I'm digging you down, but I want to be clear about the reason for this. You have literally no knowledge of the matter you are speaking about. Since this is a long post, I will make my personal suggestion to you here. If interested, read on. Please, for your own education, pick up one of those Repairing PC's books. They are absolutely massive in size, but you will learn more about the workings of a PC than you could imagine. For you, I think this may be a good read.1) To own a quad-core and consider its processing power to be 4x the clock rate is misguided SEVERELY. Multi-processor systems do not scale in a linear manner (4 CPUs don't net a 4x speed increase) due to inefficiencies in task schedulers, inter-connect busses, cache misses, etc. While work is being done to minimize these issues (shared caches, faster interconnects, etc.), the fact still and always will remain that 4 CPUs aren't 4x as fast. This is also true of multi-core single-die processors.2) SATA is an evolving standard. SATA1 is 150MB/sec total speed (1200Mbit/sec). SATA2 is 300MB/sec (2400Mbit/sec). As already stated, this is simply the speed of the bus that connects your drive to your computer. The drive itself can probably sustain a transfer rate near SATA1 speeds from cache, but something below 30MB/sec from actual media. This also assumes you are doing sequential read operations, as random reads will negatively impact the transfer rate in a severe manner. Write speeds are horrible unless you are striping across many drives, and even then you end up with diminishing returns, as in the case of multiple CPU's. Four drives does not mean 4x the read or write speed. With each added drive in a RAID set you increase your cost by a fixed amount, but increase your performance by a lowering amount.3) Judging your systems activity level by skipping music is like judging how busy your CPU is based on the HDD activity light. Your music could be skipping for many reasons, not the least of which is an over-burdened disk, low system RAM available for file cache, a crappy music player, an application running in the background taking the majority of the processing power of each core (though this is pretty unlikely in most scenarios), and many other reasons. To attempt to diagnose the cause with very little knowledge would lead you to the answer you have come up with- "My computer is slow".4) Boot times are often not effected by the overall capability of the system. Your system's BIOS still runs in 8 bit mode, initialized most system devices to their bare minimum state, and runs very slowly. Why? Legacy. Even though you are running a new machine, your PC vendor needs to make sure you could still install DOS 6.x or Windows 95. It's insane, and it's slow, but that's how things work in a general PC market. Incidentally, this is why the boot time on a MAC is quicker than a PC. They use an EFI module to boot newer code, which then boots your OS. Additionally, the process of booting into your OS of choice will usually not see massive gains after a certain point either. Initializing drivers and devices is typically a time-dependent task, where a particular device may take X hundred milliseconds to complete whatever on-board functions are necessary to be considered "initialized" and ready. There are times when disk throughput is an issue, but Microsoft has attempted to address this issue as best they can by gathering all the files needed for system startup, and optimizing their location on disk. Does it work? Sometimes. But it's certainly better than doing nothing.5) Computers _are_ much faster. The FLOPS count keeps going up, the bus speeds are climbing steadily, and most devices attached to your PC have sped up exponentially as well. Most peripherals you attach to your PC couldn't even begin to tax the system's raw abilities. USB2 is capable of a theoretical 50MB/sec (400Mbit/sec), which is again faster than most disk drives on the market. The fact that you sit around and wait for tasks to start or finish is not an indicator of the PC's performance, but rather the application's performance. Application sizes have shot up to what was once an unimaginable number. In fact, a 740K floppy was roomy for most early PC applications, and before than at 300 cps (character/sec.) tape reel was laughably speedy! Now, just an application's executable component can be several megabytes, with links to DLL's or other libraries that range in the tens and hundreds of megabytes. Games are getting massive as well, coming on one or more DVD's at this point, each weighing in at 4GB as a minimum.
ssavoy Sep 26, 2008
Virus
mastazed Sep 26, 2008
Technology f**k YEAH!!!!
drdabbles Sep 29, 2008
I'm digging you down, but I want to be clear about the reason for this. You have literally no knowledge of the matter you are speaking about. Since this is a long post, I will make my personal suggestion to you here. If interested, read on. Please, for your own education, pick up one of those Repairing PC's books. They are absolutely massive in size, but you will learn more about the workings of a PC than you could imagine. For you, I think this may be a good read.1) To own a quad-core and consider its processing power to be 4x the clock rate is misguided SEVERELY. Multi-processor systems do not scale in a linear manner (4 CPUs don't net a 4x speed increase) due to inefficiencies in task schedulers, inter-connect busses, cache misses, etc. While work is being done to minimize these issues (shared caches, faster interconnects, etc.), the fact still and always will remain that 4 CPUs aren't 4x as fast. This is also true of multi-core single-die processors.2) SATA is an evolving standard. SATA1 is 150MB/sec total speed (1200Mbit/sec). SATA2 is 300MB/sec (2400Mbit/sec). As already stated, this is simply the speed of the bus that connects your drive to your computer. The drive itself can probably sustain a transfer rate near SATA1 speeds from cache, but something below 30MB/sec from actual media. This also assumes you are doing sequential read operations, as random reads will negatively impact the transfer rate in a severe manner. Write speeds are horrible unless you are striping across many drives, and even then you end up with diminishing returns, as in the case of multiple CPU's. Four drives does not mean 4x the read or write speed. With each added drive in a RAID set you increase your cost by a fixed amount, but increase your performance by a lowering amount.3) Judging your systems activity level by skipping music is like judging how busy your CPU is based on the HDD activity light. Your music could be skipping for many reasons, not the least of which is an over-burdened disk, low system RAM available for file cache, a crappy music player, an application running in the background taking the majority of the processing power of each core (though this is pretty unlikely in most scenarios), and many other reasons. To attempt to diagnose the cause with very little knowledge would lead you to the answer you have come up with- "My computer is slow".4) Boot times are often not effected by the overall capability of the system. Your system's BIOS still runs in 8 bit mode, initialized most system devices to their bare minimum state, and runs very slowly. Why? Legacy. Even though you are running a new machine, your PC vendor needs to make sure you could still install DOS 6.x or Windows 95. It's insane, and it's slow, but that's how things work in a general PC market. Incidentally, this is why the boot time on a MAC is quicker than a PC. They use an EFI module to boot newer code, which then boots your OS. Additionally, the process of booting into your OS of choice will usually not see massive gains after a certain point either. Initializing drivers and devices is typically a time-dependent task, where a particular device may take X hundred milliseconds to complete whatever on-board functions are necessary to be considered "initialized" and ready. There are times when disk throughput is an issue, but Microsoft has attempted to address this issue as best they can by gathering all the files needed for system startup, and optimizing their location on disk. Does it work? Sometimes. But it's certainly better than doing nothing.5) Computers _are_ much faster. The FLOPS count keeps going up, the bus speeds are climbing steadily, and most devices attached to your PC have sped up exponentially as well. Most peripherals you attach to your PC couldn't even begin to tax the system's raw abilities. USB2 is capable of a theoretical 50MB/sec (400Mbit/sec), which is again faster than most disk drives on the market. The fact that you sit around and wait for tasks to start or finish is not an indicator of the PC's performance, but rather the application's performance. Application sizes have shot up to what was once an unimaginable number. In fact, a 740K floppy was roomy for most early PC applications, and before than at 300 cps (character/sec.) tape reel was laughably speedy! Now, just an application's executable component can be several megabytes, with links to DLL's or other libraries that range in the tens and hundreds of megabytes. Games are getting massive as well, coming on one or more DVD's at this point, each weighing in at 4GB as a minimum.