Maxtor's 80GB Drive

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?

Comments

OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar

[ashpool7]

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.

Have to...

[Colin Winters]

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

Colin Winters

Take a trip down memory lane ...

[dbarclay10]

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

I'll wait on this just like every other new item

[pogle]

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.

Re:BIOS and such

[PD]

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.

RPMs matter a lot for some applications

[billstewart]

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.

Yeah, but when are we gonna effectively use it?

[carlhirsch]

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

Isn't it slow though?

[evanbd]

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.

Bigger is not better

[Slashdolt]

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.

BIOS and such

[ucblockhead]

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.

80GB is quite a bit

[Segfault 11]

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!

Not much point in faster hard drives

[Erich]

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.

Re:Need is quite real...

[NoWhere Man]

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.

Need is quite real...

[NoWhere Man]

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.