Herein you will find my meandering thoughts on case airflow and mass storage...
I am really looking forward to Serial ATA soon, as I am growing tired of the restricted airflow from the wide cables currently used for EIDE drives. Are any of you planning on picking up such a drive when they are released? (The controllers and hard drives should be available some time during the first half of this year.)
I just chuckle when I hear people yelling about ATA/133. What is the point of a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 133MB/s when the first generation of Serial ATA will offer about 190MB/s and clean up the nasty cable congestion inside our cases?
Of course you will not see such transfer rates except in burst transfers from your hard drive's cache unless you use a RAID array. What I like most is the increased airflow in the case.
I just wish there was a plan for Serial SCSI. The bottleneck in today's hard drives is the seek time, not the bandwidth. This is the only component in a modern computer that is measured in milliseconds. Everything else is down to nanoseconds. Until IDE hard drives speed up and offer seek times similar to SCSI drives (currently around 3ms), I will continue using SCSI for everything but archive storage. Since the hard drive is the main bottleneck in our systems, using a hard drive that has half the seek time of another can speed up your system by a factor of 2.
What are your thoughts on this subject? What else would you cleanup inside your system if you could decrease cable sizes to help out airflow? Better airflow means a cooler processor after all...
-Raystonn
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =
I am really looking forward to Serial ATA soon, as I am growing tired of the restricted airflow from the wide cables currently used for EIDE drives. Are any of you planning on picking up such a drive when they are released? (The controllers and hard drives should be available some time during the first half of this year.)
I just chuckle when I hear people yelling about ATA/133. What is the point of a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 133MB/s when the first generation of Serial ATA will offer about 190MB/s and clean up the nasty cable congestion inside our cases?
Of course you will not see such transfer rates except in burst transfers from your hard drive's cache unless you use a RAID array. What I like most is the increased airflow in the case.
I just wish there was a plan for Serial SCSI. The bottleneck in today's hard drives is the seek time, not the bandwidth. This is the only component in a modern computer that is measured in milliseconds. Everything else is down to nanoseconds. Until IDE hard drives speed up and offer seek times similar to SCSI drives (currently around 3ms), I will continue using SCSI for everything but archive storage. Since the hard drive is the main bottleneck in our systems, using a hard drive that has half the seek time of another can speed up your system by a factor of 2.
What are your thoughts on this subject? What else would you cleanup inside your system if you could decrease cable sizes to help out airflow? Better airflow means a cooler processor after all...
-Raystonn
= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =