IDE Hard Drive

I saw an article yesterday indicating that Seagate would be dropping support for the IDE interface on its Harddrives this year. The IDE or ATA interface was in common usage until Serial ATA [SATA] came out in 2004. Once SATA was released the original ATA bus started to be called Parallel ATA [PATA] because it used a parallel bus while SATA was a serial interface.
Motherboards have been shipping with headers for either interface from 2004 on to support legacy drives. However as more companies continue to stop supporting the older [slower] PATA bus these interfaces may be dropped to save money.

SATA is an interface used between a Mother Board and an internal drive bay. A variant of SATA called eSATA may be used from the Motherboard to a Hard Disk Drive [HDD] external to the PC Case.

New Site Map

I posted a new site map out to Google pages; interfacebus_sitemap. I orphaned the older page, instead of up-dating it because of the file size. Normally while coping the code either the browser or the up-load crashes. So the html file was up-loaded.

The site map was generated from running Xenu, which is the program used to check links on the site. It lists all pages on the site and all pages that are linked from each page ~ so there is a lot of duplication. Many of the redundant pages have been removed. Over the next week the page will continue to be reduced. The current file size is 496k bytes

This sitemap differs from the XML site map used by the search engines.

Page Impressions by Section

Here is a break down of web site page impressions by section. I use Google Channels to divide the site into its major sections. Most of the channels are self defining. What isn't clear are how many pages make up any one group of pages. The number of pages are an estimate, but the page impressions are what was recorded.
A previous blog posting defines many of the major sections. This also sort of tracks what each section earns, except the Homepage which does not really earn that much, although it gets a great many hits. With the Home page, most people just click on one of the major page links to move to their topic.
These numbers cover Jan1 to July 20 2007.

Buses: 300 pages; 1,145,015 page impressions (Bus descriptions)
Hardware: 300 pages; 734,509 page impressions (Hardware manufacturers)
Website: 100 pages; 362,200 page impressions (Engineering Design)
Homepage: 2 pages; 107,013 page impressions (index.html)
Dictionary: 100 pages; 52,886 page impressions
Orphan: 20 pages; 49,717 page impressions (pages no longer link in)
Software: 12 pages; 16,728 page impressions
Manufacturers: 50 pages; 14,053 page impressions (Alphabetic company list)
Translated: 12 pages; 12,716 page impressions (non-English)
How to Chassis: 20 pages; 7,249 page impressions (Chassis design)
Blog: 250 pages; 5,431 page impressions (this blog)
Memory Obsolete: 6 pages; 4,846 page impressions
Google Page Creater: 20 pages; 3,646 page impressions
Search: 1 page; 2,862 page impressions
How to Adsense: 25 pages; 1,690 page impressions
Bad Address: 20 pages; 166 page impressions (mis-spelled page addresses)
Total page impressions: 2,521,035 page impressions

Site Organization

interfacebus.com is set up like a tree. The main site pages are displayed at the bottom of this page and are some what self explanatory. The main section is divided into a number of sub-sections. Clicking the main icon will display the next section in greater detail. The largest sections are; 1. Components, 2. Buses, 3. Reference. The Reference section contains many pages because of the large Dictionary, Glossaries, and Acronyms sections. There are a great many interface buses for both consumer and industrial computers. The Buses section contains both obsolete and cutting edge bus descriptions. The same for Component manufacturers, however this section is mostly links to OEM companies. The Equipment section is also mostly links to OEM manufacturers.
Distributors: A listing of companies that sell parts and equipment, but are not manufacturers
Components: A list of companies that manufacture piece parts, IC's, Connectors, LED's .....
Equipment: A list of companies that manufacture assemblies; Chassis, Computers, Backplanes ..
Software: A list of companies that produce either consumer or industrial software packages
Standards: List of Standards Organizations, On-line Publications, and Book stores
Buses: Descriptions of all types of computer interface buses w/ interface IC's & Connector manufacturers
Design: Back-ground info on component size, Temperature ratings, Derating and so on
Reference: Every thing else; AWG size, Jobs, PWB info, VHDL, Dictionaries, Acronyms

New sub-sections are added all the time, as are new links. Dead links are removed as their found. Use the search link located on most pages to find a particular page. Google is showing 1,220 pages in its listing.

Blog Hits

Why does interfacebus.com do so well, but not the Blog? This blog only receives about 1000 hits a month. I'm ok with that because I use it to promote the web site, but unsure why the hits do not increase. Maybe just the topics? This is a graph of the last year and a half, with the 'Y' axis showing the number of hits. The high points are when the blog is promoted or when a topic appears to be interesting.

The blog does make an income, but it isn't much ~ with only 20 to 50 page impressions a day

Slow week

Normally US holidays produce a slow down in hits to the site. This week is no exception, with only 50% of incoming hits originating from the US.
America = 15,753
Europe = 8,954
Asia = 6,869
Oceania = 4,751
Africa = 2,184
It's expected, but discomforting. Instead of 8,000 hits a day I only saw 6,000 hits a day this week. However that's still better than a normal weekend. Earnings were down as well, with only 56,000 page impressions.

Google Adsense Earnings

So I was out looking at Google's Terms and Conditions, and I see this;

7. ......"However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program."....

Any way interfacebus.com is about to hit the $100,000 mark in earnings from running the Google Adsense program. I've been using the program for about a year and a half, and the amount the site generates is different every month. I should hit $100,000 by the middle of next month or the end of this month depending on how things go.

Keeping the site on-line, getting a decent amount of hits [FAQ] and so on all come into play.

I also started to run the LinkShare affiliate program for the last 2 months, but have not seen any income yet. However, those banners are only on a few dozen pages ~ with about 6000 page impressions so far. Before using Adsense the site made money by running banners from a number of different engineering companies.

Any how a few months ago I started a small section of pages to describe how to start a site and make money running ads ~  Just some hints I've learned while running this site ~ may give a jump start to a new site, or help optimise an on-going web site.

Hits to www.interfacebus.com double about every year to year and 1/2. I expect 1,600,000 unique hits this year with 3,700,000 page views [impressions]

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