Blog Essay: You Want a 10,000 RPM Boot Drive

[KenR]

Here's a fun essay to lighten your day.

You Want a 10,000 RPM Boot Drive
I don't go out of my way to recommend building your own computer. I do it, but I'm an OCD-addled, pain-loving masochist. You're usually better off buying whatever cut-rate OEM box Dell is hawking at the moment, particularly now that Intel has finally abandoned the awful Pentium 4 CPU series and is back in the saddle with its excellent Core Duo processor. PC parts are so good these days it's difficult to make a bad choice, no matter what you buy.
If you really must build your own computer, sites like Tech Report provide excellent advice in the form of their system guides. However, their guide sets the bar a little too low for my tastes. There are a few baseline requirements for any new computer build that aren't negotiable for me:
    * current dual core chip, such as the Core Duo 2 or Athlon 64 X2
    * minimum of 2 GB of memory
    * modern PCI express video card with 256mb or more of memory, such as the NVIDIA 7600GS, or the ATI Radeon X1650. Both of these cards can be found for about $100. Whatever you do, avoid on-board video, because it's universally crappy. The rule of thumb I use is this: if you're spending significantly less than $100 on your video card, you're making a terrible mistake...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

[f0dder]

* f0dder pets his 10,000rpm Raptor

[nudone]

nudone kicks his raid 0 raptors 

[iphigenie]

Just reacting to the title... actually what you really want is a super fast flash memory based boot drive

The way prices are going, we're not far from being able to have a reasonably priced super fast 6Gb flash memory drive which is large enough to install the OS and the software you use most often. Then put the rest on other partitions on traditional hard drives. This is going to happen in laptops this year, as it not only improves performance but also saves energy.

I have had a mini-itx BSD machine that has a 4Gb flash drive for a few years, and been hoping for the move in the mainstream PC land for as long. It makes so much sense

I think this article sets the bar a little too high for normal users, but quite right for the audience of that blog.

[f0dder]

I have had a mini-itx BSD machine that has a 4Gb flash drive for a few years, and been hoping for the move in the mainstream PC land for as long. It makes so much sense

-iphigenie (February 27, 2007, 05:16 AM)

Not until the limited erase/rewrite cycle thing has been 100% eliminated... at least not for running windows, considering how often registry access or whatever causes disk activity.

From what I've gathered, current flash solutions have much better access time than disks (duh!), but still not as high transfer rates. Seek time is going to be more important for the boot anyway, since you don't reach nearly the burst rate of your drive.

Hybrid harddrives are going to be interesting, too bad MS don't plan to support it for XP (they do need something to get people to upgrade to Vista, eh? ). Also interesting is intel's Robson technology, which adds the flash part of hybrid harddrives in another way, as a PCI express card... I'm looking forward to that, especially since it might be supported on XP.