In my aging 2GHz Pentium 4 system I find that multiple processes are much more often contrained by disk access than by CPU availability or speed. If I launch a first and then a second big RAR decode the speed of each drops by much more than half - even though my processor is still 80% idle. Launching a third or fourth decode is totally counterproductive since they all go at a snail's pace, but again my CPU remains lightly loaded. Things are little better if I'm decoding from one drive and writing to another.
The files in question are heavily fragmented (I can't keep up with that), but I don't feel that explains the large relative changes between one and multiple decodes running.
So even while I eagerly read about the high-end quads coming up, and plan for a new PC using one, I keep thinking that high speed disks will probably be much more important to me. I should probably forego the QX9650 and settle for something lesser, putting the money saved towards ultra-fast drives (and a really good graphics card) instead.
Does anyone have similar experience with drives being so major a bottleneck in daily (non-gaming) use? To put it another way... other than certain games, where will an ultra-fast quad be significantly better than a fast quad?
Arbie
The files in question are heavily fragmented (I can't keep up with that), but I don't feel that explains the large relative changes between one and multiple decodes running.
So even while I eagerly read about the high-end quads coming up, and plan for a new PC using one, I keep thinking that high speed disks will probably be much more important to me. I should probably forego the QX9650 and settle for something lesser, putting the money saved towards ultra-fast drives (and a really good graphics card) instead.
Does anyone have similar experience with drives being so major a bottleneck in daily (non-gaming) use? To put it another way... other than certain games, where will an ultra-fast quad be significantly better than a fast quad?
Arbie