The article said 100 Mbps (Mega bits per second) which is more on the range of 10 MB/s. Currently the high end SCSI drives can sustain throughputs of around 18 to 23 MB/s. To get the throughput up to a reasonable rate you would have to stripe it across multiple devices.
As for current technology handling the bandwidth, Fibre Channel can currently handle 100 MB/s and 200 MB/s isn't that far out on the horrizion. The biggest problem is that your standard 33 MHz, 32-bit PCI bus only provides 132 MB/s of bandwidth, and the implementation on a lot of systems provides much less. Some systems (I think a Sun Ultra 60 for example) do have a 64-bit PCI bus, but it's hardly the norm.
Are you running NTFS? It doesn't keep it from crashing, but it'll likely save you from having to reload.
I'd also recomend looking for driver updates, especially for the video card. Video card manufacturers seem to be much more concerned about benchmarking performance than stability lately.
I agree that user mode "stuff" should not cause a kernel panic. Drivers are not user mode, and most are not written by Microsoft. On the occasions my system does crash (once every couple of months) it usually appears to be the fault of the crappy Novell client running om my machine. This does not mean that NT is unstable, this means that Novell wrote a bad networking client.
I write NT device drivers for PCI cards. When I'm testing my driver I hammer the hell out of the IO subsystem. I've had my drivers producing 20000 interrupts a second for days on end without a glitch. When my test systems crash, it's because I screwed something up in my driver, not because NT is at fault.
NT's benefit and curse is that it's supported by a lot of third party vendors. The benefit is that consumers like to have a lot of choices in what they buy. The curse is that a lot of companies release a lot of immature drivers to support that hardware.
If you're getting the BSOD running a fractal zoomer I'd suggest getting some new video drivers. The NT kernel really is pretty stable, it's more likely there's a bug in the video driver crashing the system than in NT.
I run 98 at home and NT Workstation at work. On my wife's machine at home she publishes a newsletter in MS Publisher. She also uses MS Word 97 alot in the process. She has to reboot her computer every 4 to 5 hours because of memory leaks. I haven't loaded any of the service packs for Office, so it's possible some of these problems may have been resolved. However, I would never try to do my job on a Win 98 system.
At work I write device drivers for Windows NT 4.0. My development machine (not my test machines) stays up for months at a time. It does crash a few times a year, usually after I upgrade the Novell client. But the NT kernel is pretty solid. It's reliability is in my opinion compleatly acceptable for a workstation, Win 9X is not even close. I don't manage servers, so I really can't give an opinion in that area. However, MS Word still leaks memory on my NT system. I don't have to reboot, but I do have to close the application and restart it every once in a while.
I'm not trying to tell anyone the MS apps aren't buggy pieces of crap, or that Win 9X doesn't handle memory leaks and poorly written apps well. However, if you're saying that the NT kernel is unstable, crashes often, and needs to be reloaded often, then you don't know what you're talking about. I've got test machines which I crash on a regular basis when I'm debugging my device drivers. I don't think I've had to reload one in the last year and a half. I had to reload that one because the code I wrote screwed up the registry beyond my ability to fix it. If I'd remembered to back up the registry that wouldn't have been a problem either. The key to now having to reload NT is to always run NTFS. FAT and the Blue Screen of Death do not get along well.
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The article said 100 Mbps (Mega bits per second) which is more on the range of 10 MB/s. Currently the high end SCSI drives can sustain throughputs of around 18 to 23 MB/s. To get the throughput up to a reasonable rate you would have to stripe it across multiple devices.
As for current technology handling the bandwidth, Fibre Channel can currently handle 100 MB/s and 200 MB/s isn't that far out on the horrizion. The biggest problem is that your standard 33 MHz, 32-bit PCI bus only provides 132 MB/s of bandwidth, and the implementation on a lot of systems provides much less. Some systems (I think a Sun Ultra 60 for example) do have a 64-bit PCI bus, but it's hardly the norm.
Are you running NTFS? It doesn't keep it from crashing, but it'll likely save you from having to reload.
I'd also recomend looking for driver updates, especially for the video card. Video card manufacturers seem to be much more concerned about benchmarking performance than stability lately.
I agree that user mode "stuff" should not cause a kernel panic. Drivers are not user mode, and most are not written by Microsoft. On the occasions my system does crash (once every couple of months) it usually appears to be the fault of the crappy Novell client running om my machine. This does not mean that NT is unstable, this means that Novell wrote a bad networking client.
I write NT device drivers for PCI cards. When I'm testing my driver I hammer the hell out of the IO subsystem. I've had my drivers producing 20000 interrupts a second for days on end without a glitch. When my test systems crash, it's because I screwed something up in my driver, not because NT is at fault.
NT's benefit and curse is that it's supported by a lot of third party vendors. The benefit is that consumers like to have a lot of choices in what they buy. The curse is that a lot of companies release a lot of immature drivers to support that hardware.
If you're getting the BSOD running a fractal zoomer I'd suggest getting some new video drivers. The NT kernel really is pretty stable, it's more likely there's a bug in the video driver crashing the system than in NT.
I have play sounds turned off and it still played. I guess I have to turn "Play videos" off as well.
I'm under the impression that the Athlon will do SMP, but the current chipset doesn't.
I run 98 at home and NT Workstation at work. On my wife's machine at home she publishes a newsletter in MS Publisher. She also uses MS Word 97 alot in the process. She has to reboot her computer every 4 to 5 hours because of memory leaks. I haven't loaded any of the service packs for Office, so it's possible some of these problems may have been resolved. However, I would never try to do my job on a Win 98 system.
At work I write device drivers for Windows NT 4.0. My development machine (not my test machines) stays up for months at a time. It does crash a few times a year, usually after I upgrade the Novell client. But the NT kernel is pretty solid. It's reliability is in my opinion compleatly acceptable for a workstation, Win 9X is not even close. I don't manage servers, so I really can't give an opinion in that area. However, MS Word still leaks memory on my NT system. I don't have to reboot, but I do have to close the application and restart it every once in a while.
I'm not trying to tell anyone the MS apps aren't buggy pieces of crap, or that Win 9X doesn't handle memory leaks and poorly written apps well. However, if you're saying that the NT kernel is unstable, crashes often, and needs to be reloaded often, then you don't know what you're talking about. I've got test machines which I crash on a regular basis when I'm debugging my device drivers. I don't think I've had to reload one in the last year and a half. I had to reload that one because the code I wrote screwed up the registry beyond my ability to fix it. If I'd remembered to back up the registry that wouldn't have been a problem either. The key to now having to reload NT is to always run NTFS. FAT and the Blue Screen of Death do not get along well.