Hard Drive Interfaces

I found an interesting graph today showing the up-coming status of different interfaces for either the 2.5" and 3.5" Hard Drive formats. The 3.5 inch Hard Disk Drive format is the preferred server format, while the 2.5 inch size is the preferred PC format.

In the 3.5 inch format:
Fiber Channel [FC] is anticipated to double, or increase from 5 million units to 10 million from this year out to 2010.
SCSI is predicted to drop from 20 million units this year to 15 million units by 2010.
SAS [Serial SCSI] is predicted to drop from 20 million units to 12 million units by 2010.
SATA is anticipated to increase shipments from 35 million units now to 60 million units by 2010.

In the 2.5 inch format:
FC jumps from 35 million units now to 65 million units
SATA jumps from 35 million units now to 65 million units
SAS jumps from 30 million units now to 55 million units

So SCSI, seems to be losing the server market, in either the parallel or serial format, while Serial SCSI [SAS] is increasing in the PC market [reduced cost].
Fiber Channel usage is increasing in both formats.
Serial ATA [SATA] is also increasing in both formats, which makes sense.

What does not make sense is that SAS seems to be declining, SAS uses the same interface as SATA so why the decline? I have to assume that the legacy programs still require the out-dated SCSI interface.

Alexa Ranking

Just posting a chart showing the ranking given by Alexa to interfacebus.com
The ranking is based on who visits the site while using an Alexa Tool bar on their computer.

I really don't know how many engineers are shoppers and really use the tool bar, so the data may be biased against an engineering web site. However, some people will asked~ how are you ranked on Alexa.

File Back-up

I backed-up my web data files last night to a flash drive. I cycle through different flash drives every other week. This last back-up went on a 512MB Memorex Traveldrive flash drive. Had to delete a few older versions to get it to fit, but I have a few other USB flash drives around with different versions on them.

Flash Memory Stick Formats

Web Site off-line

interfacebus.com has been off-line most of the day, and so far half the night. When it was on-line, up-loads were very slow. The last time I put in a trouble ticket was Apr 16 for the same reason. So the site misses a day just about every month. My host is at http://www.infinology.com/

It's not so much about the money the site is not making today, or the new visitors that can't find the site. I've blocked off so time to work on it, but I can't because I can't view the on-line pages. On-line viewing insures the pages that are up-loaded are the ones that should be ~ checking.

Link Checking

I ran Xenu on interfacebus.com today. Xenu is a spider that goes out and checks all the links on a page or web site. I run Xenu about once a month against the web site. It's a free program to down load. The main stats returned are:
ok 5377 URLs 98.97%
user skip 1 URLs 0.02%
no info to return 1 URLs 0.02%
no connection 18 URLs 0.33%
forbidden request 8 URLs 0.15%
temporarily overloaded 1 URLs 0.02%
no such host 10 URLs 0.18%
timeout 9 URLs 0.17%
not found 5 URLs 0.09%
the resource is no longer available 1 URLs 0.02%
auth required 1 URLs 0.02%
server error 1 URLs 0.02%
Total 5433 URLs 100.00%

I checked all the ones returned as Time-out, No-connect and so on and came up with 5 dead links. There were 4 other dead pages, but Google cache showed them good just a few days earlier. So 5 dead links out of 5433 total links ~ not so bad. However those 5 bad links were listed on 20 different internal pages, so it toke a few hours to run the program and fix the errors.

Xenu checks local page-to-page links as well, so it's a great program for any webmaster.

Languages

Here is yet another pic which shows what languages are used when www.interfacebus.com is accessed. The chart shows the first 10 languages, but there are another 157 in total. The remaining 147 countries would be part of the 8.24% of the chart. 75% of incoming hits are from the US, while another 2.81% are from other English speaking countries.
The hits are from Jan 1 to May 24 2007

Web Site Entry Page

I was looking at one of the statistics for Entry pages to interfacebus and noticed something strange. A number of pages that show obsolete interfaces still rank high for numbers of people hitting those pages as they enter the web site. The data is for May:
IDE Bus = 3217 [5th highest], replaced by SATA
AGP = 1064 [20th], replaced by PCIe
PC Parallel Port = 897 [30th], replaced by USB
Floppy Drive = 721, replaced by Flash drives

RS232 is another, which has been removed from PCs altogether.

This is just a few, there are 1150 entry pages in the list

Web Broswer

Staying with the last post, here is a listing of web browsers that are hitting interfacebus.com, from Jan 1 to May 10 2007. Most people use some version of IE for 70% of the hits. However 24% use Firefox which seems to be about the standard percentage for the last few years. I guess Firefox stooped gaining ground. Mozilla and Netscape are really just older versions of the Firefox engine. I don't recall what Safari is. Opera has been around for a while, and went completely free about two years ago.....

Software Operating Systems

I figured I would post a few charts showing what type of systems are being used to access interfacebus.com. The graphic attached to this posting depicts what type of operating system people use to access the web site. Windows tops the list at 95%, followed by Linux at 2%. I assume that most people running Unix are in a Windows Terminal, which would explain why SunOS and Unix don't really register in the chart. The chart covers Jan 1 to May 10 2007

Web Site Update Rate

I started adding a Google search bar to more pages on the web site and I noticed that by picking the pages that have not been updated in a while, just happened to be back in 11/11/06. Six months to cycle over pages in the web site. But with 1346 pages on the web site it's understandable. Of course some of these pages just contain pinouts or descriptions of older interface buses ~ facts that don't change. On the reverse, some pages on the site get updated time and again, as I add more data or correct the listings.

Any how, the search bar may help new visitors navigate the site. The attached pic shows how people find interfacebus.com, with 6% coming in as returning visitors. The numbers on the pie chart represent Apr 10 to May 10 2007. For a total of 200,914 visits over the last month.

Google Sitemaps

I ran Gsitemap again today and again it only reported about 938 pages. So instead of spending hours trying to figure out which pages were missing I went ahead a down loaded a new program. This new one is called GSiteCrawler. It seemed to work really good, as it found 1346 pages out there which is more than the 1206 pages I link to. GSiteCrawler did show a pop-up that it would asked Google what it showed for my site, so I assume it pulled in some orphaned pages and page redirects I have posted. The page redirects handle misspelled page addresses I see coming in from any number of forums.

Any way I will not know for sure if it worked right for a few hours or days. I also fixed a bug in my robots.txt file to correcly show the location of my sitemap to other search engines.

Wow, Google has already started reading the sitemap file, and agrees that there are 1346 submitted URLs ~ that's a good thing.

GSiteCrawler also produced a normal HTML siremap I could list on my web site, but the page address are not in alphabetic order ~ Maybe in the order they were spidered?

Hybrid Hard Disk Drive

Hybrid Hard Disk Drives are about the hit the market. Hybrid Hard Drives or HHD use either 125M Bytes or 256M Bytes of Flash memory as a cache to speed data thru-put. HHD devices are also set up to spin down the platter to save power as the data is only retrieved from the Flash memory.

Normally Hard Disk Drives only have a maximum of 16M Bytes of cache memory, so HHD come with at least 7 times more memory.

I don't list any manufacturers for Hybrid Hard Drives yet, but I'll start adding them as they come to market. I would assume that HHD devices will have an SATA interface.

DDR3 DIMM Memory

DDR 3 memory should be showing up soon in stores. DDR III is the third generation in the Double Data Rate series. DDR3 runs faster than DDR2 which tops out at 800Mbps. DDR3 will double that transfer rate and consume less power because it operates with 1.5 volts instead of 1.8 volts.

DDR4 is not due out until 2011, while DDR2 arrived in 2004. I've seen that the AM2 processor socket from AMD does not support the DDR3 memory. Also that the next new processor from AMD, called AM3 will not be released until 2008. However it would appear the an AM3 processor will work in an AM2 socket-ed Mother boards. Here are a few links:

Memory Modules [main page]
DDR3 Description
DDR2 Description
DDR1 Description
FB-DIMM
SSTL Signaling
DIMM Socket Manufacturers

Getting Listed on Google

There are a number of ways to get litsed on the Google search results:
1. If you blog, use Google Blogger ~ you will show up in a blog search and maybe a web search, but that depends on the key words.
2. Use Google Page Creator, for your web site. That's a Google site, so you will show up in a Google listing
3. Use the Google add a link to insert your link to the Google data base. Add your link to dmoz regardless.
4. Hit the Suggest a link out in dmoz.
5. Use Google Site Maps to get your site listed

Google Analytics Report

One of the reports that Google Analytics provides is a graphic of a page and the percentage of what link is clicked on. So for people reaching the index page of interfacebus.com these are the odds that one of the 8 main links are visited

Part Distrubutors = 1.99%
Components = 12.61%
Equipment = 3.85%
Software = 2.42%
Standards = 8.08%
Buses = 12.06%
Design = 4.90%
Reference = 4.59%

Pushing into the Components page, I find the follow click-thru's;
Semiconductor = 26.34%
Passive = 11.29%
Mechanical = 10.0%
Alphabetic Listing = 4.37%

Pushing into the Semiconductors page [three levels deep], I list the top 5 clicks;
Memory = 7.35%
Specialized IC's = 6.95%
Programmable Logic = 5.92%
Standard Logic = 5.05%
MicroProcessor = 5.04%
FETs [General] = 4.32%

Pushing into the Memory page [four levels deep];
Flash Memory = 8.46% [I just up-dated that page]

Checking my server stats:
Memory = 790 viewed pages for April
Specialized Logic = 153 viewed pages for April
Programmable Logic = 227 viewed pages for April
Standard Logic = 263 viewed pages for April

So the drill down from index to a specific page, does not tell how often a page is visited. I could spend days looking at these reports. This is one example of people finding my index page and clicking the links to get to the page they wanted, one example. I have 1200 pages, or 1200 different ways for a person to navigate the web site. Most visits start at some page other than the index page.

Site Traffic

Its been a while since I've posted the graphic showing the site traffic to interfacebus.com
The graph shows Unique Visitors to the site. A separate person showing up, and not re-counted if they come back.
Other stats; 'Number of Visits' = 1.32 visits/visitor, 1.89 pages/visit, 14.71 Hits/Visit

The chart covers Jan. 2001 to March 2007 with the highest point being 149,184 Visits in March. The large dip in 2005 occurred when I changed the site counter to my server.

More site data my be found on the FAQ page. So the site is still growing, and while being at a Page Rank of 5 for the last 8 months [after years with a PR of 6].

Total page impression for the year: 1,152,577.

AMD Pricing

The price for AMD processors are at an all time low. I saw an article the other day indicating that AMD had reduced your prices around 40%. So I got around to checking.

I pasted their list of dual core X2 processors as of today. I omitted the FX series [high end gaming PCs] and non-dual core [budget PC] series to keep the graphic from becoming to large. I assume these prices are in lots of 1000, and I don't think the PC makers are passing on the price yet. I would think they have a inventory to draw down first.

I think it's almost time to get a new PC, with a Dual-Core AMD processor..

Google Crawl rate

Here is a graphic for how Googlebot crawls the web site for the first 4 months of the year, interfacebus.com at an average of 325 pages a day, and a maximum of 723 pages crawled in one day. The site has around 1200 total pages. Click on the image to view a larger picture. The left axis shows the number of pages crawled per day. The top display shows the first three months of 2007. There are at least 48 other spiders [robots] that visit my web site.

This next graphic shows Apr to July of 2007, which was added 8/3/07



These pictures are from Google Site Maps

Web Stats

88% of the incoming hits [to interfacebus.com] from search engines are from Google. Yahoo is the next highest at 4.4%.

79% of the visitors are using Windows XP.
48% of the visitors are using MSIE 6.0.
28 different Robots hit the site just last night. The four using the largest amount of bandwidth for the month are; Inktomi Slurp, Google Adsense, MSNBot, and Googlebot. Total bandwidth consumed by the four spiders ~ 202.98MB
The top eight referring sites are all from wikipedia.
Total number of visits so far 86,286 with 162,817 page views using a bandwidth of 5.38GB

Analytics

Just a few details for site vists for the last seven days;
77.75% New Visitor, 22.25% Returning Visitor
By source;
79.28% Google, 6.10% direct, 3.77% Yahoo, 2.63% from MSN.

For the year, the numbers are all about the same ~ with in a 1/2 %.

For the year interfacebus.com had 642,023 visits, and 1,349,995 page views.

The attached pic shows the location most of the people come from....