What makes you a geek?

[Treesh]

I could cite many things, but I'll leave it with this.

When I was a student member of IEEE our chapter designed T-shirts with list of reasons EEs (Electrical Engineers) were awesome (or whatever)

My contribution was:

You can't spell geek without EE.

It was happily accepted and is on a T-shirt that I and several others still have. We sold over 1000 of those shirts (our campus only had 4500 or so students at the time and only like 400 were EE's).

I'm still proud of that phrase so yep I'm a geek. :)

No mention of party Chewbacca that was by the computers for years? For shame. =P

[Kevin]

No mention of party Chewbacca that was by the computers for years? For shame. =P

He lost his "lampshade"! He's still by the computer but I guess he finally sobered up. :)

[Concillian]

And actually U320 is still faster than 3 GHz SAS, not slower, at least with a single drive. U320 is 2560 Mbits/sec, 3 GHz SAS is only 2400 Mbits/sec. Albeit the bandwidth of U320 is shared among all the drives on the bus.

Speed of interfaces is largely irrelevant when the internal transfer rate of the drives is well under half the theoretical max of the interface. There are only two times transfer rate of the interface matters:
1) the data is stored in the hard drive's cache (very rare)
2) you are using a solid state drive (very expensive)

I used to use 15k RPM SCSI drives (I ended up getting them free, just had to buy the controller... I work for a manufacturer) But SCSI / SAS for home users is pretty much dead now. The storage geek home of the now and future is:
1) large network attached storage (multiple SATA, mirroring for reliability) for large files (video, music, etc..)
- It's cheaper to get 3 SATA drives and mirror them than a single comparably sized SAS drive plus controller. Reliability of SAS > SATA, however, reliability of 3 mirrored SATA > SAS.
- These types of files are largely not speed sensitive in a home environment, so speed benefits of SAS are minimal.
- Also serve as backup location for client machines (mom, dad, and kids' computers)

2) local drives, if you want fast, will be solid state drives. With large files on the NAS, the client machines can have relatively small HDs and the latency advantages of solid state drives far outweighs the advantages of SAS drives. These can be run on SATA, so you can appropriate budget from a SAS controller to the additional cost of the solid state drive.

Just my opinion.

And yeah, some of that is why I'm a geek. Some of it is the D&D1 books I have tucked away, and some of it is that I build and test my own home speakers.

[kandrathe]

And which of us hasn't done this?! Sheesh!:rolleyes:;)

Does it count if its a thinly veiled reference to needing your Space... the final frontier?

[Crusader]

Hooo boy.

I play D&D 3.5 and D&D 4.0. I also play Earthdawn, AD&D and Shadowrun now and then. I play about 2-3 games a week.
I assembled one computer. All the other computers I picked the parts and had some other geek assemble it. You know, geek delegation is a sign of ubergeekness.
I watched every star trek episode and movie, ever. By downloading them and watching through them all to make sure I got them all. TOS was boring so I shift-deleted that from my brain.
I started warhammer fantasy, but after attempting at this manual labor called 'painting' I realised my RSI infested shaking hands weren't up to the task.
I live by myself for half a year now. I ironed about five times, but only when mount laundry overflowed and landslides threatened me and my computer.
I have a tv, but only watch the news now and then. Because it has better pictures and goes faster then having to research it on the interweb. Everything else is boring compared to computer games.

Luckily I have a horsey that demands daily attention to prevent me into degenerating into the Blob's twin brother.

[Lissa]

Speed of interfaces is largely irrelevant when the internal transfer rate of the drives is well under half the theoretical max of the interface. There are only two times transfer rate of the interface matters:
1) the data is stored in the hard drive's cache (very rare)
2) you are using a solid state drive (very expensive)

I used to use 15k RPM SCSI drives (I ended up getting them free, just had to buy the controller... I work for a manufacturer) But SCSI / SAS for home users is pretty much dead now. The storage geek home of the now and future is:
1) large network attached storage (multiple SATA, mirroring for reliability) for large files (video, music, etc..)
- It's cheaper to get 3 SATA drives and mirror them than a single comparably sized SAS drive plus controller. Reliability of SAS > SATA, however, reliability of 3 mirrored SATA > SAS.
- These types of files are largely not speed sensitive in a home environment, so speed benefits of SAS are minimal.
- Also serve as backup location for client machines (mom, dad, and kids' computers)

2) local drives, if you want fast, will be solid state drives. With large files on the NAS, the client machines can have relatively small HDs and the latency advantages of solid state drives far outweighs the advantages of SAS drives. These can be run on SATA, so you can appropriate budget from a SAS controller to the additional cost of the solid state drive.

Just my opinion.

And yeah, some of that is why I'm a geek. Some of it is the D&D1 books I have tucked away, and some of it is that I build and test my own home speakers.

Yeah, I'm looking at setting up another game machine now for the next few years (sans video cards as those usually get updated every two years or so) and really like the speeds that SSDs provide, but paying $2.50 to $3 a Gig is kinda harsh considering you can pick up SATA drives and put them in a RAID 0 and get pretty high speeds while spending about $1 per 5 to 6 G (about a factor of 10 to 15 less for a little bit of speed loss). The only other problem with SSDs right now is that you have a limited number of writes before you pretty much lose the use of the SSD (which isn't bad if you don't plan to make many writes, but system drives tend to have a lot of writing going on, so that lowers the life expectancy of the SSD).

SSDs probably have another couple years of maturity to go before they start looking really attractive to replace spindle HDDs.

[Lissa]

Hooo boy.

I play D&D 3.5 and D&D 4.0. I also play Earthdawn, AD&D and Shadowrun now and then. I play about 2-3 games a week.

Let's see...I still have my D&D books from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, I have Shadowrun from 1.0 and 2.0, Earthdawn from 1.0 and 2.0, VtM 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, WtA 1.0 and 2.0, MtA 1.0 and 2.0, Kult, Call of Cthulhu 4.0 (because it has the best rule book funnies of them all...The Lair of Great Cthulhu sung to Chatanoga Chu-Chu is the best), and countless other RPGs that I played in one form or another.

I assembled one computer. All the other computers I picked the parts and had some other geek assemble it. You know, geek delegation is a sign of ubergeekness.

Pretender!

I watched every star trek episode and movie, ever. By downloading them and watching through them all to make sure I got them all. TOS was boring so I shift-deleted that from my brain.

Babylon 5 put Star Trek to shame.

I started warhammer fantasy, but after attempting at this manual labor called 'painting' I realised my RSI infested shaking hands weren't up to the task.

Expensive hobby by far. I started putting together a Skaven Army years ago, hoo-boy...so many figs to field a normal point army. Paiting was always fun, but the shear numbers was crazy at times.

I live by myself for half a year now. I ironed about five times, but only when mount laundry overflowed and landslides threatened me and my computer.

Don't get as many clothes, that way you have to clean and you don't have mountains building up.

I have a tv, but only watch the news now and then. Because it has better pictures and goes faster then having to research it on the interweb. Everything else is boring compared to computer games.

Only good channels anyway are Sci-Fi, History, TLC, and a couple news channels.

[Lissa]

I could cite many things, but I'll leave it with this.

When I was a student member of IEEE our chapter designed T-shirts with list of reasons EEs (Electrical Engineers) were awesome (or whatever)

My contribution was:

You can't spell geek without EE.

It was happily accepted and is on a T-shirt that I and several others still have. We sold over 1000 of those shirts (our campus only had 4500 or so students at the time and only like 400 were EE's).

I'm still proud of that phrase so yep I'm a geek. :)

We has something like that for the American Nuclear Society at the UofA

some randomly pulled from the list:

Nuke E's make better breeders

Nuke E's have better rod control

Stand back, I'm radioactive!

You don't need a light to get around at night.

[Maitre]

I could say any number of things, but I'll leave it at this.

I use spreadsheets at work to determine what gear to wear in WoW.
-- snip --

I have a similar love of spreadsheets: I maintain a spreadsheet during MLB regular season following the W/L record of the worst team in the league (Go Nats!), and a similar spreadsheet during NHL season tracking points accumulated by southeast division teams (Go Caps!). I also put together a couple excel/VBA based spreadsheets back in the day with details of the D2 SP Rune Words and compared against my character's holdings to see what was likely for me to get.

I have begun buying transformers toys for my two sons to play with when they're old enough (currently 3.5yrs and 1 yr).

I just finished ST:Voyager season 6 on DVD, and am expecting season 7 to start arriving via blockbuster later this week to complete my series experience.

I have read the five books in the Hitchhikers' trilogy (Hitchhikers' Guide, Restraunt at the end..., Life, the universe and everything, So long and thanks..., and Mostly harmless) as well as Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and the Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

I raced the 24hr Du Mans endurace race in Gran Tourismo 4 in A-Spec mode, just for fun.

I was a member of my college marching band for four years because I enjoyed the marching (as opposed to the free football). I was also the president of the local chapter of the Band/Service fraternity.

I'm currently working through a group of podcast feeds/backlogues of recorded role playing game sessions including D&D 3.5, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulu and others (thanks rpgmp3.com).

None of this gets me much real geek cred, but it's the best I can do.

[Occhidiangela]

Han Shot First.

That only matters when geek points are being considered.

[Concillian]

Yeah, I'm looking at setting up another game machine now for the next few years (sans video cards as those usually get updated every two years or so) and really like the speeds that SSDs provide, but paying $2.50 to $3 a Gig is kinda harsh considering you can pick up SATA drives and put them in a RAID 0 and get pretty high speeds while spending about $1 per 5 to 6 G (about a factor of 10 to 15 less for a little bit of speed loss). The only other problem with SSDs right now is that you have a limited number of writes before you pretty much lose the use of the SSD (which isn't bad if you don't plan to make many writes, but system drives tend to have a lot of writing going on, so that lowers the life expectancy of the SSD).

SSDs probably have another couple years of maturity to go before they start looking really attractive to replace spindle HDDs.

Raid 0 offers little to no performance benefit in average usage. Even in loading levels and such, I've not seen a review that shows substantial benefit. You improve transfer rates, which are generally a small part in the overall performance equation.

SSD on the other hand, exhibits real performance improvements
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc...i=3607&p=4
note the random read and write performance advantages that are something that RAID-0 will do nothing to improve. This is where the performance comes in.

The disadvantages of SSD drives disappear in the storage system I described.
- Networked large files negate the need for very large drives on the "client" machines. Documents, video and audio reside on the storage server, which takes advantage of the $ per gig advantage of SATA. SSD is still expensive, but a $300 SSD drive is comparable in price to a SAS controller alone, and works fine over SATA.
- Reliability concerns are removed by using a mirror array on the server. 2x cheap SATA drives mirrored is the most reliable thing out there besides 2x SAS drives mirrored. Personally I buy a 3rd drive and do a USB mirror every month or two, then keep it in a fire-safe or bring to work to protect against catastrophe.

The files on the SSD would be application data. Games, OS, office apps, etc... these are easily recoverable in the event of failure. Also there should be limited write cycles, though most modern SSDs will shuffle file write locations so the limited write cycles is a virtual non-issue.

Such a setup is not for everyone, for sure. My initial point was that SAS / SCSI for the home user is dead. Even if we look at a single computer, you can have an $80 GB SSD drive for the same cost as a 300GB SAS drive. So if you need 1TB of space, you buy a 1TB SATA drive for the junk where speed doesn't matter (or 2 or 3 for better reliability), then a SSD drive for the OS and speed critical apps. Cheaper than half the storage of 15kRPM SAS drives.

But an increasing number of families have multiple computers, and it begins to make sense to have a netoworked storage location for documents and such so they can be accessible from any computer. The middle-class home of the future will have a netoworked storage solution. Even some of the TV companies are going this route (AT&T U-verse, I believe Dish is doing this with their DVRs as well). It just makes a lot more sense than large drives at every point of access.

[Lissa]

Raid 0 offers little to no performance benefit in average usage. Even in loading levels and such, I've not seen a review that shows substantial benefit. You improve transfer rates, which are generally a small part in the overall performance equation.

It definitely does make a difference to running no raid. When you write data in raid 0, you are writing a number of bits across the the number of drives equal to 8 / # drives simulatneously, so with 4 drives, you are writing a byte across those 4 drives in the time it takes to write 2 bits. Yes, there's some overhead that the controller deals with, but saying that it doesn't improve transfer rates is a misnomer.

SSD on the other hand, exhibits real performance improvements
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc...i=3607&p=4
note the random read and write performance advantages that are something that RAID-0 will do nothing to improve. This is where the performance comes in.

The disadvantages of SSD drives disappear in the storage system I described.
- Networked large files negate the need for very large drives on the "client" machines. Documents, video and audio reside on the storage server, which takes advantage of the $ per gig advantage of SATA. SSD is still expensive, but a $300 SSD drive is comparable in price to a SAS controller alone, and works fine over SATA.
- Reliability concerns are removed by using a mirror array on the server. 2x cheap SATA drives mirrored is the most reliable thing out there besides 2x SAS drives mirrored. Personally I buy a 3rd drive and do a USB mirror every month or two, then keep it in a fire-safe or bring to work to protect against catastrophe.

The files on the SSD would be application data. Games, OS, office apps, etc... these are easily recoverable in the event of failure. Also there should be limited write cycles, though most modern SSDs will shuffle file write locations so the limited write cycles is a virtual non-issue.

Such a setup is not for everyone, for sure. My initial point was that SAS / SCSI for the home user is dead. Even if we look at a single computer, you can have an $80 GB SSD drive for the same cost as a 300GB SAS drive. So if you need 1TB of space, you buy a 1TB SATA drive for the junk where speed doesn't matter (or 2 or 3 for better reliability), then a SSD drive for the OS and speed critical apps. Cheaper than half the storage of 15kRPM SAS drives.

Right, but you're leaving out the problem I noted earlier beyond the price of SSDs, that being that there is a limited number of writes they can perform and system drives tend to have a lot of writes going on. Thus a system drive will wear out sooner if an SSD is used compared to a HDD. The average life expectancy of an SSD configured as a system drive is roughly two years from literature I've read.

Also, if you're looking for reliability, mirroring is not the way to go. If you want the absolute best reliability, ie better than 99.9999999% uptime, you go with Raid 6+5 (Raid 6 is relatively new using 2 parity disks meaning you must have a minimum of 4 disks to do it). In a 6+5 situation, you use 12 disks, but get very little usable space (effectively the combination of 2 drives in a 12 drive scenario), but, the chances of losing data is minimal (you literally have to lose 9 disks, all the same exact ones across all stripes to be toast, it just about takes a disaster that destroys your data center to lose the data). For conventional reliability, 1+0 is good enough, but I have heard of horror stories where even a raid 1+5 wasn't good enough (person I talked to had three campus data centers and a very bad thunderstorm came through, it killed 2 raid 1+5 arrays and almost killed a third). Overall, the higher the raid number, the more reliable it is.

But an increasing number of families have multiple computers, and it begins to make sense to have a netoworked storage location for documents and such so they can be accessible from any computer. The middle-class home of the future will have a netoworked storage solution. Even some of the TV companies are going this route (AT&T U-verse, I believe Dish is doing this with their DVRs as well). It just makes a lot more sense than large drives at every point of access.

This is why Microsoft is pushing their Home Server product. The idea is to create a centralized system that is meant to store the family's information and serve it to the various machines on the home network. This is also the general process behind HTPCs as well, making a single PC your entertainment center.

[Concillian]

It definitely does make a difference to running no raid. When you write data in raid 0, you are writing a number of bits across the the number of drives equal to 8 / # drives simulatneously, so with 4 drives, you are writing a byte across those 4 drives in the time it takes to write 2 bits. Yes, there's some overhead that the controller deals with, but saying that it doesn't improve transfer rates is a misnomer.

I specifically said it improves transfer rates. Increasing transfer rates by 50% or even 100% is not a large real world performance benefit. A very large portion of average transactions is latency, which is the large advantage of SSDs. Real world benchmarks with RAID have proved this in every review I've seen that bothers to test beyond using a synthetic benchmark or doing tests which are essentially equivalent to a synthetic sequential read test. My own experience with RAID 5 and a hardware RAID controller also left me with no actual perception of speed improvement.

Here is a pretty in-depth article on reasonably real-world benchmarks. A little old, but nothing has changed that will change the conclusion: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2004...html?page=0%2C5
The conclusion:

3. RAID helps multi-user applications far more than it does single-user scenarios. The enthusiasm of the power user community combined with the marketing apparatus of firms catering to such crowds has led to an extraordinarily erroneous belief that striping data across two or more drives yields significant performance benefits for the majority of non-server uses. This could not be farther from the truth! Non-server use, even in heavy multitasking situations, generates lower-depth, highly-localized access patterns where read-ahead and write-back strategies dominate. Theory has told those willing to listen that striping does not yield significant performance benefits. Some time ago, a controlled, empirical test backed what theory suggested. Doubts still lingered- irrationally, many believed that results would somehow be different if the array was based off of an SATA or SCSI interface. As shown above, the results are the same. Save your time, money and data- leave RAID for the servers!

When considering the initial point I was making (that SAS is a non factor to home users because the solution I outlined outperforms SAS in every way and also costs less), moving to RAID also will increase latency. Latency is a large factor in the end-user perception of speed. Consider that drives have somewhere around 100 MB / sec internal transfer rates, some are faster, but this is a nice round number.

Consider transfer of a relatively large file for the average user... 1MB, this would take 10 ms ( 1 MB / 100MB / sec = 0.010 sec). But the drive must find the spot on the drive where the data is first. Average seek times are on the order of 5-10 ms for 15k RPM drives and 10-15 ms for 7200 RPM drives. In an ideal world, only one seek is necessary, but in real life, you have fragmented files that may require 2 or 3 seeks until it's done.

So in a best case, user perceived transfer speed is about 50 / 50 on transfer and latency. In reality it's somewhere between that and 75 / 25 (with 75 being seek latency)

RAID 0 doubles the transfer rate, but generally gives a very small penalty to seek latency, we can assume this zero for the sake of argument. Still, moving from a 15k SAS to a 7200 RPM or even a 10k RPM SATA setup will increase latency by 50-100%, for what could be a net zero benefit over SAS, to a potential downgrade vs. 15k SAS.

SSD removes almost all latency, and dominates all mechanical drives in random performance, this is a large chunk of what people actually do, so it has a large perceived improvement from an end user.

-----

Right, but you're leaving out the problem I noted earlier beyond the price of SSDs, that being that there is a limited number of writes they can perform and system drives tend to have a lot of writes going on. Thus a system drive will wear out sooner if an SSD is used compared to a HDD. The average life expectancy of an SSD configured as a system drive is roughly two years from literature I've read.

Again, I mentioned this, you seem to glossed over major points in my post. I'll explain in more detail. SSD will track where writes are heavy and when they get more usage in one area of the SSD, it puts some block of data there that doesn't get written much and does the heavy writing somewhere else. If you're reading about average lifespans of 2 years from modern SSD drives, you're reading either outdated literature or someplace other than the places I'm reading:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
http://communities.intel.com/message/68106

Intel also claims to has solved (or at least greatly improved) the write cycle life span by reducing the 16 to 32 I/O operations required for each erase and write cycle in current SSD's down to 1.1 I/O operation per erase and write cycle. This alone would increase the life cycle of the SSD significantly and Intel claims that the wear-leveling performance over previous generation SSDs to be a full factor of 3 greater.

Estimates are on the order of 10-15 years unless you re-write your drive every few minutes. The future is today. SSD is a reality. This coming from someone who works manufacturing media for mechanical drives. Large scale adoption of SSD drives puts me out of a job. They are feasible today for the people who would be willing to shell out for a SAS drive.

Also, if you're looking for reliability, mirroring is not the way to go. If you want the absolute best reliability, ie better than 99.9999999% uptime, you go with Raid 6+5 (Raid 6 is relatively new using 2 parity disks meaning you must have a minimum of 4 disks to do it).

I don't want the absolute best reliability. I want "good enough" while being practical and usable. Again, the initial point I was making was designing a storage system better than SAS for cheaper.
Anything RAID 5 is impractical due to controller requirements. Parity bit calculations require real hardware controllers to have any reasonable write performance, which = big $$$, definitely more expensive than a basic SAS controller.
The other problem with RAID 5 is the issues that if your controller dies, you data is gone until you buy another controller. I used to use RAID 5. It works, but for home use it's not very practical, the controller becomes a factor in your reliability calculation, combined with the costs, it is not a practical solution for someone who is dedicating less than $1k to their storage system.

Mirroring is much more practical. A drive dies, and you have all your info on another identical, bootable drive with no special controller requirements, no special anything. When upgrading all your new motherboard needs is a SATA port, since there are plenty of ways to do mirroring without RAID. This is what I do now. The reliability of the system with 2 drives is already approaching cosmic coincidence level of probability, you don't really need more than that.

The other issue with reliability is that no matter how reliable your array is, there is a real threat of natural catastrophe (earthquake, hurricane, flooding, fire, etc..) This is where the 3rd drive in a firesafe or off-site comes in. Reliability of 2 drives is enough. Then add the third for the catastrophes.


Again, the point I was making was SCSI (SAS) in home usage. There are 2 main advantages to SAS: reliability and performance. My example was one that would outperform SAS in both areas while at the same time being cheaper. The points you bring are RAID 5 + 6? a 12 drive setup beats SAS in both areas and is cheaper? I'm not sure that in real world performance it actually is going to beat a 15k RPM SAS drive in performance, for one. It definitely won't beat it on cost for 2, a 12 port RAID 5/6 card that doesn't stuff write performance is probably around the same cost of 600 GB of SAS drives.

[Crusader]

Let's see...I still have my D&D books from 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, I have Shadowrun from 1.0 and 2.0, Earthdawn from 1.0 and 2.0, VtM 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, WtA 1.0 and 2.0, MtA 1.0 and 2.0, Kult, Call of Cthulhu 4.0 (because it has the best rule book funnies of them all...The Lair of Great Cthulhu sung to Chatanoga Chu-Chu is the best), and countless other RPGs that I played in one form or another.
Pretender!
Babylon 5 put Star Trek to shame.
Expensive hobby by far. I started putting together a Skaven Army years ago, hoo-boy...so many figs to field a normal point army. Paiting was always fun, but the shear numbers was crazy at times.
Don't get as many clothes, that way you have to clean and you don't have mountains building up.
Only good channels anyway are Sci-Fi, History, TLC, and a couple news channels.

Ooh, you have Earthdawn too, not too many folk have it nowadays. There's recently a third edition out by the way.

Of course I watched all of Babylon 5 as well.

And concerning TV, why watch TV when you can watch the same on your computer, only this time whenever you want it to.:)

Ooooh, forgot, I watch a lot of anime! Anime = geekiness, yay! Bleach, Ghost-07, Full Metal Alchemist, Full Metal Panic, Claymore, Berserk, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Death Note and many others I've forgotten, watched them all. In Japanese!*

*with subtitling

[Vandiablo]

Algol? That was my first high level language -- specifically Burroughs' Algol. I think I might still have the manual that I liberated from GaTech CompSci.

I should say I knew it. I'd have to brush up. Yeah, my first prog language.

Kidding aside, I've looked for years for a good text on Riemannian geometry that ties it both to Euclidean geometry and Cartesian geometry.

I just so happen to be writing a book that ties them together*. The publisher's intended audience is "there's this guy who likes Riemannian stuff".**

I have a pretty good ability to push the symbols around...

... and they are tired of it!

... but I'm looking for a better feel.

Hey, me too. I think a lot of people want a better feel.

-Van

*... and in the darkness binds them.

** j/k... the book I'm working on is "The Rise and Fall of American Snark: From Poor Richard to The Onion" ... j/k ... what I'm really working on is the next sketch for SNL's "Just Kidding" character ... j/k ... it's Weekend Update that I'm writing ... j/k ... etc.

edit: forgot "be". I hate it when I forget essence. *sigh*

[--Pete]

Hi,

. . . in . . .

:lol::P

--Pete

[Lissa]

Hey, me too. I think a lot of people want a better feel.

-Van

You mean cop right? :whistling:

[Drasca]

I just got intels new g2 ssd for my two year old laptop. Runs beautifully and the user experience factor in doing multiple things makes me breathless or to put it a different way, my swear jar is no longer being filled from aggravation with the mechanical hdd.

Price is always an issue but as for performance and experience this is the way to go. As for reliability and longevity my hdd's are generally either precluded from hitting the 1-2 yr mark from immediate (fails within first 6 months) or mechanical failure (read dropping it), or I expect them to start failing past the five year mark, at which point they have been long replaced. There is, for me, no getting around eventual failure and replacement, especially with more hdd's. So I expect these drives to last up to five and by then there will be a replacement lined up. Current estimated ssd write time was already mentioned but that is limited by use and not mechanical failure so for me traditional hdd's are just as bad or worse in terms of reliability. The more heavily I use my hdd's certainly I've had them fail more from it due to heavy mechanical spin and the associated friction heat and eventual failure.

So for me while price is certainly a concern, performance and reliability are far greater in favor or equivalent. I am using hdd's for storage certainly but all these applications, even video (since I had a slow laptop hdd) run much smoother via ssd. I am not going back for my OS / app drive. I'd rather wait to save more money and watch prices drop even further. No sense in going orders of magnitude slower and bakc to added stress in my impatience expecting immediate response an feedback from a computer that should handle it's computational load with ease but held back due to hdd as consistently the weak link.

[TheDragoon]

I use spreadsheets at work to determine what gear to wear in WoW.

I've spent more time in spreadsheets planning out chars for the NWN series than actually playing NWN in the past two years.

Me too, on both counts. :)

Some other fun ones:
- I lettered in math and band in high school (also track)
- I was a section leader for a college marching band and have performed solos during halftime of both college and pro football games (in front of an audience of 70,000!)
- My apartment currently has 3 desktops and 3 laptops for 2 people

[Lissa]

I specifically said it improves transfer rates. Increasing transfer rates by 50% or even 100% is not a large real world performance benefit. A very large portion of average transactions is latency, which is the large advantage of SSDs. Real world benchmarks with RAID have proved this in every review I've seen that bothers to test beyond using a synthetic benchmark or doing tests which are essentially equivalent to a synthetic sequential read test. My own experience with RAID 5 and a hardware RAID controller also left me with no actual perception of speed improvement.

Here is a pretty in-depth article on reasonably real-world benchmarks. A little old, but nothing has changed that will change the conclusion: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2004...html?page=0%2C5

Did you look at when this article was written? This article is 5 years out of date. Since then RAID controller technology and the HDDs themselves have been improved by using more cache to fetch information more quickly and prepare for future requests. By using caching technologies, data can be shifted to system memory more quickly and can allow systems to function more quickly. Even one of the initial graphs shows how much read time is effected by having multiple drives (with a read time on a single drive being twice as much as on two drives in a RAID 0, about 1.8ms to 0.9ms). Likewise, in the 5 year span that this article was written in, seek times have dropped by half what this article lists (going from aroun 8 to 9 ms to 4 to 4.5 ms)

When considering the initial point I was making (that SAS is a non factor to home users because the solution I outlined outperforms SAS in every way and also costs less), moving to RAID also will increase latency. Latency is a large factor in the end-user perception of speed. Consider that drives have somewhere around 100 MB / sec internal transfer rates, some are faster, but this is a nice round number.

Cost depends on if you have a controller or not. Newer MBs now are coming with two to four SAS capable ports on them, meaning that you don't have to purchase a seperate controller if you want SAS capabilities, only the SAS drives themselves. If you look at the prices of SSDs and SAS drives, you'll find that you typically are paying twice as much for an SSD of approxiamtely the same size to that of a SAS drive. (from Newegg: Hitachi 300G SAS drive and Super Talent 256G SSD

Consider transfer of a relatively large file for the average user... 1MB, this would take 10 ms ( 1 MB / 100MB / sec = 0.010 sec). But the drive must find the spot on the drive where the data is first. Average seek times are on the order of 5-10 ms for 15k RPM drives and 10-15 ms for 7200 RPM drives. In an ideal world, only one seek is necessary, but in real life, you have fragmented files that may require 2 or 3 seeks until it's done.

So in a best case, user perceived transfer speed is about 50 / 50 on transfer and latency. In reality it's somewhere between that and 75 / 25 (with 75 being seek latency)

SSDs still have the same issue as HDDs, they do slow down when performing non-sequential reads and writes just as a spindel drive would as well. If you look at the statistics of an SSD, you will always see it listed as sequential reads and writes, never random reads and writes. Articles I've seen from Tom's Hardware, Anand Tech, and a variety of other hardware websites that have performed true non-sequential tests comparing SSDs and Spindel drives have shown that in non-sequential reads/writes, SSDs are little better than their spindel based brethern showing speeds usually 3 to 4 orders in magnitude less than their sequential read and write speeds.

RAID 0 doubles the transfer rate, but generally gives a very small penalty to seek latency, we can assume this zero for the sake of argument. Still, moving from a 15k SAS to a 7200 RPM or even a 10k RPM SATA setup will increase latency by 50-100%, for what could be a net zero benefit over SAS, to a potential downgrade vs. 15k SAS.

Again, you're not taking into the effect of how little needs to be read from each disk in a RAID 0 array. Because of how RAID 0 work, information is evenly split across the drives in the raid array, this means that each drive has to let sectors and report that information back. If you take out seek time, as you're doing in your example, this means that the amount of data read drops dramatically as more drives are introduced (single drive vs. a RAID 0 of two drives is a 50% decrease in read time, a single drive vs. a RAID 0 of four drives is a 75% decrease in read time and a single drive vs. a RAID 0 of 8 drives is a 87.5% decrease in read time).

Likewise, as spindel speed goes up, seek time drops, as such a 15k RPM drive will find the data in a little under half the time a 7.2k RMP drive will find.

SSD removes almost all latency, and dominates all mechanical drives in random performance, this is a large chunk of what people actually do, so it has a large perceived improvement from an end user.

No, it does not dominate in random reads. As I noted above, random reads caused SSDs just as much problems as spindel drives. Where SSDs blow spindel drives out of the water is sequential reads and writes.

You're right on the domination, but it's in sequential reads (which is what most end users are doing, not random reads).

Again, I mentioned this, you seem to glossed over major points in my post. I'll explain in more detail. SSD will track where writes are heavy and when they get more usage in one area of the SSD, it puts some block of data there that doesn't get written much and does the heavy writing somewhere else. If you're reading about average lifespans of 2 years from modern SSD drives, you're reading either outdated literature or someplace other than the places I'm reading:
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssdmyths-endurance.html
http://communities.intel.com/message/68106
Estimates are on the order of 10-15 years unless you re-write your drive every few minutes. The future is today.

If you look at the articles from storagesearch, even he has contrdictory information on that page saying in one place 51 years, another 15 years, and still another 5 years (from one of the links in the white side articles that is recent). You'll also note that some of those numbers for life span have decreased as you increased in SSD size as well (which he eludes to in the article should be the oppostie with life expectancy incresing with drive size).

SSD is a reality. This coming from someone who works manufacturing media for mechanical drives. Large scale adoption of SSD drives puts me out of a job. They are feasible today for the people who would be willing to shell out for a SAS drive.

I'm not doubting SSDs are here to stay, but I am saying that the performance that you're stating is not at the levels you are stating. You are looking specifically at sequential reads and writes on SSDs and comparing it to random reads and writes, thus comparing apples and oranges. What you need instead to do, which I've read articles on at Tom's and Anand's is compare sequential to sequential and random to random and then take a look at performace of the technology types.

Right now, I wouldn't go with SSDs because the price to performance isn't there yet. (You're paying 8 times as much over a 7.2k RPM spindle drive to a similar sized SSD and you're paying 2 times as much for a 15k RPM SAS drive to an SSD.)

I don't want the absolute best reliability. I want "good enough" while being practical and usable. Again, the initial point I was making was designing a storage system better than SAS for cheaper.
Anything RAID 5 is impractical due to controller requirements. Parity bit calculations require real hardware controllers to have any reasonable write performance, which = big $$$, definitely more expensive than a basic SAS controller.

If you look at MBs out there now, you can buy a MB that has a RAID 5 controller built in for maybe a $50 to $75 more than a MB with a RAID controller that does RAID 0, 1, 1+0. Likewise, what really makes add in RAID controllers more expensive is not the RAID controller chip itself, but the connectors, onboard memory, and interface with the MB through the PCI bus. By having he controller on board, you interface with the PCI bus directly, you can use the memory on the MB, and you can use the connectors directly attached to the MB to connect to the HDDs.

The other problem with RAID 5 is the issues that if your controller dies, you data is gone until you buy another controller. I used to use RAID 5. It works, but for home use it's not very practical, the controller becomes a factor in your reliability calculation, combined with the costs, it is not a practical solution for someone who is dedicating less than $1k to their storage system.

How is this any different than a controller for SATA drives? If your controller goes, it goes and you're not going to be able to access your data until you have a working controller available.

Mirroring is much more practical. A drive dies, and you have all your info on another identical, bootable drive with no special controller requirements, no special anything. When upgrading all your new motherboard needs is a SATA port, since there are plenty of ways to do mirroring without RAID. This is what I do now. The reliability of the system with 2 drives is already approaching cosmic coincidence level of probability, you don't really need more than that.

Practical yes, reliable no. If you look at reliabilty with a raid, from highest to lowest it goes: 5+6, 1+6, 1+5, 1+0, 6, 5, 1, 0 (I leave out RAID 3 and 4 because no one really uses those technologies anymore). For the general home use, 1+0 is the more reliable and also very fast. It requires 4 drives to pull off, but with the prices now, you can get a TB of data is as fast as RAID 0 while mirroring it for aroudn $200 (which will only get you about 64GB on a lone SSD).

The other issue with reliability is that no matter how reliable your array is, there is a real threat of natural catastrophe (earthquake, hurricane, flooding, fire, etc..) This is where the 3rd drive in a firesafe or off-site comes in. Reliability of 2 drives is enough. Then add the third for the catastrophes.
Again, the point I was making was SCSI (SAS) in home usage. There are 2 main advantages to SAS: reliability and performance. My example was one that would outperform SAS in both areas while at the same time being cheaper. The points you bring are RAID 5 + 6? a 12 drive setup beats SAS in both areas and is cheaper? I'm not sure that in real world performance it actually is going to beat a 15k RPM SAS drive in performance, for one. It definitely won't beat it on cost for 2, a 12 port RAID 5/6 card that doesn't stuff write performance is probably around the same cost of 600 GB of SAS drives.

The point I was making is that in the highest level of reliability RAID 5+6 is the pinnacle and nothing short of a natural disaster or direct sabotage is going to cause you to lose data. The point I was making is not in a home enviroment situation, but in a reliability situation. For a home user, RAID 1+0 is the highest reliability that you should look at (requires a minimum of 4 drives). You stated that RAID 1 is highly reliable, but it's not as reliable as you state. Most cases it's going to be good enough, but not in all cases (where you may want both speed and reliability).