The ultimate diy PC

[Vortex2]

to admit, but I want to make one. Problem is it contains about £8000 worth of disk drives.

[geoff]

In message , Vortex2 writes

6TB? - that's three hard drives nowadays

same screen resolution I have here

etc etc

[meow2222]

Thats so fast that the only way to improve on the performance bottleneck is to upgrade your brain to enable 5000x as fast reading. Probably need a big pair of eye muscles too, plus shock absorbers for the eye movement.

NT

[The Natural Philosopher]

It reminds of of the speed of computers before they invented windows..

[T i m]

Yeahbut the point wasn't the capacity but the speed (of the drives) wasn't it? I thought the general rule was more spindles = faster (not that those SSD have spindles etc). ;-)

It was a Samsung promo and I don't think they make GPU's but I think they do make memory.

I've always liked seeing what the nutters do with this sort of kit, save me having to try. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Or even the speed of computers with the older versions of M$ Windows (like V3.1).

When I was doing IT training, on the basic OS course we would install DOS, 95 then NT. I used to add 3.1 after the DOS stage as not everyone had actually used it and even fewer installed it.

Most were amazed how quickly it installed and how fast it worked (on faster kit than it was designed to work on etc).

I look after the old lady across the road and she's still happily running W98 and has done so for a few years now. I'm always surprised how nippy it feels, especially on an AMD K6-2/300. ;-)

However, it's not *just* M$ Windows that's slow (in comparison with CL OS's). I have a laptop here that runs XP quicker than Ubuntu 8.1 (and that's after I've tricked Ubuntu to install on only 192M of ram in the first place, XP goes on with no issues whatsoever).

But all this seems to be what we call progress. Vehicles getting heavier and heaver to accommodate all the gadgets and gizmos we and the Gvments demand but seldom use (both by (electric 'stuff') choice and hopefully (air-bags, SI bars).

T i m

[meow2222]

A few people still run 98 on modern computers, with 3rd party upgrades it can handle terabyte discs, 1G RAM etc, and omg is if fast. Vista OTOH is unacceptably slow on new hardware. Not long ago I tried an app on a new vista pc - it took about 2 minutes - that 98 on an old P3 with masses of software installed did in seconds.

People have a choice, and I do wonder why so many regard bloat as an upgrade, or why they decide to pay for it. 98 has its issues of course, but win2k seems like a practical choice for new hardware.

NT

[T i m]

;-)

Hmm. I don't really have any interest in Vista because I still have no idea what it does that I can't already do on XP. Same applies to W7, OSX and Linux (for me) but it's interesting to have a play with them now and again to see if / how they have progressed.

I think like many things in life it's partly because they feel they must ... must have that latest thing (even if after getting it they ask "what is it") or the few that actually need the things it has to offer. Also, as the world moves on some things get left behind so often you are forced to 'upgrade' to continue to access those choices.

Of course. I recently got back a little (P3/700Mhz/192M) laptop that had been running XP and I put back to ME (as per the Licence). Whilst it runs refreshingly quickly and is fine for most everyday stuff it's the little issues ... web things you can't access properly or_at_all that make it less practical.

I stuck that on a mates P3/1G the other day to try to see if the constant 50% background utilisation I was seeing in XP (even a fresh install) was an XP / driver or hardware issue. 2K went on and ran like a charm but wouldn't support DotNetFramework V3 and that was needed for the app my mate wanted to run (a Scalextric console controller). I put XP back on and finally pinned it down to an issue with the onboard audio card so disabled that, fitted an internal one and all is fine. ;-)

This Mac mini runs XP pretty well but I'm getting twitchy to play some games again so will (might) finish the C2D box I nearly completed over a year ago! ;-(

Oh well, back to re wring the scooter in the back garden while the sun is out (removed a Datatool alarm).

T i m

[tony sayer]

In our experience we were glad to see the back of WIN98 with its memory leaks etc.. WIN 2K was and still is much better:))..

Vista is .. well absolute s**te and Microsnot know it;!..

[Steve Firth]

It was only running at 2/3rds the rated speed of a single SAS/SATA connection, so there's still room for improvement.

[Steve Firth]

The other problems are that it's a f'ugly mess and why build a fast computer then cripple it with a lame OS?

[Rod]

I have actually just been allocated a Vista PC at work. It is acceptable in speed terms. That takes 3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM, a modest but decent hard drive and pretty well naff all else. Including little software!

[Steve Firth]

Most corporate laptops are now faster than the "supercomputers" I used to use in the 1980s. Yet because they are crippled by Windows they run slower in real-world tasks than the Commodore PETs that I used to use at the same time.

[Alang]

It doesn't always run on new hardware. I recently upgraded to a dual core 64 bit system. Win2000 pro ran but it was sluggish and the drivers supplied with the system were for XP or Vista. Ubuntu 64 bit ran okay but had no drivers for the printer. I finished up having to install XP pro to take advantage of the hardware. Where I have experienced a gain was on a W98 machine in MSdos mode running older software like Alpha4

[Jules]

Wasn't *that* long ago that £8000 worth of drives would get you about

50MB... :-)

[Ed Sirett]

For older computers you should try Xubuntu which is specifically intended to run computers with less resources, but without having to do without support for modern hardware etc.

[Andrew Gabriel]

I'm playing with an SSD at the moment. They are indeed awsome.

The video mentioned the data throughput, which is around 2.5 times the sustained data rate from a disk drive. However, the performance figure which is much more relevant for most apps (except copying a DVD;-), and much more dramatically improved over standard disks, is the IOPS (I/O operations per second). An enterprise class spinning disk gets you 200-300 IOPS (and a home system SATA drive will get you slightly over 100). An SSD can achieve somewhere between 4,000 and 80,000 IOPS, depending on SSD design, and having a disk controller which can cope (which most can't). That generates a mind-blowing performance boost to many disk intensive apps, particularly large commercial apps.

Next comes the clever part - solving the issue you identified. How do you get SSD performance, but with spinning disk capacity and spinning disk price? (As well as being small compared with disks, they're also much more expensive per GB, particularly ones with the same lifetime expectency as Enterprise spinning disks). Well, that's where ZFS comes in, which is what I'm playing with. I can create a ZFS filesystem which is split between a 32GB SSD and a 500GB disk, and because ZFS knows how to make best use of the SSD, I'm actually seeing a 500GB filesystem with the IOPS performance of an SSD (i.e. very much faster than I'd expect from the spinning disk). I've still got a lot more work to do here -- I only just started scratching the surface.

SSDs draw much less total power than a standard disk, but they draw it all from the 5V rail only and it's more than a standard disk takes from the 5V rail, which means you have to be careful not to overload the 5V PSU rail if you use a lot of them in an system which wasn't specifically designed for SSDs.

[Clive George]

Presumably seek speed is where there's a huge gain.

[Steve Firth]

You don't need to "trick" Unbuntu, just use the alternate CD for systems with less than 256Kb of RAM. Hell that was difficult, eh?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Yes, and loss of rotational latency (becomes particularly significant when you're heading into the 1000's IOPS).

SSDs also have significantly mismatched read and write IOPS. For the read-biased SSDs (which is what most of the ones you'll find are), the write operations are slower (the device I have is 4,000 write IOPS, 35,000 read IOPS). For write-biased SSD's (which are much more expensive), reads are the same speed, but writes are faster (probably where the 80,000 figure comes from).