SSDs and newer processors are epic.

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LittleJess

LittleJess

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I upgraded my computer half of year ago, decided to op into a I3 and a AMD R7 360, with a Kingston SSD.

The speed is freaking epic, roughly couple second boots, no noticeable loading, very responsive. seems to kick the hell out of my old computer, which was only a couple years old.

Even though my PC is more of a mid end gaming I don't even use it for gaming, you'll be surprised how much GPU's help with specific tasks, I mostly use it to run code on the gpu, It's complicated but fun to do. (C or C++ coders will get what I'm talking about) I don't think you can do that with C#, but I'm sure with some trickery you could.

As someone who likes to code, It has really paid off, I love when it's responsive, even than it still feels overkill to me, I can run more applications at once, do video rendering faster. but other than that, I could live with my old computer.

I'm the type of person who goes with what I can afford, I could live with computers from 5-8 years ago if I really had to, but it has to have a core 2 duo minimum, there decent processors, still good these days.

Anyone else awwed at there first SSD? To me this it's a epic experience, and from now on I'm only using mechanical drives to store backups and installations.

I never realized it was gonna be this fast, even with AES(TWOFISH(SERPENT)) encryption, with the new AES-NI instruction set, it rocks, not noticeable lagging, not too much of a noticeable slow down.

Yes I encrypt my stuff, but that's mostly to protect against theft, I live in a bad neighborhood, and would rather not have my stuff stolen, i'm sure most people aren't smart enough to freeze the ram, and dump the contents. They can steal the computer, the only thing that's worth anything is what's on it.

plus, I use a password manager, and don't want some meth head to computerize my bank account, or steal my public and private keys to my servers, (yes I own servers, that's because I run a few open source projects, and want to provide clean copies of my software.

I should also add I am a gamer, but haven't gamed on this PC for long, I've played some high end games to see how she would cope, seems to run quite smooth.
 
I will never go back from using SSDs. The difference in start up time alone is ridiculous. I don't really care how much more they cost than disk drives for overall space. You can find them on special from newegg from time to time and its always worth it. I currently have two 500gb samsung evo 750s on my desktop and I love it. I also have a four tb WD disk drive for extra space but I find than most everything I ever sue fits on the first TB of my SSD's
 
Acan said:
I will never go back from using SSDs. The difference in start up time alone is ridiculous. I don't really care how much more they cost than disk drives for overall space. You can find them on special from newegg from time to time and its always worth it. I currently have two 500gb samsung evo 750s on my desktop and I love it. I also have a four tb WD disk drive for extra space but I find than most everything I ever sue fits on the first TB of my SSD's
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There quite cheap now, though because there flash storage, I've heard they can fail after so many low level rewrites, so you can't securely wipe them so many times, like you can with mechanical drives, or with constant 24/7 usage. I'm not sure if this holds true with high quality SSDs.

But, if it fails, I'll just slip in another, and reinstall windows, everything else is on my backup drives, for some reason the computer shop I go to, sells them cheaper than a entry level 500GB drive. so I can get a cheap 60GB ssd for like $35 while a 500GB seagate is $65 -.- lol
 
They are cheaper now yes but so are high storage disk drives. I remember when I got my first tb disk drive it was 120$ after Christmas sale around 2008 I think. For that same price I just found a seagate 4tb drive. Everything has gotten cheaper. So the $/gb value is still much better for a disk drive but that doesn't factor the enhanced performance you get from SSDs.

I will never build a new comp without an SSD but 500gb is not enough storage on its own. When you get into TBs of SSDs it gets quite pricey.

I've never had an SSD fail but I would never toss out any drive without putting my drill press through it if it did that's for sure.
 
Acan said:
They are cheaper now yes but so are high storage disk drives. I remember when I got my first tb disk drive it was 120$ after Christmas sale around 2008 I think. For that same price I just found a seagate 4tb drive. Everything has gotten cheaper. So the $/gb value is still much better for a disk drive but that doesn't factor the enhanced performance you get from SSDs.

I will never build a new comp without an SSD but 500gb is not enough storage on its own. When you get into TBs of SSDs it gets quite pricey.

I've never had an SSD fail but I would never toss out any drive without putting my drill press through it if it did that's for sure.
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That's why you encrypt them, than use a hammer, than a drill ;) than throw it in the river ;)
 
Well I've never encrypted a drive, but then again I've never had to actually throw a drive out.
 
i7 4790k and 128gb Samsung 850 pro... Both are great! My first drive messed up after about six months, but luckily there's a 10 year warranty. I also have a 2TB HDD. I never had a computer this amazing before. I got it 10 months ago & I'm still impressed by it often!
 
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Yes, I can never go back to slower system drives. I even got myself a NVMe PCIe card not too long ago. But even my oldest drives, a 830Pro and an Intel 530 serve well for Windows and inside my laptop.

By the way, SSDs are fast enough to outperform even fast CPUs with AES-NI. Here's my cryptsetup benchmark output for example. (using aes-xts here)
Code: 
#  Algorithm | Key |  Encryption |  Decryption
     aes-cbc   128b   814.1 MiB/s  3245.0 MiB/s
 serpent-cbc   128b   104.9 MiB/s   692.9 MiB/s
 twofish-cbc   128b   228.3 MiB/s   438.4 MiB/s
     aes-cbc   256b   592.1 MiB/s  2662.5 MiB/s
 serpent-cbc   256b   106.3 MiB/s   684.7 MiB/s
 twofish-cbc   256b   228.0 MiB/s   443.4 MiB/s
     aes-xts   256b  3021.1 MiB/s  3017.1 MiB/s
 serpent-xts   256b   690.2 MiB/s   665.0 MiB/s
 twofish-xts   256b   431.1 MiB/s   435.7 MiB/s
     aes-xts   512b  2323.9 MiB/s  2327.7 MiB/s
 serpent-xts   512b   704.4 MiB/s   674.4 MiB/s
 twofish-xts   512b   427.9 MiB/s   438.1 MiB/s
 
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kapi said:
Yes, I can never go back to slower system drives. I even got myself a NVMe PCIe card not too long ago. But even my oldest drives, a 830Pro and an Intel 530 serve well for Windows and inside my laptop.

By the way, SSDs are fast enough to outperform even fast CPUs with AES-NI. Here's my cryptsetup benchmark output for example. (using aes-xts here)
Code: 
#  Algorithm | Key |  Encryption |  Decryption
     aes-cbc   128b   814.1 MiB/s  3245.0 MiB/s
 serpent-cbc   128b   104.9 MiB/s   692.9 MiB/s
 twofish-cbc   128b   228.3 MiB/s   438.4 MiB/s
     aes-cbc   256b   592.1 MiB/s  2662.5 MiB/s
 serpent-cbc   256b   106.3 MiB/s   684.7 MiB/s
 twofish-cbc   256b   228.0 MiB/s   443.4 MiB/s
     aes-xts   256b  3021.1 MiB/s  3017.1 MiB/s
 serpent-xts   256b   690.2 MiB/s   665.0 MiB/s
 twofish-xts   256b   431.1 MiB/s   435.7 MiB/s
     aes-xts   512b  2323.9 MiB/s  2327.7 MiB/s
 serpent-xts   512b   704.4 MiB/s   674.4 MiB/s
 twofish-xts   512b   427.9 MiB/s   438.1 MiB/s
Click to expand...

Nice, This is my only processor that has the AES-NI instruction set, I use windows due to multiple linux distros crapping itself on my hardware, so I use it mostly in a virtual machine, I'm sure it's linked to my slower 5400 RPM drive causing ubuntu to freeze, but rule of thumb veracrypt's benchmarks would roughly be similar.

That being said, that's my fault for having odd hardware, nothing to do with Linux, considering it also freezes on my laptop, I've tied it to my slower RPM 5400 drives, doesn't seem to freeze with just an SSD.

I love how LUKS integrates really well with ubuntu, shame I'm stuck with windows and veracrypt, I do not trust bitlocker at all, so hibernation is a bit of a issue :p
 
Maxx said:
But the CSI people will find it and piece your filthy bits back together anyway! <LOL>
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Or will they, "dramatic music plays"
 
My PC is (mostly) about 8 years old, but it's still pretty quick. It has a Core i7 CPU, 12GB RAM, a PCIe SSD, and a half-decent graphics card. I built it to last, but I'm surprised that it's still fast enough. I haven't even bothered overclocking it, but the CPU is liquid-cooled so I could push it harder if I ever need to. :)

It's definitely worth doing your research so you can build a system that's perfectly balanced for what you want to use it for, and easy to upgrade. I've got a huge case with plenty of fans, and a 800W PSU, so anything will fit inside! All I need is a motherboard, chip and RAM, which will cost the same as a rubbish computer bundle from PC World.

It was moderately expensive to buy, but it's saved money in the long run. It must be much cheaper than buying a basic PC and upgrading the whole thing every 4 years.

Anyway, the SSD connects via PCIe, so it's supposed to have several times the bandwidth of SATA connections. It is definitely faster than booting from a traditional hard drive, but not by as much as I was expecting. I imagine my CPU and motherboard are too old/slow to really take advantage of it. Or I'm just hard to impress! :-/

I use my 240GB SSD to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and there's plenty of room for the OS and programs. So, I'm sure ~120GB would be fine for a single OS. Just stick everything else on cheap, slow hard drives. If it's not an executable file, it probably won't be any quicker to access it from an SSD (ignoring the initial drive wakeup and seek times, which are fairly negligible).

I think I have five hard drives in my PC! I'm almost hoping some will die, just so I have an excuse to replace the lot with a single 2 or 3TB one!

But still, it's a really nice machine. So... I'm only feeling a teensy-weensy bit jealous of your super-duper, latest and greatest shiny new computer, DrunkBear.
 
DrunkBear said:
Or will they, "dramatic music plays"
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For all that I despise conspiracy theories, there's still part of me that wonders if the preponderance of forensic procedural dramas over the last decade or so, is not in fact a government conspiracy to deter crime by making law enforcement appear much more competent than it actual is.....
 
DrunkBear said:
Even though my PC is more of a mid end gaming I don't even use it for gaming, you'll be surprised how much GPU's help with specific tasks, I mostly use it to run code on the gpu, It's complicated but fun to do. (C or C++ coders will get what I'm talking about) I don't think you can do that with C#, but I'm sure with some trickery you could.
Click to expand...

There are some ways that you can get GPU processing in C#. The long way is to build the main functionality in C/C++ and compile the functions into a DLL and use C#'s LoadDLL functionality to build C# wrappers around them. But I also saw this article on the nVidia about a package that handles that for you called Alea. Unfortunately it requires you to have a card from nVidia. Here's the article https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/accelerate-net-applications-alea-gpu/

If you really like GPU computing, there's some cool stuff being done in the Data Science realm with GPU computing on Python, including things like running Apache Spark on a GPU.
https://developer.nvidia.com/how-to-cuda-python
http://www.slideshare.net/continuumio/gpu-computing-with-apache-spark-and-python
Again sorry that it's nVidia specific, but I'm sure there is some AMD equivalent.
 
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