Microsoft Surface tablets

Yeah no matter clunky some of the UI is, storage spaces are a *big deal* ( I've been waiting for first-class support for that sort of thing in Windows for ages), and there are other core feature improvements too, as dlm pointed out.

I just wish there was no 32-bit version of Windows 8. Time for that to die frankly.

 

are the new atom's 64bit yet ? Cause honestly i think thats the only thing 32 bit windows ships on.

 

For the uninitiated, what are these storage spaces?

 

Hasn't atom been 64-bit for a while now?

Virtualized storage - decoupled from the underlying hard drive (array), including optional redundancy, etc. You can sort of think of it like software RAID, but with the ability to hot swap stuff, etc. Windows home server (the original) had a sort of similar thing and it was great, until they removed it in the new version :S Now that windows 8 has a first class implementation, I'll be switching my server over to it and probably considering putting two gaming/data drives in my desktops too.

 

It always had 64-bit support, but Intel fuses it off on many of its variants.

 

Wait, does Win8 also have the ability for storage to arbitrarily span multiple drives as WHS did? With file/folder level duplication/redundancy controls and ease of storage expansion/contraction? If so, that is fantastic news. While I finally switched my server to WHS 2.0, I dearly miss that feature.

If not. Hopefully WHS 3.0 will bring that back.

Regards,
SB

 

Yup, check here for detailed info: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...rage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx

Indeed it is great news, but legitimately great core features like this are getting buried beneath the weight of the media freaking out about relatively trivial UI stuff. That said, I realized around the "Vista omg-awful, Win7 best thing evar" era that similarly trivial UI stuff is what most users think *is* the operating system, so I guess I'm just the weird one :S

 

I read some rather bad results of trying to use the Storage Spaces feature, ranging from having extremely slow performance, to loss of data, to not being able to expand, to wasting drive space when mixing drives of different sizes. I'll try to find the links to where I read these reports from, mostly blog sites and storage forums from what I remember.

You may want to proceed with extreme caution before you fully convert any mass storage servers you already have.

 

Most of the stuff I've read is just really noob users who don't understand thin provisioning and parity (both are options). Since this is a core feature of the server OS, I'm doubtful that it'll have crippling bugs, at least in the long term.

But hey, good time to point out to everyone again that you should *always* have backups... never trust any single solution!

 

I prefer the "every disk has a valid filesystem" approach to transparent mirroring, with the "storage space" just providing a union which removes duplicates ... the metadata in these more RAID like approaches is more prone to catastrophic failures due to bugs (and there are always bugs).

 

In WHS1 that's sort of how it worked - it was file system "duplication" and thus each drive in the array was a valid NTFS drive by itself, but that approach comes with its own problems. I'm actually far less skittish about software/OS RAID than proprietary hardware controllers.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mSckyoAMHg

surface advertising has started

 

Very cool, thanks for the link. I'll have to look at it more when I have some time. Now, I have high hopes for WHS 3.0, assuming there is one.

I miss how WHS 1.0 managed the storage system far more than I expected I would. Having to manage my backup stores on WHS 2.0 as they exceeded the storage partition limits is extremely annoying and frustrating after how easy it was in WHS 1.0 to just add new drives when needed. And not having to worry about whether any particular storage pool was getting larger than the drive/folder/partition it was in.

Regards,
SB

 

Same here. Where I work, we use software raid on all our servers now, even the ones with expensive hardware RAID controllers in them. Instead of having custom drivers/management applications for each variety of RAID controller we now have a single way of doing things. Simplifies recovery a lot.

Cheers

 

No, definitely not, I'm completely with you. That said, Vista had it really hard because some unfortunate decisions in the implementations of core systems (global GDI lock and DWM memory allocation come to mind) had rather serious impact for UI...

 

It looks like a page briefly appeared on MS site with Surface RT price, see this (original news in French).

EDIT: same news in English.

 

Looks like they're throwing OEMs a bone by keeping pricing high.

 

Standard dpi screen, no keyboard and still $500? That seems too high to me... I'm also not convinced that at that price it's out of range of x86 tablets, which can also run desktop applications (and will probably be faster). Seems like a hard place to compete.

Of course personally I'm more interested in the price of the Surface Pro.

 

Prices of first x86 tablets have started to appear in France :
- Samsung ATIV Smart PC XE500T1C-A01FR Z2760@1.5GHz, 1366x768, with dock, 800 Euros
- ASUS Vivo Tab TF810C-1B020W Z2760@1.8GHz, 1366x768, with dock, 900 Euros

These prices look way too high to me for such underpowered CPU. But that's probably because I don't care that much about Windows.

 

Yeah those prices do look too high to me too. You can get a really nice ultrabook for that price already...

IMHO they really need ARM surface coming in around $300-400 (or 500 w/ KB maybe), low-powered x86 tablets around 500-600, the more powerful x86 ones around 700-800 and ultrabooks 800+. But maybe I'm living in dream-land