Computer Upgrade

[Rick]

I just upgraded from a 700 MH AMD processor to a 1400 MH AMD processor. To be truthful, I can't tell the difference.

The problem is I am still waiting for the programs/data to load from the hard drives.

If you have a computer in the 700 MH plus range don't expect too much when you go out and buy the new Intel Pentium 4 2000 MH computer unless there is something special about the hard drives. If it has IDE 7200 rpm 100 ATA hard drive you are still going to be waiting for the data to load.

Looks to me like we have to wait for some big imporvement in the hard drive area to catch up with the CPU's available now.

Anyone found a way around this bottleneck???

[fred4now]

Cool, can I have your old one? My home computer is still a 200MMX! Not too bad except when you try to query across 60,000 races.:D

[Eric]

Rick,

I've also recently upgraded my PC with an AMD 1400 MHz Thunderbird and a couple of IBM Deskstar 60GB drives. (ATA/100 at 7200 RPM) I was also fortunate to be able to load the critter up with a GB of DDR RAM when it was going for $33/256 MB. Since my previous system was a 1997 266 MHz "antique" I've seen a dramatic speed increase by comparison. However, the drives and bus are still a bottleneck with respect to what the CPU can actually handle. Given the current technology, I don't think there's a whole lot one can do improve things other than consider a SCSI bus (but the Drives are *expensive*). I DID have SCSI drives on my old system but I think my new EIDE drives with the ATA/100 bus are faster. (subjective evaluation) I'd guess the next plateau will be widespread implementation of the ATA/133 bus but even then, a 1.4 GB CPU will be less than strained to keep up.

Unfortunately, and thanks to Microsoft's wisdom of mandating the use of "Virtual Memory", my 1 GB of RAM really doesn't do a whole lot in terms of breaking the bottleneck either. I've even tried using a RAM Disk but for reasons I haven't figured out yet, I saw practially NO speed increase - just a guess but it might be related to how DOS handles things.

As an "aside", if you're running two hard drives (say one's a 5400 RPM the other 7200 RPM), the system will use BOTH drives at the maximum speed of the SLOWER drive.

I guess we're "stuck" until the technology improves but, in my case, it's still a heck of a lot faster than that 266 MHz beast I was using. :-)

[delmardog]

Eric,

think i saw somewhere (cenatek?) web site that they were coming out with a solid state disk drive that lives on pci bus. that would certainly speed access times. think one of the sizes was 512kb for 1800.00 or so. i assume they have larger drives coming or available now.

john

[Eric]

Thanks for the Cenatak info John - appreciated! Although they appear to have reduced prices, they're still out of reach for me ... :-)

http://www.cenatek.com/

512 MB @ $999
1 GB @ $1799
2 GB @ $2999

Sort of reminds me of when RadioShack first offered a hard disk drive for the Model 3. Only $2,500 for 5 MB of storage. :-)

[fred4now]

Ricks,
Hope you didn't think I was serious:p

[Rick]

Let's just say I wasn't going to take you up on it. :D