Brennan’s Blog

This has happened to me so much the past couple of years. I am working along and then have to wait for the computer to finish something. I look at the Task Manager and see the processor is hardly busy, but the green light indicating hard drive activity quickly blinks at me. The speed of the computer is bound to the slow, slow hard drive and not the processor. When will they learn?

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I am reading Scott Hanselman's blog about Virtual Machines and External Hard Drive throughput. It shows some metrics which try to make the point that the optimal USB 2 throughput is higher than the output from the external drive. However, it is assuming the optimal throughput is sustained over time. In a lunch conversation Chris (optionScalper) explained that he prefers FireWire over USB due to the sustained performance of the FireWire architecture. He has had recent hard drive problems so he has looked into this more closely than I have.

But I did a quick Google search and found a page which shows the contrast of FireWire vs USB 2. What you will see is the "sustained" speed of FireWire is maintained while USB 2 will degrade over time.

As a lay person I can only assume that USB, which was originally designed for peripherals such as a keyboard, mouse and perhaps a low resolution webcam, was very different than FireWire which was designed to transfer large amounts of media from video recording devices which demands sustained data throughput. For the purpose of running a virtual machine from an external drive you would want sustained throughput. If you are just holding a pile of files on the drive which you access occasionally you are good with USB 2. But actual performance tests should be done to check this assumption. (I will do a live test once I have my PC prepped for it.)

Personally, I purchased a killer drive (7200RPM, 16MB cache) and a dual USB/FireWire drive enclosure so that I can get the best of both worlds. My work laptop does not have FireWire so I use the USB 2 connection. At home I use a $15 FireWire card I purchased at a nearby computer store. On CDW.com you could get a USB 2/FireWire Combo PCI card for $40.

Once I finally get my hands on a working 1GB memory chip for my PC I should be ready to actually run the virtual machines which was the reason for purchasing this external hardware. Unfortunately the memory chip I have sitting in a static free bag on my desk is faulty.

I have seen that you can now get a 200mb drive for about $120. That seems to be the sweet spot for the price/storage space ratio. You can find one at CDW.com. Then you get a $40 external enclosure. I found one at usb-ware.com. You place the 200gb drive into the external and plug it into your computer. You can then copy all of your files over to the drive as a backup and then store away that external in someplace which it is fireproof and a place where it will not be stolen. It is best to put it in another location as well if you are really serious about the backup.

Then every 6 or 12 months you can buy a new drive to place into the enclosure and start with a new disk. Keep the older disk around as a long term and permanent copy. Altogether you just need to spend $160. That seems well worth it to make sure all of your personal digital photos and music purchased from iTunes are safe.

Notice also that drive enclosure is both USB and Firewire compatible. Another drive which only does USB is still $40. So it best to just go for the Firewire version. You may want to hook it up to a Firewire device sometime. All modern Macs use Firewire but so do many digital video cameras. You could backup your videos quickly to the disk in this encloser.

Another interesting option with such an external drive... many motherboards support booting from a USB2 external drive. You could install various systems onto separate drives and plug in the one you wish to use and boot that system. I can think of all kinds of uses for that.

In my work environment it would be helpful to have a Java development environment set up on one drive and a .NET environment on another. Then client projects could be placed on the respective drive. Sure you could simply run VirtualPC or dual boot a system, but this seems like a quick and easy way to provide running environments with less hassle. No performance degredation or possible incompatibilities due to emulation and no lack of space due to sharing the drive with another installed system with a dual booting computer. Just plug in and boot.

Today my new flatscreen monitor arrived. I got it from CDW and it was delivered overnight. I got the ACER AL1715W for $249. I remember seeing a monitor like this one for over $400 just 6 months ago. I cannot wait to use it at home.

I am really tempted to purchase a Mac Mini and use it on a KVM switch with my PC with this new monitor. But I think ultimately I will want a G4 powerbook so I have a current and portable development system.

I pretty much just use the PC for playing Halo lately, but I hope to also do a fair amount of Java development with IDEA on it now. My aging 17" monitor has a sort of blurring distoration now which makes it frustrating to write code.