Friday, October 31, 2003

Memorex Mini-CD Player

So I picked up the Memorex MPD8081 mini-CD MP3 player (as mentioned previously), and I've been using it off and on (walked across town with it in my pants pocket).

For someone on the hefty side, it does fit in the pocket if you wear baggy jeans, but it's still better suited for placing inside a bookback or coat pocket. While they could have made it about 1/2" narrower in the width/height dimensions, I'm not sure they can make it much thinner without switching to AAA batteries and using a custom CD laser element.

One problem that I found if it's in my pants pocket is that the constant motion causes problems when playing high bitrate MP3s (e.g. 224mbps or 320mbps). I'm not exactly sure how big the buffer memory is, but it's supposed to provide 120sec of anti-skip protection. My guess is that you'll only get 120sec if you're using 128mbps bitrate MP3s (which would mean about a 2Mb cache). If you're running higher bitrate MP3s (like 320mbps), it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the buffer can only hold 48sec. So for active use, I'd recommend not running bitrates higher then 160-192 (which still gives you 80-96sec of buffer).

I'll have to test this by watching how often the CD spins up to read the next portion of the file at various bit rates. (To conserve battery life, the player reads data from the CD in gulps... probably gulps equal to the size of the memory buffer.)

I also haven't gone looking for a hip pouch for it yet (I would imagine that someone sells a belt pouch that it would fit in), which might have reduced the amount of shock that the system was trying to absorb.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 2:46 PM

Tuesday, October 28, 2003

NTFS Tuning

(4) links on NTFS tuning

Optimise NTFS performance in Windows servers

NTFS Optimization

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 314878 - The Default Cluster Size for the NTFS and FAT File Systems

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 174619 - How NTFS Reserves Space for its Master File Table (MFT)

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 2:39 PM