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Very simple question; what would be the next logical bottleneck after hard drives? (SSDs have really kind of completely eliminated this bottleneck for the time being)
nobody
Posted 2011-07-23T04:24:21.160
Reputation: 29
Next bottleneck after SSD's?
Answers
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Meh, the controllers aren't such a bottleneck. Each Sata port has a 3GB/s connection. Southbridge has a 2GB/s connection to the CPU. It's rare to see that much data being moved at once.
I think the next bottleneck is the network connections. As people start moving more and more items into online storage, upload and download speeds will be constantly tested.
Already, a family of four streaming videos regularly bottle up 6/Mbps connections. I'm saying this as an American, since the cable and DSL companies have their way with us while Japan get 100Mbps @ $40 a month.
It is getting even worse on the mobile side. Operators are moving to data caps. While they are large data caps, they don't spell out what criteria will be necessary to increase them in the future. And it is very likely in the near future that a significant number of users will be bumping into those caps.
The bus problems are easy. The network side sucks. I haven't even talked about the TCP/IP packet overhead. It's amazing that you'll still run into switches that assume all packets are 1500 bytes in length. . .
surfasb
Posted 2011-07-23T04:24:21.160
Reputation: 21 453
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The controller that the drives are connected to would be the next bottleneck (assuming the cables are okay) since it is the next piece of hardware. And where these controllers are often built into the motherboard (very common), the entire motherboard is the culprit.
There are of course other possibilities too, such as flaky drivers, a messed up system BIOS, OS problems, misbehaving hardware that's generating a lot of I/O and consequently hogging the bus, etc.
Randolf Richardson
Posted 2011-07-23T04:24:21.160
Reputation: 14 002
1+1 but I say the floppy. :) – KCotreau – 2011-07-23T11:30:58.037
1Ah yes. The floppy. I had to use one the other day to make a bootable CD. – surfasb – 2011-07-23T12:10:47.613
1LOL, actually I still order systems with floppies just in case. – KCotreau – 2011-07-23T12:27:57.787
1Yeah, we got floppy drives also. Do I know where our floppy disks are? That's another quesiton . . . – surfasb – 2011-07-23T12:35:48.170
1I use it mostly for IT tools...there are still some. – KCotreau – 2011-07-23T12:40:31.613
+1 for all those floppy disk comments! I only wish that floppy drives would include a 1.44 MB memory chip for a cache (RAM is so cheap these days) that would automatically pre-load the entire floppy disk the moment it is inserted, and immediately allow parallel access for the computer to the uncached portions. Although write operations wouldn't have to be cached, at least all the read operations could be (which would eliminate the problem of users removing the floppy disk before all the cache had been written to the disk). – Randolf Richardson – 2011-07-23T15:17:02.670
Yeah, I transfered all our tools onto one CD. Or all the tools that I use. . . – surfasb – 2011-07-23T18:19:22.413