SSD woes
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Quote:
Now he's watching CES footage and drooling
It is difficult to keep up with development in the computer field, isn't it? :sigh:
Seems like very soon after you get it built it it becomes obsolete. Especially video cards and they ain't cheap.
Did a little mechanic work today. Put a rear end in a recliner! JaxCoder.com
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[Clark Kent]
This is a job...
[/Clark Kent] [Superman]
... For EBAY!
[Superman]
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Seems like very soon after you get it built it it becomes obsolete. Especially video cards and they ain't cheap.
Did a little mechanic work today. Put a rear end in a recliner! JaxCoder.com
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I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs. I always build them with myself with parts I select. My kid and I just built him a (gaming) PC, he selected the video card first and then we selected everything else to go around it. Previously, he had an off-the-shelf PC (against my recommendation of course) which didn't suit his a needs, but his mother buys him whatever he asks for. The only parts re-used from that are the CPU and an HDD. The old M.2 SSD was replaced with a WD Black one twice the capacity. Now he's watching CES footage and drooling over the upcoming graphics cards. :(
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs. I always build them with myself with parts I select.
That can turn out being quite expensive though.
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I have bought numerous Dell units over the years and on the whole found them quite reliable. However, they do come with a bunch of crapware installed, so the first thing I do, is to run the Diskpart "clean" command on the system drive and then do a clean install of Windows.
My last job I had a POS Dell that crashed often and the tech guy reinstalled OS many times. I think they thought I was faking it, had other problems but that wasn't one of them.
Did a little mechanic work today. Put a rear end in a recliner! JaxCoder.com
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I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs. I always build them with myself with parts I select. My kid and I just built him a (gaming) PC, he selected the video card first and then we selected everything else to go around it. Previously, he had an off-the-shelf PC (against my recommendation of course) which didn't suit his a needs, but his mother buys him whatever he asks for. The only parts re-used from that are the CPU and an HDD. The old M.2 SSD was replaced with a WD Black one twice the capacity. Now he's watching CES footage and drooling over the upcoming graphics cards. :(
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My last job I had a POS Dell that crashed often and the tech guy reinstalled OS many times. I think they thought I was faking it, had other problems but that wasn't one of them.
Did a little mechanic work today. Put a rear end in a recliner! JaxCoder.com
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs
I guess you don't build laptops eh? :)
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
I once had to replace the disk drive in a laptop that was designed in such a way that you had the take the entire system apart to get to the drive, including removing the main board. What a nightmare! Took me many hours and afterwards the WiFi never worked again. :mad:
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So her computer started having all kinds of issues, including BIOS misbehaving. The computer was getting quite old and I did not fancy regular maintenance work to keep it going. Her birthday is early in the new year and so I bought her a new Dell as combined Christmas and birthday gift. I paid a little extra to get her a machine with a NVMe M.2 SSD. One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD. I ordered a new Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD and used it to replace the item supplied by Dell. What a difference! Sequential read speed was about 5 times that of traditional Samsung SATA SSDs. Random read speeds were also much faster, but not quite 5 times. Now I sit with a M.2 SSD that Dell supplied, that is of no further use to me! I am a little disappointed in Dell.
Dell used to use quality components but like every other manufacturer has gone to saving every cent possible on all but their high highest-end models - all products. In fact just last week I was looking at laptops, (not just Dell). It's sad the mid-range models I was looking at from every manufacturer all have at least one, usually more, compromises in quality/performance. To get a truly uncompromised laptop really meant buying high to highest end. In the end I bought: dinner - after wasting a whole day on research decided to give up on buying a crap-top. Until recently I had an old i3 Dell, (gen 3 or 4 - "M," 2 cores without hyperthreading), that noticeably outperformed [a batch of] 8th gen i5 Dell Desktops one of my clients purchased year before last. CPU benchmarks were lower on the i3 but just running win 7 or 10 the laptop ran noticeably MUCH faster. desktop hard disks were supposedly faster but real life came out measurably slower (even without a stopwatch), boot/shutdown time: i3 by a lot, program startup: i3 ... I ran visual studio on the i3 laptop: always instant responsive (couple of seconds to start), very very useable. Tried vs on one of the i5 desktops - almost threw up (both me and seemed the desktop too). I have no idea why (yes: all 'tuned' the same etc). On paper that i3 was a dinosaur, the i5's "modern." Laptops really seem suck more and more every year.
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs. I always build them with myself with parts I select.
That can turn out being quite expensive though.
Not as expensive as buying the wrong system and then buying the right one.
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Don't know. I don't think they ever did anything besides reinstalling OS. Don't care.
Did a little mechanic work today. Put a rear end in a recliner! JaxCoder.com
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I don't buy off-the-shelf PCs. I always build them with myself with parts I select.
That can turn out being quite expensive though.
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So her computer started having all kinds of issues, including BIOS misbehaving. The computer was getting quite old and I did not fancy regular maintenance work to keep it going. Her birthday is early in the new year and so I bought her a new Dell as combined Christmas and birthday gift. I paid a little extra to get her a machine with a NVMe M.2 SSD. One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD. I ordered a new Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD and used it to replace the item supplied by Dell. What a difference! Sequential read speed was about 5 times that of traditional Samsung SATA SSDs. Random read speeds were also much faster, but not quite 5 times. Now I sit with a M.2 SSD that Dell supplied, that is of no further use to me! I am a little disappointed in Dell.
Cp-Coder wrote:
One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD.
Somebody's spoiled. I'm happy with *any* SSD. I still have machines that boot off of spinning drives.
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If it's more expensive and you're using identical parts, you're doing something wrong. Nobody (certainly not Dell) builds PCs without charging you for it.
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Cp-Coder wrote:
One of the first items I checked was the speed of the M.2 SSD. I was very disappointed. Dell had supplied the machine with a SSD that ran barely faster than clunky old SATA SSDs. In fact the sequential read speed was slightly slower than her old SATA SSD.
Somebody's spoiled. I'm happy with *any* SSD. I still have machines that boot off of spinning drives.
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Quote:
Nobody (certainly not Dell) builds PCs without charging you for it.
True, but OEMs buy components in very large volume direct from the manufacturers. You buy small quantities at retail prices.
I won't disagree with that, but in my experience, I've yet to encounter a case where an OEM system turned out to be cheaper than buying all the parts separately. But then again, it's rather rare an OEM - especially a brand name like Dell - has a PC to sell that only contains parts you can purchase elsewhere. They all tend to have *some* proprietary hardware with no equivalent that will skew the prices. OTOH, if you're buying in large enough quantities, yeah, it'll be cheaper in the long run if you get something pre-built than if you have to take the time to put a bunch of PCs together yourself. The other thing...personally I despise not being to open a case just because I'm assumed to be so incompetent replacing a hard drive will void the warranty.
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Seems like very soon after you get it built it it becomes obsolete. Especially video cards and they ain't cheap.
Did a little mechanic work today. Put a rear end in a recliner! JaxCoder.com
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Quote:
Somebody's spoiled
True, I blush to disclose. But the first time you work with a quality NVMe SSD, you may quickly join the folds of us "spoilt" folks! :)
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When a system already takes more time performing its POST routine from a cold boot (with no way around it) than getting to the login screen, I've already stopped caring. :-)
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OK, but drive speed is not just about boot time. It matters whenever you are dealing with reading / writing large files.
Purely for argument's sake :-) (because I know exactly what you're saying and I'm in your camp already): I read large files all the time: My largest files are typically movies, and even my oldest spinner is complete overkill and has no problem keeping up with playback. OTOH: If you need to move terabytes around (which I've done), then we're talking minutes rather than hours, so yeah - great. But how often do you do that? The greatest argument in favor of SSDs (and faster), IMO, is in bootup time, and application startup time. Typical users otherwise don't shuffle huge files around so frequently it matters much to them. If SSDs matched the price/capacity of spinners, that's all I'd be running (on the last Black Friday, I bought 10TB spinners for CAD$225 each). Awesome for my NAS and its offline/offsite backups. When are we going to see comparable SSDs in that price range/capacity? I'm patiently waiting.
