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I'm getting sick of super fast computers.

T

Theguynextdoor

Golden Member
Go to use a really nice SCSI setup, but goshdarn a setup is pretty expensive and sizes are fairly small.

When is HDD technology going to NOTICEABLY improve?!

Thanks for the rant.

Fix some spelling.
 
The I-RAM? if only 4GB of space really meant something it would be nice. 8gb would be better, but then the cost of the RAM... ouch
 
Originally posted by: TheSlamma
The I-RAM? if only 4GB of space really meant something it would be nice. 8gb would be better, but then the cost of the RAM... ouch
Click to expand...

The 8GB will be out eventually. It's not cost-effective, yes. But it's something different instead of turning up the RPM's and making larger caches.

 
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: TheSlamma
The I-RAM? if only 4GB of space really meant something it would be nice. 8gb would be better, but then the cost of the RAM... ouch
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Just a theory, once they start making enough of them and everyone starts buying them then maybe the prices will drop. May not be as low as HDD's but close IMO. Example: everyone remember when the 1st DVD players came out and how much they cost, or when the first DVD burners came out, just a couple of examples.
 
It's been this way forever. When I built my PII/350, I went with an LVD drive...it was a whopping 4G and cost $400, but I wanted the hard drive speed (I could have had a 12G IDE drive for that kind of money). And nearly all other systems I went up against (which at that time the PII/400 was the fastest proc) could only wish they had the same performance, especially when loading levels.

[heavy sigh] That drive is now in my secondary machine, which has a 1.6A@2.4. Not much use for the speed it provides now, and it's no longer a "huge" storage device, but I just can't let it go for some reason.

Now we have SATA, but the drives can't saturate IDE yet, so all that extra bandwidth SATA provides is hardly taken advantage of.

Something might happen to take advantage of the SATA bandwidth, but no info is leaking, and it's been a couple of years now...it might not happen.
 
I'm particularly interested in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
We got some nice, new IBM xSeries 366's last week, and they have SAS drives in them. They are the size of laptop drives, but with SCSI specs and SATA connection

 
Originally posted by: earthling30
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: TheSlamma
The I-RAM? if only 4GB of space really meant something it would be nice. 8gb would be better, but then the cost of the RAM... ouch
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Just a theory, once they start making enough of them and everyone starts buying them then maybe the prices will drop. May not be as low as HDD's but close IMO. Example: everyone remember when the 1st DVD players came out and how much they cost, or when the first DVD burners came out, just a couple of examples.
Click to expand...

I don't think the volume of RAM being bought for IRAMs is going to make a notable increase in the demand for RAM, so it's not going to be a result of economies of scale. There's the chance that the technology will mature further making it all cheaper but RAM is already pretty matured, there isn't going to be any earth shattering decreases in production cost in the near future.
 
It won't any time soon. By and large about 95% of the time spent loading windows/program/etc is spent on "seeking" where the arm moves to the next position of data on the disk.

I'm seriously considering getting a 2GB flash drive and installing XP on it. Boot and app load times should fall through the floor. It'd be great to have all your startup programs and MS Office/OO and Firefox on a USB drive.
 
Originally posted by: jlbenedict
I'm particularly interested in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
We got some nice, new IBM xSeries 366's last week, and they have SAS drives in them. They are the size of laptop drives, but with SCSI specs and SATA connection
Click to expand...


I got those too.. but HP

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/sas01.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/sas02.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/sas03.jpg

you can see its a lot smaller compared to the 3.5" server above

fyi for I rams.. you can buy the cheapest pc2100 ram.. i bought pc3200 from fry for 55/gb after rebate.. 4gb 220, 8gb @ 440.
 
Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
Originally posted by: jlbenedict
I'm particularly interested in Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)
We got some nice, new IBM xSeries 366's last week, and they have SAS drives in them. They are the size of laptop drives, but with SCSI specs and SATA connection
Click to expand...


I got those too.. but HP

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/sas01.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/sas02.jpg
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/sas03.jpg

you can see its a lot smaller compared to the 3.5" server above

fyi for I rams.. you can buy the cheapest pc2100 ram.. i bought pc3200 from fry for 55/gb after rebate.. 4gb 220, 8gb @ 440.
Click to expand...

sweet drives
 
Originally posted by: soccerballtux
It won't any time soon. By and large about 95% of the time spent loading windows/program/etc is spent on "seeking" where the arm moves to the next position of data on the disk.

I'm seriously considering getting a 2GB flash drive and installing XP on it. Boot and app load times should fall through the floor. It'd be great to have all your startup programs and MS Office/OO and Firefox on a USB drive.
Click to expand...

If you are implying a USB flash drive, or even a compact flash card; those things read and write much much slower than a current hard drive does; i.e. read at 12MB/s and write at 5MB/s (not exact bandwidth, just for the sake of what I am saying).

Most average ATA/100 drives read at around 50+ MB/s. I am not sure of write speeds though, but definately better than 6MB/s by far.
 
Originally posted by: ELopes580
Originally posted by: soccerballtux
It won't any time soon. By and large about 95% of the time spent loading windows/program/etc is spent on "seeking" where the arm moves to the next position of data on the disk.

I'm seriously considering getting a 2GB flash drive and installing XP on it. Boot and app load times should fall through the floor. It'd be great to have all your startup programs and MS Office/OO and Firefox on a USB drive.
Click to expand...

If you are implying a USB flash drive, or even a compact flash card; those things read and write much much slower than a current hard drive does; i.e. read at 12MB/s and write at 5MB/s (not exact bandwidth, just for the sake of what I am saying).

Most average ATA/100 drives read at around 50+ MB/s. I am not sure of write speeds though, but definately better than 6MB/s by far.
Click to expand...

Nah. 25MB/s is fine. Compared with HDD's, the seek times are infinitely faster. Writing doesn't matter, as all my files will be on disks. Its not like I'll need to write much to that 2GB once I have it set up.
 
But flash memory has a limit on writes. You wouldn't want to set your temp folder or anything like that on it as you will quickly wear our your drive.
Just a quick quote I found on the net regarding this, there are many more:

"Flash memory has a write endurance limit. This limit is the number of times the flash memory cell can be written until it can not be restored to its initial condition. The industry refers to this as the erase cycles. The endurance is rated between 10,000 and 100,000 erase cycles for different types flash memories."
 
Actually its more near one million, and as sectors go bad, the drive takes note and doesn't use them anymore. Also, if you write a 34KB file 1,000,000 times on a 2GB drive, it is not going to write it in the same spot, it will move it around evenly. You can fit 58,823 copies of a 34KB file into two gigabytes. This means that after 1,000,000 writes of this 34KB file, each sector of the flash drive will have been written to 17 times. Now being conservative, I bought a cheap flash drive, whose memory will begin to fail after each sector has been written 100,000 times. I've still got 99,983 writes left. That means I could write a 2GB file to this flash drive 99,983 times, or write that 34KB temp file 5.881x10^9 times.

I'm not very worried.
 
Originally posted by: soccerballtux
Originally posted by: ELopes580
Originally posted by: soccerballtux
It won't any time soon. By and large about 95% of the time spent loading windows/program/etc is spent on "seeking" where the arm moves to the next position of data on the disk.

I'm seriously considering getting a 2GB flash drive and installing XP on it. Boot and app load times should fall through the floor. It'd be great to have all your startup programs and MS Office/OO and Firefox on a USB drive.
Click to expand...

If you are implying a USB flash drive, or even a compact flash card; those things read and write much much slower than a current hard drive does; i.e. read at 12MB/s and write at 5MB/s (not exact bandwidth, just for the sake of what I am saying).

Most average ATA/100 drives read at around 50+ MB/s. I am not sure of write speeds though, but definately better than 6MB/s by far.
Click to expand...

Nah. 25MB/s is fine. Compared with HDD's, the seek times are infinitely faster. Writing doesn't matter, as all my files will be on disks. Its not like I'll need to write much to that 2GB once I have it set up.
Click to expand...

Knock yourself out if you are determined to do that. Add to the fact that USB also incures a CPU hit and you wont have DMA. It will be like running a hard drive from 1995 on PIO mode. I could possibly understand doing it with 1 to 2 apps; but an OS plus apps and what not. You have to much high expectations.

Plus you'll be surprise how much the OS writes to a HDD. Even with 2GB of ram and a disabled page file, the OS will still write data to the drive. If you have planned to set the USB drive with FAT32, 4.8MB/s isnt a whole lot of performance to do the job.

EDIT: I mention FAT32 since the OS will write to the drive with 32KB clusters at a time. No matter what the file size is.
 
Trust me, soccerballtux definately has the right idea. The scroll bar on the windows load screen won't even make it across once before you're at the desktop. Of across my flash drives are native SATA and very expensive.
 
Originally posted by: ribbon13
Trust me, soccerballtux definately has the right idea. The scroll bar on the windows load screen won't even make it across once before you're at the desktop. Of across my flash drives are native SATA and very expensive.
Click to expand...

Take a min and reread the whole thing. He is not talking about the high end expensive flash hard drives, much less SATA. I'm not sure where you read SATA in any of his or my posts since it is off topic. He is talk about those cheap USB "thumb" drives for around $100 for 2GB of space and using that as a hard drive.

EDIT: Though yes those real flash/hard drive are very sweet performance, but the price. Just wow.
 
True true, but there are 'CF to IDE' adapters. You could get a high x CF card and run it on an IDE channel. Most of booting is IOps not MB/s, so being limited to 5MB/s doesn't really matter. But going from 8ms+ to >1ms makes a world of difference. With nLite you can set the default folders so very little writing is done to the boot drive, and the doc/sets folder and page file are elsewhere. It can be done cheaply. Take one part IDE/CF adapters and add one part 100X CF card

 
I'm waiting on the 64GB SSDs announced by PQI that should be available this fall. Obviously, as ribbon13 states, devices like this have been around for some time, though at astronomical prices (I saw a 16GB SSD for over US$4000 somewhere, and that was the cheap, "slow" version!). What I hope is that Samsung and PQI will follow through with what they've said until now, and make the devices available at a more reasonable cost. If that happens, I would love to have two 64GB SSDs in RAID 0 for an OS and applications drive, though that's probably going to remain a dream for now. 🙁
 
Other than flash tech, drives are steadily getting faster. SATA should help bring SCSI speeds to the end user (we've already seen some of it with the Raptor and perp recording) - and then there's the fact that motherboards are becoming ever more advanced. Integrated RAID controllers that are actually decent...

Once we start getting better integrated support for more advanced levels of RAID such as RAID5 (which is actually available on a few high end enthusiast boards), I believe there will be more and more users going with RAID solutions to not only speed up their HD experience, but actually better protect against data loss (I believe RAID1 simply is too costly for your average user to seriously consider)

At this point, it just seems as though capacity of our traditional drives is too great to give up on for other options (especially when other alternatives are so expensive). However the introduction of newer and more demanding software might help speed up things a bit (the load times for Vista are particularly nasty)
 
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