Photo of David Gardiner
A blog of software development, .NET and other interesting things
  • Dec 30, 2008

    RAA Rounding Error

    I went to renew our RAA membership this morning. The paper bill said we owe $170.

    I went to the web site to pay online, but was greeted by this:

    TOTAL (including GST) $170.01

    Yes, they’re overcharging me by 1c.

    I rang them up to let them know (and also paid the correct amount while I was at it).

    Could this be salami slicing, or more likely someone’s made a silly rounding error. Can’t those IT people ever get it right?

    :-)

  • Dec 29, 2008

    A furry visitor

    Furry visitor “I’m sure there was a tree around here last time”

  • Dec 17, 2008

    Fast hard disks

    So exactly how much faster are the latest hard disks? A number of people commented that using the old IDE disk on my Dad’s new Vista 64bit box wasn’t the best idea. I grabbed a copy of HD Tune to get some benchmarks of each of the 4 disks in the system to get an idea of how the drives compared.

    Here’s what I found:

    Measurement IDE Disk 1 IDE Disk 2 WD2000JD WD10EACS
    Transfer Rate Minimum (MB/sec) 1.1 7.6 32.1 37.2
    Transfer Rate Maximum (MB/sec) 43.5 45.1 55.1 90.5
    Transfer Rate Average (MB/sec) 28.8 33.8 48 68.3
    Access Time (ms) 14.5 14.3 20.5 15.5
    Burst Rate (MB/sec) 53.3 49.8 91.9 124.6

    Graph showing relative speeds of 4 hard drives

    So that 1Tb drive really is quite a bit faster than the other drives after all.

    I’ve since re-configured the new Vista box to use the fast drive for the operating system, and left the other drives in for video files (but with the knowledge that it will be a simple upgrade path to swap them out for additional SATA drives as required).