Hard Drive Options

[LFFPicard]

This may be a bit nit picky but it is something that most of us say when people are asking for advice on builds.

My suggestion would be to remove the standard sata drives from the configurator altogether and just default to caviar black drives. It seems that the less knowledgeable people will just stay with the standard sata drive that is the default in configurator and end up ordering it with that, only when they show of their spec everyone suggests they should of got a caviar black. Also every person who asks for advice before ordering all get told to upgrade to a caviar black.

I think it will help to have them as default and remove the standard drives completely. At the end of the day with the components on offer here aimed at high end and gaming it seems very strange to have a sub standard drive available as default.

Just a thought

 

[steaky360]

I think I'd agree for the configuratron (cheers DED) options for the 'gaming' PC's. Maybe the office/home use pc's don't need blacks as default.

 

[vanthus]

I wouldn't exactly call the other hard drives sub standard,they would still be fine for the OS drive and a good choice for storage drives,but yes,eveyone does seem to suggest the Caviar Black on the configurator.
(configuratron is a program for "Ruby" which is a programming language)

 

[steaky360]

(configuratron is a program for "Ruby" which is a programming language)

Awwwww

 

[mantadog]

I will guarantee people have no idea how much difference a good HDD can have. I bet most people think it's the CPU getting old that is causing their computer to slow down. If people really cared would laptops still be sold with cheap 5400rpm HDD's? PCS need to offer the lowest priced components they can for simple business reasons... if someone who knows jack about computers turns up at the configurator and sees what we would all recommend, they would probably run off the another site due to the price. How many people come to the forums before ordering, i bet its not that many.

My idea would be to keep the generic drives in the lower end configurators, but move the caviar blacks into top priority in the more performance configurators and perhaps only offer the generic ones as a 2nd drive option. The caviars are about £15 more expensive for the lower capacity models than generic ones, which is hardly make or break on a high performance rig. Not sure people should even be buying a custom made rig if they cant afford a caviar black mind you.

 

[Boozad]

I'm more surprised at the amount of people who are willing to spend north of £1,000 on a PC and choose HyperX Beast RAM with a stock clocked CPU, sometimes even with lower end CPUs. Obviously they're just going for the bigger number MHz wise without doing any research into it all. That's probably the second most offered advice on here.

If you're spending that much on a PC you think they'd at least know what they're buying.

 

[mantadog]

If you're spending that much on a PC you think they'd at least know what they're buying.

It doesn't surprise me, bigger is better in almost every case when it comes to tech headline numbers. People are conditioned to think that way by the big boys so they can squeeze a bit more profit from the sheep - presumably....

Look at headline numbers on SSD, they mean just about nothing but it would take the patients of a saint to figure it all out. Unless you have an interest it would bore you to tears, that's why we get to spout off on the forums all the time

 

[vanthus]

I would give people a bit more credit for having the sense to ask for advice before splashing out on a custom built computer.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority will either do some research,ask a friend who knows more about computers,phone PCS or last but not least,ask advice on the forums

 

[nathanjrb]

I have a caviar black, but my next HDD is going to be the Velociraptor simply because of the slightly faster speed. I intend to place all my 'current project' media on that drive and use the caviar black to move them over to once I'm done with the project.

 

[Tachikoma]

The thing is, not everyone needs or wants a WD Black, I certainly don't. My machine is mainly for media playback, editing photos and the occasional bit of Skyrim.

I would get very little real world benefit other than loading times on Skyrim and Windows will boot a bit faster. Neither of which are a real concern to me.

The generic 2TB drive (7200rpm, I'm not that stupid) that came with mine (Hitachi? Toshiba? I don't even remember) works perfectly fine for my use case. I don't even believe a SSD is worth investing in (for me) when I could just buy another spinning rust generic drive and RAID the two.

 

[mantadog]

I would get very little real world benefit other than loading times on Skyrim and Windows will boot a bit faster. Neither of which are a real concern to me.

.

Just for my own interest more than anything, could you post the results of running this software to benchmark the drive? http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

Say on the 50mb setting and also the 1000mb setting, just to see what kind of drives PCS are using.

 

[Tachikoma]

Gladly, will let you know this evening, can't remote into my PC at the moment.

 

[Tachikoma]

Only had time to do the 50MB option (was my birthday yesterday and the mrs wasn't happy for me to sit there benchmarking hard drives all night)

MB/s
Seq Read: 167.5
Seq Write: 132.3
512K Read: 50.93
512K Write: 85.99
4K Read: 0.320
4K Write: 0.324
4K QD32 Read: 1.246
4K QD32 Write: 0.706

Didn't bother booting into safe mode, and Avast did an update half way through so not the most accurate test.

 

[mantadog]

well just for a comparison here is the caviar black.

seq read, 415 - write 111
512k read - 276 write 251
4k read .218 write .641
3k 32 read 2.356 write 1.614

the 1000mb test gives
seq read, 116 - write 81.4
512k read - 34 write 41
4k read .4 write 0.81
3k 32 read 0.975 write 0,.953

The differences is quite apparent and probably a bit bigger than I had expected.

 

[Tachikoma]

I can re-run it on the weekend to get a "clean" reading, I wouldn't take this test as gospel.

But, like I said earlier, a few extra seconds of loading time isn't an issue, my time isn't that important.

 

[Kuniva]

Damn that's a good read. Real good.