Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Maxtor's 80GB Drive

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the 100-days-of-music-on-/dev/hdb dept.

debren writes: "Just as I fork out the cash for a pair of 60GB drives, Maxtor brings out an 80-gigger, which they're claiming is a world record. It's the big story on their main page." Yeah I bought a 40 weeks before they released 60s. Remember when a harddrive was still a big deal?

217 comments

  1. platters vs. surfaces by axel+from+afkmn · · Score: 1
    DiamondMax 80 is teh four platter, 20 GB per platter hard drive solution

    ittm four surface, not four platter. unless they don't read from the bottom side of the platter, or something.

    also, i think it would be hard to fit four platters in a 1" high drive, but i'm only guessing ok bye.

    loev,

    --

    Axel
    mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose

    1. Re:platters vs. surfaces by rcw-work · · Score: 1
      They've been able to fit 4 platters into a 19mm laptop drive since at least 1995:

      http://www.q uantum.com/products/archive/daytona/daytona_specs_ page.htm

      (Most laptop drives are around 6mm these days, so I'd guess they'd only have one or two platters.)

    2. Re:platters vs. surfaces by LiENUS · · Score: 1

      i took apart an old like 200 meg drive and it had four platters evidently they can fit four in.

    3. Re:platters vs. surfaces by Lee+Cremeans · · Score: 1

      I've seen drives (both Seagates; a ST32550N Barracuda 2LP and a ST36450A Medalist Pro 5400rpm) that have fit more than 4 platters into a 1" high form factor, actually (the Barracuda has 6, the Medalist has 5). Not sure if anyone else has done it, though.

      -lee

  2. It's not so bad by marcus · · Score: 1

    >Yeah, but you have to get a SCSI adapter, too.

    They don't cost that much. Check out the local swapfests and such. I'm sure you could get a symbios/ncr/lsi adapter for $50 or so. A small cable is not too much and a used drive can be found anywhere for $100 or less.

    Even if you get one without a bootable BIOS, and/or your motherboard doesn't include it, all you have to do is set up a boot partition to hold the kernel on an IDE.

    A couple of other nice things about SCSI is their *external* portability and the addressing. With a little forethought, you can set up a universal address allocation scheme. There is no fiddling with master/slave jumpers or limitations to 2 or 4 devices per box. HDs are ID 1-4, tapes are 6, CDROMs are 5, zips(this really helps) are 0 and so forth. It's a piece of cake to take my zip and disconnect from the laptop, plug in to the desktop, and boot. I just set up all the scsi systems(that I admin) with ID 0 free. No problem to "rescue" a scsi system, just plug in whatever you want to boot with drive ID 0 and go. You can have a full fledged system without the limitations of "what can I pack into a floppy" and no messing with BIOS boot-order settings either. You can plug in any kind of drive from zip to a multi-gig hard drive at ID 0 and the system will try to boot it when it comes up. I have two of these, one is the zip drive, and another is a 2G hard drive with external power supply. The HD has a 500MB partition with windos, another with a basic linux system, lilo setup to boot windos and a selection of kernels with different drivers, 100MB swap, and space for more. It's the ultimate "rescue" package that's usable in *any* x86 system with SCSI.

    --
    Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
    - W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
  3. Re:Filesystems by Nexx · · Score: 1
    Though I agree with you that such a system is possibly a requirement for even the home user, the book's emphasis is on the vast systems used for information retrieval, combining not only the fixed-format information traditinally placed within the databases, but also a free-form multimedia information, such as video clips, images, text documents with formatting, etc., and querying for content.

    As an example from the book, the author lists a database designed to assist the police in apprehending a suspect, by feeding it a recent video of a drug-run into the system, and not only positively identifying the person, but also showing who the suspect's associates are.

    That kind of system is almost a possibility with today's technologies (and it is naive to think that institutions such as the FBI and the ATF do not have systems similar in capabilities as this), but is non-trivial in both the computational requirements and in storage space.

  4. Re:Just yesterday! by V_M_Smith · · Score: 1

    How about 128K for ~$25,000 (back in the 60's)? Big (12" diam.) monsters. They were used to run/collect data from the cyclotron in my department. There are still a couple lying around that are used for demonstrations of rotational motion. In fact, in those days, one could not cycle power more than ~12 times before the read-heads cut grooves into the storage media and the device was rendered useless!

  5. Re:Need is quite real... by toast- · · Score: 1

    Ok. First of all: Duke nukem was merely a reference.

    Secondly, How do you propose that a Game company create a game like Diablo 2? Diablo 2 is a 2d based game that is heavily based on Tiles (jpegs/bmps or any similar format), Animations, and Cinematics. The tiles are only created for one resolution (640 x 480) as no other resolutions are supported. The videos use Bink technology which is likely Mpeg-4 based. (Note: The videos are contained in the Collectors edition on a DVD, which gives you an idea to their length and quality).
    The files are stored in Blizzard proprietart MoPaQ format, which provides custom tuned compression, aside from other features (encryption, etc). This obviously means the files aren't wasting space on your hard drive 'in the open' and are rather expanded as needed.

    Back to the topic at hand, my point is that perhaps my mother won't use 80 gigs, nor even 8, but enough people will find applications for 8 or 80 gigs to warrant companies to put out new and more technologies. There will be no shortage of applications lining up to make use of the extra space, and also no shortage of users willing to use or find those applications.

    I remember when a 1 gig drive was considered to be massive, and i never imagined what could fill up that much space. Now, 1 gig is peanuts and makes for a better ornament than go in an end-users PC. The same is true today, one may not see what can fill 80 gigs, but it will happen. Wait 2 years, you'll see.

  6. Re:D-D-D-Don't believe the hype by smash_phase · · Score: 2

    Official International SI norm:

    1 MegaByte (MB) is 1,000,000 bytes..
    1 MebiByte (MiB) is 1,048,576 bytes...

    Get your facts straight, Maxtor is right..

    And yes, about Maxtors timing issues.., own two myself (not the 80GB) and they suck...

    More details: Large-Disk-HOWTO

    --
    /* Be the change you wish to see in this world - Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi */
  7. Re:Big enough that nobody cares any more by NMerriam · · Score: 2

    This is like saying that everyone needs a dual Alpha system because "I need to solve systems of thousands of equations."

    No, it's like saying "I have a certain amount of space and it's not enough". I never claimed anyone's PDA needed 100 gigs.

    But the thread started with "nobody needs this space". But of course as more people store MP3's (many first-time hard-drive buyers I know are there for MP3 downloads) and do home video editing (which is why I pointed out we don't even use firewire -- too much data!) your mom really will be able to use this space...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.

    --
    Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
  8. a buck a gigabyte? by peter303 · · Score: 1

    I've seen the larger drives coming in about $6-$7
    a gigabye. In a year or two we'll break a buck a gigabyte.

  9. Re:Maxtor unreliable? by exploder · · Score: 1

    The only HDD I've ever had crash was a Maxtor. All I did was drop it in the driveway.

    --
    Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
  10. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Rupert · · Score: 2

    Someone does. Saw them at MS TechEd (shoot me) about a year ago. They said they were putting the 'I' back in "RAID". It was all PCI-based, and looked very nice for the price.
    If I find their name I'll post it here.

    --

    --
    E_NOSIG
  11. 80 GB? by kris · · Score: 2

    That's slightly over two months of MP3, played 24/7. You'll need more than 26000 titles at 3.5 minutes each to fill it, or 2200 CDs with 12 titles each.

    Or in other words, it is well past anything your average radio station is playing. It is not video which killed the radio star, it's MP3.
    © Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

  12. Re:OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar by DoXaVG · · Score: 1

    And I've only had one Maxtor fail on me in years of PC work. In fact I've had a 7.2GB Maxtor spinning (with only a few power offs) doing over 8GB in transfer/day (2+GB file base) for almost three years. I also ran a nice old 650MB Maxtor SCSI drive that was mmm....8 years old I think, powered on most of that time (christ, it was a 650M...at the time it was pulled from service, there were still very few multi gigabyte hard disks out there...so I know it came from a server) and it only died about a year later. Wouldn't spin up *sigh*. Let's face it, every vendor has their bad years. I swear by Western Dig personally, but have had two of their drives die on me; I RMA'd them, no questions asked. Nontheless, I'd agree, the IBM drives ROCK! :) And somehow old IBM's seem to work with them when the BIOS only supports 4GB drives *grin*...it's wierd, IBM told me they weren't even supposed to work and here I am sitting with 8gb platters on old p100's where the comparative Maxtor wouldn't work.

    --Dox

  13. Re:My main drive has been 80 for years by DoXaVG · · Score: 1

    Hahaha, OMG, now that brings back memories :)

    --Dox

  14. Terrabyte by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I can now make, a pretty close a 1 terrabyte machine for under $5000. I can have a promise card with 4 attached, a motherboard with 4 attached and a intel controller with 4 attached. The is 960 gigs. Screw thos $100,000 terrabyte machines. P.S. My experience with maxtor drives have been good. However Quantum, just plain is a hardend floppy drive.

  15. Fault tolerant drives NOW!!! by eVarmint · · Score: 2

    Now, I do coding, gaming, graphics editing, etc. at home and I hardly use even half of my 12 Gig HD. My biggest problem is data integrity, not storage space. Hard drive manufacturers, are you listening? Here is what we need:

    Better Fault tolerant drives! A standard disk drive has 2 platters/ four heads, right? Well, why not implement an internal Raid 5 with four disks, one for each platter side? Then your 80 gig drive would turn into a 60 gig raid 5 array. If one of sides should go bad, the user could be alerted and could transfer the data to a new hard drive before the data is _really_ lost when one of the other sides craps out.

  16. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by aonifer · · Score: 1
    When are people going to start using Ultra160 SCSI for something other than digital video?

    When they start making it less expensive than an Air Force fighter jet.

  17. Re:just curious... by Penguin_99 · · Score: 1

    One of the biggest limitations the hard drives faced were the number of sectors. Originally a hard drive had to have the same number of sectors on track 0 that it had on track n. I'm sure you can see where the problem is. If you have 1024 sectors each holding x KB's on the inner most track you need to have 1024 sectors holding x KB's on the outter most track. Therefor there is a lot of wasted space as you move from the inner most to the outter most track on the platter. Recently they found a way to over come this with variable speed platters and heads so you could better utilize the space on the platter.

  18. Re:Just yesterday! by King+of+the+World · · Score: 1

    Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.

    --
    --Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
  19. I could fill 80 gigs by zxcvbs · · Score: 1

    that 80 gig drive is 40 times bigger than the drive that came with my computer. I should be ashamed. are 80 gig drives for home use ever going to catch on? it's cool to see how big they can get, but won't it get to the point where people just have no use for the extra space

    --
    ----- DevLibrary ( http://devlib.virtualave.net ) -----
  20. My experience with maxtor drives. by Dorao · · Score: 1

    I bought a 6.5G Maxtor drive several years ago... After my 5th RMA, I now have a ~10G UDMA 66 drive, which just died a few days ago (it won't spin up anymore...). I have learned my lesson, I do back-ups on a regular bases :)

    They have a great "no hassle" RMA policy, they are cheap, but that is about all maxtor has going for them.

    80Gs? No thank you. Sure, space would be great for an mp3 server, but not if you loose all the data every 6months. Of course, I have no experience with their newer products... have they gotten any better? Maybe its just me and that has had horible luck with maxtor drives...

    Dorao

  21. Re:Words from the past... by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

    You're right, it was RAM, and it was an urban legend.

    But us old farts remember a time when DOS had trouble dealing with disks larger than 32 Meg. (The first of many limits. 512 Meg. 2 Gig. What next?)

    --
    The cake is a pie
  22. Speed???? by photon317 · · Score: 1
    The 80GB drive is 5400 RPM and only has 4 platters, and therefore 8 heads. The claimed media speed (I assume for a sustained contiguous transfer, which is best case) is 46.7MB/sec. The claimed average seek time is " None of these numbers are too horribly bad for a 5400 RPM IDE disk. My problems are:

    • If you really only use 2-12GB of data, and the other "junk" you'd fill this drive with is archival stuff you're not going to access hardly at all, write your junk out to tape/CD/DVD-RAM or something
    • If you really have close to 80GB of working data to work with, accessing it all from a single 80GB drive is going to be much slower than using 4 20GB drives in a Raid-1 (striped) config... or even just as a 4 disks with different data on them.
    • Of course, it goes without saying that regardless of any of the above, SCSI is better than IDE for serious data access.

    The IDE bus is at 66 on modern motherboards now, with 100 on it's way out the door as we speak (these Maxtor's in question are Ultra-100, incidentally). The very least they could do with these mammoth drives is get the internal speed of the media closer to the bus speed, so that there isn't so much performance loss (versus same data set split over multiple smaller drives).

    --
    11*43+456^2
    1. Re:Speed???? by photon317 · · Score: 1
      [Hopeful-corrective-reply-stoppage]

      I meant Raid-0 (Striped), Not Raid-1, which is mirroring... not that it's material to the comment.

      --
      11*43+456^2
  23. Because some power users want all that space. by xdc · · Score: 1
    When I got a computer with a 100MB HD over eight years ago, I thought that it would be more than I would ever need. Ditto my 16GB HD two years ago. Wrong! I was being short-sighted.

    Now I am convinced that I will always be able to use all the space provided by the latest consumer hard drive offerings. What takes up so much space? Multimedia. I like to store and edit the stuff. Therefore, I need as much space as possible. 80GB is just one step along the way. (I'm not buying one, BTW. I just bought a Maxtor 40GB drive in January, and I'm holding out for maybe a 160GB HD. :) Sure, most people don't need anywhere near that amount of space (for the time being, at least). But things like high-capacity hard drives facilitate computing enjoyment for this power user.

    Just wait... In a couple years, it will be commonplace. In a couple more, it will be absolutely paltry -- even for average users! :)

  24. Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by heh2k · · Score: 1

    1394 isn't 400 megabytes a second it's 400 megaBITS a second. that's 50 megabytes per second. you can easily max that out with a couple newer drives on the bus.

  25. Re:My main drive has been 80 for years by generic · · Score: 1

    My webserver/SMTP server is on a 486/DX2 50. I have two 340meg IDE disks. Works great.

    --
    Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
  26. OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar by ashpool7 · · Score: 3

    The 75GXP has been out since march, supports ATA/100, spins at 7200, and is overall a better drive. Why does Maxtor, a low-end hard drive supplier compared to IBM or Seagage (or WD, but I don't like their quality), get props on slashdot? I mean, seriously, this ISN'T a big deal, except to Maxtor. I'd never buy this drive. Maxtor has serious quality issues. I had a friend get his hard drive replaced THREE TIMES before they just sent him a newer model. Even with that one, it would have problems booting occasionally. (The fact that Maxtor wouldn't help him recover his data, point him in the right direction, or send him the hard drive back to do it himself pissed him off too)

    Yes, this is probably a flame, maybe a troll. But I strongly advise against anyone even considering this drive.

    1. Re:OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 1

      From a look at the specs, the IBM drive is offering a sustained transfer rate of about 19-38M/sec, which generally approximates the physical transfer rate at which data passes under the heads. The Maxtor data sheet claims a to/from media rate of 49.5M/s, or about 25% faster than the IBM drive.

      with ATA/100 being the interface transfer rate for both.

      With admin responsibility for several dozen Dell workstations using a mix of drives, I've never seen any of the Maxtor or IBM ones fail (not so, sadly, the Western Digitals).

      I suspect the problems your friend had were related to his other hardware, software, or cabling if he needed it replaced 3 times. As for "recovering his data", I doubt any drive maker would do that for free; it was probably erased in testing if the drive was not discarded.

      Anyway, he should have just restored his data from his backups.

    2. Re:OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 1

      I've seen an IBM Deskstar fail (10 Gig, don't recall the model). Long ago, I had a Maxtor 420M fail too - but since the DiamondMax versions came out I haven't had problems.

      Ah, except trying to run a Maxtor ATA/66 drive on an Intel BX chipset (e.g. ATA/33). DMA crashed instantly, and got about hdparm 3MB/s in the default mode. This was solved by using a little program I found on Maxtor's site to reprogram the drive to ATA/33, and got raw read rate of 20+MB/s again - the facility also was capable of reprogramming the ATA/66 drive to ATA/100, btw.

    3. Re:OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar by Spy · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but it will cost less than the IBM, most likely ~$150 less. I'd like to see 4 of these in a RAID 0/1 setup, but I'm to lasy...

    4. Re:OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar by theMAGE · · Score: 1

      Well... I don't want to stand out of the crowd (too much) but I have a Maxtor DiamondMax 20Gb 7200 RPM and I'm happy.

      I didn't like Maxtor before... but I've got a deal at Staples (back in January): I bought the hard drive and they gave me a Promise UltraATA/66 controller. It works without a hitch.

      It gets 18Mb/s in the 10 gigs in the middle, it is not noisy and doesn't heat up unreasonably.

      I am happy with it.

  27. Re:Need is quite real... by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 2
    Well, I'm a bit of a data packrat, but I'd kinda expect that you can fill just about any drive in about 6 months. Now, granted, it might take a while to fill 80GB from the net without a high speed connection, but anybody who's going to buy one of these drives is going to have a whole stack of other toys.

    If, for example, you're sucking data from your Digital Video Camera, it's not going to take that long before you're choosing which clip to delete to store that latest 'cool' clip.

    Back around 1989, my work went from 280MB (2x70 + 140) to 1.7GB (1x 1GB plus a 700MB drive [all 5" full height drives]). I predicted that the drives would be over 75% full within 6 months. This had nothing to do with current data acquisition rates -- The 280MB had lasted a couple of years. It had to do with the fact that the space was available.

    Needless to say, I was right.
    Data expands to fill available space. -- Murphy

    --
    Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
  28. Re:Of no concern by Evangelion · · Score: 1


    You have to remember something though - we only have 4 IDE connectors. You can't just toss an arbitrary number of IDE drivers in there.

    Still, you have a point.

  29. Re:Failure and Backups... by Zach+Baker · · Score: 2

    So you need to back up 60 or 80 gigs? D-VHS tapes can hold about 44GB of data (so get two). Looks like all you'd need is to get a deck (about $700 these days for the best-in-category PV-HD1000), connect it with 1394, and dump out all that data onto tape ($15 a pop -- less than 50 cents a gigabyte). Plus, it's a VHS-compatible VCR. Nifty, yes/no?

  30. Re:Platters by exploder · · Score: 1

    I knew there must be some reason. Thanks for the education.

    --
    Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
  31. Re:Take a trip ... (fixed the URL) by Charles+Gaudette · · Score: 1

    They already exist -- Solid State RAM Disks. These are memory chip arrays (usually with battery back-up.) Just like early hard drives they are very expensive.

    $30,000+, 3.2GB, 30+MB/s, and 9000+ I/Os per sec, see .

    Aside from the above, it is easy to see that all hard drive makes are going be shipping 100GB drives by the November time-frame.

  32. Re:Easier solution by salyavin · · Score: 1

    I currently run a 60 gig hard disk with a BIOS that can only see 8. I created a 500k boot partition
    and the rest is one large partition and it works fine. I have another drive in the system to split things up a bit.

  33. Re:Bigger is not better by Basilisk · · Score: 1

    Hard drives, like everything else, is a balance: you can get larger capacity, with only limited performance gains that are associated with bigger platters. Or you can get memory-like speed (50 us access time) with "solid state" drives at the expense of cost, and size (available from 268 MB to 3.20 GB). These babies, however, work on SCSI-3 at can only do 30 MB/s transfer speed. Hooks them up in a RAID striping configuration, and it's even faster.

    There are also, I believe, some solid state - normal hybrids, where there are platters like in mainstream drives but the cache on the drives are huge - the only issue that a battery is required so data can be written to the platters during power outages.

    Ultimately, however, we're going to have to get away from the parallel interface to an uber-fast serial interface (hmm... OC-3 for hard drives?). I think another limiting factor is simply the physics of hard drives... so maybe some sort of holographic sugar-cube storage (this message will dissolve in 5 seconds...). Of course, being able to accurately predict reading & writing locations is good too.

  34. Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by Xenu · · Score: 2
    Ethernet typically falls over dead when the net reaches about 40% of capacity.

    I don't think so.

    Please see Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality.

  35. Re:Big enough that nobody cares any more by genkael · · Score: 1

    You'll find that games under Windoze will quickly suck up a lot of drive space. For instance a full install of Diablo II (which I'm on the last part of) takes 1500 megs and a multiplayer install is 950 megs. Now add that up with a full install of Baldur's gate (2.5 gigs) and about a dozen other games at 500 megs to 1 gig, and it's time for a new hard drive. Admittedly my amiga 2000 has an 82 meg SCSI hardrive (full height 5.25...ouch!) and I'm only useing about 10 megs of it (gotta love it!). True is your final comment that drives are full of junk and most of it's not used. I use about 2-2.5 gigs for a custom install of SuSE on each of my 8 or so machines that are running it. I only use around 20-30 packages on a regular basis. Do some rendering with blender, download some MP3s, forget where you compiled a program and recompile it, and soon you do have a drive full of junk...not to mention if you have Star Office or Applixware installed (Applix rules!!!) This all boils down to the fact that with a normal person playing games and using office suites, playing mp3s and using some other applications you do need more space. This will continue until people learn how to program efficiently. On this note, I took a 41k mod file created in Octamed and converted it to MP3. It's now 2.5 megs. How's that for compression....how much drive space did I lose?

    --
    GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
  36. Re:the downside.... by h2odragon · · Score: 1
    In the past year, I've bought bought 9 Maxtors... 7 of which are gathered on my desk here awaiting return. 4 DOA. and they won't even talk to you about returns until you run their DOS-based diagnostic program; which is a bitch when the drive is so screwed that having it connected causes the computer to hang hard during the boot sequence. I'm worried about the 2 that're still running, I'm aiming to replace them ASAP 'cuz I don't trust maxtor no more.

    Maxtor used to be pretty reliable (my old 120Mb maxtor's are still running), but it seems like about two years ago they went down the tubes.

    # end rant

  37. Re:Words from the past... by lizrd · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure if those words were actually ever spoken, but that was a limitation in MS-DOS at one time. I believe that it was corrected to allow 256MB in ver 3.3.
    ________________

    --
    I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
  38. Re:Useless POS by Datafage · · Score: 1
    Yeah, and a Ferrari 360 Modena is superior to a Mazda MX-3. That doesn't mean the Mazda doesn't have its place, nor that Mazda's shouldn't be available.

    -----------------------

    --

    Nicotine free Amish .sig.

  39. Re:Useless POS by nchip · · Score: 1

    well, Some month ago, our HPuX server's one scsi drive failed. So out to buy a replacment. Unfortunetly, The serrver had Fast-Wide disk's and they are incompatible with the LVD disks they sell all around. And ofcourse, The server has it's SCSI controller connected to a propierty bus, And HP doesn't sell Ultra-Wide controller for it. (new servers come with pci bus)

    At this point, you begin to panic, realizing, that people are starting to need the services that where on the broken disc.

    So the options I found: By a new server (and scrap all the working Fast-Wide disc's - You can't Connect them to the Ultra-Wide Bus. Or by an Fast-Wide disc, with gross overprice (4x the price of a twice a large UW disc!)

    The myriad of scsi variants makes The life of using them a utter pain in the ass. The thumb rule is that nothing works with nothing but the same variant.

    And IRL I have seen no evidence to back the fact that SCSI disc's would be more reliable than IDE ones.

    --
    signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
  40. Re:D-D-D-Don't believe the hype by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 1

    From the IBM Deskstar 40GV and 75EXP product spec at http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/prodspe c/dtla_spw.pdf - I get: (Glossary):

    GB 1,000,000,000 bytes
    MB 1,000,000 Bytes
    KB 1,000 bytes unless otherwise specified

    and a "Customer usable data bytes" of 76,869,918,720.

    Where are you getting 80,530,636,800 from?

  41. but how loud is it? by slakhead · · Score: 1

    yes it might hold 80gb of pr0n....or....games, but if it sounds like a leer jet taking off in the middle of my house i wouldnt want to deal with it!

    1. Re:but how loud is it? by ebh · · Score: 1

      As long as the bearings hold up it should be OK, at least if the large Seagate drives I have behave similarly to Maxtor drives. When the bearings go the drive makes that annoying constant buzz...

  42. Re:Filesystems by Nexx · · Score: 2

    There's an interesting book called Pricinciples of Multimedia Database Systems (ISBN: 1558604669). This is one of the books used for one of my undergraduate course in the same topic.

    Of course, something like this would be completely overkill for the home user, but with something like a large archive of videos and such, it would be invaluable.

    With latest versions of Informix, building datablades for supporting this is possible, but such an undertaking is obviously nontrivial.

  43. Re:Just yesterday! by Earl+Forophor · · Score: 1

    14.4 modem, circa Netscape 1. Hit a pr0n site the first day AOL discovered the internet. $1,000,000 connection charges for March.

  44. Just yesterday! by Jimhotep · · Score: 1

    I bought a 380 meg in 1993 at Sams Club for about
    $380.

    Yesterday they had an emachine+15" monitor for
    $400!

    Give them away!

    1. Re:Just yesterday! by Snocone · · Score: 1

      I bought a 380 meg in 1993 at Sams Club for about $380.

      5 meg. $2795. 1979.

      Beat THAT, dilettante poseur.

    2. Re:Just yesterday! by angry+old+man · · Score: 1
      Bagh. Now that was when computing was computing.

      Nowadays, it seems like you need 80 GB of storage just to store all that bloated young hippy-kid software that they write in Silicon Valley. Back in my day, programmers were upstanding individuals who would optimize code and only include neccessary features into applications. Entire OS's fit on a single floppy along side word processors and games! Nowadays, fancy schmany MS Word is huge, and it does useless things such as fighting with me over capital letters and nagging me about grammar.

      --
      -vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
    3. Re:Just yesterday! by phil+reed · · Score: 2

      5 meg, $5000, 1980. For an Apple ][.


      ...phil

      --

      ...phil
      "For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
  45. Re:Failure and Backups... by NMerriam · · Score: 2


    I lost a 60 gig drive that was 95% full of MP3s -- backup is a big problem at that size. All due to the f%cking highpoint controller card. Next time I'm buying a promise controller and setting up RAID, which is surprisingly the cheapest backup method...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.

    --
    Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
  46. Re:BIOS and such by PD · · Score: 2

    Actually I have 97 partitions on that disk.

    not really, just seeing if you're paying attention...

    Someday when you buy your very own computer, I hope you can afford a disk that's bigger than 8 gigs. That way you will see for yourself that if LILO cannot see the disk properly, then probably fdisk will also not see the disk properly. You won't be able to create partitions above that 8 gig boundary unless you've got either BIOS support, or EZ-DRIVE installed.

    My current machine has a new BIOS, and I didn't have to do anything special with my other 13.5 gig drive.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  47. that's all good, but.. by Greylark · · Score: 1

    how much is it going to cost?

    --
    -- This space intentionally left blank.
    1. Re:that's all good, but.. by isil · · Score: 1

      if you have to ask, you are not geek enough.
      now turn in your badge! >;)

    2. Re:that's all good, but.. by swright · · Score: 1

      ah, but the cheaper they are, the more we can buy without losing out on the beer, cigarettes and coffee required to keep us alive while we trawl the net looking for things to download in order to fill them up....

  48. Re:Platters by Xenu · · Score: 1
    Reading the number of platters that each drive has got me to wondering: could you implement a simple RAID scheme within one drive?

    No. The head positioning wouldn't work properly for multiple active heads, assuming you had read/write electronics for each head. Just because the head on surface 0 is properly positioned over the track, does not mean that any of the other heads are correctly positioned. You would need to duplicate the positioner and read/write electronics for each head. This would be extremely expensive and complicated. It would be cheaper to use N drives of 1/N capacity.

  49. second opinion by Vermifax · · Score: 1

    I have been using maxtor drives for years and have never had a problem with them. Heck my friend has my old three hundred meg drive in his webserver. Admittedly my harddrives only see gaming use and aren't anywhere near as used as a box that's running anywhere near a production environment but still, no problems to speak of.

    Vermifax

    --

    Vermifax

    Logout
  50. Re:Big enough that nobody cares any more by NMerriam · · Score: 2

    We've got 100 gigs on our video system and it's not close to being enough. We don't even use the firewire interface because the files would be too big -- we still capture analog so we can get better compression...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.

    --
    Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
  51. just curious... by laserjet · · Score: 2

    I don't know a whole lot about hard drive construction (of course i've take them apart and whatnot), and I was wondering if there is a limit to how much can fit on your typical 3.5" platter and is there a limit to how many platters you can have? I suppose there would be, otherwise it would slow access times quite a bit since all of the arms on the drive move at the same time to the same place. any hard drive experts out there that know the physical limits? For the most part, I just stick them in my machine and plug away. As a matter of fact, I have never had any problems with a hard drive going out, except when I dropped one a while back.

    --
    Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
    1. Re:just curious... by donglekey · · Score: 1

      it is possible you are remembering a popular science article where there was an optical cube that was going to fit 10 g's in the size of a sugar cube and have almost instant transfer rates I am surprised no one has brought this up yet. That was a while ago when 500 megs and 100Mhz was king so it was pretty outragious. It might not have been IBM. If this wasn't what your were thinking of, why not? Optical? oh yeah!

      --

      This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
    2. Re:just curious... by carlos_benj · · Score: 2

      I thought it was a gel cube about that size that held a terrabyte and it was well before 100Mhz was even on the horizon (late 80's, early 90's maybe?)

      --

      --

      As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.

    3. Re:just curious... by pyronicide · · Score: 1

      You are correct, there is a limit to how many bits can be contained on a 3.5" platter, and how many platter's can fit into a drive. I do not know the exacts, but if i remember correctly, IBM development was talking about just fitting maybe 10 gigabits on a square inch? I am not too sure about that, so, dont take my word for it.

    4. Re:just curious... by MentlFlos · · Score: 1

      Ok, I'm no hard drive expert, but I know you are very wrong here.

      Variable speed hard drives? No... not in the least. Do you hear your hard drive spinning up and down like a (recent) cdrom drive? Not unless something is very wrong with the drive

      They fixed the problem with the number of sectors being constant a _long_ time ago.

      -paul
      ---------------------------------------
      The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
      ... and missing.

    5. Re:just curious... by warkeng · · Score: 1

      any hard drive experts out there that know the physical limits?

      Here is an article from Scientific American (May 2000) that discusses the theoretical storage limits on hard drive technology. (Think this page was also a /. story).

      http://sciam.com/2000/0500issue/0500toi g.html

      --
      -- Spammers: My E-mail server is in California. Consider yourself warned.
  52. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by uradu · · Score: 1

    All true, it's all true what you say, but if it's cheap enough, it doesn't really matter. There is a market for FAST drives, and there is a market for LARGE and not so fast drives. One of those 80GB babies could hold all the CDs I'll ever buy in this lifetime, neatly squashed into MP3s. And it gives audiophiles the option to keep their 320kbps compression without sacrificing capacity too much.

    Things will really take off once we hit the several hundred GB level, where you can do with DVDs what we do with CDs today. I'm thinking of a nice little video server with a couple hundred movies on it, that can serve movie streams to several players at once over the 100BaseT network throughout the house. Oh, and all your CDs fit almost incidentally in the spare capacity of the drive.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  53. Remember? by hawk · · Score: 2

    Is Taco old enough to remember? :)

    I was using one for development in 82, and by 87 it was kind of strange not to have one . . .

    OTOH, I remember being excited about Apple adding the *floppy* as an available peripheral :)

    1. Re:Remember? by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

      I remember in college, working on a room-sized computer that had a removable hard drive. It came with 10 Meg disks the size of a pizza box.

      --
      The cake is a pie
    2. Re:Remember? by isaac_akira · · Score: 1

      I remember being excited about Apple adding the *floppy* as an available peripheral :)

      Jobs giveth and he taketh away. Hallelujah! Praise Jobs!

      - Isaac =)

  54. Have to... by Colin+Winters · · Score: 3

    It works out to 56.89 days of playing MP3s. Wow.

    Colin Winters

    1. Re:Have to... by Phroggy · · Score: 1
      It works out to 56.89 days of playing MP3s. Wow.

      Wow, that's a lot. Good thing I'm getting DSL next month; I only have about 7GB of MP3s so far. I've got some catching up to do!

      --

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
  55. Take a trip down memory lane ... by dbarclay10 · · Score: 3

    Take a trip down memory lane with me, if you will.

    I remember a number of years ago(the number is about 10, I think), I was bugging my parents for a 10MB drive. Why did I want the drive? Not for capacity, of course. I mean, even in the days of DOS 3.3(I think I used DR-DOS, actually), 10MB wasn't a whole heck of a lot. What was it? Fourteen 720k floppies? And with most programs, you could fit four of five on a single disk. Nope, it was SPEED.

    A hard drive was so much faster in those days, compared to the alternatives. So, if you were incredibly rich, you could afford a big fat 20-30MB hard drive, and your machine would be blazing. Incredibly fast(relatively) non-volatile storage.

    Now what do we have? Honestly? Compared to ever other component on our system, our non-volatile storage is damned slow. Even slower than RAMBUS ;) We're solving these problems with RAID and such, but those are really just stop-gap measures. So, today, when you really want to make your system faster, you(generally) buy more RAM. Hard drives just don't get a whole heck of a lot faster over time. I have an old 730M drive I use for my home directories, and it does 8M/second(unbuffered). My relatively-new IBM DeskStar drive gets 16M/s(again, unbuffered).

    So, I ask you this: When are we going to get fast nonvolatile storage?

    Dave

    --

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
    1. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by axel+from+afkmn · · Score: 2
      Highpoint 370 chip [...] Can you say FAST????

      can you say BUGGY???? those highpoint ATA 66 and ATA 100 controllers that come with teh ABIT mobos suck and blow at once. spend an extra us$30 for a promise ATA card that actually works. not as good as scsi, but damned fast and damned cheap and stable. to do ATA raid on teh promise card go here:

      http://detonate.net/raid/

      have fun ok bye.

      loev,

      --

      Axel
      mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose

    2. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by dbarclay10 · · Score: 2

      I can saw "fast", but I don't think that setup will be. I mean, not relatively speaking. If you're using PC100 ram sticks, that'll give you somewhere around a theoretical 800MB/s(I think it's more like 327MB/s). Anyways, that nice little 50-60M/s seems pretty paltry.

      --

      Barclay family motto:
      Aut agere aut mori.
      (Either action or death.)
    3. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Shyryly · · Score: 1
      I shudder to think of the purchase I almost made in terms of a hard drive almost 15 years ago. Hell, I shudder to think that I can think of things 15 years ago. =)

      Cool Wayne's World-ish music into faded past

      I had the cash in hand, and was preparing to buy a hard drive, a whopping, mind-boggling, 20 MB, for my Commodore 64, at the low and reasonable price of $800.00. I would be ever closer to obtaining my dream of running that BBS I was currently operating from my 1541, with the single house phone line and my 1200 baud modem...I just called people when the line was free and told them the BBS was up and available. =D Those were the days...

      Fade back to -now-

      ...which would currently be collecting dust in the box with the other C64 components. My damned watch has more processing power than it does.

      I suppose that's the way of it, though. We'll all probably be saying the same things about the computers we're using as we read and write these messages in the not-too-distant future, let alone 15 years from now. If we're not, we're probably going to be hunting for food and painting on caves instead.

      Good hunting boys!
      -Shy

    4. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by dbarclay10 · · Score: 2

      I feel that that's the problem. What do people buy more RAM for, really? The OS just starts cashing the hard drive. So, gosh darn it, why doesn't somebody make our drives faster?

      Dave

      P.S.: The memory industry must be just eating this up, it's so yummy.

      --

      Barclay family motto:
      Aut agere aut mori.
      (Either action or death.)
    5. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Phroggy · · Score: 1
      When they start making it less expensive than an Air Force fighter jet.

      Well, there ya go. If enough people make it clear that they're looking for fast hard drive access, companies will start competing on price. Until then, we're stuck with things as they are. UltraATA/100 is on the way, though.

      --

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
    6. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Duke+of+Org · · Score: 1

      Tis true..
      I just bought a 20gig 75gxp and am extremly happy with it, fast, quite, and its IBM.
      THe only thing I didn't like was that no docs came with it, but I guess the only thing you really need is the Slave-master instructions printed on the side.
      BTW, I would never buy a Maxtor, theyre very low quality, the HD I just replaced with the 75gxp was a maxtor, and almost everytime I did a Hardboot (no kidding) the computer wouldn't detect it, therefore screwing up LILO, so after doing a soft boot it would detect it though, Kinda sucked!

    7. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Azog · · Score: 2

      Whoa there.

      You have apparently confused the speed of the interface with the speed of the device.

      Serial ATA is just a faster interface. That only helps getting stuff out of the on-drive cache (typically about 1 MB). The real problem is just getting the bits off of the drive platter is still slow. So slow, in fact, that for casual applications there is little difference between the old UDMA and even the new ATA-66.

      It's a mechanical problem, not an interface problem

      By the way, why doesn't someone make a PCI controller card that presents a fast, low-overhead SCSI interface to the CPU and software, but is really a smart RAID controller for a bunch of cheap IDE drives in a RAID config?

      Imagine hooking up five of those Maxtor 80GB drives in a striped config, set up to look like a single, wicked-fast 400 GB SCSI drive?

      Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

      --
      Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
      "HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
    8. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by swright · · Score: 1

      on the way? we already have it in the UK 9labeit rarely) - so i guess u guys must have for ages..

      IBM Deskstar 76.8Gb drives (i forget the model number) at UDMA100

      and Promise Ultra100 EIDE controllers

      raa!

    9. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Fred+Ferrigno · · Score: 1

      Can you say FAST????
      Not really.

      It's 5400 RPM for Christ's sake! Maxtor is more or less admitting that the drive isn't fast enough by releasing the DiamondMax Plus 45, a smaller 7200rpm drive. StorageReview has a nice take on Maxtor's new releases.

      Barring spectacular performance from the DiamondMax Plus 45, the IBM Deskstar 75gxp (available in sizes up to 75gb) is still the king of IDE drives. The 75gxp has some very impressive specs, does well in every benchmark thrown at it, and has some insanely low street prices.

      We can't trust this press release either; it lacks key details about price, speed, and availability. Don't expect to see any of those three drives soon and don't expect them to be anything worth writing home about.

      In the end, we have one drive from Maxtor that might match the 75gxp for speed, and it's only 45gb. The DiamondMax 80 is a joke, a measely extra 5gb for a far inferior drive.

      Want insanely fast IDE RAID? Get a couple of 75gxp drives now for less money.

      --

    10. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by pyronicide · · Score: 2

      What about Serial ATA? Serial ATA, which is on target to be out to the consumer by Christmas, which will have a max data transfer rate of 1.5-2 gigabits/sec, and there will be solutions out later than that that will have multiple channels, imagine a HD with 8 gbs of bandwith, it is happening....

      Unless i am mistaken, ram does not even get 8 gbs of bandwith, last time i checked it was in the 5-6 gbs.

    11. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by core_blimey · · Score: 1

      XSI Sells a rather nice external RAID setup, single SCSI channel into the box, but all IDE to the drives for the actual storage. Handy way of adding that much needed storage space to the little Sun Enterprise 1 you have thats filled up it's little 2G Drive :)

      --
      In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
    12. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Battra · · Score: 1

      Just remember, the Apollo moon missions were done with the aggregate computing power of three C64s.

      Also, at 2600's H2K conference last weekend Cheshire Catalyst built a serial multiplex "network" out of whatever old crap people could bring in. There were several C64s, a couple of TRS-80s a pile of other retrogear. Pretty amazing to see it all work together.

    13. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Phroggy · · Score: 1
      When are people going to start using Ultra160 SCSI for something other than digital video?

      --

      --
      $x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
      $x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
    14. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by benploni · · Score: 1

      Try the new Abit Athlon board. It has an onboard Highpoint 370 chip that does ATA100 and Hardware RAID.

      Put two of these 80GB ATA100 drives on this mainboard and you'll clear 50-60 MB/s.

      Can you say FAST????

    15. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Beevis · · Score: 1

      yup ... i had a 20mb on my xt ... when my campus was upgrading, they were giving away 286 mb's ... i bought 16mbs or ram and hooked them up. at that time, i could fit the entire contents of my hdd on my ram. turbo pascal sure did load fast then.

    16. Re:Take a trip down memory lane ... by Charles+Gaudette · · Score: 1

      They already exist -- Solid State RAM Disks. These are memory chip arrays (usually with battery back-up.) Just like early hard drives they are very expensive. $30,000+, 3.2GB, 30+MB/s, and 9000+ I/Os per sec, see . Aside from the above, it is easy to see that all hard drive makes are going be shipping 100GB drives by the November time-frame.

  56. Not the biggest, but the fastest by MURDOCK1 · · Score: 1

    Before you get a Maxtor, take a look at IBM's 75GXP Deskstars. The highest capacity is only 75GB, but 7200 RPM and ATA100 make it worthwhile. I have 2 of these, and they are FAST!!! And, since I have an Intel motherboard, the BIOS supports them just fine, with no BIOS upgrade.

    --
    Eagles soar, but Weasels aren't sucked into jet engines.
  57. Re:Import restrictions by Loligo · · Score: 1

    >Plus, companies in Hong Kong seem to be affected
    >by little things

    Damn little earthquakes!

    (yes, I know that was in Japan)

    -LjM

  58. Re:Take a trip ... (really fixed) by Charles+Gaudette · · Score: 1

    They already exist -- Solid State RAM Disks. These are memory chip arrays (usually with battery back-up.) Just like early hard drives they are very expensive. $30,000+, 3.2GB, 30+MB/s, and 9000+ I/Os per sec, see . Aside from the above, it is easy to see that all hard drive makes are going be shipping 100GB drives by the November time-frame.

  59. I'll wait on this just like every other new item by pogle · · Score: 3

    The hard drive size increase, the 3-D video card improvements, and the processor speed madness all mean one thing to me: wait. Wait until one of two things happens:

    1. The race slows down. Prices settle, bugs are found and fixed. Support is available.

    2. I require something better than what I have. I've used up my 27 gig drive, and need more. Or my current Voodoo3 dies in a power surge. Or I actually notice performance loss from my celeron 500.

    I see no reason to run out and spend large amounts of money just so I can have the computer with the biggest [insert part here] in the neighborhood. I wait until one of the reasons above--then I usually get it cheaper, and of better quality. I'm not just an average computer user either--I play the best games and do programming, as well as some dabbling into graphics design and animation. I get the fullest use from what I have. And until that doesnt suffice, I wont spend more money on a new product. I dont keep up with specifics, but I do recall hearing about both 3dfx and Intel rushing certain developmental aspects of their products just to release them to match a competitor. I could be wrong, but even just hearing that is enough to make me think twice about buying from them.
    And now, with harddrive sizes increasing drastically, how long until we hit a limit? Or implement a new storage medium thats better and faster? I'd rather wait an extra year for something like that instead of blowing more money every day for the newest old technology with more stuff squeezed onto it.

    Just my $0.02, but unless you really need the space/speed/pretty colors, wait a bit and watch the price go down as quality goes up.

    --
    http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
  60. Re:BIOS and such by PD · · Score: 4

    You can safely use EZ-DRIVE. LILO knows all about it. A couple years ago I bought an 11.5 gig maxstor drive, and the BIOS could only see 8 gigs of it. Since LILO gets the drive info from the BIOS, LILO could also only see 8 gigs of the drive.

    My solution was to install the EZ-DRIVE program which allowed LILO to see the entire drive.

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  61. Price Trends... keeps getting better by ka9dgx · · Score: 1
    I wrote a web page to compute drive prices many moons ago. I keep having to adjust it to make it more optimistic, even though it adjusts for Moore's law. I think it's time again, since I'm almost off by a factor of two in price. It amazes me to see how well the prices keep going down, and down, and down.

    Current estimate (7/19/2000) for 80,000 megabytes: $552.39

    --Mike--

  62. Maxtor is Bad by jjr · · Score: 1

    I found that maxtor drives die usuasly within a few months of heavy use. I always go with IBM or Seagate. If you don't changing out your drive all the time then have fun.

  63. Re:Failure and Backups... by aozilla · · Score: 1

    I lost a 60 gig drive that was 95% full of MP3s -- backup is a big problem at that size. All due to the f%cking highpoint controller card. Next time I'm buying a promise controller and setting up RAID, which is surprisingly the cheapest backup method...

    60 gigs of MP3s? Backup is simple. DSL+napster.

    --
    ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
  64. Re:Hurray! by generic · · Score: 1

    Rock on DONO! now where is my account on that sweet box of yours?

    --
    Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
  65. Re:Sorta timely, for me... by Hershmire · · Score: 1

    Uh, $150? I just bought a new 20.4 gig yesterday for $86. Didn't you check out pricewatch?

    --
    if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll); //Stupid roommates.
  66. Re:Lear by carlos_benj · · Score: 1
    A leer is something that you do with your eyes and generally does not make much noise.

    Well, didn't you see what he wanted to put on the drive?

    --

    --

    As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.

  67. Re:Large drives by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

    Hell, remember when you could get a word processor that fit on a 140k floppy, and flamed game designers for requiring 6 140k floppies for their kick-ass game?

    --
    The cake is a pie
  68. Re:D-D-D-Don't believe the hype by coolgeek · · Score: 1
    Thanks for gently stating the correct facts. I stand corrected. To answer your question, 75 * 1,073,741,824 = 80,530,636,800. My mistake using the traditional definition of GB, 2^30 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. I suppose that could be referred to as 75dGB or dinosaur GigaBytes =)

    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)".

    --

    cat /dev/null >sig
  69. Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by uradu · · Score: 1

    It still is a very valuable technology, since it wasn't meant ONLY for storage, or even mainly for storage. SCSI will also eventually choke on multiple simultaneous transfers. The beauty of 1394 is that it's at the beginning of the lifecycle. There're working on the 800Mbps standard, and even thinking about the 1.6Gbps followup. Eventually it will offer very decent speeds even for storage. Of course, SCSI probably won't stand still either, even though I hate were it's all going with the double wide, double fast, double thick connectors. SCSI is slowly running out of steam and turning up more evolutionary than revolutionary improvements. It took how many years to finally increase the device count to 16 or 32?

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  70. Re:Missing the point: Slow hard drives aren't bad by ucblockhead · · Score: 2

    Troll!?!?!?

    Moderator points are way too easy to get these days.

    --
    The cake is a pie
  71. Backups by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 2

    Does anyone have recommendations for backup units? Anyone know of any good low-cost solutions? I'm having enough trouble deciding how to backup 5-10 gigs, much less 60!

    I recently bought one of those amazingly inexpensive Sony Superstations, which I was pretty pleased with, except I've had 2 tapes out of 6 fail in the last 6 months of use. On the other hand, I live 2 blocks from the beach, and the environment is incredibly hostile to computer equipment.


    --

    --
    Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    1. Re:Backups by Azog · · Score: 2

      Buy another hard drive and mirror the first one.

      With the low prices and insane capacities of hard drives now, that honestly seems like the best thing.

      For example, backing up your 5-10 GB can be done at least twice on the $129 dollar Seagate 20GB drive I bought last month.

      Then just use CD-R's for the really critical stuff, and stick them in a safety deposit box.

      Torrey Hoffman (Azog)

      --
      Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
      "HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
  72. Re:Bigger is not better by TyrantChang · · Score: 1

    But is hd really the bottleneck of the computer right now? I think it depends on what you do. If you play quake, faster hd really don't mean much. For office applications, it doesn't really matter. The only places I can think of that can use a faster hd are servers and dbs. Like right now, I'm running a query on a gig+ db. A fast hd would help a lot. But then again, servers and dbs usually have RAID2+.

    On a side note maybe systems like RAID is the way to go. With striping, you theoretically get 2x speed increase (not in practice though). Or maybe hd with multiple reading heads might give far better performance.

    I think for Joe Average user, fast hd would not help too much against the cost of developing a radically new technology and implementing it.

  73. Failure and Backups... by yawhcihw · · Score: 2

    I have a hard enough time backing up my 6gb drive at home. Where are you going to get an affordable backup solution for that huge 60gb drive of yours?

    I know I'd rather have a few 9gb LVD SCSI drives than one huge IDE. That way, if one fails, you're only screwed a fraction of what you'd be screwed over if your 60gb failed. Besides, SCSI has that ability to do multiple things at once (I think?). Copy a file while writing another, like that. Maybe it's because I grew up a Mac addict, but I've always believed in SCSI over IDE.

    I dunno, something that big just seems to be asking to fail catastrophically.

    1. Re:Failure and Backups... by slashdot-me · · Score: 2

      Raid as "backup" is bullshit.
      A second disk as "backup" is bullshit.

      Say a kiddie breaks into your computer and you don't notice it for a week. In the meantime you've deleted the pre-breakin backup to make room for the current backup. Then you're fucked and have to start from scratch.

      What good is a backup if you delete it every week? What's the point? Raid is even worse. One "rm *" and your data is gone. What kind of backup is that?

      Ryan

    2. Re:Failure and Backups... by soulsteal · · Score: 1
      I have a hard enough time backing up my 6gb drive at home. Where are you going to get an affordable backup solution for that huge 60gb drive of yours?

      Your first statement assumes that typical people actually *FILL* their 60 GB drives. I've got a 30GB hard driver and I have had a hell of a time trying to fill it up. I started with mp3's. But my whole cd collection fit snugly under 10 gigs (about 80 cd's worth) and I still had a ton of room. People who have enough info to fill a 60 gig drive should know of a way to back it all up and should already have a way to back it all up. If I format my hard drive, sure I lose those cd's that i ripped from my collection, but anything else is trivial. Most information on home users' computers is trivial.

    3. Re:Failure and Backups... by NMerriam · · Score: 2

      Raid as "backup" is bullshit.A second disk as "backup" is bullshit....
      What kind of backup is that?

      WEll, if you know of a way to back up 110 gigs of data without buying a $10,000 tape controller I'd love to know about it. Unfortunately, buying a whole second hard drive really is the cheapest method of protecting against the kind of errors I've found most common (though doing it in the same box probably isn't a great idea).

      I have the best security a system can get -- it doesn't connect to the internet at all and I live by myself. My biggest problems are FAT errors and physical damage, not hackers...

      I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
      Q.Tell me what the trail was.

      --
      Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
  74. You mean RAID-0 by SClitheroe · · Score: 1

    RAID-1 is mirroring. RAID-0 is striping

    1. Re:You mean RAID-0 by photon317 · · Score: 1

      Someone just had to correct me... 11 minutes after I corrected myself...

      --
      11*43+456^2
  75. I agree! bring on the BIG drives! by Cybersonic · · Score: 1

    heheh damn, i only have 110gigs of mp3s ,i guess i have some catching up to do ;)

    80 gigs is NOT ENOUGH! I want to be able to have a few movies on my drive and think nothing of it... bring on the 80 terabyte drives! woohoo!

    --
    Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
  76. is spin rate really important? by NuclearArchaeologist · · Score: 1

    Where is the limit really?

    I would think that head read rate is a function only of head design. Small size, right material, low hyserisis, fast state change, fast read.

    Can I then use that better head to pack more stuff on the disk? If I can, I'll pass just as much data despite the speed. In fact, if I go too fast I might not be able to read because I'll exceed my read rate.

    The only reason that I can see spin rate making a difference is in getting to the start position faster.

  77. Re:Make it SCSI by MentlFlos · · Score: 1

    frick'n /.

    well, I'm just claiming this post as mine because something threw up when I submitted it and it went AC

    dangnabbit.. i wanted karma :)
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.

  78. Re:BIOS and such by wilkinsm · · Score: 2

    I recently bought a Maxor 60 GB to replace my 17.2 GB drive. I was strangely confused when I had to jumper on the cylinder translation feature to make it work. I figured since my BIOS supported the 17.5 GB drive just fine, 60 GB would be okay too.

    In the past I've run across the 80MB limit, the ~2GB limit, and the ~16 GB limit, but you would think after all that they would have figured out how to overcome the BIOS translation issue permamently now. Is'nt that what LBA addressing mode is all about?

  79. Re:A mix is even better by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but you have to get a SCSI adapter, too.

    I've waited for a decade for SCSI to become common on motherboards. Sigh...

    --
    The cake is a pie
  80. Seagate 168GB by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I heard that Seagate have shipped "test" versions of a 168GB drive to major vendors like Apple, Dell, Gateway, and so on.

    I don't expect Maxtor to hold on to this "record" for long.

  81. Re:D-D-D-Don't believe the hype by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 1

    I share your pain, more so when the asterisk on a tape drive's claim of capacity leads to a fine-print footnote that says "with compression, with a 50% compression assumed.

    It's an old story though. What with 10-gallon aquarioums that only hold 9.5 gallons of water, "12 inch deep" kiddie pools that are 10 inches at the edge and measure including the sag in the middle if the pool is lifted off the ground... "{insert number]-inch" TVs and monitors.

    And the early byte magazine ad for a computer that claimed "368M RAM!" and had 8M - the manufacturer defined the floppy drive as "Random-Access Memory" "Because it wasn't sequential, like a tape drive...

  82. Re:Filesystems by digitalhermit · · Score: 2

    I'm starting to think that such a system may soon be necessary, even for the home user. As we start doing more and more of our work on the computer, and as it starts augmenting the television and radio, we need some way to keep track of where in the filesystem it's located. For example, I sometimes archive realaudio broadcasts by saving the link. However, the filename is usually a machine-readble index, and rarely has any information about the actual broadcast. Regardless of my filing system, there is still no easy way to search the actual broadcast for an interesting comment.
    I have a similar problem at work with the "paperless" (Hahahaaaa) image solution that was implemented on a filesystem. Remember the old commercial line "Roaches check in but they don't check out." That's sort of how our document filing system works. We can check images into it and get a document number. However, without that document number there is no way to search the image catalog. We have maybe 100 vendors we use. 8 of these are major vendors and searching on their name returns thousands of entries. OCR may help eventually, but given the quality of our invoices (many printed on carbon copy, many bent, folded, spindled and mutilated) it's not a workable option.
    Also, an ideal filesystem would have some sort of revision control a la RCS/CVS. Because we have so much *space*, it may not even be necessary to delete files, merely show the latest version with the option to always recover an earlier version, regardless of the application.

  83. I tire of hearing about the max interface speed... by daveman_1 · · Score: 2

    The max theoretical transfer rate of ultra ATA 100 is 100 MB/second. So what??!! You'd be hard pressed to convince me that this 5400 RPM drive is going to outperform my 10,000 RPM SCSI Cheetah. And what is often missed when SCSI and IDE interfaces are compared has nothing to do with the transfer rate of the interface, but the fact that the processing of I/O from the hard drive is greatly offloaded from the processor to the SCSI controller, freeing up cpu cycles to do other stuff. After using SCSI for some time, wouldn't think of switching to IDE again. I can't remember the last time I made a frisbee out of a CD-R. And yes, I can actually use my computer when I am making a CD without having to worry about ruining the disk. That is the true power of SCSI.

    --
    Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
  84. Re:Mac & SCSI... by up2ng · · Score: 1

    I could be wrong..... IIRC all new (g3 & up) Macs use IDE instead of SCSI because the difference in performance is trivial ? (or is it Cheaper ?) And... Does anyone really notice a difference between SCSI and IDE on HOME computers ? I have both, and except for burning CDs (Yamaha 6416s on an Adaptec 2940UW for Buffer Underrun Protection) is there that much of an advantage for everyday use ? We don't all have Multi-Gig Databases on a RAID setup ! Eh, I just have a 13Gb&10Gb IDE and 1 9Gb SCSI, thats 32Gb that will have better times than a single 30Gb !


    - Save The Whales ,Collect the whole set !

    --
    Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
  85. Re:Useless POS by Rader · · Score: 1

    -- 47 GB SCSI hard drive for $600.

    That's bigger than your "max" of 36, and cheaper than your 5 bazillion dollars you quoted.

    This is an magazine ad I have pasted on my cubicle from last summer. Nice try.

    Rader

  86. Re:Make it SCSI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    ide eats cpu time
    scsi does not

    I have both a 9gig UDMA-33 seagate drive and a 9gig UW 'cuda. When I had them in my file server the IDE drive ate the cpu like you wouldn't believe when xfering large files to/from the server. The SCSI drive did no such thing.

    So not taking into consideration speed (which I did mention in my original post, making a IDE drive 'talk' SCSI would still be benificial.

    oh, and WTF is a sczi? You are so 31337 with your spelling, i ph33r u d00dz

  87. Re:Bigger is not better by mikpos · · Score: 1

    We already have large caches you know. That 'cached' category when you run 'free' (under Linux) or 'top'? That's a cache of the most recently used files. If you think you know more than the kernel does, and want to set up your own cache, then make a ramdisk. The point is that I think adding more main memory will always make more sense than adding a large cache to the hard drive, especially since (on modern systems) 90% of main RAM is unused 90% of the time.

  88. Re:the downside.... by huibuh · · Score: 1
    I wouldnt call IBM reliable. Two of my IBM harddisks died, an EIDE (fast growing number of bad sectors after one year) and an UW-SCSI drive (stood still during operation after half a year). My friends UW-SCSI IBM drive had bad sectors after one year.

    However, IBM harddisks are cheap, and certainly they are fast. Reliability is the price you have to pay.

  89. Re:Words from the past... by DogzOfWar · · Score: 1

    I think I heard that was an urban legend, but it was about RAM. Something like "You'll never need more than 640k of RAM".

  90. Re:the downside.... by jawad · · Score: 1

    Pshht. Get a 75GB IBM drive if you're so hard up for IBM. I myself am getting a 30.0GB external firewire drive from Western Digital through buy.com (mfg part #WD300A001-RNN).
    ~jawad

  91. 2 words by Acy+James+Stapp · · Score: 1

    Flash Bios

    --
    -- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
    1. Re:2 words by axel+from+afkmn · · Score: 1
      mheh. my friend in SV tried to flash his BIOS while on the phone with me. he goes

      "ok, the progress bar is going across.... almost done.... shit."

      after toasting his BIOS, he ended up with teh $95 useless pcb. heh. so he took it back to fry's and told them it didn't work right and they gave him a new one. ;-)

      i was a bit more fortunate. i expect that a BIOS revision from three weeks ago can understand 80 GB drives ok bye.

      loev,

      --

      Axel
      mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose

  92. SCSI can reach 73.4 Gig actually by Rurik · · Score: 1

    Our company bought 4 of them about 3 months ago, for use as a file cluster. Seagate makes the ST173404LW. They're Ultra160, 10k RPM, and great for speed, but cost us around $1700 each.

  93. D-D-D-Don't believe the hype by coolgeek · · Score: 2
    The 75GXP is only marginally smaller than the Maxtor 80GB. Maxtor Megabtyes are actually smaller than real Megabytes - No kidding! (read small print on the 1 page owners manual included with each Maxtor) Maxtor considers 1,000,000 bytes to be a megabyte, whereas most propellor heads like myself consider 1,048,576 to be a megabyte.

    Deskstar: 80,530,636,800 bytes
    Maxtor: 81,964,000,000 bytes

    Not that big a difference. My money is on the deskstar, I've not had a single Deskstar or Travelstar fail on me, while I've tossed plenty of WDs and Maxtors. I would be willing to bet that ATA-66@7200rpm beats ATA-100@5400rpm in the trenches...Increase rotational latency by about 25%.

    --

    cat /dev/null >sig
  94. Sorta timely, for me... by alumshubby · · Score: 2

    ...I just sent a check for about US$150 for a brand-new 20-gigger. I'd only want an 80 if I had access to a T3 line and was a hardcore Napsterite.

    --
    "How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
  95. Yeah.. But.. by Sheepdot · · Score: 1

    Well, okay, you have me there, but I've never owned a computer when I filled up all 4 IDE connections. I have yet to try and own a DVD and CDRW and Zip all at once either. But for personal users needs, I think only 2 IDE HDs are needed. Buy a 40 to 60 gig now, another 40 or 60 in 6 months (or whenever that one is full), and by the time that one is full, you can just buy the HD that is currently closest to the price of the original 40 or 60 gig that you purchased, and copy the files over. It seems like a lot of money, but for the difference in price of 60 to 75, or 60 to 80, it is really worth it. There is little chance that you could fill an 80 or 75 gig HD much faster than you could fill a 60 gig. I mean, we are talking about replacing tape drive storage systems with "purchasing a second hard drive".

  96. Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by carlhirsch · · Score: 2
    1394 isn't 400 megabytes a second it's 400 megaBITS a second. that's 50 megabytes per second. you can easily max that out with a couple newer drives on the bus.

    Crap... that really disappoints me. That means that the gigabit Ethernet shipping with the G4's is effectively faster than the Firewire ports. The only advantage being the plug&play device management. That really pokes holes in my thinking of Firewire being a valuable storage technology. I guess those SCSI cards are still essential after all.



    -carl
    --
    . We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
  97. I wonder... by Coz · · Score: 2
    Think in terms of the big apps running these days, and the machinery behind them. Can our OSs handle these huge drives? Can Oracle or Informix or Sybase effectively use this much space? Or will we have to partition these physical drives into 8-10 smaller spaces, thereby pandering to the limitations of our software technologies?

    I can forsee a whole lot of wasted space as folks start defining multi-meg partitions. I'm pretty sure my BIOS won't understand it, either (but I'm sure there's a nice CDROM with the drive package that'll take care of that for me).

    Wonder when the software folks (OSs, DBs) are going to start building products that will be able to use the hardware of their futures, and not their pasts?

    --
    I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
  98. Re:Big enough that nobody cares any more by tsangc · · Score: 1
    As such, I don't see much point in them getting bigger, or at least in headlines about them getting bigger.

    Speak for yourself. Anyone who does video editing certainly wants more storage. I have a 20GByte disk dedicated for video storage for my MotionJPEG industrial edit card and I'm always in a pinch for space.

    This isn't just for professionals either-ask anyone who has purchased an iMac DV-a regular consumer machine with FireWire. At 3MB/sec, it fills fast!

  99. Malda uses it to house his Natalie Portman .MPEGs by Richard+Stalinuxman · · Score: 1
    80 Gigs that fits about 8 Natalie Portman movies. He will rent these from the videostore and copy them using DeCSS.

    And it might just leave room for Malda's favourite movie of all time, Sergei Eisenstein's October (about the communist uprising in Russia), as it is a silent movie.

    So, will he store these on his 80 gig beast?

    1. Anywhere But Here (1999)
    2. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
    3. Mars Attacks! (1996)
    4. Everyone Says I Love You (1996)
    5. Beautiful Girls (1996)
    6. Developing (1995)
    7. Heat (1995)
    8. Léon (1994)

    Expect Malda to cut back on his ./ posting as he pours some hot grits down his pants imagining he is Natalie Portman's jeans.

  100. Re:Not much point in faster hard drives by Gerdts · · Score: 1
    Relying on RAM to perform disk caching is great if you spend your days sitting around reading /. If, however, you commonly read and write to more disk space than it is feasible to have RAM, a whole bunch of RAM does not really help.

    For instance, when you are streaming data to disk at a high rate, you really do not want it to hit the file system buffers. Suppose you have a workstation that is writing out a 100 gig of data. Suppose you are incredibly fortunate and have 4 gig of RAM on this machine. You do not want to use up all 4 gig of RAM 25 times as you are writing this data. If you do that, not only are you thrashing your RAM, but you are wasting lots of CPU cycles trying to figure out which buffers you should not use. Rather, you want the data to bypass the buffer cache so that your /etc/resolv.conf lib*.so, and half of /usr/bin stay in FS buffers. See the "Veritas Performance" section in this paper for an intro to Discovered Direct I/O.

    Developers and users have a habit of looking at the falling price of storage and the increasing capacity as reasons that they can bloat software, use larger data sets in simulations, etc. The problem with this is that if capacity continues to increase faster than performance increases, the net result is that it takes longer for me to accomplish a similar task as time goes on. I can honestly say that my 386 with a WD 80 MB drive and 2 MB of RAM started WordPerfect 5.1 much quicker than either of my current Pentium PRO machines can load versions of WordPerfect or MS Word that were state of the art when my PPro machines were new.

  101. Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by stripes · · Score: 2
    Please see Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality.

    Nice paper. Quite old though. Things have changed a bit. The speed of the ethernet "bus" has incresed, but the packet size hasn't. However the very nice change for Ethernet is that switches are far far far more common now then in 1988ish. Cheaper per port then a repeater was in '88 by a lot. I havn't even seen a Gigabit "hub" that wasn't a switch.

    Tieing in with that, full duplex Ethernet is now failry common. And you can get almost 100% utilisation with two hosts on a net and full duplex Ethernet. You can do that with more hosts if you have all switched ports and the right access patterns (no overcommit). Assuming the switches don't suck of corse.

    I still have a soft spot in my heart for FDDI, but all switched ethernet is pretty good.

  102. Yep, install the jumper, screw BIOS by ch-chuck · · Score: 2

    That's right - if your running Linux and boot off a SCSI drive you dont even NEED to install the disk drive in BIOS! The kernel drivers will find it. However, if you do need to boot off the beyond-bios-capability disk, sometimes they have jumpers that make it report fewer cylinders, just to get around BIOS (if it locks up or otherwise freaks out), and then the Linux kernel will still use the entire disk.

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  103. Why does this even rate? Seriously, I'm asking. by Kris_J · · Score: 2

    A few months back I bought an external IDE box with a USB interface so I could connect a 20Gig hard drive to my Ultralight PC. It's mostly for playing MP3s off of and other really low bandwidth things. I had no problems and it cost 30% less than the 170MB hard drive I bought for my 386 about 10 years ago (I have a job now and all ;). The prices are inane, the sizes insane. You can easily connect more than one HDD to any PC these days, what does it matter if it's 60Gig or 80Gig? There's even network drives - Quantum has an ad in the latest APC - that plug into any 10/100 network. Storage is trivial, so why the story?

  104. Hello? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Does anyone realize IBM doesn't even manufacture drives? Go look at any IBM hdrive and it's got an IBM sticker slapped on most often, GASP, a maxtor drive. Needless to say, memory and most parts on all IBM pc's are not even made -designed- by IBM yet they all bear the IBM logo.. Just checking.

  105. Very BIG & Important... !!!!!!!!! by Yardley · · Score: 2

    Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

    --

    --

    --
    He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
  106. My main drive has been 80 for years by bluGill · · Score: 2

    Whats the big deal? The main harddrive on my most important machine has had a capacity of 80 for years.

    Oh, and whats with replacing the M with a G in there? Some new ISO thing?

    Seriously though, I still boot my old 386 from a 80 meg drive, which cranks out about 3 rc5 blocks a day. Makes a good router though, and except for a little noise isn't a bad foot rest. Haven't had a monitor in a while.

  107. Re:Need is quite real... by fudboy · · Score: 1


    "Now, I don't know the specifics of the programming methods used, but almost all programs these days could be done more efficently...and thus made smaller..."

    Well now, the bulk of any modern video game is artwork and music, already compressed to the maximum capable levels (with todays proven techniques, experimental==flaky). Programming hardly figures into it. If you want a visually/aurally satisfying title, it is going to require gobs of unique textures, sprites, mp3's and/or .wav's. Since this is the only sort of title that sells these days, what's a poor developer to do?

    In short, please go easy on the gamemakers. They are not bloating the titles for the hell of it, excepting of course that one example of 'Baldur's Gate' on 5 CD's, which made that circa '96 quality title seem impressive to many 'casual' gamers.

    Anyways, to get back on topic, while it may seem that the only thing worth keeping on that much space is movies, games and warez archives, as faster and larger storage devices become the norm, new uses will be discovered.

    Off the top of my head, I forsee a burst of new layers on top of the regular internet. We are witnessing the birth of these systems even now in things like napster and setiathome. a next step might entail the adaptation of RAID redundancy across the network, with micropayments for the amount of storage/bandwidth you contribute. This might mean a geek could lay down a partition and listen to/watch the commercial web for free, which is certainly going to be an issue soon.

    Another benefit in ultra cheap storage is that thin clients will have no excuse for existing. I am certainly never going to store copies of my check book or some pr0n or a copy of the "anarchist cookbook 2005" or rants about public figures (in private documents, even) on Sun's private network. Just look at DoubleClick or Toysmart succumb to the temptation of selling out the basic demographic data of their userbase! It is my opinion that one would needs be a complete idiot to trust Sun with that stuff.

    :)Fudboy

    --

    :)Fudboy

    I guess I'm only a Fudboy, looking for that real Transmeta
  108. Re:Need is quite real... by toast- · · Score: 1

    I have to disagree with you, in the sense that "only people running servers with vast amount of data need larger drives". ALMOST EVERYONE needs larger drives, and the proof is obvious.

    For example, a REGULAR install of Diablo 2 takes up 700 megs. a FULL install (which many will do) takes up 1.1 gigs. This is echoed amongst many of the VERY popular games, where they can often take up 1 gig of space on your HDD.

    This means i can only store 6 similar games on my 8.4 gig drive not counting other applications.
    Funny, that amount of space would store hundreds of copies of Duke Nukem 3d (1996)

    IMHO i think the attention to storage should be drawn elsewhere: for example 1.44 meg floppies? So almost useless we can do without.(boot disks are the only use for it in my world, as documents can be stored on a network). CDROMS? 640 megs isn't cutting it anymore.

    In 1990 the average hard drive consisted of 28 floppy disks (i had a 40 meg drive!).
    Today, the average drive (14 gigs) stores 21 CDROMs.

    80 gigs is 120 CDROM's (approx). That's a lot of backup CD's.

    Clearly, one needs a easy, cheap method to back this data up.

    Bring on the big drives. I'll be getting one once they hit 200 USD. By then maybe those solid-state 50gb-1kgb devices will be on the horizon..

  109. Re:Big enough that nobody cares any more by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 2

    We've got 100 gigs on our video system and it's not close to being enough.

    This is like saying that everyone needs a dual Alpha system because "I need to solve systems of thousands of equations." There's a difference between someone working at, say, Pixar, are Joe Linux Tinkerer (as much as Joe hates to admit it).

  110. Tired of these little steps.. by PopeAlien · · Score: 1

    Aw, c'mon. Lets have a real BIG leap in capacity! I want a 30 Terabyte drive that fits under my thumbnail and an optic implant. Lets get FUTURISTIC allready! Sheesh.

    --
    air and light and time and space
  111. Big enough that nobody cares any more by Junks+Jerzey · · Score: 2

    I bought a 6 gigabyte HD in 1998. I have a 2MB linux partition and a 4MB Windows partition. I have some big Windows apps installed, like Delphi and the Corel Draw suite, plus some kids multimedia software, and that machine gets used for both software development and graphics arts. Even so, I'm using only about a third of the space, maybe a bit more. Most of that is for operating systems and software; I'm using less than 50 MB for data files (mostly Photo Paint images).

    Heck, I still have a Power Macintosh with a 350MB hard drive. It'ss used for software development, web design, email, and a maintaining a database. There's still about 160MB free.

    I tend to think that most hard drives are filled with junk, like application suites of which only a few parts get used, or preinstalled software, or MP3 collections. As such, I don't see much point in them getting bigger, or at least in headlines about them getting bigger.

  112. Re:Useless POS by slickwillie · · Score: 1

    My point was not that they should only make what I want, but that it is only available in IDE, not both IDE and SCSI.

    I guess my post was didn't fit your expectations, so that makes me a bad person.

    BTW, ucfuckwad, I have both IDE and SCSI at home. SCSI is superior.

  113. Platters by exploder · · Score: 1

    Reading the number of platters that each drive has got me to wondering: could you implement a simple RAID scheme within one drive? For example, 9 platters with the first 8 storing 1 bit of each byte and the last platter for parity? I guess technically it would be a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Platters, but that probably wouldn't be the best name from a PR standpoint. I can immediately think of one drawback, in that a bad area on one platter would prevent the use of the corresponding areas on the other 8 platters. Other than that though, if one of the heads were to crash and leave a big skid mark on one of the platters, the drive could still serve data and issue a warning to the OS. I realize that if this were a really feasible idea it probably would be done already, so I'm curious about the reasons why it isn't.

    --
    Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
  114. Re:Isn't it slow though? by Another+MacHack · · Score: 1

    RPM doesn't tell the whole story; data density also plays an important role. As data densities increase, the amount of data accessed in a single rotation also increases. So, while more RPMs are always nice, a 5400 RPM drive made today is going to have a greater transfer rate than one from a few years ago.

  115. Re:BIOS and such by shinji · · Score: 1

    Buy a quality motherboard from a good company. Lots of those bargain bin motherboards about 15-20 dollars cheaper never update the BIOS. Buy from a quality source, check previous motherboards and see if they are updating old motherboard BIOSs.

    I personally buy ABIT, but I like ASUS also.

    --
    Remove the spam reference to email
  116. RPMs matter a lot for some applications by billstewart · · Score: 5
    What are you trying to _do_ with an 80GB drive? If you're going for maximum playback or recording rate for streaming material, that's one thing; going for fast seek times for an SQL database is another, and file systems are also different.

    RPMs matter for video, in that they help a drive crank out data at a high rate, but that also depends on how much data is on a track (and controllers and such). An 80GB drive probably has lot more per track than the once-fuge-and-fast 10GB 7200RPM drives you need for video, so going 5400RPM instead of 7200 probably isn't a big difference, because it's probably still fast enough for real-time.

    Most Unix and other file systems tend to be optimized to minimize seek time. This is because back when the theory developed, in the mid 80s, seek times were a lot slower than rotational latency, and you dealt with rotational latency by track caching, especially as memory got cheap enough to cache tracks in the disk drive's controller. Margo Seltzer did some work in the early 90s showing that this was no longer really the case - seek times were down under 10ms, and rotation speeds were mostly 3600rpm, with newer drives using 5400, which meant average rotational delay was 6-8ms. This means that it makes more sense to schedule disk accesses based on expected rotational latency as well as seek time between tracks, because they're now of similar magnitude. That was a few years ago, and seek times have gotten a bit faster, and RPMs have gotten higher, so if you're trying to do cutting-edge random-access file system performance, yeah, you want the high-RPM drive. But if you've got a spare 64MB of RAM for disk cache, you'll optimize most of that away. And if you're using the 80GB for high-performance SQL databases, you can't wait for moving parts anyway, so you've spent the extra thousand dollars for the extra GB of RAM.

    --

    Bill Stewart
    New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
  117. Re:Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by phil+reed · · Score: 2

    Ethernet typically falls over dead when the net reaches about 40% of capacity. 40% of 1Gb/S = 400 Mb/sec. That's why they came up with switching hubs.


    ...phil

    --

    ...phil
    "For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
  118. Re:Make it SCSI by Salant · · Score: 1

    It looks like a good way to waste money actually. It doesn't give you any of the speed, or reliability of sczi drives it just lets you connect an ide drive to a sczi card. The drive can't transfer data any faster no matter what interface the pc see's it on. And with most motherboards having built in ide slots its a waste of money.

  119. Missing the point: Slow hard drives aren't bad by xtal · · Score: 2

    Slow hard drives are fine, as long as they hold what they're designed to and can read streaming media *ahem* at an acceptable rate (Which they can just fine; they're stupid fast for video and audio streaming, albeit single user).

    What you need is a 1gb disk of solid-state storage that's fast, just like the high-speed SRAM cache that's on your motherboard/processor and how it talks to the slower (normal) dynamic memory.

    I think you'd get interesting results if this was supported on the operating system level. I use huge hard drives for a central database of (my) mp3's and movies - this is really convienent. I don't need speed for that, cheap-ass 20gb 5400rpm drives are already overkill!

    If you selectively filtered streaming content from a NVRAM cache that's big, and let things like games get loaded in there (and operating system libraries, etc) I think a real speedup would be possible. I wonder if anyone knows if this is planned for the next generation of hard drives? I know there's research into non-volatile solid state storage being done by IBM and Quantum.

    For the record, I remember buggin my mom to get a abhorently expensive 10MB drive for my Commodore 64 (yeah, they existed!).. heh heh.

    --
    ..don't panic
  120. mmmmmmm.......p3's by Atticka · · Score: 1
    80GB of pure MP3 goodness!

    imagine a MP3 car stereo with a 80GB HD in the trunk.....how many weeks of music is that?

    Atticka

    --
    No sig here...
    1. Re:mmmmmmm.......p3's by john.wingfield · · Score: 1

      I make that about 7.5 - 8 weeks of music... give or take! J

    2. Re:mmmmmmm.......p3's by Ranger+Rick · · Score: 1
      I've got 15 gig of MP3s and it's at least 2 weeks' worth.

      :wq!

      --

      WWJD? JWRTFM!!!

    3. Re:mmmmmmm.......p3's by generic-man · · Score: 1

      No. He said "give or take." He linked to Napster, a way to give -- or take -- music files.

      --
      For more information, click here.
  121. Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it? by carlhirsch · · Score: 4

    As it stands, we treat our hard drives like really big bags in which to keep all of our stuff.

    We don't have the bus speeds or the interfaces to really take advantage of drives this big. You can spin that drive as many RPMs as you want, but do you really think that ATA/100 is going to amount to that much real-world speed? Even the firewire spec, which everybody talks about being such hot shit, doesn't come near to the promised 400MB/s throughputs.

    Sure, you can keep a whole heap of DVD movies and MP3's on these huge drives, but it's gonna be some time before technologies start catching up to drives of this capacity.

    Also, I'm not an expert on Linux file systems. Can Linux take advantage of huge drives like this for fast searching? Apple's HFS+ does a pretty good job, but the lag starts to show at hefty drive sizes.

    -carl

    --
    . We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
  122. too bad they only offer it in 5400rpm by dolanh · · Score: 1

    I'll wait for the Plus model...

    --

    just my blog and pix

  123. Re:Make it SCSI by breezer · · Score: 1

    A limitation of this product to consider:

    - 32GB formatting limit (which according to the website: expect will be "field upgradeable" with a Note: This "field upgrade" is not a certainty)

    IMO the only advantages I can think of using this solution instead of buying an IDE controller card or using MB's IDE controller:

    - connecting 7 drives in a single cable
    - if you don't have any spare IRQs for IDE
    - you want to visit your SCSI-only-friend with your IDE-drive

    Hardly any extra performance or reliability of SCSI is gained with this solution.

  124. 80 is not too big by Rader · · Score: 2
    I have to disagree with the people saying that 80GB is out of control. Even for the home user...

    With video capture getting more and more popular, even mom and dad will need more room for their vids. And it never takes long for the software people to come along with something and fill up any remaining space!

    Plus, anything bigger and nicer that comes out, drives down the cost of yesterday's model, which is just fine for me!

    I have 2 hard drives on my machine. The first one is used for the Operating System and Applications only. It's 8 GB, and I'm constantly running out of space. True... my girlfriend seems to download her gymnastic videos to this drive instead of the other drive... but even after I clean it up, I'm still hovering around 7 GB just for apps, o/s, and 2 games.

    Picture a family with one comptuer: where the kids both have their mp3's piling up from napster, games getting added on a monthly basis. dad sneaking some porn at night, and mom filling it up with cookbooks, and ligit video editing, and you have a system I wouldn't sell without atleast 20GB. It'll only get worse/better... So bring on the 80Gigs!

    I'm still looking forward to the day that I can buy *ONE* hard drive that will hold my whole MP3 collection.

    Rader

  125. Of no concern by Sheepdot · · Score: 1

    Seriously though, you can already buy 75 gig HD from any of the companies listed on Pricewatch (www.pricewatch.com) So why bother getting that extra 5 gig?

    I suppose that is maybe 5 more DVD rips.. Hmm.. mabye it *is* worth it.

    Check the prices on Pricewatch for a 75 gig HD, ($530+) and then look at the prices on just 15 gig less. ($245+)

    That is over 200 dollars for a difference of 15 gig!

    So how much more is the 80 gig going to be than the 75 gig? I shudder to think of it...

    1. Re:Of no concern by rotor · · Score: 1

      Seriously though, you can already buy 75 gig HD from any of the companies listed on Pricewatch (www.pricewatch.com) So why bother getting that extra 5 gig?

      Isn't it funny how small 5 GB sounds when you're talking about 75 to 80 GB? I read that and thought, "Yeah, 5 GB is tiny." Then I realized that my computer only has 6GB and I rarely find myself in need of more.

      --
      Addlepated - punk & metal
  126. Re:Words from the past... by Vaz · · Score: 1

    You tell me, I had to split my 42mb HD into 2 seperate partitions to use all of the space due the DOS' 32 MB limit.

    Yeah, I am old fart :)

  127. Isn't it slow though? by evanbd · · Score: 3

    The info says it runs at 5400RPM for "fast performance" so that it can support ATA100. Is it me, or is 5400 now considered somewhat old and slow, with 7200 asthe new standard for good performance (in IDE). BTW, SCSI is up to 15000RPM on 160MB/s -- the Seagate Cheetah X15.

  128. How much $$$/Gig? by cvd6262 · · Score: 1
    Buy.com - which was linked from Maxtor's site, didn't have these listed. How mych will they cost? It's probably not worth it.

    I set up my box initially with a 27GB Western Dig. for $150. Last week Western Dig. 45GB went on sale for $190. So, for $340, I got 72GB of storage. which is cheaper than the IBM 75GB drive, and has a better seek time/is easier to keep cool, etc.

    --

    I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.

  129. Yes - another disk by ch-chuck · · Score: 2

    My strategy is to mirror two disks on the server, and nightly copy important data to a backup server with a single similarly sized disk. Then you have three copies over two machines. If you must have tapes a (relatively expensive but nice) DLT tape drive and/or library will handle it. I think they go to 80Gigs compressed, and are fast. Yep, my 8Gig-compressed DAT is getting smaller every day.

    --
    try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
  130. the downside.... by Da_Monk · · Score: 2

    The downside of this is that it this new hard-drive is a maxtor, and not a more reliable drive, like an IBM. only a matter of time i guess tho... mind you I have not had that many problems with the 6GB maxtor I got, but the 30GB died within a week. just gotta find a way to flush out all the mp3's, warez, and pr0n before i return it. :)

    I have been insanely happy with the pair of 45GB deskstars i got to replace it *grin*

    1. Re:the downside.... by h2odragon · · Score: 1
      none of the above.

      In the same time frame, I've bought IBM SCSIs, Western Digitals, fushitsus, and Quantums IDEs; all of which live in the same conditions as the maxtors, and none of which have had any problems.

      'cept for one of the DOAs and one that died after 3 months, the maxtors have all got bad sector troubles enough to prevent further writes to them.

  131. Re:80GB is quite a bit by mduell · · Score: 1

    And to think, a week ago i got 128MB for $100

    Mark Duell

  132. Awesome! by pb · · Score: 1

    Wow, I was hoping the 60GB drives would knock down the price of the 40GB drives; maybe I'll get something massively larger for the same money, now! For me, it'll all boil down to price/performance, with a constraint on price.

    I was also considering getting two 20 or 30GB (or maybe two 40GB!) drives, and using Software RAID under Linux to increase their performance. How well does this work? Should I bother making a few partitions and using RAID-5, or should I just stripe them?

    Also, I don't think I could ever use that many .mp3's! Time to start an ftp archive, or a very large http cache, or edit video, or store billions of digits of Pi, or something...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

    --
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
    1. Re:Awesome! by BDew · · Score: 1

      Ahh... but mp3s are good for more than just playing them! Imagine, every song Metallica ever made (including bootlegs) downloaded for free and sitting unused on a drive someplace! I'd do it just for the laughs (until I needed the space, of course....) B

      --
      "Fifty million Americans can't be wrong," said Rep. Billy Tauzin. Gore - 50,999,897 Bush - 50,456,002
  133. Fibre Channel... by willis · · Score: 1
    Fibre Channel is a pretty damn promising technology, but it doesn't seem to have hit mainstream 100% yet.

    FC currently runs at 200MB/s (nearing 2Gb) for bandwidth, and a single "fabric" can take an almost infinite (2^24) number of devices... (of course the host computer understands it in SCSI terms, and can only address 1024 on a single card...

    willis/


    Disclaimer, I work for a fibre channel consulting company, but just started...

    --

    there is no thing
    what else could you want?
    1. Re:Fibre Channel... by uradu · · Score: 1

      I really need to read up more on FC. What I've heard sounds really great, but it doesn't seem to be currently aimed at the consumer market. Prices I'm sure are way out of Best Buy territory. Besides, what about driver support in mainstream OSs?

      For that matter, I think the latest and greatest SCSI is getting too expensive for mainstream use. The controllers might be somewhat reasonably priced (depending on your definition of "reasonable"), but hard drives are simply not competitive with IDE, not even close. And I think the speed benefit for mainstream use is extremely incremental. When a heavy app starts in 1.5 seconds on ATA66, an extra .2 second or so is simply not worth any money to me.

      Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  134. ucblockhead by slickwillie · · Score: 1

    I apologize for my previous response. I've had lunch and I feel much better now (blood sugar must be stabilized).

  135. Large drives by kk5wa · · Score: 1

    Remember when a 40 MEGger was a large drive? When an 8088 with a 20 mb hard drive was "the bomb?"

    My age is 238 in your "internet" years.

    --
    sine puella vita suget
    1. Re:Large drives by pyronicide · · Score: 1

      Wait a sec, i remember those times, and yet i am 17....? Oh well, i guess i am obligated to feel like an old-timer now.

  136. Re:The OSM Saga (daily posting) by georgeha · · Score: 1

    how refreshing, a narrative. Keeps me checking all the /. stories just to get the latest chapter.

    George

  137. Serial ATA by pyronicide · · Score: 1

    When are people going to remember Serial ATA?????

    Controllers and drives out by christmas that are going to do 1.5-2 GIGABITS.

  138. Re:BIOS and such by Grand+Facade · · Score: 1

    What? No BIOS upgrade availlable? That may help you in your next choice of MB mfgrs.

    --
    Rick B.
  139. A mix is even better by marcus · · Score: 1

    There are three 1-2G SCSI drives for OS, swap, progs, home, and so forth in my "at home" server. There are also two IDEs that are 17G and 25G that are used for bulk storage of mp3s, netscape tarballs from v4.05 onward ;-P etc. They are great for backups as well. Just set up a cron job to copy everything from your working system, tgz it, label it, and save it for later. Do it every night/week/whatever.

    BTW, the two IDEs cost the same and together cost as much as one of the SCSI drives. Of course there is a time lag between the purchases, but still this data/dollar ratio is ridiculously small and still shrinking.

    --
    Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
    - W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
  140. Lear by marcus · · Score: 1

    A leer is something that you do with your eyes and generally does not make much noise.

    Lear is a brand name for a small, twin engine jet aircraft, as well as other things.

    --
    Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
    - W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
  141. Re:Words from the past... by Salant · · Score: 1

    64K acutally.

  142. FireWire adapter by uradu · · Score: 1

    Has anyone tried one of those 1394 to IDE adapters that let you connect an IDE drive into the chain? The idea sounds good, but the adapters are still a bit pricey ($149 or so), and I would like to hear some performance reports.

    Uwe Wolfgang Radu

  143. Bigger is not better by Slashdolt · · Score: 5

    I keep hearing people talk about faster processors, faster memory (for the faster processors) and claims that RAM speed is the bottle-neck. Hard drives have made very little speed improvements in the last few years. I bought a WD 340MB drive a few years back that was (I believe) 11 ms. Most of the drives now are what 7, 8, 9ms? I used the drive on a 486DX-40. I now have a Celeron 466. My processor is 10's of times faster, whereas my HD is maybe 50% faster at the most. Yes, it holds a lot more, but it's still slowing my system down.

    If SCSI became the standard as opposed to IDE, it may help the situation to an extent, but shouldn't we really be looking at new technologies? What about using flash-drives or something similar. Maybe a 200MB flash-drive to cache the most commonly accessed files (thanks to some new OS enhancement that doesn't currently exist).

    Face it. Hard drives are bigger but it would be nice if you could have something smaller that was 10 times faster.

    1. Re:Bigger is not better by tigress · · Score: 1

      This is quite incorrect, I'm afraid. You see, you're only looking at one part of the equation. Let me explain.

      Seek time is a very important factor on HDs. It tells you how long it'll take for the drive-head to go from one part of the drive to another. However, that doesn't say anything about how FAST the drive actually reads. It only shows you how much latency there'll be between reads - and that's not even the only factor in the latency part either.

      A MUCH more important fact is the spin-rate, namely how many times it takes for the disk to rotate one revolution(sp?). The RPM (not to be confused with the broken packaging-system =)) is on older drives often 3600, while newer drives are at least 5400 RPM, often 7200 RPM and sometimes even 10,000 RPM.

      Now, assume the same data-density on the actual drive and with a 10,000 RPM drive you get what? Three times more data per second? Wow, isn't that amazing?

      Now, of course that isn't all. As stated in previous posts, with higher spin you get less rotational latency, IE the time it takes for the sector you want to read to actually arrive at the driveheads (who could've been in place for almost an entire revolution). That's another few (and very important) milliseconds.

      But the most important fact when it comes to HD speed is the data-density. Now, what does this mean? Well, obviously people are able to stuff more data into the same physical space. A half-height 3.5" drive that used to hold 340MB obviously has to have lower data-density than a 40GB drive of the same physical dimensions.

      Also, obviously HD researchers have to have come up with a way to stuff more tracks into the same space. Much tighter tracks will allow for more data. That doesn't help us in speed since a single drivehead can only read one track at a time. BUT, they must logically also have figured out a way to stuff more data into each track, meaning tighter spectors.

      Let's calculate this in a square geometry for simplicity's sake. The 40GB drive is what? 100 times bigger than the 340MB drive? The square root of 100 is 10. Meaning that we in this scenario get 10 times more tracks, with 10 times more sectors per track.

      Add this to the spin-speed and we get rougly 3*10=30 times speed improvement.

      Add the reduced latency for both track seek and rotation and you'll get quite a good performance improvement.

      Oh, and Mr Slashdolt... I *THINK* your processor is a *TINY* bit faster than 10 times a 486. You see, what you're doing is only comparing the megahertz. I could go into a long rant about instructions per cycle, caches, pipelines and so on, but I think I'll leave that for another day. =)

      Anyway, this ends the Drive Mechanics 101 class for today.

      -Fel-
      Geekette

    2. Re:Bigger is not better by mosburger · · Score: 1
      On the topic of drive speed... I just finished working for a disk drive company (I wrote servo code for 10KRPM SCSI drives) for 3+ years. What Slashdolt says is true... The sequential access time more than doubled while I was there, and the seek time was "reduced" by only ~ 33%... but even that is kinda funny, 'cuz the biggest factor in reducing average seek time came from reductions in the platter size... smaller disks = smaller average seek distance = shorter seek times.

      One way you can get away with reducing the platter diameter is by reducing the capacity of the drive, the other is to increase the number of tracks per radial inch. And believe me, drive manufacturers are doing everything in their power to push the track-density envelope (it's a cost thing... platters are expensive, more tracks per inch = fewer platters for same capacity).

      So, it pretty much boils down to the fact that today, it's really darned hard to find a way to physically move the actuator arm across the disk quicker, or squeeze more tracks together. The easiest way to make shorter seek times is to sacrifice capacity by using smaller disks. 80 GB seems like a lot of storage... perhaps it's time to slow down on the capacity curve and try to make the drives a little quicker?

    3. Re:Bigger is not better by ucblockhead · · Score: 2

      While you are correct that the speed of hard-drives hasn't improved at anywhere near a Moore's law rate, the seek time is only one part of the equation. If I'm not mistaken, the overall transfer rate has improved quite a bit over the last ten years.

      The seek time is the amount of time it takes the head to get to the right spot on the disk. If the filesystem is designed appropriately, most reads will be of many consecutive sectors, so that the seek time is only the time to start reading. After that, it is the transfer rate that is important.

      That's where the spin rate comes in. That's why a 7200 RPM drive performs better than a 5400 RPM drive. (This 80 gb drive is a 5400 RPM, by the way.) Unfortunately, we are talking about mechanics here, and not silicon. The faster you spin something, the harder it is going to be to control.

      (And yes, there's a lot of other factors, between IDE and SCSI.)

      --
      The cake is a pie
  144. BIOS and such by ucblockhead · · Score: 5

    Be careful when buying these large drives. BIOSes often don't support them. I got a motherboard less than a year ago and discovered that it doesn't directly support the 40 gig I just bought. Yes, you can get around it with software like their EZ-BIOS, but that itself has some problems, especially when you are trying to recover. I'm not saying avoid it. Just be aware that it isn't always as foolproof as you'd like. If your motherboard only supports a 40, you might be better off buying to 40s rather than an 80. (Not to mention that you'll get better performance out of two 40s.)

    Note to BIOS designers: Would it kill you to design your BIOSes so that they lasted more than a month? I mean, if you're designing a BIOS now, why not allow all sorts of "unreasonable" values, like 4 billion cyclinders, tracks, sectors, etc? Then perhaps we wouldn't have to go through so many gyrations when the terabyte drives arrive.

    --
    The cake is a pie
    1. Re:BIOS and such by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

      Yeah, I didn't mean to imply it is impossible. It is quite possible. It is just a pain in the ass.

      --
      The cake is a pie
    2. Re:BIOS and such by korr · · Score: 2

      This is not a problem if you run Linux on your computer. I bought a 12 GB drive 2 years ago, and was dissapointed to find out that my BIOS would only support the first 8 GB of it. Fortunately, after I installed Linux a few months later, I noticed that it saw my disk as a full 12 GB. So, I created a new 4 GB ext2 partition in the previously unused space, without having to muck around with my bios or any other strange settings.

      --

      Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]

  145. Hard drive a big deal? by DataCannibal · · Score: 1

    I remember when having a floppy was a big deal or a tape cassette interface. I remember disk packs on "real" machines, when the new winchester came along we were amazed. I'm sure someone can beat this though. Ferrite cores anyone ? Phil

    --
    No but, yeah but, no but...
  146. 80GB is quite a bit by Segfault+11 · · Score: 3

    I just bought an ATA/100 7200rpm 2MB buffer IBM for less than the 540MB Conner I got five years ago, blah, blah blah -- it's NEVER going to be enough storage for your lifetime, we all know that. What I'd like to rant about is this: Why can't the speed and size of RAM increase at the same level as hard drives? At the very least, why can't they make the price DECREASE at the same rate as hard drives? I always spend ~$200 on HDD's, and I remember back in 95 or 96, a "gig" hit that golden price. Now a "gig" means RAM. 1GB RAM ain't much cheaper than it was four years ago, and my mobo wouldn't even be able to see it!

    --

    I registered my hate for Jon Katz

    1. Re:80GB is quite a bit by generic-man · · Score: 1

      Quiet, you. As recently as 1995, RAM was $50 per megabyte. I still remember paying $400 for an 8MB module five years ago, and then paying $78 for a 64MB module on Monday.

      --
      For more information, click here.
  147. Re:Useless POS by ucblockhead · · Score: 1

    An "everyone wants what I want" post.

    Yes, it is worse than SCSI, if speed it your prime concern. Yes, server administrators shouldn't be buying this.

    But it certainly isn't useless. Lots of people (read: "home users") have a desire to store lots of data (read: "mp3s") but don't want to spend a lot of cash. Those users will rarely use the full throughput of the drives. (Probably only installing.) The biggest slowdown will be in virtual memory, but there, they'd be better off buying more memory than a SCSI drive. These cheap IDE drives are far better than SCSI drives for those purposes. For most home users, IDE drives are simply a better buy.

    Just because you have no use for it does not mean that it is useless.

    --
    The cake is a pie
  148. 80 Gig dirve by caver · · Score: 1

    They have been available at my local Best Buys for months now, at $400 a shot. Don't know who makes them, though.

  149. Re:Maxtor unreliable? by Aero · · Score: 1

    I've had an 8GB Maxtor in my home machine for about a year now, and I just replaced my wife's teeny drive with a 15GB one (purchased for the same price that I got my 8GB unit for last year -- thank you, Moore's Law). The 15GB unit is too new to tell, but the 8GB one hasn't given me a whit of grief.

    Thing is, we hardly do anything resembling beating on these drives. Our home machines spend 95% of their time playing games and doing recreational web browsing. (My wife found it a bit disturbing that, while watching MaxBlast copy her old drive to the new one, about two-thirds of the disk was devoted to games...)

    Our home boxes are for play. Our work boxes are for work. And while I can't speak for my wife's IT department, I know that I (as Head Geek in Residence) wouldn't buy a Maxtor for real work. Losing a 14th level amazon to a HD crash really doesn't matter as much as losing client usage statistics.

    Of course, it probably helps that (at the time) the Maxtors that I've bought for myself were the low-end ones, which were the high-end ones a year previous, and thus they've had time to get the kinks out of them.


    Aero

    --
    We can believe in you for 3 minutes, but beyond that, even the King of All Cosmos can't be expected to wait.
  150. Re:Maxtor unreliable? by zeppelin71 · · Score: 1

    yes - absolutely... many Maxtor disaster stories. But I should add that I haven't used Maxtor drives in a long time (because of the constant unreliability) so they may have improved over the years. In fact people do tell me that they are better now. I guess I hold grudges... Maxtor is right up there with Corel in my book.

  151. Not much point in faster hard drives by Erich · · Score: 3
    Pump more RAM in your system. Bandwith has never increased as fast as processing speed or storage size. Thus, instead of reading to and from RAM every time, you stick a bunch of cache in your processor. Poof, with a little L1 and L2 cache you can run most of your processor out of cache (for many things, cache hits on the processor are like 99.9%). This is good, because your RAM has lots of latency in addition to not transmitting the information back to your processor very fast. Usually, going to RAM inflicts any where from 5 to 50 CPU cycles waiting for the RAM (or more!).

    Disk is worse. While RAM is, say, 10ns, a disk access is 10ms. That's 1 Million times slower. But we do the same thing... we can keep off the disk if we keep everything in RAM. And since we are multitasking and the disk is sooooo slow, if a process reads from disk we just take it off the processor and wait until the disk comes back with information before we will allow the process to come back on to the processor.

    Now, since we're really smart, we do clever things to make sure that we have to go to Ram (or disk) as few times as possible. In cache, we load more than just the one byte or word that we want, we load the words next to it into cache as well, as that means that the next read from memory will (hopefully) be in cache already. This increases the penalty for going to RAM, but tends to pay off. Likewise, when we read a byte from disk, we load the 32K after it (or whatever we decide is appropriate) so that if we have to read the next byte it's in memory already.

    Thus, we have really decreased the problems with the bottlenecks we do have. And it's very important... half the pins on modern processors are ground or power. That doesn't leave too many pins for I/O, and if you want to increase bandwith you usually want to increase the width of the bus in addition to bus speed. But unless you're Cray, it's really hard to run 1024 signals into your processors.

    That's not to say that faster disks don't help, but you're not relying on your disk's speed every time you read or write a byte to your disk (thank goodness). Instead of trying to get the fastest disk, you may just want to increase the disk cache (IE, get more RAM). On my workstation, I can run Netscape and my terminals and text editor, and after I have opened them once or so, they just sit in RAM. When Netscape crashes and I have to start it up again, it pulls almost all of the program out of memory instead of having to go to disk. Instead of spending the money on a 10,000RPM Ultra Wide Fast Loose SCSI card and drive, I bought another 128M of RAM, and for most desktopish stuff (and a lot of heavier I/O, even) I can beat someone with less memory but a bigger disk.

    --

    -- Erich

    Slashdot reader since 1997

  152. $50 for 16K in 1980? by Jimhotep · · Score: 1

    Bought 8 4116's in 1980 for $50.

  153. Re:Useless POS by Wdomburg · · Score: 2

    >well, Some month ago, our HPuX server's one scsi
    >drive failed. So out to buy a replacment.
    >Unfortunetly, The serrver had Fast-Wide disk's
    >and they are incompatible with the LVD disks they
    >sell all around.

    Actually, your problem here isn't that fast-wide is incompatible with lvd; it's that fast-wide DIFFERENTIAL is incompatible with lvd.

    It's an easy thing to miss, since HP simply labeled the ports on the machines as fast-wide in most instances, but until a couple years ago all wide connectors on the 9000 series were differential scsi rather than single-ended.

    >The myriad of scsi variants makes The life of
    >using them a utter pain in the ass. The thumb
    >rule is that nothing works with nothing but the
    >same variant.

    This is patently untrue. The following scsi protocals are backwards and forwards compatible:

    SCSI-1
    SCSI-2 (fast scsi or fast wide scsi)
    SCSI-3 (ultra scsi or ultra wide scsi)
    Ultra2 (lvd)
    Ultra/160
    Ultra3 (not finalized yet)

    In otherwords, ALL varities of scsi back to the original implementation.

    The only thing you have to watch out for is the issue with traditional differential scsi (high-voltage differential) with single-ended or low-voltage differential. Everything else will negotiate.

    Of all the issues SCSI has, compatibility is NOT one of them.

    (If you want to complain about something, why not complain about the myriad of connectors used due to the scsi spec not specifying one, or the restrictions on cable-length with single-ended scsi?)

  154. Re:Need is quite real... by NoWhere+Man · · Score: 3

    I would have to disagree with you.
    I am probably the last person to say hard drive space is spirling out of control, because I love HD space. I am going to be RAIDing a few HDs soon and I might even pick up one of these eventually.
    Howver, most gamers don't need 8 games on thier computer. After they have beaten the game, it most likely gets deleted afterwards for the next new, hotest game. And if you still play Duke Nukem 3D after 4 years, you need help.
    And I believe, personally, that Diablo 2 could have been scaled down and programmed more efficiently. Now, I don't know the specifics of the programming methods used, but almost all programs these days could be done more efficently...and thus made smaller.

    Floppy drives are pretty much obselete, I agree there. That was the point of the LS-120's, but by then anyone who needed 120MB probably already bought a zip drive (which were out for awhile). The need died a year before it came out.
    CDs are still very useful, mostly for backing up data. But I believe the DVD-RW drives in the next couple years will become the standard in information storage/transfer.

    However, I believe the standard user does not need 80 Gigs of space, and if you happen to fill a hard drive of that size in a matter of months, then you might be a little too attached to your information.

    --

    "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
  155. Maxtor unreliable? by pigeon · · Score: 1

    I have bad experiences with Maxtor harddisk. At my office we have a few (abouth 12) Maxtor harddisks and many of them (I think abouth 4) have stopped working. We haven't got that much failure with seagate, ibm, quantum or fujitsu harddisks. We for sure will never buy Maxtor again, but does anyone else has bad experiences with Maxtor?

  156. Need is quite real... by NoWhere+Man · · Score: 3

    People are starting to realize that along with processors, hard drive space seems to be spiriling out of control. Its getting to the point where people are asking do I really need that much space again.
    I believe some one once said. "Who is ever going to need more than 640K or memory?" or something to that effect. (We all know who). Luckily, RAM is only becoming more efficiant, and not larger to the point where we have gigabytes of it.

    I can understand why some people would need more space. But mainly, only people running servers with mass amounts of downloads per day. A good deal of those people are in fact those who store warez and other related material. More and more popular these days are the downloading of movies. Vast archives are rare and if you want to keep up with current movies and still retain older files, more space is needed.
    Technology is moving faster than people want it to now, which is different from a number of years ago. I can personally remember a friend of mine who upgraded from a 386 to a 486, a significant upgrade at the time, leaving my old 386 in the dust. And that 486 was used for a number of years with no problems (nothing like: low memory, not enough space, video card too slow, etc). Technology progressed steadily, and of course it became obselete, but only after a few years.
    Now it seems as soon as you purchase a piece of equipment, it becomes obselete the second you fork over the money. True your computer may operate for a number of years with software with no difficulty, but the average gamer most likely has to make a significant upgrade every 6 months to stay "in the game".
    But I don't believe that technology is to blame. It seems that maybe the programmers are getting a little too careless. Minimum requirements are sky rocketing along with technology (Or I should say, software is pushing it there). Maybe software developers should concentrate more on making thier programs more efficient.
    Hell, the min requirements for Windows 9X are a 386, but if I had the need to run it on that system, I should have to wait a year for it to load up.

    --

    "Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
  157. When/Where can I buy one of these? by xdc · · Score: 1

    I did some checking yesterday, and couldn't find anyplace that was actually selling this new "80GB" Maxtor drive. I think it was The Register that said that pricing had not yet been announced. So when will these be available, and where? I'm just curious.

  158. Why 5400rpm actually is slow despite data density by grahamsz · · Score: 2

    5400rpm is comparatively slow.

    Whilst with the huge data density i'm sure the actual disk->buffer transfer rates are almost as fast as a 36Gig 10000rpm disk the spindle speed is still some sort of a limitation.

    Consider when you seek for a file on the disk. Two things must happen before the read can start - The head must position itself over the track, and the disk must rotate to the position required.

    5400rpm means an average angular seek time of 5.56msec compared with 3msec for a 10krpm drive.

    I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes but it is probably quite a big deal when it comes to booting your operating system.

  159. Make it SCSI by MentlFlos · · Score: 1

    http://www.blackfire.com.au/ide2scsi.html

    I've been wondering how good this is. Its a IDE -> SCSI converter.

    This is the only one of these I've seen and the specs arent mind boggling, but think of it... for (guestimate) 600 bux for a 80gig drive and 99 for the converter you can have an 80gig ultra scsi drive.

    If only it could support faster SCSI and IDE speeds... 20MB/s and 16MB/s max is not bad, but could be better :)

    Great Idea tho, too bad I lack the skill to make one myself.
    ---------------------------------------
    The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
    ... and missing.