New system build hard drive choices and more

Hey guys,

I'm going to be building a new 6-Core beast in these next few weeks, so i will probably be lurking around a bit more. I got a dirty deal on a 3930k and 180gb Intel 520 SSD to retire my Q6600 system. So my first question: which hard drive to choose for performance and reliability?

1. Hitachi Ultrastar HUA723020ALA640 2TB 64MB 7200RPM SATA 3

or

2. WD Caviar Black 2TB 64MB 7200 RPM SATA 3

I can't find much info on the Hitachi, my buddy says they are pretty durable drives, but does any know much more? I believe Hitachi is being bought out and don't know about the noise level, known issues. I've had tons of issues with WD but still respect them. I am flipping my 640gb Baracudas SATA2 for this.


Rest of the setup I believe will be as follows as long as I can get it ordered
i7 3930k
Intel 520 180gb SSD (might buy a second later for RAID0)
ASUS P9X79 Deluxe (believe it has the most SATA3 and USB3 ports)
32GB G.Skill Ripjaw Quad Channel Kit DDR3-1600 CL10
Corsair AX850 PSU
Corsair 800D Case
Zalman CNPS12X


What I'm taking over from my old system

X-Fi Titanium HD
ASUS GTX460 (yeah for now, going to wait out nVidia's ripoff "game" till a 560 replacement comes and makes it "obsolete" easily. I quote as they love issuing driver updates for 6 months and claim the revision is MUCH MUCH better with no support for the last card)
2x Lite-On 20x DVD Burners

Should I expect any compatability issues? RAID0 with Trim will work properly if I do upgrade? Also, is it worth going to a better Quad Channel kit or comparable? Usually it only yields 5-10fps benefits if I go like CL9 or something.... which is nothing. Overall, I don't look to OC I am looking to have something that is upgradeable/scalable for the future (i.e. RAID0, SLi, new board for Thunderbolt). Made some mistakes with this build like a small case, BFG vid card and shitty PSU (both which were changed). I'm pretty confident in ASUS and Corsair stuff usually.

 

Considering the slew of dead hitachi drives behind me..... not to mention the recent influx of WD drives that all died premature death as well by normal lifespans expectation.

I'm more inclined to side with WD...

As for your Raid support in the future.... Trim only works if the controller is in raid mode however the drive is not part of a raid 0 array and only used used on the intel raid controller as a JBOD mode or single drive.

Unfortunately the intel 520 has the sandforce controller.... be prepared to experience hell "potentially"..... either initially or much later...

I'm getting more reliable/better results from a single Seagate 500gb or the better 750gb Hybrid SSD drive. (boot times and snappiness of the machine)

Curious though.. 32gb of ram I HOPE suggest that your grabbing 4x 8gb sticks of DDR3..... and NOT 8x4gb of ddr3.

Trust me.. don't do 8 sticks.... populating every slot is NOT recommended at all.

Indeed true compared to the other models...

this board you selected gives you 2 more back panel USB 3.0 ports... removing the 2x usb 2.0 ports in the process... moving it to an addon option internally.

dual Lan vs single.

And it appears it also has Wireless Port also.

Beyond that and a 2x extra 3gbps sata cables..... that's all...

I initially was going to get the deluxe.. but decided on the pro .. picked it over the p9x79 ...

 

I will sure as hell not populate it with 8x4gb, its 4x 8GB. I was confused on the RAID0 config and Trim. I heard Trim works with RAID0 now, does it have any hitches or special config? And the marvell controller works for SATA3 but not RAID. I should expect the same level of performance as the intel controller?

 

My personal experience is that the intel 6gbps sata ports out perform the Marvel 6gbps Sata ports.

I've never been a fan of the 3rd party ports.... nor am i happy with the USB 3.0 3rd party chips ..... they seem to perform badly. Intels ivy bridge USB 3.0 does quite well however.

If you raid 0 SSDs together..... trim will become disabled and the only thing that will happen is the firmware/hardware level garbage collection will occur only....

SSD by itself while opperating the intel chipset in raid.... will still support trim..

according to the list of chipsets... only intel's RAID MODE driver supports trim for a ssd that isn't raided with anything. Other controllers will not allow trim to work while opperating in raid.

 

So bottom line Judas, if I connect 2 SSD drives to the intel controller, can I stripe them?

Edit - why the hell do you have a My Little Pony avatar....................?

 

wow i've had this avatar for quite a long time already....

anywho.

Heres the deal:

Intel Controller set to RAID mode

1 or more SSD connected BUT NOT setup in raid 0,1,5 = Trim works

however

2 or more SSDs connected however whichever SSDs are setup in a raid 0,1,5 = Only the drives in the raid array mode = NO trim.


For example if i had 3 SSDs and 3 Standard Hardrives filling all 6 intel ports

Then i decided to raid 0 only 2 of the SSDs and raid 1 only 2 of the standard hardrives, the 2 SSDs would have no trim support, however the one by itself would still have trim, the other hardrives will not effect anything, even though the controller is set to RAID.

Many of the 3rd party controllers only have 2 options, IDE and RAID.... in which case IDE is terrible, and RAID would break trim support due to the 3rd party drivers typically lacking that support. Some 3rd party controllers with AHCI mode available do not properly support trim.

Seems intel is your best bet. And unfortunately intel still hasn't brought a fully 6x 6gbps port solution.

TL;DR

Plug in your single SSD into the intel and all other drives, set the controller to RAID mode, and your good to go with the installation of windows....

Just make sure you get the latest intel rapid storage controller driver. You may need it prior to installing windows (may need to "manually install driver from usb flash drive)... the F6 floppy driver package is basically what you need. It should be the C600 intel enterprise Raid controller driver.

Course while the older drivers are listed on asus's support website download for the board.... use it as a referrence, typically the only drivers i download from asus for my p9x79 pro is the usb 3.0 driver for the 3rd party chips and bios update... the rest i download direct from intel or realtek or similarely.


When you get a second SSD.... if you decide to raid 0 it ..... you'll be already ready to go aside from requireing to reinstall anyways.... just keep in mind.. raid 0 or raid 1 or raid 5 or whatever, means your SSDs will not do trim.....

 

Judas's stuff is good (if a little wordy ).

I'd like to ask what this rig is for. By the time there's any advantage to 3930K over 3770K, both will be obsolete imo. 32GB of RAM is also pretty crazy given 6GB is about what you want now.

That motherboard is also pretty high-end, and you say that's just because you want a load of USB3 and SATA3 connectors - how many SSDs and external HDDs are you planning to connect?

Regarding Thunderbolt, a lot of motherboards, particularly from Asus, now have Thunderbolt headers. If you buy such a board, you'll be able to drop in a Thunderbolt expansion card rather than replacing your whole motherboard when you decide you need Thunderbolt.

Only other things I can think of in your original post are that yes, RAM performance isn't that important, that that Zalman cooler will be a pain to install and that as far as I am aware (unless I've missed something at some point) RAID and TRIM are incompatible technologies.

 

I was under the impression that RAID 0 and Trim were now compatible with some chipsets. I read somewhere that Intel had updated their 'something' to get it to work - I don't know if that is firmware or drivers or even chipsets.

I'm off to do some reading as I had looked at the possibility of running a RAID 0 on my Agility 3.

 

no intel had updated the drivers so that when their controller is set to RAID mode, that an SSD that is attached without being in array will be able to still perform trim tasks...

That is all... i have found no such statement saying that ssds IN raid array together would work. There is a lot of confusion about this on the internet.. but going back to intel as the source.. they only made the raid drivers and non raid ssds able to do trim.

 

Yes, I have found that clarification about what that Intel update accomplished. Still, reading around there are some that are saying that this is possible now. Stating that you need an OS, RAID controller and SSD that all recognise TRIM calls. I can't find a definitive answer though.

I am gonna post on the OCZ forum to see if I can get to the bottom of it.

 

RST TRIM support for SSD's in RAID 0 is working in RST 11.1 beta drivers if I remember correctly, but I can't remember if it works on the newest release of the 11.5s (doesn't in the alphas). Still no "official" RAID TRIM supported drivers though.

The other thing is, if I remember correctly, is that the drivers only support certain "current" chipsets, specifically the 77 (don't quote me on that though). Oh, and Intel is dropping XP, Vista, and Server 2003 support with the next RST release.

 

motherboard manufacturers have already dropped vista support for numerous functions and basically tells you straight away "hey if you install vista.... or xp..... and it don't work... tough luck"

 

I think I'll stay single channel for now, I got the stuff I'll post a pic. Probably build it on the weekend. I skipped on the HDD for now, I'll run the 2x Seagates for a bit.

 

So here it is:



I can't find any reviews on the Hitachi drive yet, I'll be building this tomorrow or the weekend.

 

Unlike Judas, Hitachi drives, for me, have been solid storage drives, but nothing more. I would certainly never use them in a RAID setup. Also, the older ones seem more reliable these days. Current drives (within the past few months) have been kinda flaky. More lemons than anything else, so I've been sticking with WD as of late.

I'd still go with a WD drive for the main, or an SSD (using Marvell, Intel, or Intel-Sandforce based drives) for the main with a WD as the offset drive (like both my current builds), and any additional storage using Hitachi Desktar or WD Blue/Black unless it's critical data in which case I would easily go WD RE4 (maybe Seagate Constellation.2/ES.2 if I really had to). I'd also go RE4 if I were planning on doing any sort of RAID setup as these drives have TLER support... Blacks do not (WD even recommends against using Blacks in any sort of RAID setup). Oh, and WD Blacks are very picky when it comes to power management. You never want them to go to sleep, or spin down as you'll run into all sorts of problems (BSOD, extremely long slowdown while waiting for the drives to wake up completely, even hard lockups). I learned that the hard way.

BTW, WD bought Hitachi (HGST) about year ago, and they still offer the same warranty, those being 3 (on most drives) and 5 years (on the Ultrastar).

 

Really interesting about the Blacks regarding power usage, I mean if velociraptors were cost effective i'd buy 2x1tb and run RAID0. I don't expect to run RAID0 for these drives, nor turn them on standby unless the system screwed up and did it.

 

Yeah, if you do a little searching for that power related problem you should come up with a bunch of threads about it. Black drives don't have power saving features as they are always-on drives. This is one of the reasons people, including WD themselves, say to turn off any software power management for those drives.

For myself, my older 32mb Black (SATA2, FALS) works just fine regardless of what settings I use on my main rig, but the 64mb Black (SATA3, FAEX) in my gaming system, I have to disable power management on it or my system just takes a dump.

Edit: BTW, Velociraptor drives just don't seem to cut it anymore. The 450GB/600GB are nice, but the newer AAEX/FAEX Black drives use 500GB platters, and are just overall more appealing as they're not that much slower, at least when compared to the 300GB VR. Just can't justify spending a whole lot more money for very little gain.

 

kinda funny since EVERY single machine i've built prior to the seagate hybrid drives i've been using.. and even the 640gb 64mb sata 3 6gbps drive and countless others i've installed.... all sleep/resume/suspend/hibernate/etc. perfectly every time.

All machines setup with them are all intel chipsets however, and all using intel storage matrix/rapid storage controller software installed in RAID when available, and in AHCI modes..... only a few machines that are a mix of intel/ati/nvidia/via/sis chipsets that use IDE mode only still. and they also do not exhibit issues.

 

You talking about the Seagates?