data compression Archives - The Silicon Underground

Data compression, 1980s-style–and why PKZIP won

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 09 May 2014 11:00:29 +0000

My employer has me doing some very gray-hat work that I don’t want to describe in detail, because the information has a tremendous potential for misuse. But suffice it to say I’ve been trying to send data places the data

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Intel enters the budget Sandforce market

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:26:01 +0000

Intel announced a new low-end SSD today, the 330, based on a Sandforce 2281 controller. The popular 120 GB capacity will retail for $149. While not as cheap as OCZ’s entry-level SSDs, it’s within striking distance. The main difference between

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Defrag scareware

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 00:55:44 +0000

This isn’t exactly news, as word has been going around for a couple of weeks, but if you haven’t heard about it elsewhere, there are some fake defragmenters going around. I heard mention of it today, and it reminded me

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Slimming down Windows XP for SSDs and nettops

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 02:03:56 +0000

I found a very long and comprehensive guide for using Nlite to reduce the size of a Windows installation.

The guide is geared towards an Asus Eee. But it should work well on pretty much anything that has an Intel CPU in it.

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How to use compression to help life with an SSD

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:36:00 +0000

Since pretty much everyone thinks my love of SSDs is insane, I'll throw another insane idea on top of it: using data compression. It makes sense. Doing it selectively, you help performance, while saving space. At a much higher cost per gig, that saved space is very nice to have.

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We’ll have to wait longer for PCI RAMdisks

Dave Farquhar — Sat, 06 Aug 2005 00:28:40 +0000

In case nobody noticed, it's August. July came and went, and there's no Gigabyte I-RAM on the market yet.

But there are a few benchmarks out there, and Anandtech has an article that, once you get past the usual rambling and over-the-top introduction, has some useful insights.

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So there is a benefit to running Windows Server 2003 and XP

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 22:57:02 +0000

One of the reasons Windows Server 2003 and XP haven't caught on in corporate network environments is that Microsoft has yet to demonstrate any real benefit to either one of them over Windows 2000.

Believe it or not, there actually is one benefit. It may or may not be worth the cost of upgrading, but if you're buying licenses now and installing 2000, this information might convince you it's worth it to install the current versions instead.

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Easy and secure remote Linux/Unix file transfers with SCP

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 02 Dec 2003 23:42:58 +0000

Sometimes you need to transfer files between Linux boxes, or between a Linux box and some other box, and setting up Samba or some other form of network file system may not be practical (maybe you only need to transfer a couple of files, or maybe it's just a one-time thing) or possible (maybe there's a firewall involved).

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Reviving a laptop

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 25 Sep 2002 22:48:05 +0000

The drive in my work laptop gave a S.M.A.R.T. error over the weekend. I never have had much luck with Hitachi laptop drives. Micron sent a replacement drive--an IBM, thankfully--and, doubly thankfully, the Hitachi hung on until today. So I whipped out Bart's magic network boot disk--to which I'd added the 3c556 module necessary to get this Micron Transport LT on the network--and ran my copy of Ghost from a network drive. (It won't fit on that disk, no way, no how. Not with all the other stuff crammed onto it.)

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