

Having everything you are working on on SSD is great (so all the textures and things as well as the programs themselves). The question is how much space do you need and how deep are your pockets. Depending on how you work it might be trivial or a pain to just move what you need onto SSD, work on it for hours, days, weeks, months and then when you are finished shove it off onto the slow disks until you have to work on it again.

Actually looks like it's about the same price per bit now for the crucial SSDs from ~500GB to 2TB at about €280/TB (they are close enough to the cheapest at all the sizes).

Hansanter

OK.. I had a look on Komplett and Mindfactory... I see the Samsung 960 EVO - 500 GB M.2 SSD for €290 and €244 respectively.
So a dumb question... If I purchase two of these for my system with a view to maybe adding one or two more later on.. Do I need to get a motherboard with an M.2 slot/port for each drive I want to use ?
H./

minitrue

Yep, you need an m.2 for each one and a board with more then one will be cost a good bit more, let alone more then 2. Why would you buy 2 though instead of buying 1 1TB one (and splitting it in two partitions like you have been doing if you want to)?

Also you don't need to bother with m.2 (and if you really want to go m.2 for performance reasons make sure you are choosing a pci-e m.2 drive and your board has pci-e m.2 sockets).

minitrue

Well actually that's a bit of a lie, you can get adapters also. So you can get a pci-e "card" that you can plug m.2 pci-e drives into (and other adapters for sata ones which make them more like a 2.5" disk).

Hansanter

Minitrue.. thanks for your advice... If I want to create something like I had before... 2 X 1TB drives >>> 4 X 500GB drives... what would you recommend of I wanted to change to SSD drives ? I need them to be up to date and somewhat reasonably future proof without being crazy on the cost. Thanks.
H./

minitrue

I'd probably just go with 2 * 1TB 2.5" SSDs then, say http://www.mindfactory.de/product_info.php/1050GB-Crucial-MX300-2-5Zoll--6-4cm--SATA-6Gb-s-3D-NAND-TLC-Toggle--CT10_1115071.html

That would be €560 for the 2 of them but if you really need 2TB of full speed space that's about as uncrazy as it gets (you could get 2 slightly cheaper 960GB SSDs for €500). I honestly wouldn't faint if m.2 slots are replaced in another year or three so future-proofing wise just using 2.5" drives is the safe option.

Hansanter

OK Ill have a good ponder on that minitrue.. many thanks.
H./