Since FriendFeed has been acquired by Facebook, Twitter started reducing their access to the tweet stream with the clear intent of penalizing the company. It is obviously a good move from Twitter, and although the authors of TechCrunch complains about it, I can not really see why they should not be doing it.

Apparently the first tier of Last.fm’s servers uses SSD disks to increase throughput of the data. They use those servers as cache, pushing on there the songs that people are likely to listen the most for the day. Not a bad idea, considering that the prices are going down (e.g., about $280 for 160Gb).

IZEA is pushing for its sponsored tweets model. We all knew this moment would have arrived and that is not the first attempt to monetize the stream. People already complain about it but there are already millions of blogs out there created with the sole purpose of making money so what is the difference?

I spent a lot of good summers in a Club Med village in Caprera, an enchanted island of Sardegna. Next to our residence there was a cool-looking US Navy base. In the past few years both sites have been closed with the promise of improvements but everything has yet to happen. Some lights have been on for years by now!

A 25 years old guy in a small town of Italy faked to be sick at work to be visited by the nearby doctor (a female). Once in her clinic he sexually harassed her. How can people think to be able to get away with these things?

Well that was a nice Thanksgiving surprise for those of us short this weekend eh? The key will be to see if it continues into this week or if it was a simple low v over reaction. If I had my wits about me on Friday morning, I would have played to the up side, but alas I did not. In fact I was pretty sure we were in the midst of a dead cat bounce. We did see some selling into the close, and I was guessing we would close down 150 or so. As I write this, I see the futures are up over .50% across the board. Likely on the heels of a good black Friday and the news that Dubai will get bailed out by United Arab Emirates, or perhaps it is because Tiger will not speak to the Florida cops. Whatever it is, I am not looking for it to last. Although not as pronounced as the last down turn, and rightly so due to the holiday’s, I still think we will see some more down movement this week. It is starting to break that the small .05 % increase in traffic to the stores over the weekend did not result in more sales. However, I think a lot of people will be awaiting the results of cyber Monday before deciding whether to short retailers or not.

We have a lot of news again this week. Fair warning, I will be traveling through Friday, but I will do my best to throw up some charts and posts throughout the week, although brief they may be. Now on to this week’s video.

This is a REPOST from HPC Projects published 6-times annually by Scientific Computing World.

The HP Z800

Computers are continuing along their astounding path down the price/performance curve to the point where you can literally put the power of what we not long ago considered a supercomputer on or beside your desk in an office environment. Paul Schreier reviews some of these powerful systems

HPC Projects: October/November 2009

Desktop HPC, personal supercomputers, personal workstations, whatever you call them, there’s no standard definition of what they are. But most suppliers generally agree on what they aren’t: standard office PCs. Simply having lots of cores just isn’t enough of a boost for the applications where desktop HPC is generally applied: typically in engineering design, analysis and visualisation. And as you’ll see in this report, desktop HPC involves not only the familiar tower form factor, but also small racks that accommodate blades and that are designed to sit beside a desk in an office environment.

HP refers to this class of system simply as a ‘workstation’, and Jeff Wood, director of worldwide marketing for workstations, notes some key differences from office PCs. In short, it must have the ability to expand its infrastructure to accommodate large amounts of memory, disk storage, powerful graphics for visualisation and possibly cards with a GPGPU (general-purpose graphical processing units). He also suggests that you not forget about something as mundane as the power supply. Office PCs might have a 300W supply, but when you consider that a high-end graphics card alone might need 250W and the processor can easily need more than 100W, the problems are obvious. Thus, for instance, HP’s Z800 system comes with an 1,100W supply. And while it can run on standard line voltage and without any special cooling – which makes it easy to place anywhere in an office environment – there is a water-cooling option in the event you want to keep fan noise to a minimum.

In the mind of Transtec’s HPC specialist Oliver Tennert, HPC focuses on the application, not the system itself; HPC denotes the goal. He adds that you can’t simply take off-the-shelf components and build an HPC system; it requires special software and, in the case of a GPU card, also a compiler.

It’s reasonable to assume that nobody will ever have the fastest computer at any point in time on their desk, comments Herb Schultz, Deep Computing manager at IBM. The question instead becomes whether a user can run computationally intensive applications that fit within certain constraints – budgets, being in the office environment (low noise, low heat, line power) and having easy-to-manage systems that are standardised and thus run commercial applications.

Who needs desktop HPC?

Which users are most likely to use desktop HPC? According to Ian Miller, senior VP of sales and marketing for Cray’s Productivity Solutions Group, such systems have become particularly affordable and are very attractive for, among others:

• an engineering team looking for its first cluster;
• scientists/engineers hitting the limits of PC performance;
• a software developer looking for a dedicated system for development and testing;
• a design/simulation project that is just starting but needs room to grow.

In this regard, Steve Conway, research VP for HPC at market research firm IDC, points out that users are moving into this class of system both top-down (where users want immediate access to considerable power rather than waiting to have their jobs scheduled on a cluster) and bottom-up (such as a small engineering-services firm where the customer says ‘here’s the part we want’, but the company can’t get the work done efficiently on a standard office PC). In addition, rather than classify desktop HPC by number of cores or other features, IDC categorises these systems as those selling in the range between $10k and $100k. According to IDC, sales for this segment in 2008 were $1.96bn, and despite the global recession that number should grow to $2.7bn by 2013.

Amax PSC-2n

The low-end market has been underserved and users have been intimidated says Cray’s Miller. Now it’s no longer so scary, especially with tools such as Windows Cluster Server 2008 and the Intel Cluster Ready (ICR) programme. Configuring a desktop HPC system isn’t simply a matter of putting parts together; making them interact can be a daunting task. Even with a standard desktop PC users can have problems with a disk drive or its driver, and Miller adds that matters become considerably more complex when you have a whole bunch of ‘moving parts’. With ICR, the burden of integration falls on the vendors; users are assured that hardware and software elements all work together, applications will scale and take advantage of advanced architectures.

Almost 1,000 cores in a tower

A recent article in Scientific Computing World (‘A supercomputer chip for every man’, Feb/Mar 2009) gives an extensive introduction into the amazing performing boosts possible with GPGPUs (general-purpose graphic processing units), and Nvidia has packaged one of its processors in a card format that it supplies to various system integrators. Each Tesla card provides 240 computing cores and 1 teraflop of performance, and software written to run on GPGPUs has been shown to run as much as 100x faster than on a conventional processor.

A popular configuration among desktop HPC suppliers is one that combines dual quad-core Xeon 5500 Series (Nehalem) processors in a tower that can accommodate as many as four Tesla cards for a total of 960 cores and 4 teraflops of performance. Prices for such systems are approximately $12k depending on features such as disk space and memory.

One supplier in this category is Amax, which product manager James Huang notes was selected as one of Nvidia’s Tesla launch partners with the PSC-2n personal supercomputer. Its 1,200W power supply runs on 110 to 240V AC without any special cooling. In fact, notes Huang, because each Tesla card can consume as much as 200W, heat requirements mean that you can’t simply adapt any old chassis for such a system; these must be custom designed with adequate cooling for all system components.

Huang further explains that the education and research markets are showing great interest in Tesla systems, but that the biggest obstacle is on the software side. The cost savings with hardware are sometimes offset by the softwaredevelopment costs where it might be necessary to recode 30 per cent of existing programs to take advantage of the Tesla parallel processing. He also adds that these desktop HPC systems are sometimes used as a proof of concept for GPGPU computing, later leading to a full-on cluster deployment.

Super Micro Computer 7046GT-TRF

Along similar lines, Super Micro Computer recently announced a 4-teraflop tower system based on dual Xeon 5500 processors with support for four Tesla cards along with three additional PCIe slots for high-bandwidth I/O. The box also features redundant 93 per cent efficiency 1,400W power supplies. The 7046GT-TRF is housed in a 4U rack-mount convertible tower chassis that supports as many as 11 full-height, full length expansion cards and eight hot-swap 3.5-inch SAS/SATA drives.

A third member of the club offering four Tesla cards with dual Nehalem processors in a tower is Colfax with its CXT5000. The vendor does note that you can use the four Tesla cards only under Linux; Windows requires a discrete graphics card and in that case you can add a maximum of three GPUs.

Further companies with a similarly configured tower include Velocity Micro with its ProMagix VSC240 and Transtec with its 1100R Nehalem supercomputer, which uses vertical rails to accommodate two server cards in a 1U format.

While four appears to be the maximum number of Tesla cards you can plug into a tower, according to the Nvidia website there are even more suppliers offering personal supercomputers with three Tesla cards. They start with some of the players already mentioned (Amax, Colfax and Velocity Micro) and then go on to include Microway (WhisperStation PSC) and Penguin Computing (Niveus HTX). Another member of this group is Silicon Mechanics with its HPCg A2401, which is based on a quad-core AMD Phenom II processor; note, though, that loading three GPU cards results in each PCIe x16 slot operating at x8 speeds – something worth examining no matter which vendor you are looking at.

Nvidia additionally points out that several major OEMs provide Tesla-based personal supercomputers including the HP Z800, the Dell Precision T5500 and T7500 as well as the Lenovo ThinkStation D20 and S20. Consider the Z800 in more detail. This tower configuration comes with two CPU sockets and thus 8 cores using Nehalem processors and it also has support for Intel Hyper-Threading Technology with thread-level parallelism on each processor to give you essentially 16 cores. You can pack the system with up to 192GB of memory and 7.5TB of disk storage, Nvidia Quadro FX graphics and the box can also accommodate two Tesla cards, as well.

HP also points out that at this time the Z800 is the only workstation certified for Parallels Workstation Extreme, software that runs multiple isolated desktops environments simultaneously. You can run multiple operating systems − whether 32- or 64-bit XP, Vista, Windows 7 or even Linux − to support different applications all on the same box and thus to ‘virtualise’ 3D, visualisation and hi-definition video programs at full speed. While running more desktops on each server significantly reduces the total cost of ownership, an interesting concept is that an engineer could, for example, replace multiple workstations sitting on his desk, each one running a different graphics-intensive design or analysis program, such as CAD under Windows and a CFD code under Linux, all on the same hardware.

Deskside racks

Users often place a tower next to their desks, so why not put a small rack there? These systems use a ‘blade’ concept so you can populate them with the processing power you need or can afford. They’ve become quiet enough not to be a distraction in an office environment, they plug into standard wall sockets and weigh little enough that they can be safely placed on standard office floor systems. When on casters, they can be moved around for a quick change in the work location without the need for any special tools.

Cray CX1-LC

A recent offering in this vein comes from Cray, which has expanded its entry-level systems with the CX1-LC (where ‘LC’ refers to ‘light configuration’, supporting four nodes instead of the eight in the CX1). With a base price of less than $12k, it is available with the Xeon 5500 Series and supports from one to four blades for as many as 32 cores of Intel processing; other blades are available for visualisation and with GPGPUs. The 7U box is the same size as the CX1 (31 x 17.5 x 35.5cm) and thus is field upgradeable to a full 8-slot CX1. It rests on a simple deskside pedestal, its 800W power supply plugs into a standard outlet and the box complies with the ISO NR45 noise regulations for general office areas. The system can be easily expanded by connecting up to three chassis with an internal switch infrastructure. An interesting plus is a front-control panel with a touch-screen LCD that supports a configuration wizard and also provides information about local server nodes, the enclosure and modules.

Another example is the BoxClusterDSN. Measuring 568 x 434 x 640mm, this deskside unit provides four positions, each of which can be populated with two quad-core Xeon L5520 processors for a total of 32 cores; it also holds 384GB of memory and 16 hard disks. It is available in two variations, for either 110V or 220V AC. The four nodes are in a proprietary format, but the external enclosure size is the same as a standard rackmount width so it’s possible to put this system into a server rack, if desired. It draws less than 15A of current, weighs fewer than 95lbs and specs a noise level of 51.2dB(A).

Also suited for optional mounting in a 19-inch rack is SGI’s CloudRack X2. It measures 24.4-inches (14U) high and with a base of 17.6 x 41 inches has a footprint of five square feet; it supplies nine slots for fanless and coverless 1U server trays installed vertically as well as 2U available for networking equipment. It accommodates a maximum of 36 processors (216 cores). Running from 180-250V AC (no 110V AC), the CloudRack X2 is thermally optimised to safely operate in ambients up to 40° C (104°F). The vendor supplies a number of trays that take advantage of the latest processor options, including GPGPUs, and most CloudRack trays include support for up to either six or eight SATA or SAS hard drives.

BoxClusterDSN

To address this market, IBM provides the BladeCenter S chassis, a 7U rack-optimised chassis that accommodates 1 to 14 blades and plugs into a standard outlet. The BladeCenter S Office Enablement Kit is the ideal way to deploy it in an everyday office. The kit enables several office-friendly features such as the built-in Acoustical Module, a front locking door, 33 per cent or 4U available for expansion.

The market for computers selling for less than $50k is not nearly as big as people have portrayed it to be claims Herb Schultz of IBM. He believes that desktop supercomputing has not captured the imagination of users. Instead, the model for the delivery of compute cycles is changing. Why buy a system and manage it when you might not always need this extra power? And where users previously had to purchase the service of many nodes for long periods, now they can ‘rent’ hundreds of processors for half a day – computing on demand has become very discrete and inexpensive. Renting cycles in this way can also alleviate a number of problems. There are no worries about sufficient electricity; no system administration is necessary; and there is no liability, because of an extra level of security; data centres supply backup recovery, so you don’t have to worry about what happens if a key computer gets stolen.

Recorded 11/20/09 at SC09, this Panel discussion entitled “Flash Technology in HPC: Let the Revolution Begin” was moderated by Bob Murphy, Sun Microsystems. Download for iPod

Abstract: With an exponential growth spurt of peak GFLOPs available to HPC system designers and users imminent, the CPU performance I/O gap will reach increasingly gaping proportions. To bridge this gap, Flash is suddenly being deployed in HPC as a revolutionary technology that delivers faster time to solution for HPC applications at significantly lower costs and lower power consumption than traditional disk based approaches. This panel, consisting of experts representing all points of the Flash technology spectrum, will examine how Flash can be deployed and the effect it will have on HPC workloads.

* Bob Murpy slides: “Flash Technology in HPC: Let the Revolution Begin“

* Paresh Pattani slides: “Intel SSD Performance on HPC Applications“

* David Flynn slides: “Fusion-io Solid State in HPC“

* Larry Mcintosh and Dale Layfield slides: “Sun’s Flash Solutions for
optimizing MSC.Software’s Simulation Products“
For more information, check out this Sun Blueprint: Sun Business Ready HPC for MD Nastran.

* Jan Silverman slides: “Spansion EcoRAM NAM Network Attached Memory“

Here are the two most important sessions for you to learn more about SSD in the data center at the upcoming Gartner Conference:

1) Fusion-io: Fusion-io Helps MySpace Slash Server Footprint by 60%, Saving Space, Power, and Maintenance

Speaker is David Flynn, Co-Founder, President, and CTO of Fusion-io. Topics inlcude increased performance, server footprint, and rackspace/power reductions. nb: I’ve seen David speak numerous times — he is compelling so try not to miss this session.

2)  SSD – Super Strategies for Deployment

General Session with Stanley Zaffos.  Zaffos is a vice president and research director in Gartner Research. His major areas of responsibility include storage and storage management software.  A flurry of SSD-related product announcements coupled with rapid SSD price declines and a limited understanding of the operational issues surrounding the use of SSDs in complex server environments has created uncertainty about how best to deploy storage systems that incorporate SSDs in user environments. Understanding the following key issues will increase the probability of their effective use in your environment.  Topics include:

Jeg har aldrig i mit liv haft så godt IT-udstyr!

Egentlig ville jeg bare lægge Windows 7 på min bærbare pc, men jeg havde ikke undersøgt tingene ordentligt på forhånd, inden jeg købte en fuld pakke med Windows Professionel 7. Min model var nemlig ikke på Acers liste over maskiner, der kunne køre Windows 7.

En god ven foreslog mig at købe en Solid State Disk (mere herom senere), hvis eneste opgave skulle være at køre Windows; data skulle så ligge på den originale harddisk. Jeg forhørte mig lidt hos et par forretninger, der kunne lave det for mig (jeg tør nemlig ikke selv rode med skruetrækkere i en pc). Ingen mente, det kunne blive rigtig godt.

Så begyndte jeg tillige at regne lidt på, hvad det samlet set ville koste at lave alle disse ting ved en tre år gammel bærbar pc, som har været udsat for tidens tand og meget slid, hvor z-tasten ikke virker, som bliver meget varm trods flere rensninger osv.

Jeg besluttede at købe en ny pc, og denne gang en stationær, som er mit livs første, fordi man for de samme penge får meget mere maskineri, og fordi jeg er så evigt træt af, at hver gang man gerne vil lave et eller andet med hardwaren, siger alle “årh en bærbar, nå så er det mere kompliceret”, eller “nej det tør jeg ikke rode med i en bærbar”.

Hertil kommer, at man på en bærbar stort set kan begynde forfra med alt, når man spilder et eller andet ned i tastaturet – jeg har fx levet uden en z-tast i flere år; z er slet ikke en uvæsentlig tast, og den kan anvendes til meget mere end Zoologi og Zebra, for CTRL Z fortryder som bekendt seneste handling i Windows-verdenen.

Summa summarum: jeg har investeret i en vældig pc og regner med at være rigtig godt kørende de næste mange år. Jeg fik anbefalet at kontakte Datatel, som bekvemt nok kun ligger et par kilometer fra mig, og vi sammensatte følgende. (“Vi” er måske nok så meget sagt, for jeg er så inkompetent på hardwaresiden, som man kan være.)

Motherboard: Gigabyte Ga-p55-us3l Motherboard I7 Socket 1156 Intel P55 Atx Raid Gigabit Ethernet Lan
Processor: INTEL CORE I5 750 2.66GHZ
Ram: OCZ OCZ3X13334GK OCZ Technology memory, DDR3, Capacity 4096 MB, Memory speed 1333 MHz, PC10600, CL 7 ms, 240 pin, Dual channel
Disk: OCZ Vertex Series Solid State Disk 60 GB
Disk: Samsung 1000 GB HD103UJ SATA II 32MB
Strømforsyning: ENERMAX Strømforsyning pc ECO 80+ 500W
Grafikkkort: Gigabyte GeForce GT 220
Skærm: Samsung SyncMaster P2370
Tastatur: Razer Lycosa

Jeg har installeret Windows 7 i 64 bit versionen på min Solid State Disk, og det er vildt fascinerende, at fra jeg tænder pc’en til Windows er klar på skærmen går der 32 sekunder! På min gamle pc går der nogle minutter.

Og hvad er så en Solid State Disk? Jeg har fundet denne beskrivelse på Computerworld:

Solid state-drev eller SSD’er lagrer data på flash-hukommelse. Til forskel fra harddiske, som lagrer data på roterende magnetiske plader, har SSD’er ingen bevægelige dele, hvilket gør dem mere robuste og mindre sårbare overfor nedbrud. SSD’er anses også for at være mindre strømslugende.

Flash-hukommelse giver hurtigere overførsel af data og bedre latenstid end harddiske, fortæller Michael Norman, der er interim director for SDSC i udtalelsen. Ny hardware som sensor-netværk og simulatorer leverer masser af data til supercomputeren, og flash-hukommelse lagrer og behandler disse data hurtigere.

SSD’en i min nye pc “slumrer” når den ikke laver noget, hvilket reducerer både støj og strømforbrug.

C-drevet er kun en systemdisk og skal ikke lave noget som helst andet end at afvikle Windows. D-drevet er til alt det andet: programmer, dokumenter mv. Jeg er snart (efter tre dages arbejde) færdig med at installere alting og at få det til at virke, og der er noget facinerende over stadig at have 882 GB ledig plads.

Det har været lidt af en udfordring at få installeret alt på D:\ i stedet for på C:\, for alle programmer vil default lægge sig på C:\. Det varede lidt, inden jeg fandt ud af, at man typisk skal vælge “brugerdefineret installation” for at få muligheden for at vælge drevet i stedet for som vanligt bare bevidstløst at klikke på “Næste”.

Installationen af Java drillede noget, men pludselig genså jeg både netbanken og arkivalieronline.dk, og det var rigtig dejligt. Med en 24″ skærm skal man forresten ikke maksimere billederne fra arkivalieronline, for det er da helt vanvittigt så store, de bliver. Men det står skarpt og klart, og forbedringen fra en 15,4″ skærm er til at tage og føle på! Pludselig giver det mening at arrangere vinduerne lidt på skrivebordet og at kunne se det hele på én gang. Skærmen er med fuld HD, så jeg kan vist også se TV på den, men så langt er jeg endnu ikke nået.

Jeg vil faktisk gerne anbefale Datatel som en rigtig god forretning med en rigtig god kundeservice. Det skyldes følgende: Min printer – en Canon i 865 – er 5-6 år gammel, og da jeg skulle installere den, meddelte Windows, at CD’en ikke kunne bruges, da den var forældet. Nåh ja, tænkte jeg, 5-6 år på bagen, nyt styresystem, 64 bit i stedet for 32, der var nok ikke meget at gøre, så jeg ringede til butikken og ville faktisk høre, om de havde nogle kvalitetsprintere til salg. “Næh nej” sagde han, “det skal du ikke gøre, jeg finder lige nogle drivere til dig og sender dig et link”. Den slags er efter min opfattelse rigtig god kundeservice.

Samlet set har jeg jo ikke nået at bruge pc’en så meget endnu, men den umiddelbare oplevelse er:

• Windows 7 er rigtig lækkert – det bedste fra Vista sammen med driftssikkerheden fra XP
• Jeg har endnu ikke oplevet programmer, der ikke kunne fungere med 64 bit
• Fremragende at have Windows kørende på 32 sekunder
• Fantastisk at have fået en kæmpe stor skærm
• Støjgenerne er fuldstændig væk
• Det gør bestemt ikke noget, at der er lys i tastaturet (faktisk er det rigtig flot) og at alle taster virker.
• Det samlede visuelle indtryk er bare i orden.

Der er én udfordring tilbage: iPod og iTunes… det lykkedes mig i går at destruere min kalender og iTunes fryser hver gang jeg når til et bestemt punkt. Jeg må vist på nettet og se hvor mange i denne verden, der oplever lignende problemer og ikke mindst, hvordan man løser dem!

Repost from Brian Dipert’s article (EDN); You can reach Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert at 1-916-760-0159, bdipert@edn.com, and www.bdipert.com.

Flash-memory-based solid-state drives have recently stirred up the staid storage industry, and their initial success stories foretell a potentially stellar future. Consider, for example, how rapidly they’ve taken over the formerly robust market for 1.8-in. hard-disk drives. Also consider their significant influence on smaller-form-factor hard-disk drives’ lackluster initial unveilings. A notable percentage of netbook, tablet, and other alternative mobile computers, especially those running Linux operating-system variants, contain solid-state drives instead of hard-disk drives. Thin and light conventional notebook PCs running Windows and OS X are also well along the conversion path.

For the entire article:  CLICK HERE

Aufgeschreckt durch diesen Artikel: http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2009/11/25/windows-7-disk-defragmenter-user-interface-overview.aspx, hat sich folgendes ergeben.

Obwohl ja Windows 7 offiziell den Trim Befehl bei SSD Festplatten unterstützt http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx, ist die Sache wie immer nicht so einfach.

Denn eine SSD muss von Windows 7 erstmal als SSD erkannt werden, sonst wird sie wie eine schnelle Festplatte behandelt. Mit allen Konsequenzen! Z. B. auch eines unnötigen Defragmentierungslauf, der nicht nur die Lebensdauer der SSD verkürzt sondern auch noch gleichzeitig unnötig die Akkulaufzeit eines Notebook oder Netbooks reduziert.

Angeblich soll der Befehl

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

0 liefern, wenn der Trim Befehl aktiv ist, oder auch nicht. Durch zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt immer noch nicht verfügbare offizielle Information von Microsoft hat mal wieder Google die Meinungsführerschaft übernommen, so das reih auf und reih ab darüber Spekuliert wird. http://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/showthread.php?t=615540. Witzig auch dieser Forumseintrag: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprohardware/thread/d06e1cb5-d518-447e-b3d6-db2d580899cb. Ein Microsoft-Mitarbeiter verweist auf den obigen Blogeintrag, aber meines Erachtens stimmt da was nicht, denn auch bei einer normalen Festplatte kommt bei DisableDeleteNotify 0 als Ergebnis.

Aber jetzt zu meinem eigentlichen Problem die Defragmentierung. Wie stelle ich zuerst mal fest, ob der Defragmentierungsdienst läuft? Tja liebe Freunde der GUI, Pech gehabt. Seit Windows Vista gibt es so viele Anwendungs- und Dienstprotokolle, dass man Tage mit verbringen kann den richtigen Dienst zu finden. Auch die Möglichkeit Filter zu setzen ist nicht so der schnelle Bringer.

Aber als neuer bekennender Fan von Powershell, erledigen wir die Sache kurz mal damit:

Get-EventLog System | Sort-Object TimeGenerated | Where-Object {$_.Message –like "*defrag*"} | fl

Dieser Befehl gibt die neuesten Einträge als letztes aus. Nun weiß man also wann in der Richtung das letzte mal was passiert ist.

Da getreu dem Motto von Windows 7 mit den Triggered Events nur das laufen soll, was benötigt wird, läuft der Defragmentierungsdienst auch nicht immer.

Um nun das Defragmentieren zu Unterbinden, sucht man in der Aufgabenplanung den Defrag-Eintrag. Man hat nun die Option den Eintrag komplett zu löschen, zu deaktivieren oder beim Aufruf von Defrag.EXE mit dem Parameter /E eine Ausnahme für das betreffende Laufwerk anzugeben. Wie es einem beliebt.

Bleibt noch die Frage, ob an Defrag noch weitere Dinge kleben, die durch die Ausnahme nun nicht mehr funktionieren, mal sehen.

Chris Featherstone is a Fusion-io Solutions Architect / Microsoft Expert. This is a webcast sponsored by Fusion-io. Next time use a throat lozenge, Chris.

DESCRIPTION:  See how Fusion-io’s revolutionary solid-state storage technology is supercharging Microsoft Exchange, helping users get much more performance and reliability for less. Fusion-io helps Exchange users get the most out of every dollar by making it possible to support more mailboxes per mailstore, increase access times and decrease backup and recovery times.

Registration may be needed: CLICK HERE

David Flynn, Fusion-io CTO, was featured on a panel at the recently concluded SC09 — you can read about the subject matter and participants here:  SC09 Flash Technology Panel

In addition, David presented some updated slides about Fusion-io, ioMemory, and the new ioDrive Octal.  He also detailed the mySpace use case.  Here are the slides:  DAVID FLYNN SC09 SLIDES

Ich habe vor ein paar Wochen meinen Rechner ein wenig aufgerüstet.

Folgende Komponenten sind neu dazu gekommen – quasi ein Aufrüstkit:

• CPU: AMD Phenom II 905e mit 4 x 2,5 GHz

• Mainboard: Gigabyte MA785GT-UD3H, mit 785G Chipsatz, AM3-Sockel und 6 Sata2-Anschlüssen

• Ram: 2x 2GB GEIL PC-10667 CL7 DDR3

Die alten Komponenten werkeln jetzt im Rechner eines Freundes.

Seit ein paar Tagen nun habe ich weiter aufgerüstet:

• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

• SSD: Super Talent Ultradrive GX 64Gb

Interessanterweise habe ich alle Komponenten günstiger bekommen, als sie zur Zeit angeboten werden.

Vor allem Das Betriebssystem habe ich – dank der von Micrsosoft veranstalteten Promotion-Aktion – deutlich billiger, nämlich für 39,95€ bekommen.

War nur mit dem Aufrüstkit der Geschwindigkeitsvorteil eher “dezent”, so kann ich zu gefühlten Geschwindigkeit jetzt nur sagen:

WOW!

Ich kann nicht genau festmachen, welche Komponente welchen Stellenwert beim Zuwachs hat. Sei es die SSD, sei es Windows 7, sei es das Aufrüstkit, sei es alles zusammen.

So lässt sich auf jeden Fall arbeiten

Gefühlte Geschwindigkeit:

Programme, die vorher bis hin zu einer Minute gebraucht hatten, um vollständig geladen zu sein, laden nun in 2-3 Sekunden.

Firefox anklicken – nach 2 Sekunden ist er komplett geladen. Vorher brauchte er gerne mal 30 Sekunden dafür.

Man kann nun auch ohne Bedenken 30 Programme gleichzeitig laufen lassen. Und die CPU langweilt sich trotzdem.

Unter XP ging die Prozessorlast gerne mal bei 2 oder mehr Kernen in den Bereich Volllast. Unter Windows 7 dümpelt die CPU meistens auf Minimum herum.

Ein Bootvorgang (reines Windows) dauert bei mir etwa 10-15 Sekunden, vorher waren es etwa 60 Sekunden. Das BIOS benötigt tatsächlich mehr Zeit zum Booten, als das OS mit all seinen Autostart-Programmen.

Auch das Kopieren von Daten zwischen zwei Festplatten ist deutlich schneller geworden, ebenso das packen und entpacken von Daten.

Konnte ich vorher mit maximal 35 MB/s entpacken, geht dies nun mit bis zu 80 MB/s. Auch das verschieben/kopieren von Festplatte x zu Festplatte y wird jetzt nur noch durch die maximale Transferrate der langsameren Festplatte begrenzt.

Windows 7 :

Das neue Betriebsystem gefällt mir recht gut.

Der Umstieg von Xp zu Windows 7 verlief relativ reibungslos.

Die Installation auf der SSD ging flott von Statten. Insgesamt dauerte es etwa 20 Minuten.

Lediglich einige lieb gewonnene Einstellungen gibt es nicht mehr oder nicht mehr in der Form.

Ich habe bspw. noch nicht herausgefunden, wie man den Explorer dazu bekommt, beim einfachen anklicken eines Ordners seine Subfolders zu kaskadieren/auszuklappen. Das ging unter XP immer.

Ein wenig Sorgen bereitet mir, dass ich nicht mehr via ATI Catalyst Suite die Helligkeit regeln kann. Da kann ich munter Werte editieren, es zeigt sich keine Änderung.

Ich bin nun den Weg über die Farbkalibrierung in Windows selbst gegangen – jedoch schaltet  jedes Mal die Helligkeit hoch, wenn ich ein Spiel beendet habe, welches eigene Gamma-Werte nutzt.

Und ein bisschen nervig ist, dass der Windows Explorer sich partout nicht merken will, wie ich meine Ordner-Ansicht wünsche – nämlich überall als Detailansicht. Er will es einfach nicht übernehmen und zeigt mir bei jedem Ordner wieder eine andere Ansicht.

Ansonsten bin ich vor allem mit dem Design zufrieden.

Probleme hatte ich – mal wieder – mit dem Creative Treiber. Zur Abwechslung ließ er sich problemlos installieren. Unter XP hatte das gerne mal zwei Dutzend Anläufe gebraucht. Jedoch musste ich feststellen, dass 90% der Programme und Konfigurationsmöglichkeiten fehlten. Ich konnte nicht einmal irgendwo eine Bassumleitung oder Bassverstärkung eingeben. Es existierte lediglich die Audio-Konsole. Dementsprechend war auch die Tonqualität suboptimal. Der Bass ließ sich gar nicht zur Mitarbeit überreden.

Mit dem X-Fi Support Pack 2.0, einem alternativen Treiber, war dann der gewohnte Funktionsumfang vorhanden.

Jetzt klingt auch wieder alles, wie es soll.

Was ich nicht wusste: XP-Antispy läuft auch unter Windows 7. Damit wurde ich auch einige nervige Komponenten los.

Auch die Benutzerkontensteuerung habe ich direkt deaktiviert. So sinnvoll sie auch sein mag – wenn ich schon beim einfachen entpacken einer Datei Adminsistratorrechte brauche und ständig Nachrichten aufpoppen, dann muss das weg.

Den Bug, den Avira Antivir verursacht, indem es bei jedem Neustart einmal chkdsk durchlaufen lassen will, habe ich glücklicher Weise nicht.

CPU:

Ich nutze hierbei K10Stat, um die CPU zu regeln. Dabei müssen im BIOS und im System Cool & Quiet aktiviert sein, K10Stat baut darauf auf.

Der minimale Wert liegt bei mir bei 0,85 Volt. Wobei das Gigabyte Board leider von sich aus etwas übertaktet. Weiter runter habe ich mich noch nicht getraut, zumal dies auch einigen Aufwand zum Testen benötigt.

Der Maximale Wert liegt bei 1,075 Volt. Jeweils mit 0,075 Volt Abstufungen zu den P-States.

Interessanterweise habe ich keine Aufgabe definiert, wie es unter Vista/Win7 wohl üblich ist.

Ich habe lediglich eine Verknüpfung mit den nötigen Parametern (-ClkCtrl:1 -NoWindow -StayOnTray -LoadPstate) in den Autostart-Ordner gepackt – und es läuft.

SSD:

Als ich das Paket mit der SSD bekam, war ich ein wenig erstaunt. Die SSD ist deutlich kleiner, als ich dachte. Sie ist nicht einmal halb so groß, wie eine 3,5 Zoll Festplatte und wiegt nur wenige Gramm.

Glücklicherweise blieb mir das herum flashen mit verschiedenen Firmware-Versionen erspart. Mein Modell entstammt einer neueren Baureihe und weist bereits die neueste Firmware-Version 1819 auf.

Sonst hätte ich zunächst von der 17er auf die 15er und dann auf die 18er flashen müssen. Das hat bei einigen Leuten nicht so gut geklappt – und führt in jedem Fall zu einem kompletten Datenverlust.

Ich habe die SSD einfach unten auf den Boden gelegt – sie Bedarf ja keiner exakten Ausrichtung. Das sieht zwar ziemlich doof aus, aber aufgrund es unglaublichen Kabel-Wirrwarrs im Gehäuse ist das jetzt ohnehin wurscht.

Hauptsache es funktioniert!

Windows 7 hat automatisch die richtige Blockgröße eingerichtet, die Defragmentierung aus- und TRIM eingeschaltet.

Ob Trim eingeschaltet ist, kann mit einfach mit folgender Zeile in der Eingabeaufforderung herausfinden:       fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify . Wenn eine Null ausgegeben wird, ist Trim seitens des OS aktiviert. Bei einer 1 nicht.

Für diese SSD, wie auch für einige andere, wird gerne der Rat gegeben, mindestens 10% der Speicherkapazität ungenutzt zu lassen. Man kann den Platz also komplett partitionieren und formatieren, sollte aber dann 5-6 GB frei lassen, damit es nicht zu Geschwindigkeitseinbrüchen kommt.

Mit Windows 7, all meinen Programmen und sogar einem Spiel (Battlefield 1942+Desert Combat) sind nicht einmal 20Gb belegt.

Sicherlich wäre eine Intel Postville noch einen Tick schneller gewesen, aber die Lieferzeiten liegen jenseits von Gut und Böse. Frühestens Ende Dezember hätte bspw. Mindfactory eine liefern können. Intel gibt die SSDs offenbar nur Tröpfchenweise ab.

Benchmarks:

Die SSD läuft bei mir auf dem Niveau 217 MB lesend und 160MB/s schreibend. Wie ich mir versichern ließ, ein durchaus guter Wert für diese SSD. Selbst einige 128er Versionen des Ultradrive – welche eigentlich schneller agieren sollen – sind bei einigen langsamer, als meine 64er.

Wie zu erwarten war, brechen die Werte bei kleinen Dateien im 0,5 bis 16Kb-Bereich ein, liegen jedoch auf üblichem Niveau.

Ohnehin – wie einem jeder SSD-Kenner genervt entgegnet – kommt es nicht auf die maximalen Transferraten an, sondern auf die Operationen pro Sekunde an. In Zusammenspiel mit einer Access-Time von etwa 0,2 ms schlägt diese SSD jede andere Festplatte um Längen. Selbst eine Kombination aus zwei kleinen, schnellen Raptor-Festplatten von Western Digital im Raid 0, ist langsamer.

Somit ist eine SSD für den Einsatz als Systemplatte geradezu prädestiniert. Als Datengrab ist sie aber ohnehin zu klein

Andere Benchmarks, wie bspw. 3d Mark 06 oder Super Pi haben von dem neuen System wenig profitiert.

Lediglich der CPU Score ist hierbei deutlich gegenüber meinem alten Dualcore (Athlon BE-2400)  angestiegen.

Dies war aber auch nicht zu erwarten. Vor allem Grafikbenchmarks  und Spiele profitieren wenig von Windows 7 und einer SSD. Hier sind höchstens die Ladezeiten geringer.

Interessant ist jedoch der mehr als doppelt so hohe Durchsatz beim kopieren/verschieben/entpacken – vor allem beim Arbeiten auf eine anderen Festplatte.

Konnte ich vorher mit maximal 35mb/s auf eine andere Festplatte entpacken/kopieren, werde ich jetzt lediglich durch die maximale Performance der langsameren Festplatte ausgebremst – das sind meistens um die 80 MB/s.

Fazit:

Als Fazit bleibt mir nur zu sagen: ich bin mit der gebotenen Leistung sehr zufrieden!

Ich kann nicht genau ausmachen, welche Komponente jetzt welchen genauen Anteil hat, aber das ist mir eigentlich auch egal.

Es arbeitet sich mit Windows 7, aktiviertem AHCI, einer guten SSD und einem nicht allzu schlechten PC-Grundgerüst deutlich angenehmer

Wer also wie ich viel Zeit vor dem PC verbringt, sollte sich durchaus überlegen, ob er nicht doch einmal eine andere Komponente weniger aufrüstet und statt dessen eine SSD einbaut.

Bei Preisen ab 150€ für 64Gb sicherlich kein günstiges Vergnügen.

Fest steht: ich gebe meine SSD nicht mehr her

Und aufrüsten muss ich in absehbarer Zeit nichts mehr

Violin Memory just snagged Bill Pappas for their Technical Advisory Panel. Pappas is the CIO of Alliance One International — more about them here: http://www.aointl.com/

This is getting to be a bit of acrowded space but Violin CEO Don Basile has done a fantastic job getting Violin back on its feet along with COO Dixon Doll, Jr.  I am expecting major win updates as well as product announcements in 1Q10.

VIVAnews – OCZ Technology Group, Inc., salah satu pemain di industri memori dan media simpan berbasis flash menghadirkan media simpan terbarunya. Colossus, yang merupakan Solid State Drive 3.5 inci didesain untuk memenuhi kebutuhan pengguna desktop high end dan kalangan enterprise.

Yang menarik, OCZ menghadirkan berbagai versi kapasitas hingga berukuran 1 Terabyte. Kapasitas tersebut merupakan yang terbesar di industri solid state drive saat ini.

“Colossus series didesain untuk meningkatkan performa desktop dan workstation,” kata Eugene Chang, Vice President of Product Management OCZ Technology Group, pada keterangan resminya, 23 November 2009. “Pengguna yang membutuhkan kecepatan, kehandalan, dan kapasitas simpan maksimum juga dapat memanfaatkan produk ini,” ucapnya.

Untuk mengimbangi kapasitas besar yang disediakan, OCZ Colossus juga diperkuat dari sisi performa. Arsitektur RAID 0 ditanamkan pada storage yang terpasang di dalam. Dengan demikian, OCZ mengklaim bahwa pemrosesan data bisa dilakukan secara lebih cepat pada aplikasi umum seperti email, internet, dan transfer file.

Colossus SSD tersedia dalam kapasitas 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, dan 1 TB. Form factornya yang tidak lazim, yakni 3,5 inci seperti harddisk untuk PC desktop atau server, dan bukan 2,5 inci seperti harddisk untuk notebook disebutkan untuk menampung kebutuhan yang lebih luas. Misalnya untuk dipasang pada server dan lain-lain.

OCZ berani mengklaim bahwa solid state drive ini mampu bekerja salama 1,5 juta jam sebelum mengalami kerusakan. Garansi selama 3 tahun tersedia lengkap dengan dukungan teknis. Sayangnya belum ada informasi seputar harga dan ketersediaan produk ini dari distributor resminya di pasaran Indonesia.

Just curious — post an update if you attended.

Yeah I am, baby! And it feels so good to even think about it.

It’s the Kingston 40GB SSD Now Boot Drive. You can read a review here: Legitreviews Review on Kingston SSDNow V Series Boot Drive.

It’s a cheap SSD. You must be thinking, “So what’s the catch?” Well, it is a boot drive. It has very high read speeds but it has lower write speeds. Well, still much higher than that of normal rotary HDDs. Bottom line is, it is not a general purpose SSD. And I don’t want it to be. I just want it to make the PC boot faster, load apps faster and to enjoy an overall very high responsive system.

I’m getting it through a friend, and I don’t wanna tell more about it. I will surely tell you what I feel about it when I get it. That will be in mid December unfortunately. I know I can’t wait, but I have to! hehe

This is the chart you need to look at. Not the other mumbo jumbo crap.

Still not impressed?

Check out this youtube video and see how fast that drive is. Here’s an example. How fast does Firefox load on your PC for the first time after booting? 5 seconds? Longer? Guess what? With this drive, it loads up as fast as Notepad on a normal drive. Yeah! Amazing ha? Yes it is!

I just learned important new information coming out of WHIPTAIL — see the video here:

—-> WHIPTAIL VIDEO <—–

Here is a brief presentation courtesy MSFT which outlines SSD functions supported in Windows 7 — includes discussion of TRIM feature.

—> CLICK HERE <—

There’s an old expression I like: “Different isn’t better, it’s just different.”

When it comes to SSDs based around a SATA or SAS format — that’s pretty much the case in my view. Yes there are exceptional products suited for enterprise like Pliant and STEC. And, yes — there are more conventional items for consumers like Intel and OCZ (and about 20 others).  And yes, the standard pacakge 3.5″ form factor for these devices make them suitable for shared storage as well as for integration into hetreogenous and homogenous storage environments like you might find in a typical data center.  Embracing these SSDs you will find the usual manufacturers like EMC, NetApp, SUN, and others.  Their use of SSD is evolutionary, easy to digest.

PCIe-based SSDs are very different.  For one thing, they sit on the server system bus right next to the CPU.  This is a direct attached (DAS) model that has numerous advantages for certain types of processing.  We agree that not all PCIe-based SSDs are suitable for all applications — but in terms of applications that can take advantage of bandwidth, throughput, and latency enhancements, these devices are indeed a superior architecture.

There are some challenges:

1)  Not all servers are created equal.  PCIe-based devices require strict adherance to the PCIe specifications at the server level.  Ping if you want to learn more about why this is critical.

2)  Many servers do not have enough PCIe slots configure appropriately for PCIe devices.  This is especially true when creating HIGH AVAILABILITY (or HA) environments.

3)  Only a very few servers have enough of the right type of slots to be meaningful from a value perspective.  It makes no sense to refresh a server for a PCIe-based SSD if you have to spend 2x or 3x to get the right slots, power, etc.

4)  Applications may not be optimized for SSD DAS.  No kidding.  OLTP or DBMS applications that can take the most advantage of SSD DAS are optimized for high latency disk access over networks such as NAS.  These applications are totally comfortable sending out 1000s or 10s of 1000s of transaction requests to build up a queue depth for the CPUs.  The net result of this is that the CPUs appear very busy but in fact aren’t doing very much.  These limitations are known and well defined.  Over time, application vendors such as SUN, Oracle, and Microsoft will implement fixes to optimize PCIe-based storage.

Aside from these items, there is a discussion regarding suitability of NAND flash devices in the data center as well as the MLC/SLC issue.  I’ll tackle those in another post.  In my veiw, MySpace and Wine.com are leading the way — and there are many others who have not come forward publicly preferring to keep the ROI and GREEN advantages all to themselves.

The latest announcements from Fusion-io, Texas Memory Systems, Micron and others point out these differences.  FULL DISCLOSURE:  I am a former employe of Fusion-io.

Reports are all over the place.  Some improvement for some, worse for others.  Read more here.

Just scanning the net for updates — here are two articles from yesterday and today that discuss enterprise-class SSD applications. Obviously each has a viewpoint aligned with their marketing and sales departments — nonetheless, there are some good points:

INTEL ARTICLE CLICK HERE

TERADATA ARTICLE CLICK HERE

The market for SSD-based or at least SSD-inclusive storage appliances is broadening from purpose-built devices in support of specific applications to a more generic layer some call TierZero supporting basic compute operations that require low latency, fast throughput, higher bandwidth.  Below is a list of manufacturers; I’m pulling together some notes and will publish a brief chart in a future post.

• 3Par
• Avere
• Compellant
• Data Direct Networks
• DataRam
• DELL
• DolphinICS
• EMC
• Gear6
• HP
• Hitachi Data Systems
• IBM
• NetApp
• Nimbus
• Schooner Information Technology
• Solid Access
• SUN
• Teradata
• Texas Memory Systems
• Violin Memory
• WhipTail

I’m interested in published specifications, use-cases, and sales strategy.  Hopefully this will help you cut through some of the clutter.