I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

[Shiari]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

I still feel however if you are releasing a range - you are releasing the whole range - otherwise it can't be called the range.

That is only valid if the range is rigidly specified to start with. It hasn't been. Similarly, you could complain there's no extreme 5, 7, etc?

One of the other things that ticks me off is when you buy a 2G hard drive and manufacturers specify G in the respect of 1000(n) they only say G for marketing purposes and to make it sound more impressive - the computer industry has always been 1024(n) and just because people cant tell the difference between kb and kg - so what let them actually learn something for a change instead of bending to the will of the dominant populis who believe mediocrity is a goal because they have achieved it. To boot if what hard drive manufacturers are doing is correct then why isn't memory measurement done the same way? because those manufacturers got it wrong - deliberately.

The only way things are going to change is enough people stand up and say - "this is not good enough" but it wont happen because people are content just to accept whatever crap is shoved down their throats and let the world will go to hell in a hand basket.

I don't know why they've done this, but I'm guessing marketing reasons may be involved. For memory it's a bit different because memory bank sizes have to be a power of two, but there's no such direct mapping for harddrives so they can get away with a base 10 number instead. It's not going to change however. Why? Because the average user doesn't understand, doesn't have an interest in understanding, and thus doesn't care. My mom doesn't care what's in her computer, she doesn't care how it works, she just cares that it works. Plus such a change would require every storage manufacturer to change their numbers or there would be competitive advantages to those who didn't, every (web)shop to follow with product information updates ... good luck with that!

Also, another factor might be that most people just wouldn't be able to guess how much data they'd be able to store on their drive to start with anyway, it's too abstract. In the end it doesn't really matter.

[profJim]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Good points, but ....

Read user reviews for their new ssd or hdd purchases and quite a few of them are really PO'd that they "lost" almost 10% of the advertised/published disk space from their large drives when they were formatted. In the good ol' days they only "lost" 4.8% or 7.4% of the disk space.

[Shiari]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Good points, but ....

Read user reviews for their new ssd or hdd purchases and quite a few of them are really PO'd that they "lost" almost 10% of the advertised/published disk space from their large drives when they were formatted. In the good ol' days they only "lost" 4.8% or 7.4% of the disk space.

I guess those users didn't read SSD reviews before buying which often already explain that some space is lost because of technological restrictions. I'm not saying it's okay, but it's way beyond the point where it can be changed. What manufacturers could do (and afaik, sometimes do) is also specify the "actual formatted space". Still doesn't mean however that the resellers also pass on this information, or that buyers even see it.

[FalloutBoy]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

I guess those users didn't read SSD reviews before buying which often already explain that some space is lost because of technological restrictions. I'm not saying it's okay, but it's way beyond the point where it can be changed. What manufacturers could do (and afaik, sometimes do) is also specify the "actual formatted space". Still doesn't mean however that the resellers also pass on this information, or that buyers even see it.

Well no surely it would be unformatted space because the manufacturer does not know what you are going to format it with, it could be anything from FAT16 format through to a Linux Ext 4 system or a mix there of with 1 partition or 20 - it all makes a difference to formatted capacity but none to unformatted. Unformatted capacity is generally mentioned on the outer label of a hard drive and in most cases though I admit I haven't looked at a drive in the last four months it would contain it's CHS information as well.

But the unformatted RAW capacity I still feel should be express as a ^2 it only makes sense that if you ask for a 2 TB drive you get a 2TB drive not a 2,000,000,000 however many zeros it is - it just doesn't track well when it says 2TB and yet its something like 1.9TB unformatted.

People don't say I need a size of 8TB so I'm going to build an 8 TB raid array and then work out the number of drives needed by dividing by 1.9 they divide by 2 because the drive says 2TB.

[FalloutBoy]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Quote Originally Posted by profJim View Post

Good points, but ....

Read user reviews for their new ssd or hdd purchases and quite a few of them are really PO'd that they "lost" almost 10% of the advertised/published disk space from their large drives when they were formatted. In the good ol' days they only "lost" 4.8% or 7.4% of the disk space.

To hard to do because they don't know how you are going to partition and format it or what you are going to format it with.

[FalloutBoy]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

That is only valid if the range is rigidly specified to start with. It hasn't been. Similarly, you could complain there's no extreme 5, 7, etc?

On the website where I read all of the details about the z87 range there was a list of models - it included the extreme 11/ac but made no reference to 5 and 7, I don't know why the models are numbered the way they are - I presume there would be some imaginative reason for it - or maybe being an Asian brand(afaik) they find the particular sequence of numbers lucky or profitable or something along those lines or maybe something to do with a model equivalent of fung shwai - but I was referring to the list of numbers provided on the site (not ASRocks).

[- wardog -]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Meh. I don't see a Class Action suit being legitimized by a Judge over any possible delays during a/any possible launch for the board.

When, and if, it's in a workable and reasonably ready situation to be released it will be. But not until then.

Reputations have been made, and lost, over things a trivial as this.

[FalloutBoy]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Meh. I don't see a Class Action suit being legitimized by a Judge over any possible delays during a/any possible launch for the board.

When, and if, it's in a workable and reasonably ready situation to be released it will be. But not until then.

Reputations have been made, and lost, over things a trivial as this.

I think you need to go back, reread and comprehend the contents of the post discussing class action suits - it wasn't regarding the time scale or availability of the ASRock board(s) it was regarding product from chip manufacturers that stated a spec and delivered a much lesser spec.

[Shiari]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

I think you need to go back, reread and comprehend the contents of the post discussing class action suits - it wasn't regarding the time scale or availability of the ASRock board(s) it was regarding product from chip manufacturers that stated a spec and delivered a much lesser spec.

I don't see the same false information. The SATA 3 spec does transfer 6 Gbit across its wires, and that's what they're advertising. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't say "you can transfer files at X MB/sec with this", nor does it say that that is shared across the devices per interface, and they don't have to. No claims are being made, so there's nothing for you to sue. They're simply listing the highest number that's technically correct, and it gives some sense of scale from version to version.

Promising "more" through advertising happens everywhere, sadly. It's not specific to computers, and it is nothing new. Just consider the fuel efficiency of a car for example. Yeah you might be able to reproduce their advertised results in an ideal situation, but unless you manage that same efficiency yourself day after day the claim is essentially false. We can only hope the integrity in these things will improve over time, and I'm pretty sure that eventually it will. Change takes time however.

[- wardog -]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

I think you need to go back, reread and comprehend the contents of the post discussing class action suits - it wasn't regarding the time scale or availability of the ASRock board(s) it was regarding product from chip manufacturers that stated a spec and delivered a much lesser spec.

No. I read it properly. And thanks but my comprehension is just fine concerning your two "threads' here crying out for a date on the board

BTW, chip manufacturers? ASRock chose to place the chip on as many pcie lanes as ASRock themselves deemed worthy. The lack of lanes is/was the debilitating factor. Not the chip itself.

Nothing good ever comes from letting your customers sense you're angry and or disillusioned. Poor business practice for doing so, interruptions or not. It is something to be avoided at all costs.

Just what is it that this board consists that is of interest? It's an enthusiast board that wouldn't(read: does not) make for IT dept server material. That plus it's E-ATX which most likely means a new case for many of them, assuming they are enthusiasts. Manufacturers subsist on spoon feeding us sugar that is mostly little or no use to the majority. The LSI SAS3008(?) is just one more such cube on an otherwise enthusiast board.

[parsec]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

...

BTW, chip manufacturers? ASRock chose to place the chip on as many pcie lanes as ASRock themselves deemed worthy. The lack of lanes is/was the debilitating factor. Not the chip itself....

Well, can't agree with that, the devil is in the details. From the Marvell-99SE91XX-Host-Controllers Product Brief:

and a one-lane 5.0 Gb/s PCIe host interface. In addition, it features
hardware RAID to offload host CPU and AHCI interface for inbox driver support. A complete suite of RAID 0/1
software is provided, including the OS device driver, BIOS/FW, and a management utility.

http://www.marvell.com//storage/syst...ontrollers.pdf

What, am I just making this stuff up?

So explain to me what I'm missing here?

[- wardog -]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

and a one-lane 5.0 Gb/s PCIe host interface

OK! Ok. You win.

[parsec]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

OK! Ok. You win.

No problem, not my point to "win", and I must admit these add-on SATA chipsets and their contradictory specs have been a pet peeve of my for years. Meaning I researched these guys as much as possible, and using their own specs and documents, that is what I found. A different document I once found was touting that the chip only needed one PCIe 2.0 lane (at 5.0Gb/s), that for their direct customers, mother board manufactures.

OTOH, you are correct wardog, it can depend on how many PCIe lanes are allocated to a chip. To be fair, there are some Marvell SATA chipsets, the 9172 and 9182, that can be connected to more than one PCIe lane. But most mother boards do not use those chips, and not without a reason.

For Intel platforms, when Sandy Bridge "Mainstream" CPUs and chipsets were released, the number of available PCIe lanes was reduced compared to previous platforms (it's ~24-28 IIRC.) Only one PCIe x 16 lane was available, and going XFire/SLI with just two cards put you at two x8 lanes. Using three cards is even worse. That limitation remained for IB and now Haswell platforms.

With fewer PCIe lanes available, all manufactures can do is ration them. So being able to add a SATA chip using one PCIe lane is attractive. OTOH, on platforms like the i7-900/X58, or Intel's X79, that have 40 PCIe lanes, using the single PCIe lane SATA chips is just being cheap.

Back to how these chips are marketed as 6Gb/s when they are using a single 5Gb/s PCIe interface, perhaps the answer is this, from the Marvell document:

SATA 3.0 Compliant: 6 Gb/s SATA PHY with speed negotiation to backward support 3 and 1.5 Gb/s

So it has a 6 Gb/s SATA PHY "layer", but the downstream interface is not, but the former qualifies it as SATA 6Gb/s?

IMO, I still believe it's BS.

[bobbintb]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Wow. Someone's a < flame text deleted >, aren't they?



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bobbintb is banned from the forum for one month for flaming a forum member in this post.
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[FalloutBoy]

Re: I am beginning to get very annoyed and frustrated with ASRock.

Wow. Someone's a < flame text deleted >, aren't they?

Wow and someone must be really desperate for entertainment - do us all a favour don't try and troll here.