If I was building now I wouldn't buy a SATA drive anymore, old fashioned and slow compared. And it's an extra couple of cables messing up your case that you don't need. PCI-E based drives are the way to go, you may not get full performance out of them now but in a couple of years you might and that just means spending again. If you are building a new system that you want to last a long time why spend all that money and then add in a bottleneck on purpose?
HDDs can still have a place if you store loads of films or pictures but I personally would rather spend the extra on a bigger SSD these days as that gives you read/write performance benefits anyway. Once again I hate cables, I know modern cases have better cable management but still that extra SATA power coming from the PSU and an SATA cable plugged into board, meh, not for me.
Yeah, this is my new OCD about PC builds. I regretted having a 850 Pro over the 960 once I saw the cabling. Even with fully modular PSU the cable wasn't as sleek as I would've liked and still had extra connectors I didn't use.
You can get a 1TB 850 EVO for the price of a 512GB 960 Pro. The speed difference would never be noticeable. But you would definitely notice the capacity difference. Why other than aesthetics would you buy the 960? Or any NVME/PCIE drive at this point? They're hilariously overpriced. And the capacity/price on SATA drives is finally somewhat reasonable.
One problem with the new drives is that you start getting into PCIe lane management issues. I believe with Ryzen you can only have one drive at full speed. A second runs slower. Using them also disables PCI-slots. Using two might slow the graphics card down. It's not real clear and it's a bit different with each motherboard and CPU.
PCI-E 4 isn't too far away and that solves a lot of bandwidth issues as you can run these things with half the lanes.
I'm over long term storage... there are dedicated options for that. On any given local PC, I can get by on 256 (possibly even 128), so 512 is more than enough. As for price, I have access to a few Microcenter stores. The sticker prices undercut Amazon and Newegg by 20% but when you get to the register it rings up even cheaper. They are like the Khols of technology. One of them is in a tax-free depressed economy zone. On well lit days after checking police scanners, I try to save an additional 7% tax.
Microcenter is awesome. When I'm out in TX visiting family, my brother and I usually take a trip over there and go shopping. It's arguably the best place to buy a CPU and motherboard.
Like what? I don't see anything else being an option for me. I keep a 512 SDD GB for my OS. A 512GB SSD for my Origin and Steam Games, and a 2TB HDD for photos and backups. I usually have at least 1TB of photos and videos. The good stuff gets uploaded to the cloud and the rest is stuff I don't really need but don't want to get rid of either. I have a 3TB HDD in an external case because my 2 TB drive was getting too full. Indeed. It's about a 3 hour round trip for me to get to my closest Microcenter. Prices are awesome but I have to factor that against my time and gas money.
Off the shelf NAS solution....Or elaborate DIY freeNAS builds for enthusiasts.... Or Google/Amazon/3rd party cloud options. Personally, I'd recommend people get over the anxiety of using the delete button. It's a liberating experience.
My experiences with NASs haven't been that great. Most use severely underpowered hardware and have crappy software that has weird issues. Have had much better luck just putting the hard drives in my desktop and sharing folders in windows. I suspect those things are mainly for laptop users and small businesses that don't do much other than store word and excel files. I have 2 x 4TB drives running in RAID1 in my desktop. Gives me redundancy. The small amount of critical stuff gets backed up to the cloud.
I've been using the 960 pro drive over the last few days. Not a slap in the face speed difference like moving from HDD to SSD. I really only notice the difference when I was installing windows. It was faster than when we had that super speedy win7 install. This m.2 form factor is a pain in the ass though. I have big hands (long skinny fingers, can palm a basketball) and holy shit, this shit is for the birds. There were 2 m.2 slots on my mobo. One above the video card pci-e slot just below the cpu and the other one was in the open well below the dimm slots. Problem was that I didn't want to lose sata 5 and 6 so i had to use the inconveniently placed one near the cpu. I felt like I needed some precision robot hands and a microscope to screw it in.
it wouldn't have been a pain if I had put it on there first. but I did it afterwards and that space between the CPU and video card is really small. and the screw to secure the drive into the m.2 slot is basically an eyeglass screw
The true OCD people order custom made cables for their PSUs and they are wicked expensive. I want to order an aftermarket one just for my graphics card because the one that came with the PSU sucks and it's the most visible power cable. What went into your final build?
Intel have announced a partnership with AMD to bring 8th Gen CPUs to the market with AMD GPUs and HBM2 integration. The best single thread performance coupled with the best integrated graphics performance, could be interesting but didn't see it coming. https://www.anandtech.com/show/1200...with-amd-radeon-graphics-with-hbm2-using-emib
The last rumor I heard was that Intel was going to lease the IP. Having AMD makes them the hardware seems crazy. I don't know if it would have even been possible but Intel should have grabbed ATI all those years ago before AMD did. At least AMD can finally start cashing in on the HBM memory investment. In my opinion it's been a detriment to their sales. It drives the cost of their cards up without offering major performance benefits. Intel released this video yesterday.
Raja Koduri, head of the Radeon Technologies Group, has left AMD and is rumored to be going to Intel. The plot thickens... https://www.tweaktown.com/news/59784/raja-koduri-leaves-amd-now-rumored-join-intel/index.html