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Maxtor's ATA-133 Does 160GB
B. Galliart writes "ExtremeTech has an article about Maxtor's two new bleeding edge ATA-133 drive models coming out later this month. The most interesting of these is the 160 Gigabyte DiamondMax Plus D540X (priced around $400) which uses Maxtor's purposed "BigDrive" 48-bit address space instead of the common E/IDE 28-bit address space thus getting pass the 137GB barrier. The drive should be useable on existing computers due to a bundled Promise Technologies ATA-133 PCI card."
On any other day I would have jumped to this site to get more info. But not today!
Don't Panic
For most of the applications the rotation speed is more important than the ATA standard. This determines the access time.
I prefer an ATA-66 @ 7200 rpm above an ATA-100 @ 5400
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
In many situations, people are known to react irrationally if they do so in the heat of the moment. Take the time to calm down, relax, and then reflect on what's happened to get your head on straight.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
I admit, it *is* hard to sit here and read about developments in the magnetic storage field. A few states away crews are digging through dust and steel trying to uncover survivors trapped in the ruins of what was a bustling office metroplex. The majority of what they find is severed and burned body parts.
Something inside me is saying it is ethically wrong to be reading about how I might get a few more GB's on my next hard drive. Thousands of families are praying that they will see their husbands, wifes, mothers and fathers again, alive.
Let's show a little respect and not become some cavalier about the whole situation that less than 24 hours later we are back to the status quo. We may not have been personally effected, but this is a slap in the face to all the families that were.
If your dad were buried in the rubble right now, or part of the burning wreckage at the pentagon, wouldn't you be insulted by this?
If you don't want to see news about things that don't interest you at the moment, glance over the topic and _just_ skip over it. This site is not just about the bad event that happened.
Personaly my main focus is still in the event.
With 8 of those drives (which would fit into a regular PC with RAID controler) you could finally reach a Terabyte. Gee, now no point in compressing those CDs into MP3, might as well keep them in clean WAVE files :)
I didn't know that there was a problem with drives over 137GB in IDE. Is there an extension planned? Or are we doomed to proprietary extensions from here on out?
My Journal
I wouldn't say this is idle chatter, this is actually about people's jobs and work. People are paid to design and make hard drives and other equipment. Other people are paid to make sure their companies have the best equipment, and still more are paid to install and maintain that equipment.
Terrorists have struck at a potent symbol of commerce, and to retreat into a shell o not talking about anything else is a minor victory for them. Stories that relate to people working therefore are (IMHO) a very good thing.
Listening for the sound of the coming rain...
maybe it's just me, but i don't think news about harddrives is very important at that moment
It is just you.
Not everyone is American. Despite the fact that most Americans think there is nothing outside the USA. Some of us think this is particularly cool technology, and a welcome relief to the "Lets bomb afganistan - we are too l337 to let them defend themselves" crap we keep hearing from you [wy]ankers.
TimC.
It's gone. That glowing feeling I normally get when I realize that a hard drive twice as big as my current one will cost half as much because one four times as big is now on the market... just isn't there today. The handful of comments that are already on this story are saying that it's not time for regular mundane tech stories, and to a degree. But a part of me is glad that life is moving on, and that the horrifing news is no longer supplanting the mundane news. In time, we'll all have that glowing feeling produced by Moore's law. People have died and property has been destroyed, and I'm sad about that just like many other people. On the other hand, terrorism only fails by failing to induce terror, so I say bring on the 160GB hard drives and 2Ghz processors and the 1 cubic centimeter webservers.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
First of all, terrorism thrives on fear, panic, and extremist reactions (such as turning into a police state). The most effective action you can take is to return to normalcy... and resist the urge to take extremeist actions.
Second, this is totally inappropriate, because no EIDE hard drive has yet impressed me with it's ability to go faster than UltraDMA/33.
How quickly we go from shock to callousness. Yes, everybody dies. But we'd all prefer to die somewhere OFF CAMERA or at least I would.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I am:
1) Upset about the fact that _Slashdot_ is running stories about technology instead of the "attack on america"
2) Upset that slashdot stopped reporting important news about technology to talk about the "attack on america"
3) Upset because my whole world view came crashing down around my head this morning
5) Batman
4) Cowboy Neil
I fall under the other category.
Where's the "upset at GW Bush for being such a terrible speaker" option?
hmmmm?
DoS attacking taliban sites
Is that a weak attempt at a joke? Or do you really think there are taliban websites?
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
A lot of people are saying that it's not appropriate to go back to tech stories, in the face of what happened yesterday.
But one thing to consider is that terrorism seeks to disrupt our lives as much as possible.
Even not knowing who "they" are, we can best combat them by going back to "life as usual," while never forgetting what has happened. It's not insensitivity, it's showing strength in the face of a threat.
IMHO, of course.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
there is.... do a google search
IF [if] this is an attack by taliban states one way of stopping further communications would be to stop the flow of traffic
Get your Unix fortune now!
Give the guy a break. Just because he's posting a submission doesn't mean he's forgotten or is over the shock and sadness of what happened.
I'd like to commend Slashdot for rallying the crowd to give blood. I'm sure CmdrTaco and the rest did a lot for those directly affected by the attacks by that simple measure.
Guess what? Except for a very unfortunate few (I mean this with respect) the world did not end yesterday. I'm actually half way welling up in tears right now, but I am willing to get on with my life to prove that these terror attacks did not get to me. Thank you Slashdot for leading the way. I'm seeing reports on CNN of other world markets opening down today, and that's exactly the point of these attacts: to cripple Capitalism and America. All of you who want to wage war perhaps should consider a show of resolve rather than a show of agression. And I'm an American, born & raised.
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
If we want to hear more about the terrorism we can go to cnn.com etc, but most of what the media is saying today has zero information content - they keep showing the vids, 'experts' keep coming up with ideas and theories, but until there is some identification of the group involved it has no impact on my day to day business, which keeps going as usual. It hasn't changed anything in Scotland, aside from our car park security guard checking a little more carefully.
Granted, I keep checking back to see updates on casualties and it is a relief every time more survivors are rescued, but I do that through other sites.
Slashdot - news for nerds - HD specs definitely come into that category. On with the day.
Moderate the parent up.
/. just another CNN. Let it remain "stuff that matters".
Slashdot is boring today, there is a lot of sources for information on the accident in New York to go to. Do not make
lets us americans do our online part
Get your Unix fortune now!
even their main website doesn't show this article...
it's still focused on the fact that our country has been attacked in an act of war
Get your Unix fortune now!
Well, one could buy a TV-Card and have that desaster in the upper-right corner of their desktop. They'd still be able to post on-topic comments :)
0 001 11 1
However i'm horrified about the recent happenings in NYC and DC i think it is a good idea to go on with our lives... not as if nothing happened... but to show people that we cannot be stopped by terrorism, how terrible the attacks have been..
</OT>
So... Does this mean ATAPI is becomming a better technology than SCSI? I fitted my most important machines with SCSI material because i always felt that that was the better choice. But with recent technological advancements (ATAPI RAID etc..) i am beginning to think it would be best to stick with the cheaper ATAPI.
Am i right or wrong?
I don't mind that Slashdot is getting back to business so soon, but "160-scoops-of-yum dept" seems somehow wierd/inappropriate given what's been going on for the last 20 hours.
Or maybe it would just seem like a stupid subtitle on any day.
Hard drive technology is getting silly. 160GB? How many people can actually use that much space? How many people that have that much data actually put it on IDE drives? My machines have 20 and 13 GB drives and I don't have any space shortages.
What I do have is speed shortages. Same old worn out technology. Mechanical storage devices... moving parts... fragmentation headaches... ugh!!! We need *new* technology.
In the mean time, how about making 10KRPM IDE drives, or 15KRPM. I always wonder why SCSI drives are always faster internally, because I'm pretty damn sure it has nothing to do with them being SCSI. Why not just slap an IDE controller on that new Cheetah and see what happens?
Get them now.
;-)
Tasty 160Gb with no built in copy protection governors? They'll be quite a bit more on the black market in a few years. Get em while you can.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
But consider yourself +5 Insightfull / Troll 8)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
If others have this as the way to "come back" into reality, let them be.
I want to know about those Maxtor Drives.
OK It's a big tragedy, WTO has fallen, 2 insurance agents got heartbraking news (Hey Boy, Remember when you signed that contract for that building 8)
Now Move, go to work, read the Ultra Webpages and people ranting about revenge.
I will learn about Magneto Resistive and try to cotinue my life.
Thank you.
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
"Extended" LBA commands are part of the ATA-6 standard (or proposed standard, or whatever it's marked as today). They give 48-bit address spaces. I suspect Maxtor is using this; if not, hopefully it will be soon.
Hope that's helpful.
It allows me to (for instance) do high-quality digital video editing work, keeping multiple copies of everything I do.
I allows larger organisations to keep massive streaming video collections. If CNN want to keep hold of all the footage they produce in a day, they can now do it on a couple of Hard Drives, rather than the massive clusters they needed before.
It means I can take my Tivo and tell it to hit every news program, all the cartoon channel and anything with the word "Trek" in it, then come back and throw away what I don't want later.
It's not going to affect how many Word Documents I store, but it could mean that I can store every phone conversation I ever have, just in case anyone points the finger at tech-support.
My Journal
... on my Palm 3?
:p
Michel
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
I'm ambivalent about whether the Slashdot community donating blood is a good thing.
On the one hand, the risk of HIV is practically nil. There's no one cool enough to do drugs, and the biggest sexual risk anyone here faces is spunking on their keyboard.
On the other hand, the cholesterol level is probably so high, any receipient of this blood would have to worry about a heart attack.
So, no offence or troll intended, but this is still slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. The terrorist attacks on the US are definitely stuff that matters, but not news for nerds. Maxtor's new drives are both. Just because they don't matter compared to maybe 50,000 people losing their lives doesn't mean they're not important, especially when you consider that, while the attacks on the United States have global implications, they are not affecting the productivity of non-US slashdot readers (except for economic ramifications), and these drives are going to be important next month, when the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon are no longer current.
Don't get me wrong; I do sympathise, and I don't mean to sound callous, but slashdot is about tech news, and a new 160 GB ATA 133 drive is big tech news. You can't allow the entire country, or the entire world, to grind to a halt because of these attacks. That is what the attackers would find the most satisfaction in. Maybe I'll get downmodded and flamed, but I say kudos to the slashdot crew for being business as usual; it's appreciated, and maybe even a necessary distraction to some. I know you don't care, but some people do. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh.
A word can paint a thousand pictures
I think /. is right to start to move on. This even will not be forgotten anytime soon, and will continue to get more airplay than MASH reruns. If the entire nation spends to next week glued to their TV's, watching every single video they can find on the net and not going to work (or at work and just abusing company time) we will only hurt ourselves more. This stuff is important. Greater storage and faster access is vital to the growth of the industy that led to slashdot's creation. America has NOT shut down, news stories such as this may be squelched out because of recent events, and will never go noticed no matter how important.
What will happen now when other manufacturers release their new hard drives? Will all controller manufacturers have to keep updating their controllers to include support for everyone's proprietary ATA extensions or will they all have firmware so you can use whichever driver matches your drive?
What if your brand new 330 GB slave drive isn't from the same manufacturer as the master one? Will you there be "multi-BIOS" capable controllers or are you gonna need one card for each drive, eating up all your IRQs?
Does this call for a "next big thing" to replace the IDE/ATA standard or will we get ourselves into the same awkward situation that gave us MS-DOS' "memory management" back then, i.e. a patch to patch the patch that fixed the patch?
160 GB on one drive does sound cool, but I hope some standard is on the horizon. Something as fundamental as a hard drive shouldn't be left to conflicting proprietary standards..
The reason is simple; when space becomes available people think of applications to use that space. Any MP3 junkie will probably be able to happily fill a few GB with music, and it seems that video on disk is becoming more and more commonplace; see below for reasons why I'm a disk junkie)
As far as high speed is concerned, I'm not sure its truly necessary; what does appear to be a prerequisite is the ability to smoothly stream the data from the drive, and this can normally be met by the various caches in the system.
My Linux file server has just acquired an 80GB disk drive, and that just supports four people.
Some of that is because I'm a Unix software developer working on a mixture of projects involving GUI and Oracle, so I have a very complete RH and Oracle installation on my system. That alone seems to be about 6GB.
My TiVo hopefully will have a pair of 80GB drives, as soon as I read up on how to upgrade a two drive unit.
In addition to the above:
I've joined the digital photography world, and with 3-6 megapixel cameras on the market, single shot JPEG files are round about 1MB a pop.
My system also has complete Windows and Linux CD images, so remote machines can upgrade without having to find the damn disk. In addition to that I archive all Windows drivers I use - trying to locate the right floppy or CD at the right time is always impossible.
Anyway, with your who needs more disk space shot, you join a famous crowd -
BillG: Noone will need more than 640K RAM
IBM: Only about 5 computers in the world will be sold.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I think we can blame M$ for this. Their bloated OS's and SW are taking up more and more space all the time. Hard drives of this size are going to be an absolute necessity if you want to run a Windows machine and have anything more than Windows XP (eXPansive) and Office package.
This sig is licensed under the Free Sig Foundation License, you may re-distribute it as long as you retain this notice
Well it's about time ATA133 came out to match the PCI 133 databus speed. The only thing wrong is that ATA266 (better yet ATA333) should be coming out shortly since DDR266 and DDR333 are already here -- prototypes for DDR333 have already been demonstrated.
If there was a UNIX administrator in the buildings, I am sad.
props to all dead homiez
When you get over 100gig, you need to start thinking about reliability. That's an assload of data to lose and a whole lot of eggs in one basket. It sounds great but you have to start seriously considering the reliability of the drive.
I have a three 40gig drive here at work that cost me $140 each but I spent $2500 for a tape system to back them up. What's up with that?
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Will this work in a generic ATA-1394 conversion box?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I hope they IRA blows up your place of business. We are not "too l337 to let them defend themselves."
Limey british fruit.
You fawking windows trolls.
If it was about NT you'd give it a +5 Insightful.
Immature morons...
Editors PLEASE!
getting pass the 137GB barrier.
I'm sorry, but I just can't get 'pass' this obvious error and wish the editors couldn't.
Beyond that, I don't see a story. Bigger/faster drives. Did anyone NOT expect this?
Thats a WTC of kids in 2.5 days (estimated 10k dead). And a lot of those kids die because of US foreign policy and sanctions.
I have to worry-
with the lull in any news about CPRM, I worry that they'll announce a spectacular product like this, and not tell anyone that it has CPRM inside.
That way, they can be ready for the SSSCA if/when it comes.
Now, I don't know if this drive has CPRM in it or not, but I think I'm justified in being scared and cautious- I'll stock up on 80gb drives before I buy something with CPRM in it.
Millions of people are dying everywhere all the time without any media coverage. More people will die in the roads this year than any American in terrorist attack. Death is horrible but it will catch us all sooner or later.
True, but if you get killed on the road, it is generally speaking an accident, about which all the survivors are sorry. Whereas this was a highly-organised ring of people setting out to kill tens of thousands.
The US as a sanctuary of democracy/capitalism has nothing to do with it. It just happens to be where most of us live. Wipe that froth off your mouth and show some respect to the people killed.
Because it's funny.
Get used to it. Half the posts are going to be offtopic for the rest of the week.
Why are you reading this site, you inbred fuck?
We've had an incredible number of 75 GB IBM 7200 rpm drives go bad. Actually, every single one of those we've had has gone bad. We definitely stay away from those now. Other IBM drive sizes seem fine. Kind of reminds me of those Western Digital 1.2 GB and 1.6 GB drives a while back which were constantly going bad.
It would be really nice if Maxtor could make stuff like S.M.A.R.T. and bad block remapping work. I have 2 30G drives that PowerMAX tried to "rewrite disk pack" on, to remove bad blocks. They still have bad blocks. I ran the diagnostic part of PowerLacks, and it couldn't find S.M.A.R.T. support. I have to use Reiserfs on my system, and it makes the idealistic assumption that hard drives know a bit about bad block remapping. These 2 Maxtor drives, the 2 that I lost in one week, will keep me buying Western Digital for a long time.
Will these things work on those nifty little SCSI converters?
By your reasoning it would then be okay for him to turn up at your home and kill your entire family because the IRA is almost entirely funded by American citizens.
If every group that suffered deaths at the hands of America's economic policies never mind the nastier stuff, were to take an eye-for-an-eye approach the USA would have been depopulated decades ago.
"inbred"?
He's from Texas?
I love the speed bandwidth increases and the barrier breaking stuff but how compatibile will this be? I have a near useless maxtor ata-100 40gigger that on ocassion will run under winme/2k but not at all under linux. I should say the drive runs fine its the adapter card that runs like snot. when it runs is runs well but thats rare. the maxtor card is a rebranded promise tech card. i understand that with some tinkering one can get the card to run under linux but I don't want to tinker essential hardware to make it run. it just should. i expect hardships with video or sound hardware but not with a bloody ata card. sorry ranting to take my mind off things falling from the sky.
-
They'll probably have built in firmware code that disables the drives after 24 months of operation, just in case they get banned by law by then, but there will be a flash bios update for them at that time which will prevent the drive from ceasing to function, and will add the big-brotherisms to its operation, but the flash update will only work with a windoze operating system.
SerialATA will be limited to 1 drive per cable but if you think about it, the interface and logic is so much better, cheaper, faster and takes up far less silicon you could probably get 2-3 serialATA ports in the same silicon where 1 parallelATA would go. Also if you read the spec you will notice that while serialATA is 100% backwards compatible this does not mean that they can't add feature enhancements that get around some of the ide limitations when you use a enhanced driver.
I would normally post my email, etc but I am at work
Maxtor's so called Big Drive technology is no more than an implementation of the spec. ATA/ATAPI-6 specifies a 48 bit address scheme, giving a new upper limit of 2^48*512 bytes, or 128 petabytes.
Also, the limitation is not 137 GB, it's 128 GB. And Maxtor's new drives are not 160 GB, they're slightly more than 149 GB. These mistakes are what happen when you start believing "drive manufacturer math".
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Why is SCSI equipment still so much more expensive than IDE? I can understand a small price premium, but 3-5 times the cost per Gb plus the cost of a controller is downright ridiculous. I've always been a fan of SCSI for its technical advantages, but as of late, IDE has become the only feasible option for my (bulk) mass storage needs. (Although I keep my system stuff on SCSI disks.) I can easily afford a 60Gb. IDE drive, but a SCSI equivalent is way out of my budget. So why is this? SCSI should be cheaper if anything because the controller is not built in. And the drives are made in the same plants by the same manufacturers. Something doesn't add up.
FDB's are the only way to go in a modern hard drive. There are so many reasons to use them, far less noisy, far less heat, making them much more reliable, they don't have non-repeatable runout which is basically that you can't get a ball bearing perfectely round, and since there is no metal to metal contact they don't slowly wear and start to cause problems like traditional ball bearings do and I think ball bearing motors are a great source of 7200 rpm failures. FDB's are so much better, that the largest maker of hard drive motors, seiko has stopped making ball bearing motors in favor of FDB's. Unfortunitely IBM 75 and 60 GXP use ball bearings and this may be the source of all the massive failure reports. Personally when I finally get a drive bigger than my junk western digital 10 gig, I will insist on getting a FDB drive or none at all. Seagate has a older but accurate explnation of FDB's, why they are much better and other info. Many other hard drive makers are moving to FDB's as well and even some case cooling fans like Panasonic Panaflow fans with "hydrowave" use fluid dynamic bearings now. Fluid Dynamic bearings work like a hydrofoil so as long as the seals don't break the bearing should last forever. As far as I know the only disadvantage to fluid dynamic bearings is cost and they are slowly getting the price down. I forgot to mention FDB's have been used for 50 yrs in some industral stuff as well as air bearings.
l ea ses/article/1,1247,105,00.html --- why seagate moved to FDB's
http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/newsroom/re
It's a shame those new maxtors use both ball bearing and fluid dynamic bearings. I would love to put up a chart listing which models use what.
auto262814@hushmail.com
Which ATA133 is kinda a joke since the pci buss maxes out at 133 meg/sec and has more than one device stealing bandwidth, it has some new features worth dealing with. The one being added support for LBA-48 bit addressing breaking the 137 GIG barrior (I could be wrong about if this is ATA133 only). The biggest advantage is support for larger transfers per interrupt increasing from 64k to like some large number reducing irq cpu overhead and increasing performance. Again I might be wrong that these are ATA133 only.
auto262814@hushmail.com
Inaction is no help at all. Either go out there and help dig through the wreckage yourself (if you are trained for such work) or get on with your life, having everyone just sit around in constant shock does not help our country and does a disservice to those who died.
Do what you can (I donated money to the Red Cross via the helpful PayPal link) but keep moving forward, and find a productive way to honor the memory of those who are gone and to help those remaining.
It is showing the utmost respect to keep the country strong and show everyone that even an event of this mangntude cannot break us!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
do any kind of reasonable backup of media of this size? As hard disks scale up to the point where a single drive holds hundreds of hours of my video, thousands of hours of my audio, all of the e-textbooks I've ever used (if you believe in that), and every document I've ever written (no matter how trivial), how do I mitigate, at reasonable cost, the risk associated with a hard disk failure? CDR doesn't seem to cut it, I'll probably have video files larger than a single CDR can hold. High-capacity tape is expensive, and the time to dump a significant portion of a 160G disk to tape is probably excessive. Will writable DVD get cheap? Am I forced into some sort of second hard disk?
But I'm not afraid to look stupid :)
I have a very old (in tech years) computer that was unable to use an 80 gig hard drive unless it was partitioned to 'look' smaller (effectively losing several gigs of hardware space). Anyone have a guess as to whether 'useable on existing computers' will apply to my 300mHz dinosaur, or is it time to retire it to the hardware pasture in my closet?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
And if you're not living in the US (and don't use Windows ?)
Let's see... for only $800, I can further upgarde my TiVo from 160GB (2x80GB) and 193 hours to over 400 hours! At highest quality, I would only have about 200 hours... at lowest quality, I could record a single TV channel for over two weeks and 3 days straight! Woohoo!
I've had Seagate 27/30Gb 7200 RPM drives die too. On the other hand my 6 year old 7200 RPM SCSI drives are still going... It probably has little to do with the rotational speed and everything to do with quality of manufacturing.
I just bought a bunch of 80gb 7200rpm drives for a RAID! Of course, I only paid $189 for them which makes them about the same price per meg as the 160gb drive. On the other hand, my max capacity would have been much higher.
So, how do you determine what day it is if you're a hard disk?
Reboot macht Frei.
Ahhhhh, when will they learn! Why didn't they just make it 64 bits or maybe 80 bits. That way in 8 years we won't have to upgrade the damn IDE command protocol again. Christ, all the new processors have 64 bit virtual address spaces. The commonly accepted address space numbers say roughly one bit of growth a year, that means that it will take 28 years or so before we start to run out of address space again. Drive capacities are growing a little faster than that. We are at 2^37 right now, they are extending it to 2^48. Not even enough head room for the next 10 years!!!!
Sorry to flame, but Maxtor is worthless. Show me a Maxtor and I'll show you a peice of trash. I sent in a drive under warranty that stopped working... They send back another one that doesn't work.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
I couldn't get to the article but from reading posts I suspect that the new 160 gigger runs at 5400rpm? From what I know the ATA standard refers to BURST rate. I would think that rotation speed and access time play a more important role in overall performace.
IBM has a white paper regarding the issue.
sig
Come on, get a life already!
Correct Me If I'm Wrong, please.
Part of the price difference as mentioned before is "bigger caches, faster spindel speeds, more devices/larger/better raid'ing".
But the part I do *not* see mentioned is the main focus of SCSI (as a matter of fact it is part of the name).
1) Small *COMPUTER* systems interface. Yes, folks (scsi newbies) there is a small computer/controller chip on *each* device.
F'r'instance: if you copy drive to drive over IDE you speed is limited in part by the bus speed but your CPU, also...what do you think *controls* the copy, eh?
IDE raid recommendations is to mirror/strip disks *NOT* on the same cable, but one on ide0 and the other on ide1...make sense?
That way you saturate the buses on both cables, not halve your I/O.
2) SCSI is controlled by the SCSI card (takes the load off of the CPU (ideally you will have 10 to 15% cpu load during intensive disk access, and that is *worst case*).
In the previous disk to disk example the card would control both disks OR would let the disks "talk to each other" and tell the card when 'they' are done.
3) Before I forget, SCSI has *independant drive heads*, IDE does *NOT*.
What does that mean?
Do multiple copies from a server (copy several 1Gig files to a server and transfer them to one, or several machines over a network) and watch what happens.
IDE's thruput will die horribly as each file is added...why? Because those drive heads (controlled by servo's/little motors) are all connected to the same servo...Imagine 5 ppl trying to talk on the same cell phone...ain't going to work too well, unless they all wait their turn AND remember where they were in the conversation when they have to "give over" to the next person, say, 5 seconds later?
SCSI OTOH, has *independant* drive heads.
Imagine the above cellphone scenario, but all the "callers" talk at once and the "receiver/scsi controller" seperates the voice/data and directs, joins, transmits it all.
In the server scenario, the only "limits" you hit are network (obviously) and the scsi card/drive's I/O limits. But in the multiple copy you would hit the network's limits before the scsi drive's...buuut...all those copies would go thru smoother even after the 3rd, 4th and 5th plus copy.
(note: you can even prove this on 2 similar systems with the only difference being IDE vs SCSI. A Multiple copy over IDE (use linux, wink, wink...for the multitasking/threading) would degrade exponentially for each copy...
SCSI would degrade after a much higher number..but the device will get LOUD from those heads moving so rapidly...that is where the noise comes from)
I worked for several months here, but the link seems to be down for some reason.
During that time I did nothing BUT SCSI devices, tape, HD, Optical, RAID...oh MY!
This is MY understanding of the main difference...If I'm right, I'm right...If I'm wrong, show me I'm wrong (forget the artist/song).
Moose.
FWIW, recent events have put the songs "seek and destroy" and "war" playing in my head.
Two questions:
is this a left/right brain thing and do I need the RIAA's permission if a song is "playing in my head?" I mean after all, I might have heard it from an MP3 and copied it bit for bit via wetware...thought police just rang the bell, gotta go.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Just a catchy name for that crap that I saw someone use once...
Yeah, and following the rules *how* many devices can you have on the SCSI chain? 4? Unless it's LVD, in which case you can have more devices on a chain, but you can't mix LVD with 'normal' SCSI. Wide SCSI is you choice of 15 fabulous ID's, yeah!
SCSI makes sense if you don't have the extra CPU cycles to waste on I/O, but if you have extra CPU, in the case of a non-server class machine, I don't see why spending on the SCSI system ($$$) is worth it. Especially for disk. On the other hand I do have SCSI peripherals (Scanner, CD-burner).
I can say the exact same thing about Micropolis drives. That's why they went out of business. The majority of my customers I made the mistake of selling Micropolis drives to had them die within 6 months. Getting dead drives back from the warranty dept was common. Two years before that Micropolis drives were great. Often HD manufacturers go threw stages were a design sucks or they have a hard time getting quality parts. Maxtor went through one of those phases maybe 5 years back, but since then they have been awesome drives.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
but Maxtor has a datasheet available at http://www.maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/diamondm ax/DataSheet/D540X133_datasheet.pdf
problem with drives over 137GB in IDE
On a somewhat similar note, I just purchased an 7200rpm 80gb WD drive to replace my ailing 12gb Bigfoot. For some reason, Win2k would not let me format any partition on it greater than 30gb or so. I'm stuck with dividing it into 3 partitions. I can't seem to find any documentation on it, so would anyone have any clue as to why this so?
Dyolf Knip