The miracle of grading

In my last blog I mentioned that I had to contest a grade I got on a program, and when I mean contest I mean *really* contest the grade. There were around 15 of us out of the class of 40 - 50 who showed up on Saturday because we were given 25s (yes out of 100 points) on our programs that we turned in something like 2 months ago and just now got back. It turns out there was a pretty big issue with how they were tested that caused a good deal of them to fail, so an hour spent on a Saturday afternoon bumped that 25 up to a 90...we'll see if the last 10 points are anything worth arguing for :) Don't get me started on the fact that our other program, also turned in over a month ago, has yet to be graded and classes are over. Having 20% of your grade unaccounted for isn't exactly a comforting feeling; welcome to the world of higher education.

So I've finished the 2004 storage test suite based on the new Winstones, but I've got a dilemma on my hands that I need your help in solving. As it stands now I've got a business/general usage test and a content creation test. I am not going to do a webserver HDD test simply because most present day web applications run in memory, and thus disk performance isn't an issue (reliability however, is). We'll record our SQL database server test as a server benchmark for hard drives but what I want to know is whether you all would like to see a gaming test included in the suite. The gaming drive test would essentially be useful in finding the hard drive that would minimize overall game load times, but is that data all that important? Overall game performance is mostly a CPU/GPU issue and you rarely notice the impact of a hard drive on game performance. You do however notice the impact of hard drive performance on things like using Outlook, compressing files, etc... I can make the benchmark if you'd like, but I'm not sure how relevant it will be.

The overwhelming response to what sort of storage review you guys would like to see first seems to be a real-world analysis of RAID performance, so that has become my first task using the new benchmark. I'm working on getting my hands on a pair of the new Raptors as well to see if they are really worth the price premium at this point.

I didn't expect to be able to finish Deus Ex 2 in a weekend, but given that the game was around 7 hours long that wasn't too difficult to do while creating these drive tests. I'm not sure if I think the game is better than the original (other than the fact that it performs a lot better on today's hardware than the original did on the best hardware out then), but it was definitely enjoyable. Given the short length of the game I'm not sure if it's worth the $50, maybe wait until it hits $30 or less.

It's 8:42PM and time for dinner...shh...