At 01:45 PM 2/4/1999 SSgt Meidling wrote:
>
>After a month or so, I went to a 1.2 gig HD, and you should have seen the
>difference... I couldn't believe that the HD was slowing it down that
>much...
>
>
>>>  ----- Original Message from Dave Perry -----
>>>  Am I heading for trouble with this old hard drive? Will it act as a
>>>  bottleneck to the system. . . . ?


The hard drive (permanent storage) has always been a
bottleneck in computers. That's the reason for disk caching
software, on-drive caches, caching drive controllers, faster
spinning motors, faster actuators, smaller physical sector
size, wider/faster/smarter busses.  Access times are measured
by milliseconds in hard drives, not nanoseconds as in RAM.

If you use Windows 9x, which uses virtual memory (paging to
disk), the system really slows down with an older hard drive.

So, regardless of the platform, installing a much newer hard
drive is as big a performance boost as adding more RAM.

Regards,

John Chin

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