OK, live dangerously. See if I care.
Aw, you love it that I care. Fess up!
I just finished taking one of the online continuing ed classes I need for my contractor's license renewal. Boy, those bldg codes are sure fun.
Time for a good book.
-- Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself. -- Thomas Jefferson
BTW, I'm glad it didn't bother anyone that I misspelled TV in the subject line! : ) Of coure, "Cable TB" has it's own irony.
I forgot about your ahhumm, antenna stand. Good thing you did not make too much fun of my satellite dish platform at my sisters house. ;~)
I haven't checked the situation recently, but I think I got a good deal on my PCIe external HDD because of the lack of popularity of PCIe at the time. I think it's much faster than USB 2.0 as well, more akin to USB
3.0, but don't quote me on that. I can just say that it does what it's supposed to do quite well. What are you sentiments about PCIe?Cheers, Bill
Bill wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news1.newsguy.com:
PCIe's just the next generation of expansion slot. I usually prefer internal cards to external devices because it makes it harder to lose the device or for it to become distached.
For TV tuner use, the tuner matters more than the interface. If the tuner is doing the hard work itself, you only need to send the finished data to the system.
A PCIe external hard drive doesn't make sense. Are you thinking of eSATA? (Firewire and USB are common interfaces as well.)
Puckdroppre
Hell, it could have been used as hook to pick up the house.
Took a sawzall, a corded impact driver, a sparkplug socket with a long handled ratchet, two men, and twenty minutes to get it demolished ... we were afraid the house was going to tip over before we finished.
Still, it was easier than getting that kitchen "cabinet" out, and back in again, that you built/installed for her twenty years ago. :)
Gave "built to last/belt and suspenders" a new meaning ...
Puck,
Yes, it is surely eSATA. Sorry about the confusion. Are eSATA devices very popular now with the presence of USB 3.0? My motherboard (made by GIGA-BYTE) has USB 3.0 too, but I haven't used it. Strangely, its USB
3.0 shares a bus with its graphics card, so my graphics speed is supposed to be cut in half if I use USB 3.0. Not having used it, I don't know whether that means all the time, or only when the USB port is "working". I would guess the former.Cheers, Bill
The PCI local bus is a standard parallel bus used to connected peripheral adapter cards to the processor complex, via one or more PCI bridges. The PCI bus is pretty much obsolete at this point, having been replaced in most systems by the serial, point-to-point PCI Express bus (aka PCIe).
A PCIe root complex provides one or more SERDES lanes (usually in groups of four, 8 or 16) which use differential signalling to support fast serial transfers on each lane; the lanes can be grouped such that 1, 4, 8 or 16 lanes are connected to a PCIe endpoint (e.g. SATA adapter, NIC, Infiniband, Graphics card). The number of lanes (and PCIe generation) govern the bandwidth available between the adapter card and the memory subsystem.
Most new systems no longer have PCI peripheral slots (but may, internally within the chipset, use PCI-PCI bridges for legacy peripherals); but rather include one or more X1, X4, X8 or X16 PCIexpress slots.
I suspect that your "PCIe external HDD" is really eSATA (external SATA) connected to a SATA controller which interfaces via a PCIe Root Complex to the processor/memory subsystem. There is a new standard coming for SSD (solid-state disk) access via PCIe (Called NVM Express/NVMe), but it won't handle ATA drives (it's designed for plugin PCIe cards with large quantities of NAND/NOR flash chips on board).
scott
What brand of computer? Looks like my old Averatec I've been nursing along for years.
Bill wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news3.newsguy.com:
I'm not sure about eSATA devices and USB 3.0. I really haven't had a need for external drives since I set up a NAS box. The NAS box has eSATA ports, but I've never used them.
eSATA might turn out to be kinda like Firewire. The standard and interface has been out for years, but not a lot of devices use it.
Puckdropper
A Dell XPS M1210 ... built like a tank about six years ago, it is one of the most trouble free boxes I've ever owned. Dell does not make them like this any more.
Did have the mother board replaced by Dell a couple of years back, but that is the only problem its ever had.
And, it's been running ... badaboommm .... ...... Vista! for all that time without a hiccup. :)
Go figure ...
(I was sysadmin for 12 years for upwards of twenty geographically separated dns, nntp, http, and mail servers for a number of years, as well as moonlighting setting up and administering networking (all NT based) for a number of small companies during that time, so yes ... I do know/appreciate the difference) :~>
For non-consumer usage, eSATA is preferred. Will run at full 6Gbit/sec with SATA III ports. (SATA I - 1.5Gbits/sec, SATA II = 3.0Gbits/sec).
As a consumer, I'd prefer eSATA because the consumer SATA USB interface adapters are quite often junk (the drive itself is still SATA even when connected via USB).
USB 3.0 is spec'ed to do 5.0Gbits/sec, but there've been reports of cheap USB 3 hardware reverting to 0.5Gbits/sec (particularly when using cheap cables, but often for other reasons).
Not a bus, per se, but rather bandwidth. The port upstream (to/from memory) from the root complex handling the USB 3 and Graphics has bandwidth which is less than the combined required bandwidth of the super-speed (5.0Gb/s) USB and the Graphics. Common when using the DMI bus from the processor to a chipset providing legacy devices (USB, integrated graphics, SATA, et. al.) such as the ICH (Nahalem) or PCH (Sandybridge).
It's almost certainly the latter.
scott
I can see you really know your stuff! One just can't have enough communication protocals! ; )
Seeing the tiny little 32-GB micro-SD chips on sale for $30 or so (which plug into a phone, for instance), one has to accept that some things have changed! -- LOL. ; )
Cheers, Bill
Wish I still had my first hard drive just to show the kids. It was semi-shoebox size and held a whopping 20 MEGAbytes.
"G. Ross" wrote in news:K6-dnamdAuY6RP3NnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
It wasn't a Seagate ST225 by any chance, was it? It was a really common drive that fit your description.
I've got an IBM XT with a full-height hard drive. I don't remember the capacity, but it wasn't much. Somewhere less than 20MB, I believe. (I've also got a couple of the ST225s.)
Last year, we used punch cards in a chemistry class... Ok, we wrote on them like they were note cards because the instructors claimed they were easier to handle than 1/2 sheets of paper for the short quizzes they gave us.
Puckdropper
------------------------------------------------------- My first desktop was an XT clone with a 30 MB hard drive and an amber display.
Had an internal Fax card and a 56K modem.
Ran my business well into the mid '90's before the HD crapped out.
Lew
So the little 32GB Micro-SD card holds 50 x 32 = 1600 times as much!!!
I was thinking that multiple was 160, at first, and it's how many times smaller? Wikipedia says it's 15mm by 11 mm, or about 5/8" x 1/2" to non-metricians. Yep, 32 GB in 5/16" of a square inch. More than 32 billions bytes, which is 8x32=256 billion bits! More than enough to count even... Even 256 would be too many for me to count, unless I put them in stacks of 10 = F +1 (=2^4 -1).
Yeah, I know, F+1 = 2^4. That was the result of bad editing on my part, no doubt brought on by my euphoria...
When I started in the biz, we had the large 5MB (5ms latency) head-per-track disk drive (the size of a washing machine - the heads were pneumatically loaded, so each disk unit had a built-in air compressor and storage tank). We also had a bunch of 100-200MB removable drives. When we got our first memorex 3680 (1GB), it took a fork lift to bring it into the computer room. The 3682's were even larger, but fast (for the day).
Today, you've got helium-filled multiplatter drives coming this year from WD, and in a couple of years, heat-activated recording technology is poised to double or triple areal density, and there are additional technologies in the pipeline; not to mention the terabyte SSD's by Violin, FusionIO, Huawei, LSI, et alia. You've also got a couple of flash replacements in the pipeline with Phase-Change Recording (PCR) and Magento-resistive memory (MRAM).
scott
How about a USB 2.0 Device: Hauppauges "WinTV HVR-950 hybrid TV stick" (NTSC/ATSC HD TV reciever). This is handy since my wife already has one (I've got her looking for the software)! It being small, I expect it is leaving lots of processing to the host CPU which otherwise might be done by a tuner on a PCI card. True? It reminds me of the "hardware (phone) modem versus virtual modem" debate that the Linux people carried on for years!
Cheers, Bill
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