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get perpendicular perhaps?
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_h ead/pr/
attacking flash for being useless is like attacking tv for being useless. 90%or so, of the time you are right, but to someone else it's quite important.

I think soap operas are not worth the tape they are recorded on, some people can't live without them. personally I feel most websites would benefit by having little to no advanced formatting, much less flash as, for the most part, I am looking for the information in the page rather than the joy of lookng at it. and I definitely agree that flash should not be used as a place where information should be searchable or bookmarkable.

That said, for those who wish to make pretty moving pictures for their website, flash makes it very easy to create. bearing in mind that the flash is there to attract a different sort of person than you. By all means, avoid that site, or advertiser. there is a flash ad on this site that has a couple of horn blasts, and If I ever meet the marketing manager who thought that was a good idea, I will blast an airhorn in their ear.)

dhtml and css, though possibly more proper, are not easy by comparison, if they were, something like google maps would have arrived sooner.

as for another counter example, I was recently introduced to someone from ben and jerry's, who created thishttp://www.benandjerrys.com/fun_stuff/cow_to_c one/. Please try to bear in mind the audience it was intended for. this leans towards the idea that the web is leaning towards ending up to be a replacement for tv, or 'surfing from the couch' as I've recently heard it put.

we who tend to treat the web like an encyclopaedia will rue this, but we are a regrettably small minority. tv has annoying commercials, now movies do, and so will follow, or lead, the web.

one can only hope that there are more instances of things that are really good, (like school house rock) than really bad.

Get Perpendicular needs to be a link, I tell ya!

the only reason you created this dance floor is that you can dance this mega hit in the proper environment. Now send us the real video please.

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Here's a direct link to the SWF for archival purposes.

Thank goodness they've come up with a way to make HDs store more data!

SWF File

sorry, here's a working link:
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/images/pr%2 0images/Get_Perpendicular.swf

I just had to get this crap on my hard disk. Here's the direct download link: Get_Perpendicular.swf. A cool feature about flash movies is that they scale to the screen resolution, so you can watch it full screen. (The original web page specifies an absolute size.)

Then download Feature Tool from Hitachi to turn it off http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

http://www.hitachigst.com/ Hitachi GST (Global Storage Technolgies, the former IBM Hard Drive division) sell the "Endurastar" line of automotive-grade-ruggedized 2.5" HDDs. They're not cheap, but they would fit the bill nicely. Assuming you know how to upgrade a Mac Mini's HDD, that is.

the maxtor diamond max is loud as fuck until you download hitachis (?????) feature tool. link http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Ohhh... so it's kind of like Linux?

No, cause Linux has driver support

The hard drives in the ThinkPad have for the last year been manufactured by another department IBM sold off, now called Hitachi Global Storage Technologies http://www.hitachigst.com/. These are and will continue to be developed independently from anything Lenovo does, and it's more than likely that Lenovo will continue using these hard drives. So the Lenovo ThinkPads should support about the same falling distances as the ones by IBM.

You missed their Endurastar line:

J4K20 model is built to operate in temperature ranges of up to -20C to +85C
link to product specs

So it should be easy to get a system to work in all but the harshest of environments. Since it's rare that the temp would fall below -20C in NY and even rarer that the temp immedietly around the drive would get that cold considering the heat the rest of the PC would give off I don't think it would be all that risky. Besides if you want to warm it up just run SETI@Home =)

As other posters have mentioned, software raid is fine for RAID 0, 1, 0+1. As you get to RAID 3,RAID 5, and RAID 6, however, your processing requirements go up quite a bit.

A SATA RAID 5 card with hardware XOR engine and a DIMM slot for cache might be a cost-effective option for you. (Goes for ~$180 on Pricewatch, or ~$240 on Dealtime)

Oh, and I would have goine with HGST, Western Digital, or Seagate for your drives... but I suppose hardware failure is what RAID 5 is for :)

Hitachi took over IBM's Desktop hard drive business.

And I believe IBM actually had 2 lines that had issues (The 75 GXP and, to a lesser extent, the 60 GXP).

I had 2 30 GB 75 GXP drives, I think I ended up going through 3 RMAs. Eventually, IBM replaced one with a 60 GB 120GXP (I believe it was the 120 GXP) with an 8mb cache (original drives only had 2mb cache). While the RMAs were a hassle, IBM did a pretty good job of taking care of me.

Open source can change some of those things, but as far as hardware goes you still need someone willing to put up considerable amounts of money for manufacturing.

Let me provide some suggestions. I work with F/OSS development for network security and wireless applications, and have spent a few years working with low-cost embedded systems that support Linux. With a Linux kernel and OS in a small box, there's not much you can't do per amateur/wireless development.

My current favorite foundation is:

o RouterBoard from Mikrotik of Latvia. Pentium 233/266 performance, very low cost ($300ish), dual PCMCIA slots, dual Ethernet (in one of the two models), microPCI slot (wonderful!), and compactflash slot. Hardware watchdog and other goodies built in are things normally found on much more expensive embedded system boards.

o IBM/Hitachi Microdrive: My base development systems runs with a 1 GB Microdrive with Debian on it, though I've got a 4 GB setup with Gentoo and use the 370 MB version for production loads. Routerboard has a Debian developers kit available for download on the site, including watchdog control. Avoid compactflash/CF (Microdrive fits the CF profile but is an actual spinning device) unless you're certain you're going to have minimal writes over time, as they will eventually cease to write and become somewhat worthless (in my experience, low-write use lasts about one year).

o Debian or Gentoo for development environment: there are some embedded distributions out there but they're intended for when you're ready to reduce to your final low-profile image. Both these distros give you a good amount of control over what is going into your system. Embedded Gentoo will be nice eventually (with cross-compile support) but isn't there yet.

o Python: Not to start any language wars (or distro wars per above), but Python is a great place for amateur developers to work in. Frameworks like Twisted allow you to focus on your code and build upon the networking smarts of others. I haven't tried yet, but I keep eyeballing Shtoom for an amateur project as well.

*scoove*

Another ridiculous project posted on /. Is CowboyNeal on vacation? Seriously though, it would have been much more elegant to come up with a head unit that has a hot-swappable 250 Gb (or larger) drive that pops in like a cd would.

And here's the link to hitachi's press release on March 2004.

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/hgst/index.j sp?epi-content=GENERIC&folderPath=%252Fhgst%252Fab outus%252Fpress%252Finternal_news%252F&docName=200 40310.html&beanID=736703123&viewID=content

Hitachi has had 400GB drives (SATA) for a few months now link
It looks like the only thing unique here is the "highest areal density", meaning (I assume) that Hitachi is using a four platter system, where Seagate's only has three.

Also, I wonder what problems might arise from 16MB caches on normal desktop machines. One of the issues I seem to recall with larger cache drives is the risk of filesystem corruption. If power is lost while data is sitting in cache, waiting for a write, then you could potentially royally screw up your file or filesystem. Hence, the only 16MB cache drives I've seen are notebook drives (almost always gonna have a battery) and SCSI drives (likely in a server or workstation, which will most likely have a UPS). Before you go countering that these aren't meant for desktop use, keep in mind that DV video, digital photgraphy, and music are all things that home users like the idea of, and they are also the things much more likely to consume massive amounts of storage capacity.

Interesting. Hitachi seems to officially support Windows (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/mddwnld.htm ), but it's not clear if they expect you to be able to run the OS from the Microdrive, or if this package is just for add-on drives.

is Hitachi's 4gb drive solid state?

If it is, they've doubled the previous capacity for them...