Way to Revolutionize the Hard Drive?

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 9:36 am

basically, except it doesn't anymore. RAID 2 is no longer supported. i think it might be because its the only RAID that requires an external controller to tell the drives what to do, instead of just treating them like normal drives.

at any rate, the major bottleneck in hard drives is seeking, not reading data. according to my computer organization textbook here, it takes about 15ms to seek on a modern hard drive, and only 10us to read a block of data (512 bytes). so if you need to fetch 4 blocks in different places, 99.93% of your time would be spent seeking them.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Sat Feb 17, 2007 3:01 pm

So if the data was synchronized on the platters so that each head is reading a block of the file at the same time, data transfer would be greatly increased by having the heads move 1/8th of the distance on a 4 platter drive (each head is reading 1/8th of the file, all at the same time).

Post by **Sparkfist** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 7:05 am

Currently they are working to improve the speed of hard drives. New Hybrid ones that incorporate standard magnetic platters and flash ram are being tested. The addition of flash ram to the hard drive is to allow it to store data that is going to be loaded and so they're trying to move the bottle neck to the CPU or the FSB. An example of how this would work is just booting the computer up, the OS example they used is Vista (*Shutters*). They claim that the hard drive can pull information off the platters in the the flash ram and make it so a computer boots in under 10 seconds.

I find it funny that they're working so hard to make the hardware keep up with the OS. To bad Microsoft wouldn't consider the idea the something like TinyXP that can boot in 7 seconds as a possible stepping stone for a newer version of Windows.

Post by **bicostp** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 8:33 am

Problem is, TinyXP is missing a lot of stuff that programs need to function. (My unpatched SP1 box boots in about 15 seconds but runs almost everything I throw at it.) If you want a light version of XP, install 2000 SP4.

EEW Vista!

15 gigs of shiny BS. You know they're just going to bloat the system even more as the hardware gets faster. If you ask me they should have just taken the security "enhancements" of Vista and put them in XP SP3 (if they still plan on supporting it). For the majority of their market (enterprises and buisness applications) there is no reason to switch to Vista. Besides, all the web interfaces and applications they need have to go through pretty rigorous testing in a lab before they'll even think about upgrading peoples' computers. Upgrading to Vista would take a long time and cost realy large corporations millions.