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Five Years of PC Storage Performance Compared
theraindog writes "PC storage has come a long way in the last few years. Perpendicular recording tech has fueled climbing capacities, 10k-RPM spindle speeds have migrated from SCSI to Serial ATA, Native Command Queuing has made mechanical drives smarter, and a burgeoning SSD market looks set to fundamentally change the industry. The Tech Report has taken a look back at the last four and a half years of PC storage solutions, probing the capacity and performance of a whopping 70 different notebook and desktop hard drives, SSDs, and exotic RAM disks. There's a lot of test data to digest, but the overall trends are easy to spot, potentially foretelling the future of PC storage."
The current models don't spin very quickly, but in the future people will pay a premium for the increased throughput in 5000, 7500, and 10K RPM models.
It is said that pr0n drives certain sectors of technology. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a single drive to store my whole collection... :-(
The overall trend on one page instead of 12 is that storage is getting cheaper, bigger and faster. Oh boy...
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summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Looks like slashdot is on its high horse, saying "of course SSDs are faster, duh, what a waste of time!".
And yet if somebody had written that in a blog, everybody would merrily trolling about how "anecdotal evidence is irrelevant, BTW my HDD is teh fastest".
I don't understand it. Somebody goes to the trouble of comparing a shit-load of drives in a variety of tests, and apparently the results are boring/irrelevant.
Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit.
One thing I find impresive about the evolution of storage: 20TB was the total hard drive space manufactured in 1995, just 14 years ago. And today some sites are offering 1TB storage for free, and it isn't hard to imagine they have much more than 100.000 users.
Not only you get more and more gigabytes per hard drive every year, the whole world also gets a massive quantity of new storage space.
And yet, we keep on getting 'No space left on device' errors.
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If you have an internet connection, it should be trivial to ensure that you have your data backed up in multiple places that are widely distributed geographically.
common problem with the world is that everybody assumes everybody else has the same needs as yourself. yes, internet backup might be trivial for your couple of dozen word files (although privacy is not included in the discussion here), but i have currently about 8TB of data spread over at least 15 drives here at my place.
please explain me again how it is trivial to have that backed up at multiple locations?
I think you didn't notice that the reason Anand's writeup is so useful is that he exposed the major performance degradation present in every SSD as it gets filled with data and begins to need to overwrite old data that was marked as deleted. I may be misunderstanding you, though, since your writing is incoherent.
Also, I've read Anandtech since 1997, so I'm pretty sure you didn't, as you say (with incorrect spelling, which is surprising from a journalist such as yourself) write these reviews "FAR IN ADVANCE OF ANANDTECH POSSIBLY EVEN BEING IN EXISTENCE."
"Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time" - by blahplusplus (757119) on Saturday July 11, @09:23PM (#28664715)
And, I wrote about the effectiveness of Ramdisks in general + their potential for performance gain (software based ones @ FIRST), way, Way, WAY back, & in a respected publication no less, in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61...
(& when it was applied practically? It took that same tech & company (EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com) to Ms-Tech Ed 2 yrs. in a row, in its hardest category, SQLServer Performance Enhancement, 2 yrs. in a ROW as a finalist no less)
Later on, circa 2002-2003, for SSD's?
I did a review that was featured on the FRONT PAGE of CENATEK's website with analysis much like the ones I did here (& was ODDLY "modded down for" here -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299731&cid=28664527 )
"and has been written about better by anand." - by blahplusplus (757119) on Saturday July 11, @09:23PM (#28664715)
Then, I will say the same as YOU have, in regards to ANAND La Shimpi: He only "bit off my style", in doing HIS write ups... how's that? Don't LIKE IT?? See the above, write the sources noted even (CENATEK or EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com, to verify my statements).
APK
P.S.=> On the "mod-down"? Hey - That's ok too, as I have my share of troll stalkers here, (sort of an online psycho fanclub, lol)) that "gets off" on trying to put me down any chance they get & I know who they are even... & on said reviews? They were done, on MY part, FAR before Anandtech EVER did them, so as you said? Don't think TOO HIGHLY of anandtech's work... it was proceeded by myself FAR IN ADVANCE OF ANANDTECH POSSIBLY EVEN BEING IN EXISTENCE... apk
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The format of those charts is retarded. They should have time on the x axis and whatever metric in log scale on the y axis. I couldn't care less which drive from 2005 is linked to a specific data point. I just want to see the trends as a function of time. In the later charts, with apparently fully exponential trends, you can't see whats going on at all.
1) Rar it up
2) rename it to "world's best porn collection"
3) Bittorrent
I suspect you may be able to skip step two
Interesting that there appear to be no subjective or objective noise measurements (I did not read the entire article, as some moron has seen fit to split it across twelve pages). I remember when 7200 rpm drives first came out, they were aimed at the server market and a RAID array of them made the room sound like there was a generator running. The 7200 rpm drive in my recent iMac is whisper quiet by comparison.
I assume the newest 15,000 rpm drives are similarly noisy.
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Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...
Best of all, rsync.net will let you access your data through WebDAVs, so it's like you can take your data with you anywhere you like, as long as you can get online somehow.
That's weird, the only two drives I've ever had die on me were a Seagate (which is actually quite useful as a paperweight) and a Maxtor. Guess i got the duds that were meant for you...
Now Western Digital and Samsung on the other hand... the 80 gigger WDs I bought some time around 2002 (or was it 2003?) have been abused so badly (swapped in and out of cheap external cases, thrown into checked airline baggage without so much as anti-static wrap, dropped by idiot friends...) are still going strong as 2nd-and-3rd-in-line backups for the really important stuff (not pr0n :P).
I'm guessing there's enough horror stories about WD and Samsung out there too, though ;)