What's new

i7/512GB order it or not?

bluegrass

Well-Known Member
For those really big jobs a portable USB 3 SSD rocks.

You cost me money friend. I just went to Amazon and purchased a 256 gig SSD. Thought I'd start small and test the waters. I also wound up buying a 1tb drive for my new terrestrial tv tuner/dvr along with 3 new DVD's for my DVD library. Yes I dropped satellite. Anyway I'm on my way to using my first external SSD drive for my SP3. Looks like that little puppy will fit in my shirt pocket. Less bulk and weight for my SP3 bag. I know the SSD will rock but it will be rocking with some good bluegrass music.
 

megatronium

Active Member
You cost me money friend. I just went to Amazon and purchased a 256 gig SSD. Thought I'd start small and test the waters. I also wound up buying a 1tb drive for my new terrestrial tv tuner/dvr along with 3 new DVD's for my DVD library. Yes I dropped satellite. Anyway I'm on my way to using my first external SSD drive for my SP3. Looks like that little puppy will fit in my shirt pocket. Less bulk and weight for my SP3 bag. I know the SSD will rock but it will be rocking with some good bluegrass music.

How much faster are USB3 SSD's vs. USB3 traditional HD? Is it limited by USB3? I get about 100mbs with my USB3 Seagate 2TB drive. What jobs are you doing that require SSD speed?
 

megatronium

Active Member

Ok I get it now. 3x the speed = 3 times the price / 8 times the space. Using my math, the price/performance ratio isn't quite there yet.
 

GreyFox7

Super Moderator
Staff member
How much faster are USB3 SSD's vs. USB3 traditional HD? Is it limited by USB3? I get about 100mbs with my USB3 Seagate 2TB drive. What jobs are you doing that require SSD speed?
There's overhead but USB 3 is 5 gbps bidirectional or 625 MBps bidirectional so it wont limit it that way but it will be about 60% of the speed as the same SSD on internal SATA connection.
 

grumpy

Active Member
Ok I get it now. 3x the speed = 3 times the price / 8 times the space. Using my math, the price/performance ratio isn't quite there yet.
Don't forget the portability factor. I can still use my SP2 as a tablet when using the Corsair drive unlike being tethered to an external HDD.
 

GreyFox7

Super Moderator
Staff member
But everyone was saying the i5 SP3 > i7 SP3 when the i7 came out. Where art thou naysayers?
Proof was in the pudding.
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding.
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?"
All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
:)
 
I bought the i7 256gb version and mine has been issue free. The only time I have had the fan come on is when I did the first initial batch of updates (there were a lot of them) and when I'm on my fantasy football site with live score updating (it's a flash site so it's constantly updating, it's a low fan speed though and I have to hold the SP3 close to my ear to hear it). I would have gone for the 512 but I have a usb powered 500gb external hard drive so I didn't see the point as it fits in the carry case with my SP3.
 

Antitoon

Member
First of all, I have the i7 256 and the machine is great, I hope you go ahead with your purchase if you are interested in this kind of devices! I can confirm what the other say: with light use, the machine is just pleasantly warm (not more than your skin). If you do heavy work (or stay for a long time on some crappy webpage with inefficient Flash components), it will get warmer and eventually very hot, but even then, nothing suggests that this is not by design and that it is going to fail. Performance stays quite good even under these conditions, you will only notice the difference if you are doing heavy gaming, video conversion, file compression or so. As other people said in this forum, this is "running hot", not "overheating". After you are done, or you close the crappy page, in 2 to 5 minutes you will be back to the previous temperature and the fan will stop.

Oh, and I never had any thermal shutdown, and nobody has been reporting them for quite a while now. :) The problem seems fixed.

My two cents about the model to buy are that the price difference between the i7 256 and the i7 512 is unjustified. Come on, it's about 400 € (or $) difference! I guess everybody here know that SSDs are expensive, but how much can the cost difference between a 256 and a 512 GB SSD be? I would suspect around 100 or maybe 150 $, and I understand that they have to earn on that difference, but 400 €/$ is definitely excessive.

I would have liked the extra space, but I got the i7 256. I really had the feeling that they set the price so high just to get money for the kind of people for whom money is not a problem and who can afford the best model regardless of the price. I could have put the money for the i7 512, and probably I would if, for that price, they had included some more goodies, so that I could have justified the price to myself. With those 400 € I can buy as much as external storage as I need, and I believe that most people (including me), despite having more than 256 GB of data, don't really need to access all of it at SSD speed.
 
Does my surface (i7/512) get hot yes, does it ever malfunction, no. Has it ever overheated and shut down, no.

Does it get hot yes but it's doing some serious work and while it's hot I prefer not to hold it, but I'm heat sensitive anyway.

There is nothing wrong with this model and it's been blown out of proportion, if you want it get it you won't be disappointed.
 
Top