[geeks] Daily Dose of Unix

[Chris Byrne]

<snip>

> Of course i do have online file storage of much larger
> capacities, but that illustrates the point.  A great deal of
> these workstations are used in environments where networked
> file storage is used to a large degree.  

<snip>

> those who work heavily with that are expected to be utilizing
> other, faster and larger, arrays and what not.  Very rarely is
> the main disk subsystem used to deal with this type of work.
> 

I realize that this is true. I'm sure that's what SGI expects. But why
don't they include an FC-HBA with the system then? 
I mean the price they charge for an HBA is about the same amount they
charge for the bigger disk, and to my mind is a better value
proposition. 
Hell stick it on the mobo and charge extra for the GBIC. 

What I'm saying is that they arent giving you a storage subsystem that
is up to par with the rest of the systems capabilities. I think they
should.
 
> What takes up space on most peoples drives?  Two gig games
> (UT2003), tons of MP3's and a million and one bloatware apps. 
> None of which, i doubt, is SGI concerned with when they design
> systems.
> 

Lets say Im looking to repalce my primary desktop workstation. This is
orimary machine I use for everyday tasks, both business and personal
since I'm a contractor. 

I do a little video and sound editing. I do a little 3-d work. I do a
little engineering work. All of these require some pretty large files. I
have quite a few files in excess of 200mb, and a couple in excess of a
gig. I also do a lot of netowrking, admin, and security work. Which
means TONS of documentation, references, and log files. 

I have no games on this box. The only bloatware app I run is an office
suite. 

I have about 10 gigs of mp3s and 5 gigs of ebooks.

My main system has a 30 gig drive. I have 2 gigs of space on it.  I
could probably increase that to about 5 gigs free without too much
difficulty but after that things start to get ugly. I start having to
archive stuff in offline storage,a nd I don't currently have a medium
for that to be convenient.

I suspect the paragraphs above come close to describing a lot of people,
including a lot of us on this list. 


> There's nothing wrong with having a lot of storage locally, i
> just believe that this has gotten waaaay out of hand with the
> desktop market due to cheap drives.
> 
> /KRM
> 

I don't disagree, what I'm saying is that SGI hasn't kept pace with
either the prevailing market standard, or general user patterns. When
the standard HDD size was 9 gb, they included 4 gb, when 18 they
included nine, when 36 they still included nine, and only in the last
year or so switched to 18. Now the market is starting to move to 73 gig
drives, and SGI is still on 18 gig drives.

If they included a high bandwidth mass storage interface like FC I think
that would be ok, but they don't.

Chris Byrne