Third generation Cheetah review up at SR...

time

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Holy hard drive dollars! You could buy 8 WD800JB for that! I don't know that any of us are that keen. :eek:
 

Prof.Wizard

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It's really expensive... but "crown jewels" are always expensive... :wink:
SEAGATE is the Gate...
 

Pradeep

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Why the hell do they insist on serving absolutely gigantic pictures (file size wize) of the top of the drive? I thought they were struggling to pay for bandwidth costs?
 

NRG = mc²

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I've advised them to use JPG rather than PNG for the drive photos by email and from the feedback section of the forum but they don't seem to care - in typical SR style, I didn't even recieve a reply... :evil:
 

flagreen

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NRG = mc² said:
I've advised them to use JPG rather than PNG for the drive photos by email and from the feedback section of the forum but they don't seem to care - in typical SR style, I didn't even recieve a reply... :evil:
The Gods are choosy as to whom they speak. :D
 

timwhit

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The most impressive thing about that drive is the super low noise and heat levels...simply amazing!
 

time

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timwhit said:
The most impressive thing about that drive is the super low noise and heat levels...simply amazing!

I agree. Fujitsu may well match the performance, but I doubt that anyone will match both heat and noise in this generation. Unless Eugene knows something we don't, I think it should have received a better award than "Safe Buy".
 

Pradeep

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By second version do you mean the X15-36LP? That is available from Hypermicro for $209.
 

Santilli

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Yes, and WOW :excl:

That's a great deal.

These new drives are sort of raid in one drive, setups.

s
 

Santilli

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Only problem with Cheetahs is they have a bit of a price drop, and, then, they are too good to sell for what you can get for em.

I still have the first,second, and third generation drives around(10k's) and they are a perfect match for my mac, and, are still faster then just about any ide drive around, overall performance wise. Darn things just don't wear out, which, becomes a problem.

I have to continue to use my uw cards with em, and even the LVD drive, if I want the uw drives to be avaliable for backup.

Now use em as separate disks for backing up data. Fast, and quick access.

In retrospect, I'm not going to be buying any brand new Cheetahs for a while. The 2nd generation cheetahs are an incredible value right now.

Why pay double for a not so great performance increase?

s
 

CougTek

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NRG = mc² said:
I've advised them to use JPG rather than PNG for the drive photos
JPG would create jitters that would make the small text on the drive's label unreadable. A .gif using an optimized 8-bit palette would be boot sharp and small in size, while there would be enough colors to display the drive correctly. I'll do the test to be sure, but that's what I'm going to propose to Eugene.

Unless manufacturers start to make rainbow patterns on their drives' labels, 256 colors will be well enough for any drive picture.
 

CougTek

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Hmmm....

I was wrong, jpeg is sharp enough and, while subtile, there is a visible loss in color gradient in .gif format. I guess I'm too used to screwed screen shots in jpeg. Other kind of pictures don't show the same effects.

Consider I have never post in this thread.
 

e_dawg

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If you can desturate and play with the image characteristics in Photoshop, I am almost certain that GIF would be the most efficient compression algorithm for these continuous tone, almost monochromatic HD labels as you yourself alluded to.
 

CougTek

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The GIF version of the 1.15MB PNG file weighted in 293KB while the J-PEG only took 93.2KB of space. I doubt you can shave so much on the GIF to make it more than 3x lighter.
 

Tea

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SR's PNG: 1,154,444 bytes

ST373453LW_top.png


Simply opened in PMView and re-saved with the factory default options, it looks identical (I'm not going to waste my server space by posting it again), size: 710,219 bytes.

Saved as an 8-bit GIF it looks very, very nearly as good. I can tell the two apart, but only if I have them both open side-by-side. Size: 250,179 bytes.

Saved by PMView as a JPEG, again using the factory defaults for the program, nothing fancy, it looks like this:

test3.jpg


Like the GIF, it is almost identical to the original PNG but if you look closely, marginally inferior. Size: 32,328 bytes.

Doubtless, with a slightly less aggressive setting on the JPG builder (which would take two mouse-clicks to achieve) it could be completely indistinguishable and take maybe 80k.

Please, someone buy Eugene a copy of PMView.
 

NRG = mc²

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PNG would be smaller than the GIF if they reduced it to 256 colours. But the thing is that JPEG works fine for this use. I'm a fan of PNG, but unless there is a reason to want lossless quality for that photo then I don't see the point, also if using an earlier version of photoshop to save the file, the compression will not be as high as what can be achieved using other programs, as Tea probably found out. There is also a program called PNG Crush that can reduce further the file size by trying various compression algorhythms on the file to see which one creates the smallest size. But still not as good as JPEG.
 
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