quote:

Originally posted by electricdragon/ madevilbeats:
Yeah, been trying to find a good disk utility for error checking the drive itself. Cannot use the one mentioned above as this is a laptop with no floppy support....

If your laptop supports SMART, there's always utilities that can check the error stats in Linux. And there's SpinRite which boots DOS off a CD and can error-check the whole thing via SMART.

Actually, the one thing that pisses me off royally about SMART is how free and easy with the allowable error count drive manufacturers are. SpinRite will be pointing out errors left & right and the drive will not have triggered to an error state in-OS. There is nothing more annoying than recovering files off a drive with bad sectors suddenly springing up all over it while Disk Utility merrily insists the SMART status is "Verified".

Tried TinyXP install, no luck.....

Researching replacement drives I noticed a few solid states are on the market. Anyone have any thoughts on these?

They still seem a bit too wet around the ears to consider, trying to get a handle on the cost-benefit factors here. Seems to be potentially faster and less power consuming, so maybe they are approaching being worth the premium price per gig....

These are really early days for Solid State Disks (SSDs).

The good news is they are now in reach of normal people at capacities that are usable. The 32GB for an XP filesystem being normal. More good news, they're fast and use very little power.

The bad news is they're still expensive.

You also have to configure your OS for their use. For example, SSDs don't write fast in proportion to their reads. So, its recommended to disable your page file, and increase your RAM.

Right now, the Intel SSDs are the best. However, they're US$800 for 64GB. Trailing behind Intel is the OCZ 'Core' line (OCZ has two lines) and the Samsungs.

If I was going to buy an SSD, I'd get the OCZ Core 32GB drive for US$100. This drive will format to about 29GB. There is a hefty rebate right now.

However, if you have a lot of files, it may be more prudent to get a Western Digital Scorpio Black laptop hard drive. the 250GB 7200 RPM model is US$120.

Storage space is not the issue; I already have over 1TB in externals....

You can get a 32GB SSD for around US$100 but I'd be into booting 3 different operating systems on a portable device so I'm guessing 64GB would be the minimum (~20GB each). Those're about $180 if you find a good rebate deal.

Beyond the speed bonus, SSD are silent and generate little heat. I have not seen reports on if they actually consume less power. Standard laptop drive pricing though is somewhere around $0.50 per GB vs the SSD price of $2.50 to $3.00 per GB.

I am wondering if anyone has noticed more heat and wattage in general being used by the 7200rpm over the 5400rpm standard laptop hard drives?

Broke down and got a 64GB SSD plus some sticks to max out my RAM on the Tablet PC. Should arrive in a day or so. Will post thoughts after using for a bit.

You get the OCZ Core for US$99?

Wonder why the write speed on those is so slow compared to read ... Does your tablet run noticeably different with the SSD?

It's the nature of the technology. I have not yet tried it as parts are in the mail.... Should be arriving sometime during my "weekend", that tomorrow and Friday.

I am anticipating that the programs will take just as long to install but be much snappier once running. Boot times should be much slower as well as wake from sleep. Walking into populated areas in WoW should'nt cause as much of a performance hit as the game tries to load everyone's gear.

System should run cooler too, hopefully! Certainly the HD will be quieter....

quote:

Boot times should be much slower as well as wake from sleep. Walking into populated areas in WoW should'nt cause as much of a performance hit as the game tries to load everyone's gear.

That's the peculiar nature of the technology. Sequential read (large, contiguous files) performance is nothing to write home about, but random reads (small files) are where it excels.

Nothing peculiar about it in my mind. Probably it's an averaged speed to find and pop an address, whether it's the one right next to the one you just read or not. Whereas the spinning disc involves moving the head from random point to point, which could be geat distances from each other, before being able to read. Sequential data involves not moving the head very far, reducing the find time....

Since SSD wears out over time as each address gets overwritten, it's even recommended not to defragment an SSD. Not peculiar, just different.

What part did you buy?

I would not worry about 'wearing out the bits'. I've seen several calculations, some of them under Enterprise-level workloads. It takes years for a memory location to wear-out. By that time, you'll have moved onto holographic storage, or something equally exotic.

The SSD of the future? Right now you'll pay through the nose: http://www.nordichardware.com/news,8136.html

Patriot Warp + more ram = happy tablet.

XPtabEd installed fine, OSX 10.5.2 installed fine. =) Still hunting down wifi driver for Leo before enabling tablet support.

Boot up is definitely improved. Have not tried loading Photoshop yet; would prefer to do that stuff on OSX once the tablet is enabled but for some reason the wifi is being a bitch to fix.

WoW working snappier on XP, still limited by crappy Intel video chip.

Did you install with the AHCI driver?

For some reason my ADSL bandwidth as dropped off 75% since I auto upgraded Azureus to Vuze - anyone else experienced this torrent throttling?

Who is your DSL vendor?

Some DSL vendors have been administratively throttling torrent traffic at their switches during 'business hours'. They now have the technology to detect the torrent packets and traffic pattern.

The technology is actually expensive, but less expensive than building-out their network to abet peer-to-peer networking of their customers.

You can verify this, by seeing your torrent bandwidth be high at 3:00 AM, but be non-existant at 9:00 AM.

I run 24/7 with AOL; Gold package here in the Uk with a 6mb line - never any bandwidth, torrent or quotas in the past. Was seeing 200k on downloads but now I'm lucky to get above 30k per stream last 2 weeks.

Gonna roll back to Azureus or maybe try BitTornado again tonight. Less is more.

The Azureus/Vuze switch was, I think, cosmetic without any major code re-writes (disclaimer - I don't use it myself), so I think that it's likely it's just a coincidence that your speed dropped at the same time as the upgrade. To eliminate Vuze as a cause I should download something easy to install like uTorrent and test the speed of that on a known torrent.

More likely is either your ISP changing their throttleing hardware/strategy or somebody with profligate torrenting habits moving in down the road and sharing your contended line. Housefulls of students at the start of term are good for this. You might also be able to check the date on the ISP's terms of use doc to see if anything's changed recently.

The other thing that might be useful to do if you're an ADSL subscriber is to visually check the telephone wires going into your house. A friend up the road just saw her broadband speed drop dramatically because the final drop of (ancient) BT cable nailed to the street facing side of her house had been damaged by people leaning bikes against it.

Cheers. No newbies in the street, but it is a very old BT line.

Noticed Vuze hadn't inhereted my old lie settings, seemingly installed with defaults. tweaked yesterday, to no avail. Maybe the ISP.

UPDATE: looks like its a common problem; Google to the rescue - Optimizing Vuze (formerly Azureus) for Speed to try tonight, before I bin it.