Windows Vista in the UK

[Megalith]

i seen some performance charts recently and you get no improvements over using XP in almost all categories that they tested. I thought that the ability to use a USB stick would speed up the startup but it is only used as a program startup cache so programs you use often start faster. it would be a lot better if using a stick meant that the OS itself would run from it as this really would make things run quicker. there are some good improvements under the hood of vista over XP but the additional bloatware included removes any benefits.As these benchmarks seem to indicate XP is as good as vista I'll be staying with XP until i hear that vista has had service packs that do improve its performance and remove all the DRM nasties that are an invasion of our liberties and an anathema to all the freedom that computers are supposed to offer. one thing i am waiting for is for the monorail open source to become 100% .NET2 compliant then i will have no need whatsoever to use windoze at all.

[GorunNova]

My question is... why would a system boot faster if loaded from a USB stick?  USB sticks aren't that fast... every one I've ever used can't even match a fraction of the full USB 2.0 throughput.  The only possible benefit would be that it could load files from the USB stick and the main drive at the same time, but you'd get the same benefits (and probably higher speed) by installing XP to a small partition on a rarely used disk, while installing all your programs to another drive.  Even better, you could use interleaved RAID... hard to beat THAT sort of performance.

 

Then again, if Vista really is getting a file-based symlink scheme, you could always move your main OS and program files around to several disks (USB or local) and symlink them to the main disk, so that the OS can take advantage of reading from multiple drives at the same time.  Of course, that's assuming their symlinking isn't back-a##ewords and won't link between drives... (totally expects this).  Of course, in this case, removing the USB stick after bootup would guarantee the quick and hideous death of your system if important files are on it...  Instant OS lobotomy.

 

(Edit: That wouldn't work too well, though... the files that Vista needs to load would already be loaded and immovable by the time you get to a point where you can move the files around.  It's not like Linux, where you can move and delete libraries even when they're loaded and in use without killing running programs.)

 

As a side note, I use this symlink trick on my multi-drive Linux system, and the performance gain is noticeable. ^^  (Edit: Then again, I have three hard drives in it, so that helps. ^^')

 

Another question is... why do they keep using hard drives for paging instead of a secondary array of cheap and slow RAM?  Even slow RAM blows away the speeds of hard drives...

 

As for .NET compatibility... whenever mono comes close, expect M$ to release a new set of .NET APIs for the non-locked-in-standard bits of .NET to force mono to be 'behind'.  Microsoft always does that.  Why do you think the WINE project has such headaches? -_-'

[TetsuoShima]

Another question is... why do they keep using hard drives for paging instead of a secondary array of cheap and slow RAM?  Even slow RAM blows away the speeds of hard drives...

 

Well, I can answer this one. What they are doing with the new usb flash cache is sort of what you describe. They use flash as a slow ram. In the end the benefit isn't all that great once you have over 1 gig in your system. Flash may not be very fast, in fact the sequential read speed of usb flash is usually slower than hard disks, but the access times are a lot smaller, that is the benefit. The other reason they still use hard disks as aditional ram (pagefile), is becuase everybody has a hard disk, hence no need to buy yet another piece of hardware. The reason not more effort is put into providing an extra level of caching between the system ram and the hard disk, is the small benefit you get from it, compared to just putting in extra ram. Ram isn't all that expensive anymore, so it's easier to do that. That is also the reason why this usb flash drive thing is not going to be a big hit. The benefit is too small and buying a bit more ram will get you more speed for about the same price.

 

In the end it's all about price/performance comparisons. If you use a tech that's faster than usb flash, it's going to cost more, but if you do that, you may as well just put in extra ordinary ram to start with, since that isn't that expensive either.

 

There are special hardware ram drives that allow you to use ram as a hard disk (forgot the name), but the benefit is not as big as the cost, unless you're filthy rich that is. :D

[Hilander72]

Back in the mid 90's I did a comparison test to see how much would be gained performance wise using a ram-hd on a Mac.

 

I maxed out the RAM to 1024MB (back then 1024MB was a damn lot, 8MB was the standard RAM back then, and expensive, 256MB cost ~$1000/stick) and used a software to create a 750MB virtual HD. (I think the conventional hd in that Mac was either a 1080MB/2048MB Quantum)

 

The results were very much dependent on what kind of software was being used and the more the software needed access to files on the hd the better the performance (compared with a conventional hd). Most gains were made by games (not so odd, since games must work on machines with low RAM, hence a lot of loading), and least by software that used a lot of CPU power (rendering and similar softwares).

 

I even tested by creating an image of a CD (Mac OS) and compared how much faster the installation would go. It was almost increadible how much faster it installed from a ram-hd to a conventional hd (5x faster, not to mention a CD with access times ~200ms), so I ended up using a ram-hd to install Mac OS on new customer Macs (removed the hd from it and hot-plugged it in to my workstation, installed and put it back again) and saved a lot of time.

 

Only downside was that I had to copy (read) the image to RAM everytime I needed to install an OS (or anything else I had as an image).

[Chiggy]

USB2 Transfer Rate of 60 MB/s

SATA Transfer Rate of around 150 MB/s

 

The figures above speak for themselves.

 

The only reason why I would use a USB stick would be to run a recovery on an OS. Sometimes that dangly thing round your neck can be handy, its also a real geek fashion accessory that I wouldnt be seen with out.

[TetsuoShima]

A quick remark on the USB transfer rate, that 480Mbps is maximum burstable, you'll never ever get that in real life, the most you'll get to see on file transfers is about 30-35MB/s under ideal conditions, that's about half of what's advertised, USB has got a huge overhead to deal with too and also drives processor usage up a fair bit when intensively used.

 

SATA 2.5 spec has been in use for over a year now btw, which specifies a maximum trasnfer rate of about 3Gbps, when taken down to active data transfers this results to about 300MB/s (which is the advertised figure), the difference (3Gbps is a fair bit bigger than 300MB/s) is mainly for integrity checks and command protocols.

[Megalith]

hmmm hype huh dma 133 is about the same as sata when it comes to actual thruput this is another example of pc figures being used that in practice really are no no diff than the status quo....

[TetsuoShima]

Ah, now you see that is incorrect. The throughput of ATA/133 is very much lower than SATA 2.5 .

 

It's not because there are no hard disk yet supporting such high speeds that the spec itself is not faster. It's only a matter of time before there are disks that will be faster. In any case hdd burst speeds (hdd cache to controller) are currently over 200MB/s. Speed is definately not the only advantage for SATA 2.5, there is the simplified cabling and the p2p structure too.

 

What's more SATA 2.5 supports all kinds of enhancements, such as staggered diskstart, eSATA (slightly different spec really, but it wouldn't be there without SATA), hot swap, native command queing. Most of those are quite useless to ordinary home computers, but enthousiast computers and entry level server definately have great advantages with those extras. What makes it even better, is that SAS supports SATA drives, so even higher class servers have benefits by these developments, and then I haven't even begun about port mulitpliers (which allow multiple SATA disks to be connected to the same SATA channel). Again, most of it is not necessary for ordinary consumers, but in the long run it's definately a good deal certainly because it's equally priced and you get a lot more out of it (even though you may not need it, you never know when you might), did I mention SATA is completely backwards compatible. :D

 

ATA/133 is a goner, intel no longer supports it and as such, that is the end of that technology.