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I've purchased a few WD Passports (they're up to 160GB now), and while they seem to be meant more for personal "sync up your stuff!" use, they're not bad for backups. In their favor are the facts that they're powered by USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply) and that they're relatively small. The tradeoff is the modest capacity (I really like that we can call 160,000 megabytes "modest" -- simple pleasures for a simple mind, I suppose) and the price-for-storage (they're much more expensive per gig than the WD My Books).

TFA reviews the My Book Pro, but they also have a USB-only My Book "Essential" (read: Cheaper!) version; anyone tried those?
____________________________________
Dejobaan Games, LLC - Because we love developing games.
Indie Superstar - Because we love webcasting about indie games.

Errr. In Linux, I get 70+MB/s on my current Seagate drive. That's with syncing.

And the WD Raptor 10k drives are just as fast or faster than the current generation of 7200rpms. According to WDC [1], you should be getting about 84MB/s transfer rate! 22MB/s is just ridicules!!!

As for networking, if you are on a 100MBps unloaded network (no traffic), you should get 10+MB/s transfer rate. 8MB/s is a little slow there too But 0.5MB/s! OMG!.

[1] - http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveI D=189

PS. Yes, Slashdot, again correct mind reading (CAPTCHA word thingy). Vista's performance is "terrible".

Western Digital SATA drives have the regular Molex connection and that is why I will only use them. Those SATA connections are so sloppy that the data and power cable falls off. WD drives also have a kind of propriety extension on the data connection retention mechanism called SureConnect.

WD Caviar® SE16
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveI D=159

;)

I've read some of those reviews, and it seems many folks are misunderstanding and/or misapplying WD's RAID Edition drives, presumably because they haven't read the datasheet. Put simply, they are not intended to be used as single drives or in RAID0 configurations, and will be less reliable than regular 'desktop' drives (e.g. WD's 'Special Edition' models) in these roles. My understanding is that the RE drives are also not really suitable for mirrored RAID levels (e.g. RAID1, RAID10) either, and are only intended for use with parity-based RAID levels (RAID5, "RAID6") where missing data that was unable to be read from one device can be reconstructed from the remaining devices.

Sadly, this matches with my own experiences with WD.

I've done OK with WD. I bought three of their 80GB Special Edition drives in 2002, and they've been fine and are still working. I'd probably still be buying them, if Seagate hadn't increased their standard warranty across their entire range to 5 years (Special Editions have 3 years, most other 'desktop' HDDs have 1 year).

Remember also that blocks on HDDs do become unreadable from time to time, and that with the sizes of modern units, the probability of this happening to a block that's occupied by a file you care about is quite high. No problem, though, just re-write the block (e.g. by removing the file, then filling the filesystem with a dummy file to cause all unallocated blocks to be re-written) and the drive's firmware will relocate the block to one of the reserved blocks set aside for this purpose. Many people are overly paranoid and consider a HDD to be 'dying' the first time they see a read error.

I just bought myself a completely new gaming rig -- my first such rig in about seven years. Prior to that I'd been upgrading various components in my old box. But the newest games were starting to far outstrip my machine's ability to play them (Doom 3/Quake 4 were the earliest offenders). Thanks to a pleasant year-end bonus from my employer (and rather serious prodding from my partner), I got a completely new box:

• ABIT AN8-32X SLI (nForce 4) motherboard,
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ CPU,
• eVGA geForce 7900GT CO SC graphics card,
• Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card,
• 2 Western Digital WD2500KS SATA drives, 7200RPM, 250G each,
• LiteOn SHM-165P6S DVD-RAM/DVD+-RW/DVD+-R/CD-R/CD-RW drive,
• 2G (1Gx2) Crucial CT2KIT12864Z40B PC3200 RAM,
• Enermax Liberty 500W power supply (12V @ 22A for the gfx card),
• ASYS CK-1022-5 "Eiffel Tower" case, complete with chasing blue-LED rice

Sadly, the graphics card has turned out to be the biggest problem in the new rig. It seems that everyone is having trouble with the new NVidia 7900-based boards. My first card would display "exploding" geometry once it warmed up a bit. Happily, eVGA have been very good to deal with, and performed a free cross-ship RMA. The new card still exhibits a few glitches, but only when I expressly go looking for them. When actually playing games, it's been very well behaved. It's only done the exploding geometry thing once since then, during a game of Oblivion. I'll keep leaning on eVGA to perfect this card.

I have very mixed feelings about the Creative sound card. Creative has a very spotty reputation for drivers, especially when multiple CPUs are involved. However, virtually all the competing sound card vendors have gone away, or have chosen instead to go for a race to the bottom in terms of price (and, sadly, quality). So I got the Creative X-Fi. It makes the games sound pretty good (it's breathed new life into QuakeWorld), but I would have much preferred something that works with Linux. I have my eye on the upcoming Razer Barracuda sound card, though...

I'd have to say that I'm probably happiest with the case. I was very paranoid that I wouldn't have enough space for all the cruft I planned on putting in it, or that it would be very difficult to work with, but it's turned out to be just lovely. It weighs a ton, but no more than the old Antec tower it's replacing. It's very accessible, has a large interior, very well ventilated, very sturdy, has a clean appearance, and the blue LEDs don't hurt, either.

As I said, this is the first new rig I've put together in seven years (the last machine I built was a dual-Pentium III on a PC-100 motherboard). I'd appreciate commentary from a more experienced eye. Could I have selected better RAM? Better drives?

Schwab

I've been putting together the specs for such a beast. I decided to go with SATA for cheap drives and "SATA-II" (or whatever you want to call it, since there isn't a standard name for NCQ and 3.0Gbps support) for future-proofing.

1) The natural first choice was 3ware. 12 port SATA-II controller (9550SX-12), for about $800. 3ware products are very well supported on Linux. The only downside is that it's a PCI-X device (this is NOT "PCI Express"!), and PCI-X busses are generally only found on very high end motherboards for servers and workstations. Any athlon motherboard or single-processor opteron board claiming to have PCI-X is lying, they really mean PCI express (AMD chipsets did not support PCI-X at all until around the time dual opteron motherboards were being created)

So since I didn't want to spend $500 on a motherboard that had built in scsi raid, support for 16GB of ram and dual opteron processors just to use that $800 card, I looked around some more...

2) And found a serious contender, the 12 port Areca 8x PCIe ARC-1230 (also about $800). While most low end motherboards don't provide an 8x PCI Express slot, they DO provide a 16x slot which will work just fine for this card (after all, this will be the fileserver, so a motherboard with crappy built in video will do, we're not playing Doom 3 here). Linux drivers are provided as source, even including a kernel tree patch which will build the driver into the kernel rather than as a module, making booting directly from the RAID controller easy.

Slap the Areca into Tom's Hardware's 37 watt computer (motherboard has built in GigE, but pentium-Ms are 32 bit processors, making giant files/filesystems a pain. An Athlon 64+cheap mini-ATX can be had cheaper, but uses more power), add in a stack of 10 watt 400GB WD Caviar Raid Edition 2 drives, and you're set for a very low power fileserver with a lot of storage.

Now, my turn to "ask slashdot":

Where do I get a 250-300 watt powersupply with 12 SATA power connectors?

Alternatively, do the SATA drive cages (like 3ware's RDC-400-SATA (pdf) have their own SATA power connectors built in and use standard molex connectors on the outside? Do I need special cages to support 3Gbps drives (ok, not a serious problem for now, but futureproofing)? 3ware's website says it'll work, their product PDF doesn't.

The parent makes a good point. Flash cards are very slow when compared to hard drives. An 80x flash card (the highest I've seen) is only 12 Mbps! To contrast that, Western Digital's Caviar drive lists 602 Mbits/s (Max).

I'd only use one of those cards in special situations. Especially since flash also costs much more per megabyte.

This drive costs $50 dollars more than this version of the 150gb 10k rpm raptor. The window is nice and cool looking, but not enough for me to spend the extra $50 over the standard one.

Because, according to the WD literature for the TLER functionality of their RAID Edition drives, they are designed not to attempt 'heroic recovery' for longer than 7 seconds on the assumption that RAID at a higher level will use ECC to recover any errors. RE drives are not intended for use in plain stripe sets, or as single drives.

Oh, and I have 3 80G SE drives from 2002 which still run fine.

It's not an error by NewEgg. Follow the link to the manufacturer's site, and you'll see the same specification:

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveI D=114

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveI D=92

I bought one to replace what I thought was a bad drive in a RAID configuration about a year ago.

WD now has 3 year minimum warranty and 5 year for enterprise drives:

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/releases/PressReleas e.asp?release={264FE90B-5808-489E-9DEC-05106E24AD7 9}

These are rated at 10K and come in 36 and 72GB sizes like SCSI drives. The MTBF is measured for 24x7 use like SCSI (unlike normal SATA which is not for sustained usage). They only cost 2/3 of the price of a SCSI drive, however.

I am really not sure where you people are getting your inflated drive r/w rates from, but most people have nowhere near 80-85MB/sec transfer rates from their hard drives. It takes a 10k RPM SATA drive to get even 72MB/sec sustained read speeds.
WD 10k RPM SATA

Get an off the shelf product, like After FX, Maya, Lightwave or Photoshop and run a series of performance tests in both computers.

Graphics processing is a compute-bound problem. No one (sane) is going to argue that commodity x86 doesn't give you the most bang for the buck for raw number crunching power, which is why clusters of x86 boxes have basically replaced the traditional Cray-style supercomputer for everything except a small class of esoteric problems.

What you seem to be forgetting is that for most applications, CPU speed isn't the performance bottleneck -- I/O is, in one of it's many forms. Memory I/O is a major bottleneck in modern systems, which is why having a huge on-die cache is so important. It doesn't matter how fast your CPU is when it's sitting idle waiting to get data back from system memory (or even worse, the disk drive). Even low-end modern CPUs are so overpowered compared to the rest of the system that CPU speed doesn't really make much difference when it comes percieved performance in desktop applications.

When a user says "my computer is slow", what they usually mean is that "it takes a long time for a program to come up after I click the icon". Putting a faster CPU in their box isn't going to improve their observed performance, because the CPU isn't what's causing the problem they're seeing -- thier disk drive is. I've found that 95% of the time a faster disk drive is a better investment than a faster CPU for perking up a sluggish system.

PATA/SATA disk are still lagging horribly behind stuff like SCSI disks and their 10k RPM offerings.

There's the Western Digital Raptor which is 10k RPM SATA-drive, but apart from that the pickings are very slim. It's also a rather expensive drive (albeit cheap compared to SCSI).

But I agree, IDE/SATA-drives need a boost in their speed. Storage is fine, but speed is lacking. I mean my old Sun Ultra-30 from 1998 has 15k RPM-drives! SCSI of course.

For over a grand, I'd expect more thought put into how a camcorder is actually USED.

How about image stabilization? They could put in a metal disk and it would spin. I wonder if they could think of any secondary use for it as well.
Of course the camera would tend to want to roll a bit when you want it to tilt.

I can't be certain for sure, but I know a *big* limitation of older IDE/ATA drives was that the controller could only talk to one device at a time (per channel maybe?) My guess is SATA would not have that limitation since it's a serial interface (no bus), but I know for sure that with SCSI there is no such limitation.

IIRC, SATA is also including some of the advanced SCSI abilities - TCQ/NCQ (read more here), but still falls shy of the complete list (including Packetization, QAS, & Negotiation and Domain Validation [reference]). Not entirely sure if those increase performance in any measureable amount, but I'm sure it doesnt hurt.

Ever since I had my new 2gb drive die (yes, that long ago) I wanted nothing to do with IDE anymore and gradually phased it out of my system entirely to all SCSI. Never been disappointed. Sure, all my friends joked for being anal about it but I was more than happy (except for the prices). For most applications there was not that big of a performance increase but if you partition your system intelligently across several different physical drives you can really see a difference.

"Supports 2 TB" could mean "uses 41-bit addressing" (2^41 B = 2TB). Current IDE interfaces with 48 bit addressing "support" up to 256TB of storage but you're not going to see that kind of density on a single device any time soon.

So those 2TB are probably addressing blocks using 32 bits, a much more sensible number than 41 bits.

Just put together out second 2TB array today, We use the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, this is an 8x ATA disc array --> SCSI. The tower I put together today uses 8 (well 9.. one for hot swapping) WD 2500JD drives. The tower takes care of the actual RAID subsystem, we use, 5, though it supports 1, 10, 3, 30, 5, and 50, and possibly others.
This setup yeilds 1.75TB of usable space, at a cost of $3,708 (if you buy it from MWave good upport, and the best prices I have seen on this stuff), or a realized cost of $2.12/GB. If you go with WD2000JD drives you can save some money, coming in at $3,258 or $2.04/GB.

That isn't strictly accurate, WD offer a 3 year warranty on their "Caviar SE" drives (those with an 8Mb cache) and 5 on their Raptor drives with the exception of retail hard drive kits for whatever reason. Neither of these drive ranges are what you'd consider enterprise kit...

For more complete information check out their warranty page (where I confirmed this info myself).

And you can buy enterprise grade drives now such as this drive.

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/

Until WD improves its QC, I will stay away. In the last year, I've bought Seagate, Maxtor, and Hitachi drives -- all without issue.

The WD Raptor is super sexy, especially in the new 74GB flavor, but I just can't risk another WD drive.

Depending on the make of disk, try running the manufacturer's diagnostic utilities - they may give a better idea of any problems.

IBM http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.ht m
Fujitsu http://www.fujitsu.com/au/support/hdd/warranty/
Maxtor http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/index.h tm
Seagate http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/index.html
Western Digital http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
Samsung http://www.samsung.com/Support/ProductSupport/inde x.htm

*sigh* how did you get modded as informative?

The original post that started this thread (from mensa babe) stated "run 20 drives of MTBF 20 years, then one fails each year", a poster replied to say they were incorrect, it would mean drives had MTBF of 10.5 years. And I replied to say the correctee was right. (which they are).

Your example is for 1000 drives, running for 1 year, 1 failure. Going by the same math which i used to back up the aformentioned correctee, ie MTBF = Sigma(runtime)/failures, which is:

(1000 drives * 1 year)/(1 failure) = MTBF of 1000 years.

This is the text book definition of MTBF, quoted in the glossary linked to in the story. So you're still wrong... and the math still holds.

NB: this does not take lifetime into account at all (they might /all/ fail after 1.1 years). See other posters explanations for that. MTBF is a measure of failure rate observed in a sample over a given period of time rather than an actual quantitive measure of how long something will likely run for before it breaks. Hence you will get vastly different figures for different sample sets/time periods. The 2 examples in this post being prime examples of this:

20 drives, 20 years, 1 fail per year
= 10.5 year MTBF

Vs

1000 drives, 1 year, 1 fail
= 1000 years MTBF

These are both textbook MTBF figures.

Which demonstrates the biggest problem with MTBF: its mostly meaningless unless one knows the details of the sample set and conditions used to obtain MTBF.

I think we're looking too deeply into this concept. The Western Digital definition for MTBF says, the MTBF "is calculated by dividing the total number of operating hours observed by the total number of failures. Also, the length of time a user may reasonably expect a device or system to work before an incapacitating fault occurs."

This means that they hook a whole bunch of drives up and run then for a while. Add the total hours of drive operation up and divide by the number of failures. They're estimate of 500,000 hours could correspond to the following experiment:

Connect 100 drives and run them, 24/7, for 200 days. This yields 100 * 24 * 20 about 500,000 drive hours. If there was only one drive failure in that time, then you could say that the MTBF is 500,000 hours. Granted, that's not 500,000 hours for ONE drive, but it's spread across all drive hours completed.

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.

Western Digital has adopted a new warranty policy effective October 1, 2002. Western Digital WD Caviar Special Edition hard drives are covered under warranty for a three-year period. All other Western Digital products will be covered under a standard warranty for a period of one year.

On a side note, I have the 80GB Special Edition drive and the performance is amazing.

Actually, any of their drives from their Caviar line have a three year warranty.
source

Personally I swear by Western Digital already, I don't need an article of dubious validity to convince me of that.

1). tomsrtbt Linux on a floppy - essential!
2). Windows 98SE boot floppy
3). Knoppix 3.2 bottable Linux on a CD.
4). Memtest86 bootable CD for testing RAM - excellent!
5). DOS freeware F-Prot and recent virus definitions
6). Norton's DOS utilities
7). Various HD setup utilities (eg: Western Digital, Seagate boot floppies)
8). Freesco Linux router/webserver on a floppy
9). Sample linux config files (eg: XFConfig-4, fstab, etc)
10). Frozen-Bubble bootable CD for times of stress

You can get a hardware IDE RAID controller from 3Ware right now that supports serial ATA (the model 8500) in 4, 8, and 12 channel varieties or parallel ATA in the same capacities (the 7500 series), and install commodity disk drives. The hardest part about this is getting a chassis with sufficient power and cooling capacity to handle all the drives.

It looks like running 12 Western Digital "Drivezilla" 200GB drives ought to give you somewhere around 2.0TB of storage (taking into account the bullshit mathematics of hard drives). At Pricewatch prices, I see about $3,500.00 tied up in the drives and the controller.

Whoopy shit.

Now if only they make a 200G version with the 8M cache, gotta love those special edition drives.

Well I don't have TOO much info to that end, but what I was able to get from one of our people in sales that the distributors in Australia are Westan, Acheive, and esystems or you can view the list here. Sorry the info's a bit sparse, this really isn't my area :P

Just found the perfect product.

It's USB 2.0, even!

in reality, you are wrong. Gee, who should I believe? An industry legend, or some putz on /. ?

Quite true, you do not know me and it would be unwise to believe an anonymous person on Slashdot over a person who is certainly an industry legend. Honestly, you probably misinterpreted what he wrote. In any case, if you didn't, that's why I said that you could open up a drive and see for yourself. Reality doesn't lie.

"Open up a Seagate Cheetah X15 if you don't believe me."

Hrm let me see, what will I find: A spindle motor a platter array a head assembly.

Yes, a spindle motor which you will not find in an IDE hard drive (unless you know of any 15,000RPM hard drives), platters of a special size made specifically for 15K SCSI hard drives, which you will also not find in any IDE hard drive (though it is indeed the same basic core technology, as I have already stated), and a head assembly which has been shortened in length for the smaller platters, an assembly which you will--again--not find in an IDE hard drive.
Go to www.storagereview.com and ask a person named "MaxtorSCSI"--he is a SCSI engineer at Maxtor.

Now go and look under the hood of a Ford Pinto and a Mercedes. Hmm, let's see. Pistons, valves, a radiator. They must be the same!

See how rediculous your example is now?

Probably not.

Should we look on the outside? Oh gee look! there's a Logic board and it has a GASP! SCSI interface IC on it. Wow, amazing.

If you think that the circuit boards on IDE and SCSI drives are the same (other than cosmetic items like the cable connection and a single IC), you are far more misinformed than I originally expected. The entire design philosophy of the electronics on the two is completely different. SCSI drives include much of the controller hardware on, well, the controller. IDE drives are designed to be run by a very simple controller, integrating most of the controlling hardware onto the drive itself. If you read the book, you will notice IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics.

You make alot of half-assed assertions which are just flat wrong.

I am stating facts. Facts which you can find out for yourself if you do a little research.

Just looking At the specs for a WD Protégé 5400 (which is their low end drive) they specify a 5 year service life, with a standard MTBF of 500,000 hours.

Thanks for bringing that up. Now look at Western Digital's warranty policy. The high-end drives have a warranty of, you guessed it, three years. All other drives have a warranty of one year. This is the industry standard, adopted by all major IDE drive manufacturers I know of except Samsung (who makes very reliable, if a bit slow, drives)
That said, there are IDE drives which are supposed to be designed to last five years. By "designed to last 5 years" I mean that the manufacturer will actually back that up with a warranty, service life be damned. The company is Maxtor.

However, if you look at the specs you love so much, you will find that the access times are magnificently faster on their SCSI drives than on their IDE drives. Same hardware indeed. I mentioned these drives earlier, IIRC.

However, I don't need to quote specs or policies to point out that it is absurd to believe a consumer-grade IDE drive is built to the same specifications as drives designed to work in enterprise servers, such as Sun Fire 15K's and HP Nonstop Himilayas, 24/7. If you believe that, you are clearly an idiot.

You have also demonstrated that you are rather misinformed to quote MTBF numbers. Do the math on 500,000 hours and tell me how realistic and useful that number is. If you're nice, I'll tell you where they come up with that figure, since you seem to be averse to doing your own research, outside of your deity's PC repair book.

Dude, lay it down ok, you're not going to convince me of anything because I know you are wrong.

I don't particularly care if I convince you. I am doing my part to quell ignorance in an area I have knowledge of. Others have done the same for me, though I wasn't such a prick in return. You are clearly more interested in believing you are correct than in finding out for yourself. This is not unlike a Fundamentalist: "The bible says it, so it must be true!"
Your bible is Upgrading and Repairing PCs. "It" is your SCSI comment.

If you would like to quote the author, I would be happy to tell you how you misinterpreted him, or if you did not, how he is incorrect, and point you to references. If you would rather insult me, which you seem to be very interested in doing, please do the entire online community a favor and stick with AOL chatrooms or wherever you go to get people to agree with you.

I agree with you 100%. When someone is talking about putting any large number of $1200+ drives into a PC-clone case, it makes me wonder why they dont use a real case solution instead.

I mainly use SCSI for my home lab, but I've started looking at using RAID5 IDE stuff with those cool 8MB cache drives from Western Digital. 240GBs usable RAID5'ed space for $600 including controller?? Sick!

I agree with you 100%. When someone is talking about putting any large number of $1200+ drives into a PC-clone case, it makes me wonder why they dont use a real case solution instead.

I mainly use SCSI for my home lab, but I've started looking at using RAID5 IDE stuff with those cool 8MB cache drives from Western Digital. 240GBs usable RAID5'ed space for $600 including controller?? Sick!

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.

Didn't anybody read the actual article? The drive comes with a free Promise Technology Ultra ATA Controller Card.

The also explain the 137 gig barrier

28-bit addressing, there are only 28 bits available to access a given address on the hard drive, which when all bits are set equates to 137 GB.

By doubling the number of bits that can be used to access a given address, 48-bit LBA addressing pushes the maximum storage limit to 144 petabytes.

Hmmm, how does going from 28 to 48 bits double the number of bits?

Well how long before we will need to change again? It was not long ago that they came up with the 28 bit system. 137 gigs - no one will ever need that much memory. Now its 144 petabytes - no one will ever need that much memory. Hell a quantum transporter will need at least 4 yottabytes. I say go to 128 bit addressing just to be safe.

Western Digital already announced 200GB drives a few weeks ago, so this is probably a Maxtor announcement.

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

Them's megabits per second, Mb/s. If you can find me ATA/133 that does 133 megabytes per second, I'll pay just about any price you can name.

Actually, no, it really is MB/s (megabytes per second). No drive can actually sustain that speed, of course, but the buffer can use it. To use WD's famed drive with an 8MB buffer as an example, the buffer completely empties in about 60 milliseconds. To think... just a little bigger, and you could load ALL of Doom 1 in less than 1/10 of a second (if it were already in the read-ahead buffer, of course).

oops... here's the correct announcement (June 25th) for the 200GB drive.

Oh, wait, no, find me simply a 7200 RPM IDE drive with 8MB of cache onboard.

Available from Newegg for $210.00. Great numbers on Storage Review.

Here is a link to Western Digital's utility that allows you to low-level partition their ATA drives (the WDC seems to be popular in these devices):

http://www.wdc.com/support/download/dlg/dlgdiag.zi p

From the spec:

"The commands as described below may be included in a device without license obligations. However, to be useful in a copy protection environment, the commands need keys, keying material, and intellectual property requiring a license. This license is available from 4C Entity, LLC, and is administered by License Management International, LLC, in California(http://www.lmicp.com/)."

So the keys and crypto algoritms are available through a license. This license will of course contain a lot of requirements (like never exposing the content in cleartext, etc).

there is a ton of information at T13.org. these links require a PDF reader:

• e00148r2 Content protection of recordable media (CPRM) 12/6/00 anderson
• e00152r0 CPRM presentation 10/13/00 anderson

Note the following contact information: Jeffrey Lotspiech <lotspiech@almaden.ibm.com>. Is this the lead project engineer? If you feel like emailing him for information, BE POLITE. Also the presentation mentions someone named David Goldschlag, who may be able to shed more light.

The second link especially has lots of nice diagrams and information about data structures - possibly useful for constructing workarounds and educating people about what this is exactly. Highly worthwhile reading.

still no mention anywhere about SCSI... seems like a "safe" alternative? I'm ready to ditch IDE forever.

there is a ton of information at T13.org. these links require a PDF reader:

• e00148r2 Content protection of recordable media (CPRM) 12/6/00 anderson
• e00152r0 CPRM presentation 10/13/00 anderson

Note the following contact information: Jeffrey Lotspiech <lotspiech@almaden.ibm.com>. Is this the lead project engineer? If you feel like emailing him for information, BE POLITE. Also the presentation mentions someone named David Goldschlag, who may be able to shed more light.

The second link especially has lots of nice diagrams and information about data structures - possibly useful for constructing workarounds and educating people about what this is exactly. Highly worthwhile reading.

still no mention anywhere about SCSI... seems like a "safe" alternative? I'm ready to ditch IDE forever.

...on t13's website, its a presentation on CPRM. They say quite a few interesting things, like on page 3, they mention that its all about the license and not about the crypto. It seems these people will never get it... This whole thing seems like another CSS waiting to happen. BTW, they say that this is only for DVD-R, DVD-RAM, DVD-A, and a few other formats. It seems as though this is meant to keep the EI off the DVD-R makers, nothing more. I imagine that it will be fairly useless tech, but highly enforcible under the shitty ass DMCA. I can't wait until that POS gets before the supreme court...