Question about CPUs. (Warning: A stupid one)

[jj]

@Piru

Thanks for the link to the pagefile defragger cause we all know that a fragmented pagefile does cause a real world performance hit and windows defragger does not defrag the pagefile as it is in use when the defragger is running.

Schedule to run in lunchbreak?

You must have a small hardrive or a really long lunchbreak :lol:  Wonder how long it would take to defrag my more or less full 250gig sata HDD.  Im guessing awhile

[Tomas]

Actual harddrive must be replace at least each 2 years if they are used 10h/days, after that they lost 50% of the speed output.

That also sounds like bull*it to me..
I have a old seagate 10gig from 1998, which has been running 24/7 since that time and still runs in my server today. The performance tests i did earlier this year shows that it still gives around the same performance today. Saying that it will be 50% slower after 2 years is the biggest bull i have ever heard.

It sounds to me like you have not defragged or formated the disk in ages. The windows filesystem has a tendency to get fragmented, and thus one would experience the loss of performance you are talking about. It just has zero to do with the physical hard drive.

[jj]

I have to agree with tomas.

I still own the first HDD I ever bought which was a 200 odd MB seagate.  Still works fine now.  Cost me nearly £350.

You got to love progress , that was well over a £1 per MB and now these days we are talking 20p per GB  

[Tomas]

JJ wrote:
Stop........De-fraging a hard-drive is pointless.  It will take hours and hours, and you will not notice the real world difference (apart from the old its supposed to be faster so it is effect).  you will never gain back the time lost in de-fraging in a performance gain.  And guess what as soon as you have de-fragged the drive it gets fragmented again.  

I hope you are joking  :-o
Claiming something like this, makes you look very clueless..
If you use your pc alot for years without defragging, then you will for sure notice a noticeable increase in performance after defragging a windows box. Defragging can be done at anytime, even while you sleep. Having a very fragmented filesystem is not good for your disk either, as it will have to work so much harder when data is fragmented all over the disk.

[jj]

@ tomas

no I am not clueless, if you look at the time it takes to defrag a large harddrive (and I am not talking about if you are sleeping etc) just about the actual time.  You will NEVER get that time back in speed increase.

And how often would you suggest defragging your HDD.  Because very very quickly after a defrag you will get to the same stage again.

Lets take a user who uses their PC mostly for gaming.  They are not going to be writing a lot of data back to the disk, the only thing that get fragmented wouldd be the pagefile.  As previoulsy discussed the windows defragger (that most people would use) cant defrag this.  So where would be the advantage of defragging

[Tomas]

no I am not clueless, if you look at the time it takes to defrag a large harddrive (and I am not talking about if you are sleeping etc) just about the actual time. You will NEVER get that time back in speed increase.

And how often would you suggest defragging your HDD. Because very very quickly after a defrag you will get to the same stage again.

That part is true, but i doubt most people sit on their pc for 24/7. One can make the pc do it lets say once a month or so at night time or at other times you dont use the pc. Less often if you dont use the hard drive so hard that it is fragmented. I would not defrag if it was lets say less than 10% fragmented. It all depends on how you use your pc.

But anyways.. Sorry for sounding so harsh in my first reply. I read it as if you suggested that defragging would not do a thing even if you do it on a very fragmented system.

[jj]

Ok then prehaps I should have said in some cases de-fragging your harddrives is not always nessecary  :-D

[Tomas]

JJ wrote:
Ok then prehaps I should have said in some cases de-fragging your harddrives is not always nessecary  :-D

Then we agree..  :-)

[adonay]

Actual harddrive must be replace at least each 2 years if they are used 10h/days, after that they lost 50% of the speed output.

comletely BS!!!  :lol:  :lol:  :lol: I have a raid deck running from 2001 and i can tell you it is far far far from 50% slower"yes it is being frequently bechmarked every 4 weeks.." And the only slowdown is if the swap gets too low or over fragmentation ... Try to format those drives install software again and you will see the speed is far from what you say..

[vic20owner]

This is a pretty funny thread.  Naturally de-fragging is nearly mandatory unless you have a self defragmenting file system.

Hard drives may get slower over time... the reason is simple. Mechanical wear and magnetic anomalies on the platter surfaces potentially mean multiple seeks trying to locate data... ever try to read a worn or lightly scratched cd? Yeah it takes longer as it keeps re-seeking missed attempts.  Really depends on the quality of the drive I guess.

CPU's don't slow down. An external crystal drives the cpu... it either works or it doesn't at the speed it's running at.

It suppose it's possible that they could become flaky and need to be slowed down to run smoothly.  If that happens then most likely the cpu was slightly overclocked to begin with.

The speed rating of a cpu is hit and miss and based on tests after production.  They make the cpus and then speed test them. Some end up running well at 1ghz and some are only stable at 800mhz.  Rather than throw away the 800mhz cpu they are sold as such accordingly.  It's possible that a 1ghz cpu may just barely run at 1ghz and runs better at 800mhz..

So thats my 2 cents, and it's worth what you paid for it

[zipper]

Defragging my lappie with Diskeeper, 110 GB, takes perhaps 5 mins - no big deal.

[jj]

Think my problem in the past is I have used windows defragger whicch taked for ever and quite often the disk is as fragmented after using it as before

[Xamiche]

Umm, did anyone notice the [color=008000]April Fools[/color] notice on the article concerning the "slowing down" of CPUs over time?

@the guy who's computer benchmarked slower some years later with the same set up. If the heat sink and fan on the CPU or VPU were functioning less effectively, quite likely considering the age, then those chips where mostly likely running hotter and that would result in poorer CPU/VPU performance and therefore a lower benchmark score.

[Zac67]

Xamiche wrote:

@the guy who's computer benchmarked slower some years later with the same set up. If the heat sink and fan on the CPU or VPU were functioning less effectively, quite likely considering the age, then those chips where mostly likely running hotter and that would result in poorer CPU/VPU performance and therefore a lower benchmark score.

Only few chips are actually capable of downclocking when overheated (e.g. Pentium 4). Most simply crash.

[murple]

What you need to do is every few days, remove your CPU and soak it in a glass of V8 juice. The antioxidants and nutrients in vegetables will slow down the aging of your CPU.

As the other posters have indicated, it seems highly unlikely a CPU will slow with age. You may begin to experience system problems of some kinds, though I dont think this would be "slowness"... most likely a damaged CPU will simply stop working.

[coldfish]

I remember reading a piece about "proton drift" or something like that, talking about how the electron flow can actually move protons over time.  Its becoming more of a problem as dies shrink further i believe.

Now, where's that link?