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Balloons count for 19% of Helium consumption each year. A standard tank of Helium fills about 50 balloons for a party. According to the PDF here a single tank fills 10,000 drives. Seems minimal.

Really? Why do people always feel the need to make worthless, content-free drive-by comments on things they don't understand?

https://www.hgst.com/sites/def... [hgst.com]

Still gonna leak?

Against helium? Really? Why do people always feel the need to make worthless, content-free drive-by comments on things they don't understand?

https://www.hgst.com/sites/def...

Still not new or difficult?

... because it is heavier than air (REALLY heavier than air-- you can float a tinfoil boat on it!) ...

If sulfur hexafluoride is this heavy it could potentially cut short hard disk's life span

Normal hard discs have 'breathing holes' in them, allowing heated gas to escape when the drive gets hot, and letting gas outside in when the drive gets colder

If we fill a room full of sulfur hexafluoride and put a working hard disk inside, sooner or later all the gas inside the disc chamber within the hard disk will be filled by the sulfur hexafluoride gas

The heavier the air the discs inside a hard disk has to spin on, the more friction it encounters, and the more friction it encounters the more drag it gets, the more pressure it puts to the motor which spins up the discs, etc

In fact, HGST (formally hard disk division of Hitachi now owned by Western Digital) is pushing out hard disks that are hermetically sealed with the Helium gas - and they do so for one purpose, to cut down the friction inside the disc chamber

Here is the link to their 'helium filled disc'

http://www.hgst.com/science-of...

Where'd you address that registry has indexing, ini files don't?

Where'd you address that text files (.ini) have added bulk in their structure that std. methods for read/write I-O don't address (including the std. API for ini files)?

Where'd you address that a hdd buffer is a DUMB BUFFER that will flush fast and incurs overheads up from hdd, into dumb hdd buffer, into RAM to work on it (vs. registry is always in RAM from OS bootup onwards)?

Clue: HDD buffers use FIFO, as "dumb buffers" I called them earlier (which you tried to use, failing there too "The Transport layer also manages the FIFO or buffer memory for controlling data flow" http://www.hgst.com/tech/techl... )?

You tried to make up for .ini files' shortcomings using hardware there (bad move that, takes more steps, and has to traverse more circuitry busses typically).

Where'd you address that the registry is better for multiuser application setups (per MS http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

Where'd you address .ini files do NOT handle binary FASTER data (per stackoverflow quote I used earlier), they are slower, more complex to do IO to!

Where'd you address that text files that also lack indexing for read/write too?

Deskstar 7K3000 tech spec page 84:
The Error Recovery Control command can be used to set time limits for read and write error recovery. For
non-queued commands, these timers apply to command completion at the host interface. For queued
commands where in order data delivery is enabled, these timers begin counting when the device begins to
execute the command, not when the command is sent to the device. These timers do not apply to streaming
commands, or to queued commands when out-of-order data delivery is enabled.
These command timers are volatile. The default value is 0 (i.e. disable command time-out).

I have 8 Hitachi HDS723030ALA640, 2 Hitachi HDS723030BLE640 and 4 TOSHIBA DT01ACA300 in my home file server, and they do all support reading/setting error recovery timeout via smartctl -l scterc.
Different to what the spec sheet above says, they seem to all default to 7.0s/7.0s and not disabled/disabled. Suspect that might be the firmware on the LSI9211-8i controllers they're connected to doing that (maybe someone with a bunch of those on a bog standard SATA controller instead of a SAS raid controller can shed some light on that?).

This is the future of discovering man kind's left overs. A piece of plastic with a small microchip containing unreadable gibberish.

Unlikely. Actually what will doom data retention is constant race of storage providers to give us more for less at a cost of quality. Smaller silicon processes, TLC NAND, SMR ( http://www.hgst.com/science-of-storage/emerging-technologies/shingled-magnetic-recording ) all lead to terrible data persistence.

Even worse, a Linux laptop won't shutdown if it becomes too hot - I lost a hard-drive this way. Normally, the laptop was used with the screen up, so there weren't any heat problems, but one time the screen was folded down for 36+ hours. Some time during this time, there was a grinding noise and the hard drive packed in.

According to a typical hard drive specification

Service life of the drive is approximately 5 years or 20,000 power on hours, which comes first, under the following
assumptions:
Less than 333 power on hours per month.
Seeking/Writing/Reading operation is less than 20% of power on hours.

American companies are active in the wind energy arena. Consider General Electric's Windpower business. General Electric has started to take both wind and Solar Power seriously lately, which is typical of the large American companies once these technologies get to a certain stage. The US has a mixed research environment, with much of the basic research happening in Universities under Government funding and guidelines.
This research model may prove to be flawed in the long run, simply because foreign corporations and students have perhaps just as easy access to research produced in US Universities as do US corporations, given that over half the PhD candidate positions in engineering in the US are given to foreign students.
Still, it would be kind of silly to claim that the US doesn't make significant contributions to global research, simply because the model in the US has most of the basic research occurring in University rather than corporate labs. The problem for the US is that America has to sell nearly half a trillion dollars of corporate assets per year to foreign nations to pay for its trade deficit, resulting in the loss of fundamental research capacities like IBM's former world class storage systems research labs in Silicon Valley, which sold for a mere $2 billion. Sell, oh, two hundred of those each year and it really puts a crimp in your long term plans.
Still, there's no chance the US will address this problem because to speak of it is politically incorrect, so in the future countries which care about their trade balance will be the wealthy ones who can support research.

The specs say that the MTBF is 1 in 10E14. I suspect that the reason why it suggests low I/O applications is that the amount of data stored is huge per disk, and if you need to shift 400GB regularly, a RAID of smaller drives would work better.

Here you can see that the drive is rated for 300,000 head load/unload cycles. Here you can pick out the OEM design specs (it's 156 pages)and read that it's rated for 140 operating hours a month. So I'd use it in my MP3 player and camera, but I'm not sure I'd want one in a PC yet.

Here you can see that the drive is rated for 300,000 head load/unload cycles. Here you can pick out the OEM design specs (it's 156 pages)and read that it's rated for 140 operating hours a month. So I'd use it in my MP3 player and camera, but I'm not sure I'd want one in a PC yet.

It's a Hitachi Microdrive, i.e., a hard disk in Compactflash form factor. A 4gb flash drive for $250 would be news indeed.

i think the mini-ipod will be a complete flop, too price for too little.

I thought "deja vu"....o well...it would nice to know where I can file for losses I've suffered (9 out of 9 75GXP I own have failed at one point, costing me my data and $ when one of my most important drives dead and I paid to get the data back [they had to replace some chips on the drive]).
Hell one of 'em which I call the deathstar, can cause most computers to not boot (it clicks out of control). My deathstar and it's unaffected as of yet cousin of the same make and model have one other flaw; unlike the other 75GXP's I have, they couldn't be firmware updated with firmware that's suppose to "extend" their lifespans. And I was never able to RMA any of the drives as all my requests were rejected (even though the drives were in warranty at the time).

Wondering if they were the infamous 75GXP deathstars under another label, I looked at the master table of part numbers at Hitachi. (Fortunately for me, they aren't -- the Hitachi 60GB and 80GB retail kits have Deskstar 7K250 drives.)

Wondering if they were the infamous 75GXP deathstars under another label, I looked at the master table of part numbers at Hitachi. (Fortunately for me, they aren't -- the Hitachi 60GB and 80GB retail kits have Deskstar 7K250 drives.)

Having worked on many bad HDs, I keep this list of links to all the manufacturers HD testing programs:

Maxtor/Quantum
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powerma x.htm

IBM/Hitachi
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/index.html

Western Digital
http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools

Fujitsu
http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/download/hard-drives/

As most people have agreed, this is a bad mark on IBM's record. I respect them for their pro-Linux attitude (despite the fact it may partially be due to retaliation on MS) and think they have contributed a lot to the field, this is why it's so unfortunate.

Thankfully this problem doesn't effect me as I use almost all SCSI devices, however I have noticed my IBM SCSI drive hasn't quite been up to par recently. And I had to RMA it already once... hmmm. I think I'm sticking with Seagate from now on, I love my ST336607LW. :)

The story is about the 75GXP series of harddisks, which includes 15GB, 20GB, 30GB, 45GB, 60GB and 75GB disks. See here for a list of models.

I bought a retail 60GB GXP back in 2000 or 2001 (forget which year). I understand it's basically the same drive as the 75GXP, but with one fewer platter. It tells linux that it is called "IBM-DLTA-307060".

Well, I had a look at a page on Hitachi's web site, and -- no shit -- my main hard drive is a 75GXP. It is simply the 60GB model of the 75GXP.

So anyway, you can chalk me up as a 75GXP success story. No complaints here.

Powerbooks are now shipping with a 5400 rpm drive option availbale (as opposed to the painfully slow 4500 rpm drives standard). Hitachi has begun shipping a 7200 rpm (standard desktop rpm) drive for notebooks. My new PowerBook is being ordered, but the first thing I'm doing with it is putting in a new 7200 rpm drive to remove this limitation. slow drives have hampered Powerbooks for a long time, but the 5400 option and the ability to put in a 7200 rpm drive shuold make things "much better now". I'm looking forward to drooling after the disaster that was the TiBooks is finally over.

The sizes are just right for microdrives

You can already get something like that. Hitachi sells Microdrives which can be used in some cameras. Check the compatability matrix for drives and cameras.

If any of you were wondering about "The 1-inch HDD developed by the US affiliate of Hitachi Ltd," that is the same as (what was) the IBM MicroDrive. IBM's hard drive section was purchased by Hitachi.

Also, it says that the Hitachi 1" hard drive was "released in November," but I know that the IBM MicroDrives have been around a lot longer than that. Maybe it's just that they shrunk a little and grew in capacity.

Actually, I think that a large screen (12-15 inch) PDA or Pocket PC would meet most needs that people have for tablet PC's. The ability to take notes and wireless access being the most important in my opinion.
The PDA's edge would be the ease of use and the instant on and off. Just add a keyboard and use the Corice Hard Drive or a MicroDrive for storage needs.
A device like this (reguardless of who makes it) would make a good laptop replacement of business people on the go, students or anybody else that need more than a PDA but less than a laptop.

Good point. Don't see why not .. somehow ... eventually, considering that micro-drives are available for use with electronic equipment, notably digital cameras. It looks at though 1 GB is available now, with 4 GB perhaps this fall.

I routinely upgrade drives in my various notebooks, but I've discovered a drive in an external case can be much faster than swapping out the internal drive. To get maximum benefit out of the newer 7200rpm drives, one needs to use Mode 5, right? Do any current notebooks do that?

Hitachi have piles of info available on their drives here, and a discussion of 7200rpm drives here. The IBM legacy shines through.

I routinely upgrade drives in my various notebooks, but I've discovered a drive in an external case can be much faster than swapping out the internal drive. To get maximum benefit out of the newer 7200rpm drives, one needs to use Mode 5, right? Do any current notebooks do that?

Hitachi have piles of info available on their drives here, and a discussion of 7200rpm drives here. The IBM legacy shines through.

How about a RAID of IBM/Hitachi Microdrives? They're IDE compatible with the right cabling, use less power than any other rotating storage, and are super shockproof. Of course, given their size, they weigh very little relative to other rotating solutions.

The only problem I can see is that they're only good for 1GB each right now, but 4GB is coming soon.

Of course, you'll need some kind of off the shelf motherboard and some IDE controllers - but you can GLUE that together to avoid stuff shaking out of slots. But I guess you'd have the same issues with any RAID solution.

Jonathan

A preceeding article mentions the 2.4 Gb Magicstor already in production with 3.6 Gb on target this year and 4.7 next year. The same article predicts that 0.7 inches will be the next big standard if some barriers are passed.

If Cornice or some other company bought Ritek's Microstor is unkown to me (it seems to have been related to dataplay developers too) but it's clear that there is a shortage of good brand names for this product. The Press release for Magicstor was hilarious, promptly stating that the company GS Microdrive released a harddrive called Magicstore, showing a picture of the HD with MICRODRIVE written all over it and stating that this is the company's name not the brand name since Microdrive is a trademark of IBM (Hitatchi Storage) ((Sorry lost the couldn't find the pressrelease again on nikkeibp.com))

Problem: I don't build new machines with floppy drives anymore.

Of the 4 programs I listed, 2 of them (SeaTools and PowerMax) use a proprietary disk creation program (Ontrack's Diskette Maker), so you're SOL for them.

The third program, Western Digital's DLG, comes (if you just download the diagnostics module) as just a .zip file containing the actual program (a single .exe). You should be able to add that to the CD portion of any standard DOS boot CD. (Disclaimer: I've used that guy's tools to make Win2K boot CDs, but haven't tried his DOS images.)

The fourth program is the easiest, however. IBM/Hitachi's DFT, comes in 2 flavors. The 'Windows' package uses an Install-shield based diskette maker program, so you could theoretically grab all the files from the temp directories it unpacks them too. Even easier, though, is to just download the 'Linux' package, which is an actual 1.44MB boot disk image, suitable for direct use with your favorite burning software (see: mkisofs -b, or Nero's "CD-ROM (Boot)" type.).

HTH.

Maxtor's Powermax
Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools (You only need the Diagnostics module. There's also a Windows version farther down.)
Hitachi GS (Including IBM drives) Drive Fitness Test (Also check out SMART Defender, farther down, for a lightweight windows systray icon to monitor all your drive's SMART status.)
Seagate's SeaTools (Or try a direct link to the file to avoid registration.)

If you've got an off-brand drive, you can check the manufacturer website to see if they have one, or just try one of the above, I believe all of them can run at least basic dagnostics on any drive.

I was looking for some support tools for my Deskstar yesterday, and ran acrossed this tool for OEM's from Hitachi.

Hitachi DDD-SI

Looking at the User's guide, it looks like you could use it's basic features on non IBM/Hitachi drives. You also might want to check out the other manufacturers sites and see if they've got something similiar.

For a long time, live recording has been consigned mostly to the realm of DAT recorders, Minidisc recorders, or laptop computers. On one hand you have subpar sound quality, on the other you have a bulky rig with a big 'steal me' sign attached.

Subpar sound quality? The DATs that I've worked with have better resolution than CDs (48 KHz vs 44.1 KHz sampling), minidiscs are technically CD quality, and laptop computers can be equally sensitive given the right equipment. Given what I've heard of PDA sound, there's nothing subpar about the existing recording mediums. Also, it's hard to claim that a minidisc is "a bulky rig".

By using a hardware card that allows recording via S/PDIF onto Compact Flash, you will be able to use your iPaq or Zaurus alongside a decent A/D converter to portably get field recordings at up to 24bit/192kHz.

So to record in this way, I must buy a "decent" A/D converter and a bunch of Compact Flash. And, unless they are using some compression which will lower the sound quality, this thing will suck up more MB-per-minute of audio than a CD. Good thing Hitchai (formerly IBM) makes their MicroDrive, and I have a money tree in my yard.

So, bottom line as I see it? An interesting project, but one which uses expensive hardware and media that makes it prohibitively expensive. So if you want professional digital recording, get a professional digital recorder. If you want ad-hoc "pro" sound recording from a PDA, now you've got an option.

Yep, but the mini-cds have one other distinct advantage over CompactFlash. Most, if not all computers today have some sort of CD Drive (or DVD, or CD Burner, or DVD Burner) that are compatible with mini-cds.

The only type of drive I can imagine that is probably incompatible with it could be the drives on some apple machines (though, no currently shipping models, I think)... the old iMac comes to mind, with those car stereo style, tray-less cd-drives. In theory loading a mini-cd into one of those should be possible (correct me if I'm wrong with this assumption), but I'm not too sure about doing it consistently (I'd have to see it to believe it I guess, a bad picture comes to mind, for some reason, of the mini-cd playing pin-ball inside your computer if improperly positioned while loaded...).

Other than that, most modern drives are compatible with the media. Consequently, most computers would support updates / boot disks / etc. from mini-cds regardless of the sized drive and can burn them from any modern CD Burner...

I like the compactflash idea, though! Also, an even more expensive option is the (formerly IBM Storage) Microdrive. Of course, these all, as you've pointed out, can't currently touch CD's in any size on price point... and hey, those mini-cd's can hold 185 MB!

Is the IBM MicroDrive still around?

Hitachi Microdrive Website

What's more they have recently announced a 4GB model due by the end of the year. Which would be ideal for use in HD based camcorders.

Ferroelectric density: 1.5Tb/in^2
8 bits to a byte -> 187.5GB/in^2

Hitachi's (formerly IBM's) 180GXP line packs 60GB to a platter. According to their data sheet, that is 45.5Gb/in^2. Convert to GB, and we have ~5.69GB/in^2.

When common HD technology reaches Ferroelectric technology, we'll have about 6TB in a top-of-the-line IDE drive.