Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

[Psycho101]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

He's using a SATA to IDE "Translator Card". This is the brand name, not very well known but works really well. I thought it would be either rubbish or not work as it looks like a real lowend kind of thing. As we all know, there are two kinds of products to come out of Taiwan. Taiwan is home to some of the best manufacturers out there with amazing quality stuff, but is also home to the really poor quality and cheap end of the market.

Whilst he was recording one show and watching another, recorded earlier (usually audable because of head movement) I couldn't hear the drive at all. Also the internal temp controlled fan kicked in less as the drive is ice cold. His isn't a TIVO brand though, it's a no name one he got free with his Digital TV subscription.... UK "Freeview" has a Top Up TV scheme where you buy access at the local post office for a month with no subscriptions/contract.

For a DVR, they're fantastic drives indeed and will store a bucket load of standard def NTSC or PAL (For Europe, UK, Aus, slight higher res lower refresh/frame rate) footage.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Ahh, I thought about that myself but wondered if it would slow things down any or mess up the Tivo data somehow, so I just planned to look at IDE Drives.

I Agree, about Taiwan, spot on analysis! I have used IDE to SATA converters, not sure what brands though, and they worked fine for what I need them for when working with computers. And they were cheap ones too, but I just think I want to lean away from that in my Tivo though.

I may try one out though, but I guess I would need to decide on a disk anyway first and since I am thinking IDE I may not try one because to do so I would have to buy two disks for the trial and it isnt that important to me.

I would like a quiet drive in my Tivo though, know which IDE models are the quieter ones?

I am using a Directv branded Tivo (R10) model in case that helps you find any info for me on drives that are best. I have read around and found so many opinions I am just not sure, plus a lot of the drives mentioned are not sold anymore either.

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Ya I saw those 750GB ones today!

Well you should test with memtest86+ 5-10 full passes, then with Orthos or Prime95 for 12-24 hours to be sure of stability. If you have a good cooler you can test with LinX or Intel Burn test 5-10 passes, these are very quick and HOT Tests.

Will do. I have the Xigmatek S1283 heat sync/fan system.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Cool, that is a decent cooler so you should be OK but watch your temps just in case as those tests make it hot and do so quickly

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

I've been trying to hunt for more details on the Caviar Greens but not come u with much. Closest I got was a Custom PC magazine review where they said "5400-7200 RPM depending on individual drive tuning". Whether this means each is altered at the factory, that it kicks up speed when needed or it's user controlable, I don't know.

There are a couple of utilities out there that can alter Drive settings like AAM (Acoustic Management) and power saving. Maybe turning them off will kicj the drive into 7200 RPM mode. The Greens are useful in certain situations like when using a drive for backup images. As USB is slow any way, using them in USB enclosures is ideal because a high speed drive will operate at the same speeds, due to USB restrictions. Also a nice drive for a HTPC and to upgrade a DVR/TIVO etc. My brother has one in his DVR. It had a 160GB SATA 1 drive so it was a great perf boost and was much quieter and cooler.

The best value drive for performance and capacity atm (at least in the UK) looks to me to be the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB. It has two 500GB platters, meaning a very high areal density (that = faster transfer rates), has I believe 32 MB of cach and out performs the 1TB WD Black and the other competition at the 1TB mark. It even boots Vista quicker than a Velociraptor. Latency is ofc higher than a Velociraptor, but it's faster in a lot of ways due to high density platters. I think the Velociraptor has 150GB platters.

The Blacks twin drive controllers doesn't make a huge difference. Areal density and latencies are the main limiting factors. The 2TB black is very quick in combination with the two controllers and twin drive head actuators. It's mighty expensive though. You could get 4 Spinpoint F3's for the same price. This way you can set them up in RAID and beat the pants of the single 2TB black.

To make the most of your Swap file, it's a good idea to partition off a section right at the begining of the drive to be used. This will force the swap file onto the very outside of the disk where transfers are fastest and drive heads have the shortest stroke. To illustrate, on my Caviar Blue, at the end of the disk Read is ~70MB/s and write is about 65MB/s. On my swap partition at the begining of the drive the figures are 120MB/s and 116MB/s with slightly improved seek.

According to WD tech support the speed is some where between 5400 - 7200. I had read elsewhere that these are variable speed disks and do what they need when called on. So if needed they would kick up to 7200. However, I don't think that is true based on what I was told. I also asked if you could set the speed manually and was told no. But, this may be what they are told to say. Not the level of tech support I've had at WD in the past.

The WD Black 640G I just bought has two platters and a 32Mb cache. I wonder if it's processor per platter?

Good idea! I've partitioned many a disk but if I were to partition, say, 12Gig (using the idea of 1.5 x amount of RAM. Only have 4G currently) and when using a program to partition it would be thought that the first partition made would be to the outside of the disk? Makes sense but I'm not sure.

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Outside of the disk is the beginning = shortest distance to data

Some reading on that for those who may be interested
Radified Hard Drive Partitioning Strategies

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Outside of the disk is the beginning = shortest distance to data

Some reading on that for those who may be interested
Radified Hard Drive Partitioning Strategies

I used to put Windows on it's own partition. Maybe something worthwhile doing would be to move my current Win7 setup to another disk, partition the disk and then move Windows back to the first (C:) partition (just to get the job done without reinstalling) and install Windows apps on the second partition (D:) as I have not installed any apps yet. I used to do this all the time and stopped for simplicity and didn't know if I really gained that much by doing so anymore or not. Thought the info was dated but apparently not so?

[Psycho101]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

I have my disk set up exactly like you suggest, with the first 12GB used as Swap and if I need the highest speed for any odd job.



The outside of the disk, as well as having the shortest head stroke is also an advantage because speaking scientifically, a disk spins faster at the outside edge. I'm not saying that on a 7200RPM the outside is spinning at 10000 or something. It's hard to explain.

Think of it like this; Immagine the platter of a HDD. It's flat and circular. Imagine a line drawn from the centre to the outside edge (the radial line). along this like you draw one dot near the inside of the disk and another near the outside. Now imagine how long a line you would het if you were able to stretch out the circle formed by the rotation of this dot.

Lets pretend that the drive platter spins at 10 RPM and the inside dot's rotational line stretches out to 1". Also imagine the outside edge dot's rotational path stretches out to 10". From this we can then say that in 1 second, if the heads are at the dot 1 position then 1" of platter goes through the heads per second. In the dot 2 position, 10" of platter goes past the head in 1 second.

If more physical area passes through the head at the outside, then the outside is travelling faster than the inside. Speed = distance/time even with a disk. Don't you just love physics?

It's less beneficial for an OS to be restricted to the 1st partition because of a few things. First the drive firmware will do its best to make sure the disk is filled from the outside in, meaning only the last bits of data to fill the drive will be at the slow end. Second, you have Boot Defrag, Prefetcher etc in XP, Vista and 7 which will move all the needed files at boot and all program files to the very outside edge of the disk.

The reason a page file benefits is because the drive firmware over rides the logic of placing things at the edge when doing a lot of little random writes, as if it didn't 4K write performance would be even more horrible than it is now on HDD's. Performance would suffer immensely.

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

I have my disk set up exactly like you suggest, with the first 12GB used as Swap and if I need the highest speed for any odd job.



The outside of the disk, as well as having the shortest head stroke is also an advantage because speaking scientifically, a disk spins faster at the outside edge. I'm not saying that on a 7200RPM the outside is spinning at 10000 or something. It's hard to explain.

Think of it like this; Immagine the platter of a HDD. It's flat and circular. Imagine a line drawn from the centre to the outside edge (the radial line). along this like you draw one dot near the inside of the disk and another near the outside. Now imagine how long a line you would het if you were able to stretch out the circle formed by the rotation of this dot.

Lets pretend that the drive platter spins at 10 RPM and the inside dot's rotational line stretches out to 1". Also imagine the outside edge dot's rotational path stretches out to 10". From this we can then say that in 1 second, if the heads are at the dot 1 position then 1" of platter goes through the heads per second. In the dot 2 position, 10" of platter goes past the head in 1 second.

If more physical area passes through the head at the outside, then the outside is travelling faster than the inside. Speed = distance/time even with a disk. Don't you just love physics?

It's less beneficial for an OS to be restricted to the 1st partition because of a few things. First the drive firmware will do its best to make sure the disk is filled from the outside in, meaning only the last bits of data to fill the drive will be at the slow end. Second, you have Boot Defrag, Prefetcher etc in XP, Vista and 7 which will move all the needed files at boot and all program files to the very outside edge of the disk.

The reason a page file benefits is because the drive firmware over rides the logic of placing things at the edge when doing a lot of little random writes, as if it didn't 4K write performance would be even more horrible than it is now on HDD's. Performance would suffer immensely.

So are you using two disks. One with the Windows OS and apps (one partition) and a second drive that is partitioned with the swap file set at the first partition of the second drive?

Sounds like it may not be that beneficial to have Windows on it's own partition from applications. I've been using Perfectdisk 10 for a while now as a defragmenter and plan to use it in Windows 7.

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Also, what really is the best allocation unit size to set a disk at? I know the default is about 4k. Is it any better to drop to 512?

I haven't revisited this in years. Curious to where this currently stands.

[Psycho101]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Yep, I've got a SSD on SATA 0 for OS and progrms and a WD6400AAKS on sata 3 for data. the WD is partitioned into two, a 12GB for the swap with 5Gleft (a DVD's worth for on the fly ripping and encoding) and the remaining 584GB for data, downloads and backup images.

IMO the best allocation size for a HDD partition or anythning else is the default 4K. Some programs don't like non standard cluster size. I also think that XP without any service packs will refuse to install to a non 4K cluster drive (fixed if using slipstreamed SP1).

The benefits of different cluster sizes vary depending on if they're smaller or larger than default. Larger cluster sizes lead to better performance as if the files are quite large and spread over many clusters in random locations, the heads of the drive have to move less. Smaller clusters are more space efficient. If a file is written to a 64K cluster formatted drive that is 4K in size then the space that 4K file takes up on the disk is 64Kb rather than 4KB. This is because a cluster is the smallest increment of space an OS can use to store files.

It has been suggested that for drives which are used heavily for sequential work or that are dedicated to a page file, larger cluster sizes are better. IMO, 4K is fine and you'll note very very little difference.

On the Corsair SSD forum there's actually a guide for setting up SSD RAID that states out of all combinations a stripe of 128K combined with 64K clusters is the best performer. However with thousands of small files on an OS partition it's wasteful. I've experimented a lot with cluster size on a WD2000JS RAID 0 array (2 drives) but after a while, and the first re-install, couldn't be arsed to use the 32K clusters again as it made no noticeable difference.

Feel free to try new things, don't let me put you off though. Just that for me, 4K was fine, and I like squeezing every drop of performance I can. Cluster size was like trying to squeeze performance out of a stone.


Lsd: The quietest drives I have heard so far that are native IDE have been Seagate's specialist range. The smaller capacities are noted for being about half the usual height while maintaining the 3.5" form factor. First gen used 160GB platters and the second gen uses 320GB platters with both being single drives.

Perhaps a better way to go would be to see if you can find a large IDE drive that supports AAM Acoustic management and runs 5400RPM. That way you can hook it up to your PC as a spare, set the quietest AAM setting and tweak the power management to match the old drive. Not sure if there are many IDE AAM enabled drives on the market though. AAM does make a big difference to the sound. A HDD that sounds like a tin of angry bees is almost silent with AAM on full.

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Yep, I've got a SSD on SATA 0 for OS and progrms and a WD6400AAKS on sata 3 for data. the WD is partitioned into two, a 12GB for the swap with 5Gleft (a DVD's worth for on the fly ripping and encoding) and the remaining 584GB for data, downloads and backup images.

Do you have Windows on one partition and your applications on another on the SSD?

[Psycho101]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Nope, just the normal System Reserved partition created by Windows 7 and the rest is a single partition for OS and programs.

Some swear by partitioning HDD's and go partition nuts. This is utterly pointless. Microsoft invented folders for the organisation of data, not a million partitions.

I'd partition for two reasons on an OS drive, One to force the swap to the front of the disk and the second if the user formats and re-installs a heck of a lot with only one physical drive. Then I'd give em one partition for OS and apps and another for data.

A SSD is completely uniform in speed over the entire capacity, so on that kind of medium, partitions offer zero performance benefit. LBA locations on a SSD don't necessarily marry with actual physical position of the sector on a SSD either due to wear levelling algorithms used by the SSD controller, that are hidden from the OS to fool it into not being "upset" by such remapping actions.

[SBMongoos]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Thanks for the info. Good stuff!

Curious about some settings in the BIOS. I currently have the following set to suit XP 32 bit. But I'm swapping disks in an Icy Dock if I want to run Win 7 (part of my migration process to Win 7 Pro 64bit - to load what I want/need). I'm wondering if I did this wrong as I may not be able to change the following settings after the fact for Win 7 64bit (vs XP 32bit).

Option in bold is my setting.

• SATA RAID/AHCI MODE
  • Disabled
  • RAID
  • AHCI Mode
• SATA PORT 0-3 NATIVE MODE
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
• ONBOARD SATA/IDE CONTROL MODE
  • IDE
  • AHCI
  • RAID IDE

Under Power Settings

• HPET Support
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
• HPET Mode <- Greyed out if HPET Support Disabled
  • 32 Bit
  • 64 Bit

Lastly, how do you guys have the following settings while OC'ing:

• CPU Warning Temp
  • Disabled
  • 60C/140F
  • 70C/158F
  • 80C/176F
  • 90C/194F
• CPU Fan Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
• System Fan2 Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
• Power Fan Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
• System Fan 1 Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  • Disabled
• CPU Smart Fan Control
  • Auto
  • Disabled
• CPU Smart Fan Mode
  • Auto
  • Disabled

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Stable E8400 OC - stock voltages

Lsd: The quietest drives I have heard so far that are native IDE have been Seagate's specialist range. The smaller capacities are noted for being about half the usual height while maintaining the 3.5" form factor. First gen used 160GB platters and the second gen uses 320GB platters with both being single drives.

Perhaps a better way to go would be to see if you can find a large IDE drive that supports AAM Acoustic management and runs 5400RPM. That way you can hook it up to your PC as a spare, set the quietest AAM setting and tweak the power management to match the old drive. Not sure if there are many IDE AAM enabled drives on the market though. AAM does make a big difference to the sound. A HDD that sounds like a tin of angry bees is almost silent with AAM on full.

Which 160GB drives do you see that are good, I mean still for sale new?

I would be connecting it to my PC for sure anyway to do the mirroring process, so I would check into that as well but it's hard to know from specs which allow this to be changed. I know the OEM ones do not, well most of them I have looked at for Dell client's anyway.

Thanks for the info. Good stuff!

Curious about some settings in the BIOS. I currently have the following set to suit XP 32 bit. But I'm swapping disks in an Icy Dock if I want to run Win 7 (part of my migration process to Win 7 Pro 64bit - to load what I want/need). I'm wondering if I did this wrong as I may not be able to change the following settings after the fact for Win 7 64bit (vs XP 32bit).

Option in bold is my setting.

• SATA RAID/AHCI MODE
  • Disabled
  
  
  • RAID
  
  
  • AHCI Mode
  
  
• SATA PORT 0-3 NATIVE MODE
  • Enabled
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• ONBOARD SATA/IDE CONTROL MODE
  • IDE
  
  
  • AHCI
  
  
  • RAID IDE
  
  

Under Power Settings

• HPET Support
  • Enabled
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• HPET Mode <- Greyed out if HPET Support Disabled
  • 32 Bit
  
  
  • 64 Bit
  
  

Lastly, how do you guys have the following settings while OC'ing:

• CPU Warning Temp
  • Disabled
  
  
  • 60C/140F
  
  
  • 70C/158F
  
  
  • 80C/176F
  
  
  • 90C/194F
  
  
• CPU Fan Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• System Fan2 Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• Power Fan Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• System Fan 1 Fail Warning
  • Enabled
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• CPU Smart Fan Control
  • Auto
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  
• CPU Smart Fan Mode
  • Auto
  
  
  • Disabled
  
  

You can enabled HPET and set to your OS type, this can be changed anytime you like and will have no ill effects.

Fans and warnings, all disabled here but I am on water. Not sure what would be best for air cooling but I do know the CPU Fan mode you want to set will depend on your fan and how you want things to sound.