Hard Driving

[cwin]

The battle for faster, more productive processors and video cards is still raging, yet hard drive speeds and technologys have taken a back seat.
We all know that while gaming may be the most fun use of a computer, the main reason they exist is administrative and office tasks.
People are going and buying faster processors, simply so Microsoft Word will start faster. I know my old 500mhz will start M$ word 2000 pretty slowly, but once it is going, its OK.

My 2.8GHz often takes longer to start Word because its hard drive is more fragmented. My startup times for word vary from 3 seconds to 25 seconds. 25 seconds is when i am low on RAM, and Window$ starts eating into my pagefile.

I have seen people with SCSI hard drives start MS word in the blink of an eye, with 1.6GHz machines. Most office applications are the same, it isnt the processing speed they need, it is faster hard drives.

They are bringing out technologys like SATA, but for the biggest speed increase, it will need to be in the drive mechanics. 7200rpm aint enough. We could all go out and buy SCSI discs, but we aint gonna

I think the technology race's emphasis should be put more on hard drives. Processors can only process as fast as the data that is being inputted, which is fine for things which run in ram, or that load all the required things to memory, like games.... but office & server apps are the real use for computers.

[CompGeek01]

SS (Solid State) drives will (and are) comming into exsistance. In a few years I predict that nearly all HD bottlenecks will be all but eliminated.

-B

[CausticNylon]

My Question is... if solid state Hard drives are coming out in larger increments than 1GB, wouldnt the heat that those chips put out eventually surpass that of the CPU???? not only that, but when will they begin using carbon chips rather than silicon????

Edit...

Also, if everyone were able to implement a proper RAID configuration wouldnt that increase speed and productivity???

[leprechaun_40]

Until solid state is worked out, I'm staying with my SCSI, next system I build (hopefully soon) will have no EIDE, IDE or SATA drives, just SCSI. I love the access times and the ability to read and write at the same time on a channel. :t

[urdvurk]

My 2.8GHz often takes longer to start Word because its hard drive is more fragmented. My startup times for word vary from 3 seconds to 25 seconds. 25 seconds is when i am low on RAM, and Window$ starts eating into my pagefile.

Well you might try defragmenting your hard disk on a regular basis, to keep fragmentation down as much as possible. Also you might try more RAM. If you regularly encounter situations when your pagefile is being used, adding more RAM is a cheap way to speed up your computer.

As for solid state hard drives: back in the day when DOS was king, there used to be RAMdisk programs that let you use part of your RAM (if you had a really large amount of RAM, like 4 MB or something) as a hard disk. Yes, it worked very fast (compared to the hard drive anyway), but the RAMdisk hasn't persisted. 80GB disks are aound $90 now. Would you be able to build a solid state hard drive of a useful size (say 5GB, for temp files or something) for that kind of money?

[crossedup]

Originally posted by urdvurk

As for solid state hard drives: back in the day when DOS was king, there used to be RAMdisk programs that let you use part of your RAM (if you had a really large amount of RAM, like 4 MB or something) as a hard disk. Yes, it worked very fast (compared to the hard drive anyway), but the RAMdisk hasn't persisted.

Thay were quicker then because every thing else was so slow. Tried one not long ago on my rig with 1 gig of ram and a 7.2 k HD. Used a 256 mb ram drive, loaded tiberian sun into it and then started it. Didnt start any quicker than pulling it off the drive.

They are still around and a thread still surfaces every once in a while but that test turned me off on them. Seems their used mostly now for temp files and such. Good idea i suppose but when i set it up like that and then tried to remove it, it killed my windows install.

[herosrest]

The trick is running the os swap file and drives in ram.
I fiddled and f***ed with Hyper os - definate potential to improve the computing experience.

Virtual pc's run in ram may be a way to go.

[urdvurk]

Thay were quicker then because every thing else was so slow. Tried one not long ago on my rig with 1 gig of ram and a 7.2 k HD. Used a 256 mb ram drive, loaded tiberian sun into it and then started it. Didnt start any quicker than pulling it off the drive.

My point exactly. Well, not exactly, but who's going to use expensive RAM for doing stuff a hard disk can do just as well, albeit a little bit slower?

Somewhat off topic, but it's still a mystery to me why doing the most basic stuff (copying files, switching apps, you know, stuff) still has to take a noticeable amount of time on a new 2.8GHz system. Which also, for some reason, is not 3 times as fast as an 850 MHz system. Well, maybe copying files isn't such a good example but you know what I mean.

[crossedup]

Tried it in 98se. Seemed that it added reg entries that werent there to begin with so restoring registry left them intact. Sounds wierd but that seemed to be the problem.

Got to the point it was putting temp files and temp internet files in 3 differant locations, not alternating, all at the same time, duplicates.

Ghost got me out of that mess in under 5 minutes. :D Good to have a plan. :D

[urdvurk]

It is indeed good to have a plan.

However could it be this post went in the wrong thread?

[herosrest]

Total Posts: 994,390 :rolleyes:

[crossedup]

Originally posted by crossedup
. Good idea i suppose but when i set it up like that and then tried to remove it, it killed my windows install.

right thread, was just replying to that and this.

The trick is running the os swap file and drives in ram.

Agree solid state better and fast CPU not very good unless they have data to push.

Gaming probably only best use of fast cpu's right now and they have two cpus and two sets of ram working on a faster substatially bus than just opening apps and copy and pasting. Solid state HD would work well for that and time will come.