nForce Speculation

[ktlx]

Originally posted by sturm375

RAID is excellent for writing, but horrid for reading. So you would be able to Write large file very fast, and safely, however reading them back would take longer. I thing the Screen Savers posted some benchmarking scores, and found that on average, RAID is slower than standard Master/Slave. The only reason to use RAID, is for the security of redundancy.

There are various types of RAID, each for a different application. Here is a run down of the most common types and where they are good and where they are not so good:

RAID 0: This is often called striping and consists of chaining multiple drives together to make a single larger volume. If the data is spread across multiple drives (hence the term stripe) then read and write performance is very good. It approaches the speed of an individual drive times the number of drives in the volume. However if you loose a single drive, the whole volume is toast. So you pay a huge reliability risk because the chance of a failure is the MTBF of each drive divided by the number of drives in the volume. One area where this can be useful is in intermediate processing of things like video. You need the intermediate stages to work as fast as possible, but their life span is relatively short so you can risk a disk failure.

RAID 1: This is often called mirroring and consists of having one volume exactly mirror another volume. There is no speed increase but the reliability goes up. It is now the MTBF of both drives added together. If the data is read and written in a very sequential nature, this model can be very fast. However, the main reason to go with mirroring is redundancy.

RAID 01, 10, 0+1, etc. All these are names for the same basic idea. First you create two volumes using a RAID 0 stripe. Then you mirror the two volumes as you would two disks. Now you have the read performance of RAID 0 combined with the redundancy of RAID 1. However this is very expensive as you have to buy twice as much disk space. But if you have disk needs that have lots of reads and writes and must be able to withstand disk failures, this is about all you can pick.

RAID 5: You can think of this as RAID 0 with parity information. Additional data is written to the volume to allow the volume to continue to function if a single disk failure occurs. Since the parity information has to be written on each disk write, writes pay a significant performance penalty. You almost always have to use a RAID controller to get any kind of throughput. However, if no disks in the volume have failed, you do not need to use the parity information, so reads are as fast as RAID 0. RAID 5 is great if you have data that is written very infrequently but read quite a bit. You get the reliability of mirroring without the cost of RAID 0+1.

Also on IDE RAID, you still can't write, or read from more than one disk at a time. That is part of IDE.

This completely depends upon the implementation. Yes, if you have two drives in the RAID set and both are on the same channel, this is true. However IDE RAID controllers typically have multiple channels (between two and eight) so that you put each drive on its own channel. Once you do this, then you can write to multiple drives at the same time. I believe the thinking is that if you need more than four to eight drives in the volume, you really should be using some other means to access the drives (i.e. SCSI or Fiber Channel).

 

[Scottgfx]

Originally posted by ddtlm
Chryx:
Scottgfx:

There are actually two busses between the processor and memory, the FSB and the RAM's bus (which is not called "Rambus" cause that's a freaking company name). CPU's with only a single bus between memory and themselves are those with on-die memory controllers, such as AMD's Hammer series and I think Moto's 85xx series.

But however there is NO performance edge offered by current dual-channel nForce1's over single-channel DDR chipsets, such as the VIA KT333.

OVERALL, I'd have to say that this rumor is silly, the 45deg angle of the chipset is meaningless, the nForce2 is not generaly useful to Apple, the nForce2 needs changes to both FSB and network controllers to work for Apple, and that no DDR FSB G4 is known to exist at this time. THere is no reason to suspect that this chipset will be used by Apple, and I would be surprised if it were.

Understood, I've been away from my PCs for a few months, and forgot that Hypertransport only went between the north and southbridges.

I too think it's silly about the 45 degree angle issue. I've seen either network cards or modems with angled chips. Perhaps it has something to do with "alien" technology being used?