Hah, don’t worry. I only look for solar neutrinos and dark matter. Harmless stuff. :)
Ya, all the solar neutrinos I’ve ever met have been quite polite and friendly. ;-)
Any reason not to use an Intel X25-M Gen2 160GB SSD drive as the system disk under Win 7 64bit, for building the said CUDA development monster system?
While I need to verify I think at the moment only XP64 or Linux is compatible with 4 X GTX295 cards without jumping through some hoops to make Vista or Windows 7 think monitors are attached but you probably already knew this.)
As for the hard drive for pure development systems the shorter life of the X25-M may not be an issue. In a presentation I saw from Intel the 160 GB M drives had a projected “random host data” life of 15 TB while the better technology X25-E 64 GB had a 2,000 TB life. I think the differences in the two technologies is the -M uses Multi-Layer-Cell technology and the -E uses Single-Layer-Cell (for a good paper about the technologies go to http://www.texmemsys.com/files/f000252.pdf) SLC is significantly more expensive but it has two orders of magnitude the life. After saying this we have built RAID0s of the Gen 1 -M and they have been great. we have built 3 drive RAID0s due to layout constraints but think a four drive system would be more than assume. The Gen-2 X25-M is supposed to keep the drive efficient by better dynamic cleans of old paging files using a trim function (reference: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-…ware,2461.html) and I believe trim functionality is availabile for X25-E.
That is all for now.
Thanks for the info John. Your systems look very great BTW…
I have the 80 GB Gen1 in the 4xGTX 295 system I mentioned above, and I love it. It was the first time that I’ve ever seen a system stay responsive under heavy swapping.
(Can’t comment on the Win7 thing as I only use CUDA on Linux and occasionally OS X.)
Thanks Timaeus, we think we have a great set of offerings and we continually strive to improve.