The most awesome looking PC cases...EVER.

[Tarami]

[Sheepherder]

Even you have to admit that buying several SSD's to run in RAID-0 is kind of fuckstupid at the moment considering that the practical limit on SSD bandwidth is due to the drive itself and will in all likelihood jump to the SATA/600 spec in the next generation or two anyways.

From a practical standpoint platters are still superior if you like drinking beer and will accept the extra two seconds of load time.

[Engels]

I am not understanding your arguement against Raid 0 with SSDs. Its still two feeds to the raid card/motherboard controller, regardless of the limit on the bandwidth on the drives themselves...

[Strazos]

I dunno, this is still pretty cool.

[Tarami]

What Engels said. 800 MB/s on quad-striped is practically very viable. Or 2 GB/s... (I remember seeing that one, but I had forgotten about it. OH YUM.)

The problem was that your original argument that RAID0 improves access time to the physical media was wrong. RAID0, regardless of the underlying physical media, has never been there to improve initial access time. Typically it degrades the access time very slightly compared to a single drive, but more than compensates for it by hugely improving read and write speeds.

If you want to improve initial access time, you might be able to set up a RAID1 to do that, but then you're typically only getting single drive read and write speeds which largely defeats the purpose (given the purpose is overall speed), unless you're serving very small files that are faster to read than they are to access. Even then you haven't actually improved the initial access time, just the time between physical seeks. It still takes t time to access a file, but you can get up to (n - 1) accesses "for free" as they're done asynchronously.

[Sheepherder]

I was actually confusing my RAID stripings, so yeah.

SSD's are up to ~3 GB/s in RAID-0, by the way.  Toms Hardware has an interesting write-up.  As I said though, the drives themselves are the limiting factor on the bandwidth, barely approaching the upper bound on what the original SATA spec calls for (300 MB/s).  All the infrastructure is in place for 600 MB/s drives with the SATA2 spec, and there is supposed to be a SATA3 spec coming some time.

Or: early adopters of new technology always get fucked.

[MahrinSkel]

Lately, I've been going for "simple and quiet".  Decals, kaleidoscope LED's, cooling systems that cost more than an entire PC should, it's all just gotten tacky.  Made my youngest boy a system around a glossy black case with a ginourmous 10 inch blue LED fan, the second oldest girl got a cobalt blue case with a pattern screen cutout taking up half the side panel and purple LED's inside, built both systems, soup to nuts, for $500 total and they're both more computer than either will really need for the next few years.

Most of these cases are the equivalent of car-show hot-rods, so prettied up you need to keep them inside another Lucite box, so nobody scratches them.  Or insane performance enhancements that get 3% more horsepower for 300% more cost.

--Dave

[ghost]

Yeah, I just built a new setup and the case had that blue light with the fans.  I don't get it.  Then again, I'm quite old