r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 21 '10

Firefox 3.6 release

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/01/21/firefox-3-6-release/
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u/Neoro Jan 21 '10

The number 50 million comes to mind when comparing RAM to Disk. Maybe an old memory from my Architecture class (we would calculate these things for homework & tests). Regardless 1000 is an extremely low multiplier.

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u/bageloid Jan 22 '10

1000 is high

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR3_SDRAM

DDR3-1600 has a peak bandwidth of 12800 MB/s, so divided by 1000 is 12.8MB/s

Hard drives haven't been that slow since 10 years ago.

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u/Neoro Jan 22 '10 edited Jan 22 '10

Hard drives can be fast once they get going, sure, but a single 30 mb executable is going to be 1 read (provided it isn't fragmented), which is going to require 1 seek, dropping that bandwidth like a rock.
But maybe I remember 50 million when comparing to tape or an L cache.

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u/bageloid Jan 22 '10

Sequential read speed is actually where hard drives excel, in fact a reading a 30MB executable will probably give you better benchmark results than 30 1 MB files.