silicon image sil3124 softraid 5 controller

#Silicon image sil3124 softraid 5 controller windows#

Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital have all entered the fray with SATA units specifically tuned for the enterprise sector. By then, it was clear that both the hardware and benchmarks required updating. Testbed1 nonetheless carried us through dozens of drive reviews spanning two years from March 1998 to March 2000. Looking back, however, its clear that the benchmark came up short. ThreadMark was our initial attempt to present multi-user performance.

#Silicon image sil3124 softraid 5 controller windows#

Windows 95 and NT 4.0 laid the foundation for our tests, ZD’s WinBench 98 and Adaptec’s ThreadMark 2.0.ĭespite its flaws, WinBench 98 truly was the best tool to measure single-user disk performance at the time. An Adaptec 2940U2W provided Ultra2 (80 MB/sec) SCSI functionality. Testbed1: Our initial testbed was a 440LX-based 266 MHz Pentium II machine featuring an ATA-33 controller operating off of the PIIX4 southbridge. This changed, however, with StorageReview’s debut of Testbed1. Though such articles occasionally featured one or two other drives tested in the same machine for comparison, by and large, it was difficult to directly compare contemporary drives with one another. Back then, when one could find them at all, hard drive reviews were always conducted on “the latest and greatest” machine that the individual reviewer could put together.

When we launched StorageReview back in 1998, one of our principal goals was to maintain a consistent, unchanging test platform that would enable readers to directly compare a wide variety of drives with each other.

Join us as we take a look at SR’s updated hard drive test suite and see how your favorite disk stacks up!Ī Brief History of StorageReview’s Testbeds Temperature assessment has been overhauled. Our third-generation Testbed has carried us for more than 3.5 years. Maybe there should never have been room for Eminem in the first place.One of StorageReview’s hallmarks has been our consistent testbeds that enable direct comparison of a wide variety of drives, not just those found within a given review. Just over a decade ago he emerged as an unlikely worldbeater: a white rapper from Detroit with a vexatious obsession with violence and social dysfunction. His pop megasuccess was serendipitous, explicable by no common measuring sticks.Ĭertainly, in the rear view, it’s tempting to see Eminem’s ascendance as a fluke, never more so than now, several years past his commercial peak. On Monday he released “Recovery” (Aftermath/Interscope), his sixth solo album on a major label, his first album as a sober man and the most insular of all his releases. In many ways, the Eminem captured on “Recovery” is reminiscent of the artist he once was, before the world got hold of him. He still has the familiar preoccupations: cartoonish gore, sexual aggression, astonishingly intricate rapping. He sounds far more invigorated than on anything he’s released since 2002, the year of his last strong album, “The Eminem Show,” and the soundtrack to the quasi-biopic “8 Mile.”įor the first few years of his fame Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, exerted a gravitational pull on pop and was impossible to emulate, making him only more powerful. But over the last few years, as he retreated into drug-fueled isolation, Eminem one of the most crucial figures in pop culture in the last 20 years, who pushed hip-hop over the final hump to mainstream acceptance has been a nonentity. Take this tightly packed run from “No Love”:Ĭold hearted, from the day I Bogarted the game, my soul started to rot, fellow Were this same album to come from a new artist, it would be met with head scratching and possibly derision, but for Eminem it’s merely charmingly bare-bones.įirst and foremost Eminem’s rapping has survived largely intact, still a wondrous thicket of internal and complex rhymes that come off as feats of athleticism as much as language.

When I’m not even at my harshest, you can still get roasted cause Marsh is not mellow. Throughout “Recovery” he is practically panting from rapping at such a frenzied clip. This is redolent of Eminem circa 1997-98 before the whimsical accents and cadences just as his Slim Shady alter ego was being formed, when wordplay mattered far more than subject or tone.