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...

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:

The future is here

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