"SSD has a rather limited lifespan due to the number of writes it can handle before it fails."
You want to guess how long that is? Do you want the answer in years or decades?
"I have no personal experience with SSD and I'm as skeptical as anyone, but from all the articles I've read the authors expressed that SSD was a monumental improvement in their overall computing experience."
Honestly, try one. It is literally the single biggest upgrade you can do to your PC. You really cannot appreciate it until you've tried one. I recommend OCZ's Vertex series
Let's not forget you also have to buy a chassis that will hold 10 disks and you have to power them all ($$$). Oh and you still can't touch the seek time or random read performance of the SSD.
On the brightside, you sure would have a ton of storage capacity.
"He is a gamer, right? They are the only ones I have EVER seen with a Raptor drive, which kinda proves my point. "
No, he just likes his computer to be very very fast and can afford it. I have raptors in my PCs as well and I'm not a gamer either. I have two PC's, a linux box running fedora 9 with a 36GB raptor and a windows xp machine that I built later with a 72GB raptor (which I got open box from newegg for $89 a couple years back, absolutel steal at the time). My linux box has 25GB free and my windows xp box has over 50GB free.
I don't know why you're going on and on about the average joe, this has nothing to do with the average joe (yet). This is for people who, like me, don't need much storage but want exceptionally fast workstations. I do have a second 500GB hard drive that I use for storage/archival and a 300GB HDD in an external enclosure I use for backups.
Don't think of it as replacing HDDs entirely, thing of it as a new tier of storage. It used to be:
HDD -> RAM -> CPU registers
Now its:
HDD -> SSD -> RAM -> CPU registers
Each tier from left to right getting progressively smaller and faster.
But, SSDs are no more pointless than giving sally homemaker a quad-core monster with 4GB of RAM. Once you actually use one you'll appreciate that it is the single biggest upgrade you can do to a modern PC. It's just one of those things you have to experience to appreciate.
Your logic doesn't track. It is specifically BECAUSE CPUs are so fast that the slow performance of HDD is exacerbated even farther. Hard drives were always the slowest component in PCs, but as RAM and CPUs get faster and faster, without any appreciable difference in HDD speed, the gap grows farther and farther.
I have a friend who just replaced a single 72GB Raptor (not Velociraptor, but still a 10K RPM SATA HDD with 32MB of cache) with TWO (2) OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in RAID0 and let me tell you, the difference in performance is nothing short of staggering (and was with a single drive before he added the second). Solid state drives are the single largest upgrade you can do to any modern PC assembled from parts manufactured in the last 3 years.
If you haven't seen the difference with the new generation of SSDs (Intel X25-E/M and anything with the Indilinx or Samsung controllers - not JMICRON drives) I seriously encourage you to do yourself a favor and just try one out. You can get a 30GB Vertex for as low as ~$130. Sure, it benchmarks with TWICE the throughput of the fastest consumer HDD on the planet (WD VelociRaptor) but that doesn't really tell you the whole story. It's not just throughput, its the random read speeds and the total silence from the drive that is just absolutely awesome.
No, what it proves is that everyone has a discretionary income, and whether they spend it on music or something else, they're still spending it, which is what's important. Not buying music doesn't hurt the economy, not spending the money _AT ALL_ hurts the economy.
No where in the post I responded to does the word "flash" even appear.
I've got a hp mini 2140 with a 1.6Ghz Atom, 2GB RAM and the standard intel GMA 950 graphics adapter and have no problem whatsoever playing 720p encoded video via the VGA output port, including numerous h.264 encoded videos (which is the same format used by Flash)
"Flash Player 9 Update 3, released on December 3, 2007,[2] also includes support for the H.264 video standard (also known as MPEG-4 part 10, or AVC) which is even more computationally demanding, but offers significantly better quality/bitrate ratio.[3] "
So again, to answer your question - yes, the Intel Atom is easily capable of playing 720p, including Flash based h.264 video.
"Now, you have the equivalent of the $270 E8600 c2d which also rates high in their gaming benchmarks (beating the phenom ii 955, i7 920, and even the i7 940 in their hl2 and crysis warhead benches, and only slightly losing to the 955 and i7 940 in farcry 2)."
Maybe I'm missing something but the links you posted do not show the E8600 beating the 920, 940 or 955, except where it beats a 920 by less than 1 frame per second. All that tells me is that games are not CPU bound.
"71% increase in cost vs. a 2% decrease in performance.
Sure, you could make the argument that future games will likely utilize 4 cores more effectively. But when? I'd wager a guess that we aren't really going to see a significant advantage to quad-core gaming for a few years yet. Just about enough time to plan the next pc upgrade!"
I'm not a gamer, but remember, your computer has a process scheduler that will thread processes to each core. So, as opposed to a synthetic benchmark, in real life, you may be doing several things when playing games. Virus scan, listening to an mp3, downloading a torrent. All of those things would be offloaded to idle cores, without affecting your gaming at all.
With that said, if all you do is play video games, your best bang for your buck is probably an AMD processor followed closely by something like an E8X00, no doubt. Remember, most of the time you're much better off just dumping any extra money into a better graphics card. Of course you'll get a lot more longevity out of upgrading to something like an i7 920 and upgrading the entire platform.
Dual and Quad socket motherboards are exceptionally expensive and typically require registered/ecc RAM. I would genuinely like to see a setup with comparable CPU features to say, a core i7 920, where you'd get comparable performance for the price using two processors. (no used prices obviously, since we need apples v apples).
You mean 720P flash I assume, or, less likely, 480P. 780P isn't a standard high-def resolution.
But, to answer your question, probably the new class of netbook like the Pegatron, which, interestingly enough is running a Freescale processor with an ARM based core. This little netbook also has flash based GPU acceleration (supposedly), is incredibly thin and sports I think 6 hours of battery life.
"It's sad how little people actually care about their rights."
I never understood statements like this. How do you know you care more than me? Did you stage a violent revolt all alone or something when the rest of us weren't paying attention?
"Backups by definition can't be real time - Mirrors can.. but you wouldn't need to recover data if you have a Mirror."
Not necessarily. A true mirror would also mirror deletes. So, if someone accidentally deleted a file, the delete would be mirrored and then you may still need to recover it.
If your business will lose $larger_number per hour because one cat5 cable goes bad, you really shouldn't be working in IT to begin with. I'd also like to point out I've seen just as many pre-crimped cables go bad as hand made. There really isn't any difference.
100mb fastethernet is good for over 94mb/s. Feel free to test yourself, I recommend a utility called iperf. It's just a client/server packet generator that will clock the transfer speed.
Yes, exactly, I'm agreeing with you. Maybe it's a colloquial thing, but I wasn't referring to you specifically when I said "You definitely won't convince me", it's meant in a general sense, as in, anyone else who may take that position. Sorry for the confusion:)
Well that's a little tougher comparison. The short answer is ethernet is probably the better choice. Just look at FCoE and cisco's unified fabric solution using converged network adapters over 10GbE (copper at that). You definitely won't convince me that we should keep building two networks, one for ethernet and one for storage.
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"SSD has a rather limited lifespan due to the number of writes it can handle before it fails."
You want to guess how long that is? Do you want the answer in years or decades?
"I have no personal experience with SSD and I'm as skeptical as anyone, but from all the articles I've read the authors expressed that SSD was a monumental improvement in their overall computing experience."
Honestly, try one. It is literally the single biggest upgrade you can do to your PC. You really cannot appreciate it until you've tried one. I recommend OCZ's Vertex series
Why use 1-4GB SSD when you can buy DDR2-800 memory for ~$10/GB these days? Just buy a few extra 2 or 4GB DIMMs and let the OS handle the caching.
Let's not forget you also have to buy a chassis that will hold 10 disks and you have to power them all ($$$). Oh and you still can't touch the seek time or random read performance of the SSD.
On the brightside, you sure would have a ton of storage capacity.
And your secondary objective is performance and you buy a drive that compromises between the two.
A lot of us will just use a two drive configuration, one fast SSD for performance and a large, inexpensive, mechanical drive for storage.
whoops, absolutely, good catch :)
"He is a gamer, right? They are the only ones I have EVER seen with a Raptor drive, which kinda proves my point. "
No, he just likes his computer to be very very fast and can afford it. I have raptors in my PCs as well and I'm not a gamer either. I have two PC's, a linux box running fedora 9 with a 36GB raptor and a windows xp machine that I built later with a 72GB raptor (which I got open box from newegg for $89 a couple years back, absolutel steal at the time). My linux box has 25GB free and my windows xp box has over 50GB free.
I don't know why you're going on and on about the average joe, this has nothing to do with the average joe (yet). This is for people who, like me, don't need much storage but want exceptionally fast workstations. I do have a second 500GB hard drive that I use for storage/archival and a 300GB HDD in an external enclosure I use for backups.
Don't think of it as replacing HDDs entirely, thing of it as a new tier of storage. It used to be:
HDD -> RAM -> CPU registers
Now its:
HDD -> SSD -> RAM -> CPU registers
Each tier from left to right getting progressively smaller and faster.
But, SSDs are no more pointless than giving sally homemaker a quad-core monster with 4GB of RAM. Once you actually use one you'll appreciate that it is the single biggest upgrade you can do to a modern PC. It's just one of those things you have to experience to appreciate.
Your logic doesn't track. It is specifically BECAUSE CPUs are so fast that the slow performance of HDD is exacerbated even farther. Hard drives were always the slowest component in PCs, but as RAM and CPUs get faster and faster, without any appreciable difference in HDD speed, the gap grows farther and farther.
I have a friend who just replaced a single 72GB Raptor (not Velociraptor, but still a 10K RPM SATA HDD with 32MB of cache) with TWO (2) OCZ Vertex 30GB SSDs in RAID0 and let me tell you, the difference in performance is nothing short of staggering (and was with a single drive before he added the second). Solid state drives are the single largest upgrade you can do to any modern PC assembled from parts manufactured in the last 3 years.
If you haven't seen the difference with the new generation of SSDs (Intel X25-E/M and anything with the Indilinx or Samsung controllers - not JMICRON drives) I seriously encourage you to do yourself a favor and just try one out. You can get a 30GB Vertex for as low as ~$130. Sure, it benchmarks with TWICE the throughput of the fastest consumer HDD on the planet (WD VelociRaptor) but that doesn't really tell you the whole story. It's not just throughput, its the random read speeds and the total silence from the drive that is just absolutely awesome.
"The average lifespan of a hard drive is (guesstimate) five years? An SSD is going to be much shorter."
And what analysis is this based on exactly?
No, what it proves is that everyone has a discretionary income, and whether they spend it on music or something else, they're still spending it, which is what's important. Not buying music doesn't hurt the economy, not spending the money _AT ALL_ hurts the economy.
Also is this graph adjusted for inflation?
No where in the post I responded to does the word "flash" even appear. I've got a hp mini 2140 with a 1.6Ghz Atom, 2GB RAM and the standard intel GMA 950 graphics adapter and have no problem whatsoever playing 720p encoded video via the VGA output port, including numerous h.264 encoded videos (which is the same format used by Flash)
"Flash Player 9 Update 3, released on December 3, 2007,[2] also includes support for the H.264 video standard (also known as MPEG-4 part 10, or AVC) which is even more computationally demanding, but offers significantly better quality/bitrate ratio.[3] "
So again, to answer your question - yes, the Intel Atom is easily capable of playing 720p, including Flash based h.264 video.
It's a pretty compelling little device considering it's only going to cost $199.
"And actually I think the Atom doesn't handle 720p all that well yet."
Incorrect. NVIDIA Ion based nettops are already playing 1080p video smooth as silk. It's more about the graphics adapter than it is the Atom.
Skidpad numbers doen't translate directly into handling. That said, the zr1 is an exceptional value and an amazing automobile.
"Now, you have the equivalent of the $270 E8600 c2d which also rates high in their gaming benchmarks (beating the phenom ii 955, i7 920, and even the i7 940 in their hl2 and crysis warhead benches, and only slightly losing to the 955 and i7 940 in farcry 2)."
Maybe I'm missing something but the links you posted do not show the E8600 beating the 920, 940 or 955, except where it beats a 920 by less than 1 frame per second. All that tells me is that games are not CPU bound.
"71% increase in cost vs. a 2% decrease in performance.
Sure, you could make the argument that future games will likely utilize 4 cores more effectively. But when? I'd wager a guess that we aren't really going to see a significant advantage to quad-core gaming for a few years yet. Just about enough time to plan the next pc upgrade!"
I'm not a gamer, but remember, your computer has a process scheduler that will thread processes to each core. So, as opposed to a synthetic benchmark, in real life, you may be doing several things when playing games. Virus scan, listening to an mp3, downloading a torrent. All of those things would be offloaded to idle cores, without affecting your gaming at all.
With that said, if all you do is play video games, your best bang for your buck is probably an AMD processor followed closely by something like an E8X00, no doubt. Remember, most of the time you're much better off just dumping any extra money into a better graphics card. Of course you'll get a lot more longevity out of upgrading to something like an i7 920 and upgrading the entire platform.
Dual and Quad socket motherboards are exceptionally expensive and typically require registered/ecc RAM. I would genuinely like to see a setup with comparable CPU features to say, a core i7 920, where you'd get comparable performance for the price using two processors. (no used prices obviously, since we need apples v apples).
You mean 720P flash I assume, or, less likely, 480P. 780P isn't a standard high-def resolution.
But, to answer your question, probably the new class of netbook like the Pegatron, which, interestingly enough is running a Freescale processor with an ARM based core. This little netbook also has flash based GPU acceleration (supposedly), is incredibly thin and sports I think 6 hours of battery life.
"It's sad how little people actually care about their rights."
I never understood statements like this. How do you know you care more than me? Did you stage a violent revolt all alone or something when the rest of us weren't paying attention?
"Backups by definition can't be real time - Mirrors can.. but you wouldn't need to recover data if you have a Mirror."
Not necessarily. A true mirror would also mirror deletes. So, if someone accidentally deleted a file, the delete would be mirrored and then you may still need to recover it.
You shouldn't be doing 100 meter runs, that's far too close to the distance limitations. You should be doing two 50m runs with a repeater/extender.
There is no one answer. We do top-of-rack switch deployments (vs end row) and we hand make all the cables for a clean installation.
That said, we also keep various lengths of cable pre-made (3', 7', 15', etc) for use as patch cables in offices.
If your business will lose $larger_number per hour because one cat5 cable goes bad, you really shouldn't be working in IT to begin with. I'd also like to point out I've seen just as many pre-crimped cables go bad as hand made. There really isn't any difference.
100mb fastethernet is good for over 94mb/s. Feel free to test yourself, I recommend a utility called iperf. It's just a client/server packet generator that will clock the transfer speed.
Yes, exactly, I'm agreeing with you. Maybe it's a colloquial thing, but I wasn't referring to you specifically when I said "You definitely won't convince me", it's meant in a general sense, as in, anyone else who may take that position. Sorry for the confusion :)
Well that's a little tougher comparison. The short answer is ethernet is probably the better choice. Just look at FCoE and cisco's unified fabric solution using converged network adapters over 10GbE (copper at that). You definitely won't convince me that we should keep building two networks, one for ethernet and one for storage.
Depends on what we're comparing exactly. Are we comparing SCSI disks vs FC disks or are we trying to compare FC arbitrated loop against ethernet?