At 5:40 PM -0700 11/28/05, Bruce Johnson wrote:
On Nov 28, 2005, at 4:37 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Okay guys, you're busted! I figured you were pulling my leg so I
checked around. The biggest buffers on any normal consumer drive
is 16 mb. That's "m" as in mega not "g" as in giga. It just
didn't make sense to have giga-bytes of buffer for kilo-byte files.
And the prices didn't seem to reflect that much buffer either.
Honestly, I hadn't even noticed the typo; my brain corrected it
without thinking. Aaron almost certainly meant 8MB buffers. The
statement about memory being much faster than HDD still holds, and
were we able to create 8GB memory buffers, trust me, it would be
faster.
As I said, the OS doesn't search those buffers anyway, it's handled
by the dedicated hardware on the drives themselves, and is much
faster than looking for something on disk.
In addition to caching previous lookups that buffer memory does two
other things. Most drives read a cylinder at a time. That is one
complete track on each surface. Subsequent sectors on a track and
tracks in a cylinder are most likely to be the next data to be
requested (or 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ... request down the line). So you
don't have to wait for the drive at that point, it's already in the
buffer. And depending on how smart the drive is it may read the next
cylinder in progression. Basically the disk tries to find stuff to
read when it isn't otherwise busy.
--
Clark Martin
Redwood City, CA, USA
Macintosh / Internet Consulting
"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"
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