Bam!
It’s pretty hard to get excited about hard drives. Magnetic media’s most reliable trick is that it keeps getting bigger; solid state on the other hand is obliterating every bench mark out there, but remains expensive per gigabyte. Fortunately, something has come along to fill the gap.
Seagate’s Momentus XT is awesome and we’ve got some.
Snow Leopard: Defeated
After spending years professionally beating irrational computers into acting rationally again, it’s a humbling experience to almost get beaten by a simple software update. That’s not to say software updates are without their eccentricities, but you can at least count on the problems to begin either after the software has finished installing, or right in the middle (ideally at a critical and irrecoverable point). It’s not often that problems begin before the installation takes place, or so I thought until I was staring down Snow Leopard’s missive that “You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume.”
“Can’t, or won’t?” I thought, in my best Kevin Conroy voice.
The problem, it turns out, is somehow related to the destination drive’s partition map, about which a few theories are being floated by others who have been affected. I hear you, PowerPC veterans, exclaiming “Of course! He must have an Apple Partition Table. How 2006.” Not so fast: the issue affects the requisite GUID Partition Table, and while there seems to be a few different causes, you’re more likely to run into this problem if you’ve chopped up your hard drive for a dual or multi-boot machine, or say installed Fedora and added a 2GB swap partition.
At least the solution is simple: pop open Disk Utility and resize your destination partition a couple times. Whatever the reason, most users are back in business after this digital flexing. My computer understands that I’ve made a profession out of fixing far worse nightmares, and would have none of this quick fix nonsense. Disk Utility managed to ratchet up the difficulty level by arbitrarily hating the ext3 file system upon which Fedora was installed, and crashed whenever asked to modify the partition map.
My computer forgets who its dealing with: someone who keeps a full back up and isn’t afraid to erase the partition map. Long story short, the software is installed.
Formula 1 in your Phone
Here’s something cool. Racetrack memory is one of those technologies that promises to do everything, right down to being bundled with rainbows and unicorns. We’re told that it will be fast, spacious, and cheap (R&D costs not included). To give you an idea of how far the conventional spinning platter hard drive lag behind newer memory technologies in terms of speed, it’s worth considering that memory access times were measured by nanoseconds even in the 80s, whereas today’s spinning platter hard drives are still measured in milliseconds.
It may not seem like big deal, but your operating system is made up of tens of thousands of files, and indexing those thousands of small files takes far longer than indexing a few large ones, even if those large files take up more room that the group of small files. Seek time adds up. This actually one of the lesser-known bottleneck for the average user, because seek time has only improved from 20ms in the late 80s to 5-15ms today, a 4x improvement at best. This is such a gradual improvement that most of us actually don’t know what we’re missing.
In truth it’s not actually end-of-the-world dire; better buffering, smarter file systems, and RAID mean that our hard drives are still a huge improvement from the past (not to mention larger and smaller at the same time), but it doesn’t hold a candle to semiconductor improvements. CPU speeds have improved from a modest 8MHz in 1984 to today’s 4.7GHz monsters, a figure which will probably be out of date before I even finish typing this. The 4x improvement pales a little compared to 587.5x, and that’s not even taking into account improvements the accompanying chipsets and the ubiquity of multi-core processors.
This is old news though. Flash-based solid state drives have already slain this dragon apart from a few missteps, and while there’s the usual rogue’s gallery of bar graphs to support the claim of victory, even the anecdotal accounts agree that solid state is a winner. Racetrack though, somehow unsatisfied, wants to take wicked-fast and give it a jetpack. It’s exciting stuff, and the cherry on top is that it will probably be even more energy efficient than conventional memory, so the dolphins win too.
Bricked Hard Drive
A hard drive that makes horrible grinding noises is a bad thing. A hard drive that makes awesome grinding noises is just plain awesome. Found c/o Marc:
