How many people here have called tech support and gotten someone with a thick Indian accent named "Steve"?
Not me. The three guys I talked to called themselves Mike.
Flash doesn't thrash (was Re:Exsqueeze me?!)
on
Why Vista Won't Suck
·
· Score: 1
Other people have pointed out lots of reasons why you are incorrect, some citing actual people who know what they're talking about. But in the end, it comes down to this: hard drive performance drags as you start to run more and more file-intensive tasks, because the hard drive thrashes as it tries to read and write data all over the disk. Flash has no moving parts, so throughput is more or less constant regardless of which part you're trying to read or write. That means no thrashing.
A RAID can attempt to address this problem, but it takes work to set up a RAID correctly, it isn't a complete solution, and in a typical office or home PC, nobody is going to bother. RAID also isn't nearly as cheap as a flash drive, considering that you have to purchase and allocate the hardware specifically for that task. Flash drives are cheap, tons of people have them, and most flash drives sit unused most of the time. That makes the performance gain from flash drives free. To think of it another way, the "I" in RAID may stand for "Inexpensive," but it can't compete with the "F" in Flash.
Oh...and don't call me Shirly.
Sounds like you got a good deal back then. I haven't checked prices on old stuff forever. I actually have a bunch of old computer stuff I got for free but some of it barely meets the minimum install requirements for NetBSD. I was just wondering what 128 MB would have cost back then since the person I replied to said he had 128 MB.
FreeBSD should have no problem at all on your old machine--you might even be able to run X! I was able to put NetBSD on a 486DX2/66, though it took me a lot of digging to find a floppy drive and enough RAM to handle the installer. I think the minimum RAM requirement is 16 MB, and at first I was trying with 12 MB and getting really strange crashes during installation.
Close--that would actually be a significantly upgraded mid- to late-90's machine. I bought my first computer in 1995, when the P100 was considered blazing fast. I actually ended up buying a machine with a 90MHz NexGen Nx586 chip based on the RISC86 architecture. NexGen was later bought by AMD and I think their Nx686 actually became the AMD K6. Back then 8 MB of FPM RAM (two 4 MB SIMMs) cost something like $275. Does anyone know how much the four 32 MB SIMMs would have cost? (...or even if you could have purchased such a gargantuan memory module for a PC in the first place?) Ahh, those were the days....
Slashdot Mirror
Not me. The three guys I talked to called themselves Mike.
Other people have pointed out lots of reasons why you are incorrect, some citing actual people who know what they're talking about. But in the end, it comes down to this: hard drive performance drags as you start to run more and more file-intensive tasks, because the hard drive thrashes as it tries to read and write data all over the disk. Flash has no moving parts, so throughput is more or less constant regardless of which part you're trying to read or write. That means no thrashing. A RAID can attempt to address this problem, but it takes work to set up a RAID correctly, it isn't a complete solution, and in a typical office or home PC, nobody is going to bother. RAID also isn't nearly as cheap as a flash drive, considering that you have to purchase and allocate the hardware specifically for that task. Flash drives are cheap, tons of people have them, and most flash drives sit unused most of the time. That makes the performance gain from flash drives free. To think of it another way, the "I" in RAID may stand for "Inexpensive," but it can't compete with the "F" in Flash. Oh...and don't call me Shirly.
Sounds like you got a good deal back then. I haven't checked prices on old stuff forever. I actually have a bunch of old computer stuff I got for free but some of it barely meets the minimum install requirements for NetBSD. I was just wondering what 128 MB would have cost back then since the person I replied to said he had 128 MB. FreeBSD should have no problem at all on your old machine--you might even be able to run X! I was able to put NetBSD on a 486DX2/66, though it took me a lot of digging to find a floppy drive and enough RAM to handle the installer. I think the minimum RAM requirement is 16 MB, and at first I was trying with 12 MB and getting really strange crashes during installation.
I found an even better link about NexGen.
Close--that would actually be a significantly upgraded mid- to late-90's machine. I bought my first computer in 1995, when the P100 was considered blazing fast. I actually ended up buying a machine with a 90MHz NexGen Nx586 chip based on the RISC86 architecture. NexGen was later bought by AMD and I think their Nx686 actually became the AMD K6. Back then 8 MB of FPM RAM (two 4 MB SIMMs) cost something like $275. Does anyone know how much the four 32 MB SIMMs would have cost? (...or even if you could have purchased such a gargantuan memory module for a PC in the first place?) Ahh, those were the days....