Western Digital make such a thing. They don't necessarily recommend its use in a laptop, but it's been tried and tested. My Dell M1730 would not have a problem with it, for instance.
For sale in the UK here: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/300-GB-Western-Digital-WD3000BLFS-VelociRaptor-25-SATA-300-10000-rpm-16MB-Cache-42-ms
You would have been able to find this information using the trivial Google search term "10000 rpm laptop drive".
The thing with spinning disk technology is that it's extremely mature and stable. Drive failure rates are quite low. Data retention is exceptionally long.
SSD technology is immature. SandForce are bringing super-fast performance to the market but nobody knows how robust SSD's really are. Also, recovering data from a failed SSD might be a challenge, but recovering data from a failed HD is usually fairly easy (technologically speaking).
I'd love to have an SSD boot drive in my laptop but I'd be spending 150GBP on ~60GB of storage where I could instead spend 170GBP on a 300GB 10,000RPM 2.5" HD. Competitive performance, 5 times the storage and known reliability.
Spin power is proportional to the square of the radius only if the power is applied at the centre spindle.
Circumference driven motors exist. It's only a matter of time before the idea is applied to hard-drive platters. Lower power consumption and enormously reduced spin-up time, resulting in even more power consumption as the drive can be more aggressively idled.
A lot of corporations will not buy 3TB drives until the technical issues are nicely resolved. Then they'll not buy them because their fileservers are running SAS drives anyway. They'll also not buy them because 2x 1.5TB drives are cheaper than 1x 3TB. Probably still true even if they're trying to cram as much into a rack as possible.
I dread to think of the RAID5 rebuild time needed on such a large volume.
I've a 7+ year old desktop self-build with Win7 x64 installed. The only device with driver issues was my Audigy eX 1 sound card. I think that is nearly 10 years old. Got it to work though, after some work.
I'll be tempted to buy a couple of 2TB drives to expand the storage into a usable fileserver on that machine. After all, when the 3TB drive hits, 2TB drives will fall in price soon after. Even more so when WD release their 3TB drive.
At the moment 1.5TB drives are a sweet spot at around 69GBP.
If only Microsoft Office weren't so darned useful as a productivity tool with solid collaborative features. *sigh*
I have zero love for Microsoft but they time and again push out tools that make my home and work life much easier.
I have great fondness for Linux and UNIX-like OS's in general (with a special mention to the Haiku project) but whilst I like using them at home, they're fuck-all use to me at work. If we implemented Linux at work, it would cripple the business in the short-term.
Other businesses may be able to make a successful migration but in a small/medium sized company which has seen systems and procedures grow organically and haphazardly, any attempt to transition the IT infrastructure would be foolishly epic in its failure.
If the format was just slightly difficult to understand, one person would have figured it out. If it was quite difficult, a team of people would have figured it out.
That several teams, talented individuals and the combined power of the internets haven't figured out how to fully and correctly render a fairly simple.doc file, that speaks volumes for the format's obfuscation.
The regular kind? There's at least one supercomputing architecture which uses liquid squirted from nozzles onto CPU's, whereupon it evaporates. Very efficient cooling.
I'm a bit out of date perhaps (I read about this a few years back) but what is the regular kind that you refer?
I very much doubt an eSata connection would be considered anywhere near robust enough for a server environment. Especially such a specialised environment that the host company has decided an immersed rack/blade is a viable option.
Unfortunately, most users do not want to hear "this is going to take potentially a couple of days to fix and I'll need to take your computer away to do it", which is what can happen when you're presented with an unknown, transient problem which may or may not be related to the OS, a 3rd-party application, virus, PSU fault, RAM fault or motherboard fault.
Sometimes it can be quick to fix a problem. This usually means a driver needs an update (or roll-back) or a particular piece of malware needs removing. There are many problems which, if tackled head-on, may take longer and yield fewer benefits than just reinstalling the OS and configuring it properly.
If you're charging by the hour, it is perhaps more fair to take the least time to bring a PC back to a usable condition. If the user then has a professionally configured Windows install, they have added bonuses of a machine that likely boots much quicker, possibly runs a lot smoother overall and is a heck of a lot easier to maintain (should any after-sales or repeat visit be needed).
OK, those with a million 3rd-party apps, for which they have questionable sources (like the hand-scrawled "Photoshop" CD I saw just the other week) you might not want to sit through all those installs. It's something you have to balance between time VS usefulness VS value.
I have to mention this, because my 'must argue with the internets' nerve is tingling...
Does nobody else here think that folks smoking e-cigs look slightly foolish? I don't mean to detract from e-cigs health benefits or effectiveness in any way, but I just had to put that out there.
Admittedly, my only exposure was watching a video of a gentlman enjoying his e-cig whilst travelling by train.
He gave an unmistakable air of "look, I'm smoking. On a train. You can't say anything to me because it's an e-cigaratte. I *dare* you to say anything. Look. LOOK. I'm SMOKING here. Anyone?". The amount of smugness he was emitting really was magnitudes higher than any noxious chemicals.
You haven't factored in energy costs, physical space requirements or reliability. If you have 20 spinning disks, two will fail within 6 months (most likely) unless you've paid extra for e.g. an Apple fileserver.
I agree, but I think powerhouse desktop/workstation machines are becoming ever more niche.
You don't even need a powerhouse to play games, because sub-£100 CPU's are more than capable of running them. Even GPU's costing £100 are enormously powerful (though I'd perhaps stretch to a £120 ATI 5770 if I wanted a really good 1920x1080 experience). Anything more expensive than that and you're at the wrong tangent along the graph of the law of diminishing returns.
Powerhouse machines are for people doing crazy, niche stuff like tri-monitor 3D (as in the 3D which requires you to wear silly glasses), rendering their own 3D movies, designing Boeing aircraft, running physical simulations (finite element stress analysis, fluid dynamics) or zooming into Mandelbrot fractals a few hundred times.
Granted, desktops are cheaper than equivalent laptops (by about two thirds), but everyone has a laptop or wants one if they haven't. Most come with dual-core CPUs. The only problem is they generally don't want to spend more than £500 and thus end up with Intel integrated graphics, which probably struggle with even Half-Life or Painkiller-era games.
I'll always have a desktop PC, but times, they are a-changin'. It used to be that I did compute-intensive stuff on the desktop and internet stuff on the laptop. Now, my desktop PC is about half as powerful as my laptop. Granted, I spent £1800 on a laptop in Sep 2007 and I haven't upgraded my desktop in about 7+ years, but I got fed up of changing CPU+motherboard+RAM for every meaningful upgrade of my desktop.
Sony lie and lie and lie and people just continue to buy their products. Well, except they don't so much, these days. PSP-GO... oh dear, it's tragic how badly it's selling.
I almost want a PS3 for God of War 3 and FF13, but crippling restrictions and Sony's "f**k you" attitude to customers mean I'll never put any money their way.
Independents are where all the new ideas and originality come from now. Big name developers just copy or rehash old ideas.
That sounds like more of a sweeping generalisation than I intended, because there are good developers out there (Valve spring to mind). Sadly, they are the exception, not the rule. Some are clearly in the marked just to squeeze easy money from unwitting punters (EA spring to mind).
Well, see... nVidia are the only one moving in the right direction to remain a viable GPU manufacturer beyond the time when PC gaming really does die on its arse.
They are more interested in producing a chip capable to doing lots of stuff really fast, which just coincidentally means a DX11 and OpenGL driver can be written to make games look good.
It really depends on how much you want to spend on a laptop... but I understand what you're getting at.
Desktops may be on the road toward obsolescence, but I strongly believe there's a growing place for a PC in your TV stand.
TV's, these days, are an absolute marvel of display technology. Years ago (actually, 5), I spent £700+ of the bank's money to grab a 24" monitor (a Dell 2405). It's a great display (I'm looking at it now and I still think it's excellent) but I can walk into any electrical retailer tomorrow, pay less than £500 and I can walk out with a 37" or maybe 42" display with almost the same resolution, much lower latency, much better colour reproduction and more inputs (well, maybe, the Dell 2405 has lots of inputs).
Even something as simple as web browsing is now a far more social experience. I've had fun times with YouTube, a TV and a few drunk friends. It's also good fun to do gaming on a TV with mouse+keyboard with an excellently loud sound system.
I'm building a gaming rig / workstation soon and I'm fully intending it to be close to my TV to not only be a gaming PC (hey, emulated SNES on the big screen? Oh yeah!) but a media playback device too. PC's are great for doing exactly those things.
I pirate a *whole bunch* of stuff but I spend a hell of a lot more money on games and apps than my friends. Well, except my one friend who buys DVD's and CD's like he's frightened they're going out of fashion (which they really are). He still lives at home with mommy though, so he has a lot more disposable income (and gets his ironing done for him).
DS games get pirated to hell and back, yet it's a grossly successful platform. That, sir, is where your argument falls flat upon its expressionless face.
Rubbish single-player, non-casual PC games are holding back PC gaming.
As more and more tired, old ideas are rehashed into ever more off-the-peg 'build your own game with this engine' titles go on to flop, the piracy arguments get ever louder.
It's just so easy to say "We released this game 6 months ago and sales have been disappointing. Our information tells us that piracy has played a large part".
It's not helped when some niche (and maybe not so niche) publisher tries to be all 'edgy' and 'renegade' by shouting "we're releasing our game... with *no* DRM!", only for *that* game to be rubbish.
Good games sell well. Great games sell great. Even to pirates.
I'm looking at £500 for a really quite good gaming rig / workstation. That's with me building it, although I do note that OEM's are building very similar machines for almost the same price.
Except I don't skimp on motherboards and power supplies.
I'll be building it up within the next couple of months, by which time I fully expect ATI 5770 (or equivalent) will cost under £100 (they're around £120-140 right now). That's all I need to run Half-Life 2 with the cinematic mod:)
Unless Bose and the like remove a few nuances from their prices, most of us will never own equipment of high enough quality to appreciate every finger-slide down a guitar string, or the slight wheeze of a 20-a-day singer.
What mp3 (and other compressed formats) have actually achieved is *greater* perceived audio quality on cheaper hardware.
Amps and speakers have quite a lot less work to do to output the strategically reduced waveforms of an mp3 compared to a CD (or even a thunking great 24-bit, 192KHz master).
DirectX and, by defninition, the hardware that backs it up is merely a means to an end.
The end is an API with enough transistors on the other side of it to facilitate any effect anyone could ever conceive of doing with a screen full of pixels.
The furthest ahead I can conceive of is throwing raytracing (with all sorts of niceties like caustics) and solid geometry modeling into a GPU and having it spit out a 7680x4320 resolution, 48-bit colour, anti-aliased screen anywhere up to 120 times per second.
As I understand it, DX11 just builds upon the idea of being able to program a GPU into doing just about anything a graphics guy would like to achieve. DX10 had programmable this and that. DX11 just ratifies those ideas and broadens the horizon.
So, the question shouldn't by "why should devs adopt DX11?", rather "why shouldn't devs adopt DX11 (or other similarly capable API, like OpenGL)?".
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the laptop.
I have 2 in mine. Others are able to support 3.
Western Digital make such a thing. They don't necessarily recommend its use in a laptop, but it's been tried and tested. My Dell M1730 would not have a problem with it, for instance.
For sale in the UK here: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/300-GB-Western-Digital-WD3000BLFS-VelociRaptor-25-SATA-300-10000-rpm-16MB-Cache-42-ms
You would have been able to find this information using the trivial Google search term "10000 rpm laptop drive".
The thing with spinning disk technology is that it's extremely mature and stable. Drive failure rates are quite low. Data retention is exceptionally long.
SSD technology is immature. SandForce are bringing super-fast performance to the market but nobody knows how robust SSD's really are. Also, recovering data from a failed SSD might be a challenge, but recovering data from a failed HD is usually fairly easy (technologically speaking).
I'd love to have an SSD boot drive in my laptop but I'd be spending 150GBP on ~60GB of storage where I could instead spend 170GBP on a 300GB 10,000RPM 2.5" HD. Competitive performance, 5 times the storage and known reliability.
Spin power is proportional to the square of the radius only if the power is applied at the centre spindle.
Circumference driven motors exist. It's only a matter of time before the idea is applied to hard-drive platters. Lower power consumption and enormously reduced spin-up time, resulting in even more power consumption as the drive can be more aggressively idled.
A lot of corporations will not buy 3TB drives until the technical issues are nicely resolved. Then they'll not buy them because their fileservers are running SAS drives anyway. They'll also not buy them because 2x 1.5TB drives are cheaper than 1x 3TB. Probably still true even if they're trying to cram as much into a rack as possible.
I dread to think of the RAID5 rebuild time needed on such a large volume.
I've a 7+ year old desktop self-build with Win7 x64 installed. The only device with driver issues was my Audigy eX 1 sound card. I think that is nearly 10 years old. Got it to work though, after some work.
I'll be tempted to buy a couple of 2TB drives to expand the storage into a usable fileserver on that machine. After all, when the 3TB drive hits, 2TB drives will fall in price soon after. Even more so when WD release their 3TB drive.
At the moment 1.5TB drives are a sweet spot at around 69GBP.
If only Microsoft Office weren't so darned useful as a productivity tool with solid collaborative features. *sigh*
I have zero love for Microsoft but they time and again push out tools that make my home and work life much easier.
I have great fondness for Linux and UNIX-like OS's in general (with a special mention to the Haiku project) but whilst I like using them at home, they're fuck-all use to me at work. If we implemented Linux at work, it would cripple the business in the short-term.
Other businesses may be able to make a successful migration but in a small/medium sized company which has seen systems and procedures grow organically and haphazardly, any attempt to transition the IT infrastructure would be foolishly epic in its failure.
If the format was just slightly difficult to understand, one person would have figured it out. If it was quite difficult, a team of people would have figured it out.
.doc file, that speaks volumes for the format's obfuscation.
That several teams, talented individuals and the combined power of the internets haven't figured out how to fully and correctly render a fairly simple
The regular kind? There's at least one supercomputing architecture which uses liquid squirted from nozzles onto CPU's, whereupon it evaporates. Very efficient cooling.
I'm a bit out of date perhaps (I read about this a few years back) but what is the regular kind that you refer?
I very much doubt an eSata connection would be considered anywhere near robust enough for a server environment. Especially such a specialised environment that the host company has decided an immersed rack/blade is a viable option.
I'd guess SSD and network attached storage.
Unfortunately, most users do not want to hear "this is going to take potentially a couple of days to fix and I'll need to take your computer away to do it", which is what can happen when you're presented with an unknown, transient problem which may or may not be related to the OS, a 3rd-party application, virus, PSU fault, RAM fault or motherboard fault.
Sometimes it can be quick to fix a problem. This usually means a driver needs an update (or roll-back) or a particular piece of malware needs removing. There are many problems which, if tackled head-on, may take longer and yield fewer benefits than just reinstalling the OS and configuring it properly.
If you're charging by the hour, it is perhaps more fair to take the least time to bring a PC back to a usable condition. If the user then has a professionally configured Windows install, they have added bonuses of a machine that likely boots much quicker, possibly runs a lot smoother overall and is a heck of a lot easier to maintain (should any after-sales or repeat visit be needed).
OK, those with a million 3rd-party apps, for which they have questionable sources (like the hand-scrawled "Photoshop" CD I saw just the other week) you might not want to sit through all those installs. It's something you have to balance between time VS usefulness VS value.
I have to mention this, because my 'must argue with the internets' nerve is tingling...
Does nobody else here think that folks smoking e-cigs look slightly foolish? I don't mean to detract from e-cigs health benefits or effectiveness in any way, but I just had to put that out there.
Admittedly, my only exposure was watching a video of a gentlman enjoying his e-cig whilst travelling by train.
He gave an unmistakable air of "look, I'm smoking. On a train. You can't say anything to me because it's an e-cigaratte. I *dare* you to say anything. Look. LOOK. I'm SMOKING here. Anyone?". The amount of smugness he was emitting really was magnitudes higher than any noxious chemicals.
Maybe you want to deploy it somewhere you don't visit regularly...
Perhaps you have space constraints.
Perhaps you want to put it in a music production environment (which needs to be quiet).
There are any number of uses for $4k/TB silent, low-power storage. Not all of them will fit your idea of sensible, but some are still valid.
You haven't factored in energy costs, physical space requirements or reliability. If you have 20 spinning disks, two will fail within 6 months (most likely) unless you've paid extra for e.g. an Apple fileserver.
Plus: noisy.
I agree, but I think powerhouse desktop/workstation machines are becoming ever more niche.
You don't even need a powerhouse to play games, because sub-£100 CPU's are more than capable of running them. Even GPU's costing £100 are enormously powerful (though I'd perhaps stretch to a £120 ATI 5770 if I wanted a really good 1920x1080 experience). Anything more expensive than that and you're at the wrong tangent along the graph of the law of diminishing returns.
Powerhouse machines are for people doing crazy, niche stuff like tri-monitor 3D (as in the 3D which requires you to wear silly glasses), rendering their own 3D movies, designing Boeing aircraft, running physical simulations (finite element stress analysis, fluid dynamics) or zooming into Mandelbrot fractals a few hundred times.
Granted, desktops are cheaper than equivalent laptops (by about two thirds), but everyone has a laptop or wants one if they haven't. Most come with dual-core CPUs. The only problem is they generally don't want to spend more than £500 and thus end up with Intel integrated graphics, which probably struggle with even Half-Life or Painkiller-era games.
I'll always have a desktop PC, but times, they are a-changin'. It used to be that I did compute-intensive stuff on the desktop and internet stuff on the laptop. Now, my desktop PC is about half as powerful as my laptop. Granted, I spent £1800 on a laptop in Sep 2007 and I haven't upgraded my desktop in about 7+ years, but I got fed up of changing CPU+motherboard+RAM for every meaningful upgrade of my desktop.
This is SONY, folks. Backwards compatibility?
Sony lie and lie and lie and people just continue to buy their products. Well, except they don't so much, these days. PSP-GO... oh dear, it's tragic how badly it's selling.
I almost want a PS3 for God of War 3 and FF13, but crippling restrictions and Sony's "f**k you" attitude to customers mean I'll never put any money their way.
Independents are where all the new ideas and originality come from now. Big name developers just copy or rehash old ideas.
That sounds like more of a sweeping generalisation than I intended, because there are good developers out there (Valve spring to mind). Sadly, they are the exception, not the rule. Some are clearly in the marked just to squeeze easy money from unwitting punters (EA spring to mind).
Well, see... nVidia are the only one moving in the right direction to remain a viable GPU manufacturer beyond the time when PC gaming really does die on its arse.
They are more interested in producing a chip capable to doing lots of stuff really fast, which just coincidentally means a DX11 and OpenGL driver can be written to make games look good.
It really depends on how much you want to spend on a laptop... but I understand what you're getting at.
Desktops may be on the road toward obsolescence, but I strongly believe there's a growing place for a PC in your TV stand.
TV's, these days, are an absolute marvel of display technology. Years ago (actually, 5), I spent £700+ of the bank's money to grab a 24" monitor (a Dell 2405). It's a great display (I'm looking at it now and I still think it's excellent) but I can walk into any electrical retailer tomorrow, pay less than £500 and I can walk out with a 37" or maybe 42" display with almost the same resolution, much lower latency, much better colour reproduction and more inputs (well, maybe, the Dell 2405 has lots of inputs).
Even something as simple as web browsing is now a far more social experience. I've had fun times with YouTube, a TV and a few drunk friends. It's also good fun to do gaming on a TV with mouse+keyboard with an excellently loud sound system.
I'm building a gaming rig / workstation soon and I'm fully intending it to be close to my TV to not only be a gaming PC (hey, emulated SNES on the big screen? Oh yeah!) but a media playback device too. PC's are great for doing exactly those things.
Oversimplified to the point of ridiculousness.
I pirate a *whole bunch* of stuff but I spend a hell of a lot more money on games and apps than my friends. Well, except my one friend who buys DVD's and CD's like he's frightened they're going out of fashion (which they really are). He still lives at home with mommy though, so he has a lot more disposable income (and gets his ironing done for him).
DS games get pirated to hell and back, yet it's a grossly successful platform. That, sir, is where your argument falls flat upon its expressionless face.
Rubbish single-player, non-casual PC games are holding back PC gaming.
As more and more tired, old ideas are rehashed into ever more off-the-peg 'build your own game with this engine' titles go on to flop, the piracy arguments get ever louder.
It's just so easy to say "We released this game 6 months ago and sales have been disappointing. Our information tells us that piracy has played a large part".
It's not helped when some niche (and maybe not so niche) publisher tries to be all 'edgy' and 'renegade' by shouting "we're releasing our game... with *no* DRM!", only for *that* game to be rubbish.
Good games sell well. Great games sell great. Even to pirates.
I'm looking at £500 for a really quite good gaming rig / workstation. That's with me building it, although I do note that OEM's are building very similar machines for almost the same price.
Except I don't skimp on motherboards and power supplies.
I'll be building it up within the next couple of months, by which time I fully expect ATI 5770 (or equivalent) will cost under £100 (they're around £120-140 right now). That's all I need to run Half-Life 2 with the cinematic mod :)
Unless Bose and the like remove a few nuances from their prices, most of us will never own equipment of high enough quality to appreciate every finger-slide down a guitar string, or the slight wheeze of a 20-a-day singer.
What mp3 (and other compressed formats) have actually achieved is *greater* perceived audio quality on cheaper hardware.
Amps and speakers have quite a lot less work to do to output the strategically reduced waveforms of an mp3 compared to a CD (or even a thunking great 24-bit, 192KHz master).
Anything that isn't running at your monitor's native resolution at your monitor's native refresh rate *will* detract from your perceived immersion.
It's a complex subject, which really doesn't survive past your exaggerative argument.
Let's just say that Forza and PGR are good games, but Forza does a better job of quickening my pulse because it manages to maintain a 60Hz refresh.
So, yes, I say... bring on 12000x9000 pixels displays and realer-than-real refresh rates :)
DirectX and, by defninition, the hardware that backs it up is merely a means to an end.
The end is an API with enough transistors on the other side of it to facilitate any effect anyone could ever conceive of doing with a screen full of pixels.
The furthest ahead I can conceive of is throwing raytracing (with all sorts of niceties like caustics) and solid geometry modeling into a GPU and having it spit out a 7680x4320 resolution, 48-bit colour, anti-aliased screen anywhere up to 120 times per second.
As I understand it, DX11 just builds upon the idea of being able to program a GPU into doing just about anything a graphics guy would like to achieve. DX10 had programmable this and that. DX11 just ratifies those ideas and broadens the horizon.
So, the question shouldn't by "why should devs adopt DX11?", rather "why shouldn't devs adopt DX11 (or other similarly capable API, like OpenGL)?".