Tuesday, October 21, 2003


Hard Drive Performance


I originally tried posting this as a comment on another blog, but it didn’t go through for some reason. I’ll post it here because a full clipboard is A Terrible Thing To Waste…

Sven has a problem with hard drive performance on his Powerbook. Well, this doesn’t directly address his issue, but I found this article (via Slashdot) to be very interesting — a reminder that cheaper isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just… cheaper. Sigh. For many years Macs shipped with SCSI drives by default, but ironically enough (in an Alanis sense) they did it when their machines were shipping a single-tasking largely unthreaded operating system that didn’t exercise the storage susbsystem’s potential. Now they ship modern OS with server tasks and real virtual memory and they ship all their machines (except the custom configured ones) with good-old brain dead (but cheap cheap cheap!) polled-I/O IDE drives. Why? Because the beige box vendors realized they could shave dollars off their bottom lines by bundling in cheaper (and in this case clearly less performant) hardware. When you have to compete on price with “the cheapest possible hardware that will work”, you don’t have a lot of options.


:: Dave Walker 10:45 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/all]
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Quite interesting indeed - both the information and the typical knee-jerk reaction of the IDE enthusiasts. I don't expect top notch hard drive performance from my Powerbook, it's a portable computer after all (if I want to unleash the power of SCSI I'll turn on my Mac SE - hehe). But I do expect my personal computer to get its priorities right. It should know that devoting resources to loading a folder full of icons for me is much more worthwhile than saturating a 100Mb/s ethernet connection for someone else to enjoy. Sorry about our server. It's slow, occasionally unreliable and tends to suck. And things seem to be getting worse :(



"I was drunk last night, crawled home across the lawn. By accident I put the car key in the door lock. The house started up. So I figured what the hell, and drove it around the block a few times. I thought I should go park it in the middle of the freeway and yell at everyone to get off my driveway." -- Steven Wright