A little confused, buying from xotic pc

I'm currently looking to buy an asus n550jv from xotic pc, and I'm a little confused on the ssd and options for hdd/ssd into the optical drive. I'm mainly getting an ssd because it helps keep volume down and lets me get more battery life. However, if I purchase a hdd into the optical drive as I have no use for a dvd reader, then what do I have to lose? Say for example, the OS is installed into the ssd and I put all my everyday programs into there. I just leave the hdd that's installed in the optical drive for things I don't access often, like pictures or movies. If I don't touch the things in my hdd, it won't be used right? And my battery life/relative quietness can still be preserved. Or am I completely wrong in my way of thinking?

 

Yeah; do a search (you're almost completely wrong) of the last few pages of posts here.

Having two drives will always be more power than a single power consuming device (there is no free lunch).

To get the most effective (at idle) low power consumption you need to stick with one drive (SSD or HDD) or get two SSD's...

Note too that not all SSD's will give you more battery run time than a low power, (slow) 5400 RPM drive though. SSD's are not created equal.

Nor are they automatically superior to HDD in all areas.


Good luck.

 

mmm okay, haha yea I thought I would be pretty off the mark. What would you recommend then? I just wanted to see if I could make use of the optical drive as I haven't used a single dvd in years.

 

You are looking at 10-15 minutes of extra battery life. See here. This is assuming you constantly use data stored on your hard disk i.e., you r disk is constantly active. The spindle of a HDD will spin down a few minutes after you stop using it. If you are not using it at all, I'm not sure if you would notice the difference in battery life. Is 15 minutes above 2 and half hours important to you? That you have to decide.

 

Eh not that important to me, I think i'll go with the ssd + hdd, I just wanted to cram something into my optical bay without the hassle of carrying an external hard drive around. Thanks

 

Personally what I'd like to do is have an SSD on boot drive and keep a few games on it, and use the HDD for mass storing of data and games that don't need the extra speed.

This is sort of the 'best of both worlds' option.

 

how exactly do you do that?

 

If the HDD is a SSHD, then I don't think it would matter all that much where you put them. That's what I plan to do.

 

What is a SSHD? Is it a HDD with a NAND flash based cache? A hybrid drive, in other words? Then it would matter a lot. The cache is very small, usually on the order of a few score MB. The only place that really helps is a speed up (but small in comparison to a full SSD) in boot times and a speed up when accessing some very frequently used files, if you have any. You are not going to see a speed up in load times for games.

I agree with (and do) what Xion says. I use my M4 as the boot drive and keep a couple of games on it. The rest of my stuff goes on an external or on my secondary.

Do what? Segregate data like Xion mentions?

 

SSHD=hybrid, it's something in between a HD and a SSD.
It's cache mem on a Seagate for example is 8gb, so I'd say it's pretty respectable.
Even if you use it as a secondary drive, all the data that is frequently accessed will be cached and so, will speed up. Yea, that includes games installed on it.

 

Um no you cannot put whole games on it. You have no access to the 8GB flash. The drive decides what gets on there and what gets stored magnetically. You play a video game and you are going to practically see no difference with a SSHD and if you do, it would not be worth the price imo if you have a SSD already. If you use it as a secondary drive, that's fine. However, hybrid drives are more expensive than HDDs so spending that extra money is not worth it imo.

 

Not quite so true. You decide what to store magnetically. The drive will manage the ssd mem, according to your most frequently used "pieces" of data (notice I didn't even say complete files).

I don't agree. ANY frequently used data like game executables, textures or whatever you open should speed up, quite noticeable (you should see for example windows boot speed with SSHD).
Whether or not it is reasonable to spend money on that is relative to each person.
I think it's a good alternative if you need more space on your ssd.

 

You cannot fragment files over the magnetic storage and NAND flash. That would increase access times even more. A file is requested by the CPU. It doesn't request like half a file. That statement carries no meaning. Data stored in a file is accessed by compiling the file and sending it to memory or reading an already compiled file. Either ways, you cannot access a part of a file. You need the whole file. So storing a "piece" as you call it will have no benefit as it would still need to access the data from the platter which would imply switching the controller and additional read overhead as opposed ot if it was wholly located on the flash or on the platter. And it IS completely true that you have no control over the NAND flash. The drive decides what goes to the flash and what to the platter.

That is not how data is stored. The game's exe or the saved file are loaded only ONCE when playing. Those will speed up, true. But that is not what you want. You want the level load times to be faster. Each new area that loads up is comprised of several gigabytes of information, depending on the game of course. If a game's information were to be completely uncompressed, you'd probably be able to have one game barely fit on a 128GB SSD. So again, textures are compiled within files. These files are not always frequently accessed by the game. Level load times in video games will NOT speed up in a hybrid drive. There is far too much information to store that is not frequently accessed and the drive will not cache it. Like I said before, Windows boot up will speed up but again, it will be right in between a SSD and a conventional HDD.

This isn't a human being sitting and controlling the information. Think of it from the POV of a computer. It is not possible to store parts of a video game on the flash. These are two PHYSICALLY separate storage locations. You can store a WHOLE file to one or the other. The algorithms that decide this will give priority to a smaller file accessed a little fewer times than a 500MB file accessed a few times more. A texture is contained within this 500MB file. It needs to be loaded up into system RAM first. That would mean requiring access to the platter. Physics calculations, AI algorithms these are all required to be dynamically loaded by a video game and these combined together work to give you, say, an enemy shooting at you or the behavior of NPCs/bots when you load a new area. The slack depends on the slowest of these loads. You simply cannot store all this information on the flash. If you do, then the next load will be slower because it almost definitely will require access to different libraries.

Also, I clearly said it is MY opinion that spending money on a hybrid drive is a waste of money. This directly implies that it is relative to each person.

 

Don't remember where I read it, but if what you say is right then it's completely useless anyway.
Just speaking out of ignorance, but what about a swap file?

I agree with most of what you say, though I think some things can be questionable. For example: are absolutely all textures loaded just once? There aren't any repetitive textures that will be loaded again and again on many levels? (Like trees and other enviromental/decorative stuff). What about paging?
Even then, like I said, any -repetitive- access will speed up, it doesn't need to be just games. Anything that you do frequently will show some improvement, I'm thinking it's a good option to install any secondary apps and save some space on the ssd.
I was curious about really how many accesses count as "frequent". Here it seems that 3 is enough, though I read somewhere that it actually works with a priority algorithm once the cache is full. So I guess it might take more eventually.
There is also a big improvement on random I/O, I don't know how much of a real world performance it would be though.

Didn't mean to imply otherwise.

 

Actually, most if not all modern hard drives use logical block addressing, and (files get broken down in to blocks instead of stored whole). According to Anandtech, the Seagate Momentus XT puts the most commonly accessed blocks on to the NAND cache. And I'd expect that this applies to most hybrid HDDs in general, to avoid the situation you described where a large yet commonly accessed file just doesn't get cached. So parts of files may end up on the cache while others are on the disk.

Though as for gaming, I agree that a hybrid HDD may not be ideal due to the limited cache size (though there may be some improvement if you only play a few or small games). I think just getting a separate SSD and HDD is the best solution, though it may be more expensive as well.