Ask Ars

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Question: Intel's Sandy Bridge launch just brought its desktop CPU line up to 3.8GHz, but I remember that the Pentium 4 got up to 3.8GHz before being cancelled. So why is it that Sandy Bridge is just now getting to the clock speed levels that the Pentium 4 was at years ago? And how is it that Sandy Bridge still manages to outperform the older Pentium 4, even though it has a lower clock speed?

The relationship between clockspeed and performance isn't nearly as straightforward as it used to seem—not that it ever was all that simple.  To understand why different CPUs at different clockspeeds perform in different ways, we'll first look at how the CPU processes instructions. 

Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. And now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then we'll turn to the community for your take. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Question: I'm finally ready to drop Windows XP and move to Windows 7. Should I go with the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the operating system?

Short answer: 64-bit.

Long answer: 64-bit, but you may not see much real difference. Before explaining why, there is an important contraindication to be aware of: if you use any 16-bit Windows applications or DOS applications, you'll have to either stick with 32-bit Windows, or run those applications in a virtual machine (or, for DOS programs, an environment such as DOSBox). 64-bit Windows supports 64-bit and 32-bit applications, but 16-bit ones are consigned to the trash can of history.

In practice, the only advantage of using 64-bit Windows is that you can install more physical memory. 32-bit versions of desktop Windows are limited to 4GiB of physical memory, and thanks to dubious compatibility restrictions, they can't even offer that much. Every byte of memory in a system has a physical address, a number representing that byte of memory, and on 32-bit desktop Windows, those addresses are only 32 bits long (or rather, the addresses are between 36 and 64 bits long depending on which bit of software is manipulating them, but only 32 bits are actually used by Windows). This should allow 2³² addresses, and hence 2³² bytes—4GiB—of memory.

Question: How can I liberate my music collection from my single PC, store it somewhere central on my LAN, and access it from multiple locations?

This question is a little like the onsite backup one we answered last week, and what methods you can use depend on how simple, expensive, and extensible you want your centralized music collection to be. Clearly, there are a ton of ways to tackle this problem, and this answer does not aim to be comprehensive. Rather, we're just throwing a few ideas out there that newbies to networked music sharing should investigate further. (Regular Ars readers should feel free to pitch in with further suggestions in the comments.)

On the low end, you don't even really need to move your media off your PC in order to liberate it. Both Home Sharing on iTunes and Windows Media Center make it easy enough to stream media directly off one computer to others in the same network. But this method can create a lot of extra work for the central computer, and makes it hard to sync devices, since non-local music through these services isn't accessible for that purpose (you can download music between computers with Home Sharing, but this might fragment your collection and will take up extra space). A better solution is to set up a server or a network-attached storage (NAS) device that can be accessed over your home network, which gives you more options and has varying costs.

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap into the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Question: What is the smartest on-site backup strategy for my house? Time Machine? NAS? External SATA? DVD-R?

There's almost no end to backup solutions and configurations these days, and virtually no excuse for not backing up your computer. Even if you have only a few important files, it's worth it to shell out for an 8GB USB flash drive to store copies on; if you don't, you'll cry out that $20 you saved in anguished tears.

For the most part, backup storage solutions vary on three axes: speed, cost, and flexibility. We'll go over a few different types of storage, and you can determine what's best for you based on your setup.

In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly-launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Question: What's the most secure way to transport 100GB of data via Sneakernet?

Sharing small files across the Internet with a good amount of security keeps getting easier, but large datasets can still create long, painful upload times. In this video edition of Ask Ars, we cover the most secure ways to transport large datasets by trekking the dusty trail, otherwise known as Sneakernet, even with predators in hot pursuit.

Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. And now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then we'll turn to the community for your take. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

How can I safely erase the data from my SSD drive? I've seen a few pieces in recent days about how traditional "secure delete" programs fail to work properly on SSD drives, so what tools are available and useful?

As pointed out in a recent research article, there isn't a standard method for securely deleting data from a solid state drive. Hard disk drives have had this problem solved for ages, and can execute a secure delete by filling the space occupied by an incriminating file with zeroes or multiple writes of different characters. We'll go into why this approach and some other secure erase methods don't really work on an SSD, especially not for individual files, and then describe some approaches you might take to make sure all your old data is gone for good.

We did an Ask Ars not long ago concerning the way that SSDs handle deletion and cleanup of old files, and we'll assume you've read it or have equivalent knowledge. Basically, the issue with SSDs is this—let's say your SSD is a pirate, and your data is buried treasure. If you tell an SSD pirate to make his buried treasure disappear, all he really does is burn the treasure map. The buried treasure is still out there for someone to find if they know where to look. This isn't the case for all SSDs in the long term, but it is the case for all of them in the short term.

Welcome to the re-launch of Ask Ars, brought to you by CDW! 

Re-launch, you ask? Why, yes! Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. Ask Ars is all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then comes the best part: we turn to the community for your take.

To launch, we reached out to some of our geekiest friends to solicit their burning questions. Without further ado, let's dive into our first question. Don't forget to send us your questions, too! To submit your question, see our helpful tips page.

Q: I've seen a few different recipes online for making a patched, updated install disk for Windows on a USB drive. What process do you guys recommend?

I'm not sure that I would go to the trouble of making and maintaining a patched and updated install disk. New Windows patches are published virtually every month, and occasionally more often. For a typical home user, creating a patched image, and keeping it up-to-date, is a greater burden than simply installing the vanilla operating system and hitting Windows Update. Installing from USB is worthwhile, as it's typically much faster (and means you don't have to bother with optical media any longer), but customizing the installed media is harder to justify.

Welcome to the re-launch of Ask Ars, brought to you by CDW! 

Re-launch, you ask? Why, yes! Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. Ask Ars is all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then comes the best part: we turn to the community for your take.

To launch, we reached out to some of our geekiest friends to solicit their burning questions. Without further ado, let's dive into our first question. Don't forget to send us your questions, too! To submit your question, see our helpful tips page.

Let's get started with a question that was unthinkable in 1998!

Q: I've heard that some SSD controllers do "garbage collection" while others don't. Is this really that big of a deal, and if so, which controllers should I be on the lookout for?

To begin with, an SSD that doesn't do garbage collection would be like an elevator that only goes up—that is, it would never delete anything. However, some drives are able to do it more quickly than others, and some engage in a process called "idle garbage collection" that distributes the workload across periods of inactivity. But before we get into that, we'll take a minute to describe how and why an SSD does garbage collection, and why a drive that does only that would be a weak one indeed.

Solid state drives have two hangups that force them to deal with data differently than hard disk drives do: they can only erase data in larger chunks than they can write it, and their storage cells can only be written a certain number of times (10,000 is standard) before they start to fail. This makes tasks like modifying files much harder for SSDs than HDDs.