Foo - HOLY CRAP! 400GB IDE hard drive for $110.

Check it, live it, love it.

I bought two....combined with the 200GB already in my desktop, I shall be rocking a full Terabyte...hell yeah!!!

If you want one, you should move on it. It's frontpaged on digg.com, so their stock might not last very long.

http://shop3.outpost.com/product/4596287?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

They've been getting scarily cheap. It only makes one wonder what the fail rate/time is on those hard drives. Too bad they're not getting any faster or quieter.

Yeah I was concerned about that, but I've had very good luck with my past Seagates, and we use Seagates at work in our products (which have to have 24/7/365 reliability, being a telecommunications product), so I have decent enough faith in the company to give it a go.

And quiet is not a concern for me, since my computer's chassis is lined on all panels with 1/4" acoustic foam. Only place noise can come out of is the rear fan openings, and the front grill (front panel is even foam lined, down to the unused 5-1/4" bays.). That will be fixed soon once I get my sound trap design streamlined. There has to be an ideal spacng for airflow vs sound isolation....and I will find it.

Pretty much it's a gaming computer that's had extensive noise reduction mods done to it.

And with the 16MB buffer, no less. Not bad! :) Although I'm more of a 15k SCSI guy (http://www.mechbgon.com/SCSI_v_ATA.jpg) when practical. :p

They've been getting scarily cheap. It only makes one wonder what the fail rate/time is on those hard drives. Too bad they're not getting any faster or quieter.

Make a mirror drive. They're cheap enough.

And with the 16MB buffer, no less. Not bad! :) Although I'm more of a 15k SCSI guy (http://www.mechbgon.com/SCSI_v_ATA.jpg) when practical. :p
:roflmao: That picure is gold, man! :)

:roflmao:

hmmm .25 cents a gig, thats kind of hard to refuse. I just paid 50 cents a gig about 6 months ago on a WD 200GB drive and that was a super deal at the time. I still have an 8GB Seagate drive running win98 in a machine that is about 6 years old now and never had a problem.

I know, I bought a 200GB about that long ago as well.

It's amazing me how fast prices are dropping. Supposedly Athlon 64s are going to see a massive price drop, in the neighborhood of 40%, in retaliation to the new Intel chip coming out...but I'm holding my breath until I see it.

I know, I bought a 200GB about that long ago as well.

It's amazing me how fast prices are dropping. Supposedly Athlon 64s are going to see a massive price drop, in the neighborhood of 40%, in retaliation to the new Intel chip coming out...but I'm holding my breath until I see it.
They will neeld to. UYntil they can find something that can compete with it :p Wonder if it's going to go back to Intel being the fastest and aMD combatting with price. AMD no longer has the "we're the only overclockking enthusaists". People been OCing teh Conroe up to 4.xghz. Not that these new Intel's chips are supposed to be expensive (unless you buy their Enthusiast line, or unless people mark them up alot)

Yeah, I remember when RAM at radio shack was $80 a MB. 30-pin SIMMs.

I also remember how much I paid for my first motherboard (AMD-built board to go with their Nexgen 133 CPU)....$490. Then i dropped $2000 on a videocard (miroVideo 12PD 2MB...back when 512k was a big deal, bought it for Autocad hardware compliance).

Pretty much at the time I had a dream system....since then though I have gotten a bit more down to earth, keeping the computer tame in some places, and outrageous where it matters :D

They will neeld to. UYntil they can find something that can compete with it :p Wonder if it's going to go back to Intel being the fastest and aMD combatting with price. AMD no longer has the "we're the only overclockking enthusaists". People been OCing teh Conroe up to 4.xghz. Not that these new Intel's chips are supposed to be expensive (unless you buy their Enthusiast line, or unless people mark them up alot)Between AMD's 4x4 platform at the high end (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060626004842.html) for gamers, and possibly reverse-hyperthreading throughout the SocketAM2-based multi-core line (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060622143710.html), it might be closer than you think ;) Envision an A64 running an effective 5.2GHz, or an effective 2 x 5.2GHz on a 4x4 platform with rHT. And at the same time, it's still able to use the individual cores individually for multithreading apps. If they actually pull rHT off, it's going to be interesting. :) But the 4x4 platform is on its way to production, no questions on that one.

It's nice to see Intel getting their game to the next level too. They needed to recapture some mindshare, and it'll keep AMD from pricing their stuff too high. Unfortunately, it sounds like Intel's production mix will still be heavily weighted towards the old Netburst architecture for a while (meaning, Conroes will be a bit scarce for a while).

Bottom line: generally, in the epic battles of the CPUs and GPUs, it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings and everyone's laid their cards on the table :)


:roflmao: That picure is gold, man! :)Yeah, isn't she hawt? :) I'd let her access my SQL databases 24/7, no problem! :D Rrrowr!

I tend to go for smaller but more proven and stable/hardened technology when it comes to disks. Most of my hard drives last anywhere from six to eight years of continuous running. I have a 30-drive array in addition to the two internal drives on my Sun workstation. While my PeeCee platforms seem to fail an IDE drive every year or so, my FibreChannel and SCSI drives on my Sun equipment seem to run forever. I'm currently mixing 10K and 15K RPM 36GB drives internally and 18GB drives in the storage array. I run the two internal drives as mirrored volumes for high-availability. In the array, I have a bunch of RAID5 volumes for high-availability/fault-tolerant data and a couple of RAID0 (striped/concatenated) for stuff that just needs lots of space without the overhead of HA/FT. I tend to use an 85% threshold to determine when to increase storage capacity in my volumes. This way I'm not just spinning empty platters and burning down MTBF for nothing. My longest running drives are the ones in my RS/6000-520 and my DECstation5000/200 which date back to 1990. The one thing I might be tempted to use a 400GB drive for is for nearline backup storage (I'm currently using DLT). I would ideally hook up a couple of large IDE drives via a small IDE backplane array with a SCSI handoff. I would need to make sure the array will respond properly to the SCSI spinup/down commands so I can spin up the array to do backups and then spin it back down when finished. Once every month I would commit the data on the IDE drives to longterm archival via tape (probably still DLT).

Aye, the differences in construction between enterprise-class drives and consumer-class drives are significant. Seagate did an educational writeup on the topic... let's see if I can find this...

*rummage, rummage*

Ahh, here we go: More than an interface: SCSI v. ATA (http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper/D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf) (PDF file) :)

While all of Seagate's consumer-level drives presently have 5-year warranties, it would be foolhardy to think they're in the same reliability class as enterprise stuff. But you sure do get lots of GB for the money :)

Between AMD's 4x4 platform at the high end (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060626004842.html) for gamers, and possibly reverse-hyperthreading throughout the SocketAM2-based multi-core line (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20060622143710.html), it might be closer than you think ;) Envision an A64 running an effective 5.2GHz, or an effective 2 x 5.2GHz on a 4x4 platform with rHT. And at the same time, it's still able to use the individual cores individually for multithreading apps. If they actually pull rHT off, it's going to be interesting. :) But the 4x4 platform is on its way to production, no questions on that one.

It's nice to see Intel getting their game to the next level too. They needed to recapture some mindshare, and it'll keep AMD from pricing their stuff too high. Unfortunately, it sounds like Intel's production mix will still be heavily weighted towards the old Netburst architecture for a while (meaning, Conroes will be a bit scarce for a while).

Bottom line: generally, in the epic battles of the CPUs and GPUs, it ain't over 'til the fat lady sings and everyone's laid their cards on the table :)

Yeah, isn't she hawt? :) I'd let her access my SQL databases 24/7, no problem! :D Rrrowr!
Heh. Sadly, I don't think I will ever have faith in AMD being able to do super robust multi-threaded operations efficiently.
My AMD XP 1800 with 1.5GB of ram couldn't and can't do it and this AMD 3400 with 1gb of ram can't seem to do it. I've always put my money on Intel for servers and will probably be all Intel for desktop (except for this pos at work) once I finally committ to building a machine that will hopefully last me another 3-5 years.

For my useage (games/video and sound editing/etc) my a64-3500 with 2GB ram does pretty well.

One thing to remember is the chipset. A lousy chipset will cut off any processor at it's knees. I've seen 3ghz p4 setups that could not compare to an athlon xp 2500 that was weaker in almost every way, due to the P4 having a crappy chipset, and the Athlon having a motherboard with a top of the line chipset (and properly implemented as well).

I'm a big fan of Nvidia chipsets. They really do perform nicely, and are rather stable as well.

Heh. Sadly, I don't think I will ever have faith in AMD being able to do super robust multi-threaded operations efficiently.
My AMD XP 1800 with 1.5GB of ram couldn't and can't do it and this AMD 3400 with 1gb of ram can't seem to do it. I've always put my money on Intel for servers and will probably be all Intel for desktop (except for this pos at work) once I finally committ to building a machine that will hopefully last me another 3-5 years.AthlonXP's and 3400's are single-core. If you want to take advantage of multithreading, you don't use one single-core CPU, you either use two single-cores, a dual-core, or multiple dual-cores. So that would mean dual AthlonMP, dual Opterons, or one or more of AMD's dual-core processors. Now that Dell's brewing up a range of AMD-powered desktops and workstations, you could try one this fall, and probably return it if you don't like it. Based on what you do, I still say you should be running 15k SCSI, it's a no-brainer.

I know a guy with a twin-dualcore Opteron rig, and based on his testing in various multithreaded encoding/CAD/rendering apps (which he does for a living), as well as my own work with my dual-core A64 X2, I really see no reason to be griping about the multithreading performance on the dual- and multi-core setups. It exceeded my expectations, that's for sure. Well worth the investment. Brian saw diminishing returns setting in after the third core on his twin-dualie Opteron, but said he might also be running into the limitations of his I/O.

One thing to remember about multithreading and multicore architectures is that your performance is only as good as the branch predictor. If you flag a miss then you have to flush and actually having super-deep multiple pipelines can actually be a detriment. One of the things that have always set the high performance RISC based processors such as SPARC, PA-RISC and MIPS (to name a few) apart from the x86 line and derivatives (Itanium, x64, etc) thereof is the superior branch prediction and context switch handling.

You can actually get pretty good multithreading performance off a single-core/single-processor unit. You just need a processor with a good speculative unit. That said, I'm pretty impressed with Sun's UltraSPARC-T1 chips which has eight cores per chip and can do four threads per core per cycle. It will probably be a little while before they start shipping it in the bulk of their products although they do offer two systems with it now. They're still offerring most of their high end stuff with UltraSPARC-IV+ dual-core processors. and their low to midrange stuff is based on UltraSPARC-III still.

am i the only one that sees a 199 price tag?

No, I see it too, looks like you missed the boat