NP-8790 Now Ordered - No Acer for Me!!! - Page 2

The waiting game begins.

G-Omaha how come you changed your harddrive to the 80G. I was considering doing that as well but still undecided.
Is there a big performance difference between the two?

What happened gsferrari, I thought you were like first in line?

Jeez, Chill dude.

Cheap is in the eye of the beholder, when I first started looking for a lappy I had a total budget of $600, then while comparing features and considering what I really needed, that price jumped up to $1000, $2000, $3000 etc. I finally found my comfort zone with the machine I want and the price at about $3500. If I went with all the wants I would be pushing $4000+.

Having owned a 4780, I can say I look forward to my 8790, The M11 is special enough for me and a big enough difference, raid is another, the 3.4Extreme Edition while overpriced is yet another reason.

As far as the wireless goes you may have a point, I will debate that with you once I have done some research, but I find 8 out of 10 problems user/idiot errors. I forsee know difficulties getting it up and running but I will post a full review when I do.

If its not for you its not for you, I for one and happy to have the order in, and can't wait until it gets here. As far as balloon popping not a chance, I got the cash, and I'm not afraid to use it.

Thanks. That is exactly the information i was looking for. I am not that smart when it comes to raid. Do you know if the raid of the 60Gb (7200) would be faster than the raid of the 80Gb(5400)?
I have been considering the 80Gb but have not switched yet.

Aargg! What is it with people and RAID?

Please read my two long posts on page 2 of this thread. I don't understand why people keep insisting that RAID 0 will give them any performance increase.

http://notebookforums.com/showthread...934#post171934

While RAID 0 stripping will have both hard drives written to simultaneously, the IDE bus isn't capable of writting to both simultaneously.

...mind exploding...must....get....duct tape.....BOOM.

Ease the rhetoric, up the data ;)

Even assuming the drives are on the same bus (which I for one do not know), the IDE drives certainly can be writing simultaneously. The bus does not feed the write heads directly, there happens to be an 8 MB buffer between the bus and the platters. Since the buffer is vastly faster at receiving data than the disks are at writing it, the overall speed depends more on the implementation of the RAID controller/software etc. You cannot simply make a blanket statement that "RAID 0 will offer no performance benefit because it is an IDE and not SCSI bus". That is simply a falsehood.

So before you or anyone attacks RAID as being meaningless for notebooks, lets get some real data on the specific system in question.

Afterall, if you do happen to get RAID 0, and later decide it isn't what you need, you can always simply reformat and reinstall your system to a non-raid config.

- Card

I don't understand why people keep buying into hype. I know that quite a lot of the posters in these forums are very intelligent people, but it seems hype trumps common sense. Manufacturers pump out UXGA screens with horrible response times (40 -45ms) and people just eat it up with the opinion that higher resolutions must equal a better product. Meanwhile, I'm sitting back looking at the 1600*1200 screens and saying "I can't read the text, it's too small, the icons are too small, and none of my games play well at that resolution. Manufacturers release Serial ATA drives. Again, regular consumers eat it up, despite the evidence that there is little to no increase (various tests done by Hard OCP, Tom's, and Ananatech) because the drive literally can't spin fast enough or output enough information to fill up the bus. Nevermind the fact that most (Seagate is the exception) SATA drives are regular ATA drives with an additional converter panel put on them to fit a SATA cable. But wait, that's not all folks. Now enter RAID 0 and 0+1 for the consumer. Most consumers haven't even heard of SCSI, much less afford it, so the industry resorts to using IDE hard drives. Weee! A whooping 1.5x to 1.6x increse in performance.

I'm tired, and my head is all over my floor. We can debate this all day long with no affect. I don't like fake RAID setups being advertised to regular consumers, since I have seen the real thing. I just really don't like products that pretend to be something they aren't. There might be some increase in performance for RAID 0, and there might be some use for SATA drives in another year or two when the technology catches up with the hype. In about 10-20 years, maybe laser eye surgery will have matured enough that I can get it done and I'll finally be able to see UXGA screens.

Pain, massive unrelenting pain. Wow, torn completely apart in not one, but two threads. Yay, I think my humor might be recovering soon. A more in depth reply is in the other thread. I still think it is unfortunate that most of my knowlege gained from my computer classes is so full of holes and misconceptions. Thank goodness that I have gotten most of my knowledge outside of school. Odd though that even with my Dad being a computer engineer / systems admin person, I haven't even heard of RAID outside of my UNIX class. We didn't even spend much more than a few minutes on it in my A+ certification course. The only conclusion I can arrive at is that RAID is a very specialized technology with few benefits or uses outside of an industrial environment. I still think that whatever the minor increases gained by RAID 0 in the Sager notebooks, that it is a "poor-man's" solution not the real thing.

Oh, and G-Omaha, my hairs are not only split, but I have dandruff too.

how can you say that if you have never used one?

and how can you say that when the increases are so obvious. reading/writing to/from 2 disks at once will increase speed dramatically. ditto on raid 1, except you only see the improvement on the read time.

SEMC
No worries. Just make sure of your facts before you post them. If you only read it in a book, say that in your post. Seeing stuff first hand and reading about it are worlds apart. I am in the Navy, and we still use raid a lot. They are still common in a lot of high end systems. The cost is the main resin why we all don't use it. Most of your facts are right; there were only a few holes. But you assumed stuff. Any ways, we all have to learn some time. Out of curiosity what classes are you taking? Please say more than A+. Good luck.

Courses:
MS Office Suite (each are individual classees): Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access
AS/400 operations
AS/400 control language
C programming
Java programming
Data communications (basic networking concepts course)
Operating Systems (theory & design of microchip architecture and operating systems)
Database development and design using MS Access
MS 2000 Pro (Lan System Manager)
MS 2000 Server (Network Architecture I)
MS 2000 Server w/ Active Directory (Network Architecture II)
Unix OS
Unix Admin
Webpage design
Systems and Procedures (I still can't explain this class, but project is to design a business solution for a real company locally and develop a full development package for them).
A+ hardware/software course
Technical writting

These are my degree specific courses, not including the humanities and other random stuff.

That helps out a lot. Thanks G-Omaha

We don't mean to totally destroy you SEMC just discipline you (somebody hand me the whips again) .

I get the feeling that we should be whipping your lecturers for not teaching you properly. I mean it is not your fault that some of the information you were given is faulty. I mean after all, a round earth - what sort of nonsense is that - everybody knows the earth is flat.

You know the best lesson you can learn from this SEMC, always question. I once heard a very good definition of "Due Diligence" (sometimes used in the financial markets). All that "due diligence" means is to be able to distinguish fact, from opinion.

Very powerful statement that - being able to distinguish fact from opinion. Remember that and it will serve you well.

My suggestion for you? Go back thru your notes and cross check the information they have given you with other sources.

Oh and btw RAID 3 - minimum of 3 disks (can be more). If we assume a 3 member RAID 3 raidset then data is striped onto the first 2 disks. A block of parity is then computed for the data stripes that was written on the first 2 disks and that block of parity data is written onto the 3rd "parity disk" (it is not just a few bits - it is a complete block of parity). The downside of RAID 3 is that the parity disk becomes a bottleneck due to the amount of data continually being written or read from it.

RAID 5 (min 3 disks) distributes the parity across all disks in the raidset so that the parity disk is not a bottleneck.

If one disk in a RAID 3 or a RAID 5 raidset fails you can rebuild the data from the remaining disks without restoring from backup (I think you said that if the parity disk on RAID 3 failed you had to restore from backup - this is not the case).

Whilst RAID 0 does introduce additional risk, the risk is not doubled. The additional risk is calculated from MTBF (mean time before failure) information. It is not done by simple addition (for a mathematical explaination of how to compute the increased probability of failure by adding an extra disk to a RAID 0 raidset, see this post). The risk of using RAID 0 is the same as using JBOD (just a bunch of disks) to store information on. The only additional penalty of RAID 0 over JBOD is the time to restore the data is longer (one smaller disk vs a virtual larger disk made up of smaller disks). The performance gain of RAID 0 (striping) over the increased risk of a single disk failure (particularly given the high reliability figures for current disks) makes RAID 0 an attractive alternative for some non-critical applications. The most data that can be lost is that which has changed since the last backup.

High performance features like faster rotational spindles, seek times, larger caches are initially high cost features due to the recoupment of development costs (so called NRE costs). Those features will appear first on disks that are targetted at performance users - typically server farms and database systems. These users demand performance and are not as price sensitive as consumers. Consumers are normally not as demanding but are very price sensitive. High volume lower specification devices are released for consumer applications to gain market share. Eventually higher performance hardware will filter down to the consumer level once NRE costs are recouped by the high margin (ie. professional market). This is why you do not see all the goodies that SCSI disks have in a consumer (ie IDE) disks. It would cost to much to implement and thus raise the price beyond the consumer budget.

Laptops rarely support RAID due to weight, power, heat and cost considerations. Sager's inclusion of a RAID architecture is a unique selling point for them which appeals to high end users. However, most games are not dependent on disk activity in order to run (they are primarily memory resident). Games are however dependent on GPU performance, video memory speed, CPU speed and associated main memory speed (the infamous FSB and memory latency debate - dual channel Intel vs single channel SiS chips for example).

RAID 0 implemented properly will give a gain in data throughput (ie how much can be read or written in a given timeframe) of between 1.4 to 1.8 times irrespective of the disk interface due to caches and hardware RAID controllers.

Hope this helps.