Go for it. You'll thank yourself for the speed boost.

I'd rather get this one Here as It's not that much more.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Was it also a clean install of Windows?

I'm not doubting your machine runs better, but it may be a combination of the neat new hard disk, a nice clean windows install, and practically no disk fragmentation.

With the old system, a 'cluttered' windows install, slow and fragmented hard disk I can see that SETI could have some effect on windows foreground task. I dont notice a slowdown on my Quad core, unless I'm running other projects that grab more RAM, then I get slow downs when it has to page stuff too and from disk.

Anyway, glad you got your machine running better, and a faster hard drive WILL help with booting Windows and loading programs etc

Ian

Go for it. You'll thank yourself for the speed boost.

I'd rather get this one Here as It's not that much more.

I don't really need that much space because I have an external 300GB storage drive. Really good price on it though.

I'd rather get a solid state HDD. no moving parts means it just wont wear out. I've just read a few reviews and it looks like the performance of SSD is just a bit better than a HDD. I think the biggest difference is the buffer. and Drive read time. Both are better on SSD. The only disadvantage is the price. You can get about 5X more HDD than SSD for the same price.

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In a rich man's house there is no place to spit but his face.
Diogenes Of Sinope

The only thing that wud really matter wud be read,write,accsses, latency times. If it is in ur bios..set ur UDMA to the hights setting ..or auto..You can download HDD monitering such as SpeedFan from Download.com, which will send u to a HDD health checker, or if u have something like SystemSuite with diag tools. If its an oooold drive (2/5 years or more) wera will be a factor.

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Do WHAT THO WILL SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW.

THE ONLY PATH WORTH TRAVELING IS THE PATH WITH HEART.
Proud member of TEAM CARL SAGAN

Was it also a clean install of Windows?

I'm not doubting your machine runs better, but it may be a combination of the neat new hard disk, a nice clean windows install, and practically no disk fragmentation.

With the old system, a 'cluttered' windows install, slow and fragmented hard disk I can see that SETI could have some effect on windows foreground task. I dont notice a slowdown on my Quad core, unless I'm running other projects that grab more RAM, then I get slow downs when it has to page stuff too and from disk.

Anyway, glad you got your machine running better, and a faster hard drive WILL help with booting Windows and loading programs etc

Ian

Yes, It was a clean install of Vista 64 bit and has 4 GB RAM. I just built this computer four months ago. The only part that wasn't new was the hard drive. The old drive was about two years old. Guess I should have mentioned that before.. Didn't think about it until now. I had suspected something might be wrong with it but it passed all the tests done to without errors. In fact everything including the memory passed every test I could throw at it. Buying the new HD was a last ditch attempt to fix the problem and it worked.

But even after that, I'm quite sure the speed up of programs and boot time are due to the faster drive. The freeze ups could have been an actual problem with the drive or it could have been that the slower drive couldn't keep up with all the read/writes and would freeze.

The only way I could be sure it was just a problem with a slower drive and not something physically wrong with it, would be to install windows on a different drive with the same specs as the old one. I don't plan on going through all that but it would be interesting (to me anyway) to find out for sure.

I'd rather get a solid state HDD. no moving parts means it just wont wear out. I've just read a few reviews and it looks like the performance of SSD is just a bit better than a HDD. I think the biggest difference is the buffer. and Drive read time. Both are better on SSD. The only disadvantage is the price. You can get about 5X more HDD than SSD for the same price.

I considered buying a SSD when I was building this computer, just couldn't afford it. Price isn't the only disadvantage. Even though there are no moving parts, the drive sectors have a higher failure rate than a HDD. It handles the failures by using extra sectors (Not counted in total specified size of drive) that are made/built/designed in just for that reason. That's until they are used up and then the drive starts decreasing in size.

I'd rather get a solid state HDD. no moving parts means it just wont wear out. I've just read a few reviews and it looks like the performance of SSD is just a bit better than a HDD. I think the biggest difference is the buffer. and Drive read time. Both are better on SSD. The only disadvantage is the price. You can get about 5X more HDD than SSD for the same price.

I considered buying a SSD when I was building this computer, just couldn't afford it. Price isn't the only disadvantage. Even though there are no moving parts, the drive sectors have a higher failure rate than a HDD. It handles the failures by using extra sectors (Not counted in total specified size of drive) that are made/built/designed in just for that reason. That's until they are used up and then the drive starts decreasing in size.

SSD's are still too young for mass consumer market prime time. Plus HDD's still hold a massive size (and cost, SSD's are about $1.50-$3.00 per GB) advantage... 2TB (going on 3TB) to about 256GB. And when you watch HD multimedia constantly (like me) size is everything.
And even if some sectors don't fail, there is a limited amount of times a SSD can be written and re-written to, eventually it will wear out, I believe that point occurs around 100,000 write cycles.
So, until SSD's can prove they can have a data capacity in the many terabytes, and compete for a reasonable price, I'm sticking with HDD's.

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- Luke.

I'd rather get a solid state HDD. no moving parts means it just wont wear out. I've just read a few reviews and it looks like the performance of SSD is just a bit better than a HDD. I think the biggest difference is the buffer. and Drive read time. Both are better on SSD. The only disadvantage is the price. You can get about 5X more HDD than SSD for the same price.

I considered buying a SSD when I was building this computer, just couldn't afford it. Price isn't the only disadvantage. Even though there are no moving parts, the drive sectors have a higher failure rate than a HDD. It handles the failures by using extra sectors (Not counted in total specified size of drive) that are made/built/designed in just for that reason. That's until they are used up and then the drive starts decreasing in size.

SSD's are still too young for mass consumer market prime time. Plus HDD's still hold a massive size (and cost, SSD's are about $1.50-$3.00 per GB) advantage... 2TB (going on 3TB) to about 256GB. And when you watch HD multimedia constantly (like me) size is everything.
And even if some sectors don't fail, there is a limited amount of times a SSD can be written and re-written to, eventually it will wear out, I believe that point occurs around 100,000 write cycles.
So, until SSD's can prove they can have a data capacity in the many terabytes, and compete for a reasonable price, I'm sticking with HDD's.

Those are the same reasons/conclusions I came to when deciding against buying one. I'm sure the price per GB will go down enough in a few years to make them a worthy investment.

I'd rather get a solid state HDD. no moving parts means it just wont wear out. I've just read a few reviews and it looks like the performance of SSD is just a bit better than a HDD. I think the biggest difference is the buffer. and Drive read time. Both are better on SSD. The only disadvantage is the price. You can get about 5X more HDD than SSD for the same price.

I considered buying a SSD when I was building this computer, just couldn't afford it. Price isn't the only disadvantage. Even though there are no moving parts, the drive sectors have a higher failure rate than a HDD. It handles the failures by using extra sectors (Not counted in total specified size of drive) that are made/built/designed in just for that reason. That's until they are used up and then the drive starts decreasing in size.

SSD's are still too young for mass consumer market prime time. Plus HDD's still hold a massive size (and cost, SSD's are about $1.50-$3.00 per GB) advantage... 2TB (going on 3TB) to about 256GB. And when you watch HD multimedia constantly (like me) size is everything.
And even if some sectors don't fail, there is a limited amount of times a SSD can be written and re-written to, eventually it will wear out, I believe that point occurs around 100,000 write cycles.
So, until SSD's can prove they can have a data capacity in the many terabytes, and compete for a reasonable price, I'm sticking with HDD's.

Those are the same reasons/conclusions I came to when deciding against buying one. I'm sure the price per GB will go down enough in a few years to make them a worthy investment.

Besides one can't stuff too much squirrel into the tight ass confines of an SSD. ;)

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Sciurus Vulgaris, you didn't said which system (CPU & GPUs) you have (and your PCs are hidden).
I'm confused that you say, the HDD LED was continuously on.
I can't imagine it, that this was only because of your HDD.
If it was an old ATA33 (or older), then maybe yes.. ;-)

I have an AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE @ 4x 3.0 GHz & 4x OCed GTX260-216 (4x MB & 4x CUDA).
Current top_host_#2 with ~ 60,000 RAC.
And I see only every ~ 5 - 10 sec. the HDD LED short flashing.
Only if the PC DL new WUs, the HDD LED is little bit more on.
The HDD is ~ 3 years old (out of an other PC). Can't remember, I guess ATA100 with 8 MB cache.

Only WinXP 32bit and BOINC. Nothing else on PC. Pure crunching PC.


Maybe you let run stock apps?
If you crunch stock CUDA, this would make your PC sluggish. (calculation of VLAR WUs)

Small look in my -> <- (quick instruction).

Also if you calculate CUDA and simultaneously you work on your PC, the display is slow. The GPU is running full load if CUDA, so not much free space for others.

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Sciurus Vulgaris, you didn't said which system (CPU & GPUs) you have.
I'm confused that you say, the HDD LED was continuously on.
I can't imagine it, that this was only because of your HDD.
If it was an old ATA33 (or older), then maybe yes.. ;-)

I have an AMD Phenom II X4 940 BE @ 4x 3.0 GHz & 4x OCed GTX260-216 (4x MB & 4x CUDA).
Current top_host_#2 with ~ 60,000 RAC.
And I see only every ~ 5 - 10 sec. the HDD LED short flashing.
Only if the PC DL new WUs, the HDD LED is little bit more on.
The HDD is ~ 3 years old (out of an other PC). Can't remember, I guess ATA100 with 8 MB cache.

Only WinXP 32bit and BOINC. Nothing else on PC. Pure crunching PC.


Maybe you let run stock apps?
If you crunch stock CUDA, this would make your PC sluggish. (calculation of < 0.12x AR WUs)

Small look in my -> <- (quick instruction).

Also if you calculate CUDA and simultaneously you work on your PC, the display is slow. The GPU is running full load if CUDA, so not much free space for others.

It's a new (Built myself) computer. Well, it WAS new about four months ago.

Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66GHz
NForce 790i ultra sli motherboard.
A very large NZXT case with seven 120mm fans and two 80mm fans not including the 120mm fan in the 850 watt power supply. Of course I had to add a fan controller because the board didn't have enough connectors for all of them.
4-GB of OCZ RAM.
One GTX 285 GPU which replaced a bad 9800GT. Just added it a couple days ago.
One GTS 250 GPU.
One 9800GT GPU.
Running windows Vista home premium 64-bit.

I can't really explain it any better. I even turned off indexing to lower the hard drive read/writes. It was constantly reading and writing to the drive with very little down time. I just figured running four CPU's and three GPU's on the slower drive was too much for it to handle if I did anything else at the same time. I could just load big web pages and it would freeze. It would always freeze watching video's. In fact I had to suspend computation to keep it from freezing when doing just about anything. And it would freeze a couple times a day when I wasn't even using it besides crunching WU's.

So, maybe the drive was going bad. I can't be prove it was or wasn't. All I can really say is that it works perfectly now with the new fast drive.

Edit: I'm running optimized apps and I use reschedule to rebrand VLAR tasks after downloading any new WU's. All motherboard and video drivers are updated and I flashed the newest version of BIOS the first or second day after building it.

Hmm.. if your OS was fresh installed (and not much software additional installed) and you saw this with the old HDD, after changing only the HDD then not longer, then I guess your old HDD was broken.

BTW. With this nice equipment, your RAC at SETI@home could be ~ 30,000 . Why we see so little? ;-D

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Hmm.. if your OS was fresh installed (and not much software additional installed) and you saw this with the old HDD, after changing only the HDD then not longer, then I guess your old HDD was broken.

BTW. With this nice equipment, your RAC at SETI@home could be ~ 30,000 . Why we see so little? ;-D

Oh, I had tons of software on it. Mostly digital image and video editing software. Numerous others too.

I was crunching for other projects and just recently started crunching just for SETI again. My RAC will be climbing for a couple/few weeks. I'm curios how high it will go. :)

Muchos confusus..........

This has been discussed many times before.........

HDD access does NOT affect Seti crunching much........if at all.

The time spent with read and writes to disk are such a minimal time to the manager time is nothing..........the time Boinc spends thinking about it is something. My Cuda riga are now working with one core lollygaggind around..........gives the manager time to whack it's worries without cutting down on word done.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster