Patriot SuperSonic Pulse

Some quick benchmarks for a Patriot SuperSonic Pulse 16GB USB3 (Product number: PSF16GSPUSB). As I suspected the reads are fast but writes are slow (sub USB2 speeds). This is not unexpected especially considering this flash disk was < 20$. It's also interesting to observe when running on USB2 the reads are faster than stock standard USB2 flash disks.

Benchmark was performed on NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 controller uPD720200 firmware 3016. I've seen slight (~ +5%) performance variation for the same benchmarks on a different NEC USB3 equipped laptop.

USB 3.0 Controller Firmware

Just to recap NEC/Renesas USB 3.0 controller uPD720200 firmware 3016 on my ASUS P6X58D Premium worked quite well with my Buffalo 1TB 2.5" HDD, delivering as expected results where finally the HDD was the bottleneck and not the USB connection itself. This is why I was surprised at the synthetic benchmark results for another Buffalo drive on the same PC, this time HD-LB2.0TU3-A3.

Initially contemplating this could be due to Western Digital internal drive within the enclosure (I've had a bad run with any WD disks for years now). Notice how slow and intermittent the reads are behaving compared to the writes. I suspect the writes were representative of disk's buffer & RAM caching more than the HDD speed itself.

Results with USB 3.0 controller firmware 3016:

Baffled as I was, swapping USB 3.0 port connections around, checking for driver updates and rebooting nothing seemed to help. The internal HDD @ 5400RPM (= 90Hz pitch * 60 sec, aka WD's IntelliPower) should be able to give much better and more consistent sequential read results. I finally remembered how suss SSD controller firmware can get with particular disks and decided to upgrade the USB 3.0 controller firmware to version 3012 (with the same 64bit driver version 2.0.4.0).

Results with USB 3.0 controller firmware 3021: 

I believe the results speak for themselves. Seems to me any high speed interface would benefit from a firmware upgrade these days. Plug-and-Play isn't what it used to be back when interfaces were running at much lower speeds...

Buffalo 1TB 2.5" HDD

Well it seems that Twitter has pretty much stalled my blog. I thought this could be of benefit for some folk out there hence posting it formally.

I happened to pick up one of these HDDs on sale recently and was quite impressed by it. The item is Buffalo HD-PCT1TU3/BB-AP (USB 3.0 capable) 1TB 5400RPM 2.5" external HDD. This happened to be the first USB 3.0 device I've plugged into my computer which runs USB 3.0 via a Renesas/NEC controller (for a lack of chipset model number, here's the hardware ID: PCI\VEN_1033&DEV_0194&SUBSYS_84131043&REV_03). Traditionally I've been biased towards buying Seagate and more recently Samsung HDDs, hence this is a bit of an "oddity" for me.

It's interesting to observe how physical backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 Micro-B cables has been preserved within a USB 3.0 Micro-B port:

This essentially means you can use the same drive with either USB 3.0 or USB 2.0 depending on the computer/cable mix you happen to have at the time.


Some exciting benchmarks follow...

Results whilst connected via USB 3.0:

Notice above you can finally begin to see the physical rotational speed characteristics of the internal HDD (5400RPM from outer 100MB/s to inwards 38MB/s of the platter). This is not visible on USB2.0 since the bus itself stagnates the IO flow below the minimum speed of the HDD. 

Results whilst attached via USB 2.0 (on an Intel ICH10R port) after converting to NTFS:

iPad review

This device needs multitasking badly and yes it will be coming towards the end of this year according to Apple (we'll see how that turns out to be). Push notifications for IM and the inability to properly stream Internet radio whilst browsing the web further reinforce this statement. There are workarounds for the streaming part, however no real solutions until multitasking's out.

Contrary to what people reckon App Store has plenty of free an usable apps such as: WordWeb, RDP, VNC, IM+, StreamItAll, GoodReader Lite, Google Earth, Fring, Nimbuzz, LinkedIn, Opera Mini, Wikipanion, APOD and so on... Put in other words you'll fill up the desktop with app icons easily just with free (and useful) apps..

I've never been a fan of touch screens on mobile phone sized devices (eg. iPhone...) however the screen size of the iPad makes it usable for me.

Who needs to sit in front of the noisy desktop computer when you can VNC/RDP into it from the comfort of the couch with your iPad...?

New PC Rig

An upgrade which was long time coming (5+ years). Replaced my old trusty Athlon XP 3200+ on a GA-7N400 Pro nForce2 Ultra400 (including legendary SoundStorm audio) with:

• ASUS P6X58D Premium
• Intel i7-930 (running OC @ 4.00GHz)
• 12GB of DDR3-1600 G.Skill F3-12800CL9T-6GBNQ
• Two ATi HD5770 1GB GPUs in CrossFireX config (2xPCIe 16x)
• 4x Samsung HD103SJ (on an ICH10r in RAID-0 and RAID-5 groups)
• ASUS Xonar Essence STX

The main purpose of the high specs was simple: VMware.

This build supports VMware ESXi straight out of the box (including things such as VT-d). Only the onboard Marvell 88E8056 NICs needed to have special oem.tgz injected into the ESXi disk in order to install (since ESXi will not install without seeing a MAC address on a NIC). Note that ICH10R's RAID is Not supported under ESXi (this is the case with any onboard RAID controllers).

I must admit expenses were high but are well worth it for running various VMs under VMware. Finally PCs have become powerful enough for properly running ages old VMware (and virtualisation concepts in general). VMware makes experimenting with various OSes and software stacks tremendously easy and flexible. Creating an Active/Active Veritas Cluster Server with SCSI3-PGR iSCSI fencing compliant storage no longer requires hefty non-x86 CPUs and hardware RAIDs.

Some very exciting benchmarks follow for 4x Samsung HD103SJ on a ICH10R...

Read/Write test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache ON, NTFS filesystem benchmark (4096 allocation unit size):

Write test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Read test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Write test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Read test of RAID-0 (striping), 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Write test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Read test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache OFF:

Write test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Read test of RAID-5, 128K width, with write back cache ON:

Alan Wake

Well what can I say... I'm disappointed that the game is not available on PC as Remedy have originally intended. Those who know me also know that I've always played games on consoles but at the core I'm a die hard PC fan. The ending is quite sudden and lots of the storyline remains quite open-ended (no surprises here, it seems to have become defacto mechanism for setting up sequels). This no doubt will have something to do with the upcoming downloadable add-on episodes from Xbox Live and probable release of Alan Wake 2.

Both in-game episodes style of storytelling and cut-scenes have boosted overall cinematic experience which Remedy have started off with the Max Payne series. The level of detail within the game ranges from realistic star skyline to the actual light switches used within game's location (north west US). One can only appreciate the various level of detail once storyline and time-line are well understood by the player. This is not something obvious on the 1st attempt at playing the game. On the other hand the graphics lack detailed character modeling and animations which Heavy Rain far surpasses. This is probably due to the fact no facial motion capturing has been done for Alan Wake as well as the fact game is predominantly focused on outdoor environments. In either case this shows off relatively badly in the cut-scenes. Foliage textures within the game are not of high resolution and not varied. I suspect this is predominantly due to the relatively limited storage capacity of Xbox's DVDs (as compared to the potential of PS3's Blue Ray disks). Enemies fast become more annoying than scary and fairly repetitive.

On the brighter side graphics lighting effects, dynamic weather environment and well made ambient sound mix have worked quite well towards game's overall atmosphere. Terragen fans will appreciate the vast landscape visuals which were once upon a time only feasible for non-real time wallpaper renders. It was also refreshing to see various forms of references to Remedy's past games (Max Payne, Death Rally) as well as famous moments in movies such as The Shining. Limited edition also includes a very interesting documentary about Remedy and development side of their games (working there would be great).

Now comes the waiting for next episode, I wonder how the whole "episodes result in faster and more frequent releases" concept will work with Remedy given that Valve seem to have totally forgotten about it for the Half-Life 2 series...

18c and snow?

Severe weather leads to funky weather status:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Not that much different from the original CoD:MW. The graphics are about the same, multi player's about the same - the major difference was obviously the single player gameplay. Single player's easily clocked in a matter of few hours, cinematics and variety of environments have been somewhat increased. I wonder what the inevitable sequel's going to be like, given we've seen a divergence outside of the CoD series with MW2 (eg. CoD branding being completely dropped at one point in time). So far I'm loving the Stinger lock-in for bringing down anything that flies within multiplayer... All in all a game worth the wait.

Nature adapting to technology

All must answer to the Inquisitor!

The future is here

Who needs to wait for standards to be defined, when the products already on sale...?

Max Payne 3

Max is now bald, has a beard and has moved to sunny Brazil. He's also ditched his outfit for a more temperature tolerant white shirt. No wonder, since the original Finnish team's sold off the game series brand to RockStar, in a venture to make Alan Wake. Also the Max Payne movie wasn't that great either.

Conclusion: Not looking good. This is not the original Max Payne the character, rather it is Max Payne the trade mark

Let's hope Alan Wake's drifting in the right direction... Not many games to look forward to except CoD:MW2 & Mafia 2.

Windows 7...

...it's not that different from Vista internally, but it does indeed run loads better on every PC I've installed the RC on. Its 'backward driver compatibility with Vista' further states how similar the core OS components really are, doubt there was any more than a marketing reason for upping the kernel version all the way to 7...

I'd classify Vista being notorious in the similar fashion Windows Millennium was back in its time. I've personalty dodged Vista any way I could ever since the Beta came out, no wonder the "downgrades" to XP were so popular in the community. 

On the other hand Windows 7 RC's so far behaved like Vista was meant to be initially. There's no constant sluggishness about it and constant HDD I/O. I'd classify Windows 7 as being "the new XP". The new taskbar comes in very handy (seems as if they've pretty much copied the years old dock from MacOS X, same deal with wallpapers changing). 

• Changing resolution's much easier to access compared to Vista
• Resource Monitor's long time coming
• File copy/paste dialogs and functionality are still pathetic (lucky there's Total Commander to fill in the gap)
• System tray's been cleaned up in a workable fashion
• Automatic driver updates are more useful than ever
• ReadyBoots seems to actually work properly this time with an SD card
• Indexing seems not to bring the entire HDD down to it's knees, even with Vista's long overdue HDD I/O priorisation
• No telnet client by default just like in Vista, it's not the telnet client which is unsecure but the server. Telnet's extremely useful for troubleshooting network comms!
• Maximum Performance power setting has somehow got WiFi power savings enabled by default, instead of WiFi maximum performance
• Virtual Hard Disks is a plus which I've only read about so far
• Windows manager mouse gestures are handy, however primitive compared to Linux windows managers which are far more intelligent and functional (eg. proper auto-placement of new windows and ALT+mouse resizing, moving...)

Apple summed it all up quite concisely.

Solaris - Tales from the past

$ uname -s
SunOS
$ grep Copyright `which clear`
#       Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T
#       Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation

via blubrick

Global Financial Crisis

All I can say, leverage off it!

Gran Torino

"Get off my lawn!!"

Great move, Clint's kept both his directing and acting tempos at his fine levels.

The Ascent of Money

Channel 4 has brought out an interesting BBC style documentary/series covering the history of money, financial markets and evolution of economies. Was quite surprised at the sheer selection of the topics covered, even the obscure and often rarely heard of Jacob Rothchild was interviewed. All up of 6 episodes are well worth the watch...

Dr Strangelove

Thumbs up for Dr Strangelove. This is one of those rare movies that manages to be political, serious and funny all at the same time... Given the year it was released in 1964 & some of the lesser known facts it portraits [1] [2], I can only imagine how simply outright it was about the whole political context back then. I'd rate this as the 2nd best movie Kubrick directed, right after the timeless classic of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Llorca

"...There is, you must recall, a kind of serious study that will give you the confidence to strike your match to the mighty wick that will illuminate yet another portion of the darkness..."

More useful than it looks