Smanci wrote:Almost every piece of electonics is prone to that. Switching frequencies in digital motherboard VRMs is several hundreds of kHz. Some power supplies and converters, couple of tens of kHz.
Basically you shouldn't be using any electronic devices if that's an issue
That just treats everything as equivalent. That's like saying spending 10 minutes in the sun is equivalent to 3 hours, because whatever you do, outside there will be sun.
So that's no argument at all, it just tries to undo arguments by saying everything is equivalent, when the inquiry was about whether this is actually so (you can only make that statement when the inquiry has been answered, in absence of any answer, you cannot know these things).
Basically, you cannot use the argument of not knowing it, to say that people should not inquire into knowing it, as if you did know it, which wasn't so, or you would have provided a straight answer
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Thanks for responding though
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So the inquiry still stands and hasn't been answered yet apart from a very generic answer about basically all electronics. But the question pertained to the specificness of this one. Including, of course, its amplitude, frequency, patterns, and all of that, if that ever became important in that sense
while trying to figure out if there was anything interesting going on there.
Tzeb wrote:Fighting ssds is a waste of time. No sane person should use an "old style" hdd for the os today, as the slowness is cringe worthy. You have no excuse, as you can get ~120GB ssds for 30-40$.
There is actually no excuse for using them, at least the way they were used before (and still). The slowness is only a result (really, I am pretty sure it is going to be a direct result) of systems designing
for SSD, so they are trying to solve a problem that didn't exist before they were introduced, catch my drift? If everyone uses SSDs and then designers become lazy or let your system do stupid shit it doesn't need to (I have no clue what Windows 8 and 10 are constantly doing all the time for useless activity) THEN not using SSD is going to be cringe-worthy DUH.
But that's like putting the wagon in front of the horses. It is a bit the same as a run on the bank. People say the bank is going to crash, hence everyone does a run for the money, and as a consequence the bank crashes. Same thing.
Same with Audio CDs. People were all hyping that Audio CDs were going to go extinct, so they started selling their CDs and stopped buying them even though maybe they still wanted to. As a consequence, Audio CDs went extinct and they realized their self-fullfilling promise.
Their self-fullfilling prophecy.
So you are really being quite stupid by ensuring that SDDs have become an absolute necessity when before they weren't, but as a result typically your cost of computing has gone up and the advance in system responsiveness is really irrelevant (at least to me) compared to what it used to be before.
TODAY it is not longer irrelevant but that is the self-fullfilling prophecy I was talking about. You ensured that you could no longer live without the SSD by allowing software designers to not care anymore about their performance.
A modern system with 8GB of RAM may have 4GB in disk buffers at any one time. That means that unless you are doing writing (and you cannot tune the thing) there will be 4GB of disk in your memory. That means that anything that was recently acccessed is going to be in there.
Even this should be unnecessary for a good performing system.
Linus once said "If you require 1.6GB of buffers because you are compiling and then deleting the entire kernel source tree and you want this to be blazing fast because you don't want to commit any of that to disk, you have
issues". He said that 100MB would be sufficient (talking about dirty buffers, e.g. write cache). For any 16GB system.
That also means that if you hard-limited the dirty cache to 100MB, you would have those 3.9GB so to speak available as read buffers.
So basically you say "resistence is futile" but that is only ever uttered about something that is getting recognised as detrimental.
And I am not intending to fight them, in fact of course I want to use them as caching drives in a better setup than what I have today. I just don't want the big ones in my system for health reasons ostensibly. I have a very small one but it sucks (Transcend may not be the best brand).
But also because I do not take the "easy route" as I am a system's designer myself and want to work towards the
good solution and not stick and be content with a
mediocre one. You can only serve one master. If you invest in the bad systems, you will no longer have the impetus and desire to invest in the good ones.
(You saw the amount of research I do in RAID systems in the other thread, I really believe in a certain concept. There is a design concept I believe in and I feel it could have life). So I am not just doing this as a reactionary thing. This is as much a creative thing for me: SSDs as main OS disk do not fit with my creation.
They just don't agree with the concept I have. They do not agree with the design. They render the operation of the machine impossible, in the sense of the larger system I would be devising and all the tools around it.
I just ordered a WD Scorpio Black 750GB I must say. I need this 1TB disk for a RAID 10 system
. So I will take the opportunity to upgrade this "motherboard" to Windows 10 at the same time (only 3 days left). I still wonder what RAID card to buy, if any.
On this 5400 system, Chromium (Chrome-based webbrowser) takes about 5 seconds to start up completely.
That is more than I want but then I do not have the solution I want either (a cache disk) because Linux started being a complete idiot about it. The kernel just couldn't handle it. I don't know why. I have to ask them.
So I am not saying everyone should stay with slow HDDs and maybe the introduction of SSDs as system oses is just the logical evolution (you know, thesis, antithesis, synthesis).
But if the goal is synthesis then the goal is cached drives, the goal is not to stay stuck in the antithesis.
The design imperative is the combine the technology, not to throw one out for the other and then only combine them at the network level or something like that.
But as a solution designer myself (kuch kuch) I have a bit of a longer breath in dealing with these issues than most, perhaps. For me using a computer is not "hope it works, fine, done with it, can play games now".
I spent countless hours getting this to work (in Linux, currently) and testing and debating the LVM cache system, for instance.
My work then also leads to other interests such as designing hidden partitions for Linux (that doesn't exist in it) which uses the same technology (the device mapper). "There is no excuse" is like saying "Please stop doing all that development work, we don't need it, no one needs it". Even though e.g. commercial NAS providers use those kinds of systems.
Which I also want to work or develop for, in a sense.
So "there is no excuse" clearly doesn't grasp "who you're dealing with" in that sense
. Maybe my goals just extend much farther, I have a lot of patience with this, and I have much bigger issues currently than slow startup times.
Starting Chromium a second time also takes 5 seconds even though it is supposed to come from the in-memory cache.
This basically means that for this system, (there is no hard disk activity at all) the disk is not even an issue here.
Starting Firefox (coming from disk now) takes about 7 seconds. Starting it a second time takes about 3 seconds. 3-4 really. So my first time start latency only gets doubled compared to the second time. 3 seconds for a first browser start is completely acceptable for me considering the slowness of the overall system.
Relatively speaking, a 100% overhead in having to read it from disk is not bad.
That would e.g. be the equivalent of 2s -> 4s on a faster system.
Microsoft did an excellent job in redesigning the startup sequence of its most important Windows 10 apps. They now start in stages and give you the experience that it loads very fast because constantly and at a constant pace you get to see new elements load. It is a rather pleasant experience I must say. Even when it still takes 5-6 seconds, it feels very very fast. (Firefox takes longer to start on Linux than on Windows because Mozzila cannot use certain optimizations that they can use on Windows). (In general Linux is slower anyway).
So maybe, I don't know, maybe it is just illusionary, but the cringeworthiness of some piece of software also depends on how stupid the designers are in how their application loads. If there are going to be user interface inconsistences you are going to be annoyed. If you don't know what's happening, you are going to be annoyed. If nothing visible responds (all the while it is doing something) you are going to be annoyed.
You want to know what is going on; as long as you do, having to wait is not all that bad (because it can be pleasurable).
Having to wait while nothing visible happens is really the worst thing.