Sunday, April 24, 2005

Finding the Best Latency Settings for DDR2. DDR2 SDRAM Timings Under Investigation

8:25 am | Yaroslav Lyssenko

TweakTown has posted an article containing an investigation of the best latency settings for DDR2 memory. The author tries to find out what set of memory timings is the best choice for ensuring higher performance on Intel Pentium 4 platform. The investigation was made with OCZ’s DDR2 memory module kit installed on the Intel 925XE core-logic-based ASUS P5AD2-E Premium mainboard.

“We can see from our test results that it is pretty clear the Intel Pentium 4 is not a latency craver, as its design simply precludes any need for extremely low latencies which the AMD Athlon craves. It is however, a bandwidth hog. DDR-2’s higher latency over DDR doesn’t make it such a bad choice now that speeds are starting to reach 667MHz and above which is much quicker than the speeds which DDR-2 was first released at 533MHz. DDR-2 is now starting to show its colours, and with Dual Core, PCI-Express now starting to take a chunk of the bandwidth, its certainly a good thing to see that bandwidth is now in abundance. When it comes to setting up your system (overclocked or not), we can see that for the Pentium 4 platform series, higher bandwidth is more important than tighter timings when it comes to overall performance. Tight timings are good but are far from crucial for the Pentium 4 – keep this in mind when it comes to buying DDR-2, especially expensive DDR-2,” concludes TweakTown.

• TweakTown: DDR-2 Memory Investigation Guide - Making Sense of Memory Settings.

Old Hard Disk Drives May Unleash Secrets. For True Confidentiality Erasing Tools are Inefficient

8:16 am | Yaroslav Lyssenko

An article at CNET News.com claims that there is a sufficient problem with information security on old hard disk drives. Expert claim that simple delete and format actions do not bring total data disappearance from an HDD. Such valuable information as bank account passwords could be found later by some people who know where and how to look. 

“For people who want to sell or donate a computer, who are trying to protect their checkbook or medical info, you can expect to protect yourself against all but the most sophisticated attacks with wiping. But you have to use the software the right way,” said Stephen Lawton, the director of marketing at Acronis, a maker of wiping tools, backup and recovery software.

“Even the people who destroy disks will tell you (that) unless you do that correctly, there are always people who can get the data off,” he added.

Because of the huge importance of the data security, organizations such as the National Association for Information Destruction constantly test wiping applications that may bring adequate data destruction. So far the tests had left reason to doubt the wiping products.

“Our position, ultimately, was that we will only give our approval to physical destruction of the hard drive. We know that unless that is done a certain way, even that can be an ineffective approach,” said Bob Johnson, executive director at NAID.

• CNET News.com: Skeletons on Your Hard Drive.

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