The US is a huge country. It's comparable to China or Russia more than any European country in terms of cities spread out and huge swathes of absolutely nothing (fields, deserts, etc).
This is aimed at business laptop users, not gamers. RAM will not help with boot speed or pulling files into memory after a boot. Hybrid HDD will. So it will benefit the targeted demographics a lot more than adding RAM.
1. It depends on how often you reboot. The more data is accessed, the faster it will be added to the cache and the longer it will stay in there between being accessed. 2. I don't know about this specific ones, but the caching I've dealt with before had writes go directly to the HDD to avoid data corruption in the event of power loss. 3. Maybe. This is sort of dependent on a case-by-case basis. From the last time I looked, the turning point is around 60-100GB. If you will never, ever, need more than 60GB, it's probably about the same cost to get an SSD as hybrid
Looking at our laptops, this makes sense. Most laptops we have 40GB used space, so it doesn't matter if I can get a 1TB drive for under $100, only 40GB will get used anyway. A 60GB SSD from a reliable source costs about the same as the cheapest HDD I can get anyway, so why not?
I wouldn't say I'd "never" buy a Seagate drive, but I've replaced 12 Seagate disks under (3 year) warranty in the last 18 months. All from the same server. Many of those had been drives to replace earlier ones that failed under warranty. It could be an issue with that server, but it's kind of suspicious to have that many Seagate drives fail when almost all of our other servers use WD drives and have had two failures in the same time period (one of which was almost 13 years old)
Bare in mind that hybrid drives are designed to excel in a fairly specific role: serving up the same small set of data repeatedly. If you access many large files, then you'll never see the advantage of caching anyway except, perhaps, with OS/program start times.
I was wondering that as well. The best car analogy I could come up with is putting a bench on the back seat of your car so you have a place to sit people. The seat is already there, so why add a layer just to do the job it's already doing?
In developing Intel SRT, Intel came up with 20GB to 60GB being the optimal level of cache, although that's more aimed at desktops whereas Seagate's study is aimed at laptops.
Most of my laptop users do access the same 8GBs every day. That includes the OS and programs. Unless you're saying you boot to a different OS every day and rarely use email/browser/office software regularly? I don't think you understand the difference between "most users" and "a few niche cases"
When I needed more HDD capacity, I also jumped from 5400 to 7200. The performance difference was pretty good, up to and including OS boot times. I'm also seeing a lot more laptops coming with 7200 drives from the manufacturer, or offering it as an upgrade.
The other factor is that laptops are generally used to access network files much more than desktop drives, whereas desktops are more likely to have larger local storage and access more locally stored files (not to mention being used more heavily for multi-tasking). Thus it makes sense to cut back on 7200 laptop drives while still making 7200 desktop drives... different usage cases for most users.
I've been using Intel-SRT for about a year now, which is basically just doing the caching thing using a separate SSD and HDD. The first time you load a file, you get HDD speeds. Each time after that (as long as it's not pushed out of cache), you get SSD speeds. It can be leveraged to increase write speeds as well by writing to the SSD quickly and then writing to the HDD from there, but that risks data corruption/loss if you lose power between writing to the SSD and when it writes to the HDD (thus, the write-caching is disabled by default and gives appropriate warnings when activated).
Unique Data doesn't mean "data that has never been touched before", it means "data that has not been touched in this 24 hour period" So if I open a 100MB file five times today, it counts as 100MB of unique data for today. If I open it again four times tomorrow, it still counts as 100MB of unique data for tomorrow. It is NOT cumulative.
Also consider that locally installed programs count too, including the OS. That very easily adds up to 10GB even if all of the actual "data" files are stored non-locally.
The part I find interesting is that Intel-SRT (basically using a separate SSD as a cache) won't work with less than a 20GB SSD. When developing SRT, Intel determined that 20-60GB is the appropriate range for caching, so it won't work with 20GB and will ignore capacity beyond 60GB.
Having RAID on the drive itself mostly defeats the purpose of RAID (excepting RAID 0, but even that has issues with this approach). RAID is best for combating downtime due to hardware failure. By sticking both "disks" of a RAID-1 on one drive, you have no recourse if one of those "disks" fails. You can't swap out half a drive to let it rebuild on a good 'disk'.
You're assuming that most people do that anymore. I'm the only one in my circle of friends who still maintains an mp3 collection (which is on a file server anyway). Everyone else either stores the files on their phone/mp3 player or, more commonly, streams the media. Likewise with photos, most people store them online now. Besides, how often do you actually look at those photos? We're talking everyday usage, not Aunt-Bertha-Is-In-Town-For-Her-Yearly-Visit usage. Likewise for an office user, any competent IT department is hopefully running performance-damaging scans during off-peak hours and relatively few people run VMs from a laptop. The key here is *most* people, not *every* person.
For static pages, yes, that's basically true. The difference here is that the vast majority of files on your PC are static with relatively few files changing regularly. Web pages usually have a fair bit of dynamic content that changes every time you view the page (not to mention streaming media). Obviously it's not true of everyone, but we're talking about *most* people; *most* people rely on streaming/web for a good majority of what used to require large files.
My laptop is now 7 years old. In that time, I've made three major upgrades to it.
1) Moving from XP Pro to Win 7 Ultimate 2) Upgrading from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm drive (only other major difference between drives was capacity) 3) Upgrading from 1GB RAM to 2.5GB RAM
As far as day-to-day performance goes, the hard drive upgrade made the most noticeable difference. The RAM upgrade is great for the relatively rare moments that I have a lot of stuff open on my laptop (it's not my primary computer) and Windows 7 certainly sped things up overall, but not as much as the HDD upgrade.
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
You want the endpoints to be where people use it. You want the noisier, space-hogging midpoints to be that big gap between Where People Are and Where People Want To Be. If it weren't for that gap, people would walk.
Coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro, wind, solar... oil isn't exactly the only way we make electricity. Nuclear alone accounts for ~20% of US energy supply.
No more than Steve Jobs personally designed and built the iPhone. However, Steve Jobs was still the driving force behind Apple's domination of the mp3 player and, later, the smartphone markets up until Android began to take over.
Using Latin in a place where it's not needed and has no historical ties (as "cum laude" would) is stupid. Using the one Latin word that's also English for "jizz" just makes you look like a moron. Unless you like using video chat for... stickier activities than most people.
If a government is overthrown, that's a revolution because it's a big, fast change. If a government slowly changes from a dictatorship to a democracy over many years, that's not a revolution, that's an evolutionary change (small changes over time). It doesn't matter if someone else has it first. Given that it's one more step of many based on technology almost twenty years old (which is a fairly long time for computer systems), it's an evolutionary advancement, not a revolutionary change.
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The US is a huge country. It's comparable to China or Russia more than any European country in terms of cities spread out and huge swathes of absolutely nothing (fields, deserts, etc).
This is aimed at business laptop users, not gamers.
RAM will not help with boot speed or pulling files into memory after a boot. Hybrid HDD will. So it will benefit the targeted demographics a lot more than adding RAM.
1. It depends on how often you reboot. The more data is accessed, the faster it will be added to the cache and the longer it will stay in there between being accessed.
2. I don't know about this specific ones, but the caching I've dealt with before had writes go directly to the HDD to avoid data corruption in the event of power loss.
3. Maybe. This is sort of dependent on a case-by-case basis. From the last time I looked, the turning point is around 60-100GB. If you will never, ever, need more than 60GB, it's probably about the same cost to get an SSD as hybrid
Looking at our laptops, this makes sense. Most laptops we have 40GB used space, so it doesn't matter if I can get a 1TB drive for under $100, only 40GB will get used anyway. A 60GB SSD from a reliable source costs about the same as the cheapest HDD I can get anyway, so why not?
I wouldn't say I'd "never" buy a Seagate drive, but I've replaced 12 Seagate disks under (3 year) warranty in the last 18 months. All from the same server. Many of those had been drives to replace earlier ones that failed under warranty. It could be an issue with that server, but it's kind of suspicious to have that many Seagate drives fail when almost all of our other servers use WD drives and have had two failures in the same time period (one of which was almost 13 years old)
Bare in mind that hybrid drives are designed to excel in a fairly specific role: serving up the same small set of data repeatedly. If you access many large files, then you'll never see the advantage of caching anyway except, perhaps, with OS/program start times.
I was wondering that as well. The best car analogy I could come up with is putting a bench on the back seat of your car so you have a place to sit people. The seat is already there, so why add a layer just to do the job it's already doing?
In developing Intel SRT, Intel came up with 20GB to 60GB being the optimal level of cache, although that's more aimed at desktops whereas Seagate's study is aimed at laptops.
Most of my laptop users do access the same 8GBs every day. That includes the OS and programs. Unless you're saying you boot to a different OS every day and rarely use email/browser/office software regularly? I don't think you understand the difference between "most users" and "a few niche cases"
When I needed more HDD capacity, I also jumped from 5400 to 7200. The performance difference was pretty good, up to and including OS boot times. I'm also seeing a lot more laptops coming with 7200 drives from the manufacturer, or offering it as an upgrade.
The other factor is that laptops are generally used to access network files much more than desktop drives, whereas desktops are more likely to have larger local storage and access more locally stored files (not to mention being used more heavily for multi-tasking). Thus it makes sense to cut back on 7200 laptop drives while still making 7200 desktop drives... different usage cases for most users.
Exactly this.
I've been using Intel-SRT for about a year now, which is basically just doing the caching thing using a separate SSD and HDD. The first time you load a file, you get HDD speeds. Each time after that (as long as it's not pushed out of cache), you get SSD speeds. It can be leveraged to increase write speeds as well by writing to the SSD quickly and then writing to the HDD from there, but that risks data corruption/loss if you lose power between writing to the SSD and when it writes to the HDD (thus, the write-caching is disabled by default and gives appropriate warnings when activated).
Unique Data doesn't mean "data that has never been touched before", it means "data that has not been touched in this 24 hour period"
So if I open a 100MB file five times today, it counts as 100MB of unique data for today. If I open it again four times tomorrow, it still counts as 100MB of unique data for tomorrow. It is NOT cumulative.
Also consider that locally installed programs count too, including the OS. That very easily adds up to 10GB even if all of the actual "data" files are stored non-locally.
The part I find interesting is that Intel-SRT (basically using a separate SSD as a cache) won't work with less than a 20GB SSD. When developing SRT, Intel determined that 20-60GB is the appropriate range for caching, so it won't work with 20GB and will ignore capacity beyond 60GB.
Having RAID on the drive itself mostly defeats the purpose of RAID (excepting RAID 0, but even that has issues with this approach). RAID is best for combating downtime due to hardware failure. By sticking both "disks" of a RAID-1 on one drive, you have no recourse if one of those "disks" fails. You can't swap out half a drive to let it rebuild on a good 'disk'.
You're assuming that most people do that anymore. I'm the only one in my circle of friends who still maintains an mp3 collection (which is on a file server anyway). Everyone else either stores the files on their phone/mp3 player or, more commonly, streams the media. Likewise with photos, most people store them online now. Besides, how often do you actually look at those photos? We're talking everyday usage, not Aunt-Bertha-Is-In-Town-For-Her-Yearly-Visit usage. Likewise for an office user, any competent IT department is hopefully running performance-damaging scans during off-peak hours and relatively few people run VMs from a laptop. The key here is *most* people, not *every* person.
For static pages, yes, that's basically true. The difference here is that the vast majority of files on your PC are static with relatively few files changing regularly. Web pages usually have a fair bit of dynamic content that changes every time you view the page (not to mention streaming media). Obviously it's not true of everyone, but we're talking about *most* people; *most* people rely on streaming/web for a good majority of what used to require large files.
My laptop is now 7 years old. In that time, I've made three major upgrades to it.
1) Moving from XP Pro to Win 7 Ultimate
2) Upgrading from a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm drive (only other major difference between drives was capacity)
3) Upgrading from 1GB RAM to 2.5GB RAM
As far as day-to-day performance goes, the hard drive upgrade made the most noticeable difference. The RAM upgrade is great for the relatively rare moments that I have a lot of stuff open on my laptop (it's not my primary computer) and Windows 7 certainly sped things up overall, but not as much as the HDD upgrade.
I've used an SSD. Works great for my laptop and router, don't care for it for my desktop largely due to price. For $60, I can get an 80GB SSD or I can get a 2TB HDD. That 80GB SSD is going to require an additional HDD anyway for storage for many people.
Most consumers are still going to go with cheapest and, outside of the tech-oriented crowd, don't really care if they have to wait an extra few seconds. As far as I'm concerned, the SSD boat is still boarding passengers and is no where close to leaving just yet. Once SSD prices are more competitive with hard drives (which could be another decade or two at the least), then you can say that ship has sailed. Until then, cost will trump performance for the largest markets.
You want the endpoints to be where people use it. You want the noisier, space-hogging midpoints to be that big gap between Where People Are and Where People Want To Be. If it weren't for that gap, people would walk.
Coal, nuclear, natural gas, hydro, wind, solar... oil isn't exactly the only way we make electricity. Nuclear alone accounts for ~20% of US energy supply.
Maybe we just need to figure out how to apply regenerative braking to rocket engines...
No more than Steve Jobs personally designed and built the iPhone. However, Steve Jobs was still the driving force behind Apple's domination of the mp3 player and, later, the smartphone markets up until Android began to take over.
"Individuals can buy the smartphone-cum-PC"
Using Latin in a place where it's not needed and has no historical ties (as "cum laude" would) is stupid. Using the one Latin word that's also English for "jizz" just makes you look like a moron. Unless you like using video chat for... stickier activities than most people.
You're right, we should send out a rover to see if there's water at the bottom of the ocean.
If a government is overthrown, that's a revolution because it's a big, fast change. If a government slowly changes from a dictatorship to a democracy over many years, that's not a revolution, that's an evolutionary change (small changes over time). It doesn't matter if someone else has it first. Given that it's one more step of many based on technology almost twenty years old (which is a fairly long time for computer systems), it's an evolutionary advancement, not a revolutionary change.