ibmman | (no subject)

hello again! today I had an exciting fun filled day of benchmarking hard drives! (again) it seems like i tend to do that alot. My conclusion: hard drive benchmarks are not consistent whatsoever. This leaves me wondering how in the world I should judge the performance of my drives... well heres the full story.. last week my 120gb wf1200jb appeared to be making louder noises than usual so I went ahead and made an advance rma and got the replacement drive yesterday. The one that was in there still tested out fine physically but im so paranoid when it comes to hard drives now taht if it didnt cost money to ship them back (and if i had serial ata) i'd probably return all my hard drives at least once a month just to make sure they wouldnt randomly die on me. Of course I'd probably have more problems that way but theoretically it would be an interesting idea.. so yeah i notcied a few weeks ago that the disk benchmark in sisoft sandra seemed to have some issues with my 1200jb (at least on the kt333 integrated ide controller) since every time i retested it would alternate between 15 MB/s and 64 MB/s for the buffered write.. which is odd. 64 is more of where it should be at since this thing is suppossed to have an 8mb buffer, but sandra doesnt seem to be able to test the drive reliably. I copied the partition to the new drive with partitionmagic (one of the most useful utilities ever) and ive been benchmarking both of them. The new drive gets different scores in sandra than the other one but still seems to go between certain numbers.. it could be dependant on what part of the drive its writing/reading the data but it wouldnt vary that much and both drives contain the exact same data right now.. ive also tried winbench 99 and the scores werent really reproducible on there either. I know I should be using a pci ide controller for best results with benchmarking but I've only got two ata66 cards and one of them is raid only and the other is in the internet server. Just seems kind of odd since i would have heard alot more about it if there were known issues between these drives and benchmarking suites, especially since this model was really really popular. Its suppossed to be really fast but i dont really have any way of telling, since its the secondary drive and it does at most times seem moderately slow. I really want to switch motherboards between the two computers since the duron has the soltek board but that will mean reinstalling windows and ill have to back everything up first.. if jessie wants to help organize my files first before backing stuff up so i'll know what it is than maybe i actually will switch the boards.. since the black computer is suppossed to be my performance system but the duron has the better motherboard. Also today I;ve been watching the live video from Assembly 2003 in Finland (www.assembly.org) which is 4000+ person computer/demoscene party in finland.. some of the stuff is in finnish but like 3/4 is in english some pretty darn cool stuff. Maybe ill make it there someday but im not sure ho i would go about fitting computers on a plane.. ill guess i'll worry about that when i need to but it would be sweet. Oh yeah i have a laptop now, i could use that.. hmm.. wow its alot later than i thought it was. I made it into the There beta (www.there.com) and i still want to try that tonight but i need to sleep argh hmm.. anyway sorry to bore everyone with this but i figured I'd let all of you know what I was doing today. lol.. I promise something more exciting next time, at least i hope so. If you can, get more people to vote in my orange juice poll.. I want to know if there are any other people out there who like the pulp almost as much as the juice...