Five Years of PC Storage Performance Compared

theraindog writes "PC storage has come a long way in the last few years. Perpendicular recording tech has fueled climbing capacities, 10k-RPM spindle speeds have migrated from SCSI to Serial ATA, Native Command Queuing has made mechanical drives smarter, and a burgeoning SSD market looks set to fundamentally change the industry. The Tech Report has taken a look back at the last four and a half years of PC storage solutions, probing the capacity and performance of a whopping 70 different notebook and desktop hard drives, SSDs, and exotic RAM disks. There's a lot of test data to digest, but the overall trends are easy to spot, potentially foretelling the future of PC storage."

why so many pages?

[timmarhy]

3 benchmarks for the same thing? oh right this is techcrunch they need to fill every page with as many stupid ads as possible, and draw out their pointless review to the point you gag.

summary - intel x25 is super fast, super expensive. not much has changed with spinning platters.

Re:Overall Trends

[JustinOpinion]

on one page instead of 12

The Firefox Add-on AutoPager [mozilla.org] is your friend: automatically loads the next page inline as you scroll downwards. Turns multi-page sites into the single page they are supposed to be. Works great with many popular pages, including search results... and idiotic news sites.

Re:Thorough article backed up with a lot of data

[blahplusplus]

"Slashdotters are always bitching about lack of empirical evidence for claims, yet when an article come along with abundant information to back up its conclusions, it dosn't get any credit."

The truth is the way the article displays the information is shit, they could have done a lot better job on information presentation... and anandtech did a big write up on SSD's a while back that should tell anyone all they really need to know until SSD's come down to sane price levels and storage capacities. Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time and has been written about better by anand.

Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1 [anandtech.com]

Re:I did such reviews FAR BEFORE Anand... apk

[Colonel Korn]

I think you didn't notice that the reason Anand's writeup is so useful is that he exposed the major performance degradation present in every SSD as it gets filled with data and begins to need to overwrite old data that was marked as deleted. I may be misunderstanding you, though, since your writing is incoherent.

Also, I've read Anandtech since 1997, so I'm pretty sure you didn't, as you say (with incorrect spelling, which is surprising from a journalist such as yourself) write these reviews "FAR IN ADVANCE OF ANANDTECH POSSIBLY EVEN BEING IN EXISTENCE."

"Everything published here isn't new, and has been known for a long time" - by blahplusplus (757119) on Saturday July 11, @09:23PM (#28664715)

And, I wrote about the effectiveness of Ramdisks in general + their potential for performance gain (software based ones @ FIRST), way, Way, WAY back, & in a respected publication no less, in Windows NT Magazine (now Windows IT Pro) April 1997 "BACK OFFICE PERFORMANCE" issue, page 61...

(& when it was applied practically? It took that same tech & company (EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com) to Ms-Tech Ed 2 yrs. in a row, in its hardest category, SQLServer Performance Enhancement, 2 yrs. in a ROW as a finalist no less)

Later on, circa 2002-2003, for SSD's?

I did a review that was featured on the FRONT PAGE of CENATEK's website with analysis much like the ones I did here (& was ODDLY "modded down for" here -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1299731&cid=28664527 [slashdot.org] )

"and has been written about better by anand." - by blahplusplus (757119) on Saturday July 11, @09:23PM (#28664715)

Then, I will say the same as YOU have, in regards to ANAND La Shimpi: He only "bit off my style", in doing HIS write ups... how's that? Don't LIKE IT?? See the above, write the sources noted even (CENATEK or EEC Systems/SuperSpeed.com, to verify my statements).

APK

P.S.=> On the "mod-down"? Hey - That's ok too, as I have my share of troll stalkers here, (sort of an online psycho fanclub, lol)) that "gets off" on trying to put me down any chance they get & I know who they are even... & on said reviews? They were done, on MY part, FAR before Anandtech EVER did them, so as you said? Don't think TOO HIGHLY of anandtech's work... it was proceeded by myself FAR IN ADVANCE OF ANANDTECH POSSIBLY EVEN BEING IN EXISTENCE... apk

Re:Great Technology?

[Zerth]

1) Rar it up
2) rename it to "world's best porn collection"
3) Bittorrent

I suspect you may be able to skip step two

Re:Great Technology?

[JayAEU]

Get an account on rsync.net and have all of your 15 machines rsync their data there. Might take long the first time, but from there on it will just fly. You could even use a trivial cronjob to do it for you...

Best of all, rsync.net will let you access your data through WebDAVs, so it's like you can take your data with you anywhere you like, as long as you can get online somehow.

Re:Overall Trends

[Ma8thew]

That's because Safari 'addons' are actually input manager hacks, which are theoretically designed to provide access for assistive devices on Mac OS X, but generally aren't. They work by dynamically injecting code into the executable. This means they can seriously break stuff if the application is updated, and can cause instability. I only use a single input manager hack for Safari, which is AdBlock. It's fairly simple, and hasn't broken anything yet.