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They do exist, you know

Just as with 7200 rpm drives, it's just a question of time before it migrates down the foodchain, and ends up in ATA drives.

At the bottom of this page though it says that the drives come with a 3 year Warranty and 1 million hours MTTF.

State of the art is ATA/ATAPI-6 a.k.a. "Big Drive". It supports 48-bit addressing. That's 48-bit sector addressing, so the maximum size of a disk is 144 Petabytes. This standard also supports transferring 32MB of data in a single I/O. This is at least partly implemented in ATA-133 controllers.

After hitting limits at every factor of 4 (32MB, 128MB, 512MB, 2GB, 8GB, 32GB and most recently 128GB), they've finally got it right.

Take a look here for more details.

I've been launching Atlas V's for a while now. Typically at walls or out the window.

Hard drive testing programs:
IBM -- Drive Fitness Test
Maxtor -- Powermax
Western Digital -- Data Lifeguard Tools Utilities: DLGDIAG
Seagate -- SeaTools
Fujitsu -- Diagnostic Tool
NOTE: Some of these tools may work with all drives, but this (free) collection should cover quite a few drives.

An ATA133 controller isn't what is needed, an IDE controller that can use the 48-bit addressing mode is. Maxtor call it big drive.

My Intel 850 chipset-based motherboard (abit TH7-II) got a BIOS upgrade in March which enabled the big drives to work natively with the on-board ATA100 IDE controller. I've been running one of the Maxtor 160GB drives at full capacity (153GB formatted) for two months.

Details here

ATA133 is totally unnecessary as these are not fast drives, ATA100 is plenty fast enough.

However it only extends IDE to 144 PB - when will they learn?

First of all i'm not complaining about "editor" mistakes... i could care less. But this is a western digital drive not a maxtor one, things like that seem rather silly to let slip through the cracks. And just to be sure I checked maxtor to see if they had anything, but all i could really find (in about 15 seconds worth of time) was a page about > 137 gig drives.

Not Maxtor!

I like Maxtor Products better.

No dead Maxtor drives yet, I have a few Seagates that died and gave up on WD.

What about ATA-133? SATA will support 150MB/s, will draw less power, use smaller cables, be directly connected therefore doing away with the master/slave and C/S problems. Plus it will scale to 300MB/s in a few years. Read all about it here and here and here.

I'm convinced that even if it yielded a 20% increase in performance it wouldn't be worth complicating my install

Unless you're running some really old drives it wouldn't increase your performance at all.

That new 160 GB Maxtor drive only spins at 5400 rpm and has a sustained transfer rate 10-15 MB/s lower than a 7200 rpm drive. Go check out Maxtor's website and look at the product specs in PDF format.

Note, you want the media transfer rates, not the interface transfer rates.

Maxtor's product page

But I wanted good performance for a machine I was converting to a dedicated fileserver for my home office (finally a machine I could leave running Linux all the time, without having to reboot, running Samba, Netatalk and NFS for all my machines). So I decided to try the Atlas 10k III.

The one I ordered was a Quantum, but I guess they got bought out by Maxtor, or something, anyway Quantum is still around but only sells tape drives now.

I read somewhere that the 10k III's were quieter than previous 10,000 RPM drives so I was pretty hopeful.

My first drive didn't work. I tried it at first in my mac on an adaptec 29160, but the 29160 didn't detect it. I thought it wasn't spinning up because I couldn't hear it.

Maxtor sent me an advance RMA (secured by a credit card) and I got the new drive today. I have 30 days to return the broken drive or else they'll charge my card.

The web page above says they are Ultra320 but the drive I have is labeled Ultra160. No matter, really, I don't think one drive can sustain a 320 MB/sec transfer rate - these high transfer rates are most useful for RAIDs.

I was distressed when I put the new drive in my PC on an adaptec 39160, because I couldn't hear it at all! There is another drive in the box, an old 2 GB IDE drive with Windows 2000, and the old drive completely covers up any sound coming out of the 10kIII.

I was really upset until I went into the Adaptec SCSI utility to test and format the drive, which checked out fine.

I'm really impressed. My wife wants me to get these for all our machines.

I'm installing just the bare essentials of Debian potato on it as I write these, and then I'm going to use debian's go-woody script to update it to woody.

Enterprise server admins might be skeptical of running beta software on a fileserver, but I've been running unstable (sid) on my Mac for months with few problems. My only concern is which kernel is the best, I want to run a 2.4 kernel on it and I'm not sure which I should use.

Not all new drives experience this problem...specifically mentioned in the article is the Hydrodynamic Bearings, like are used in my newer Quantum Fireball AS Plus 60.

So, the real culprit is the old Metalic Bearings that are still used in some of these drives...

So, what's the big fuss about? Well, it would be like an automobile manufacturer making a car without airbags today (only without that whole life or death thing)... :)

Feel free to jump in the time machine any time, and speed forward to join the rest of us... Maxtor already did that, with ATA/133.

Other links for further information:

Cnet

SATA and ISCSI

Intel Dev paper

Maxtor Whitepaper

I'm posting this from the best computer I have right now, my home build mini-computer.

I used an Intel D810EMO mainboard. (legacy free).

In a Elan Vital MF-1

And a Maxtor 531dx hard drive.

with a USB Microsoft Natural keyboard and a USB Optical Logitech it is one nice machine. And it even looks good sitting on my desktop.

The Linux support for this hardware is excellent, also BeOS runs beautifully.

IBM's major problem was that, although they were able to scale down the GMR head very easily, they had large stocks of old media that was not certified for use on GMR drives. (Incidentally, most of that media is in an enormous warehouse in Hungary, which is where most of their drives are produced now.) They designed a recertification process that was supposed to allow them to separate the media that would be suitable for the 75GXPs from the media that wasn't suitable, but that process was deeply flawed and this resulted in the high failure rates of their drives.

You may find it a bit odd to be hearing this from a former Maxtor employee. Well, the dirty little secret of storage companies is that reverse engineering is rampant. My colleagues at Maxtor probed, disassembled, and tested the IBM drives; indeed, they might have known what the bug was even before IBM did.

So, the obvious RISK of GMR technology is: do not use platters that are not certified for use with the new heads. Those who disregard this creed are certain to meet with a nasty public relations disaster in due time.

freebsd guy

For my money, it's hard to beat the new ATA RAID cards that are out. Most can be had for less than $100.

Couple that with two or four 80GB drives, for less than $150 each, and you've got yourself a pretty nice array that will keep your data safe against all but the most horrendous problems.

Even with this, you're probably wise to have some offline backup solution to go along with it.

What data would you really want back if your house was swallowed by a hole in the ground? In that situation, do you really need access to your 30GB of MP3 files?

If the anwers is that you really only need access to your Quicken files, then arranging to have those backed up online should be pretty cheap and easy.

Summary: cheap ATA RAID for hardware redundancy, online backup for truly life-critical files.

If you don't want any compression, why not go down to Circuit City and buy a 400-disk CD jukebox for $300?

(Yes, hard drives can fail, but as long as you stick with fairly decent drives and avoid junk, you should be OK...especially for something that more than likely won't be fired up all the time.)

To extend the question, does anyone know any details about USB 2.0 under linux? I've been looking at Maxtor's personal storage products and they look pretty nice.

USB 2.0 ==> 480 Mbit vs 1394 ==> 400 Mbit

The choice seems clear to me. Am I missing something?

Remember the 2Gb barrier? Today we are rapidly approaching the 128Gb barrier.

Actually, we've already passed it. Maxtor has come out with drives that are at least 160GB. Granted, this is currently achieved through a hack/kludge that bypasses ATA spec, and will likely not be a new standard, but people are already coming up with solutions and with large drives.

Firewire is better, but the USB 2.0 devices I've looked at say that they also work on a USB 1.x connection, albeit at a slower speed (obviously). It would appear not be the case that "2.0 devices will not work on 1.x buses". Maxtor, for example, has USB 2.0 products that say they are backwardly compatible with 1.x USB ports.

I would say the only problem is support the 20+ Mac users, but after you get a friendly demeanor going, they're easy to get along with and actually start to solve their own problems.

Now I'm working on projects that are fun for me, that eventually Stone & Ward will see benifits from. Like playing with different Linux distros for an in-house webserver (that doubles as an Infiltration server :) Or building a RAS to take advantage of our 24 phone lines and 6mbit connection that don't get used after hours. I also have a planned network backup solution that uses an ATA RAID controller and a bunch of big hard drives. It would give them four months of hourly incremental backups.

~LoudMusic

1) Get:
- 1U 4bays rack mountable chassis from Sliger Designs
- 3WARE 6410 Escalade IDE controller (Choice of 0/1/0+1/5 Raid) on a 90 PCI riser card
- 4 x 75/100GB ATA100 drives (maybe DiamondMax)
- MicroATX mainboard with NIC and Video integrated on board (invest in RAM not in processing power - 750/850MHZ should be more than sufficient)
- Minimum Linux/*BSD OS booting from a read-only 16 to 64MB flash IDE device, loading kernel and a customised Ramdisk root filesystem, mounting Raid devices in R/W mode, starting SAMBA (and/or Netatalk).
A good starting point is Linux Bootdisk HOWTO

2) Choose 0+1 Raid and you get quick and completely redundant 150/200GB storage that can survive the full failure of one disk.

3) Want remote grafical managment from a standard web browser? Go for Webmin or SWAT.

About a month ago, I upgraded my ReplayTV to have 100 hours of record time. (I did the fast-n-easy swap out the old drive for a 100GB drive.) It's overkill, and there are some problems.

First of all, the interface wasn't designed to cope with that much TV. To get down to the Simpsons (alphabetized by "The") I have to page through like 12 pages of other junk. Yuck.

Second, that's a hell of a lot of TV; I don't want to let the thing fill up, because when will I possibly find the 100 hours to watch everything it records?

Third, it does encourage you to watch more TV. There are shows I used to watch only when the opportunity arose, but now, since I'm recording EVERYTHING I might ever possibly watch, I end up watching all of them.

The real problem I have now is not the amount of record time, but the fact that it only has one tuner.

P.S. Do you know how long it takes to low-level format a 5400 rpm 100GB drive? About 15 hours!

Don't you know that creating 64-bit addressing is difficult. The design should fit for today's need.

Let's say that we have the 64-bit addressing. Thus, every single transfer (either read or write) has to send this 64-bit signal in which some of those are padded with zeroes (i.e. unused). Don't you imagine how much power it wastes to transfer those zeroes? Moreover, 144 PB should be enough for 20 years. Come on! Be realistic. By 20 years, mankind would have come with different solution.

Maxtor/Quantum's tech is called Quiet Drive and was out in 1999. But their drives are all above 3 bels. For example, all the 5400RPM drives are 3.3 bels. They have a whitepaper touting this technology that shows all but the least Fireball drives to be above 3 bels. The new Seagate drives are 2 bels (reportedly) ... huge difference.

Maxtor/Quantum's tech is called Quiet Drive and was out in 1999. But their drives are all above 3 bels. For example, all the 5400RPM drives are 3.3 bels. They have a whitepaper touting this technology that shows all but the least Fireball drives to be above 3 bels. The new Seagate drives are 2 bels (reportedly) ... huge difference.

• an Intel D810EMO mainboard.
• a Maxtor 531dx hard drive. (slim and durable)
• I am considering at this Elan Vital MF-1 case.

For those that are interested here are a few other links to small case manufacturers.
Case Manufacturer listing
Morex/ProCase
In Win
Yeong Yang

Solid-state components prob'ly don't mind subzero temps, but the drives sure will. To pick one example, this Maxtor SCSI drive is only rated to run above 5C. Heck, NON-operating temperature is only -40C.
--

Apparently, according to Maxtor (skip to Q-17), sharing of devices between multiple computers is not an available ability.

How about you folks all send some of this wisdom to the people who are behind this?

Pete McLean of Maxtor, Vice Chairman of T13

Kent Pryor of Quantum Corp, Secretary of T13

4C Entity's Contact Us address

I suggest that a Slashdot effect of IT Admins and purchasing decisionmakers will have more effect on this proposed standard than anything else, including America's favorite passtime, lawsuits, or the threat of illegal hacks. Be vocal!

Too bad nothing is sacred, not even a Megabyte. Looking at the Historical Context* on the page http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/bina ry.html the other guy put in his flame^H^H^H^H^Hpost, we used (until less than 2 years ago, I might add) to think of MB as 2^20 bytes. I suppose my age is showing a bit here. I am inclined to think that the IEC saw the error of their ways too, choosing Mebibytes as the spelling for the new prefix (I pronounce it maybe-bytes, as in depends on whom you ask what MB means :)

I would like to point out that Maxtor was one of the first to break ranks, and start using the tin-filled MB in 1995 (3 years before the IEC document quoted above). As shown here, the 245MB 7245AT specs. If you look near the bottom, the engineers even say "Yields: 245.6 Million Bytes (Approx. 234 MegaBytes)".

As for mainboards, the Abit KA7-100 is out and new chipsets will support ATA/100 as well (like the SiS730s).

Source: the Maxtor Hard Disk Glossary

There's no date on the article, but they mention the "new" DiamondMax Plus 5120, so whenever that drive came out has gotta be close. As hard drive density has increased, it was my understanding that ECC was getting larger and larger, to the point that on the largest drives, there's virtually never a sector that comes in clean. But this is rumor: can someone else track down any whitepapers or more specific details?

I'll point out that if someone had looked at the Maxtor site, read what it said, but missed the bits vs. bytes part, well, 430 would look darn close to 40% of (512 + 430) now wouldn't it? (It's actually 45.6% of 942...) Think someone misread bits for bytes somewhere?