Friday, May 11, 2007

Concerning storage media

The power of computers today is quite big. They have GHz processors , GB RAMs and Gb networks. Yet they are too slow when it comes to real efficiency. Why is it? There are many reasons and one of them is the storage.
Traditionally it is the one component of computers that cannot follow the evolution of speed of the others. The basic problem is that it is an electromechanical device and this applies great restrictions to the speed increase that is possible. For example the rotation frequency nowadays gets close to the limit where the disc is disintegrated by centrifugal force. The density of the stored data is also a problem since the medium is read from a distance and this creates complications. Hard discs however represent still the best solution for mass storage and density poses up to this day not too great a concern. But the rate of transmitted data does.
If the system has not a really large RAM then the hard disc is used also for the virual memory and this effectively destroys every idea of efficiency. And this is a usual fact considering that today's programs, operating systems and graphic environments are "eating" vast quantities of memory.
What is the solution? Since abandoning hard discs is not an option yet as there is no other medium that can do its work with a sensible cost we have to preserve them in our systems. So we must find a solution around this problem. First we must find out how much Ram is used in normal operation in our computer. Normal means what we do usually from video processing to listening to music. The physical RAM of the system must be double this quantity in order to render virual memory system inert and have no latency from reading memory from the disc. The improvement in the speed of the computer proves more than noticable.
Second we may think about a RAID system where we read partially from the one disc and partially from the other to theoriticaly double the speed. These systems are no more expensive since they are supported by motherboards and Hard Discs are not expensive too.
A third proposal is to identify processes that use too often the disc and see what their job is and if they are necessary. There may be processes running that consume both hard disc bandwidth and memory and at the same time being useless.
If the RAM is large enough the user can deactivate virual memory for a greater improve since not writes for that purpose will be made in the disc.
Concluding the answer to facing the disease of failing efficiency in our computer we must balance its components and understand that the processor is as fast as the peripherals which it cooperates with.

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