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Maxtor's "Sturdy" Hard Drive
robkill writes "PCWorld has this article on a new drive by Maxtor, using 1 platter, 1 head and
70% fewer moving parts. Using one side of a 30GB platter, the drive
holds 15GB and has a smaller height as well." Well, it's not huge, but it's sufficent size - and with more durability, putting it into mobile devices becomes easier to do.
Yeah, sure. If I had to pick one of a) my root filesystem, b) my /home drive, or c) my MP3 collection to save when the shit hit the fan, it sure as heck wouldn't be c).
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Anonymous Cowards: Proving daily that human beings are innately jerks.
If you are losing EVERY drive you buy for lab machines, you might want to take a good look at your lab. Does it shoot up to 200 degrees at night? Frequent earthquakes? Really bad power? Do you buy your drives from the back of a pickup truck? If you just had a whole batch of drives go bad on you (I've seen a whole department of Maxtors come in more or less DOA) then I could belive it, but if you're spreading out your drive vendors, then I have trouble beliveing it is the drives fault.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
Real Men use a plain old hole-punch, and eyeball the placement.
Trends like this are the reason SMP officially ended in 2001. Computer parts are getting simpler and smaller.
On-disk mirroring?
You have only one side being used in this situation, why not a system that writes the same data to both sides? If a head dies or side of the platter goes bad you still could have access to your data.
I really do appreciate any effort towards reliability. Most companies seem to treat it as last priority behind 'paper' performance, price and time to market, leaving people that can't tolerate down time out in the cold.
Dammit! And just a few days after I threw out my 5.25" floppy notcher!
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I've had 3 from different vendors in the last two years on my home computer. Server equiptment lasts much longer than PC
Engineering and the Ultimate
Maybe my experience was unusual but I've only had two hard drives fail in the 20 years I've been using computers -- and both were Maxtors. Needless to say, I'm leery about ever buying one again.
Keep It Simple Stupid.
I am glad that some companies are tring to take away complexity instead of adding it to thier products. Sometimes less is more
Unlikely. Such reliable technology will *HAVE* to be used with reliable software, the kind that does not gratify you with a blue screen of death (tm).
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If you were maintaining an 8TB disk farm with 8GB drives, that's 1,000 drives.
Mean Time Before Failure means that half of all drives will fail before this time, not that a hard drive will last that long.
So, assume a 40,000 hour MTBF (which was common for hard drives a few years ago). That's about 4.5 years (40,000 hours divided by 24hours/day == 1667 days divided by 365days/year == 4.57years). At that point, about half of the drives would have been expected to fail. 500 drives is half of the total, and that works out to a drive failure every 3 days or so(1667 days divided by 500 drives == 3 days/drive), which is about 2-3 a week.
Either I royally screwed up my math (always possible) or your drives performed exactly as expected.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
You don't understand it correctly. 30 Gs is enough to make a human body look like it has been through an industrial meat-grinder. Jet fighter pilots are not capable to stand more than 9 Gs in steep turns and these guys and girls are specially trained and selected. Stubbing your toe against a table leg is more in the order of 1 G or even less.
-- Spelling and grammar errors tend to be a sign of erroneous thinking.
"Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important."
This is a 3.5" drive. You can't fit it into portable devices who use 2.5" drives pretty much universally.
2.5" drives are allready designed to tolerate large shocks.
Where can I get one of these? I would like to collect things like that.
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Stupid opera made that anonymous...
The cake is a pie
Dude, not everything is a desktop.
We built a box that had a requirement to survive a 5-foot drop onto concrete (nonoperating) and a 3-foot drop operating. And we used rotating media.
Try that with your $150 hard drive.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
See my previous post about droptesting.
3' operating, 5' non-operating.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not a laptop. Special box for the Air Force.
Oh, and those drops were onto concrete.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Operating Mechanical Shock 30 Gs, 2 ms, no errors Non-operating Mechanical Shock 300 Gs, 2 ms, no damage
If I understand correctly, a shock of 30 Gs is roughly equivalent to the impact after a straight fall from a desktop to a carpeted floor. (It's also akin to the force your toe receives if you stub it hard against a table leg.) That's not really a lot of shock padding in industrial settings.
I would say that the shocks encountered by battlebots would be a LOT higher, unless you put your computing unit inside a shock isolation system. Rigid metal banging against rigid metal at moderate speeds is an almost entirely elastic collision (almost a pure velocity bounce). Hundreds of Gs of shock force.
[
Too bad Maxtor has owned Quantum outright for awhile now.
http://www.quantum.com/quantum/pc/pr/pr00100401.h
The only hard drive I've ever had fail so abruptly, and with so little warning, that I lost every bit of data on it was your treasured DiamondMax Plus. The replacement they sent me? well, it works fine in PIO mode, but enable uDMA and it locks the machine, and yes I've tried it with two different motherboards and an add-in udma controller. it wont even do 33 much less 66. After the hassle I had getting the first drive replaced, I'm not even going to bother trying to get this one replaced. I'll just never buy another Maxtor and never recommend them. I wouldn't even try one of these 'sturdy' ones even if they sold them 2-for-one with a bundled raid1 card.
Notebooks, notebooks, notebooks. I've lost plenty in my time.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
This could be good for Maxtor, because I've found that their drives have a nasty tendancy to fail. With fewer moving parts they might actually become dependable.
This new drive: 15GB, $90
If this is as sturdy as they say, with the head locked at power-off and all, then this drive should be about as durable as a Jaz drive. Probably more durable.
You could afford to buy a kit to mount this drive in a pull-out drawer ($30 or so) and still be way ahead on GB per dollar.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I know it doesn't make too much sense to do this, because a single point of failure on the HDD hardware or some other thing like that will make it useless anyway...
But, if instead of using only one side of the HDD, why not use both sides, as mirrored sets? So instead of 30GB on both sides of the platter, you'd have 15GB on both sides of the platter, possibly with better throughput and some more reliability, if the hardware is done properly. A mirrored set within a drive! The only thing is, it won't be better performance, because the HDDs are already reading and writing with both heads simultaneously now.
Or, if you have 3 platters and 6 sides, you could just do a raid 5 with 4 platters, one parity, and one spare. So instead of 90GB, you'd have 60GB capacity, and you'd have better reliability in terms of the heads and the sides...the performance still won't be much better than if it was just a regular 6 head HDD...
But then, how often do you have a HDD failure simply because one of the drive heads or one of the sides of the platter was bad? Do you even know? I guess this, plus the drives are getting cheaper, and that performance won't necessarily be better, makes my scheme kind of worthless. Damn! I though I was onto something with that Raid5-in-an-HDD thing.
When you have a sturdy hard drive your mp3s sound better.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
I used to work, maintaining a multi-terabyte diskfarm (on the order of 8 TB) using 4-8 GB scsi drives. What can I say, it was state of the art when we built the thing.
4 years later, we were getting disk failures, on average, 2-3 times a week.
So, you've been lucky, and if I were you, I wouldn't tempt fate.
You'd think this would increase the MTBF for drives in heavy usage situations, like web servers, compute servers, TiVo ("always recording"), etc. Statistically speaking, dumping 70% of moving (and therefore more-fragile) parts, you MTBF should increase as well.
From the article: The drive has an UltraDMA/100 interface... The drive is also compatible with the earlier UltraDMA/66 and UltraDMA/33 interfaces, albeit with reduced performance. /100 makes a difference is on burst, which rarely happens with a modern OS that keeps its own cache. UDMA/100 will be marketing hype for a couple more years
Drives do not max out the UltraDMA/66 interface as it is, so the only time the
Maxtor didn't design the 531DX for use in applications--such as video editing--that demand the highest performance, but the company did include a 2MB data buffer.
The 2MB data buffer is also rather meaningless. It gives improvement, by about half a percent on average. The spindle speed and access time is much more important. Maxtor's spindle speed for this drive is a low 5400RPM and the access time is a high 15 milliseconds.
But the 531DX uses a technology called ramp loading that locks the head in a plastic latch above the drive surface when you power it down.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but IBM drives could be purchased with this feature for over a year. And they do it with more than one read/write head.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is a value market drive, and though it has a nice areal density (30GB a platter), it won't be fast, and even though it uses the IBM head rest technology, it won't be that much more reliable. Everything else is PR fluffery.
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It is easy to control all that you see,
Ok, why would you put a 15Gb HD in a battle bot?
Real Men(tm) would open the drive (scoffing at the warranty seals) and remove the write-protect detection sensor because real men don't use write-protect!
How much longer can this go on for?
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
WTF? IMHO, Maxtor makes the best IDE hard drives available right now. This article on Tom's Hardware rates the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus at the top of the list!
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
This is mildly offtopic, but does anyone have any data on hard drive crashes per capita in the U.S.? I never really thought about different climates affecting the parts, but if some brands are less prone to fail in certain conditions (cold vs warm, dry vs. wet, etc.), it would definitely be info worth knowing. Obviously climate isn't going to affect servers in controlled rooms, this is for my own information to possibly prevent the aggravation of going through a HD crash again.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
SHOCK
Operating Mechanical Shock 30 Gs, 2 ms, no errors Non-operating Mechanical Shock 300 Gs, 2 ms, no damage
This could be pretty usefull for a lot of industries like robotics (esp battlebots!), mobile research stations, and my favorite, space exploration.
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
Other companies have been making HDDs that are bad-ass sturdy for years, they're used by the USAF in warplanes (I believe that Seagate makes most of them).
I'm afraid to ask what the USAF pays for those drives. I would guess it's at least as much as a P4 would cost you now. The "news" factor IMO is the fact that it's cheap. I get to picturing where this could used and I think of all those scientist types that camp out in Antarctica in tents the size of catering halls. I hope it's only a matter of time before maxtor applies this technique to laptop drives.
Cheaper equals more gooder!
"Me Ted"
BOSTON SUCKS!
>As a result, when you turn the drive on and off regularly, it should last much longer and wear less, according to Maxtor. The company rates the drive for at least 50,000 on/off cycles with a component design life of at least five year.
So if you use windows and you set your sleep cycles and you don't get blue screen of death the drive should last about 50000 / (((3 crashes * 2 reboots) + 4 sleeps )* 365.25 days ) which is 13.689 years or long enough to see it make it till your next upgrade.
I found this very interesting, because the drive no longer uses a landing area in the platter. It has a ramp feature. Now also it has less moving parts, that's the best thing i could hear. I have an old system that I have to whack every time to boot it up (kicking does not work, only a good slap). yes I should replace the drive but I'm to lazy. I use it for booting up old dos games that i like.
ONEPOINT
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I don't see how this is breaking news, except for the fact that it's Maxtor doing it and not some other company.
Other companies have been making HDDs that are bad-ass sturdy for years, they're used by the USAF in warplanes (I believe that Seagate makes most of them).
Tangentially, does anyone know how the sturdy drives that are used for military applications differ from this one? Are the military drives one side, one platter, too, or do they use some other sort of method to make them tough?
Brant
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
but:
> putting it into mobile devices becomes easier to do.
is not really a good thing.
Mobile devices translate to
* more work for someone. They mean that people will never be free from work wherever they go.
This is not a good thing.
I can't see anywhere where this is going to have positive benefits in human terms - more wives separated from their husbands, more stress, less time spent by parents with their children, etc.
Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you?
I reckon this would be good for office use. Hard drives might not crash that often, but if you're supporting 1000 users, you're going to get crashes, so the less common you can make them, the better. Also, the (relatively) small size of this HD is less of a problem in an office situation, where all important stuff should be saved on a fileserver rather than locally. I don't expect the average Slashdotter would want their pr0n & w4r3z collection limited to 15gig. :-)
Since when has Maxtor been fit for normal PC's? This would only make Maxtors on par with "real" HardDrives (WD, IBM...)
I wish they made beds like this. 50,000 on-off operations before mechanical failure would be lovely.
(damn I miss Deja)
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
I used to work at a computer store that custom built computers to specifications. I ended up testing returned merchandise. In my experience, Maxtors and Western Digital drives have had time frames and models that weren't as good as the rest. There was a time I wouldn't have bought a Seagate IDE drive of less than 4Gb because the smaller ones died way too quick but I would have bought any of their SCSI drives. The only brand I have seen that has been consistently good over the years is Quantum drives. They usually are a few dollars more but I have seen far fewer bad ones. I bought my last one before the merger so I can't comment on current models.
Finally! A Slashdot article on storage technology with a believable figure. 15GB is reasonable, and Maxtor is a real company.
Even more amazing, I can actually buy one of these. Even more more amazing, I might actually want to buy one of these.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you? With today's technology in back-ups and the such, it just doesn't seem to me that this needs to be an issue. I have been in the Computer/Network racket for about 3 years now, and I have only had two hard drives crash hard on me. One was on a RAID 5 server, so it didn't matter. I just think that this is a waste of time for the "Unsinkable Hardrive". Let's call it Titantic and watch her dive on her maiden voyage. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. (copyright Dennis Miller)
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
I've been bitching about this for years. Ever since the density explosion began (~95-96), RPMs have gone up, and MTBF has gone waaaay down. In the lab I work in, we have to buy drives by the dozens. I was surprised to find that the mortality rate of our stock skyrocketed during the 97-98 timeframe. Every 4+ GB drive we bought (western digital, maxtor, ibm) would fail after a week or so of constant operation. That's why I at home I only use ancient 1.2GB Fireballs from six years ago.
But is one platter better? It seems like the heads would have to move more for just one platter. Fragmentation would make the problem even worse. But if it is as realiable as they claim, I can finally get rid of the noisy and oh-so manful 6 GB RAID array of Quantum FBs that I've been using...
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
That way you could get 30 gigs.
This would be a lot like LP's, an obsolete form of analog music reproduction. Ask your mom or dad about them.
I've had a hard drive fail before, too, but mine was a really lousy experience. It was a laptop hard drive and I lived in a city without a decent electronics store. The warranty replacement took a week to arrive, so I was high and dry until it got here; nevermind the fact that the drive started dying slowly well before it was apparent that the hard drive was dying (odd, my display driver seems a bit funky...huh. That file was fine yesterday...damn Windows, why are you crashing now?)
Bear in mind that the drives used in most decent network centers are already quite well designed and live in well-controlled environments. If you work on a laptop (or even a desktop in a hot, humid climate without air conditioning,) you really do want to have the Unsinkable Hard Drive. Imagine what might happen to your network disks if you went around the server room and gave them a good, sound bump once every few hours.
Yeah, a hard drive failure doesn't happen often, but it can really, really suck when it does happen; thus, having a good, sturdy hard drive in the first place is a nice thing.
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Now when I get the blue screen o death and decide to chuck the box out a 10 story window, the hardrive might still work.
Patrick C. Lamoreux lamoreux@iastate.edu
It's nice to see some effort being put into durability rather than increasing data density. While high-density is great for certain apps, the idea of drop-testing an IDE or SCSI hd is a joke. Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
- 622M capacity using 14" platters
- weighs 163 lbs
- can be used as a bench or footstool
- has a locking air-cylinder to hold up the 'hood'
- Can be repaired using tools from your garage.
- Sounds very much like a radial arm saw
3/4" high disk considered sturdy? What is the world coming to?Back in '83 I was outside a computer room when a large drive like that had a head crash. The platter (still spinning) got ejected through the side of the case and embedded into the wall. Sounded like a bomb went off.
Best Slashdot Co
With it using only 1 side, I'll just break out my trusty old nibble-notcher and get me a dual-sided drive! Wooooooo!
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
*looks in computer case*
*looks at sawzall*
Well shit, I can do that!
-Caino
Dont't touch my .sig there!
Each switch to a smaller form factor (8 inch, 5 1/4 inch, 3.5 inch, etc) actually LOWERED the price/performance ratio and didn't seem to make sense, but it allowed the drive to be used in new situations (minicomputers for 8 inch, desktops for 5 1/4, early laptops for 3.5, modern laptops for 2.5.)
Who cares if the drive only has 5 gigs if it'll fit in your palm pilot?
Rob
I work in the hard drive industry (scary) and there are a few monetary benefits to the company, hopefully passed on to the consumer...
Basically platter yield goes up. HD companies lose a certain % of platters when the two sides aren't parallel to each other within spec. With a one sided setup this doesn't matter and won't cut into yield. Also, since Si defects will always be there, you can gain some yield back when the defects are only on one side, and simply use the other side.