Multi-core processors

Hardware keeps developing very quickly, and Moore's law which states that the number of transistors in a processor will double every two years is still valid. The speed of operation though has hit a kind of ceiling and 3GHz processors has been fast for about 6 years now. The method of adding more punch to a processor has been with multi processors, and hyperthreading. The problem is that software has not always kept up.

With a lot of data recovery, many processes are sequential. ie read the problem disk, analyse the data, and then write the data somewhere. With multiple processors, probably the best we can manage is 3 parallel tasks. At each end is a bottle neck of a disk drive. The fastest way to read a disk drive is as a sequential stream. If you try and recover from two parts of a disk at the same time, then the drive will spend a lot of time 'thrashing', just moving the head to the new area, and then back to the original area. Overall, the process will be slower. Multiple processors may assist and enable two recoveries at the same time on the PC, but there are always dangers that the USB interface or similar may then end up saturated.

Very few recovery processes naturally make use of parallel processing so normally on a nice 8 core processor, 7 cores remain rather sleepy. CnW are looking at ways to wake a few of the cores up to help with the ever increasing size of disks, but ultimately, the big bottleneck is the speed of reading a disk. eSATA and USB-3 are all helpful parts of the equation, but at the moment, USB-2 just churns along.