The Last Bottleneck

Dual core processors are the standard. By the end of the year quad core cpus will probably have become the standard on all but budget desktops and laptops, thanks to Nehalem. Ram is relatively cheap. I have had smaller hard drives than the amount of ram I currently run in my workstation. Broadband is the standard, with the days of dial-up a distant memory.

It hasn’t been that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that I was using a Pentium 200MHz with 64 megs of ram. Back in those days I was obsessed with RISC microcomputers. While the PC world was topped out at 200MHz, Apple had 350MHz G3’s, Sun was making 450MHz UltraSparcs, and Digital was king of the hill with a 600MHz Alpha workstation. 600MHz! I had a poster of that bad boy on my fridge. It was the object of countless fantasies. Just imagine your rc5 number crunching…..

I am writing this article on my new Mac Pro. I have two 2.8GHz quad core Intel Xeon processors, 14 gigs of 800MHz DDR2 ram, a 320 gig 7200rpm hard drive, and a one terabyte external hard drive for backups. It’s astonishing when you put it in perspective.

And yet, there is that part of me that is never satisfied with a Good Thing. The same part of me that, back during my biker days, drove me to port and dual plug cylinder heads, stroke flywheels, use crazy cams and transmission gears, and use oversized cylinder bores.

How do you make a fast system faster? The fact of the matter is that we have overcome most of the bottlenecks that have always plagued the desktop computer. There are faster cpus than what I have. There is faster ram. In both cases, I underutilize both resources, and an upgrade on either would net me zero as far as real world benefit.

Once you have cpu to burn, and enough ram so that you never, ever page to the hard drive, what is left?

The biggest bottleneck left on the desktop is the hard drive.

The one area where there is the most room for improvement is storage. Not the amount, but the speed with which it accesses, reads and writes your data. It’s the one thing you’re likely to notice waiting for when using your computer.

So how do we go about improving the speed of our storage medium? There are a few options:

1. Solid State Disks The solid state disk is fast, really fast. It’s also really, really expensive. The solid state disk is a relatively recent development, and you are going to pay a lot of money for a little storage. Even so, if you are a bleeding edge type with money to burn, this is the single biggest upgrade you can make to your system.
   Pros
   • Fast
   • Really fast
   • Really, really fast
   Cons
   • Expensive
   • Not the best performance when reading and writing simultaneously
   • No chance of data recovery in the case of drive failure

   We are all going to be using SSD’s down the road as the technology becomes cheaper and better, but for now it’s for hardcore enthusiasts only.

2. SCSI SCSI has been THE performance solution for as long as I can remember. Today’s 15k SAS (serial attached SCSI) is still the pinnacle as far as conventional drives go. However, they aren’t cheap, and you’ll need a SCSI or RAID controller to run it or them. SAS is the fastest overall solution, but also the most expensive.
   Pros
   • FAST
   Cons
   • EXPENSIVE

   The ultimate hot rodder’s solution, but prohibitively expensive.

3. Velociraptor Western Digital’s 10k rpm Velociraptor drives are by far the fastest SATA drives on the market. The have very good read, write and access times. The cost of a Velociraptor is probably 3-4x that of a comparable 7200 rpm SATA drive, but the performance is definitely there.
   Pros
   • Fast
   • Reliable
   • Relatively cheap in terms of performance gain
   • Quiet
   • Much cheaper than SSD or SAS
   Cons
   • Somewhat pricey compared to 7200 rpm

   The Velociraptor is probably the best performance path for most. No extra equipment needed, it’s a single drive solution that is reliable and provides real world improvements in performance. Not as fast as SSD or SAS, but much cheaper, and a no-brainer upgrade.

4. RAID 0 RAID O takes two or more disks and stripes the data between them. That is, instead of writing to a single disk, it splits that data between how many disks are used in the RAID. So, if you take a 320 gb 7200 rpm SATA drive and add an identical second drive, you now have a 640 gb volume that reads and writes twice as fast. Access time is still the same, so the only net gain is for reads and writes.
   
   This increases the potential for data loss due to drive failure by a factor of how many drives are in your RAID, so backing up is crucial, either by an external drive or by RAID 0+1. RAID 0+1 is when you have an array of disks, with one of the disks mirroring the volume contained on the other disks. So, in a three drive system, two disks would comprise your volume, and one disk would be a mirror for redundancy.

   Either way, with an external or with RAID 0+1, you have some peace of mind regarding the integrity of your data should a drive fail.

   Mac OS X and linux support software RAID, and I believe at least the top tier of Vista does too, so there won’t be any need for a RAID controller either. Yes, your cpu will be doing the heavy lifting, but most of us have cpu to burn so that argument really isn’t valid in 2009.

   Pros
   • Fast
   • Cheap
   • No need for a RAID controller if using software RAID
   Cons
   • More drives=greater chance of hardware failure
   • Access time doesn’t benefit, just reads and writes

   If you already have one drive, for less than fifty bucks you can run a RAID 0. Reads and writes will be fast, faster even than a Velociraptor, however with the Velociraptor’s fast access time, it’s a better overall choice. Still, for $50 a RAID 0 consisting of two 7200 rpm SATA drives is a lot of bang for the buck.

Whatever choice you make, you’ll be upgrading the one link in your system that could stand the most improvement.

For those of you blessed enough to not suffer from OCD, today’s SATA drives aren’t all that far off performance-wise, at least not compared to their IDE cousins from yesteryear. For you, picking a good drive with enough storage for your needs will be more than enough.

I have a feeling that in my case, a RAID 0 might not be too far in my future, in which case, I will post benchmarks comparing before and after in the comments.

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