Slashdot Mirror
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."
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'
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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.