[jinu_joseph]

Originally Posted by frankmehta

I am using a laptop hard drive. Supposedly they are better at taking shocks than the huge Desktop drives.

Hey Frank
Laptop hard drives are better equipped to handle shocks, true, and this is because they have a inbuilt mechanism to disable the Hard Disk head when it encounters a shock. This protects the disk and data from disaster but creates a kind of stutter on your online performance. This does not matter much in a laptop, but as a music system it could. I suggest you move to SSD. You will notice a lot of difference. SSD's dont have any moving parts and hence are not susectiple to shock and vibration. Also they are much faster that your regular desktops. You could bring your hard boot time down to 10-15 secs and up from hibernate in a jiffy.

Check this link out of the difference between HDD and SSD. Also note the comparison talks of a desktop HDD. Laptop HDD are even slower.

SSD vs HDD


As a computer person I consider it sacrilegious to use a HDD instead of SSD in a setup as high end as yours.

[srishiva]

Originally Posted by ariesonu

MODS: Wouldn't it be appropriate to change a single word in title. "Idiot's" to "dummies".

Raab Rakha.

+1, I had to go through the entire thing slowly to get it. Then thought maybe its because I am not a Idiot

[navin]

Originally Posted by srishiva

I had to go through the entire thing slowly to get it. Then thought maybe its because I am not a Idiot

Originally Posted by ariesonu

MODS: Wouldn't it be appropriate to change a single word in title.

Chill guys I dont think Frank meant any harm; but for the sensitive ones the title has been changed.

To me, being called an Idiot is a compliment but I guess it comes with being married for so long.

[ariesonu]

Originally Posted by navin

Chill guys I dont think Frank meant any harm; but for the sensitive ones the title has been changed.

To me, being called an Idiot is a compliment but I guess it comes with being married for so long.

Hi Navin,
No way would I ever consider FM meaning us any harm.
His this thread should in fact is "Gospel of Carputers by Frank Mehta" in ICE BIBLE.
When I wrote that post I was simply thinking of that "dummies series" books. Nothing more.

FM: Dont listen to Navin.

Raab Rakha.

[navin]

Originally Posted by ariesonu

FM: Dont listen to Navin.

Ariesonu,
Kya aap bhi? As it is no one listens to me now you are making it official.

[DerAlte]

Correct no, Navin? It is when youngsters talk (and we old fogeys keep quiet) will new stuff emerge. We are at a stage of life where, to filch @ariesonu's line, Raab has to rakha us!

@drfrankbhaimehta, why so much distrust of Windows mixer? Works with uncompressed byte stream, no, so what is the harm?

[frankmehta]

LOL Guys no offence taken.

@DerAlte: There is no distrust in the Windows Mixer. In fact, if I could use it, it would allow one to bypass 2 softwares, virtual audio cable and asio4all.
The thing is, the Asus Xonar D2X card MUST have internal routing (which is not the case), if you intend to use the Windows mixer. Windows Mixer cannot be used in this case.
Hence the
Centrafuse>ASIO4ALL>Virtual Audio Cable>Audiomulch route is taken.

I might be a little less technical in explaining this, but this is all I understand of this routing business. If internal routing was possible (like some MAudio cards etc), we could be looking at 2-3 steps lesser.

[navin]

Originally Posted by DerAlte

Correct no, Navin? It is when youngsters talk (and we old fogeys keep quiet) will new stuff emerge.

Absolutely.

Originally Posted by frankmehta

In fact, if I could use it, it would allow one to bypass 2 softwares, virtual audio cable and asio4all. The thing is, the Asus Xonar D2X card MUST have internal routing (which is not the case), if you intend to use the Windows mixer.

Full bouncer! Curve ball! Call it what you may but this is all Geek and Latin to me.

Frank if I ever get the courage to stuff a PC in my car I will drive my car to your place and hand you the keys. I am not even going to try to figure this out.

[frankmehta]

In fact, let's do it. I am game. Let your wife's car be, let's do your Skoda!!! Whatsay!?! Then you don't need to worry about listening to music on your headphones!! Come on! This is too tempting for you to pass off!

[greenhorn]

Originally Posted by jinu_joseph

Hey Frank
Laptop hard drives are better equipped to handle shocks, true, and this is because they have a inbuilt mechanism to disable the Hard Disk head when it encounters a shock. This protects the disk and data from disaster but creates a kind of stutter on your online performance. This does not matter much in a laptop, but as a music system it could.

Wouldnt that be more than compensated for by the buffer in the hdd and the music player itself?

To give some context, the CD drives in our car stereos experience much bigger dropouts, and much lower transfer rates than our hard disks, and their buffers put up with these shocks just fine

[frankmehta]

Originally Posted by greenhorn

Wouldnt that be more than compensated for by the buffer in the hdd and the music player itself?

To give some context, the CD drives in our car stereos experience much bigger dropouts, and much lower transfer rates than our hard disks, and their buffers put up with these shocks just fine

Good point Greenie, but then again the HDDs have to put out OODLES of more data as compared to the CD player, which means the buffer size must be really large.
All said and done, this is all theory. The HDD is working perfectly ok within the confines of my car and has not skipped even once. Let's just say we shall discuss this HDD vs SATA business after a few months when the durability and resilience of the computer is spoken about.

[jinu_joseph]

Originally Posted by greenhorn

Wouldnt that be more than compensated for by the buffer in the hdd and the music player itself?

To give some context, the CD drives in our car stereos experience much bigger dropouts, and much lower transfer rates than our hard disks, and their buffers put up with these shocks just fine

To a certain extent but remember we are talking regular Desktop PC and not HU. HU may have built in mechnisms to take care of stutter and it just has to buffer the songs from the CD, but in a PC its a whole different ball game. You have the PC constantly writing to the pagefile (even if you have truckloads of RAM), System Volume Information directory, System logs and other background services and programs are also reading from the disk. if you run diskmon you will be suprised to see how many reads and writes it does to disk even when you are apparently not doing anything . While a lot of this can be cut down its require a very fine tuning of windows 7 and lots of time and experimentation.

Please dont get the impression (from what i am saying above) that the first speed breaker you go over the hard disk is going to hang and songs are going to sttuter. That wont happen. 95% of the time you might not even notice. But i sincerely feel that when installing a high end setup you have to consider SSD as the primary boot hard disk, if not for anything else then atleast the massive performance boost you get over an HDD especially the latest ones based on Sandforce SF-2281 controllers(450MB/sec). Even the ones that one generation old based on the Sandforce SF 1200 are also very fast 250MB/sec (they cost about 11K for 120GB. Lower capacities are also available).

[greenhorn]

if you are playing music, the max bandwidth needed will be a few Mbps. video, especially HD video might need a bit more, but its still trivial compared to the transfer rate of an HDD (30+ Mbps for a 5400 rpm drive, more for a 7200rpm).

HU's have built in anti skip which are essentially big hardware buffers. Media players also have a similar facility

Even I'm not saying that you SHOULD not get an SSD, but I'm really not sure its worth it. Despite frank's history, I'm really not sure high end = excuse to blow money on anything and everything

[StreetAddict]

Originally Posted by greenhorn

Even I'm not saying that you SHOULD not get an SSD, but I'm really not sure its worth it. Despite frank's history, I'm really not sure high end = excuse to blow money on anything and everything

+1 to that. I'm using a 7200 RPM laptop HDD in my CarPC for over 6 months now & I don't think it has ever skipped. Swift's ride quality on oversize rims is not exactly plush!

Originally Posted by frankmehta

Let's just say we shall discuss this HDD vs SATA business after a few months when the durability and resilience of the computer is spoken about.

HDD vs SSD OR IDE vs SATA!!!

[jinu_joseph]

Originally Posted by greenhorn

Despite frank's history, I'm really not sure high end = excuse to blow money on anything and everything

Quite sad you interpreted it that way.

I have been working with SSDs on my PCs for over six months now and know how much of a difference it makes compared to HDDs not just in your cold boot up, but also in your day to day to day tasks on the PC like searching for a file, importing files into a library, or opening a file, or taking a backup. Net net the response becomes a lot more faster.

Maybe six months down the line you should try replacing the HDD with SSD and see. Unfortunately it will involve a total reinstall, but its worth it.

Hey Frank when are the Pics getting loaded.