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Elementary OS isn't a bad one to use either, as I've used it and it's relatively bloatware-free. How about CentOS though? Is that a good one to play around with? I enjoy working with the gnome environment for some odd reason, which is what CentOS is currently built off of.
 
So I got a bunch of money for my birthday. Intel Core i3 @ 3.5 GHz is in the bag from my aunt, I have $160 saved from allowance (if my mother goes halves), and $70 I got from my father and stepmother in cash.

I'm thinking of blowing the allowance on the 120GB Samsung SSD I was wanting, and take the $70 and buy the case. The case is going take at least 1 2.5", 1 5.25", and 1 3.5", and has to have USB 3 connectors. What would you guys recommend I do?
 
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Elementary OS is definitely amazing. Their interface does look similar to OS X, yeah, but I see nothing wrong with that. In-fact, I personally find it to be a lot better-looking. d: Though, it would have been nice if they included a dark version of their theme. Arch Linux's a pretty good distro, too, but never managed to get it installed; for me, it was too confusing.
 
Alex said:
So I got a bunch of money for my birthday. Intel Core i3 @ 3.5 GHz is in the bag from my aunt, I have $160 saved from allowance (if my mother goes halves), and $70 I got from my father and stepmother in cash.

I'm thinking of blowing the allowance on the 120GB Samsung SSD I was wanting, and take the $70 and buy the case. The case is going take at least 1 2.5", 1 5.25", and 1 3.5", and has to have USB 3 connectors. What would you guys recommend I do?
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$160 for a 120 GB SSD = overpriced

Look for a better SSD deal, or get a SSHD. Or, heck, get a 32 GB SSD and a HDD of your choice and set them up for cache-based SSD use.
 
Twiggy said:
$160 for a 120 GB SSD = overpriced

Look for a better SSD deal, or get a SSHD. Or, heck, get a 32 GB SSD and a HDD of your choice and set them up for cache-based SSD use.
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I'm not saying that I'm spending the whole $160 on it. And you trying to get me to use SSHDs over SSDs is like me trying to get you to use Firefox over IE. :P
 
Alex said:
I'm not saying that I'm spending the whole $160 on it. And you trying to get me to use SSHDs over SSDs is like me trying to get you to use Firefox over IE. :P
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"Blowing the allowance" does sound like you're spending the whole $160, so sorry about that.

Either way, an SSD is the way to go if you want speed at all costs. (If I were you, though, I'd rather see that your system also has some sort of HDD to go along with it. Try to figure out what's the best combination for you. Remember, even a 8 GB cache can do wonders to system responsiveness - I can only imagine how much it would be if it were 32 GB or higher.)

Check this out, by the way. SanDisk has a cache SSD that's about as plug-and-play as you can get.
 
Twiggy said:
"Blowing the allowance" does sound like you're spending the whole $160, so sorry about that.

Either way, an SSD is the way to go if you want speed at all costs. (If I were you, though, I'd rather see that your system also has some sort of HDD to go along with it. Try to figure out what's the best combination for you. Remember, even a 8 GB cache can do wonders to system responsiveness - I can only imagine how much it would be if it were 32 GB or higher.)

Check this out, by the way. SanDisk has a cache SSD that's about as plug-and-play as you can get.
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I'm likely going to get a 3TB external HDD for media storage, and leave my internal SSD for the system and program files.

Also, I was leaning towards an acutal SSD that was Samsung, not SanDisk.
 
Sometimes I think I need an SSD for my desktop, but I'm not too sure if it'd be the bet thing for me to have. There have been times where my computer freezes up, but sometimes I blame the hard drive only because it freezes up for maybe a second or two, and that's it. However, the hard drive in my desktop is also only 2 and 3/4 years old.
 
My brother's HDDs, both of them, just died. :/

I need to replace mine ASAP. Both are over 5 years old now.
 
Zet said:
I think you should give this a read for which harddrives you should consider buying: https://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
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In short, Seagate sucks. Thanks for posting this, as I was thinking of getting an external Seagate HDD. I think I'll stick with WD or Hitachi :D

I don't know if I shared this, but nonetheless I'll go ahead. Last Christmas I got a 1.5TB WD MyBook Essential HDD. After a few hours of owning it I stupidly dropped it on the floor and my guess is that the platters shattered. The problem I have with this is that I had a 320GB WD MyBook that I got in 2008, of which the drive well outlasted its casing and never once had drive failures of any sort (until I accidentally magnetized it). I lost count as to how many times I dropped it, and at one point I just peeled off the casing and put it on my desk.

It bothers me that some cheap plastic has better shock resistance than an important data medium that I spent $120 on for it to break within four hours of getting it in the mail.
 
Alex said:
I'm likely going to get a 3TB external HDD for media storage, and leave my internal SSD for the system and program files.

Also, I was leaning towards an acutal SSD that was Samsung, not SanDisk.
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I've always thought of a split solution like that as a bit of a kludge. Wouldn't it be nice for the average user to not have to care about where the data has to go? Let the software/drive firmware decided what goes to where. Usually, it's very efficient - when you go with cache-based solution, the only thing you're probably missing are sequential read/write speeds of an SSD.

Terabyte said:
Sometimes I think I need an SSD for my desktop, but I'm not too sure if it'd be the bet thing for me to have. There have been times where my computer freezes up, but sometimes I blame the hard drive only because it freezes up for maybe a second or two, and that's it. However, the hard drive in my desktop is also only 2 and 3/4 years old.
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HDDs tend to choke when subjected to a flood of non-sequential IO, but most of the time, the OS has a mitigation plan in the form of in-memory cache. For Windows, there'd be some form of caching since... the 16-bit* days (I think 3.1 did something), but the real improvements in prefetching data really came in Vista.

* Strictly speaking, the Enhanced Mode 3.x kernels are 32-bit, even if it's not NT 3.x. Depending on your system configuration, it might be likely that the only 16-bit apps running on a Windows 3.x machine are Win16 apps!

Zet said:
I think you should give this a read for which harddrives you should consider buying: https://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
Click to expand...

Alex said:
In short, Seagate sucks. Thanks for posting this, as I was thinking of getting an external Seagate HDD. I think I'll stick with WD or Hitachi :D
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Just remember that not hard disk drives are the same - what works for a given company isn't necessarily the same for others. Backblaze are using consumer drives in a corporate environment - that alone gives me some doubts about the statistics, even though it might be a good indicator for a given drive make.

Quite possibly the most important thing is that most drives should still be alive by the three-year point. Also, judging from the comments:

Charles Burns said:
It looks like exactly one model/size of Seagate had a high failure rate, and the rest did not. That's actually believable, because every hard drive company has bad models from time to time. Western Digital had the Expert and several models of Raptor. IBM/Hitachi had the 75GXP. Perhaps Seagate's is the ST31500341AS (doesn't that just roll off the tongue).
This does not mean that you should avoid Seagate anymore than you should avoid any other manufacturer for their bad runs.
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I feel that I've become spoiled with my SSD. I use it for my OS and most used applications. I love the way it starts right up and never has pauses like traditional HD will. I have a 2TB I use for Steam games and media and it's pretty annoying it always has to start up every time I get something off it. I'm sure there is an application to make the drive spin all the time but I don't wanna wear it out.

I never had issues with Seagate in the past, but now I have a Hitachi HD and Samsung SSD. Want to get another SSD or two in the future and look to use the Hitachi for backups via external hookup.
 
If there's a hard drive manufacturer I'd avoid, it'd be Western Digital. I got a 1TB external HDD, specifically a MyBook Essential External HDD, and I did a stupid thing by uninstalling the software from it. Only problem is that the software for it locked the drive up when I uninstalled it, and I was unable to recover the data I had on it.
 
I'm not necessarily shunning WD as being a bad brand, but they really need to factor in what could happen if someone deleted their software from an external hard drive.

Also, back to Zet's link, can I just say how much irony it is that the hard drive that's in my desktop now replaced a dying Samsung HDD? My desktop used to belong to my parents back from 2008-2012, and I discovered it was dying because the OS install became corrupt and Linux wouldn't work on it at all either.
 
Am I weird for never formatting the Seagate external HDD ever?

On another topic, I'm using Windows 8.1 again on my laptop. Looks like all the driver issues are gone for me, and I'm enjoying ridiculous boot times and memory usage at idle, to boot. (Think 2-3 seconds after POST, and 1 GB)
 
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