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is IBM going to say "Tough shit, you ran it for more than double the monthly limit! Forget about your warranty replacement."? What kind of recourse

From storage review IBM stands by the 3-year warranty for the 120GXP. Power-on hours will not be a determining factor in negating the warranty.

The good news: You'll get it replaced. The bad news: You'll replace it. No cost in hardware, just lost production (unless you're using it in hotswap raid). That's why people pay a premium for high-end equipment. The cost of downtime is more than the incremental cost of the hardware.

For those of you that notice that 333 / 30 != 8, please read this link.

100-120 IO/sec? These SCSI drives you're talking about are several years old.

Storagereview reports 120 IO/sec for Western Digital's top IDE drive, the WD1200BB. See Storage Review. A top-end SCSI drive such as the Seagate X15-36lp performs on the order of 360 IO/sec. See Storage Review.

For the interested, the X15 runs about $14/G, and you would need about 100 drives to equal the IO/sec of the RAM drive. That's $1400/G; minimum $60,000, and about 700W power consumption and about 2kW total when you add cooling to that. High quality PC2100 DDR is in the $550-600 range per gig, and about 10 watts after cooling.

100-120 IO/sec? These SCSI drives you're talking about are several years old.

Storagereview reports 120 IO/sec for Western Digital's top IDE drive, the WD1200BB. See Storage Review. A top-end SCSI drive such as the Seagate X15-36lp performs on the order of 360 IO/sec. See Storage Review.

For the interested, the X15 runs about $14/G, and you would need about 100 drives to equal the IO/sec of the RAM drive. That's $1400/G; minimum $60,000, and about 700W power consumption and about 2kW total when you add cooling to that. High quality PC2100 DDR is in the $550-600 range per gig, and about 10 watts after cooling.

I would like to note (as someone else did) that StorageReview was attempting to build a reliability database, in addition to reviewing units themselves. Tho they seem to have intended to make money, they have subsequently followed the dot-bust and are going to end their site when their current funding runs out. It would be a shame to lose the data. Anyone interested should email them and ask them to make the database public domain, and then see if there is enough support for someone to host it. This would be a valuable resource. There is no substitute for good statistical data analysis. The only other thing you can review is manufacturer claimed MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). If your drive bites the dust outside a statistically likely variance from the manufacturers claim, at least call them up and ask that they give you a new drive.

That said, you should use HW RAID and SCSI if you want reliablity. Otherwise, simply buy a good tape backup device and backup regularly. IDE drives are a commodity item, and are basicly least-common-denominator products where whoever can cut a corner to bring down the price will. Given that, use equipment aimed at business/enterprise/professionals and use HW RAID if the data needs to have reliable uptime.

the storage review reliability index should serve you well. Unfortunately the site itself may be taken down soon (due to financial reasons), so get there quick.

If you've had 3 hard disks die on you in 2 months, the problem may not have been with the disks themselves. The first thing to check is if you're getting adequate ventilation to the area where the hard disks are at. You might also want to test the voltage your power supply is putting out.

Questions like this about hard disks are really better answered here.

I was talking to some folks, and we mentioned that the world is becoming more dependent on information that is ONLY stored electronically, and not on paper. Perhaps the time is coming where something (like a major filesystem eating bug in XP or the next SuperVirus (TM)) will destroy a large portion of the internet's data. (An example is , who recently lost everything in a major raid update crash.

So what we should do is plan and prepare for this eventuality. If we have the equivalent of backup generators and emergency equipment in the digital arena, we can take over when the main system stumbles. It's not going to be long until someone devises a way to seriously crash a significant portion of the machines in the world - all the recent virii have been relatively harmless - it would not take much at all to program a relatively smart virus that would do serious damage (IE hit network drives first, destroy files that are heavily used, only strike at night, morph code, etc.)

Ah, well. This is just a bunch of blathering, but we should thing about how to use the "enemy's" weakness against it. We need to make sure that linux is seen as more stable and more secure because it is BY DEFAULT - if people start using it and get burned, they'll go back to Microsoft.

Well, a good place to start is to identify where the noise is coming from. In a PC this is generally three places: CPU Heatsink fan, power supply fan and hard drives.

For the CPU heatsink fan, the best way to silence the thing is to use a CPU that doesn't need a fan. The only currently available chip that comes to mind here is the VIA Cyrix III. Sure, this chip is quite a bit slower then a Celeron or a Duron, but as you said, performance wasn't your top criteria.

For the power supply fan, you could try getting rid of this altogether to, however your best bet would probably be to get a power supply that uses a relatively large, slow spinning fan. The PC Power and Cooling fan mentioned is one option, though you could probably get just about any power supply out there and simply replace the fan with a quiet, slow spinning fan instead. Pabst is known for making some very quiet fans, or just a plain old ~2000-2500rpm 80mm Panasonic fan should do the trick.

For hard drives, obviously some 15K rpm SCSI drives are out of the question. The quietest common drive out there today, according to Storage Review's Testbed3 is the Seagate U6 5400rpm IDE drive. For a higher performance drive, Seagates Baracuda IV drives get top marks for low-noise. Beyond that, you can further reduce drive noise by putting the hard drive into a drive sleeve type thing (put a 3.5" drive into a sound-proof casing that fits in a 5.25" drive bay).

Storagereview does this for hard drives.

[At] the bottom it has some VERY useful information, including a little utility called cdrid [www.gum.de], which identifies WHO REALLY makes the cdr disk.

The CD-R FAQ disagrees with youspecifically "[2-33] Who really made this CD-R blank?" which says you learn significantly less than you think you do from these CD-R ID routines which report information read from the "ATIP" region.

Typically, I buy Sony CDRS from staples... they're pretty cheap and work good.

Unless Sony makes their own CD-Rs (which I doubt) you can't tell what you are buying. Again I refer you to the CD-R FAQ.

[A] Plextor 24x burner is only about $150 now...

But the comparable Lite-On 24/10/40 IDE CD-RW burner is half that price. It has the same features as the Plextor 24/10/40 and is only slightly slower at some tasks than the Plextor 24/10/40 (a few seconds slower in tests where the Lite-On trailed the Plextor, not anything significant). If you find this difference to be an issue I'd say (1) you're overstating the difference and (2) in some tests the Plextor wasn't as fast as the Ricoh MP7200A.

The Plextor is probably a fine drive if you are willing to ignore its cost. The Lite-On is giving you better than 90% of the speed of the Plextor at half the cost, hence the Lite-On is a better deal for the money. Plextor's day in the sun has ended. They should make their firmware free software to compete. As far as I know nobody makes firmware that is free software (even though they all should).

[Make] sure your drive supports BuRN proof or something similar.

Actually if your system is configured correctly you don't need it, even with IDE burners. You might find it hard to avoid paying for the technology since so many drives currently on the market have burn resumption technology. But for sub-US$100 drives, the price isn't a big deal.

In terms of throughput, yes, you'll get about the same performance. However, unless you spend all day loading large files from a completely defragmented partition, what you should really look for is reduced seek times. This is the bottleneck when doing 99% of the work in your computer -- and that's why solid state drives are so blazingly fast, despite having an inferior throughput than their mechanical counterparts: they have smaller seek times, by many orders of magnitude.

Smaller seek times can be achieved by various means:
1. Get a high-end drive. More expensive models feature faster actuators.
2. Reduce the physical area the disk can access, by partitioning accordingly. Seagate also used this trick with their first-gen X15 drive, by reducing the platter size from 3" to 2.5", and they were very successful.
3. Use RAID 1 (mirroring) with a good controller, which for IDE basically means the 3ware models. They are, far and away, the best. Besides shaving off the seek times, they also improve the throughput.
4. And, of course, the most important: get a hard drive which spins faster. If you don't believe me, take a look at the sites below for benchmarks.

The hard drive is the only peripheral nowadays whose access time is measured in miliseconds and not nanoseconds. Instead of buying loads of memory and the fastest processor available, everyone should pay attention to the storage side of their machines -- whoever has experienced 10k and 15k RPM disks finds it hard to go back.

The best places in the web for storage info are Storage Review and, to a lesser extent, x-bit labs. Storage Review, besides their extremely scientific methodologies, maintains a drive reliability database, so you can check whether the drive you're looking for is likely to fail.

IOMeter Tests CPU Util
IBM Ultrastar 36Z15 (U160 SCSI) 0.48%
IBM Deskstar 60GXP (ATA-100) 0.35%

I'm quite frankly shocked that you didn't look into Seagate drives. They have "Softsonic" technology, but ultimately gives you good quiet performance. Storage Review has a review of the most recent drive the Baracuda IV.

I haven't heard of problems with the 40GV's, but that's not authoritative. Check the discussion boards at Storage Review for more info.

I had a IBM 20gig fail on me just two weeks ago--right after my brother lost two Maxtors. IBM was very good about filling the warranty--much better than Maxtor! The 20gig had been running smoothly for about a year.

In reality, all hard drives are made pretty much the same way. (For some GREAT information on everything harddrive related, check out this site.) For some reason IBM appears to be in a bit of a slump, but I remember a few years ago everyone was saying "don't buy a maxtor--they're cheap trash." Whatever you buy, just remember that your precious data resides on ferroceramic disks spinning at 5200-10000 rpm with the means of destruction--the read head--floating mere microns above. Back up often!

-s

Storage Review has been conducting a survey for a while now. 140 posts and counting. As for me, my 45GB 75GXP is running just fine, but mine usually isn't a problem model. It seems to be much more likely for a drive to fail if it was assembled in the Hungary plant.

I've heard a rumor (floating around the FreeBSD mailing lists) that there are known problems with voltage regulation on board with the 7xxx series, and they had some stability issues. Can anyone substantiate or refute that rumor?

On a side note, storage review's Adaptec 2400A review compares and contrasts the 3Ware escalade 6400 and Adaptec 2400A performance (which is near the performance of the 7400 for up to 4 drives).

The issue fixed with solid state disks are rotational latency and seek latency. When faced with a heavy random seek load, platter based drives waste immense amounts of time waiting for either the head, or the disk to be in the correct position to read data. Combined, this takes about 12 ms on a good IDE drive. By contrast, "finding" the correct spot on a solid state disk takes about 10 ns. Thus a random seek pattern on a solid state drive should run about 1,000 times faster. This is the sort of load placed by heavy use of database servers. Slashdot, for instance would benefit from this. Your quake game, would not as most of the reads would be sequential, not random.

Check out Storage Review to see some i/o performance of platter based storage.

Which is exactly what Western Digital did with their 100 Gig caviar drive. They've taken advantage of cheap dram to pump their cache up to 8MB from the usual 2 MB. The result is their 7200 rpm drive is outrunning 10k rpm drives and is quieter as well.

More info on the Western Digital drive is available at storage review.

Yes, and for more additional information you might want to check
this link.

I saw this discussion on StorageReview (or one just like it) several months ago. After reading it, I came to the conclusion that the only people posting were those that have had problems with these drives. Any time someone came back with "Mine works fine", they were shot down with "IBM sympathiser" or "lucky [%^&%*]" name-calling.

I found this disheartening. Are we all just angst-ridden 14-16 year olds?

FWIW, I have 2 75GXPs in my machine right now: A 30 and a 45 gig. Both from Hungary. Neither one has given me even a passing whine. I have had them in 24*7 use for 12+ months now.

We purchased a half-terabyte IDE RAID system utilizing 8 75GXP Drives. 5 of the 8 drives failed in less than a month. In fact, the drives prompted our RAID vendor to remove them and replace them with Maxtor diamondMAX drives, which have operated flawlessly. If you have a look at storagereview.com, you'll notice that the current king of IDE drives are the western digital "BB" Series drives. I'd stay FAR away from the DeskStar's.

There was some rumbling on Storage Review that these drives may just be too fast for their electronics, and once you start filling up the outer sectors on the disk you will start getting errors. My friend has a pair of the 45GB 75XPs, and at least one of them has "issues". Every so often (now that the drive is full) the kernel will spit out:
ad4s1g: hard error reading fsbn 76293856 of 26874736-26874751 (ad4s1 bn 76293856; cn 8073 tn 63 sn 37)
followed by:
ad4: DMA problem fallback to PIO mode

So far the 60GXPs that I use have had no problems (knock on wood). I've seen at least once source that suggests that the 45GB versions of this drive are the most suseptable to having this problem. I suspect there was some poor quality control on these drives and some very marginal hardware was released onto the world (bad IBM, bad!), but that's more of a feeling since I don't have much evidence to support the claim.

Take a look at the discussion forums over at StorageReview.com. There have been several discussions about the 75GXP (and 60GXP) over there.

Case in point, some of their readers are currently running an unofficial survey.

Take a look at the discussion forums over at StorageReview.com. There have been several discussions about the 75GXP (and 60GXP) over there.

Case in point, some of their readers are currently running an unofficial survey.

Unfortunately I don't have any good benchmarks but I do have some for a 3ware IDE RAID 1 (mirror) from a year or so ago here:

3ware ide raid

The CPU usage is interesting - it would be nice to have a SCSI RAID board to do a comparision... I definately agree that SCSI has some advantages.

Hopefully I can grab a four port board and use RAID 5 or something else that is a bit more sexy than just plain mirroring. In the meantime though StorageReview.com has some good tests on numerous RAID products (and a drive comparision database).

Hi Sid:

I'm in the process of having a file server built for myself using similar technology. It is not built (and thus is not in my hot little hands) so I cannot speak from experience. You might be interested in the data at Storage Review . Although Storage Review focuses on timings under a Microsoft O/S, the IOMeter measures are interesting, and they have a nice database of measures that allows you to query for a comparison.

One interesting note is that 3Ware's 7400 series appears (according to their analysis) to be weak at Raid 5 performance (I've decided not to go Raid 5 so it is not currently an issue for me). If you need Raid 5, you might want to consider an Adaptec 2400 series which allows you to plug in extra cache memory on the card for write buffering.

The FreeBSD mailing lists have recently had some tales of woe for a Raid install. One speculation is that the IDE drives don't have staggered spin up like their SCSI counterparts, so if you have a large number of drives, you may need extra power to get the system to startup reliably (get a redundant or high capacity supply and offload some drives perhaps).

Apparently, it is. People would rather see their favourite sites go away than put up with a little popup that they can just close. In effect, you're pirating your viewing of the site. Many people rationalize downloading warez by saying that the big companies are making too much money anyway (and they may be right), but by blocking popups, you're hurting the bottom line of people just like us.

When you watch TV, you put up with the ads. Or, you subscribe to some premium channels that don't have ads. Or you just don't watch TV. Same with printed magazines. Why screw over webmasters?

Thanks to Davin and Eugene at StorageReview.com for making me aware of this issue.
---

Get a motherboard with 4 IDE channels (most "raid versions" have this) and plug 12 drives into the Hotrods, 4 into the motherboard's raid channels, and 2 into the secondary ide channel. The boot hard drive goes on the primary ide channel.

Ouch! Spend a few hundred more, and get an Escalade Storage Switch. They perform very well and aren't wildly expensive (you should be able to have an 8-channel 32-bit, 33Mhz version for under $500.00). You also have your motherboard IDE channels free for things like DVD-ROM drives... heh heh... Lots of DVD-ROM drives... Heh heh...

Ahh, yes-- and there are Linux drivers available for the Escalade controllers. If you're looking for wild amounts of performance, they do have a 66Mhz, 64-bit PCI version available, too. Wowza.

Promise has their SuperTrak controller, which looks very interesting, but based on some messages I saw flying around on the Kernel List, apparently it's not as straightforward as just compiling in I2O support to use it under Linux. Grrr...

Check out this review and this review if you want to see how the Escalade stacked up to other "high end" IDE RAID controllers.

Well, it seem these days, most of the power user just care to get something like 200fps in Quake III. Why ? Beat's me ! I'm not on a quest to get the ultimate frame rate, I just want my box to be quiet as possibly can be.

To help you understand my take on the subject, here is the background :
My PC has the following components :

• A OEM case
• A 235W OEM power supply
• ASUS P3B-F
• Intel Pentium II rated 400Mhz @ 400Mhz
• A cheap OEM SECC2 Heat-Sink made of aluminum
• A 128MB CAS2 no-name DIMM
• Two 32MB CAS3 Samsung DIMM slowing down my memory timing, but preventing the appearance of the all mighty evil SwaP
• A ATI All-In-Wonder Rage128 16MB
• A Creative SoundBlaster Live! Value
• A Realtek 8139 Ethernet NIC
• My beloved USR 56Kbps ISA Real Modem. Sorry but to me a component that uses CPU power to do it's processing instead of taking the load off is not worthy of being in my computer. Not to mention the M$ Win part...
• A Creative 48x CD-ROM drive. It's the loudest damned thing in my computer when it's spinning
• A Quantum Fireball AS PLUS 40GB (7200RPM) in a removable tray
• A Quantum Fireball CX1 10GB (5400RPM) mounted inside the case
• Of course the stupid old 1.44 MB floppy drive only used for booting Tomsbrt in case of emergency

Soon to be :

• A Adaptec 2940UW
• A Diamond Monster 3D II for Glide games

It turn out that the Quantum Fireball AS makes less noise than the Quantum Fireball CX1. I still have to figure it out ...

I use my PC for :

• Running Linux and learning as much as time allows me (Jez I had so much time when I was a student... Think of all the time I wasted in High-School running the evil W monster)
• Doing some gaming i.e. : Diablo II, Unreal, UT, Undying (Although that thing is going to cost me a new box)
• Spending numerous nights filling my brain @ Slashdot, Tomshardware, Anandtech, Arstechnica, StorageReview, Developper.Intel.com, and most importantly, hounding the web for all the case manufacturers and their take at a quiet box.

As I'm writing this post, that is probably going to be the base documentation for my Silent Case Project, you're guessing that my sleepless night of browsing have not yielded the desired result.

I've check out many options such as water cooling, moving the PC to the closet, returning to the forest where a PC is pretty far from your everyday quest for survival. None of them suits me.

The objective of my project is to build a case that meets the following criteria :

• A silent as possible
• Accessible
• Provides sufficient ventilation to maintain all the components running within thermal specs
• Be light enough to be easily transportable (Let's not forget the Lan parties ;-)

To attain those goals I have to :

• Read all I can about noise, sound, aerodynamics, PC specs
• Find suitable materials : A case is not just a protection against unwanted fingers and dust ; it must provide EMI shielding, proper grounding, resist to impacts, and fit into my conception of the king of object you want in your bedroom (If you were thinking about plywood and a box of rusted leftover nails, forget it)
• Find the tools or the companies or individuals with the means to work the materials I choose to build the casing

For the sound isolation I was thinking about some kind of foam. Mineral lint would be affective but that takes too much space and it's not the kind of thing I want beside my bed. Form the casing itself, metal is almost inevitable if you want EMI shielding and grounding. And as for you who wonder why I have not mentioned water cooling yet, the greatest source of noise is not my CPU cooler and your just moving the problem out of the case (Nice ; you have water heating up but unless your reservoir is like a bathtub or something you will have to transfer the heat for the water to the air).

That about as far as I am. If you have any idea that might help me, please fell free to send me some bits forming ASCII characters at Prozzaks@operamail.com

To finish up, here is a list of thing that might help people wanting to achieve similar goals :

• http://www.formfactors.org/ You should be able to find all the documents regarding the ATX form factor and thermal design guides. A must if you want to build a quiet PC.
• http://developer.intel.com/ Intel has contributed a great deal to the ATX definition ; here you will find many relevant documents including thermal design guides for all Intel processors.
• Etract from my favorite's :
  
  

  Hardware\cases PC CASE
  Fong Kai
  PowerOn
  Enlight Corporation
  dir.yahoo Enclosures Manufacturers
  procase
  YY Computer
  Psi
  IN WIN
  Amtrade
  American Suntek
  Addtronics
  A-Top Technology, Inc
  Nikao
  Palo Alto Products
  Antec
  Lian-Li
  amaquest
  Koolance
  Quietpc
  PC Power & Cooling
  
  
  

  Hardware\Heat Sinks ALPHA
  Cooler Master
  AVC
  ekl
  GlobalWIN
  globefan
  RDJD
  Foxconn
  Spring Spread
  Sanyo Denki
  TITAN
  TaiSol
  ChipCoolers
  Orb a
  ElanVital
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Form Factor Platform Development Support
  SSI
  WTX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Standards Fibre Channel Industry Association
  PCI SIG
  RAB
  serialata
  SPEC
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Storage RAID.edu
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info\Cours CS 252 - Graduate Computer Architecture
  
  
  

  Hardware\Info The PC Guide!
  Hardware Bible
  FullOn3D
  developer.intel.com
  HwB The Hardware Book
  United Overclockers
  Ars Technica
  Tech-Junkie
  HardwarePub
  Webopedia
  Illustrated Guide to the PC Hardware
  SysOpt
  2CPU
  Ace's Hardware
  Technical Support - RaidHelp v1.0 - Free RAID Technology Guide
  Computer Architecture
  OPENCORES.ORG
  TechFest
  MidWest Micro Support
  
  
  

  Hardware\Resalers GeekTek!
  Micro-Bytes
  ALCO
  ABC Micro
  2CoolTek
  Plycon Computers
  TCWO
  ABC Micro - Lprix
  Case Outlet
  The Chip Merchant, Inc
  Cimsys
  OrdiGros
  ALIENWARE
  SHENTECH
  FireStorm
  Hyper Microsystems
  TWEAKBOX
  
  
  

  Hardware\Reviews Tom's Hardware Guide
  Sharky Extreme
  StorageReview
  HardOCP
  AnandTech
  SystemLogic
  x-bit labs
  Active-Hardware
  FiringSquad
  SocketA
  Overclockers Australia
  HEXUS
  dansdata
  SysReview
  
  
  

  Hardware\Manufacturers AMD
  ASUS
  Belkin
  MassMultiples
  Promise
  StarTech
  VIA Technologies, Inc
  ABIT Computer Corp
  Comcase
  Micron Semiconductor
  ECS
  
  
  

  Hardware Freeboxen
  

More RAID level 6 info
The difference between Raid 3 and Raid 5 is where the parity information is stored. With Raid 3, the parity is stored on a dedicated disk. With Raid 5 - that information is spread over all the disks. Which is better depends on what you're storing. Large data files such as graphics/image files get better performance on raid 3, while smaller files do better on raid 5.

Oh - and i messed up in my previous comment - i meant raid 1, not raid 0. 0 is striping over 2 disks, 1 is mirroring.

So you're wondering - all this theoretical info, and no practical tools to be able to actually use it.

Well - it appears that software raid under linux currently doesn't support raid 6 - but some enterprising hacker could certainly put it in (i'd assume) IANAPY (I am not a programmer yet). But RAID-5 gives us a 33% acceptable failure not, not quite 50%, but nothing to sneer at.

I did find some references to sites with a /kernel/2.2.16-1-RAID/modules/CDROM - so i'm assuming somebody uses raid+cdrom currently.

I'll let y'all know if i find something more concrete out

• Total I/O per second: X15 117% faster
• Total throughput: X15 116% faster
• Average I/O response: X15 53% faster

And remember kids, maximum length on those UltraATA cables is 18 inches(!), versus a luxurious 12 meters for Ultra160 SCSI, which transfers data much more quickly anyway.

I have the Adaptec IDE raid card (AAA-UDMA) with two IBM 37.5 gig hard drives in a stripe set, and it can sustain 27 MB/s read. (It contains footage for a DV feature; it's about 80% full.)

The new IBM 75 gig IDE drives are very fast; you might look at those.

The total amount of data you are looking at is about 170 gig by my calculations. So you'll need three of the IBM 75 gig drives, plus the adaptec card (which can support up to 4.) That'll give you 225 gig at a cost of about $1600. Or you could try to use WinNT/Win2k software striping. This setup might even get you up near saturating the PCI bus, at about 90MB/s.

Avoid Promise cards at all costs; I have lost a lot of time and data trying to use them.

You might check out Storage Review as a good place for disk info.

If you're really on a budget, you shouldn't be using uncompressed video. It's much harder to work with, eats a lot more storage, and isn't any better looking to 99% of the population than DV.

Marshall Spight

Can you say FAST????
Not really.

It's 5400 RPM for Christ's sake! Maxtor is more or less admitting that the drive isn't fast enough by releasing the DiamondMax Plus 45, a smaller 7200rpm drive. StorageReview has a nice take on Maxtor's new releases.

Barring spectacular performance from the DiamondMax Plus 45, the IBM Deskstar 75gxp (available in sizes up to 75gb) is still the king of IDE drives. The 75gxp has some very impressive specs, does well in every benchmark thrown at it, and has some insanely low street prices.

We can't trust this press release either; it lacks key details about price, speed, and availability. Don't expect to see any of those three drives soon and don't expect them to be anything worth writing home about.

In the end, we have one drive from Maxtor that might match the 75gxp for speed, and it's only 45gb. The DiamondMax 80 is a joke, a measely extra 5gb for a far inferior drive.

Want insanely fast IDE RAID? Get a couple of 75gxp drives now for less money.

--

I wish that they had a picture of the unit, but what I am envisioning from the description is a box with little more than a 'off' switch and a display in front (it doesn't need either, but they are cheap, and would aid marketing at this price point - $250 w/o system purchase)

The real magic would be the 'back panel', standard output jacks to mate with a home stereo, which unfortunately will probably just be phono plugs and clamp-ons for bare speaker wire. It's really too bad, because believe me, if they added stereo 'balanced input' jacks, I might even suggest it some people I know. getting a decent balanced in to a computer, even one with a studio-style music card (not a Soundblaster) is pretty expensive.But that would make the device and I/O device, and I see no suggestion that it's anything but an output device.

I also wouldn't immediately assume it's Ethernet or anything like that. It could be USB.

It's primary advantages (if I envision it correctly) are:

0) Fiddle free operation: i could (and have, in the course of helping people with home studios) create some of all of the advantages below without adding components, but I like hacking. And because it was important to get it 100%, I noticed how many apparent solutions weren't 100% for various reasons

1) Skip protection -- face it, HDDs are *slow* to change tracks. I doubt there's an IDE HDD around that can't be pushed to 20-30ms *worst case* track seeks. Don't bother checking your specs, NO ONE publishes worst case numbers, and even their 'typical' and 'capability' (best case) figures are unstandardized between manufacturers and suspect, technically, as savvy HDD review sites like Storage Review will happily show you, via exhaustive testing and comparisons. So when you're doing a few things at once, skips aren't unheard of, even at modest CPU loads. I rarely notice them, and they don't bother me, but they are there. A meg of buffer at the output device is cheap and easy anti-skip pretection.

2) Better sound reproduction -- Yeah, you could buy a better sound card, but as great as those can sound, a dedicated device can be better, especially when driving a stereo amp/speakers . I'm no sound snob personally, but I help a lot of home studio musicians, and the difference is easy to hear, even for me. Similarly, few PC speakers come close to a goo set of home stereo speakers. Even some $300 'big name' (you'd recognize it instantly) USB speakers I tested recently were very disappointing.

3) Device segregation: There are actually good reasons why a normal user mught be better off keeping a 'game style' (FMsynth/MIDI/WAV) card like a soundblaster as his primary audio device, rather than a killer studio-style card -- I have a friend who has separate semi-pro MIDI and digital audio cards, and a cheap Ensoniq for apps/surfing, so he doesn't have to power up his whole studio for normal computing. Such a set-up tends to create confusion in apps that expect a SB compatible, too. Sure, you could do this with USB speaker drivers, but see above re: those

4) Looks cool on shelf: don't knock it

5) allows full utilization of existing Home Entertainment components (which, in many houses doesn't revolve around the PC, as strange as that sounds) Unfortunately, this is merely a theoretical advantage. This product seems clearly targeted at the market that will buy first (computer users) and will probably not even talk to other home stereo components, aside from passing on the audio analog signals.

However, having said all that, I am utterly unmoved by this product, and I expect most users will be, too. What I'd like is a "digital entertainment station" - bidirectional, so it would be able to pipe me radio, TV, good balanced mike input etc. as well as piping my decompressing and D/A'ing mp3 (and WAV) stream to the speakers.

There is a market out there for this. Lots of companies sell this stuff for Beaucoup bucks. But Dell is going for a mass market portal model for revenue and expansion

StorageReview.com is a good source of this information (though it would be better if it had Linux benchmarks.) It's very frustrating though - as soon as the fastest disks are available here in Oz, a newer, faster disk beats it on the leaderboard... (Trying to find a store that sells disks by brand and model, not just capacity, is also a challenge.)

You don't need to unsolder anything. Click here for a simpler mod which accomplishes the same thing.

Here is a site that describes a much simpler mod which accomplishes the same thing without needing to desolder the 32-pin chip.

correct link?

...but this method is much easier than the one posted on the main page.
And the next time I'll use the preview button. :)

This better work

This is the URL...

http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www .storagereview.com/ubb/For um1/HTML/002964.html

Odd URL huh?

Goddamn, I can't get this right!

Try this instead

And this is it. You don't have to mess around with SMD components or remove the BIOS chip.


Sorry for the dbl post, but I fscked up the last URL.

Not quite. That's avg. seek time you're thinking of. Latency has more factors than that to take into consideration. [details]

If you got the bucks, SCSI is definately for the power user.

www.storagereview.com - I consider the website the best site for hard drive performance info and reviews, so far they have reviewed 81 hard drives. They also provide info about the latest hard drive, a forum for people with question, and look into hard drive technologies such as the effect of buffer size on hard drive performance. (and like any good website) Storage Review is frequently updated...

As for my personal experiences, my IBM 10.1 GB hard drive was dying and experience random shutdowns. I was able to pull my data off and restore from backups. IBM tech support was really helpful and I got a replacement within two weeks (it's a 14.4 GB) *grin*


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There is no statute of limitation on stupidity.