Giving HDInfo a second chance...

[Prof.Wizard]

I have noticed more frequent news posting on their site lately... should we trust the after the "address harvesting" of last year?

Can someone comment on the quality of their news?! :-?

 

[Tannin]

I can't comment on the quality of their news or of their reviews, PW, simply because I haven't looked hard enough at their site to make a fair and balanced judgement. I doubt that I will do that anytime soon. I try to make it a habit not to ever respond to spammers, and though I've poked around their site once or twice, I've made sure not to make a habit of it.

Now there are more than a few hysterical virgins around who are absolutely convinced that Storage Review is the One and Only Forever and Ever for Davin's is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, and Thou Shalt have No God but Eugene, Amem - and that no other web site has or ever will have the right to exist if it has anything to do with storage.

To this I say: bullshit!

On the other hand, to the best of my knowledge, HDinfo began as a cheap and tawdry attempt to cash in on SR's hard work and its difficulties by setting itself up as a clone site, and it did so in a low and sneaking manner - harvesting SR members to set up in direct competition was beyond the pale in my book. I am still getting their spam.

I doubt that an organisation that began with such bad faith is likely to ever live it down.

So yes, I welcome other storage-related web sites, and I wish there were lots more of them - and no, I don't welcome HDinfo, nor visit there to speak of. I assume that the quality of their reviews is poor, but I've never checked for myself.

Mind you, I rarely read SR's reviews either anymore. Since the change to Testbed Three I have had my doubts about SR's methodology too. The very stridency with which Eugene touts the new measurements rings strong alarm bells in my head. Surely, if the methods were half the step forward that SR claim, their merit would speak for itself, and not need such heavy-handed sneering to support it.

The recent SR test results are quite unsatisfying to me. I no longer feel that I can simply accept an SR test result without bothering to check it for myself. Having recently played with a WD JB, for example, fine drive that it is, its ranking on SR's tests is clearly spurious.

Maybe they will get it right with testbed 4.

 

[Pradeep]

I would be much happier if they were using win2k SP2 instead of this semi completed winXP, not to mention it is completely unpatched! Also the sudden deposition of IOmeter for other benchmarks seems a bit odd.

 

[time]

Bottom line is I don't believe Eugene's day to day usage is at all representative of what I look for in a drive, and that's what his tests are based on. Results of any test should withstand scrutiny based on everyday observations. So if the 8MB drives don't seem to be 30% faster in real life as the benchmark suggests, the benchmark may lack validity.

Is it measuring the performance of the drive or its interaction with Windows data caching? Testing on other operating systems would be an invaluable addition here.

There's also no point measuring miniscule differences between operations that are fast on any drive. You need to focus on what is slow to achieve any sort of meaningful comparison, that is what people will actually notice. Benchmarking 101, and hardly any of the hardware sites understand this.

 

[Tea]

Time said:

"There's also no point measuring miniscule differences between operations that are fast on any drive..... Benchmarking 101.

Exactly.

 

[Prof.Wizard]

I agree with all the above comments. So, bottom line, we have to wait and see...

To be frank, if they achieve the quality status of the sister site CDRinfo, I'll be more than pleased... :right:

 

[CougTek]

To this I say: bullshit!

Wouldn't Kangarooshit more appropriate for Aussies? Use Kangarooshit and I'll use Mooseshit ok?

I agree that measuring tasks that are completed too quickly for the user to notice isn't the best way to differenciate drives. So, does it mean that SR Office DriveMark should be exclusively made of huge Excel spreadsheet loads and huge PowerPoint document loads? I think Bootup DriveMark has its place though, as booting is one of the most time consuming task on a modern computer. Gaming DriveMark, I have no idea. I always thought games aren't the most drive intensive applications, but I could be wrong. HighEnd DriveMark is essentially a capture of Content Creation drive activity. Many people questioned the usefulness of Content Creation because few people (relatively speaking) use these applications, much less all of those applications together. Let's just say that HighEnd DriveMark is the one I pay the least attention to.

So, according to you, what are the most time consuming tasks performed by today's hard drives? Tasks that common people use, that is? If I understand what you want, these are the tasks that should be used in benchmarks, aren't they?

Or am I saying Mooseshit?

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not going to argue 'Mooseshit'. That one's pretty good.
I think the aussies among us might be better off with "Koalashit" or "Dingoshit" instead. Poor Tannin doesn't type so fast. We don't need to make it any harder for him.

 

[Buck]

Applicable rant:
http://www.dansdata.com/gz006.htm

"People whose intellect slices through problems with the ease of a car key through frozen butter can be found in all walks of life. As far as computer gear reviews go, though, it's not usually too difficult to spot the, um, Special People, if you pay attention to the numbers.

"Everybody's entitled to an opinion. But nobody's entitled to be taken seriously."

 

[Cliptin]

monitor-scat

 

[CougTek]

Koalashit would only be for small disagreements, much like beavershit IMO.

Sniff, sniff. Is it just me or this thread is starting to stink?

 

[Handruin]

Koalashit would only be for small disagreements, much like beavershit IMO.

Sniff, sniff. Is it just me or this thread is starting to stink?

Could just be those beans you had at lunch...