For your information: I am not using it "incorrectly". If I were living 200 years ago then I would be, however since I am living in the year 2001, this is the correct usage.
You forget that meanings of words and phrases change over time.
The New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says it is "widely accepted in modern standard English".
And at least have the courage to post as a real user next time.
You must be king idiot then I'm sorry but you really need to go back to drive technology 101 Idiots like you shouldn't talk out there ass so much... You must be one of those who
I'd call you stupid names back in return, but I don't stoop that low. Anybody who needs to do that (a) needs a lot more fiber in their diet and (b) needs to lighten up.
I HAVE a 4x75GB IDE RAID 0 array, and can get a max of 98MB/sec read off of it, and a good 75MB/sec sustained. Off of a single drive I can get 45MB/sec max, 25MB/sec sustained.
And I was implying that there are very few applications that need the use of that specific RAM disk over a much cheaper IDE raid array. If you had 4GB RAM on the mainboard, or 8GB or 16, then you would see a few more apps that would benefit from that performance. However just about any home user, and the vast majority of corporate users wouldn't benefit one bit from the use of that. There are very few uses that would benefit from a sustained 90MB/sec, however the very low latency is a big help.
So I wasn't "talking out of my ass". Go shove your nasty attitude up someone elses ass. Like we don't have enough problems to stress over as it is. Lighten up.
Even 20% speed increase in compilation time is worth it for me...
Would it be? How long does a compile take? Do you do anything else during compile time that would take away time from the other parts of your day (like, oh, reading slashdot;P)
My full compiles take about 10 minutes for my module, and I do them maybe 5 times a day, max 10. Saving 2 minutes per compile will save me 10-20 minutes a day, which is nothing. I also do many spot compiles of individual files which take very little time at all.
And during those 10 minutes I read my slashdot, I go to the can, I gab with some coworkers and impact their performance, I surf the web, I gab with my boss, I keep happy. I'm very HAPPY to be given a good excuse for many 10 minute breaks a day, I dunno about you =)
I was thinking. What I was implying is that for the vast majority of uses these devices will NOT help people. It sounds like it would help you a lot, certainly, but for the people who would love to get one of these for home or think that their compiling would go faster if running from that particular ramdrive solution, they are most likely misstaken.
The only benefit that that particular ramdrive solution gave over a much cheaper IDE raid solution was to allow for very low latency. And without a better bus design (perhaps PCI-64) ramdrives won't help you with bandwidth.
If Mobo makers upped the capacity of motherboards to allow for 4/8/16+GB onboard then you could no only have blazingly fast access to all of the data in ram, but you can suspend to ram and not worry about needing to shutdown, and attach some sort of battery to it to keep it alive while the power is out. I think that would be a far more practical solution, and much more usefull (no small bus transfer limitation, limited to memory bus speeds only)
As I was saying, a 3 or 4 disk RAID IDE array can easily max out the PCI bandwidth capabilities. That particular SS device gave 80-100MB/s of transfer, which you can get more of on an IDE raid array. The only advantage is the seek time, which is definitely a niche market. I'm not saying that there is no market, I'm just saying that most people thinking that it'll help them at home or doing compiling are probably misstaken.
When you're streaming sixteen channels at 24/96 from 16 different microphones, trust me, speed matters more than anything.
Ok, thanks. That actually helps my point, because just about any package that needs 80MB/s transfer rates is sequential, not random, and therefore a RAM based drive is no more helpful than a nice IDE raid array.
I think that everything would be a lot better done if you just adapted the newer motherboards to being able to hav 4GB of memory. Suspend-to-RAM and suspend mode and you're done, AND you can use the memory for more than just storage space.
And in case you haven't noticed, have you tried to use an PCI video card lately? There's a lot more going on there than just onboard stuff, there's a reason why it has that high bandwidth.
who wants to step up to the plate and give me ONE irrefutable reason why ANYONE would NEED a GPS-Enabled Cell Phone?
Because you just got hit by a car/had a heart attack/(something in danger of dying or loosing consciousness)/had a stroke/are having a seizure and you use your cellphone to call 911, but pass out before you can tell them where you are, or you simply don't know where you are.
Wow you're gonna get flamed for this one...
In case you've been living under a rock, it's now madatory that all cellphones have GPS tracking capability because of the number of people who have phoned 911 on their cellphone and 911 hasn't been able to track their locations so the emergency people can get there to save their lives.
And it does have usefullness... I have a GPS hooked up to my laptop in my car, and it displays on the map exactly where I am. IT's 1 step away from being able to tell me to "turn left in 500m" and give me all directions, and I never get lost anymore. Someone gives me their address and I immediately know how to get there. Having it in your cellphone can provide the same benefits.
Woah... You mean that something that is software configurable... So the software itself can activate the feature!
Who'da thunkit?
Next thing you'll be telling me that my cellphone can change it's own time too...
(BTW, I think that's basically (if not a necessity) a great idea, so you can normally have it turned off if you want, and then it will automatically turn itself on when you make that 911 call)
I spend a great deal of my life waiting on compiles. That's why I want a RAM drive.
As a test, make a ram drive and copy all of your files there to compile, and time it versus the hard drive.
Hmm, not that much faster eh? Definitely not the 10-20x faster than you were expecting.
I tried this before too and didn't get that big a speed difference. That's because it's mostly processor speed. Your disk cache will help you greatly on queing up the next files to compile while the processor is chugging, and keeping everything optimized on the hard drive will also cut down on your speed.
But regardless. At 50x the price per MB for a 4GB ram drive versus a 4x75GB HD solution + HPT 380 raid controller, it's simply not worth it, except in very few cases.
I can't think of very many apps that require a single 80MB/s stream
Neither can I, which is why you're not going to notice much of a difference by using a RAMdrive quite yet, and as I worked out it's actually 50x more expensive (per MB) than a 4x75GB HD + HPT 380 Raid controller solution, and the only benefit it gives is less latency.
I HAVE a 4 disk IDE raid that gives me 75-90MB/sec sustained performance. At peak it can hit just shy of 100MB/sec. 4x75GB IBM drives on a HPT 380 IDE Raid controller.
SO I don't know where you're getting your "stats" from. I can also get 20MB/sec sustained transfer rate off my 40GB IBM drive that I have right here in my system, single drive, I just did a file transfer yesterday to proove the same point (a copy from one HD to another at 19.8MB/sec for a 450MB file). That wasn't optimal conditions. The files and free space on both drives were fragmented. Under "optimal" conditions I can get 32MB/sec raw read rate off the drive itself. Off each of the 75GB drives I can get 45MB/sec raw read rate.
And the cenatek solution that was posted gave 80-100MB/sec and was also extremely expensive. Setting that up for 4GB would be the 2/3rds of the cost for setting up my 300GB raid 0 array. 4x1GB SDRAM (if it uses SDRAM, the info only said DRAM) modules is $500 according to pricewatch and the controller itself is unknown (I can't find any vendors selling it) but I'd assume to be around $100-$200 range). So say $600 for the 4GB ramdrive solution, $900 for the 4x75GB raid solution. So it's 50x more expensive (per MB) and the only thing that it gives me is less access time.
And the "data sheet" (LOL!) reports that the rates (80-100MB/sec) is "thousands of times faster than standard hard drives" (exact quote)... So apparently they think that 80kb/sec is the usual read rate for a hard drive these days. Even in their actual breakdown they conpare "100,000 sector reads/writes per second compared to 5,000 to 6,000 I/Os per second for a standard disk drive". Oh, they're talking about FLOPPY DRIVES... Well OK then, yeah then it is thousands of times faster...
What I was stating is that the Cenetek is pointless. If they offered something that had the speed of RAM, then yes it would be pointful. But at 80-100MB/sec maximum, hard drives are the far cheaper and easier solution.
Also the device said DRAM (and not SDRAM), I dunno if that was an oversight or if they're actually using the older ram model on that board (which might explain the speed problem).
According to their website, sustained data transfer rate is 80-100MB/s (umm, WHY would it vary if it's all solid state?). Add to the fact that the PCI bus is limited at 133MB/s and there's more than just 1 device using the PCI bus (and a lot of them aren't conservative when it comes to bus usage)...
Or, for 1/4 the price you can pack together 2x75GB drives in a raid 0 array, get 30x as much space AND get the same bandwidth.
No, right now there's not much point to solid state drives. Iff (sorry, math hangover, If and Only If) hard drive prices were to stay the same, and memory prices were to fall by an order of magnitude (lets say 10x) THEN I could see there being a market for this. But you'd also need to use either PCI-64 (533MB/s+) or get some other designed bus to support the much higher throughputs.
But then again this just begs the question, what do you need that much more speed for?
To take advantage of RAMdisks, you pretty much need to have your computer on all the time, or in standby mode when you're not using it. At this point, what do you need much higher disk bandwidth for?
Loading your mp3s or movies?
Loading office in 2s instead of 6s?
running your games (oh wait, that's CPU/GPU intensive not HD).
Quite frankly I don't see the technology or the market right now to create solid state HDs.
The slashdot crew over the past few days/weeks have been extremely out to lunch, has anyone else noticed this?
Example 1:
but RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives -- cliff
RAM is 30-40x more expensive than HDs, I don't know WHAT he was smoking when he thought that...
Example 2:
I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're moderately happy with AOL as an ISP -- timothy
how many people do you know who would be running Linux if it wasn't for the fact that they were using AOL? (Let me rephrase, how many tech savvy people are using AOL (that aren't forced to)?)
And the anti-Microsoft hysteria has been especially harsh over the past few days. That article about File Extensions And Molopolies was so pathetic it didn't even qualify as satire. It should never have seen the light of day on either/. or Salon.
And/. gets over 200 story submissions per day, and yet the average number of story postings has gone way down, now to about 10/day. What's going on here?
I dunno, but you'll have to knock on my bomb shelter when it's all over.
I don't have a very warm-and-fuzzy feeling about all of this stuff. Nothing immediate, but all that the US is doing is pissing off the people who caused this atrocity in the first place.
Notice how nobody is asking the most important question of it all: why? (Or sorry, we've all been blindsided by the media in to not thinking about this question, although I imagine that many people have been wondering about it)
You're not going to find 19 people who are willing to die just for kicks. These people had serious and longstanding grudges.
I've said it before: you can't stop terrorism by force. The only way that you can stop terrorism is to remove the reasons that are causing people to take these extraordinary measures.
Think about it. Oslama Bin Laden (if it was in fact him) obviously had this thing planned out for at least a few years prior to it's execution. He's patient, and his followers are too. He pledged that "America will never feel safety", and quite frankly I'd be more worried about that then about bombing terrorist camps. Do you think that the people who were given airplane training in the US needed the the terrorist training camps in Afgan. to operate? Doubt it. This is just stoking the fire right now. If we don't take a serious look at the whys then history is just going to repeat itself, and it'll be worse next time.
AMD's not trying to "hide" the mhz, they're forcing companies to NOT market by a confusing number that misleads customers.
And that is where you are missing the whole point!
If AMD instead called their chips the AMD AthlonXP 6XG+ then and only then would that argument hold water.
But they are intentionally using numbers that sound like the very numbers that they are trying to discredit.
It's the subtle difference between lying and not telling the-whole-truth. "A half truth is worse than a lie"... It's like me trying to say:
Hey, my car can do 0-60* in 3.2 seconds! (* Glibtons per minute).
Hey, my car can get 350mpg*!!! (* minutes per gas-station)
Hey, my (insert object of comparison here) can get (insert number suspiciously close to another well known number here)!!!
If AMD was truly trying to wein people off the MHz system, then they wouldn't be using a system that's basically mimicking the system. They're saying "Hey, X AMD MHz are just as good as Y Intel MHz, and therefore we'll call our chip the AMD AthlonXP X+"
That's not nice marketing. That's close to the same ploys that Microsoft is doing that everybody condemns. Funny that...
If you dont see how its misleading than you arent looking. They are disallowing anyone from displaying the MHz - they are suprressing it on the hardware level - forbidding people to speak about it!
I agree with you.
So when the Big Evil Corporation decides to put in marketing hooks saying that you cant disparage them using their own software, it's part of The Great Conspiracy and BG's Evil Ploy To Take Over The World.
But When AMD puts in marketing hooks saying that you're not allowed to show the real numbers of the chip, and instead to use very misleading numbers that resemble the numbers that you're trying to tell people aren't important, hey that's just a good move by them to get more market share.
Yes, that is a VERY good point that I wish that more people would realize.
The fact was that for a while there Intel did have the fastest chip out on the market, and AMD is constantly playing the catchup game. In another month Intel will release their newest chip, and they will have the lead as the "fastest chip" on the market.
So whilst all of the AMD affectionatos are trying to proove that "MHz aren't everything! (It's not the size that counts!...)" that door swings both ways there... AMD is still playing catchup for fastest chip, and Intel is still in the lead. (Yes yes the newest AMDs are faster than the P4 2.0, but not for long).
HOWEVER, AMD does have one huge advantage : price. That one is a little hard to dispute, and is why my last PC purchase was a nice TBird 1.4 rather than an Intel at significantly more price. However if I was going for a once you factor in the cost of the motherboards. If you go for good motherboards, the Intel ones are cheaper and thus offset the price difference between chips. But as soon as you leave the Celerys behind then AMD is a clear winner, if not having the fastest chip (which doesn't really mean much since who really buys the fastest chip out anyways?) then all of their chip/mobo solutions are 2/3rds of the price for about the same performace.
Oh well. Too bad Intel got gipped with the Rambus scandal. Mind you, it's not the RDRAM technology that's inherently bad, but more of the company. Interesting parallels between the RDRAM technology and Intel vs AMD and SDRAM if you ask me =)
Re:will the trickery work?
on
AthlonXP Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Silly silly question time:
You have 2 competetors, really. The underdawg is going to try to make a new rating system that they hope to get everyone to use to bring back "fairness" to the processor rating game, but when your only real competetor is the one who is going to loose bigtime by using this new system (and therefore they will not), then how do you expect this new rating system to work?
I think what would be better is for now to drop this silly "we're as good as that P4, swear it!" scheme and just call it something else. Call it the AthlonXP G+ or 6P+ or something. That way there is no realative comparison, and when you go to the store to ask "hey, which is better here?" the guy can just tell you "Go with the AMD such and such, because it's as good as this P4 over here", not only does it stay up to date with comparisons, but you also don't get accused of trickery.
No, calling it the 2000+ would be a horrible idea right now, and they did the right thing to be conservative, because as the article stated, once the P4s come out with their new core then the comparisons will be much more accurate. If they overjumped now and then the 2000 was only as good as a 1800 MHz P4, then you'd have even MORE trouble on AMD's hands then they would have had before they started this.
I recently put together a 240gb RAID 1 volume of four 60gb 5400rpm drives
Well, for starters a 4 drive raid 1 is kinda pointless (raid 1 is mirror, I think that you meant raid 0 which is stripe;P)
Wow... I have a 2x30gb raid 0 from about 18 months ago that I can get 50-60MB/s read rate off of. a new 4x60GB drive should easily net you around 90-100MB/sec (since you have split across 2 channels, you can get 133MB/sec even on UDMA66). At UDMA100 with a dual 533 celeron you should EASILY be netting 100MB/sec. My friend just hooked up 2x75gb raid 0 (software raid too!) and gets 75MB/sec read rates.
And the PCI bus saturates at 133MB/sec if you don't have it overclocked. So getting 100MB/sec isn't too hard to imagine, especially if you have 4 hard drives pumping out the juice =)
7200rpm drives *DO* make a difference. A good 15% difference actually. Think of it, you're spinning 50% faster and thus 50% more data is passing under the read head =)
If you want benchmarking information, check out any of the popular benchmark sites, they'll get you big numbers too.
On my 7200rpm 40GB here I can get about 30-40MB/sec raw read off of it, and about 20-28MB/sec realistic read off of it. Here, I just did a test:
I just did this from 1 hard drive in my machine to another (40gb 7200rpm IBM drive to a 20gb 5400rpm WD):
456,138,752 / 23sec(rounding up) = 19.8MB/s read off one hard drive, write onto another. The "benchmark" that I ran the other day was really a raw read from one hard drive and writing to a file on another HD (the same 2 HDs actually but in reverse) and I got about 25MB/s sustained speed there. Notice that the.wmv file in question was fragmented too, but not too heavily.
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If you've got something wrong with what I said, then quote it and state your displeasure.
So, as they so humbly say, put up or shut up. Also, next time at least have the courage to post as a real user.
For your information: I am not using it "incorrectly". If I were living 200 years ago then I would be, however since I am living in the year 2001, this is the correct usage.
You forget that meanings of words and phrases change over time.
The New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, says it is "widely accepted in modern standard English".
And at least have the courage to post as a real user next time.
You must be king idiot then
I'm sorry but you really need to go back to drive technology 101
Idiots like you shouldn't talk out there ass so much...
You must be one of those who
I'd call you stupid names back in return, but I don't stoop that low. Anybody who needs to do that (a) needs a lot more fiber in their diet and (b) needs to lighten up.
I HAVE a 4x75GB IDE RAID 0 array, and can get a max of 98MB/sec read off of it, and a good 75MB/sec sustained. Off of a single drive I can get 45MB/sec max, 25MB/sec sustained.
And I was implying that there are very few applications that need the use of that specific RAM disk over a much cheaper IDE raid array. If you had 4GB RAM on the mainboard, or 8GB or 16, then you would see a few more apps that would benefit from that performance. However just about any home user, and the vast majority of corporate users wouldn't benefit one bit from the use of that. There are very few uses that would benefit from a sustained 90MB/sec, however the very low latency is a big help.
So I wasn't "talking out of my ass". Go shove your nasty attitude up someone elses ass. Like we don't have enough problems to stress over as it is. Lighten up.
Even 20% speed increase in compilation time is worth it for me...
;P)
Would it be? How long does a compile take? Do you do anything else during compile time that would take away time from the other parts of your day (like, oh, reading slashdot
My full compiles take about 10 minutes for my module, and I do them maybe 5 times a day, max 10. Saving 2 minutes per compile will save me 10-20 minutes a day, which is nothing. I also do many spot compiles of individual files which take very little time at all.
And during those 10 minutes I read my slashdot, I go to the can, I gab with some coworkers and impact their performance, I surf the web, I gab with my boss, I keep happy. I'm very HAPPY to be given a good excuse for many 10 minute breaks a day, I dunno about you =)
I was thinking. What I was implying is that for the vast majority of uses these devices will NOT help people. It sounds like it would help you a lot, certainly, but for the people who would love to get one of these for home or think that their compiling would go faster if running from that particular ramdrive solution, they are most likely misstaken.
The only benefit that that particular ramdrive solution gave over a much cheaper IDE raid solution was to allow for very low latency. And without a better bus design (perhaps PCI-64) ramdrives won't help you with bandwidth.
If Mobo makers upped the capacity of motherboards to allow for 4/8/16+GB onboard then you could no only have blazingly fast access to all of the data in ram, but you can suspend to ram and not worry about needing to shutdown, and attach some sort of battery to it to keep it alive while the power is out. I think that would be a far more practical solution, and much more usefull (no small bus transfer limitation, limited to memory bus speeds only)
As I was saying, a 3 or 4 disk RAID IDE array can easily max out the PCI bandwidth capabilities. That particular SS device gave 80-100MB/s of transfer, which you can get more of on an IDE raid array. The only advantage is the seek time, which is definitely a niche market. I'm not saying that there is no market, I'm just saying that most people thinking that it'll help them at home or doing compiling are probably misstaken.
When you're streaming sixteen channels at 24/96 from 16 different microphones, trust me, speed matters more than anything.
Ok, thanks. That actually helps my point, because just about any package that needs 80MB/s transfer rates is sequential, not random, and therefore a RAM based drive is no more helpful than a nice IDE raid array.
I think that everything would be a lot better done if you just adapted the newer motherboards to being able to hav 4GB of memory. Suspend-to-RAM and suspend mode and you're done, AND you can use the memory for more than just storage space.
And in case you haven't noticed, have you tried to use an PCI video card lately? There's a lot more going on there than just onboard stuff, there's a reason why it has that high bandwidth.
who wants to step up to the plate and give me ONE irrefutable reason why ANYONE would NEED a GPS-Enabled Cell Phone?
Because you just got hit by a car/had a heart attack/(something in danger of dying or loosing consciousness)/had a stroke/are having a seizure and you use your cellphone to call 911, but pass out before you can tell them where you are, or you simply don't know where you are.
Wow you're gonna get flamed for this one...
In case you've been living under a rock, it's now madatory that all cellphones have GPS tracking capability because of the number of people who have phoned 911 on their cellphone and 911 hasn't been able to track their locations so the emergency people can get there to save their lives.
And it does have usefullness... I have a GPS hooked up to my laptop in my car, and it displays on the map exactly where I am. IT's 1 step away from being able to tell me to "turn left in 500m" and give me all directions, and I never get lost anymore. Someone gives me their address and I immediately know how to get there. Having it in your cellphone can provide the same benefits.
It can turn itself on? That can't be good.
Woah... You mean that something that is software configurable... So the software itself can activate the feature!
Who'da thunkit?
Next thing you'll be telling me that my cellphone can change it's own time too...
(BTW, I think that's basically (if not a necessity) a great idea, so you can normally have it turned off if you want, and then it will automatically turn itself on when you make that 911 call)
I spend a great deal of my life waiting on compiles. That's why I want a RAM drive.
As a test, make a ram drive and copy all of your files there to compile, and time it versus the hard drive.
Hmm, not that much faster eh? Definitely not the 10-20x faster than you were expecting.
I tried this before too and didn't get that big a speed difference. That's because it's mostly processor speed. Your disk cache will help you greatly on queing up the next files to compile while the processor is chugging, and keeping everything optimized on the hard drive will also cut down on your speed.
But regardless. At 50x the price per MB for a 4GB ram drive versus a 4x75GB HD solution + HPT 380 raid controller, it's simply not worth it, except in very few cases.
I can't think of very many apps that require a single 80MB/s stream
Neither can I, which is why you're not going to notice much of a difference by using a RAMdrive quite yet, and as I worked out it's actually 50x more expensive (per MB) than a 4x75GB HD + HPT 380 Raid controller solution, and the only benefit it gives is less latency.
Latency and Access time, you id10t.
That was uncalled for...
I HAVE a 4 disk IDE raid that gives me 75-90MB/sec sustained performance. At peak it can hit just shy of 100MB/sec. 4x75GB IBM drives on a HPT 380 IDE Raid controller.
SO I don't know where you're getting your "stats" from. I can also get 20MB/sec sustained transfer rate off my 40GB IBM drive that I have right here in my system, single drive, I just did a file transfer yesterday to proove the same point (a copy from one HD to another at 19.8MB/sec for a 450MB file). That wasn't optimal conditions. The files and free space on both drives were fragmented. Under "optimal" conditions I can get 32MB/sec raw read rate off the drive itself. Off each of the 75GB drives I can get 45MB/sec raw read rate.
And the cenatek solution that was posted gave 80-100MB/sec and was also extremely expensive. Setting that up for 4GB would be the 2/3rds of the cost for setting up my 300GB raid 0 array. 4x1GB SDRAM (if it uses SDRAM, the info only said DRAM) modules is $500 according to pricewatch and the controller itself is unknown (I can't find any vendors selling it) but I'd assume to be around $100-$200 range). So say $600 for the 4GB ramdrive solution, $900 for the 4x75GB raid solution. So it's 50x more expensive (per MB) and the only thing that it gives me is less access time.
And the "data sheet" (LOL!) reports that the rates (80-100MB/sec) is "thousands of times faster than standard hard drives" (exact quote)... So apparently they think that 80kb/sec is the usual read rate for a hard drive these days. Even in their actual breakdown they conpare "100,000 sector reads/writes per second compared to 5,000 to 6,000 I/Os per second for a standard disk drive". Oh, they're talking about FLOPPY DRIVES... Well OK then, yeah then it is thousands of times faster...
Yes yes yes, I'm aware of the potential benefits
What I was stating is that the Cenetek is pointless. If they offered something that had the speed of RAM, then yes it would be pointful. But at 80-100MB/sec maximum, hard drives are the far cheaper and easier solution.
Also the device said DRAM (and not SDRAM), I dunno if that was an oversight or if they're actually using the older ram model on that board (which might explain the speed problem).
look at the stats idiot!
80-100MB/s sustained data output.
Which is what 2 or 3 HDs on a software controlled raid can give you for MUCH MUCH cheaper.
hehehe I remember when I got 24MB of ram in my 486 dx2/66. It was so cool to be able to make a 16mb ramdisk and play Doom out of ram entirely =P
Why would you bother with one of these?
According to their website, sustained data transfer rate is 80-100MB/s (umm, WHY would it vary if it's all solid state?). Add to the fact that the PCI bus is limited at 133MB/s and there's more than just 1 device using the PCI bus (and a lot of them aren't conservative when it comes to bus usage)...
Or, for 1/4 the price you can pack together 2x75GB drives in a raid 0 array, get 30x as much space AND get the same bandwidth.
No, right now there's not much point to solid state drives. Iff (sorry, math hangover, If and Only If) hard drive prices were to stay the same, and memory prices were to fall by an order of magnitude (lets say 10x) THEN I could see there being a market for this. But you'd also need to use either PCI-64 (533MB/s+) or get some other designed bus to support the much higher throughputs.
But then again this just begs the question, what do you need that much more speed for?
To take advantage of RAMdisks, you pretty much need to have your computer on all the time, or in standby mode when you're not using it. At this point, what do you need much higher disk bandwidth for?
Loading your mp3s or movies?
Loading office in 2s instead of 6s?
running your games (oh wait, that's CPU/GPU intensive not HD).
Quite frankly I don't see the technology or the market right now to create solid state HDs.
The slashdot crew over the past few days/weeks have been extremely out to lunch, has anyone else noticed this?
/. or Salon.
/. gets over 200 story submissions per day, and yet the average number of story postings has gone way down, now to about 10/day. What's going on here?
Example 1:
but RAM is now cheaper when it comes to memory-per-unitofcurrency than hard drives -- cliff
RAM is 30-40x more expensive than HDs, I don't know WHAT he was smoking when he thought that...
Example 2:
I suspect a fair number of people never try Linux or one of the BSDs because they're moderately happy with AOL as an ISP -- timothy
how many people do you know who would be running Linux if it wasn't for the fact that they were using AOL? (Let me rephrase, how many tech savvy people are using AOL (that aren't forced to)?)
And the anti-Microsoft hysteria has been especially harsh over the past few days. That article about File Extensions And Molopolies was so pathetic it didn't even qualify as satire. It should never have seen the light of day on either
And
Inneresting. Whatcha make of it?
I dunno, but you'll have to knock on my bomb shelter when it's all over.
I don't have a very warm-and-fuzzy feeling about all of this stuff. Nothing immediate, but all that the US is doing is pissing off the people who caused this atrocity in the first place.
Notice how nobody is asking the most important question of it all: why? (Or sorry, we've all been blindsided by the media in to not thinking about this question, although I imagine that many people have been wondering about it)
You're not going to find 19 people who are willing to die just for kicks. These people had serious and longstanding grudges.
I've said it before: you can't stop terrorism by force. The only way that you can stop terrorism is to remove the reasons that are causing people to take these extraordinary measures.
Think about it. Oslama Bin Laden (if it was in fact him) obviously had this thing planned out for at least a few years prior to it's execution. He's patient, and his followers are too. He pledged that "America will never feel safety", and quite frankly I'd be more worried about that then about bombing terrorist camps. Do you think that the people who were given airplane training in the US needed the the terrorist training camps in Afgan. to operate? Doubt it. This is just stoking the fire right now. If we don't take a serious look at the whys then history is just going to repeat itself, and it'll be worse next time.
And that is where you are missing the whole point!
If AMD instead called their chips the AMD AthlonXP 6XG+ then and only then would that argument hold water.
But they are intentionally using numbers that sound like the very numbers that they are trying to discredit.
It's the subtle difference between lying and not telling the-whole-truth. "A half truth is worse than a lie"... It's like me trying to say:
If AMD was truly trying to wein people off the MHz system, then they wouldn't be using a system that's basically mimicking the system. They're saying "Hey, X AMD MHz are just as good as Y Intel MHz, and therefore we'll call our chip the AMD AthlonXP X+"
That's not nice marketing. That's close to the same ploys that Microsoft is doing that everybody condemns. Funny that...
If you dont see how its misleading than you arent looking. They are disallowing anyone from displaying the MHz - they are suprressing it on the hardware level - forbidding people to speak about it!
I agree with you.
So when the Big Evil Corporation decides to put in marketing hooks saying that you cant disparage them using their own software, it's part of The Great Conspiracy and BG's Evil Ploy To Take Over The World.
But When AMD puts in marketing hooks saying that you're not allowed to show the real numbers of the chip, and instead to use very misleading numbers that resemble the numbers that you're trying to tell people aren't important, hey that's just a good move by them to get more market share.
I got one word for y'all out there!
HYPOCRITE!
Yes, that is a VERY good point that I wish that more people would realize.
The fact was that for a while there Intel did have the fastest chip out on the market, and AMD is constantly playing the catchup game. In another month Intel will release their newest chip, and they will have the lead as the "fastest chip" on the market.
So whilst all of the AMD affectionatos are trying to proove that "MHz aren't everything! (It's not the size that counts!...)" that door swings both ways there... AMD is still playing catchup for fastest chip, and Intel is still in the lead. (Yes yes the newest AMDs are faster than the P4 2.0, but not for long).
HOWEVER, AMD does have one huge advantage : price. That one is a little hard to dispute, and is why my last PC purchase was a nice TBird 1.4 rather than an Intel at significantly more price. However if I was going for a once you factor in the cost of the motherboards. If you go for good motherboards, the Intel ones are cheaper and thus offset the price difference between chips. But as soon as you leave the Celerys behind then AMD is a clear winner, if not having the fastest chip (which doesn't really mean much since who really buys the fastest chip out anyways?) then all of their chip/mobo solutions are 2/3rds of the price for about the same performace.
Oh well. Too bad Intel got gipped with the Rambus scandal. Mind you, it's not the RDRAM technology that's inherently bad, but more of the company. Interesting parallels between the RDRAM technology and Intel vs AMD and SDRAM if you ask me =)
Silly silly question time:
You have 2 competetors, really. The underdawg is going to try to make a new rating system that they hope to get everyone to use to bring back "fairness" to the processor rating game, but when your only real competetor is the one who is going to loose bigtime by using this new system (and therefore they will not), then how do you expect this new rating system to work?
I think what would be better is for now to drop this silly "we're as good as that P4, swear it!" scheme and just call it something else. Call it the AthlonXP G+ or 6P+ or something. That way there is no realative comparison, and when you go to the store to ask "hey, which is better here?" the guy can just tell you "Go with the AMD such and such, because it's as good as this P4 over here", not only does it stay up to date with comparisons, but you also don't get accused of trickery.
No, calling it the 2000+ would be a horrible idea right now, and they did the right thing to be conservative, because as the article stated, once the P4s come out with their new core then the comparisons will be much more accurate. If they overjumped now and then the 2000 was only as good as a 1800 MHz P4, then you'd have even MORE trouble on AMD's hands then they would have had before they started this.
I recently put together a 240gb RAID 1 volume of four 60gb 5400rpm drives
;P)
/t & copy enterprise-pilot.wmv c:\ & time /t & del C:\enterprise-pilot.wmv
.wmv file in question was fragmented too, but not too heavily.
Well, for starters a 4 drive raid 1 is kinda pointless (raid 1 is mirror, I think that you meant raid 0 which is stripe
Wow... I have a 2x30gb raid 0 from about 18 months ago that I can get 50-60MB/s read rate off of. a new 4x60GB drive should easily net you around 90-100MB/sec (since you have split across 2 channels, you can get 133MB/sec even on UDMA66). At UDMA100 with a dual 533 celeron you should EASILY be netting 100MB/sec. My friend just hooked up 2x75gb raid 0 (software raid too!) and gets 75MB/sec read rates.
And the PCI bus saturates at 133MB/sec if you don't have it overclocked. So getting 100MB/sec isn't too hard to imagine, especially if you have 4 hard drives pumping out the juice =)
7200rpm drives *DO* make a difference. A good 15% difference actually. Think of it, you're spinning 50% faster and thus 50% more data is passing under the read head =)
If you want benchmarking information, check out any of the popular benchmark sites, they'll get you big numbers too.
On my 7200rpm 40GB here I can get about 30-40MB/sec raw read off of it, and about 20-28MB/sec realistic read off of it. Here, I just did a test:
I just did this from 1 hard drive in my machine to another (40gb 7200rpm IBM drive to a 20gb 5400rpm WD):
[d:\download]time
17:58:17
D:\Download\enterprise-pilot.wmv => C:\enterprise-pilot.wmv
1 file copied
17:58:39
Deleting C:\enterprise-pilot.wmv
1 file deleted 456,138,752 bytes freed
456,138,752 / 23sec(rounding up) = 19.8MB/s read off one hard drive, write onto another. The "benchmark" that I ran the other day was really a raw read from one hard drive and writing to a file on another HD (the same 2 HDs actually but in reverse) and I got about 25MB/s sustained speed there. Notice that the