Intel and Laptop RAID? 366
Might E. Mouse writes "The next version of Centrino, codenamed Napa, will support RAID. Intel is pushing it as a great way for business users to have added reliability and data backup on their work notebooks. Should boost gaming performance too. Anyone for 2.5GHz Pentium M, GeForce 7800 Go graphics and a 200GB RAID array? "
Re:WTF for? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WTF for? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not everyone will need/want it. Personally I'd keep mine in a RAID-0 config because laptop drives are low RPM.
Why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Additionally, Intel's new chips are supposedly VERY power efficient. If they can make future laptops with RAID sans the power problems... great.
But the real issue is probably COST. If you don't know what RAID is you aren't going to buy it....and its not going to increase cost THAT MUCH. But for those of us who DO know what raid is and either want increased performance or reliability.... there is a market! I don't really like having limited options when I'm making a choice, so having the OPTION of RAID is exactly what I WANTED. --Matt Wong
Laptop Raid (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure lots of "dont need it" posts today, only downside is battery life.
Screw games, work on some server logs and try to do some statstics, give me faster HD access now. (I upgraded my 5200 to a 7200 HD, night and day difference.)
typical intel (Score:2, Interesting)
MMX and SSE came in to boost the CPU's multimedia performance, so that people would be less tempted to take an extra, non-intel, chip to do that (for which they failed...).
The Centrino was an all-in-one Intel bundle so that you wouldn't buy somewhere else to get Wifi on your laptop.
Now it's RAID. I'm surprised, though, that they'd consider RAID a big enough market to include it in their chip. Or is it rapidly expanding with home-users?
Re:WTF for? (Score:1, Interesting)
If you have data that important on a laptop, it should be backed up to something else-- DVD, thumbdrive, pocket-size USB HDD, etc. Having a second drive in the laptop means that whatever ills befall your laptop, also befall your backup:
Laptop stolen? The thieves have 2 copies of your data, you have zero.
Laptop physically FUBAR'd? A lot of good that redundant internal drive did you, it's toast along with the rest of your laptop.
Re:Work backups (Score:4, Interesting)
Indeed. I learned this in an important, almost "hard" way.
I had my home system on a 2x120GB raid1 setup, with no spare. I made daily full backups to another stand alone disk.
Imagine my surprise when they both started acting up, in the same way, at the same time. Eventually, they both completely died on the same day.
What had happened was my power supply had gone bad, though not died. It was outputting dirty power, and slowly damaged both drives. It also smoked the on board IDE controller, requiring an add on replacement.
Why it did not damage the disk i had backups on, I am not sure. The only thing I can think of is that I always spun the drive down after backups.
So, excellent point you have there.
Re:WTF for? (Score:5, Interesting)
At the university I work some of the more overhyped IT courses lend laptops to their students. Of the about 1000 laptops in circulation there are maby 3-4 dead HDs a year, and it's all due to generous amounts of gravity. :D
/greger
Re:Works for me... but... (Score:2, Interesting)
For Blade Servers (Score:2, Interesting)
On a side note, the napa northbridge might soon be integrated into the pentium-m die, now they will have a fast cache and memory controller: http://anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=25
Offsite Backups (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Automation (Score:1, Interesting)
a)take them home at night (most of the reason they have laptops in the first place) and don't want to have to sit there for anywhere from 2-15 minutes while all the changes made since last synch are pushed up to the network every night when they logoff to head home and only actually turn the things on once at home once a month or so. If you schedule backups to happen "in the background" during the work day, you will either miss the most important files because they are open or the users will scream because the harddrive is thrashing about and making it "impossible to work on".
or,
b) are road warriors and are almost never in an office with decent connectivity to the network (most of the reason they have laptops in the first place). Most of the time they wind up connected through VPN by way of unsecured, dodgy wireless at their hotel/home and don't want to sit there for 20-150 minutes while all the changes made since last synch are pushed up to the network when they logoff.
Notebook RAID 1 makes perfect sense to me from a fault tolerance perspective for business users.
Notebook RAID 0 also makes perfect sense to me from a performance perspective for gamers who would like to be mobile.
The only concerns I would have with one of these systems is battery life. With 2 harddrives, a FX7800 GPU, and presumably at least a 15" display, I'm wondering if you could break the 2 hour mark...
I miss laptops. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't get it? ; onboard ; memory ; solid stat (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are willing to pay $50 per gigabyte of solid state mass storage, go right on ahead. I'll continue to pay 1% of that per gigabyte of mechanical storage until a truly competitive alternative emerges.
Keep in mind that the costs of fabbing 1GB of flash memory is going to be on the same order of magnitude as the cost of fabbing 1GB of RAM. This is because of the relative transistor and feature size complexities involved, so it is unrealistic to expect silicon-based solid state mass storage to be inexpensive unless there is a significant breakthrough that affects flash fabbing and not RAM fabbing, or some other, completely different tech becomes available.
How the hell will it boost gaming performance? (Score:3, Interesting)
- A.P.