(12-29-2014, 10:28 PM)epixoip Wrote: Hard drive and RAM can both be a bottleneck, yes.
You also have to take into consideration startup & shutdown time, there is overhead there where you are not doing any cracking.
I had never really considered this before, but this might be a scenario where the operating system actually makes a difference. I suspect that the Linux kernel has better CPU scheduling and NUMA-aware memory/task placement than the Windows kernel does. The preemption model also would likely play a big role in desktop systems, where the system is constantly being interrupted to respond to events. This might be a fun experiment to try.
Ah, funny you should mention that. I actually have Ubuntu on a USB stick lying around somewhere in which I was going to test your analogy on, but I forgot too haha. I'll give it a try right away, maybe install it for a duel boot while I'm at it.
Btw, my hard drive read speed is 65MB/s. Also I have 8GB of ram.