- Joined
- Mar 18, 2004
Here we are on ocforums and it dawned on me: the CPU get's all the glory these days, but like the Windows Experience Index always says, you're only as fast as your slowest component.
I've done a little bit of research and hard drive capacity has increased at a faster rate than cpu frequency and ram capacity / speed, since my first Tandy 1000 TL/2.
It had 640kBytes of onboard ROM which served as a sort of a root partition. Settings were saved on a floppy. Now I have a tByte of disk space. That's an increase of over 1.5 million.
Hard drive speed, however, is comparatively unchanged.
The 1000 had an ST-506 disk interface capable of nearly 1 mByte/s. Those were the days when PCs were still "IBM Compatibles". These days, SATA II has an advertised throughput of 3.0gbit/s or about 375mByte/s. That means in 20 years hard drive speed has increased by a factor of only about 375x.
Compare that to the CPU. The 1000 had an 8mHz 286. I now have a 4 x 3.7 gHz ci7. That makes a total of 14.8gHz which, xompared with a mere .008ghz, represents an increase by a factor of 1850x.
Then there's memory: 128kByte vs 3 gByte = a factor of 24,000,000x.
And don't even get me started on Video. 1920x1200x2^32 vs 640x200x16!?! A factor of about 36,000,000,000x.
Nonetheless, my computer then was as fast getting from Power On to OS, or loading it's most resource intensive app, then as it is today.
Sure, on some levels that's an unfair statement. Look at how much more complex modern computers are. But I'm not blogging here, so let me just make my point.
These days software tends to take advantage of all that memory capacity and speed, and given a modest amount of ram and processor speed, opening menus, inputting text, moving windows and other mundane minute to minute tasks are pretty much instantaneous.
But when you are booting, or opening an MS Office or
app, or even just doing a lot of SATA I/O intensive tasks, you computer takes a hit. That's when you have to wait that extra 3 seconds for Firefox to open a new window. That's when you hear the glorified LP that is your SATA II drive, the only moving part in your computer that isn't a fan, struggling to read enough DLLs into memory to boot Windows.
To add insult to injury, IDE and SATA need help from the cpu just to move data around. That's why I've had a man-crush on SCSI and SAS for so long... those RISC processors built into the controllers are to disk I/O what a GPU is to triangle rendering. Without these you get the worst case scenario: Your computer is appreciably slower, and all you're doing is moving a few gB from one partition to the next.
But then here comes SSDs. Sure it doesn't have the throughput of SAS, but no moving parts. No noise. It just feels right.
...
Finally, in the process of writing this post, I encounter this: http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct .
Now something like that is the future, if you ask me. I'm not referring to this particular product. If the quality of the web site in an indicator, it's probably garbage. However, the concept is solid.
DDR-667 in a 2gB KVR DIMM runs about 20 bucks (US) is some of the cheapest memory that is readily available today. $20 will get you 2 gB. It has a throughput of 5.4 gigaBYTES per second, which comes out to 42 gigabits per second. (Compare that to 375 mb/s SATA II and its over 100 times faster).
The main reason not to endorse this is obvious: This gets you less than .1gB for your dollar, whereas cheap SATA gets you almost 13gB for every $ (a factor of 130 ).
But otherwise, what's the issue here? All you need is an interface on you mb fast enough to handle the rates (PCI-X 3.0?), some DIMMS, and a controller card for it all.
...
Anyway, to bring it all to a close, I assume you guys are the storage enthusiasts. Have you guys ever thought about that? What are your thoughts on the future of storage media? Do you envision a day when PCs come with two types of ram, one traditional and one for permanent storage?
More importantly, what kind of drives are you guys using, and what kind of performance benefit do you get if you invested in top shelf HDs? I've never actually used SAS or SSD or FiberChannel for myself, so I'm dieing to know.
Ultimately, my post is about this: in terms of performance, where does it make more sense to spend that $700 extra bucks? Getting the C i7 965 over the 920 or in getting a lot of very fast (and possibly very silent) disks?
I've done a little bit of research and hard drive capacity has increased at a faster rate than cpu frequency and ram capacity / speed, since my first Tandy 1000 TL/2.
It had 640kBytes of onboard ROM which served as a sort of a root partition. Settings were saved on a floppy. Now I have a tByte of disk space. That's an increase of over 1.5 million.
Hard drive speed, however, is comparatively unchanged.
The 1000 had an ST-506 disk interface capable of nearly 1 mByte/s. Those were the days when PCs were still "IBM Compatibles". These days, SATA II has an advertised throughput of 3.0gbit/s or about 375mByte/s. That means in 20 years hard drive speed has increased by a factor of only about 375x.
Compare that to the CPU. The 1000 had an 8mHz 286. I now have a 4 x 3.7 gHz ci7. That makes a total of 14.8gHz which, xompared with a mere .008ghz, represents an increase by a factor of 1850x.
Then there's memory: 128kByte vs 3 gByte = a factor of 24,000,000x.
And don't even get me started on Video. 1920x1200x2^32 vs 640x200x16!?! A factor of about 36,000,000,000x.
Nonetheless, my computer then was as fast getting from Power On to OS, or loading it's most resource intensive app, then as it is today.
Sure, on some levels that's an unfair statement. Look at how much more complex modern computers are. But I'm not blogging here, so let me just make my point.
These days software tends to take advantage of all that memory capacity and speed, and given a modest amount of ram and processor speed, opening menus, inputting text, moving windows and other mundane minute to minute tasks are pretty much instantaneous.
But when you are booting, or opening an MS Office or
app, or even just doing a lot of SATA I/O intensive tasks, you computer takes a hit. That's when you have to wait that extra 3 seconds for Firefox to open a new window. That's when you hear the glorified LP that is your SATA II drive, the only moving part in your computer that isn't a fan, struggling to read enough DLLs into memory to boot Windows. To add insult to injury, IDE and SATA need help from the cpu just to move data around. That's why I've had a man-crush on SCSI and SAS for so long... those RISC processors built into the controllers are to disk I/O what a GPU is to triangle rendering. Without these you get the worst case scenario: Your computer is appreciably slower, and all you're doing is moving a few gB from one partition to the next.
But then here comes SSDs. Sure it doesn't have the throughput of SAS, but no moving parts. No noise. It just feels right.
...
Finally, in the process of writing this post, I encounter this: http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct .
Now something like that is the future, if you ask me. I'm not referring to this particular product. If the quality of the web site in an indicator, it's probably garbage. However, the concept is solid.
DDR-667 in a 2gB KVR DIMM runs about 20 bucks (US) is some of the cheapest memory that is readily available today. $20 will get you 2 gB. It has a throughput of 5.4 gigaBYTES per second, which comes out to 42 gigabits per second. (Compare that to 375 mb/s SATA II and its over 100 times faster).
The main reason not to endorse this is obvious: This gets you less than .1gB for your dollar, whereas cheap SATA gets you almost 13gB for every $ (a factor of 130
).But otherwise, what's the issue here? All you need is an interface on you mb fast enough to handle the rates (PCI-X 3.0?), some DIMMS, and a controller card for it all.
...
Anyway, to bring it all to a close, I assume you guys are the storage enthusiasts. Have you guys ever thought about that? What are your thoughts on the future of storage media? Do you envision a day when PCs come with two types of ram, one traditional and one for permanent storage?
More importantly, what kind of drives are you guys using, and what kind of performance benefit do you get if you invested in top shelf HDs? I've never actually used SAS or SSD or FiberChannel for myself, so I'm dieing to know.
Ultimately, my post is about this: in terms of performance, where does it make more sense to spend that $700 extra bucks? Getting the C i7 965 over the 920 or in getting a lot of very fast (and possibly very silent) disks?
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