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KSP1 Computer Building/Buying Megathread


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23 hours ago, WellItExplodedAgain said:

Using an SSD and a HDD is recommended. I personally use a 256gb m.2 SSD for my boot drive, KSP, and some other games. I have a 1tb WD caviar blue for my recording drive. It works wonders!

It should be noted that using multiple SATA drives can improve performance, even if some drives are not the fastest, as the SATA bandwidth is limited and using multiple drives multiplies the bandwidth available. Not having Windows reads and writes interfere with other operations can also improve performance a lot.

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2 hours ago, Camacha said:

It should be noted that using multiple SATA drives can improve performance, even if some drives are not the fastest, as the SATA bandwidth is limited and using multiple drives multiplies the bandwidth available. Not having Windows reads and writes interfere with other operations can also improve performance a lot.

Running them in RAID is expensive, but marginally faster read/write speeds. 

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On 7/01/2017 at 9:07 PM, Camacha said:

Hybrid setups are the solution of choice

My "Hybrid" storage setup is 2 SSDs (OS/home + games), backed by a 24TB ZFS pool over dual gigabit ethernet. :wink:
Windows on the other hand gets an ancient mechanical drive, as I boot it about once a year.

3 hours ago, Camacha said:

It should be noted that using multiple SATA drives can improve performance, even if some drives are not the fastest, as the SATA bandwidth is limited and using multiple drives multiplies the bandwidth available.

Maybe... depends how fast a drive you're talking about. I've never encountered a mechanical drive that can saturate a SATA link. More likely it's going to be the drives R/W throughput or IOPS that is the limiting factor. You might saturate a SATA link with a decent SSD, but do you really need more than 6Gbps on a desktop?

3 hours ago, Camacha said:

Not having Windows reads and writes interfere with other operations can also improve performance a lot.

Indeed, and on a mechanical drive it's the seek contention that's the killer. Not such a big deal on an SSD though.

31 minutes ago, WellItExplodedAgain said:

Running them in RAID is expensive, but marginally faster read/write speeds.

Depends on what kind of RAID you're talking about. RAID0 will give you double the performance of a single drive at no added cost over using two separate drives... but with half the reliability. If you want a wickedly fast scratch disk (or have a good backup system) RAID0 a pair of SSDs.
RAID1/10 can double read throughput & IOPS (but typically not write), and provides redundancy, but it is more expensive as you sacrifice half the storage capacity.
Other RAID layouts (and advanced filesystems like ZFS & BTRFS) provide different price/performance/redundancy compromises.
In practice, most RAID setups are for redundancy, not performance.

Edited by steve_v
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On 09/01/2017 at 3:54 AM, WellItExplodedAgain said:

Running them in RAID is expensive, but marginally faster read/write speeds. 

Multiple drives does not automatically mean RAID. That is just one of the options. Having one driving handling Windows and having another for your recordings can greatly improve performance and eliminate hiccups. Another obvious option would be to either RAID0 two drives and use them as a fast host OS + VMs drive, or having one SSD for the host and another for one or more SSDs.

Reduced reliability is something to consider, however, anyone who is sensible will have proper backups and with proper backups it is a matter of restoring the most recent one.

On 09/01/2017 at 4:24 AM, steve_v said:

Maybe... depends how fast a drive you're talking about. I've never encountered a mechanical drive that can saturate a SATA link. More likely it's going to be the drives R/W throughput or IOPS that is the limiting factor. You might saturate a SATA link with a decent SSD, but do you really need more than 6Gbps on a desktop?

Whether you saturate the SATA link or the drive itself does not matter much, you multiply bandwidth in both cases. Having everything on one drive can bite you when multiple things have to happen at the same time. Even using traditional drives, having one for the OS and one for games or recording or other performance hungry applications can improve the experience.

Edited by Camacha
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56 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Having everything on one drive can bite you when multiple things have to happen at the same time. Even using traditional drives, having one for the OS and one for games or recording or other performance hungry applications can improve the experience.

This is most certainly true of spinning rust, though NCQ and plenty of RAM for disk cache can alleviate this problem somewhat. IME it's not really an issue on a decent SSD unless you are running properly I/O intensive applications.

 

56 minutes ago, Camacha said:

Another obvious option would be to either RAID0 two drives and use them as a fast host OS + VMs drive, or having one SSD for the host and another for one or more SSDs.

If I had two or more identical drives in my desktop, I'd almost certainly use them in RAID - RAID0 will give a much bigger performance boost than a separate OS disk (as will RAID1, for reads at least), and like any sane person, I have a robust (and well tested) backup solution.
I'm not doing so at the moment because the SSDs I have are not the same size, and the second is a recent addition... also because I am too lazy to change it right now.

I'm not sure I'd recommend RAID to Windows users though, my experiences with Windows soft-raid (at least in non-server editions) have been unpleasant to say the least.
Most reasonably priced addon RAID controllers (or BIOS softRAID), aren't much better IME, and introduce dependency on a specific controller - if your card (or motherboard) dies, so does your array... permanently if you can't find a compatible replacement.

On that note, I have been recommended DrivePool as an alternative to softraid on Windows (for redundancy, not performance), but I could never get it to meet all my requirements - primarily hotspares,  automatic "just plug it in" disk replacement and graceful (read: fully automatic resync) detach / re-attach of redundant disks. Anyone used it seriously?
I know how to do what I want with both MDRAID and ZFS, but I'm not seeing a solution for Windows that doesn't involve expensive controllers or expensive server licences.

Edited by steve_v
Missing letters today for some reason. More coffee.
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2 minutes ago, steve_v said:

I'm not sure I'd recommend RAID to Windows users though, my experiences with Windows soft-raid (at least in non-server editions) have been unpleasant to say the least.
Most reasonably priced addon RAID controllers (or BIOS softRAID), aren't much better IME, and introduce dependency on specific controller - if your card (or motherboard) dies, so does your array... permanently if you can't find a compatible replacement.

Most enthusiast motherboards provide reasonable RAID solutions. It introduces additional complexity and is therefore only worth the hassle if you know why you want it, but losing a RAID set with your hardware is not an issue if you have proper back-ups. You would not depend on RAID for that anyway. If your motherboard dies, replace it and rebuild from the back-up - though motherboards are fairly resilient.

For sure, RAID is a plaything for the enthusiast, but it can be useful in some situations where faster components are not available or terribly expensive.

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Just now, Camacha said:

losing a RAID set with your hardware is not an issue if you have proper back-ups.

It's not data-loss that's the issue, it's MTTR. With softraid or a redundant filesystem it's simply a case of plugging the disks into another machine, or replacing the controller with whatever comes to hand (or you can do full multipath failover if uptime is really important). With a sufficiently large array restoring a backup can be a lengthy process, particularly if it's write constrained parity-raid and doubly so if that backup is off-site or on tape.

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1 hour ago, steve_v said:

It's not data-loss that's the issue, it's MTTR. With softraid or a redundant filesystem it's simply a case of plugging the disks into another machine, or replacing the controller with whatever comes to hand (or you can do full multipath failover if uptime is really important). With a sufficiently large array restoring a backup can be a lengthy process, particularly if it's write constrained parity-raid and doubly so if that backup is off-site or on tape.

Sure. Luckily, such an event is pretty rare. Data security is never about eliminating risks, but always about mitigating them to an acceptable point.

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Is there any reason why a "normal" PC user should RAID SSDs? The real-life difference between entry-level Sata-SSDs and highend NVMe SSDs is allready hard to notice and in that case the performance difference is way bigger...

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7 hours ago, Elthy said:

Is there any reason why a "normal" PC user should RAID SSDs?

Assuming RAID0, you'll get ~2x the performance of a single SSD or two separate SSDs. As to whether you actually need a storage system that fast... in most cases you don't. Maybe if you do a lot of video editing.

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So I'm thinking of doing a new build - as now I'm just always on my MBP - and need to replace my last desktop that I sold.  I will be mostly be doing KSP, streaming lecture, and some Lightroom/photo stuff on the side.  I run a TON of mods, but not many are visuals.  I'm really looking for something that can handle higher part counts rather than better visuals, most likely won't be running scatter, etc.  How does this build look?  I'm just educated on the stuff to know I know nothing.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KFFrwV

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If the i5-7600k is only a tiny bit more expensive i would choose that (together with a Z270 mainboard), no idea about your local prices.

You could save on the mainboard, is there a specific reason you choose that one?

I would advise against the Sapphire version of the 480, its the worst cooling solution. Also imho it doesnt make much sense to go for the 4GB version of the 480, maybe you could get a similar priced 470 with 8GB (here the Sapphire version is the best), which wouldnt be much slower but way more future proof due to twice the memory.

I also dont see any SSD/HDD in that build, what are you planing to use?

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1 hour ago, mavric1298 said:

So I'm thinking of doing a new build - as now I'm just always on my MBP - and need to replace my last desktop that I sold.  I will be mostly be doing KSP, streaming lecture, and some Lightroom/photo stuff on the side.  I run a TON of mods, but not many are visuals.  I'm really looking for something that can handle higher part counts rather than better visuals, most likely won't be running scatter, etc.  How does this build look?  I'm just educated on the stuff to know I know nothing.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KFFrwV

Wait for AMD's Ryzen processors to come out. March 3 at latest. For a cooler, the CRYORIG H7 is much better and easier to install than the 212 EVO. If you are set on Intel, this is a better build ($90 more expensive, though, but it's Z270+Kaby Lake i5 instead of Z170+Skylake i5 and has a 8GB RX 480 with the best cooler): https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KG4kbj

That will be an awesome black-on-black build, but if you don't care about looks whatsoever you can drive it down about $110 or so, here: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/dCXByf

Edited by legoclone09
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3 hours ago, mavric1298 said:

So I'm thinking of doing a new build - as now I'm just always on my MBP - and need to replace my last desktop that I sold.  I will be mostly be doing KSP, streaming lecture, and some Lightroom/photo stuff on the side.  I run a TON of mods, but not many are visuals.  I'm really looking for something that can handle higher part counts rather than better visuals, most likely won't be running scatter, etc.  How does this build look?  I'm just educated on the stuff to know I know nothing.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KFFrwV

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/profile/142607-legoclone09/

legoclone09 has a point!

Also you may consider a 750W PSU to support better your second GPU ...  that you will buy in a couple of months :)

Crossfire will be a major factor in your gaming performance

 

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1 hour ago, DeadOnDuna said:

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/profile/142607-legoclone09/

legoclone09 has a point!

Also you may consider a 750W PSU to support better your second GPU ...  that you will buy in a couple of months :)

Crossfire will be a major factor in your gaming performance

 

Crossfire doesn't work in some games, but when it does it's amazing. And you don't need a bridge like a certain other company!

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2 minutes ago, legoclone09 said:

Crossfire doesn't work in some games

True

3 minutes ago, legoclone09 said:

but when it does it's amazing.

Soo true

4 minutes ago, legoclone09 said:

 And you don't need a bridge like a certain other company!

you don't even have to buy the same card crossfire works with different cards (some of them) http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Crossfire-Chart.aspx

 

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