|
||
|
|
|
              |
|
 |
 |
||||
 |
 |
|||
| By Chris Angelini | ||||
I WAS ONE OF THOSE POWER USERS who actually liked and was happy with Windows XP. I knew where everything was, could set the operating system up for a customer in less than an hour, and was satisfied with most of the default settings (after disabling that heinous desktop theme, of course). Vista in hand, I set out to determine why anyone would want to upgrade. More specifically, I wanted to explore some of the new memory technologies that Microsoft snuck in but didn’t push very hard. Your customers already know about the operating system’s graphics. The Aero interface has been the center of Vista-oriented discussion since early beta. Although 3D accelerators and a better looking desktop are certainly nice, these less-publicized memory technologies have the potential to cut costs, improve performance, and stretch battery life compared to the same hardware configuration running Windows XP. But how much of the talk is marketing hype, and how much of it is the real deal? SUPERFETCH OPTIMIZATION Vista is smarter than XP, Microsoft says. “Sure,” you’re thinking, “so it intelligently blocks programs I’m trying to run and warns me every time I try to install a non-Microsoft program, right?” Don’t get me wrong—it does those things too. But it also monitors the applications your customer uses most frequently and, depending on how much memory his machine has, caches those applications in system RAM. When one of those apps is needed, it’s loaded much faster than if it were being pulled off the hard drive instead. Microsoft calls this intelligent caching technology SuperFetch. Windows XP also used a pre-fetching technique, but it didn’t analyze usage patterns and was consequently unable to optimize the data stored in memory the way SuperFetch does. A second component of the SuperFetch feature is better task prioritization. In XP, it never failed that as soon as you sat down to type up an email, the antivirus would run a scan and slow things down to a crawl. Until now, the only solution has been to buy dual- or quad-core CPUs, which alleviates the application strain by shouldering both loads independently. SuperFetch pushes background tasks like disk defragmenting and anti-virus scanning down to a lower priority, so that when you get back to your desk, email pops right up and the background tasks don’t interfere. Hardware configuration aside, Vista should yield better multi-tasked performance as a result of the improvements SuperFetch introduces. READYBOOSTING VISTA The SuperFetch feature works by recognizing system memory and optimizing for usage patterns. In addition to utilizing traditional RAM, SuperFetch also sees nonvolatile flash storage devices enhanced for ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive—two of the other new innovations introduced with Vista. According to Microsoft, ReadyBoost is defined as a technology that allows USB Flash Memory to serve as a data cache, complementing system memory and improving the responsiveness of your PCs. You already build systems with multi-tiered storage subsystems. Magnetic hard drives represent the slowest yet highest-capacity media. Then there’s system RAM, which costs much more per megabyte but is able to transfer multiple gigabytes per second of data. Processor cache is next in line, followed by tiny data registers inside of CPU cores. The USB flash devices supporting ReadyBoost sit between hard drives and system memory. They’re priced below RAM, yet they can deliver better speed than a disk drive. The idea is to give Vista’s SuperFetch feature one more place to store cached program data when a value-oriented machine is low on memory. Not all flash drives are up to the job, though. While flash features exceptionally quick access times, it often lags in transfer speed—even below hard drives. As a result, ReadyBoost deliberately sends larger data transfers straight to the hard drive and smaller random accesses to the flash drive. READYBOOST UP CLOSE Getting ReadyBoost up and running is a piece of cake. First, sell your customer a machine with Windows Vista. Then upsell a ReadyBoost-optimized USB flash drive. Super Talent offers them, as does OCZ and Corsair. Plug the drive in and, on the AutoPlay dialog box, select “Speed up my system.” The ReadyBoost property sheet is then added to the USB drive’s property page with the default “Do not use this device” radio button selected. Opt to “Use this device” and then specify the amount of flash memory to reserve for ReadyBoost. Space tagged by the performance-enhancing feature can’t be used for file storage, so balance capacity accordingly. Not all USB drives play nice with ReadyBoost. In an interview published on Microsoft’s MSDN site, Matt Ayers, program manager in the Microsoft Windows Client Performance group, says that a ReadyBoost-compatible drive must be able to push at least 2.5 MBps for 4KB random reads and 1.75 MBps for 512KB random writes. Both performance attributes are tested when you connect your USB flash drive. Insufficient speed is reported on the ReadyBoost pane if the drive you sold isn’t fast enough. Solve that problem by only selling USB drives explicitly noted as ReadyBoost-compatible. A non-official list can be found at www.grantgibson.co.uk/misc/readyboost. Flash memory guaranteed to work with ReadyBoost will deliver the biggest performance gains in systems short on RAM. In other words, ReadyBoost best complements value-oriented boxes with 512MB of memory—the bare minimum allowed by Vista. Because Microsoft’s Ayers recommends a 1:1 ratio, at the low-end, consider selling a whitebox with 512MB of RAM and a 512MB flash drive. At the high-end, 2.5:1 is optimal. Offering 1GB or 2GB flash drives with less expensive platforms is your best bet for balancing performance and price. Any more than that, and you’d be better off selling systems with an extra 512MB memory module. Just how much of an improvement can customers expect from a Vista box with ReadyBoost? When it comes to opening and closing programs, the extra memory will, in many cases, double responsiveness. In more processor-intensive tasks, like video encoding, don’t expect ReadyBoost to do much of anything for overall performance. FLASH ON A HDD Microsoft had to develop ReadyBoost knowing that USB flash drives are easy to plug in and remove. Because of this, all pages on flash storage are backed by a redundant page to disk. If that flash memory were internal, it would be much easier for the operating system to count on persistent storage, meaning data and files that Vista knew would never be unplugged on a user’s whim. ReadyDrive is the Vista technology that enables support for hybrid drives and their embedded, nonvolatile RAM (NVRAM) data cache. The first drives from Samsung and Seagate are just starting to ship with 256MB of flash and capacities up to 160GB. Unlike ReadyBoost, there’s no interaction between you, ReadyDrive, or the hardware it controls. Vista simply recognizes the disk with onboard flash memory and uses the storage for caching. From a performance standpoint, that means faster boot times and quicker recovery from hibernation states since the data is stored on non-volatile memory. More important is the technology’s impact on mobility. “Hybrid drives won’t give you faster runtime performance,” says Josh Tinker, manager of Seagate’s personal compute market development division. “You do get the value of faster boot times. But you also get the value of better battery life and better reliability, so it isn’t necessarily a straight enthusiast play.” According to Tinker, the benefits of hybrid hard drives are decidedly in favor of laptops. That’s why Samsung and Seagate are targeting the 2.5” form factor first. By caching the most commonly used information in flash storage, mobile hard drives spend a lot more time idle, which is where the power savings come from. The benefit to reliability is closely related. Hard drives are evaluated for the impact they can withstand in both operational and non-operational states. For example, Seagate’s 100GB Momentus 7200.1 has a 250G operating/800G non-operating shock rating. Running off cached data means hard drives spend less time spinning. As a result, they’re less susceptible to the low operational shock rating. THE SOLID STATE STORY Take the hybrid concept one step further and you have solid state hard drives—storage repositories unfettered by spinning magnetic disks. Solid state disks are much more expensive and generally offer less capacity, but they amplify the power, noise, and reliability benefits of hybrid drives. Super Talent sent one of its 16GB SATA Flash Drives over for testing to prove the technology’s viability. Powering up a small form factor machine without any drive noise is eerie at first, but the silence is ultimately satisfying. And if hard drives account for 10 percent of a whitebook’s power budget, solid state hardware can cut that number to two or three percent. Don’t tell anyone over at Super Talent, but even after banging the drive against my knee repeatedly, it had no problem firing back up. That’s the sort of durability a 1,500G operational shock rating yields these days. Is there a reason to go solid state instead of hybrid in Windows Vista? Depending on the situation, there may be. Joe James, marketing director at Super Talent, says that solid state drives are ideal for ruggedized environments or in notebooks designed to sip battery power rather than guzzle it. The raw throughput of today’s solid state hard drives lags behind magnetic drives in some cases, but James is confident that, in the very near future, solid state will also have the performance advantage. Also keep in mind that flash memory density is on the same dizzying climb that magnetic media has enjoyed, so don’t expect today’s limited capacities to last too long. Until then, though, hybrid disk technology is going to deliver a better balance between price, performance, power, and reliability. SO WHAT’S TURBO MEMORY? Getting your head around SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, and ReadyDrive is easy enough. For boxes without enough system memory, upsell the USB flash drive to enable ReadyBoost. Deploy a 2.5” hybrid drive on notebooks that could stand to benefit from the power and durability attributes of ReadyDrive. And, just by installing the operating system, automatically enjoy the efficiency of SuperFetch’s usage analysis. Vista has only been available for a few months and vendors like Intel are already mixing and matching the storage technologies, trying to get more value out of them as a package the company calls Turbo Memory. Turbo Memory combines the benefits of ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive in one Mini-PCI Express card equipped with 1GB of flash memory. One-half works to enable ReadyBoost as the other half is earmarked for ReadyDrive. Given Microsoft’s 1:1 ratio recommendation, you can expect Turbo Memory to be most commonly used in lower-end notebooks with 512MB or 1GB of RAM. On the flip side, adding extra memory for ReadyDrive means you don’t have to sell Turbo Memory-equipped whitebooks with pricey hybrid hard drives. Instead the onboard flash serves as the cache keeping your customer’s disk drive in its lower power state. The point of Turbo Memory is to give you a low-cost (roughly $25) alternative to decking out whitebooks with lots of RAM while still enabling roughly 80 percent of the performance, according to Intel. The boot time improvements, increased reliability, and reduction in power consumption are simply icing on the cake. THE VALUE IN VISTA So it turns out that there’s some coolness to Vista beyond its 3D desktop. Is the operating system worth mastering today? Absolutely. This is something your whitebook customers are going to want to get their hands on, especially as Intel starts shipping more hardware based on the latest revision of Centrino. Even mainstream desktops stand to win from the modest gains enabled by ReadyBoost. Once you get over the operating system’s default tendency to keep every non-Microsoft application from running, Vista is actually a cool piece of software. |
||||
 Back to top |
||||
Copyright © 2007 RAM Magazine. All rights reserved.
Do not duplicate or redistribute in any form. |
||||
