RE: Why do computers still have disk drives?

Jon -

It's hard to say.  USB 2.0 is 480 Mbps, which works out to about 40MB/s.
Most USB drives (FLASH or actual hard drives) top out around 37MB/s,
which is pretty reasonable.  It certainly looks like the USB interface
is the bottleneck.  That said, it doesn't tell us how fast modern FLASH
RAM is.  It could sustain 40, 70, or 80 bazillion MB/s.  We need to
remove the USB interface from the equation to find out.

Current desktop internal hard drives (7200 RPM units) can easily sustain
50-60MB/s; some are over 70 and they can burst even faster.  10K and 15K
disks can do even better, although what they really excel at is
seeking/random I/O.

Firewire 800 (not 400) external drives should be comparable to internals
but good luck finding them.

John A. Jones, CISSP
Americas Information Security Officer
Jones Lang LaSalle, Inc.
V: +1-630-455-2787 F: +1-312-601-1782
john.jones@xxxxxxxxxx

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jon Paris
Sent: Friday, October 06, 2006 2:53 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Why do computers still have disk drives?

" Why can't the manufacturers just load about 200 GB of this solid state
memory into the machine?"

I'm not convinced that at this point in history that it would be faster.
It would certainly be much more expensive.

Using a file on my USB thumb drives is way slower than using a
comparable file on the hard drive.  How much of that is due to
differences in buffering/caching etc. I don't know.  I was under the
impression though that the raw access speed of flash memory was pretty
darned slow.

Jon Paris
Partner400

www.Partner400.com 

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