erikko

Gigabyte's i-RAM: Affordable Solid State Storage Unfortunately the review does not test any usage pattern focused on random access. That a device bottlenecked by 150MB/s SATA doesnt deliver fantastic load times wasn't much of a surprise. The thought of working without hard drive whine sounds tempting though....

I've always been wondering, does case volume matter? If the air around the drive is moving with the same velocity and has the same temperate, it'd say it doesn't. 209725[/snapback] Exactly. And with a given volume of air driven through your case per unit of time the airspeed would actually be bigger in a smaller case. In effect the case works more like a tunnel with even flow instead of the more reservoir like effect in larger cases. Any shape of the case that reduces the area of a cross-section perpendicular to the airflow will give a higher airspeed, which is why the flat desktop models get by with modest fans while the fat tower cases need a lot more power in the fans. In practice it's pretty hard to achieve the same volume per time because you usually have to rely on a single fan in the sff-cases.

Me too. According to a review by a norwegian web site it's an order of magnitude quieter than the 7200.7, which says a _lot_. Currently the 200GB model is dirt cheap around here, but the 250GB model comes at a 50% price premium. According to some test results I've seen on German mesageboards the 200GB models are utilising 100MB platters and have a max STR of 60-something MB/s, while the 250GB models with 125GB platters deliver ~70MB/s. With the horrible seek times currently delivered by the newest models from Seagate and Maxtor, the P120 seems to at least not degrade as much from the P80 models as well. BTW, whats up with the StorageReviw crew? One post in the forum every other mont doesn't exactly convey much enthusiasm about the site.... The reviews and articles are excellent, but some progress to the community would be nice.

link Has anyone seen more test results on the T7K250 yet? Seems to have the lowest seek time of the bunch so far...

I think you misunderstood them - they're referring to the disk you are storing the backup image (which is a file and needs a file system) on, not the disk you want to restore the image to.

Sorry - forgot you were on win2000, not XP. You might need your extra SATA drivers for that. It seems like windows wants to write the bootloader to your RAID array, which is why it wants to format it. This fails if it doesnt have the drivers for it loaded. You would have to load _both_ the SATA drivers and your RAID drivers through F6 to get this working. I do not know why it wants to do this, it might have something to do with how your SATA and RAID controllers are configured in the BIOS. This might also be the reason why the array was not detected in your running windows installation. What controllers are you using and how did you configure them in the system BIOS?

And this is what you should stop doing immediately. Do like the first guy said and do it one step at the time. The installer for win2000 isn't very sophisticated, you would be better of setting your system up first and then adding your RAID array. The procedure you are describing (pressing F6 in the installer) is for installing windows on a RAID array, because then windows might not have the drivers for the RAID controller. You on the other hand should not do this - you want to install windows on a single drive handled by a normal SATA controller and windows has built-in support for these. So - get your two single drives up and running, and then start fiddling with your BIOS to activate the RAID-controller and installing the windows drivers for it.

Seems like seagate got the message. My favourite webshop here in Norway estimates the 16MB models in stock within a week: netshop.no The model numbers are not yet on seagates website, but I also found them listed on span.com by googling them. The model numbers are ST3250623AS (250GB) ST3300631AS (300GB)

I never quite understood that either. If your OS has a perfect virtual filesystem the latency incurred by going to main memory instead of ondrive cache should be negligible. And you could vary cache replacement algorithms for prefetch better with usage patterns. Or? With separate systems accessing the drive as permitted by sata2 this falls apart and a huge onboard cache would be the way to go of course.

No. They are probably talking about the error correction on the data-cds not RAM. To preserve data against common write/read errors, scratches and the like, cd-roms have a two-layer error correction scheme. Analysing combinations of drives and media with regards to the frequency of error corrected reads seems to be a popular benchmark for writer "reliability" on cd-r websites.

from the specs of Deskstar T7K250: shipping 1Q05.....looks like I'll put that 7200.8 order on hold.

Thanks micnn! Those rates are pretty low though. If those numbers are correct, it would seem that most of the density increase is a result of mostly tighter radial density of tracks and not so much in the tangential/linear density within the tracks themselves, since the transfer rate isn't that much better than the 100GB/platter drives. Would you give winbench 99 v.2.0 a try? http://www.veritest.com/benchmarks/winbench/default.asp I am really eagerto see if the test for sequential transfer rate across entire drive gives the same sad results.

Nice review! Pretty disappointing performancewise compared to the 7200.8 up ahead though. Anybody know when we can expect 133GB/platter products from other manufacturers than Seagate? PS. Eugene - The "Single page" link is broken.