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I believe you're correct. According to the datasheet for the SanDisk 32GB:
Internal transfer read rate: 62MB/s
Internal transfer write rate: 36MB/s

Whereas, for example, the Maxtor MobileMax 40GB drive (for comparison) says:
Sustained Internal (MB/s) 42

Maybe it averages out?

Obviously, it takes more energy to spin a disk all week than it does to power it down for a read on monday morning and a write on friday afternoon. I don't know exactly at what point is it more cost effective? I generally use 1hr in the power save box before the drive is spun down. However, the OP wanted to 'pulse' the HDD, basically keeping it powered down until it was needed which would be terrible for energy use.

Bear in mind that big, fancy SCSI arrays on big boxes have special circuitry to bring the drives up 1 at a time, rather than all at once - the simple reason being that the surge of power required to start them all up at once would trip the power protection circuitry.

Quick check on Google: an old 75Gb IBM deskstar drive takes 1.8amps at startup, 0.8 amps when used (0.6 amps when idle). Modern Seagate sata drives take 2.8amps at startup (but then settle down to 0.7amps active, 0.4 amps idle)

Do you seriously think a drive won't have reached thermal equilibrium after an hour, let alone after several hours? Mine seem to get up to their 'normal' temperatures in 30 minutes or less.

And according to the Google study, heat doesn't lead to a significantly increased risk of failure till you get above 45 C

Acronyms schmackronyms... anyway, I found at least one paper that I read in the past that states the 8 hours/day thing I was referring to: http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper /D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf

The most significant difference in the reliability specifica- tion of PS and ES drives is the expected power-on hours (POH) for each drive type. The MTBF calculation for PS assumes a POH of 8 hours/day for 300 days/year1 while the ES specification assumes 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

This paper from Seagate claims that SCSI drives are individually tested, whilst (S)ATA discs are only batch tested. As a result, I started running badblocks in write-test mode on my new ATA discs before putting them into service so as to attempt to reclaim that relative advantage. I also suspect that SCSI drives have a larger pool of reserved blocks for remapping failed blocks, which would go some way to explaining their funny sizes.

Amen!

Seagate and Peregrine/HP have some really nice, robust, Data Center Management software for managing 10s, 100s, or even thousands of computers and the software on them... you can push, say, SP2 to all 5000 machines, and it's like a few clicks to do it.. and it takes care of everything! Then you check the error report, etc. to make sure that none of the known machines encountered an error (or were turned off at the time), and then you address them individually...

With the # of servers that you are talking about, I wouldn't even think of doing it manually.. unless you get paid by the hour and literately have nothing else to do for the next few months (or year - as per your statement about almost being done after having started the update(s) a number of months back..) It would be well worth your investment to install something like this so that you could push a patch, or a simple update (like windows malicious software removal tool monthly update, etc.) to selected machines, or all machines, and do it from a single console..

To each his own though..

"Credit-card sized" is an abused term these days. And the Seagate press release is self-contradictory:

The DAVE reference design is about the size of a centimeter-thick credit card, with dimensions of 3.5 x 4.7 x .47 inches (61 x 89 x 12 mm) and weighing only 2.5 ounces (70 grams)

So which is it? 3.5 x 4.7 inches (89 x 120mm), or 61 x 89mm (2.4 x 3.5 inches)? The latter sounds more credit-card sized to me.

Cisco defines MTBF as "Mean time between failure. Time at which 50% of the units of interest will have failed; used as a measure of the time a user might reasonably expect a device or system to work before a fault occurs." http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/me ls/dwdm/dwdm_gl.htm#xtocid1301111

wiki defines MTBF as the reciprocal of the Failure rate (1 failure/16 million hours -> 16 million hours until a unit fails) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_fai lure

Seagate defines MTBF as "The average time before a failure will occur. This is not a warranty measurement. It is a calculation taking into consideration the MTBF of each component in a system, as well as, the statistical average operation time between the starting lifetime of a unit and the time of a failure. After a product has been in the field for a few years, the MTBF can become a field proven statistic." http://support.seagate.com/support/glossary/terms/ mean_time_between_failure.html

Western Digital's definition is also very similar http://westerndigital.com/en/library/gloss0803.pdf

In none of the definitions I can find online have I seen the warranty time span come into play.

If this drive has a 1.6 million hour MTBF you should indeed get 1.6 million hours of use from it.

From a batch perspective, if you had 182 of these drives, after 1 year, 1 of them would have a 50% chance of failing.

-Rick

It's nice that they have these, but it's really not that super special. Why is this front page news?

Maybe it's not super special... but check this paper out. Figure 1 in particular (yeah... they are comparing 10k 3.5" to 10k 2.5"... it's an old paper, but the theory is the same.)

Who would want faster 2.5" drives? People who want 6 drives in 1U instead of in 2U. People who want faster drives in their blade servers.

The html tag parsing mangled my reply when I used a less than symbol. Fixed reply:

What was that Hi-Cap driver that I installed to allow access to the 300GB drives I have installed in the boxes then?

Something that bypasses the 128GB limitation of single partition size by doing a little trickery. I trust you noticed that you have to partition the drives into less than 128GB chunks.

There are no "inexpensive" ATA PCI cards that work for a mac. They are starting out at $65+ everywhere I have seen them. Cards for PCs don't work.

Uh, $65 is inexpensive. More inexpensive than the only alternative you implied ("buying newer stuff [from Apple]").

You're wrong that I'm wrong. I have installed large drives on countless boxes. They may require drivemagic or a BIOS update, but I have yet to see a PC that was limited by the hardware.

If they require additional software/drivers, that's the same trickery as Hi-Cap.

In any event, the fact that the ATA controller on early G4's didn't have 48-bit LBA/Large Disk support isn't a "bug". Earlier ATA controllers didn't have such support. (And if you think Apple purposefully did it when disk sizes were commonly less than 40GB with designs on "forcing" people to upgrade when >128GB disks became available, you're deluded.)

What's really amusing is you seem to have no problem doing essentially the exact same solution you're using on the G4 on PCs.

More info:

http://www.48bitlba.com/
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pd f
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bio s/sizeGB128.html

What was that Hi-Cap driver that I installed to allow access to the 300GB drives I have installed in the boxes then?

Something that bypasses the 128GB limitation of single partition size by doing a little trickery. I trust you noticed that you have to partition the drives into There are no "inexpensive" ATA PCI cards that work for a mac. They are starting out at $65+ everywhere I have seen them. Cards for PCs don't work.

Uh, $65 is inexpensive. More inexpensive than the only alternative you implied ("buying newer stuff [from Apple]").

You're wrong that I'm wrong. I have installed large drives on countless boxes. They may require drivemagic or a BIOS update, but I have yet to see a PC that was limited by the hardware.

If they require additional software/drivers, that's the same trickery as Hi-Cap.

In any event, the fact that the ATA controller on early G4's didn't have 48-bit LBA/Large Disk support isn't a "bug". Earlier ATA controllers didn't have such support. (And if you think Apple purposefully did it when disk sizes were commonly less than 40GB with designs on "forcing" people to upgrade when >128GB disks became available, you're deluded.)

What's really amusing is you seem to have no problem doing essentially the exact same solution you're using on the G4 on PCs.

More info:

http://www.48bitlba.com/
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pd f
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/bio s/sizeGB128.html

Oh, if you _do_ need them on all the time, look for something like the Western Digital Caviar special edition drives, which have a 3 year warranty, or SCSI drives, whose warranties go up to 5 years. Standard consumer drives come with a mere 1 year warranty, and there's a good reason why...

Source for the last statement?

Seagate consumer drives come with a mere 5 year warranty, and there's something that directly refutes your point.

1. Buy drives with the longest warranty period you can find. At the moment this is Seagate (5 years on all drives) or Western Digital (3 years on their 'Special Edition' models). Buy from a local vendor or one that you know to use sensible packaging for shipping (in the UK, dabs.com and insight.com pack sensibly, at least).
2. Make sure the case they're installed in is adequately ventilated. Use

   smartctl -a /dev/hdx

   to check the operating temperature of the drives periodically, if your drives provide this attribute.
3. Run

   badblocks -w

   (write test) on them as a soak test and to try and get the drives past the 'infant mortality' stage of the bathtub curve. According to a Seagate white paper this is one of the significant differences between SCSI and ATA drives (SCSI drives are individually tested, ATA drives are batch-tested).
4. Run S.M.A.R.T. tests on the drives regularly (i.e. from smartd if you're running Linux) and monitor the reports.
5. Don't worry too much about periodic read errors; just identify the affected blocks and force a write to them in order to get the drive firmware to remap any failed blocks. Note that write errors should be treated as fatal (though S.M.A.R.T. monitoring should pick this up as a failure long before this is a problem!)
6. Replace the drives at about 2-3 years old and upgrade. Keep the discs around as scratch discs as they've probably still got plenty of life left in them, even if you don't feel like trusting them with important data.

I have discs that are 13 years old and which are still running. Only that one and one from 1995 have any issues whatsoever - stiction in both cases.

That's one huge cooling fan!

A larger fan rotates slower and is therefore more quiet. Engadget says After plenty of gameplay the console is cool -- or at worst warm -- to the touch on every surface. In a side by side test with the Xbox 360, the console is comparably virtually silent, and the Blu-ray drive is significantly quieter than the 360's DVD drive.

Why did they use a Seagate drive, when Seagate is known for sucking more power than just about anybody else?

Really? This Seagate 60GB drive eats .8 watt idle, 2 watts active. That is nothing compared to the cell chip and gpu.

The ATI RSX has its video memory on the module, but not in-core.

Just as Sony said months ago, the framebuffer memory will be moved on-die in a later rev.

According to posts on various Japanese sites... the unit gets hot. Very hot.

That hearsay does not jibe with engadget's rather credible sounding report above.

The news should be that this was announced some time a go, but is still delayed. I've been reading press releases (such as this, sadly undated example) since March of this year (yes, almost 8 months a go). No release date given in the article provided by the submitter, but I've heard rumours of Q2 2007.

This should be good when it's released, but I've long since stopped holding my breath.

Looking at the Seagate HDD specs. The maximum sustained transfer rate is typically below 100 Mbits/s. This puts it well below 480 Mbits/s for USB.

If you're hitting 35C ambient temperature, your internal temps shouldn't be much over 55C unless you have inadequate air circulation. Get some SMART monitors on the hard drives to watch their temperature sensors and use an application like Motherboard Monitor to alert you when you approach your CPU's critical temperature. I wouldn't worry about it too much. Speaking only from my own experience, quality hard drives have operating temperatures up to 60 Celsius. A Dual-Core Opteron can operate anywhere from 65C to 83C depending on what chip you have (PDF). A word of advice: larger fans at lower RPMs tend to push more air and are quieter. If noise isn't a concern, then go with larger fans at higher RPMs. Also, if you can maintain a higher total pressure inside the server case it will help prevent dust from settling and limit how often you need to pop the top and clean it out, but it also puts more stress on the intake fans which may lead to more rapid failures. I've never collected statistics on this sort of thing so the increase in failure rate may be negligible.

and, of course, my linking skills suck. Here is the actual link

Have you read the MTBF rating on that 200 gb Seagate drive? They claim 600,000 hours. That's like 70 years of continuous operation. "Mean" time between failure; that means that half of those drives should still work after 70 years.

Is there anyone out there who owns a hard drive they seriously expect to be in operational condition 70 years from now? Anyone?

Its like Tobacco's claims that their product was safe in the face of blatently obvious proof that it wasn't. Someone should file a class-action.

If you have a datacenter plan on doubling or tripling that wattage because of the need for cooling. Then multiply by 100 or more units, it adds up.

• Highest capacity notebook drive (ST9160821A): 160GB
• Spindle speed of notebook drive: 5400 rpm
• Highest capacity desktop drive (ST3750640AS ST3750840AS ST3750640A ST3750840A): 750GB
• Spindle speed of desktop drive: 7200 rpm
• Ratio of desktop drive capacity to notebook drive capacity: 4.6875
• Notebook drive power consumption (watts):
  • ACTIVE 2.0
  • IDLE 0.8
  • STANDBY (typ) 0.2
• Notebook drive power consumption in watts times Ratio of desktop drive capacity to notebook drive capacity:
  • ACTIVE 9.375
  • IDLE 3.75
  • STANDBY (typ) 0.9375
• Desktop drive power consumption (watts):
  • Seek 12.6
  • Idle 9.3
  • Standby 0.8
• Cost of desktop drive: $377 shipped (SATA, 8mb cache)
• Cost of laptop drive: $226 shipped
• Cost of laptop drive times Ratio of desktop drive capacity to notebook drive capacity: $1059.375
• Amount you will have to save to make up for the difference in cost, during the duration of an upgrade cycle: $682.38 times (Total capacity/750GB)
• Not even considered in this survey: The probably incredibly high cost of actually connecting 4.6875 times as many drives to servers.

It would make absolutely no fucking sense to use these drives in any kind of massive storage scenario, and datacenter machines that don't have a bunch of drives probably only have one drive, which substantially decreases the usefulness of such a plan; in fact, most of those machines don't even NEED a hard drive, they need access to a fat SAN.

If you have a datacenter plan on doubling or tripling that wattage because of the need for cooling. Then multiply by 100 or more units, it adds up.

• Highest capacity notebook drive (ST9160821A): 160GB
• Spindle speed of notebook drive: 5400 rpm
• Highest capacity desktop drive (ST3750640AS ST3750840AS ST3750640A ST3750840A): 750GB
• Spindle speed of desktop drive: 7200 rpm
• Ratio of desktop drive capacity to notebook drive capacity: 4.6875
• Notebook drive power consumption (watts):
  • ACTIVE 2.0
  • IDLE 0.8
  • STANDBY (typ) 0.2
• Notebook drive power consumption in watts times Ratio of desktop drive capacity to notebook drive capacity:
  • ACTIVE 9.375
  • IDLE 3.75
  • STANDBY (typ) 0.9375
• Desktop drive power consumption (watts):
  • Seek 12.6
  • Idle 9.3
  • Standby 0.8
• Cost of desktop drive: $377 shipped (SATA, 8mb cache)
• Cost of laptop drive: $226 shipped
• Cost of laptop drive times Ratio of desktop drive capacity to notebook drive capacity: $1059.375
• Amount you will have to save to make up for the difference in cost, during the duration of an upgrade cycle: $682.38 times (Total capacity/750GB)
• Not even considered in this survey: The probably incredibly high cost of actually connecting 4.6875 times as many drives to servers.

It would make absolutely no fucking sense to use these drives in any kind of massive storage scenario, and datacenter machines that don't have a bunch of drives probably only have one drive, which substantially decreases the usefulness of such a plan; in fact, most of those machines don't even NEED a hard drive, they need access to a fat SAN.

A careless plumber caused a gush of water to dump 10,000 gallons of water into our DC last July, and the point of entry was right above one of our SAN units.)

Seagate's solution is hardware based, meaning the encryption functions are performed on the drive, separate from the operating system. Even the password or user ID is encrypted and stored in an inaccessible area on the drive, providing much stronger security than today's software-based encryption solutions.

A system with Momentus FDE comes fully enabled for encrypting all the data on the drive, so there are no time-consuming installation and configuration requirements as with software; users simply enter their ID, and if authenticated, they have full access to their data. Since the user ID is entered before the operating system can load, it's essentially impossible for any spyware-like code to have visibility of the key.

So I would say for a DVR manufacturer, this helps prevent things from being recorded and then the drive pulled to steal the video.

"Drive security tools enhance fair use of digital programming by helping manufacturers implement appropriate digital rights management technologies."

This may be what you are looking for, Bruce Schneier pointed to it as a triple-DES solution with the followup product using AES.

http://www.seagate.com/products/notebook/momentus. html
(Look at the FDE part)

http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/ PO-Momentus-FDE.pdf
(Brief 2 page pdf on the hardware based full disc encryption)

I just ran across it a few days ago and have not yet read into the details of exactly how it works or if there is any enterprise management functionality.

This may be what you are looking for, Bruce Schneier pointed to it as a triple-DES solution with the followup product using AES.

http://www.seagate.com/products/notebook/momentus. html
(Look at the FDE part)

http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/ PO-Momentus-FDE.pdf
(Brief 2 page pdf on the hardware based full disc encryption)

I just ran across it a few days ago and have not yet read into the details of exactly how it works or if there is any enterprise management functionality.

pdf warning After I saw your post, I remembered an announcement some months ago that seagate was looking to move encryption to the hard drive. Not quite what you said you were looking for, but not too far away, either.

That gap existed because those were the kinds of hard drives that were available, 6 gig 1 inch drives and 20/40 gig 1.8 inch drives. I'm not even sure if the 1.8 inch drives are more expensive, i'm guessing they're actually cheaper but less shock resistant. They could use multiple 1 inch drives, but that would end up making the smaller players more expensive than the big ones. Perhaps apple could have used their size to influence drive manufacturers to start making 1.4 inch drives, but that would likely reduce overall efficiency.

Now we have 8 gig 1 inch drives. Anytime now, seagate is supposed to be producing 1 inch hard drives that use perpendicular recording to have a capacity of 12 gigs( http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/relea ses/article/0,1121,2973,00.html ), so if you want a 10 gig mp3 player, and especially if you'd like it to be small, you're in luck.

Mobile drives are still expensive compared to desktop drives.

It won't neccessarilly be a laptop hard drive, seagate has a 2.5" desktop type hard drive just for this sort of stuff, the LD25 http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/marketing/ PO-LD25.pdf , although I haven't heard of a 60 gig version of it. So the cost difference could be even greater.

I think IMPLICITLY in the storage domain, a kilo=1000 and a giga=100000

have you EVERY purchased a hard drive? have you EVER seen the disclaimer on the side of the box?

here is seagates take
http://www.seagate.com/products/discselect/glossar y/index.html#cap
Capacity:
Capacity is the amount of data that the drive can store, after formatting. Most disc drive companies, including Seagate, calculate disc capacity based on the assumption that 1 megabyte = 1000 kilobytes and 1 gigabyte=1000 megabytes.

Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter.

Check out the Seagate Barracuda for more info.

If was thinking of OSR2 for Windows 95: It added FAT32 support ... but that isn't nearly as major as NTFS->WinFS. I'd agree with you - it'll be a while.

as oppose to the -200 to 10,000 feet limit on regular hdds

Hmmm ... are you sure about that? They call it a Solid State Disk and say it's based on NAND Flash memory.

The Seagate 2.5" 4200 rpm (100GB) drives require: (data taken from this pdf overview)
* 5.0W at startup
* 2.3W during seek
* 2.1W reading/writing
* 1.0W Idle
* 0.2W Standby

Except for startup, that's all under 5v * .5A = 2.5W that USB provides. That surge could easily be handled by a rechargable AA battery or an ultra-capacitor. Or, in a desperate pinch, require 2 USB connectors -- it's still better than lugging a power cube.

Whatever you do, be sure to read the following article first. It's a bit dated, but it's written by people who definitely know what they are talking about (Seagate engineers) and may help put things in perspective. The hefty pricetag of SCSI does not depend on the interface. Read this and you'll now why.

http://www.seagate.com/content/docs/pdf/whitepaper /D2c_More_than_Interface_ATA_vs_SCSI_042003.pdf

Seagate has 160GB 2.5" 5400RPM drives available.

Seagate NL35 are near-line versions of their consumer drives, with MTBF's of around 1M hours.

Of course with a failure rate on your existing drives ~15x what you might expect, I'd consider getting one through a different vendor/courier, although 24/7 writes isn't exactly the sort of duty cycle you might expect for a cheap consumer drive either.

A filesystem format ("high-level" format) of a hard drive is much different than a low-level format.

Even a worthless A+ certification will teach you that much.

You do not even need to zero-fill the hard drive (which is NOT a low-level format) to wipe out a virus. If you reformat it at the OS level (again, a "high level" format) you're removing the FAT/MFT/inodes/btree pointers to the files on the disk, and without those pointers the data is pretty much inaccessible by the operating system, unless there is software in place to specifically go to each sector and read it - and because you've removed the pointers to the files that can kickstart that process when you do the reformat/reinstall, there is no way in hell that any such hidden virus code is going to be executed - you've removed the possibility.

Also: resorting to reformat/reinstall at the drop of a hat is a sure sign of incompetence. $.02 and then some. SOME spyware or viruses which include rootkits or other exploits are so intrusive that a reformat/reinstall may be recommended but it's not going to be every case. Hell, even Windows' "System Volume Information" (restore points) can be purged of infection by changing permissions on the directory and then scanning them- or you can even turn off System Restore to simply blow away the restore points and prevent automatic reinstallation of the scumware

Read. Learn. Stop scamming customers with technical terms you don't understand.

Seagate has announced a laptop disk that does full disc encryption in hardware, without slowing down disc I/O at all. Seems like that makes software solutions (which are subject to reverse engineering, etc.) decidedly inferior.

Awwwww, dat funnie! Id mod you up if I could :)

So If I installed 8x 400GB Seagate drives (http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds _barracuda7200.8.pdf) drawing 12.8 Watts on average with a peak ampage of 2.8 (+/- 10%) I really shouldnt worry about the fact that the manufacturers product sheet doesnt tell me the peak draw (so I can just estimate it as @25W because Im *really* familiar with the normal peak draw on SATA drives) or about how many Amps my 12V rail will sustain?

Phew, glad your addition system helped me clear that one up ;)

After three failures in five months, I had it replaced with a same-size Western Digital. I don't recall if I still have that drive someplace or if I sold it at some point, but I never had any trouble with it.

With that many failures that quickly, I suspect you had a bad or inadequate PSU. The WD drive may simply have drawn a bit less power or been a bit more tolerant of dirty power.

If that were the case, I'd think the other drives I'd had in the same computer (now that I remember, the "800MB Quantum" was really an 850MB Conner, and I had a 120MB Seagate before that (an ancient half-height model at that)) would've had problems. If three drives from Maxtor all puked within a short time of each other but three drives from other manufacturers ran for years and years both before and after, I'd think it's safe to say the fault was with the Maxtor drives.

(Also keep in mind this was back in '96 or '97. Computer parts were sufficiently expensive that you tended not to see anything like the ultra-cheap junk power supplies that get flogged by resellers today for $20 or so.)

And hey... watch out, and don't forget, these fly-by-nighters only offer a 5 year warranty on their internal drives. And you can bet their drives are gonna die right after their warranty ends... ok, well, within 5 or 10 years of right after their warranty ends... ok, well... they can't last forever, can they?

There are a lot of other factors to "system performance", like memory, video, and disk subsystem speed. How much of a gain will a dual core CPU buy if the system is waiting for a (relatively) slow disk? If you want to put in a 7200 rpm 2 1/2", or a pair of 'em (or here), well ok. But then power consumption and it's cousin heat go up. Bigger batteries, Ok. Now you've got weight. I guess it's all about trade-offs, and what do you really want.

Even Seagates website has a very obvious typo. It's contradicted in the press release which was released in 2001! See here.

Seagate's DiscWizard. Worked for me.