kony wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 22:05:17 GMT, CJT
wrote:


John R Weiss wrote:


It is true in the general case. There may be exceptions, but I can't think
of any off hand...


Many of the office type tasks here (e.g. word processing, Web browsing,
even listening to music) get done on devices that don't even HAVE local
hard drives. And the compute server to which they attach just has small
drives for booting its OS and for swap. So the disk drives the user
devices actually access are a couple of ethernet links away. Even the
file server has what you'd probably consider slow drives (but it has
lots of RAM for buffering). And it all works plenty fast -- probably a
lot faster than you're accustomed to.


You must be on crack. It is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH MUCH slower that
anyone with semi-modern gear is accustomed to. Even GbE on a PC
is slower than budget local storage HDD. Server-side apps are a
logistic solution, performance be damned.


You're just pulling things out of your *ss. I'm telling you about
actual experience.


Of course, if you just have one (truly "personal") computer, it'll have
a disk attached.

But I think for many people, disk drive speed is pretty low on the list
of things on which they should be spending money.



That's why some people buy newer computer then soon feel it isn't
much faster, because they didn't significantly improve the
bottleneck to their use, which is often the HDD.

Not in my experience for typical office tasks in a properly
configured system.


HDD speed is one of the most profound impacts on everyday tasks.
Sure the system must have ample memory, but that's a given for
any but the most budget-constrained of new PCs or most demanding
users.


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