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New nForce Boards Previewed
s3k writes "Firingsquad.com takes a look at nVidia's new nForce4 chip. It now includes a hardware-based firewall for improved CPU utilization, support for Serial ATA 3 Gigabytes/second hard drives, Gigabit Ethernet, and most importantly, 20-lane PCI Express. Firingsquad includes game performance numbers with nForce4 Ultra and a few performance notes on nForce4 SLI, which, according to nVidia will need a 550-watt power supply!" pacmanfan adds a link to PC Perspective's article (including benchmarks), Necroman points out the coverage at Bjorn3d and Anandtech, and Atif Butt would like you to check ATIF Approved for their take. The same boards, the same NDA -- don't be surprised to find the reviews cover similar ground, and are mostly positive.
So what technology is going to be able to produce this sort of throughput from a harddrive?
You'd be insane to risk losing 1-2TB of disk (assuming 4-8 250GB disks) on a raid-0 array!
Once again, a slashdotter forgets that he does not represent Joe User at which a product is targetted.
If you want RAID-5, then go buy your favorite PCI-Express RAID card and do it yourself. There is no since in making this more expensive for the 99.999% that won't be using it.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
How long until an entry level machine needs 3 phase power, 16GB ram, terabyte hard drives and networking quick enough to stream the entire iTMS all at once... (don't mind me, I'm an ancient git who's been reminiscing about 1mhz 8 bit machines today)
The [grin] at the end of 'Is this too much to ask' was supposed to be an indicator that I realise it's not the most common of requests...
OTOH, I don't think *my* data is any more or less valuable to me than X's data is to X. How many 'Joe Public's are going to "throw away" one of their two disks to run raid-1 ? Very few I suspect. Most people will go with the raid-0 approach, if they use raid at all, and one raid-0 disk dying is a bad thing, even if it's one of their two 80G drives.
If you don't think that many people will use raid at all, then you have to question why it's there at all, and then you would have a point. I think nvidea would have done some market research on that, though.
So, actually I think it's a valid point - the size of the array isn't important. The reliability is, and that's independent of size.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
raid-0 is not for your archival use.
Raid-0 is what I use for my pair of 250 gig drives for video capture. they are fast enough so that I do not get any frame drops when capturing from DV or from my Targa-3000 analog capture card (capturing at a measly 20Meg per second data rate.)
Raid-0 is for insane speed and temporary storage.
if you are looking for server class RAID solutions there are motherboard out there for you, but you will be paying that extra 500 for it.
It blows my mind the number of people that want server class hardware but refuse to pay for it.
"I want a $50.00 motherboard that support's 4 processors, 8 gig of ram, and has both untra 320 scsi RAID and SATA RAID! oh and put a geforce FX5900 on it, soundblaster audigy built in and 5 1000/100/10 erthernet ports on it!"
It will never happe, so stop looking for it.
if you want server class hardware then you have to buy server class hardware at server class prices.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If the computer industry does not get it's act together with high power usage they will begin to see a decline in these power systems sales. Running 450 watt systems can cost hundreds of dollars a year in extra costs in electricity. For this reason me and the wife are now looking into Mac solutions for standard work stuff and SFF pc's with 200 watt PS's to cut down on the electric bills. In fact it's just not the wattage pull you have to worry about. These systems are now putting off so much heat it puts strain on your home AC systems having to recool off the house as the heat spreads. I've seriously have considered a dryer hose hooked up to the PSU output fan and pipe it out the house.
Well, the motherboard as an integrated gigabit port. You'd expect them to try the firewall with a ~1Gb/s traffic.