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April 2002: Paul Smith - The low-down on what's up.
With the recent roller-coaster ride that's been RAM pricing, it's worth thinking outside of the square to get more for your Pound. Pushing the oomph envelope. Giving the performance package a shove. Remember this was written a few weeks before publication, but currently DDR RAM is cheaper than good ol' standard SD-RAM. Which is odd because DDR is the better stuff. Marry it with a nice P4 board, such as Intel's Billings model, and you have a cost effective, high-performance solution for those not wishing to go the whole hog and buy an 800MHz RD-RAM set-up. The motherboard may cost you a little more than an SD-RAM one, but 266MHz memory is always going to be a lot quicker than 133MHz, as well as being more pocket-friendly at the moment.
More so than RAM, arguably the hard drive is the most mission-critical (I love jargon, me) element of a system. Processors and PSUs may come and go, but when a HDD pops, especially if it's not been backed up, you're, in the words of Bernard Matthews, "stuffed". As well as being a mechanical device that WILL wear out and break, they're also a slow bit of PC architecture. UltraATA-133 drives have a theoretical maximum read or write of 133Mb per second and, working from cache memory, can momentarily peak near this. However, no drive can sustain these very high-speed data transfers. But there are ways around this bottleneck if you want to go looking for them. A nice fast drive is a good starting point, and 7,200rpm spinners are getting more popular all the time. Before Christmas I sold perhaps six slower (5,400rpm) ones for every quick one. This is now more like a 3:1 ratio, which is getting smaller as the price differentials between the two standards closes. Worth thinking about if you're not unhealthily obsessed with building cheap systems, which I hardly need to add is a world apart from building systems cheaply.
Another way to squirt BBQ fluid onto your hard drive performance without burning money is to add a second drive and an ATA RAID controller. Set the card to RAID-0 (striping without parity checking) and as it writes it'll put data as quickly as it can onto both drives. Similarly, when it reads, it reads two disks simultaneously, straight into the PCI bus. Wallop, instant red-hot performance enhancement! The downside is that there's no fault redundancy (as there's no parity checking with RAID-0) plus the cost of the card. On the upside, you still get the full capacity of both drives with this set-up because there's no loss of storage space with this sort of RAID. I'm sure it's not the right approach for most applications, but for a kick-botty demo machine, or for the customer with a love of high-performance consumer electronics and a chequebook up to the task, it's worth a look. Plus, two 60Gb drives are cheaper than one 120Gb one, and the RAID controller shouldn't be any more than, oh, £60-ish.
Paul Smith is 'big in the parts department' and works in component distribution.
500 technical words for April, Dale. Feel free to move them about a bit.
Paul
April 2002: Paul Smith - Words are a cage we make for ourselves. (unused)
It always unnerves me when I discover people actually read my column. At a show once a stranger strode up to me saying, "You write for Indie, don't you?" Suddenly I was wondering if this person was a stalker. What else did they know about me? Had they been going through my bins? For a moment I had the feeling the ghost of John Lennon and something ancient in my glands were both telling me to kick this man in the goolies and run like buggery. "Er, yes", I replied uncertainly. "How did you know?" He pointed at the attractive picture of me (as above) in the copy he held, and then at the Indie t-shirt I was wearing. I grinned like the moron I so clearly was, made my excuses and left.
I was in a local retailers place recently when he waved me over. "You know that rant you had in the mag a few months ago?" he said. Naturally I wondered which rant he meant. "The one about a crap local retailer", he continued as I nodded with fake recollection. He fixed me with a look. "It wasn't about me, was it?" He asked. Well, as it happens, it wasn't. I've always thought of his busy shop as a cool little outlet full of activity and atmosphere. Then he pointed-out a badly written price on a neon-pink star and I remembered the rant he meant. "I've also been known to call 'thanks' sarcastically when someone leaves without buying something", he confided. Again, this was something that has happened to me elsewhere in the past. I shook my head and assured him the piece wasn't about him. I added that I hoped he'd stop doing it in the light of my damning article about such things. His reaction was a tad vague, but I like to think he's taken my thoughts onboard.
Yes, my articles (records tell me this is my 48th, since first appearing as 'Tammy' in the November '97 edition- Aaagh) are supposed to make you smile, and even giggle if they catch you in a light-hearted mood. But they also carry a serious message. Well, most of them anyway. Some of them. 'To amuse and inform' has always been my intention; a hit and miss affair, I admit. My hidden agenda has also been to make you, the reader, question what it is that you do. I hope I've been successful once in a while.
And now the industry bit: Hard-drives have always been controlled by three factors; performance, capacity and price. Needless to say when the price-point for two different models gets too close, the lesser-spec'd one vanishes. We're seeing 20Gb drives go now 40Gb ones are only a bob or two dearer, and soon the same will be happening with performance. 7,200rpm drives are nearly the same price as their slower brethren, so expect lower-capacity 5,400rpm drives to evaporate soon. This information is freely given. What you do with it is up to you.
Paul Smith is to PC component distribution what Lenin was to furry hats.
501 words-o-wisdom Dale.
Paul
P.S. A statement I overheard the other day: "Windows XP isn't all that user-friendly. It's like a cartoon travesty of everything we know and love". Which sounded kinda cool to me.