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."

Comments

It's the rotation speed that counts

[Drashcan]

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

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[raynet]

High rotation speed might also be bad. I've noticed that none of my 5400 rpm hdd have crashed (IBM Deskstars and Maxtors) but my 3 IBM Deskstars running at 7200 rpms have all crashed, mostly on spin-up problems.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[Jeff Probst]

it is not the rotation speed that counts. rotation speed accounts for access time, but nothing more.
cluster density is another kettle of fish, if a drive can pack twice the amount of information in half the space, you should get twice the sustained transfer rate, all things being equal.
speed is access time.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[Jeff Probst]

a good overview of rotation speed vs data density is available from tom's hardware:

There are basically two ways to increase the performance of hard drives: increase the rotation speed or increase the data density. Increasing the rotation speed definitely enables better sequential performance, but only if you adjust the read/write mechanism accordingly.

I dont want to take away all of tom's message, so read it further for a reasonable overview of the issues involved.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[ostiguy]

7200 rpm is not high rotation speed - 10k rpm scsi drives are in there 3rd generation, and a few 15k rpm drives have been out for a few months now. The IBM 60gxp series is simply dead in the water, read the forums at www.storagereview.com for more info.

ostiguy

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[MadCamel]

Agreed. Being a very poor computer person, I tend to keep drives around for a very long time, as I cannot afford new ones. Every 7200rpm drive I have had has died within 2 years, while all my 5400(and lower) drives are still in working order, some of them dating back to 1991.
My computer(yes I only have one *sigh*) was dropped down the stairs with a 5400rpm 6 gig and a 7200rpm 20 gig in a moving accident. Guess which drive survived without -any- problems? I for one will never buy another high-rpm drive until they have proven them reliable.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[Loualbano2]

Yes, but given the same cluster density increasing rotation speed will speed up disk to controller transfer speed. This is usually the bottle neck as controller to bus transfer speed is now at 133MB/Sec.

ft

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[Zaknafein500]

I for one will never buy another high-rpm drive until they have proven them reliable.

I've never had issues with a 7200 RPM drive, but there are some applications where they definitely don't work well. If you don't have good heat dissapation in your case, don't get a 7200 RPM drive. They produce much more heat than a 5400 RPM drive. 7200 RPM drives are known to not work well in a TiVo. The heat they put out tends to cause severe stutter problems, among other things.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[fobbman]

Personally I just bought a couple of the 5400 ATA100 drives and a cheap Maxtor/Promise ATA100 PCI card, soldered a half-dozen spots and flashed a BIOS and now I've got a couple striped drives on a FastTrack 100 RAID card.

I use it for video capture and the write speeds are fantastic. And that I needed it for. My write speeds on those two drives striped easily twice what a single drive with their capacity would get.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[arnex]

I use it for video capture and the write speeds are fantastic.

Are you using Firewire/DV? I bought into the FastTrak nonsense when I started doing DV work three years ago, but recently discovered that one of those 5400rpm Maxtor 80-gig drives on an ATA-66 interface (on a P2 400Mhz machine) will easily keep up with the 3.6mb/s requirement. I'm not certain about analog vidcap with other cards, but there seems to be no need for RAID-0 whatsoever with MiniDV.

Re:It's the rotation speed that counts

[fobbman]

Nope, I'm still stuck in the Dark Ages of analog. It's nice to be able to capture at pretty much any resolution that I want to without worrying about dropping frames. There's just something about having that buffer that tells me that it's not my storage medium that is slowing me down.

We need SOME relief

[Halcyon-X]

After today's events, don't you want to take a few moments to let your brain and emotions relax? We can't sit here on edge 100% of the time, it won't do us, or the situation, any good.

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.

Re:We need SOME relief

[Halcyon-X]

Hey, this wasn't offtopic when it was originally attached to someone else's message. Methinks it was removed? What happened here? This used to be part of a thread!

Cool !!!

[Betcour]

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 :)

Re:Cool !!!

[p_trinli]

I still compress my MP3s(using Razorlame, 256 ABR) because:

• What if you want to share a tune with a friend? Even on broadband, it's nice to transfer a 12 MB MP3 instead of a 75 MB .WAV
• What if you want to backup to CD-R? It is easier with fewer discs. Granted, it's smarter (for people like me that buy all their music) to just duplicate the original audio CD

Since we are on the topic, a quick plug for awesome info on MP3 ripping and encoding: www.r3mix.net

P.S. WTF are safety links supposed to do!? They just make Slashdot (even more) ugly.

Re:Cool !!!

[root_42]

> Gee, now no point in compressing those CDs
> into MP3, might as well keep them in clean
> WAVE files :)

or maybe even UUencoded...

Re:Cool !!!

[sammy baby]

P.S. WTF are safety links supposed to do!? They just make Slashdot (even more) ugly.

They're supposed to stop the uninitiated from blindly clicking on a link like this.

Re:Cool !!!

[esper_child]

the reason to keep them in wav format is so that they sound better (granted still not the best format for listening but a lot better than mp3's quality) besides if a friend wants an mp3 off of you, they just have to chill for a min or two while you make the mp3 for them at their settings not the ones that you chose.

Re:Cool !!!

[cwebster]

>P.S. WTF are safety links supposed to do!? They just make Slashdot (even more) ugly

go visit your preferences page here and turn them off if you think they are so ugly. You are posting as a registered user, dont complain about something you can control. thx

Re:Cool !!!

[A_Non_Moose]

(offtopic portion, sorry)
I had to check my account management just in case I was wrong, but now that links are shown where they point to, would it be possible to filter out stupid S*IT like these goat* sites? Just a thought, if you agree please insert an "AOL(TM) ME TOO"
(end OT)

Anywho, like a few posters here who've done DV and the like (what follows is IMO):
Capturing at high resolutions, good frame rates and lack of dropped frames everything should be "the faster the better" HD's, Procs, and don't forget the fans too.

(as an aside, the current "CPU tech has only really improved due to *cooling tech* we are really just flogging the proc's harder and need better cooling solutions).

For playback, conversion, dubbing and so forth, well, IMO, again:
Converting to other formats (DivX, anyone?) is almost *pure processing power* dependant. Disks, meh, they just need to be HUGE, is all.

Dubbing, disk speed helps esp. NLE (non linear editing), splicing etc...less wait time for huge files.

Playback? *heh* 8X cdrom on a p200 does quite nicely...but that 2M video card...ouch!

Moose.

SIG! SIG out loud!

I didn't know

[samael]

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?

Re:I didn't know

[jtdubs]

I would assume that once we make the move to Serial ATA, if that ever happens, it would be as simple as upping the clocking on the serial line to add more bits to the address space and hence maximum addressable size.

So, once that happens I would expect a clocking standard that would give us more than the 28 bits of addressing we have now.

Justin Dubs

Re:I didn't know

[imroy]

So, once that happens I would expect a clocking standard that would give us more than the 28 bits of addressing we have now.

We already have that. It's called ATAPI. It's already used by non-harddisk IDE devices like CDROM, DVD, and CDR/RW drives, removable drives (Zip, Jaz, Orb, LS-120...), and tape drives. From what I understand, ATAPI uses SCSI-II commands sent over the physical IDE channel. So you don't get over the mater-slave limitation of IDE, but you get more reasonable block addressing. BTW, this is the reason you almost must use the ide-scsi driver to use CDR/RW drives under Linux. I've also found that my DVD drive works much better with the SCSI CDROM and ide-scsi drivers than the IDE CDROM driver.

This was bound to happen soon. You can only go so far with 28 bits, or whatever the original IDE has. LBA gave us some time, but harddisks must now go to ATAPI.

Re:I didn't know

[arafel]

>This was bound to happen soon. You can only go
>so far with 28 bits, or whatever the original
>IDE has. LBA gave us some time, but harddisks
>must now go to ATAPI.

Er ... check my other post in the thread. You don't have to go to ATAPI at all - ATA-6 has specs for LBA-48. I know this because I spent some time recently implementing them in a driver for the company I work at.

Re:I didn't know

[pangloss]

Do you know the reasoning for some of the newer CD-RW (e.g. Plextor's 24x) to switch to ATA/33?
I think I saw one other (Ricoh?) also do the same.

Re:concurrance

[riggwelter]

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.

Re:i don't think it's time for this yet

[tconnors]

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.

That New Tech Smell

[Nater]

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.

Two things

[Elbereth]

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.

new poll:

[perrin5]

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?

Re:new poll:

[Per Wigren]

5) Batman

Re:new poll:

[digitalmonkey2k1]

if everyone else is covering the same topic (americain attack) why should slashdot also need to. To flood the media with the same thing and stop all other life is basically what a terrorist would want, why let them basically suceed in what they set out to do and cause complete upset when all in all... Life must go on

Back to work

[tm2b]

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.

Re:Back to work

[mgblst]

Some people will never be happy that we go back to talking about tech. Others think that slashdot took too long, or should never have gone there in the first place. This is the bane of a public forum.

Slashdot was a very useful site in the crisis, and kept going when other sites did not. For myself, it was the second source i heard about the tragedy, the first being an ICQ message that didnt make much sense at the time.

time to live on..

Re:Back to work

[Cloud K]

The first time I heard was in an ICQ message also.
It's amazing how fast bad news travels, especially if it's on an instant messenger!

I agree with continuing tech stories, and the idea of everyone dropping everything for this is exactly what the terrorist scum wanted in the first place. Sure, for the first day I was too shocked to do anything (for some reason they even put the soaps on TV still. But I couldn't even begin to enjoy watching them.) But life must go on, else those people have won.

Re:Who Cares?

[ImaLamer]

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

Re:i don't think it's time for this yet

[dlek]

Really? Myself, I'm doing a sixteen-hour day at work so I can finish off a project before I take vacation. Yes, it's a huge tragedy, it's scary and we just might be looking at the opening shots of war. Everybody at work's been following the developments. Somebody had a small radio and we listened Bush's address. But we went about our business, because--apart from giving blood or money, mourning and praying, if you're into that--if you don't live near one of the crash sites, there isn't a lot you can do.

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.

• dlek.

Re:I agree, but...

[Bronster]

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 it was my dad buried in the rubble right now, I'd:

a) Not be reading slashdot, I'd be out there helping or at least donating blood.
b) Happy that other people were getting on with their lives rather than stopping everything to watch over my shoulders like vultures and revel in my misery.

If on the other hand I was someone from another part of the world, I'd:

a) Not stop my entire life every time there was an act of terrorism or racism or un-democratic election somewhere in the world.
b) Be sorry for your dad, but not any more than I am for all the other people who die in less middle-class white newsworthy places.

Back to Business

[KurdtX]

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.

Re:Back to Business

[MisterPo]

Absolutely, Cant let those people ruin all our lives. Just look today; oil, gas, and gold all gone crazy. We gotta keep it together or else we will all come apart. Peace, Po

Of course we need news like this

[frog51]

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.

Re:Of course we need news like this

[AntiFreeze]

I just wanted to completely agree with this post. I lost friends and aquiantances yesterday, and am having trouble getting on with things. Everywhere I turn, I am reminded of how horrible what happened was, and I am susepted to "theories" about what happened and why. Getting a little other news is quite nice. Helpful even.

I was shocked by the amount of attention Slashdot gave the horror yesterday, and it leads me to say something some Slashdotters might gasp at -- I am very pleased with how the Slashdot editors handled this event.

Cmdr: Thank you for your support. I tend to disagree with Jon Katz, but everything he spoke of in his account yesterday struck home. The effort Hemos and Timothy put into gatherring information and posting all the relevent material was quite helpful, especially when I couldn't get through to anyone in the City and had to occupy myself some way.

It's time for other news. Yesterday's news was overshadowed completely (and for good reason). It's time to take a few steps, albeit possibly tiny ones, forward. I'm shook up, but saturated. Other things to consider only help.

Re:Of course we need news like this

[CmdrTaco]

Thanks man. I need words like that right now. My best friend is in town. She's on active reserve. Her husband is in Saudi. I'm scared for her and her baby.

Now somebody please moderate us both offtopic.

Re:Of course we need news like this

[Pengo]

Sometimes I think that being a \. editor must be as gratifying as a dentist. ;-) Good luck to your friends.

Re:Of course we need news like this

[Syberghost]

If we want to hear more about the terrorism we can go to cnn.com

Unless you want what you hear to be accurate.

They spent an hour yesterday reporting a "CNN Exclusive: the US Bombs Afghanistan". It was an exclusive, all right; exclusively in CNN's heads. Afghanistan was bombing Afghanistan, like they do approximately daily.

They were reporting the Camp David attack that didn't happen, the George Washington Bridge bombing that didn't happen, the State Department carbomb, etc. etc.

Re:i don't think it's time for this yet

[svl]

Moderate the parent up.

Slashdot is boring today, there is a lot of sources for information on the accident in New York to go to. Do not make /. just another CNN. Let it remain "stuff that matters".

Re:Who Cares?

[ImaLamer]

lets us americans do our online part

Re:i don't think it's time for this yet

[jezreel]

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 :)

Great turnaround

[Diabolical]

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?

Re:Great turnaround

[vrmlknight]

With SCSI depending on a few thing but for the most part you can use more devices per connector 4 vs. 2 and the devices still can communicate with each other faster cause they can do it directly rather than wait for the CPU... and yes DMA does the same thing but i have had problems with it in NT (non-existent) and under win2k

Re:Great turnaround

[chill]

ATAPI still has a limit of 2 devices (master/slave) per controller. Ultra-SCSI is 15, not including LUNs.

ATAPI devices are still limited to hard drives and CD-ROMs (via a hack). SCSI handles scanners, tape drives and other devices as well -- it is much more generic.

ATAPI still causes performance degredation when you are accessing the master and slave on the same channel at the same time. SCSI does not.

Re:Great turnaround

[GigsVT]

The 3ware ATA RAID controller cards do not put drives into master/slave config, they only support one drive per IDE channel.

Available in up to 8 ports per card, 3 cards per computer.

Re:Great turnaround

[shadowlight1]

I work at a midsized .com that survived the crash and is actually growing quite nicely. One of our databases crashed a few days ago and we've been working on a long recovery ever since. My boss was concentrating highly on the recovery of the database; and didn't say a word about the tragedy. "How," I wondered, "could someone be so unfeeling? Who is going to be looking at our database right now??"
Only do I find out after the database is recovered that my boss's oldest brother was on route to DC and grounded in Cleveland and he hadn't heard from his brother..and was doing whatever it took to keep his sanity; in this case, concentrating on his business.

The lesson? This effects everyone, from the lowest tech to the CEO, and everyone is going to deal with it differently, but bottom line, EVERYONE cares about this.

Re:Great turnaround

[esper_child]

ATAPI is like a Ford Escort
SCSI is like a Ford Mustang

The mustang will always be nicer, but much more pricy than the Escort. (not that the local cops will actually pull you over for having SCSI as the local cops here have pulled over ppl for having mustangs just so they can look at it) As the Escort gets better so will the Mustang and in the end it will be the better performer.

*groan* This is getting silly

[glenebob]

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?

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[Alvandaar]

???

I need such a harddisk in my next TiVO, VCR-Replacement, whatever system. You can store over 200 movies on a single disk, instead of using 50 tapes, so I think this _is_ smth. useful.

For all those whining, that there are no EIDE 15Krpm drive available, I have the following question:
What for? Faster access times? You gotta be kidding, if I want smth. it's probably a high sustained data rate and thats mainly affected by the density the data is packed on the physical disks within the HDD.

Access time is important for db-boxes, not for my home entertainment super-station.

JK

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[kinko]

You know who you sound like?

"64K ought to be enough for anybody"

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[suss]

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?

I remember, not that long ago (early 90's) someone saying the same thing about a 330MB IDE drive... times sure change.

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[jcr]

>160GB? How many people can actually use that much space?

I dunno, that's only about, what, 40 hours of video, right?

Yeah, I can fill that up.

-jcr

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Try video editing. I just dumped a 90-minute Hi8 tape over IEEE-1394 into a 19GB file.

ac.uk

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[tconnors]

Hard drive technology is getting silly. 160GB? How many people can actually use that much space?

I do. Do you know how much space Radio Synthesis Imaging takes to analyse? The 2 people I work with and I have very very nearly filled our 2 35 gig drives. And I have only been working on my project for a year. I still have 3 months left on this project, and have only completed 2/3 of all my data reduction. Unless physics buy us a new disk (not likely, given the current university funding situation in Australia), we will run out in a couple of weeks.

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.

You dont? My desktop has 13 gigs, and is nearly full (uni work, some of my CD's as mp3 format, data files), and my laptop has 20gigs and is nearly full (more data, more mp3's, a build of mozilla and X). As for our data disks - they are on commodity hardware running SunOS i86pc, since speed does not matter when the programs we run are limited by the 100Mbit ethernet and the CPU speeds on the ultra10, so IDE makes sense.

What I do have is speed shortages. Same old worn out technology. Mechanical storage devices... moving parts... fragmentation headaches... ugh!!! We need *new* technology.

You care to invent some for us?

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?

Ever noticed that SCSI cabling is complex? Need to terminate the cables, need to be under a certain length, need to be this thick fat expensive stuff? It is all related to the bandwidth it is required to handle. I'm pretty sure there is a bit of physics holding back anything better, at least for now....

TimC.

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[esper_child]

But I need all this space to store my MP3s, warez, pirated movies, and porn. Also think of the number of linux distros you could put on here. For the next step in storage lets try storing data as waves in murcury, or what about as strands of RNA and just read the encoding from there.

Re:*groan* This is getting silly

[Drunken Philosopher]

Yeah, and 640k? Who the hell is gonna use more than 128k, or maybe 256k in ten years? Heh...

Got Copy-enabled drives? =P

[Kasreyn]

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

Extended LBA already part of ATA-6 spec

[arafel]

"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 new Kinds of Technology

[samael]

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.

will it fit...

[salimma]

... on my Palm 3?

:p

Michel

Re:will it fit...

[RennieScum]

On it, yes.

In it, no.

My comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted, until I added this blurb.

blood donation...good? bad?

[AndyChrist]

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.

Re:erm...

[D Anderson n'Swaart]

I feel like I'm taking a big risk posting this, because in all honesty I am neither from the US, nor have I lost any friends or family (full stop, let alone in terrorist attacks), so if you think I'm an arsehole I guess I'll understand.

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.

IDE Drives

[TwistedTR]

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.

Controller troubles

[PsyQ]

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..

Re:Controller troubles

[pkesel]

I think maybe the next big thing will be SCSI. Or perhaps firewire.

Re:I agree, but...

[dabadab]

Yes, their news channels.
Look at CNN and other news sites. They are dominated with it. If you want your news, you can get it there.
/. is supposed to be a tech news site so it should report tech news.

Demand will nearly always exceed available space..

[maroberts]

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.

The Paradigm shifts

[AppyPappy]

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?

Re:The Paradigm shifts

[GigsVT]

Just buy twice as many drives, and have two physically seperate computers, preferably in different buildings, or at least in different rooms, on different circuits. Combine this with RAID1 or 5 if you want.

Hard disks are so cheap, the preferred media to back up a hard disk becomes another hard disk.

Re:The Paradigm shifts

[Mistah Blue]

I think you are going to find that as we move forward with larger and larger drives we are going to hit a physics brick wall. Tape drives are not going to be able to back the data up fast enough (never mind the insane cost). Disk space is cheap. Mirror your primaries to keep your data available. Back up to other disks for your primary backup methods. Tapes are probably going to be used only for disaster recovery purposes (think offsite storage). Before you say, what about 3rd party disk vaulters... yes some companies will go that route, but a lot of others are going to be more comfortable with tape because it is easier to transport tapes to a hot site for recovery.

Firewire?

[jcr]

Will this work in a generic ATA-1394 conversion box?

-jcr

Re:I agree, but...

[Theodore Logan]

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.

Did you know that a couple of children dies every second from starvation? Or that 22 million people are currently fugitives of totalitarian regimes? Or that thousands people somewhere in the world are being tortured for their political views on a daily basis? What's more, this has been so, more or less, for every second of your life.

So either never read Slashdot, and donate blood every minute of your waking life or whatever, or stop trolling. It's not more ethically wrong to read about harddrives now than any other day.

Re:i don't think it's time for this yet

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they IRA blows up your place of business. We are not "too l337 to let them defend themselves."
Limey british fruit.

Getting pass the obvious

[erroneus]

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?

CPRM and SSSCA

[firewort]

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.

Re:CPRM and SSSCA

[RelliK]

How quickly do we forget that CPRM proposal was defeated and Maxtor was one of the high-profile companies to vote against it. IBM, Microsoft, Iomega and others wanted to push it through.

Re:CPRM and SSSCA

[firewort]

You really think that with the approval of the SSSCA, that the proposal won't come back with the excuse "See, we're legally required to do it" ??

Re:Oh please !

[Snootch]

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.

Re:4000 children die of malnutrition every day..

[Theodore Logan]

there's always The Hunger Site.

compatibility?

[RestiffBard]

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.

Re:compatibility?

[karnal]

I may have a solution to your problem. I have seen an issue with my 60 gig maxtor paired to my promise ATA/100 card -- and the solution took me weeks of lost files to discover.

Set your drive mode on that interface through hdparm to use DMA, but only at ata-33 for that drive. Everything else can be left alone (I for one, however, made sure every other drive worked fine before committing the settings to rc.local)

Of course, with this method, you will not want to use that as a boot drive. That's why I have plenty of spare 1 gig drives lying around....

"Maxtor Big Drive" = ATA/ATAPI-6

[Otto]

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".

Re:"Maxtor Big Drive" = ATA/ATAPI-6

[jbrauer]

It is both 128GB and 137GBs. Depends on if you believe a drive vendor and a GB is 10^9 bytes (137.439...GB), or you believe it is 128*1024^3, (128GB).

Still smaller than SCSI drives ;)

SCSI prices and sizes

[Ogerman]

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.

Re:SCSI prices and sizes

[Ace Rimmer]

Becouse SCSI is thought as "high-end" technology and manufacturers let you pay for it. This won't change anytime soon becouse they don't count content users but money... (what would you expect? ;)

You can only hope that firewire devices would be more affordable and won't get similar stamp. Firewire is also more friendly (no terminators) and quite cheap now.

So buzz manufacturers that you want an internal firewire disc ...

Re:SCSI prices and sizes

[Izmunuti]

That's the thing, the mechanisms aren't the same. They often spin faster (10K, 15K), seek faster, are more reliable (>10^6 MTBF), have bigger buffers, and so on. IDE mechanisms are cheap. There's a little overlap at IDE's high end and SCSI's low end where they may share a mechanism. If there were a Cheetah-15K/IDE it would cost about the same as a Cheetah-15K/SCSI.

Re:SCSI prices and sizes

[MasterOfDisaster]

At the moment firewire drives are just a firewireIDE bridge, and i could be wrong, but at least on the macos, I think the tech for firewire drives is mostly IDE over firewire.
While I see no real reason we couldnt slap a SCSI[ultra wide scsi, whatever[ controler in there, insted of a IDE controler (yes, each firewire drive has it's one IDE bus, if you do a little soldering, you can attach 4 drives to most enclosures) and use SCSI drives, it's not being done yet

Re:SCSI prices and sizes

[RennieScum]

Yeah, I get the Seagate literature too. 100000 hour MTBF? How do they know this? They manufactured these things back when I was a kid?

A lot of it is simply supply/demand. Demand for SCSI drives is low, since every PC comes with IDE plugs, and SCSI costs extra. SCSI is probably 5% of the consumer market, more on the server end, and people who buy servers have bigger budgets.

Complaining about termination? Wah. Thats like saying "don't use linux, you have to split your drive into multile partitions". RDRAM also needs to be terminated, but it's bitchin fast, too.

Hell, I once paid over $400 for a 40MB drive. But I'm with you, I'm gonna set up a twin 40GB IDE RAID. Less than $200 with cables and shipping. I've spent more than that on boots.

How does it help to sulk?

[SuperKendall]

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!

How do I...

[michael_cain]

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?

Re:How do I...

[haruharaharu]

how do I mitigate, at reasonable cost, the risk associated with a hard disk failure?

Buy 2 and run them in raid-1. If you're paranoid, buy 3 at the same time so you have a spare

TiVo potential...

[Glove d'OJ]

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!

IBM/Segate

[bored]

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.

Suckage,

[bored]

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.

Re:Got Copy-enabled drives? =P

[haruharaharu]

So, how do you determine what day it is if you're a hard disk?

48bit address space?

[bored]

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!!!!

Maxtor's JUNK!

[Penguinoflight]

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.

Re:Maxtor's JUNK!

[thanq]

Maybe it's your board, connector, BIOS, or other piece of hardware. It is highly unlikely that the hard drive itself would be bad after you exchange it. But in case it is, ask them for another one. If that one will arrive not working, then I bet you that it's something on your side.

Beside that, a really nice thing about Maxtor is that they provide warranty and exchanges for ANY of their drives, including OEM. They are the best in support and warranties in the industry.

IBM does not cover any of their OEM drives under warranty, they won't even send you a replace. Seagate and WD provide warranty services on a case-to-case basis, and most of the cases there is a timeline you can get an exchange.

With Maxtors, there are no limitations, which means that for the money you put in them you will get the worth of them.

Re:Maxtor's JUNK!

[DarkEdgeX]

Uh, you're an idiot. Maxtor drives are the best, and fail far less often than drives from Seagate (I've bought Seagate drives and had them die, not just one or two, but LOTs) and when I used Maxtor drives in those same systems, they worked FLAWLESSLY. As the other replier pointed out, Maxtor also has awesome warranty coverage, usually going so far as to send you a replacement the SAME DAY YOU CALL **BEFORE** you send in your broken drive (yes, they require a credit card number in case you don't follow through on shipping it in). It doesn't get much better than that.

The other drives I like are Western Digital, but as far as JUNK goes, Seagate (for IDE devices!) sucks ass. IMHO, SCSI drives from Seagate are of a much higher quality though...

Re:Maxtor's JUNK!

[DarkEdgeX]

Coming from an AC, I'll make sure not to take your word at anything more than a steaming pile of dogshit.

Re:Maxtor's JUNK!

[Velox_SwiftFox]

The replacement policy does seem to obtain, though. They seemed eager to send out a pre-replacement for an Atlas 73G drive that died (Quantum, who they acquired). It's taking a few days to ship, but that's understandable given the airlines have been grounded after the WTC atrocity-thing.

SCSI vs. IDE (CMIIW)

[A_Non_Moose]

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.

Re:Wide SCSI and REAL #of devices.

[vovin]

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).

ExtremeTech seems to have pulled the article

[AvantNik]

but Maxtor has a datasheet available at http://www.maxtor.com/products/diamondmax/diamondm ax/DataSheet/D540X133_datasheet.pdf

[OT] Drive limits

[Dyolf Knip]

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?