is it all hype? basically can current hard drive technologly really keep up? could the harddrive really handle as many things as the processor could without slowing to a crawl? i have a raptor and even a 300gb with 16mb cache, but im not sure either of those could perform a ton of things without some slowdown...
how much will dual core really allow you to multitask?
- Thread starter chinkgai
- Start date
RichUK
Lifer
- Feb 14, 2005
- 10,341
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HDD's do not denote system performance they just impact initial load times .. programs are designed to access big file stores as little as possibile due to the fact of the slow access times (latencies), thats why programs store the main parts of their program that needs to be accessed regularly in the RAM .. thats one of the reasons for having RAM so you can store large amounts of data close to the CPU(s), .. and the answer to your question would be .. you would literally have double the multi task ability due to a second physical core ...
RichUK
Here is a good, real life example. This weekend I was compiling a video using Windows Movie Maker (an application that uses threads to take advantage of the second core). Previously, on my Athlon XP 2800+ system it was lights out. I couldn't do anything when I was saving the movie. However, on my new system, windows wasn't even lagging. I was listening to music, using outlook to check my email and browsing the web at the same time and was having no problems.
That's the best way of looking at it.
Extracting files from 2 huge archives, however, would be a bad idea.. unless of course they're to and from seperate hard drives
Here's a real world "professional" example (in quotes because I'm just a somewhat advanced amateur photographer):
I often end up with close to one gigabyte of Nikon D1 RAW files to process. My workflow involves converting those NEF files into DNG files while copying them from the CF card using the Adobe DNG Converter. This conversion process can last several minutes or more, depending on the number of images to be converted.
Formerly, on my Athlon XP system, doing anything else during DNG conversion was almost impossible. Now, I can load Photoshop, start up the Bridge (which can take longer than loading PS!), check my email while the previous two are still struggling to get their boots on, and go track a FedEx shipment in Firefox while Outlook is still grabbing the latest messages from my email account. All the while, I have been listening to music with no skips or dropouts at all.
I :heart: my X2
N.B. some of this loading multiple apps at once stuff can get a bit sluggish on the X2 (I can always work on already-loaded apps without slowdown while the others open), but if that really becomes an annoyance, I can take care of it next year with an upgrade to SCSI for the disk subsystem. Still, a high-quality IDE hard disk with NCQ should be good enough for most multitaskers.
I often end up with close to one gigabyte of Nikon D1 RAW files to process. My workflow involves converting those NEF files into DNG files while copying them from the CF card using the Adobe DNG Converter. This conversion process can last several minutes or more, depending on the number of images to be converted.
Formerly, on my Athlon XP system, doing anything else during DNG conversion was almost impossible. Now, I can load Photoshop, start up the Bridge (which can take longer than loading PS!), check my email while the previous two are still struggling to get their boots on, and go track a FedEx shipment in Firefox while Outlook is still grabbing the latest messages from my email account. All the while, I have been listening to music with no skips or dropouts at all.
I :heart: my X2
N.B. some of this loading multiple apps at once stuff can get a bit sluggish on the X2 (I can always work on already-loaded apps without slowdown while the others open), but if that really becomes an annoyance, I can take care of it next year with an upgrade to SCSI for the disk subsystem. Still, a high-quality IDE hard disk with NCQ should be good enough for most multitaskers.
Indeed. The 2GB of RAM in my X2 system mitigates the "slow" hard disks (my Raptor isn't really as bad as I may be making it out to be, but I'm just complaining because I haven't reached that 100% total absolute silky-smoothness that I crave - the dual core upgrade did get me 95% of what I wanted, though).
GuitarDaddy
Lifer
- Nov 9, 2004
- 11,465
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You'll need more ram before you need a faster hard drive setup. Although if you can afford it, a 15k SCSI array is always a nice thing to have
With a Pentium 4 without HT, assuming that memory was around 512mb, and the south bridge was pretty decent, you could...
burn a DVD (bottlenecks erased using modern drive and XP drivers), watch an mpeg, play a mediocre game, download files, and run multiple smaller threads in the background
With dual core, you can do all of that, and up the level of multitasking. Intel will do more with multiple applications, whereas AMD's will handle fewer applications with a little more efficiency.
burn a DVD (bottlenecks erased using modern drive and XP drivers), watch an mpeg, play a mediocre game, download files, and run multiple smaller threads in the background
With dual core, you can do all of that, and up the level of multitasking. Intel will do more with multiple applications, whereas AMD's will handle fewer applications with a little more efficiency.
Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles
You'll need more ram before you need a faster hard drive setup. Although if you can afford it, a 15k SCSI array is always a nice thing to have
"always a nice thing to have"
if you're a gamer, a raptor would be cheaper without an array. therefore, spending the money on a nicer video card, for example.
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