(to fezz)
Just to reiterate -- the maximum transfer rate of a 40x cd-rom is 6 MB/s. The maximum sustained transfer rate of a hard drive lies anywhere between 5 and 20MB/s for a modern drive. The PCI bus (upon which the ide controller lies), is capable of 133MB/s peak, assuming a 33mhz PCI bus speed. It's not physically possible to underclock your PCI bus enough to make it become even close to a bottleneck to the ide transfers in this scenario. Nor is it possible to make the memory or FSB speed become the bottleneck - they are 100% ignorable for our purposes here.
As I said before, a Pentium 100 (with a 66mhz FSB, versus the 400mhz of the P4) is fully capable of copying files from the cd at the exact same rate (fast enough to saturate the cd reader and the hard drive) as the P4. Physical media is so much slower than the supporting hardware that it renders it nearly irrelevant. The only thing that could cause his problems here are a software configuration error (such as a virus scanner in the background), or a hardware configuration error related to the ide bus (such as pio instead of DMA mode, or having the hd and cd-rom share a channel, having block/burst mode disabled, etc.)
I you have one car driving down Interstate 5, and decide to close 3 of the five lanes, you've "technically" created a bottleneck, very similarly to your FSB/memory speed argument. The car isn't going to go any slower however, becuase it was using so little of the available resources already that taking half of them away makes no difference. Same concept applies here. If you had a dual-channel caching scsi raid controller on the PCI bus, with 8 drives hooked up to it, we might be looking at a difference, but not in this case.
The SCSI versus IDE debate is moot as well in this scenario, as long as the hard drive and cd-rom were mounted on separate channels. We're talking about 6MB/s transfer here, which is easily sustainable by any modern incarnation of the ide standard.
Just to reiterate -- the maximum transfer rate of a 40x cd-rom is 6 MB/s. The maximum sustained transfer rate of a hard drive lies anywhere between 5 and 20MB/s for a modern drive. The PCI bus (upon which the ide controller lies), is capable of 133MB/s peak, assuming a 33mhz PCI bus speed. It's not physically possible to underclock your PCI bus enough to make it become even close to a bottleneck to the ide transfers in this scenario. Nor is it possible to make the memory or FSB speed become the bottleneck - they are 100% ignorable for our purposes here.
As I said before, a Pentium 100 (with a 66mhz FSB, versus the 400mhz of the P4) is fully capable of copying files from the cd at the exact same rate (fast enough to saturate the cd reader and the hard drive) as the P4. Physical media is so much slower than the supporting hardware that it renders it nearly irrelevant. The only thing that could cause his problems here are a software configuration error (such as a virus scanner in the background), or a hardware configuration error related to the ide bus (such as pio instead of DMA mode, or having the hd and cd-rom share a channel, having block/burst mode disabled, etc.)
I you have one car driving down Interstate 5, and decide to close 3 of the five lanes, you've "technically" created a bottleneck, very similarly to your FSB/memory speed argument. The car isn't going to go any slower however, becuase it was using so little of the available resources already that taking half of them away makes no difference. Same concept applies here. If you had a dual-channel caching scsi raid controller on the PCI bus, with 8 drives hooked up to it, we might be looking at a difference, but not in this case.
The SCSI versus IDE debate is moot as well in this scenario, as long as the hard drive and cd-rom were mounted on separate channels. We're talking about 6MB/s transfer here, which is easily sustainable by any modern incarnation of the ide standard.
Doei is the sound dutch cows make, Frank !
MacOS X is based on FreeBSD for PowerPC ( called Darwin at Apple ) with a shell on it that's called Aqua. There is a fair bit of NextStep in it too. It is a very well thought-out OS. Take for example the screenoutput in PDF format ! Stepless zooming in or out the icon of the harddisk really shows you a picture of a harddisk ! Regardless of the fact that we might not really need this it technically is impressive. IMO the looks are a bit overdone. But I will buy it the day that it is available for X86 ( and that day will come ! )
You're very right about this one. Please see the advertisements for Apple's beautyful first real servers. The words Unix/Linux return a lot and I even read "NT compatibility"
MacOS X is based on FreeBSD for PowerPC ( called Darwin at Apple ) with a shell on it that's called Aqua. There is a fair bit of NextStep in it too. It is a very well thought-out OS. Take for example the screenoutput in PDF format ! Stepless zooming in or out the icon of the harddisk really shows you a picture of a harddisk ! Regardless of the fact that we might not really need this it technically is impressive. IMO the looks are a bit overdone. But I will buy it the day that it is available for X86 ( and that day will come ! )
You're very right about this one. Please see the advertisements for Apple's beautyful first real servers. The words Unix/Linux return a lot and I even read "NT compatibility"
I'll say it again:
DEFRAGMENT!
Not true at all, espeically if he's copying a lot of little files to the hard drive, buring to CD, deleting them, burning CD's .. that's a recipie for disaster.
It can double the apparent speed of your PC. I've seen this in the real world and in bench marks.
Virus checking and the indexing software can make a difference also, as others noted.
DEFRAGMENT!
Not true at all, espeically if he's copying a lot of little files to the hard drive, buring to CD, deleting them, burning CD's .. that's a recipie for disaster.
It can double the apparent speed of your PC. I've seen this in the real world and in bench marks.
Virus checking and the indexing software can make a difference also, as others noted.
ThingyNess said:
i see your point, but we are not talking about just one car, we are talking about many cars - 6MB/s may not sound much, but remember that it is about the same at the average home network (10Mbit - 8 bits in a byte)
and also remember that we are using theroy - a slower front side bus will result in a slower data transfer - this is due to the chipset and ram - also remember that we canot get up to 100% efficant - you are looking at between 70-90% in most cases
i suggest you download a benchmarking program by SISoft called SANDRA, it can test the maximum data transfer rate rate for computers - a P233MMX achives around 16MB/s - this computer is close to a beige G3 - bear in ming my computer - and most mordern computer are not limited by the ront side bus anymore - mine achives 1700MB/s
SiSoft also benchmarks harddisks and CD drives - my CD drive achived much greater then 6MB/s - 29MB/s! my hard disk also achives a substainable transfer rate of 41.7MB/s
jgwinner said:
I don't say that defragmentation is useless but some people do it too often. My disk 27 GB, 7200 rpm is probely fragmentated but I can't feel a thing when it comes to speed. I feel it's still very fast.
I have never(!) failed burning a CD with my Yamaha x6 and I have never defragmented before a burning.
PC's are ok just as mac's are ok, just that pc's very often get polluted with Windows.
So it's not entirely the fault of the machine. BTW, I run NT4 (on a P200MMX 
) which is not a toy OSlike some other MS stuff, IMHO. If all *Windowed* pc's ran it maybe the mac crowd would have less to laugh about.
So it's not entirely the fault of the machine. BTW, I run NT4 (on a P200MMX ) which is not a toy OSlike some other MS stuff, IMHO. If all *Windowed* pc's ran it maybe the mac crowd would have less to laugh about.
Further to that...
I think you can tell whether you have a "toy" or a serious operating system simply by watching the things that appear on the screen while it is installing. If it tells you it is exorcising daemons, creating file systems, reticulating splines etc then you are on the right path, but if it uses the word "rich" and "experience" together anywhere then look out.
I think you can tell whether you have a "toy" or a serious operating system simply by watching the things that appear on the screen while it is installing. If it tells you it is exorcising daemons, creating file systems, reticulating splines etc then you are on the right path, but if it uses the word "rich" and "experience" together anywhere then look out.
TOY OS.
Hi,
NT4,Windozs2000 and XP are all based on the same kernell and can't be compared to the DOS based W9X OS.
NT was targeted for the pro market and is indeed a very stable OS,none of my Win2K machines have ever crashed for the past 2 years.
A record for MS I guess?
Gone are the blue screens and clueless error messages.
It is actually so good I often catch myself neglecting to take backups and snaps of the system.
We have come a long way in the past five years....how else could we spend so much time on DIYAudio?
Cheers,
Hi,
NT4,Windozs2000 and XP are all based on the same kernell and can't be compared to the DOS based W9X OS.
NT was targeted for the pro market and is indeed a very stable OS,none of my Win2K machines have ever crashed for the past 2 years.
A record for MS I guess?
Gone are the blue screens and clueless error messages.
It is actually so good I often catch myself neglecting to take backups and snaps of the system.
We have come a long way in the past five years....how else could we spend so much time on DIYAudio?
Cheers,
NT4 was the best operating system ever created by microsoft, IMHO. It run fast, never crashed, needed very little hardware. Real OS for doing real work. I have XP home edition on my laptop now and it feels like win95. Full of crud and overhead service programs that I never use and make the machine snail slow. Nonetheless, that is still faster than any mac OSX 10.2 I use at school.
Frank are you sure that all XP are based on NT? Professional edition is. I am not so sure about the Home Edition.
Frank are you sure that all XP are based on NT? Professional edition is. I am not so sure about the Home Edition.
Hi Frank,
Please explain this. IMO the differences aren't that big. Yes, Home edition isn't able to log on to domains. They are the same OS to a large extent. I have both Home and Pro editions and I think a lot of home-users decide for the Pro just for the name
And yes all new Windows versions are based on the NT kernel.
So Windows 2000 and XP Home and Pro are NT in a refined form with all original NT's problems removed. And a lot of features like Plug and Play were added. Manufacturers of PCI cards and other hardware are told to make better drivers for their hardware and those drivers are digitally signed by Microsoft to guarantee the stability of your system.
This was in fact THE big problem with Windows NT. At least 50 % of the blue screens were created by bad written drivers. Apart from that I can still live with NT as it really still is a very good OS that deserves more than all the complaining a lot of people do about it.
I''LL "SPLAIN"
Hi,
Don't read too much into that remark.
What I meant is that XP Home Edition inherited some of those half hearted utilities and gimmicks from previous OS versions that cluttered those.
The main differences between Home and Pro editions are mainly felt when you need to administer them.
On the Home edition you just don't have the same power to share folders,administrator rights and so on as a user.
Things can get tricky with that version.
NT4 is an excellent platform as per SP3,I'd even say that if you like a bit of a more spartan environment it has a lot to offer in sheer speed and simplicity.
The server version is even more stable.
If you have a bit dated hardware,say from around 1998,NT4 would be my prefered platform.
I had a software program from Steve Gibson that disabled all plug and pray for NT and all was bliss in the hardware department.
Once you have it properly set up it wil just run and run and run....
Win2K has a fair share of problems but nothing really major.
In my case for instance Explorer sometimes doesn't properly refresh because the machine has too much RAM.
Most of the other problems are more related with badly written software for the OS then the OS itself though.
One example is the very slow response I get for writing to UDF formatted media.
So slow that you would even consider not using that anymore.
It turns out to be largely self-healing and very stable,good,but not excellent at load balancing.
As with NT4,the server version is better but far more expensive to run, some software I use on the Workstation edition refuses to install on the server edition which is a pain.
Again this is due to how that piece of SW is written,NOT the OS fault.
Yes,complaining is sooo easy and doesn't cost a penny.
Moreover most of the time it's the users' own fault.
Remember RTFM?
Ciao,
Hi,
Don't read too much into that remark.
What I meant is that XP Home Edition inherited some of those half hearted utilities and gimmicks from previous OS versions that cluttered those.
The main differences between Home and Pro editions are mainly felt when you need to administer them.
On the Home edition you just don't have the same power to share folders,administrator rights and so on as a user.
Things can get tricky with that version.
NT4 is an excellent platform as per SP3,I'd even say that if you like a bit of a more spartan environment it has a lot to offer in sheer speed and simplicity.
The server version is even more stable.
If you have a bit dated hardware,say from around 1998,NT4 would be my prefered platform.
I had a software program from Steve Gibson that disabled all plug and pray for NT and all was bliss in the hardware department.
Once you have it properly set up it wil just run and run and run....
Win2K has a fair share of problems but nothing really major.
In my case for instance Explorer sometimes doesn't properly refresh because the machine has too much RAM.
Most of the other problems are more related with badly written software for the OS then the OS itself though.
One example is the very slow response I get for writing to UDF formatted media.
So slow that you would even consider not using that anymore.
It turns out to be largely self-healing and very stable,good,but not excellent at load balancing.
As with NT4,the server version is better but far more expensive to run, some software I use on the Workstation edition refuses to install on the server edition which is a pain.
Again this is due to how that piece of SW is written,NOT the OS fault.
Yes,complaining is sooo easy and doesn't cost a penny.
Moreover most of the time it's the users' own fault.
Remember RTFM?
Ciao,
Aren't these the same in the Pro and Home edition ?
Ok, fair enough. You're making a mistake however with this one:
NT 4 never had Plug and Play !!!! Only items that were connected to the serial ports were "recognised".
Stability of the Workstation and Server version doesn't differ much as they are nearly the same. Some software, especially Backup software, recognises the version and refuses to install if you have the "wrong" one.
Plug and Play was introduced in Windows 2000 after more or less having success
in the W9x versions.People still running NT4 better upgrade to SP6a and the Security Rollup Package. Less problems and more stability after the update.
Plug&Pray.
Hi,
Well,that depends mostly on the way you define the concept.
I agree that the OS itself did not not offer any support for it initially.
However the main problem stemmed from the machines that had a bios with P&P support and even when turned off in bios didn't release the INT lines to the OS.
That little piece of software from GRC went along to sort things out.
Although I am not 100% sure about it,didn't SP3 offer better P&P support amongst other major improvements?
I can readily accept that for backup software as it's server version needs to be a lot more extended for network support.
However,when I see that anti-virus soft and even a silly firewall do the same version checks I can get a a little .
Cheers,
Hi,
Well,that depends mostly on the way you define the concept.
I agree that the OS itself did not not offer any support for it initially.
However the main problem stemmed from the machines that had a bios with P&P support and even when turned off in bios didn't release the INT lines to the OS.
That little piece of software from GRC went along to sort things out.
Although I am not 100% sure about it,didn't SP3 offer better P&P support amongst other major improvements?
I can readily accept that for backup software as it's server version needs to be a lot more extended for network support.
However,when I see that anti-virus soft and even a silly firewall do the same version checks I can get a a little
.Cheers,
That's true (especially drivers), and there's 10x of the stuff (both hardware and software) for the Windows platforms so .... 10x the problems. It's math, not the O/S.
My favorite thing when Unix guys go off about how better their platform is, is to ask this: Would you want your Grandmother to use Unix? When the answer is yes, THEN we'll talk
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