Think the other way around. The more they tighten DRM the less business they will get.
Playing by their rules will only lock yourself into their game. The only way to stop it is to break their DRM until they tighten it so much the nut breaks.
I seriously hope you dont actually BELIEVE that if everyone played by their rules and accepted DRM they would reward you with less restrictive DRM... That is just comical.
No end user license agreement (which is not a contract by the way) can superscede standard copyright law. It can only give you EXTRA freedoms already not given. You cannot restrict license agreements any more than standard copyright law already allows. This has been decided in court over and over again.
The only way they can do it is if they secure a written signature or encrypted electronic signature of each purchaser.. (for instance, sight license contracts) In a case like this, they could have the right to sue under BREACH OF CONTRACT (but not copyright law)
BTW: all of this has already been sorted out in the court systems. This argument comes up way too much on slashdot and it is not valid. Nobody is forcing you to sign a contract when you sign up for iTunes. EVEN if they did, you would not be in breach of copyright laws. You would be in breach of contract which is a 100% pure civil offence.
If you don't like the restrictions set on your business, then don't go into business. spending billions to lobby law changes in several countries around the world to enable a never-successfull business model is no way to run a business. The recording industry should figure this out rather than lobbying for more restrictions on content. Maybe they would gain customers via loyalty rather than legal leverage "all your [laws] base are belong to us"
the RIAA can fuck themselves. If someone is going to get around their BS encryption (legally I might add because he isn't decrypting it) and they are going to throw a hissy fit, then that is their problem. You defending them however is just the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard a human being say (assuming you don't have any direct financial interest in the success of the RIAA) (if you do then why are you posting to slashdot?)
"you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content - don't intend to do that."
Maybe they should have encrypted the music before it got sent over the network... Or maybe they should figure out a way to save their business without lobbying congress to bail them out. Or MAYBE they should do something innovating to gain marketshare rather than lobby to change laws to put their competitors out of business? Guess they never thought of that. You probably didn't either. You were too busy listening ot U2 on your ever so popular iPod.
Why is this guy annoying? He has legimitately gotten around the copy protection. It is even legal in the US because it does not circumvent digital rights management. No, it gets to the root of the problem before it is even encrypted. Smart move...
It is nobody's fault but yourself for installing software which you find annoying on your system. If you don't like the fact that you must update iTunes so often, then maybe you should use a REAL mp3 player which doesn't require proprietary software to load up your music. Ever think of that? I guess the iPod is too popular for the mainstream croud. The fad is in full force. Why do I even bother.
Actually, its not jon's fault. It's yours and apple's. You can't say that him breaking iTunes is forcing you to install quicktime and thrash your system. No... that is your fault for buying an apple product which forces you to install quicktime. It just so happens that Jon wrote a patch that caused apple to write a patch and then caused you to download crappy software from apple...
It is your own fault for supporting a company who installs trash software onto your system when you don't want it. If you can't handle that iTunes installs stuff you don't like, then I ask you:
WHY DID YOU INSTALL ITUNES IN THE FIRST PLACE?
let me guess, you are a sucker for the hype that is the iPod. You must be popular with your other ipod buddies.
You are using 768MB ram, I said 512MB was minimum. You are trying to say that 256 is enough for those people... But yet you still are using 768 and are talking about 425 in top... How does your argument make sence again?
The simple facts are that what top reports doesn't make a whole lot of difference if the kernel is using up 100MB or so for disk cache (which it does) on a 256mb system, disk cache is maybe 50 or more MB on average. other people in this thread have already said that iphoto doesn't run well with 256MB and i can personally vouch for them.
You are telling me not to be "stupid" because I recommended 512MB ram for everyone, and you are running 768. How does that make *ME* stupid?
It isn't about how much RAM top says you are using. It is about how often your disk is swapping. The more you swap, the shorter lifespan your disk. The hotter the system gets. The more power the system uses. The slower the system goes. The more fragmented your swap file gets... the loop continues. Combine all this with trying to load a program and swap in and out the SAME program you are tring to load simply because you only have 256MB ram and cache is taking 50MB and system is taking 50MB and iphoto is taking 50MB and safari is taking 50MB and expose is taking 20MB and etc etc etc..
Let me be clear here. 256MB is ___NOT___ what ___ANYBODY___ needs (save those who ONLY want to browse the web)... don't try to make it sound like it is OK. It isn't.
get real. MacOS X needs 512MB minimum if you plan on running anything other than your desktop. Your disk will be swapping significantly with anything under 512MB in os X by default, even with just browsing the web and using iTunes...
Dont spread lies to newbies. While YOU may think 256MB is good enough for most users, you should let people who actually know what they are talking about and deal with everyday problems of users to give advice to new users who are looking to buy a new computer system. I deal with hundreds of mac users on a weekly basis. I *KNOW* that 512MB is the minimum that 90% of those users need. And they aren't doing _ANYTHING_ special with them.
(To the parent. Don't buy the special configured mac's... they are non-returnable if there is a problem with them. Instead install it yourself or buy the default bundle from a store and have them install it for you.)
I used to think the same way.. About a year ago USB drives were about twice the price per megabyte over CF and SD cards... Now they are cheaper and more popular. So having this functionality is almost useless...
Still, if you still want this functionality, sandisk makes a very popular SD card reader which is just slightly larger than their cruzer Micro drive. It's a little thicker and a littler wider. But honestly this day in age you really are wasting your money to buy a USB drive if you plan on "upgrading" it later on.. as the usb drives are cheaper per megabyte than SD nowadays.
Now... when it comes to mp3 players... upgradeable mp3 players are definately the way to go as far as the near future is concerned... once flash supply can catch up to demand (probably will take another year or so) upgradeable mp3 players won't be such a big issue. But right now the mfg's are charging literally twice as much for twice the flash ram in an mp3 player... Ridiculous when they could just put an SD or CF slot in it and sell the ram for market value, not twice it.
because when you have a card that "averages" 100FPS or so, it will drop below your monitor refresh at several points in the game... many times to 30 or less FPS...
Unless your minimum FPS is 85Hz or better, you need a card that can push 200FPS in a benchmark to have perfectly smooth gaming...
" KDE 3.4 weights in at 6,500+ bug fixes, 1,700+ enhancements, and a grand total of 80,000+ contributions."
Well that to me means they fixed 6,500 bugs but added 1,700 new bugs, plus the potential for 80,000 more new bugs! Hope they aren't working backwards hehehe;)
because the DAC's run at a fixed frequency and you know it because your monitor accepts it... The FPS rating is determined by how often the frame buffer gets updated... This cannot be measured by your method..
This guy is making an outrageous claim. I have a brand new 12in powerbook, 12in iBook, 14in iBook, and 15in PB... none of them get over 4.5 hours when idle...
the "blue shift" is the "doppler" shift you speak of... They call it blue shift and red shift but it is the equivilent of the doppler shift of sound waves.
You, and all the replies below which claim "serious design flaws" with this system really have absolutely no idea what you are talking about..
I went through several tens of these boards and they all ran stable (from several differetn batches over about a year period...
i have seen ALL of these probs on this board... they always end up being either bad ram (not flaky mobo, just crappy generic ram) or an underpowered PSU... It usually is because people who tend to buy an ECS board tend to be cheapskates and buy the cheapest TRASH on pricewatch in both PSU and RAM... and it always ends up being that cheapness that gets in the way...
the MOBO is solid tho. They are almost never flaky when used with a decent PSU and decent RAM.
In general yes it will be easy to comple to the new registers... But it will take a much longer time to tweak it to those registers... let me explain
Yea, a compiler can immediately take advantage of the new registers because they are essentially general purpose just like the other 8... but they are currently tweaked to the smaller 8 registers and will have a hard time being tweaked to the 16 regs because they must maintain backwards compatability (which implies they will keep their compiler tuned to the 8 rather than 16) and I just assume that they are still focusing on 8 registers in the general case...
Eventually -- years down the road -- the mindset will be more registers and they will have a new set of assumptions to code to.. Not to mention that current 32bit processors have register re-naming which kinda-sorta eliminates the dire need of more registers (kinda-sorta because it is still better for compilers to have more, but just not as detremential with register renaming)
Now, that being said. I'm not a compiler coder so you can't take everything I said above to be 100% accurate but it is reasonably justified to myself considering what I know now.
"A two platter disk does not have a higher transfer rate then a single platter disk! "
In all modern drives that I am aware of, yes they do. Multi platter disks read from both platters at once in parallel fashion (you might call it "striped" fashion...
There may be some cases where you can't read from both platters at once, such as when the drives S.M.A.R.T logic moves data to different sections of one platter because of known bad sectors. But in the general case of a new drive (or newly formatted and defrag'd drive) you can normally assume that the drive reads both platters in parallel when accessing one single large file.
If you don't believe me run the benchmarks on 2 drives from the same MFG where one drive is say.. 80GB and the other is 160.. (but watch out and make sure that they use the same platters but 2 of them in the larger one.. Sorry I can't name off any model#'s right now cos i don't have the matrices handy) and you will see that the 160 drive will have a faster sustained sequential read speed.
naa.. It is just a matter of benchmark methods... My 40MB/s numbers come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outter track in a SATA 7200RPM 160GB drive (that is about 3 months old)... I used sandra to do the benchmarks... I even compared my drive to other drives in the sandra database and my 7200RPM drive is marginally faster than other 160GB 7200RPM drives...
Unless you run the same exact benchmark, you will never get consistant results... You may get 60MB/s in sequential buffered reads if they are shorter bursts, etc.. I am not arguing this...
In the end, You all have points about my data being "wrong" in the circumstances you give... But in other circumstances (namely, the ones i give in my (1) paragraph with equivilently sized desktop vs laptop drives, my data is correct and conclusive. I may not be able to point to hard data on an independant reviewer's website but that is only because no reviewer to date has done a comparison spec'd out as I have in my origional post. (one day I will post hard numbers onto my website but that is for another day and time long after this discussion will be over)..
All in all, i'm not really disagreeing with your points.. I'm just saying that my points are different than what you are making, and don't conflict with what you are saying. It just so happens that the experiments you point to do not use the same initial assumptions as I have..
Wether or not you agree with my initial assumptions in point (1) in my post are another matter and can be discussed in a different way. But just for the sake of clarity:
1) drive density and RPM speed are directly proportional to sustained sequential read speed.
2) platter radious and RPM speed is directly proportional to seek time.
3) Multiple platters in the same drive read in parallel while accessing data, thus doubling the density of a single platter
4) Knowing the above, and working the numbers in the specific instances I am claiming in my origional post (namely, 5400RPM 2.5in disk vs 7200RPM 80gb disk) you can determine that the 5400RPM 2.5in disk will have faster sequential read speeds on the outter track of said disk.
5) Adding point (4) above with the fact that 5400RPM laptop drives are more reliable, generate less heat, use up less battery power, and have a longer MTBF (due to heat issues in plastic chassis and due to bumping the drive while being accessed is more detremental on a 7200RPM drive) and the fact that this is a discussion on the AMD Turion processor (which is ment to go into thinner, lighter, and more portable and longer battery life notebooks, and My claims about 5400RPM drives being better in this scenerio stand in my professional opinion. (I won't give my credentials because I don't feel this discussion should be about me justifying my knowledge of the subject).
You don't have to trust me, you just have to take what I claim and understand it.. And if you don't agree you can only run the tests yourself and come to your own conclusions.. But pointing to a website which doesn't run the tests as I described will not get you anywhere in this discussion.
"WRT comparing drives of the same size, that's hard when there are so few desktop hard drives available in 60 or 80 GB."
Well, I don't know about how the drive market is in Europe.. But in the USA most OEM desktops come with 80-120GB hard drives standard... Most laptops come with 60-100GB laptops standard...
Low end laptops(and desktops) come wiht 40GB drives.. higher end laptops come with 80-100GB drives... Higher end desktops come with 120-200GB drives... (this is all generalizations.... but you get my idea)
all that being said, I don't know how you can say that "so few desktop hard drives available in 60-80GB" because 40 and 80GB drives are among the most popular in consumer desktop systems... And you won't find lower than 40GB in a laptop unless it is ultra low end (sub 700$ range). 40GB is as small as a laptop -- and desktop-- drive get in the general case...
My whole origional post is a direct relation of equivilently sized hard drives.. As soon as you start throwing in 250 gig desktop drives and compare them to 80gb laptop drives, you are throwing out my initial assumptions and are making new ones... with new initial assumptions, yes, my argument doesn't hold out...
I will agree with you 100% that a higher density desktop drive wil definately outpace a lower density laptop drive in sustained sequential reads... This is not my argument...
My argument specifically compares 2 equivilently sized drives (such as 80gb v 80gb) one in a laptop and one in a desktop, at 5400RPM vs 7200RPM respectively.
Now, You can go on about how the economics of it are different.. and you may have a point to an extent... But my main point is that RPM's do not always mean faster performance... And my second main point is that RPM's do not always mean better. It depends on the circumstances.. When you are talking about ultra light laptops or midsized to smaller 14in laptops, you have to take into account battery life, heat, and power drain... In these circumstances, 7200RPM drives are definately overkill and will be significantly detremental to battery life and drive reliability (being that they aren't cooled properly) and are also un-needed considering that a 5400RPM 80gb drive performs the same or better than a 7200RPM 80GB desktop drive...
I think that would be a great idea.. cylyndrical drives rather than wider ones... But there are cost issues (mainly that they have to make a seperate head for each platter) and the larger size head arm would mean it is slower to seek... it is all tradeoffs no matter what your drive geometry might be...
You are comparing a 3.5in disk with 100GB per platter times 2 platters to a 2.5in drive with a single 80gb platter (or a single 100GB platter) so obviously the desktop drive will beat it.. it has a higher density AND a higher spindle speed.
Just wanted to make another followup... most 10K drives go slower than 7200RPM drives at sustained sequential reads. The reason is because most 10K drives are at most 74GB.. (you can get some larger scsi ones but they are through the roof in price)
a cheaper 250GB 7200rpm drive will beat out a more expensive 10K 74Gig drive in sustained reads/writes.. (im not talking about seek here)
And that is where I think that German magazine gets it wrong.. They do a weighted average of seek and sustained reads and writes with buffering to try to determine an overall "drive performance" rather than individual benchmarks for each type of access...
Your numbers are wrong.. I have a 160GB 8mb cache WD1600JD SATA drive here and on the outter tracks of the disk it only gets 40MB/s sustained...
On an 80GB 7200rpm drive it is much lower than that.. compared to an 80GB laptop drive it will be faster...
You only quote german's magazine on 2.5in vs 3.5in.. but you dont' quote any drive storage sizes... The storage size is relevant to the drive density... Of course a desktop drive at high density (such as 250GB) will be faster than a common 40GB laptop drive at 5400RPM.. it has more density even though the 40gig is smaller...
I am talking about a direct comparison. 80GB laptop vs 80GB desktop drive.. If you measure those you will get a faster rate on the laptop drive even though it runs at a slower RPM.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't?
Can you point to relevant case law where a clickthrough license has _EVER_ been enforced on this magnitude?
Didn't think so.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Think the other way around. The more they tighten DRM the less business they will get.
Playing by their rules will only lock yourself into their game. The only way to stop it is to break their DRM until they tighten it so much the nut breaks.
I seriously hope you dont actually BELIEVE that if everyone played by their rules and accepted DRM they would reward you with less restrictive DRM... That is just comical.
However,
No end user license agreement (which is not a contract by the way) can superscede standard copyright law. It can only give you EXTRA freedoms already not given. You cannot restrict license agreements any more than standard copyright law already allows. This has been decided in court over and over again.
The only way they can do it is if they secure a written signature or encrypted electronic signature of each purchaser.. (for instance, sight license contracts) In a case like this, they could have the right to sue under BREACH OF CONTRACT (but not copyright law)
BTW: all of this has already been sorted out in the court systems. This argument comes up way too much on slashdot and it is not valid. Nobody is forcing you to sign a contract when you sign up for iTunes. EVEN if they did, you would not be in breach of copyright laws. You would be in breach of contract which is a 100% pure civil offence.
If you don't like the restrictions set on your business, then don't go into business. spending billions to lobby law changes in several countries around the world to enable a never-successfull business model is no way to run a business. The recording industry should figure this out rather than lobbying for more restrictions on content. Maybe they would gain customers via loyalty rather than legal leverage "all your [laws] base are belong to us"
the RIAA can fuck themselves. If someone is going to get around their BS encryption (legally I might add because he isn't decrypting it) and they are going to throw a hissy fit, then that is their problem. You defending them however is just the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard a human being say (assuming you don't have any direct financial interest in the success of the RIAA) (if you do then why are you posting to slashdot?)
"you know, those people who actually have LEGAL RIGHTS to the content - don't intend to do that."
Maybe they should have encrypted the music before it got sent over the network... Or maybe they should figure out a way to save their business without lobbying congress to bail them out. Or MAYBE they should do something innovating to gain marketshare rather than lobby to change laws to put their competitors out of business? Guess they never thought of that. You probably didn't either. You were too busy listening ot U2 on your ever so popular iPod.
Get real.
Why is this guy annoying? He has legimitately gotten around the copy protection. It is even legal in the US because it does not circumvent digital rights management. No, it gets to the root of the problem before it is even encrypted. Smart move...
It is nobody's fault but yourself for installing software which you find annoying on your system. If you don't like the fact that you must update iTunes so often, then maybe you should use a REAL mp3 player which doesn't require proprietary software to load up your music. Ever think of that? I guess the iPod is too popular for the mainstream croud. The fad is in full force. Why do I even bother.
Actually, its not jon's fault. It's yours and apple's. You can't say that him breaking iTunes is forcing you to install quicktime and thrash your system. No... that is your fault for buying an apple product which forces you to install quicktime. It just so happens that Jon wrote a patch that caused apple to write a patch and then caused you to download crappy software from apple...
It is your own fault for supporting a company who installs trash software onto your system when you don't want it. If you can't handle that iTunes installs stuff you don't like, then I ask you:
WHY DID YOU INSTALL ITUNES IN THE FIRST PLACE?
let me guess, you are a sucker for the hype that is the iPod. You must be popular with your other ipod buddies.
You are using 768MB ram, I said 512MB was minimum. You are trying to say that 256 is enough for those people... But yet you still are using 768 and are talking about 425 in top... How does your argument make sence again?
The simple facts are that what top reports doesn't make a whole lot of difference if the kernel is using up 100MB or so for disk cache (which it does) on a 256mb system, disk cache is maybe 50 or more MB on average. other people in this thread have already said that iphoto doesn't run well with 256MB and i can personally vouch for them.
You are telling me not to be "stupid" because I recommended 512MB ram for everyone, and you are running 768. How does that make *ME* stupid?
It isn't about how much RAM top says you are using. It is about how often your disk is swapping. The more you swap, the shorter lifespan your disk. The hotter the system gets. The more power the system uses. The slower the system goes. The more fragmented your swap file gets... the loop continues. Combine all this with trying to load a program and swap in and out the SAME program you are tring to load simply because you only have 256MB ram and cache is taking 50MB and system is taking 50MB and iphoto is taking 50MB and safari is taking 50MB and expose is taking 20MB and etc etc etc..
Let me be clear here. 256MB is ___NOT___ what ___ANYBODY___ needs (save those who ONLY want to browse the web)... don't try to make it sound like it is OK. It isn't.
get real. MacOS X needs 512MB minimum if you plan on running anything other than your desktop. Your disk will be swapping significantly with anything under 512MB in os X by default, even with just browsing the web and using iTunes...
Dont spread lies to newbies. While YOU may think 256MB is good enough for most users, you should let people who actually know what they are talking about and deal with everyday problems of users to give advice to new users who are looking to buy a new computer system. I deal with hundreds of mac users on a weekly basis. I *KNOW* that 512MB is the minimum that 90% of those users need. And they aren't doing _ANYTHING_ special with them.
(To the parent. Don't buy the special configured mac's... they are non-returnable if there is a problem with them. Instead install it yourself or buy the default bundle from a store and have them install it for you.)
I used to think the same way.. About a year ago USB drives were about twice the price per megabyte over CF and SD cards... Now they are cheaper and more popular. So having this functionality is almost useless...
Still, if you still want this functionality, sandisk makes a very popular SD card reader which is just slightly larger than their cruzer Micro drive. It's a little thicker and a littler wider. But honestly this day in age you really are wasting your money to buy a USB drive if you plan on "upgrading" it later on.. as the usb drives are cheaper per megabyte than SD nowadays.
Now... when it comes to mp3 players... upgradeable mp3 players are definately the way to go as far as the near future is concerned... once flash supply can catch up to demand (probably will take another year or so) upgradeable mp3 players won't be such a big issue. But right now the mfg's are charging literally twice as much for twice the flash ram in an mp3 player... Ridiculous when they could just put an SD or CF slot in it and sell the ram for market value, not twice it.
because when you have a card that "averages" 100FPS or so, it will drop below your monitor refresh at several points in the game... many times to 30 or less FPS...
Unless your minimum FPS is 85Hz or better, you need a card that can push 200FPS in a benchmark to have perfectly smooth gaming...
" KDE 3.4 weights in at 6,500+ bug fixes, 1,700+ enhancements, and a grand total of 80,000+ contributions."
;)
Well that to me means they fixed 6,500 bugs but added 1,700 new bugs, plus the potential for 80,000 more new bugs! Hope they aren't working backwards hehehe
because the DAC's run at a fixed frequency and you know it because your monitor accepts it... The FPS rating is determined by how often the frame buffer gets updated... This cannot be measured by your method..
This guy is making an outrageous claim. I have a brand new 12in powerbook, 12in iBook, 14in iBook, and 15in PB... none of them get over 4.5 hours when idle...
the "blue shift" is the "doppler" shift you speak of... They call it blue shift and red shift but it is the equivilent of the doppler shift of sound waves.
Time to start wearing some tin foil braws!!!!
:)
(and panties
You, and all the replies below which claim "serious design flaws" with this system really have absolutely no idea what you are talking about..
I went through several tens of these boards and they all ran stable (from several differetn batches over about a year period...
i have seen ALL of these probs on this board... they always end up being either bad ram (not flaky mobo, just crappy generic ram) or an underpowered PSU... It usually is because people who tend to buy an ECS board tend to be cheapskates and buy the cheapest TRASH on pricewatch in both PSU and RAM... and it always ends up being that cheapness that gets in the way...
the MOBO is solid tho. They are almost never flaky when used with a decent PSU and decent RAM.
Yes and no...
In general yes it will be easy to comple to the new registers... But it will take a much longer time to tweak it to those registers... let me explain
Yea, a compiler can immediately take advantage of the new registers because they are essentially general purpose just like the other 8... but they are currently tweaked to the smaller 8 registers and will have a hard time being tweaked to the 16 regs because they must maintain backwards compatability (which implies they will keep their compiler tuned to the 8 rather than 16) and I just assume that they are still focusing on 8 registers in the general case...
Eventually -- years down the road -- the mindset will be more registers and they will have a new set of assumptions to code to.. Not to mention that current 32bit processors have register re-naming which kinda-sorta eliminates the dire need of more registers (kinda-sorta because it is still better for compilers to have more, but just not as detremential with register renaming)
Now, that being said. I'm not a compiler coder so you can't take everything I said above to be 100% accurate but it is reasonably justified to myself considering what I know now.
"A two platter disk does not have a higher transfer rate then a single platter disk! "
In all modern drives that I am aware of, yes they do. Multi platter disks read from both platters at once in parallel fashion (you might call it "striped" fashion...
There may be some cases where you can't read from both platters at once, such as when the drives S.M.A.R.T logic moves data to different sections of one platter because of known bad sectors. But in the general case of a new drive (or newly formatted and defrag'd drive) you can normally assume that the drive reads both platters in parallel when accessing one single large file.
If you don't believe me run the benchmarks on 2 drives from the same MFG where one drive is say.. 80GB and the other is 160.. (but watch out and make sure that they use the same platters but 2 of them in the larger one.. Sorry I can't name off any model#'s right now cos i don't have the matrices handy) and you will see that the 160 drive will have a faster sustained sequential read speed.
naa.. It is just a matter of benchmark methods... My 40MB/s numbers come from unbuffered sequential reads of the outter track in a SATA 7200RPM 160GB drive (that is about 3 months old)... I used sandra to do the benchmarks... I even compared my drive to other drives in the sandra database and my 7200RPM drive is marginally faster than other 160GB 7200RPM drives...
Unless you run the same exact benchmark, you will never get consistant results... You may get 60MB/s in sequential buffered reads if they are shorter bursts, etc.. I am not arguing this...
In the end, You all have points about my data being "wrong" in the circumstances you give... But in other circumstances (namely, the ones i give in my (1) paragraph with equivilently sized desktop vs laptop drives, my data is correct and conclusive. I may not be able to point to hard data on an independant reviewer's website but that is only because no reviewer to date has done a comparison spec'd out as I have in my origional post. (one day I will post hard numbers onto my website but that is for another day and time long after this discussion will be over)..
All in all, i'm not really disagreeing with your points.. I'm just saying that my points are different than what you are making, and don't conflict with what you are saying. It just so happens that the experiments you point to do not use the same initial assumptions as I have..
Wether or not you agree with my initial assumptions in point (1) in my post are another matter and can be discussed in a different way. But just for the sake of clarity:
1) drive density and RPM speed are directly proportional to sustained sequential read speed.
2) platter radious and RPM speed is directly proportional to seek time.
3) Multiple platters in the same drive read in parallel while accessing data, thus doubling the density of a single platter
4) Knowing the above, and working the numbers in the specific instances I am claiming in my origional post (namely, 5400RPM 2.5in disk vs 7200RPM 80gb disk) you can determine that the 5400RPM 2.5in disk will have faster sequential read speeds on the outter track of said disk.
5) Adding point (4) above with the fact that 5400RPM laptop drives are more reliable, generate less heat, use up less battery power, and have a longer MTBF (due to heat issues in plastic chassis and due to bumping the drive while being accessed is more detremental on a 7200RPM drive) and the fact that this is a discussion on the AMD Turion processor (which is ment to go into thinner, lighter, and more portable and longer battery life notebooks, and My claims about 5400RPM drives being better in this scenerio stand in my professional opinion. (I won't give my credentials because I don't feel this discussion should be about me justifying my knowledge of the subject).
You don't have to trust me, you just have to take what I claim and understand it.. And if you don't agree you can only run the tests yourself and come to your own conclusions.. But pointing to a website which doesn't run the tests as I described will not get you anywhere in this discussion.
"WRT comparing drives of the same size, that's hard when there are so few desktop hard drives available in 60 or 80 GB."
:)
Well, I don't know about how the drive market is in Europe.. But in the USA most OEM desktops come with 80-120GB hard drives standard... Most laptops come with 60-100GB laptops standard...
Low end laptops(and desktops) come wiht 40GB drives.. higher end laptops come with 80-100GB drives... Higher end desktops come with 120-200GB drives... (this is all generalizations.... but you get my idea)
all that being said, I don't know how you can say that "so few desktop hard drives available in 60-80GB" because 40 and 80GB drives are among the most popular in consumer desktop systems... And you won't find lower than 40GB in a laptop unless it is ultra low end (sub 700$ range). 40GB is as small as a laptop -- and desktop-- drive get in the general case...
My whole origional post is a direct relation of equivilently sized hard drives.. As soon as you start throwing in 250 gig desktop drives and compare them to 80gb laptop drives, you are throwing out my initial assumptions and are making new ones... with new initial assumptions, yes, my argument doesn't hold out...
I will agree with you 100% that a higher density desktop drive wil definately outpace a lower density laptop drive in sustained sequential reads... This is not my argument...
My argument specifically compares 2 equivilently sized drives (such as 80gb v 80gb) one in a laptop and one in a desktop, at 5400RPM vs 7200RPM respectively.
Now, You can go on about how the economics of it are different.. and you may have a point to an extent... But my main point is that RPM's do not always mean faster performance... And my second main point is that RPM's do not always mean better. It depends on the circumstances.. When you are talking about ultra light laptops or midsized to smaller 14in laptops, you have to take into account battery life, heat, and power drain... In these circumstances, 7200RPM drives are definately overkill and will be significantly detremental to battery life and drive reliability (being that they aren't cooled properly) and are also un-needed considering that a 5400RPM 80gb drive performs the same or better than a 7200RPM 80GB desktop drive...
That is my argument.. and I'm sticking to it
I think that would be a great idea.. cylyndrical drives rather than wider ones... But there are cost issues (mainly that they have to make a seperate head for each platter) and the larger size head arm would mean it is slower to seek... it is all tradeoffs no matter what your drive geometry might be...
You are comparing a 3.5in disk with 100GB per platter times 2 platters to a 2.5in drive with a single 80gb platter (or a single 100GB platter) so obviously the desktop drive will beat it.. it has a higher density AND a higher spindle speed.
Just wanted to make another followup... most 10K drives go slower than 7200RPM drives at sustained sequential reads. The reason is because most 10K drives are at most 74GB.. (you can get some larger scsi ones but they are through the roof in price)
a cheaper 250GB 7200rpm drive will beat out a more expensive 10K 74Gig drive in sustained reads/writes.. (im not talking about seek here)
And that is where I think that German magazine gets it wrong.. They do a weighted average of seek and sustained reads and writes with buffering to try to determine an overall "drive performance" rather than individual benchmarks for each type of access...
Your numbers are wrong.. I have a 160GB 8mb cache WD1600JD SATA drive here and on the outter tracks of the disk it only gets 40MB/s sustained...
On an 80GB 7200rpm drive it is much lower than that.. compared to an 80GB laptop drive it will be faster...
You only quote german's magazine on 2.5in vs 3.5in.. but you dont' quote any drive storage sizes... The storage size is relevant to the drive density... Of course a desktop drive at high density (such as 250GB) will be faster than a common 40GB laptop drive at 5400RPM.. it has more density even though the 40gig is smaller...
I am talking about a direct comparison. 80GB laptop vs 80GB desktop drive.. If you measure those you will get a faster rate on the laptop drive even though it runs at a slower RPM.