The Hard Business of Selling Hard Drive Platters

Hyper-linked. by jarodss · 2002-07-01 14:14 · Score: 0, Redundant

Link

whoo! by DooBall · 2002-07-01 14:15 · Score: 0, Flamebait

cool, another typo on slashdot!

Re:whoo! by DooBall · 2002-07-01 14:18 · Score: 1

oops, the e-mail had the typo... I am an idiot... that's even cooler!

A one word story? by shepd · 2002-07-01 14:17 · Score: 1

And its not even english, like the rest of the site. Blech!

--
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC

Editors need to wake up by premier · 2002-07-01 14:17 · Score: 1, Funny

The title uses "Hard Drive", while the editorial text says "Hard-Drive". Pick one?

Re:Editors need to wake up by Mad+Marlin · 2002-07-01 14:51 · Score: 4, Funny

The title uses "Hard Drive", while the editorial text says "Hard-Drive". Pick one?
I vote for Winchester disk.

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Best Slashdot comment ever
Re:Editors need to wake up by The+Pi-Guy · 2002-07-01 15:12 · Score: 1, Offtopic

You use "uses", while you also say "says". Pick one?

. . . Also . . .

You use "Pick one?", while the rest of the world ends it with an exclamation point or period. Pick one ??!!

... Noone's perfect. But a little humor helps.

--pi
Re:Editors need to wake up by Dr.+Awktagon · 2002-07-01 15:29 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Why do they call it an exclamation point, when it's clearly not a point, but a point and line? I use exclamation mark. To be consistent with question point... er... question mark.. ?
Re:Editors need to wake up by Fulcrum+of+Evil · 2002-07-01 15:40 · Score: 1

It's DASD or nuthin'

--
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Re:Editors need to wake up by shepd · 2002-07-01 16:32 · Score: 1

>Why do they call it an exclamation point, when it's clearly not a point, but a point and line?

That's because ISO calls it a bang.

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If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Re:Editors need to wake up by shepd · 2002-07-01 16:35 · Score: 1

>Pick one?

Sentence fragment.

"Sentence fragment is a sentence fragment."

"Oh no! Linguo melting!"

Or something like that...

--
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Re:Editors need to wake up by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:06 · Score: 0

Indeed. "hard-drive platters" would have been the correct English. Mainly because "drive platters" are rather mysterious things which only arise when incorrect English usage is put forth ;)
Re:Editors need to wake up by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:15 · Score: 0

"bang"? theyre retarded.
Re:Editors need to wake up by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:20 · Score: 0

I drive platters to the repair shop. I put them in my car. How is that incorrect English?
Re:Editors need to wake up by damien_kane · 2002-07-01 17:26 · Score: 1

I vote for Winchester rifle...
Re:Editors need to wake up by shepd · 2002-07-01 18:32 · Score: 1

Did I say ISO...

Meant normal people.

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If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Re:Editors need to wake up by Mad+Marlin · 2002-07-02 06:09 · Score: 1

I vote for Winchester rifle...
I own Remingtons and Marlins to shoot beer bottles with, but no Winchesters. Any specific recommendations, preferably for larger-calibre rifles?

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Best Slashdot comment ever
Re:Editors need to wake up by damien_kane · 2002-07-02 06:53 · Score: 0, Offtopic

large calibre? get custom-built imported 20mm cannons or better, don't go with American brands. I personally do not know where to find them, here in Canada gun laws are a little more restrictive.

In light of recent events (the previous year specifically) good luck getting your purchase into the country.
Re:Editors need to wake up by Mad+Marlin · 2002-07-02 11:02 · Score: 2

large calibre? get custom-built imported 20mm cannons or better, don't go with American brands. I personally do not know where to find them, here in Canada gun laws are a little more restrictive.
In light of recent events (the previous year specifically) good luck getting your purchase into the country.
20mm! I said large calibre, but just to avoid hearing about .22LRs. Hell, 20mm is a standard anti-aircraft cannon calibre. I was thinking more along the lines of a .270MAG or .300MAG.

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Best Slashdot comment ever
Re:Editors need to wake up by Tassach · 2002-07-02 11:24 · Score: 1

If you are a traditionalist, there's only one choice: the Winchester 1895. It is arguably the classic American rifle.

--
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?

Too bad by jred · 2002-07-01 14:18 · Score: 2

/. screwed the link, and now everyone is posting a proper link. I just wish they had posted the circumvented link instead of the reg. required one...

--

jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...

Re:Too bad by Eversor · 2002-07-01 14:20 · Score: 3, Informative

username: slashd0t
password: slashd0t
works
Re:Too bad by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:22 · Score: 1, Interesting

You mean THIS link?
Re:Too bad by MageNuts · 2002-07-01 16:17 · Score: 0

Here's the full story for those who don't feel like signing up to the times...
Advances Nip at Its Heels, but Disk Maker Moves Forward
By JOHN MARKOFF
SAN FRANCISCO, June 30 -- In an antiseptic factory in San Jose, Calif., Christopher Bajorek peers at trayloads of mirror-surfaced hard- drive platters as they stream by and contemplates the fact that the disks, which contain almost as much technology as a modern computer chip, sell for less than the cost of a plastic Frisbee.
"The plastic tray they sell you to carry your drive home is a higher gross- margin product," said Dr. Bajorek, who for many years was a pioneering disk-drive scientist at I.B.M.'s Almaden Research Center and now directs advanced technology research at Komag Inc., which has become the last surviving independent manufacturer of disk-drive platters based in the United States.
It hasn't been easy. On Monday, Dr. Bajorek's company will announce that it is successfully emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which the company entered in May 2001.
"This industry can't seem to get any respect," said James Porter, president of DiskTrend, a market research firm in Mountain View, Calif., that follows the industry. "It's a weird combination of chemistry, electrical engineering and a lot of math. The problem is they just work too well and nobody pays any attention."
The industry is in ways a victim of its own success.
In recent years, it has performed the Herculean feat of increasing disk-storage capacity at a rate of 100 percent annually -- almost twice the rate of improvement in the computer chip industry -- only to find that storage demand has grown by only 50 percent a year. The result has been a financial shambles.
"We left Moore's Law in the dust, and in the process we've become our own worst enemy," Dr. Bajorek said, referring to an observation of Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that processing power doubles every 18 months.
That has created a desperate situation that continues to pummel the industry. In June, even I.B.M. became a casualty of the brutal technology wars, announcing that it was selling its disk-drive manufacturing business to Hitachi.
Like many of Silicon Valley's other high-technology companies, Komag has moved all of its manufacturing operations to Asia and cut its cost structure in half in the last two years. There may finally be a payoff: several analysts said the company's turnaround would soon become more visible with the addition of a prominent new customer.
Komag's revival is a significant event, in part because during the dot-com mania, which ended last year, basic technology companies were increasingly viewed as dinosaurs in Silicon Valley. Now Komag's reemergence from bankruptcy, with fewer factories and a stronger balance sheet, is an indication that the Valley is returning to its roots, where innovation was seen in terms of electronic and magnetic technologies, and not new business models.
"Komag has done a wonderful job of getting out of bankruptcy," said Mark Geneen, president of TrendFocus, a market research and consulting firm that follows the information storage industry.
Dr. Bajorek, who believes the company is now stronger but still in a challenging and competitive industry, compares the situation to "walking through Death Valley -- we hope our canteens have enough water to let us reach the Sierras."
If Komag ultimately returns to prosperity it will be because its technology, for a long time ignored, has once again become crucial in a computer industry with voracious new storage demands resulting from new low-cost consumer markets ranging from video games and MP3 music players to digital video recorders.
Indeed, it has largely been the brutally competitive landscape of the disk-drive industry that has made these new consumer applications possible. The amount of data that can be stored on a single disk-drive platter has soared from one gigabyte in 1997 -- enough to store the equivalent of 1,000 hefty novels -- to 40 gigabytes today.
Since the 5 1/4-inch hard-disk drive was introduced by Seagate Technology in 1980, the industry has increased storage capacity 8,000-fold and improved price per bit of storage by a factor of 40,000.
Moreover, it is still uncertain whether the rate at which storage density is increasing will slip from the staggering pace of recent years. The industry will introduce 60-gigabyte platters in July, and 80-gigabyte surfaces are expected by the end of the first quarter of 2003. Before the end of next year, Komag will almost certainly be shipping disk platters that can store 120 billion bytes of data each.
At some point, analysts and industry executives say, the pace of improvement in the industry will inevitably slow down, but those predictions are not new. For most of a decade, the disk-drive industry has defied technology limits as well as what many have viewed as financial common sense.
The roots of today's disk-drive industry can largely be traced back to work originally done in the 1950's.
While he was at I.B.M., Dr. Bajorek was a key member of the team of researchers that during the 1970's developed the basic magneto-resistive recording and sensing-head technology that is the basis of modern disk drives. For his contribution, he was awarded the Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers this year.
Today, a more refined version of the writing and reading heads that descended from Dr. Bajorek's research "fly" over the disk surface at a height of about 150 angstroms (an angstrom is roughly the width of a single hydrogen atom). The tolerances are even more remarkable given that hard disk drives are rapidly becoming a staple of consumer products like Apple Computer's iPod music players, which are handled with little awareness of the delicate machine that stores digital data.
The surface of the Komag disk itself is composed of nine separate layers that sit on an aluminum platter. The data itself is organized in three layers of nickel phosphorus shielded by two layers of a diamond-like carbon material. Currently, the magnetic ones and zeros are aligned end-to-end in concentric tracks. By 2004, Dr. Bajorek believes, the industry will need to begin stacking the tiny magnetic domains perpendicularly to squeeze them more tightly onto the surface of the disk media.
Progress in disk-drive storage in recent years has been made by pushing back what the industry refers to as the "superparamagnetic limit," the size at which the magnetic spots are so small that their magnetic fields can no longer be kept stable at room temperature. Last year, I.B.M. announced it had begun to use new materials the company referred to as "pixie dust" to push back the limit.
In contrast, Dr. Bajorek said Komag had been able to achieve the same densities without resorting to new materials. That will offer a significant cost savings in the next two generations of disk media. "We were blessed with conventional designs that were more thermally stable," he said.
The company is less blessed in terms of competition. Although Komag is the only remaining independent supplier of disk media in the United States, both I.B.M., during its transition to Hitachi, and Seagate will continue to manufacture disks for their own products. And although industry executives said Komag was having some luck in pursuing both companies as customers, internationally it faces three competitors in Japan and a fourth in Taiwan.
The central problem is that the industry overexpanded in the mid-1990's, spending an estimated $700 million on new plants and equipment. That led to the resulting shakeout that forced Komag to merge with a United States competitor, HMT Inc., as well as to close two United States factories and shut down a joint venture in Japan.
The company is left with two modern factories in Malaysia. It is controlled by two New York-based hedge funds, JDS Capital and Cerberus Partners, which specialize in acquiring debt in distressed companies. They currently hold 57.6 percent of the company's shares.
Komag has clearly not yet escaped its financial problems. The company reported a $10.2 million loss on sales of $61.4 million in the first quarter of this year. The amount was lower than the company's $51 million loss of a year ago, but sales growth is still awaiting an industry upturn.
The company's chief executive, Thian Hoo Tan, said he believed the company was now well positioned for the information-technology industry turnaround when it finally occurs. Dr. Bajorek, who shares technology leadership at the company with Komag's president, Michael A. Russack, is even more optimistic about the long run.
Recently, I.B.M. announced plans to commercialize a radical nanotechnology approach to data storage code-named Millipede, which does not use disk platters at all. The computer maker said recently that it would be able to reach storage densities of one trillion bits per inch, and there has been industry speculation that Millipede is the secret advantage that led I.B.M. to decide to sell its disk-drive business to Hitachi.
Even faced with a technology race, Dr. Bajorek said he believed it was possible that the disk-drive industry would be able to keep pace. Why? Dr. Bajorek believes that demand for storage will ultimately grow just as insatiably as his technology.
There is a human characteristic, he said: "If it is easy for us to keep it, we keep it."

the front page selection method by PMM · 2002-07-01 14:21 · Score: 0

stories chosen for the front page are oviously random,

wonder what technique is used

darts, hat, roulette wheel...

oh for a job as easy as that

Re:the front page selection method by Bi()hazard · 2002-07-01 14:55 · Score: 0, Offtopic

didn't you know?
they use this:http://bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/index.html.

By the way, I'm trying out the Opera browser for the first time, and the text I'm typing in this comment box is damn small. Any way to fix this or is Opera just gay? Criminy! iCab doesnt render /. right, netscape 4.08 sucks, newer netscapes suck more, ie is evil, Opera makes text look gay...maybe I'll try Mozilla next. or maybe lynx. fuck, i'll just use raw telnet to port 80.
Re:the front page selection method by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 15:40 · Score: 0

Since you're obviously a Mac sissy, you should try a real browser. Or are you just so leet that you had to tell the /. crowd that you're gonna try Mozilla. Spare me the sob story, boy. IE 5.5 for Mac is one of the best browsers ever... it was so good they re-wrote the Windows rendering engine based on the IE Mac code. Go figure.
Re:the front page selection method by DamonCanine · 2002-07-01 15:59 · Score: 1

Opera makes text look gay, huh? Does that mean slashdot stories show up with the text rainbow colored, or what?
BTW, Netscape 4.08 doesn't suck....
It blows.
Use Mozilla.
Re:the front page selection method by great+throwdini · 2002-07-01 16:21 · Score: 1

Spare me the sob story, boy. IE 5.5 for Mac is one of the best browsers ever...

There is no such thing as IE 5.5 for Mac. Silly AC.

Kinda shot yourself in the foot while it was dangling out of your mouth, huh?
Re:the front page selection method by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:29 · Score: 0

When I try it in Opera, the default font isn't quite the right style for /., and the text in the post comment box is pretty tiny. But I think the original poster is just blaming the text while actually being frustrated over the threatening message that they will give you a banner after 30 days unless you register. somewhat of a freudian situation, which explains the focus on homosexuality.
Re:the front page selection method by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 01:29 · Score: 0

you are the dumb fuck since you didn't notice that it was a joke, tithead.

jesus did I really need to say it? by carpe_noctem · 2002-07-01 14:21 · Score: 2, Insightful

This is a pretty interesting story about http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/01/technology/01KOM A.html>the 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing ...

double check those URLs and HTML tags!

I tell you, nobody takes any pride in their work anymore :/

--
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K

Re:jesus did I really need to say it? by jethro200 · 2002-07-01 14:34 · Score: 1

here it is, for all of you too lazy to copy and paste.

Commodity business by DeafDumbBlind · 2002-07-01 14:22 · Score: 5, Interesting

The drive market has been a commodity business for several years now. There's very little to distinguish the top offerings from the various vendors. IBM's exit from the drive arena recently was a reminder of this. A few years ago when I was part of a team designing a high-end RAID controller, it was the concensus of all the engineers that IBM made the best SCSI drives. They were dumbing billions into R&D and they still couldn't differenciate their offerings enough to make it profitable.

Here's waiting for fast solid state storage...

--

Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.

Re:Commodity business by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:35 · Score: 0

Really nice post. But shouldn't that be waiting for cheap solid state storage?

Bad Puns by TheDick · 2002-07-01 14:23 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Gotta Love /. there needs to be a mod for this.

--

Re:Bad Puns by jcoy42 · 2002-07-01 14:34 · Score: 1

Gotta Love /. there needs to be a mod for this.
Yes, but should a bad pun mean positive or negative karma?

--
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Re:Bad Puns by Trinn · 2002-07-01 16:54 · Score: 2, Funny

It's obvious. +0 Punny.
Go ahead, tell me you didn't see that coming.

Circumvented One by Disevidence · 2002-07-01 14:23 · Score: 2, Informative

Circumvention

--
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.

Re:Circumvented One by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:17 · Score: 0

The NYTimes is blocking it. At least, they are for me.
Re:Circumvented One by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:38 · Score: 0

Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door
that's easy, just stick a piece of metal between the door and the wall, and push. slam!

heh by hatter3bdev · 2002-07-01 14:23 · Score: 3, Funny

The problem is they just work too well and nobody pays any attention.

I Guess we know why windows is so popular then :-)

Fixed Link by GrandCow · 2002-07-01 14:23 · Score: 0, Redundant

Fixed link

For those too lazy to cut and paste

--
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson

Based in the US? by ObviousGuy · 2002-07-01 14:24 · Score: 1

So what?

Do they make cheaper, better, or larger hard drives than their competitors? On this, the article is silent.

I'm all for mindless flag waving, but only so far as I don't have to pay extra for it.

--
I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.

Re:Based in the US? by martyn+s · 2002-07-01 14:52 · Score: 1

A commodity, by definition is a product which is the same regardless from who you buy it from. Indistinguishable in quality and price.

Maybe people claim that hard drives are commodity items. If what they're saying is true, than the article had nothing to say about how this company's product compares to other hard drive companies' product, because there was nothing to be said.
Re:Based in the US? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:54 · Score: 0

Then the article is nothing more than a chance to do some flag waving? Slashdot is getting better and better.
Re:Based in the US? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 15:00 · Score: 0

Part of the problem is that in Asia, they get 20 year tax free holidays. Free trade is nice, as long as the playing field is level.
The drives made vary in quality, lesser quality ball bearings, made cheap.
What the article does not say is that if this company got the subsidy sugar growers got, they would be in easy street. Congresscritters have voted to put sugar ahead of high-tech jobs; but not send thier own jobs offshore. Meantime, I cannot get hard numbers on will this disk drive go for 2 years nonstop; MTBF has become worthless.
Re:Based in the US? by nelsonal · 2002-07-01 15:48 · Score: 2, Interesting

As we all learned with the 60/75GXP fiasco. I personally think that had alot to do with IBM's exit from the HD business. However, its difficult to know if the drive your about to buy for less than normal street price is cheap because an OEM had too much inventory, or cheap because it made from cheap parts. I agree with you on the free trade on a balanced playing field would be best, but how do you get the other guy to change his rules, when he feels that you have cheated him for centuries? And its even tougher to deal with other countries if you don't show good faith in most dealings. The steel tariffs have hurt trade negotiations pretty significantly. Down with the sugar lobby, if nothing esle it keeps your prices for sugar about 50% higher than world prices. While the average /.er doesn't do enough sugar purchasing to notice, they might enjoy better pop. Soda switched to corn syrup about the time the quota's were put in place. Incedentally I once heard a sugar farmer complain that he never got a check from the government, so he obviously wasn't getting any subsidies.

--
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Re:Based in the US? by ObviousGuy · 2002-07-01 15:49 · Score: 1

Incedentally I once heard a sugar farmer complain that he never got a check from the government, so he obviously wasn't getting any subsidies.

He needs to get in line and fill out forms. You don't get money from the government by working on your farm all day trying to grow your crops.

--
I have been pwned because my /. password was too easy to guess.
Re:Based in the US? by sconeu · 2002-07-01 16:06 · Score: 3, Informative

If you go to Komag's web site, you'll see that they don't make drives, they make drive platters, which they sell to drive OEMs.

--
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Re:Based in the US? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:11 · Score: 0

If you go to Komag's web site [komag.com], you'll see that they don't make drives, they make drive platters, which they sell to drive OEMs.

To which the proper reply, if I get ObviousGuy's drift, is, "So what?"
Re:Based in the US? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:10 · Score: 0

Acctually he benifits indirectly, sugar subsidies come in the form of very limited quotas on imports of cheap foreign sugar. So he has benefited by getting a higher market price for his sugar, that you and I paid for, even if he didn't get a check made out to him. That kind of subsidy is the most destructive, because its easier to ignore.
Re:Based in the US? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 23:25 · Score: 0

Actually, the big 'farmers' receive subsidies for sugar grown outside the US.. let that sink in good. Meantime, the environment in Florida is being raped, everglades will be extinct soon., so tourism and flipper go down the gurgler. Hanging chads, you betcya. Limited quota's - thats a joke. Would like to see wasted agriculture checks 'capped' , and the US re-invigorated to what it does best - hi-tech, rather than copying the European farmer/subsidy handout mentality. This is academic anyway, when national security is stored on drives made in China, yet nobody is alert. We all know what happened to high tech in Europe.. anyone see a pattern? The rot started when Zenith stopped US TV production. Total dependance on imports is a bad thing.

Re:a href=timothy by Bingo+Foo · 2002-07-01 14:26 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Some serious smokin' and drinkin' going on around the /. offices tonight, maybe?

The moderators too, apparently. The only mod on that post is "Overrated."

--
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!

Gee by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:28 · Score: 0

It's a good thing that IBM got out of that volatile, risky market and into the nice, solid, safe market of selling holographic memory "in five to ten years"

They'd be in real trouble now otherwise!

Am I reading this wrong? by GrandCow · 2002-07-01 14:33 · Score: 1

And probably soon to be gone completely.

I accidentally clicked on the link to Komag Incorporated's stock prices... Hoooooooo boy.

Open $ 0.01

High $ 0.01

Low $ 0.00

How do you get a low of $0.00??? How come my stock broker didn't call me that second and have me buy ten million shares? He's fired!

--
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson

Re:Am I reading this wrong? by q-soe · 2002-07-01 15:08 · Score: 3, Informative

from the article

" It hasn't been easy. On Monday, Dr. Bajorek's company will announce that it is successfully emerging from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which the company entered in May 2001."

Honestly before commenting please read the article... Companies in Chapter 11 are not traded thus they have a 0.00 dollar share price..

--
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Re:Am I reading this wrong? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:49 · Score: 0

Also, depending on where you are getting the quote from, if the stock is valued at under a penny some sites will just say 0.00 rather than going into the decimal places. In this case it probably was the fact that they were bankrupt.
Re:Am I reading this wrong? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:53 · Score: 0

I think instead of 0.00 for sub-penny stock prices it should say "SELL NOW YOU FOOL BEFORE YOU LOSE EVERYTHING!". :)
Re:Am I reading this wrong? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 20:27 · Score: 0

Shouldn't "not traded" mean more like infinite share price instead of 0.00? 0 means free, infinite would mean you couldn't get them even if you wanted to (not traded).

Anyway, how can you value something if you don't trade it?

My speculation... by Ziviyr · 2002-07-01 14:35 · Score: 3, Insightful

there has been industry speculation that Millipede is the secret advantage that led I.B.M. to decide to sell its disk-drive business to Hitachi.

I speculate it might have been due to IBM's hideous failure to manufacturing stable drives that cause them to sell out. 60% failure rate here, and thats not the floor of it!

--

Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!

Re:My speculation... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:52 · Score: 1, Informative

60%? Maybe you should stop buying your parts from places where manufacturers dump their defective shit (aka PriceWatch).

If 60% of the drives in IBM's own machines failed, they'd be out of business right now.
Re:My speculation... by Ziviyr · 2002-07-01 15:00 · Score: 1

I got three of the drives from brick and mortar, the newest one is the one from there that isn't dead. Then I got two replacements from IBM, one was horrific, the other is still running but I really don't trust it.

--

Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Re:My speculation... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 15:52 · Score: 0

And you wonder why your computer randomly reboots et. all.

You sir are obviously much l33ter than moi. Please shine some l33tness on me.

Half the shit on pricewatch is probably stolen or damaged anyway.

Go away, thanks.
Re:My speculation... by FrostedChaos · 2002-07-01 18:37 · Score: 1

Um... what's wrong with pricewatch? I've ordered from there many times, never had a problem.

Of course, I didn't order the absolute cheapest parts on sale (in most cases) because I knew they would be crap. I also didn't order speakers from there because I wanted to listen to my speakers before buying.

So in conclusion, if you really feel like going to a retailer and paying 2x the OEM price, that's fine with me. But don't use it as an excuse to show off your superior "knowledge" because the rest of us will laugh at you. (And there's still no guarantee the salesmen won't rip you off. There is no substitute for knowing what you're doing.)

--
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot

US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 14:35 · Score: 2, Insightful

'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S., and reasons why the industry is ailing

Because American workers are over-paid and the "strong" US dollar makes imports cheaper?

Re:US Manufacturing by OneFix · 2002-07-01 15:59 · Score: 5, Insightful

I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).

Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada...or even Japan (most of the cheap electronics are made in countries like Korea and Hong Kong).

No...the truth is, it's just cheaper to buy a worker in developing/under-developed countries.

But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.

...Now, don't get me wrong, there are overpaid American workers, but there are also overpaid workers in most every industry and in most every developed country.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 17:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).

The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada

Cheap is a relative term, but costs are significantly lower for manufacturers in Canada, for instance. That is why so many American cars are made in Canada. Canadian workers are paid relatively less (or, as I said before, American workers are over-paid), and the 'artifically' low currency-exchange rate makes importing much more sensible than manufacturing in the US. You also get an educated and skilled workforce as good as or better than in the US. OTOH, the US is a big market with a big appetite for imports. Common business sense says to move cost centers (manufacturing/production) to Canada (or various other countries) and profit centers (sales) to America.

No...the truth is, it's just cheaper to buy a worker in developing/under-developed countries.

Well yeah. In a system of global economics, each country has different circumstances and can offer different comparative advantages. Third-world countries sometimes have raw natural resources to trade, but they always have cheap labour to offer.

But really, one needs to question the notion that these workers are 'exploited', given that the 'exploitation' happens on a voluntary basis. The only conclusion is that the 'exploitation' (by first-world standards) is significantly better than the alternative, presumably subsistance farming, begging, or starving to death. The anti-globalization protesters never seem to grapple with this issue. [A prosperous nation doesn't just appear overnight, and international welfare will never create one. Prosperity is the result of a long bootstrapping process that only possible under a responsible government.]

But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.

Bullshit. In the long run, the economics balance out to where workers are compensated in proportion to their skills and relative worth. Everybody wins in this circumstance. Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this. With greater economic efficiency, the global standard of living increases.

but there are also overpaid workers in most every industry and in most every developed country

That's pretty much a tautology. For various political and fixed forces, some workers are paid more than they are worth, because the free market has been retarded from functioning properly.
Re:US Manufacturing by Anne+Thwacks · 2002-07-01 18:54 · Score: 1

Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this.
Just as soon as the Arabs accept payment for oil in Euros. Given GWB's apparent support for Israel, this could happen any minute.
The dollar derives its value from the fact that all Oil consumers MUST pay in dollars, so to buy oil, you must first buy dollars, while the oil producers have dollars more than they can spend.
Any minute this will change, and no one will want UDS any more What does the US export to support the dollar? Apart from Gansta rap and hollywood moves? Nothing They did export planes, but Airbus is cheaper to buy and run.
Incidentally, a significant amount of cheap electonics IS made in Europe. (Ever heard of Dell, Compaq, or IBM?)

--
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Re:US Manufacturing by OneFix · 2002-07-01 19:27 · Score: 2

The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

Of course the statement in your origonal post seemed to overlook this fact by just saying that American workers are over-paid...what you should have said is that American workers are paid more than those working in under-developed/developing nations. Which is why the average American worker has a higher standard of living than say someone living in Mexico or Korea. And I would agree with that, but I hardly think that justifies the origonal statement.

Bullshit. In the long run, the economics balance out to where workers are compensated in proportion to their skills and relative worth. Everybody wins in this circumstance. Perhaps American workers will ultimately stop being over-paid, but the rest of the world won't suffer because of this. With greater economic efficiency, the global standard of living increases.

Wrong...history has proven that the gap between the haves (those living in developed countries) and the have-nots (those living in under-developed/developing countries) becomes larger over time. Your assumption is that as soon as american workers are willing to accept a lower salary, then that will increase the salary of someone working in an under-developed/developing country...and that just isn't true. When the cost of an american worker goes down, then the cost of a similar worker in another country has to go down as well...it doesn't as you say "balance out". As countries become more prosperous, then their workers get paid more, and then eventually their workers lose jobs to ppl in another developing country...

Consumers will never pay more for the same exact product (except in certain circumstances like memory where supply is limited). This is the problem with this viewpoint...as soon as an "exploited" worker's salary starts to go up, the company that once prefered to exploit the workers in this once poor country will find a new country to exploit (probably somewhere like Afganistan)...

The flaw in this thinking is that companies that move production to countries where their workers are willing to work for lower pay will somehow stay there because their workers either have a higher education (how does that work...poor workers in developing countries are somehow given better opportunities)??? Or are making a better product...

I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

It's simple, exploited workers in developing nations are kept on a short leash and if they demand more or become "difficult", the same company that didn't hesitate to give them a lower pay/less benifits/etc will move to another location where the workers are not as "problematic"...

Like it or not, companies that do this have no loyalty to their employees...
Re:US Manufacturing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 20:20 · Score: 0

I am a former employee of Western Digital. When the factory was moved from Singapore to Malaysia, the primary reason given was the tax incentive. Malaysia was giving us several years of tax-free operation in exchange for moving into their country.

Cheaper salaries was a lesser concern.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 21:22 · Score: 1, Offtopic

I wonder if so much of the gang and drug activity in our inner cities is a result of an artificially high minimum wage which makes unskilled people less employable.

I'd suspect that a big component of the problem is cultural (physical abuse, substance abuse, poverty, lack of education, lack of motivation, recruitment into street gangs).

But, minimum wage is indeed an artificial control, though there are many delicate balances between economic and social agendas in such things. Minimum wages are basically aimed at preventing low-skill workers from being exploited within their own country. The substitute, I guess, is fewer low-paying jobs and more welfare. Of course, under-the-table arrangements exist for less-than-minimum-wage employment.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 21:32 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Just as soon as the Arabs accept payment for oil in Euros. Given GWB's apparent support for Israel, this could happen any minute.

International payments are usually exchanged into the local currency of the supplier, though there is undoubtedly an underground economy based on US dollars in many poor countries. Governments don't have all that much control over underground economies, neverminding what currency they use, and governments are usually trying to stamp them out.

In any case, Americans would have little trouble getting a hold of Euros if they needed them.

The dollar derives its value from the fact that all Oil consumers MUST pay in dollars, so to buy oil, you must first buy dollars, while the oil producers have dollars more than they can spend.

Nonsense.

BTW, America imports only about 20% of the oil it uses from the Middle East (or was that only 20% of only imports?). Do you know where most of its oil comes from? America. Do you know where it imports the most oil from? Canada.

Any minute this will change, and no one will want UDS any more What does the US export to support the dollar? Apart from Gansta rap and hollywood moves? Nothing They did export planes, but Airbus is cheaper to buy and run.

More nonsense. America exports a large variety of products.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 22:24 · Score: 2

Of course the statement in your origonal post seemed to overlook this fact by just saying that American workers are over-paid...

American workers on average, compared to all other workers in the world, including the industrialized nations, are paid disportionality high wages for the value of the work that they do. I think that "over-paid" is a pretty good summary of this situation.

what you should have said is that American workers are paid more than those working in under-developed/developing nations.

And industrialized nations.

Which is why the average American worker has a higher standard of living than say someone living in Mexico or Korea.

South Koreans have a surprisingly high standard of living, almost on par with industrialized nations ($16K+ per capita purchasing-power parity). North Korea is pretty much a poster child of Communistic poverty. Mexico has big problems with government corruption and low education. An interesting related stat is that 80% of Canadians have a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans (except for the richest quintile). Don't delude yourself that America is the end-all and be-all of living standards or that it is immune from the laws of economics. Farmer subsidies, tarrifs, etc., serve to lower your standard of living.

Your assumption is that as soon as american workers are willing to accept a lower salary, then that will increase the salary of someone working in an under-developed/developing country...and that just isn't true.

You're confusing cause and effect. Basically, I am saying that freer trade will cause American wages to go down, because they are disportionately high w.r.t. making products elsewhere for cheaper.

Salaries in developing countries will increase as their labour forces acquire more skills and improved infrastructure for more production capability. As they are able to do more work, such as with India and software development, they will get more work and Americans will need to become more competitive (or reduce wages). Competition is a great equalizer.

In the bigger picture, economics is not a zero-sum game. It's one of few processes in which everyone can win.

When the cost of an american worker goes down, then the cost of a similar worker in another country has to go down as well...it doesn't as you say "balance out".

I don't see why. All that matters is that the foreign worker be competitive against the American worker. He could even be paid more if his productivity was higher. The Japanese steel industry, for example, is about twice as productive per worker than the American steel industry. This is mostly the result of investment in infrastructure, which I guess just isn't a sexy thing to do in America. I don't know what their wages are like.

As countries become more prosperous, then their workers get paid more, and then eventually their workers lose jobs to ppl in another developing country...

Well yeah, as developing countries become more competitive, workers in more-developed countries will need to justify their wages. Invariably, low-skill/low-pay jobs will migrate to the less developed nations, since they can supply low-skilled labour cheaper.

But, these developing nations that loose low-skill jobs to less developed nations will also acquire the critical mass of education, skills, and infrastructure to go to the "next level" and do more-complicated work, like build cars, microchips, hard drives, and televisions. Since their workers will presumably have (and require) lower wages than Americans, jobs of manufacturing hard drives, etc., will migrate away from America to "middle-tier" nations. How many television manufactures are in the US? Zero. How many hard drive makers? When IBM finishes pulling the plug, zero. America is not competitive at doing these things.

OTOH, greater global economic efficiency means that you can buy more stuff for cheaper. If you were to suffer a 10% loss in wages but get a 20% increase in purchasing power, you've come out ahead. Your standard of living will have increased.

Consumers will never pay more for the same exact product (except in certain circumstances like memory where supply is limited). This is the problem with this viewpoint...as soon as an "exploited" worker's salary starts to go up, the company that once prefered to exploit the workers in this once poor country will find a new country to exploit (probably somewhere like Afganistan)...

You say that as if there were something wrong with it. Perhaps you're a protectionist? Also, it takes a large amount of infrastructure and a fair amount of labour skill to make memory chips, so Afghanistan won't be very competitive in that market for a long time.

I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

An automobile is another complex commodity. Developing nations have a way to go before being truly competitive in that market. Textiles and farming, OTOH, for example, require significantly fewer skills. Ultimately, it's the consumer who decides what is the best product at the best price. If Kias suck, then don't buy them.

Like it or not, companies that do this have no loyalty to their employees...

Nor should they. Why should anyone pay more than they need to, including employers?

Assuming that you're an American worker, I think that you've been far too pampered for far too long. The rest of the world is becoming more competitive every day. You will need to either become more productive or your wages will decrease.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 22:39 · Score: 2

I am a former employee of Western Digital. When the factory was moved from Singapore to Malaysia, the primary reason given was the tax incentive. Malaysia was giving us several years of tax-free operation in exchange for moving into their country.

Interesting. Government subsidies interfere with a free market. Most trade agreements seek to reduce subsidies, though don't tell that to George W. and the farmland states that voted for him.
Re:US Manufacturing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 22:40 · Score: 0

That makes no sense. I'm not going to argue whether or not minimum wages are a good thing, but why would lowering the amount unskilled workers are paid make legitimate employment more attractive? These things exist because they're more lucrative than legal employment. Making legal employment less lucrative at the bottom end would make the drug trade and other organized crime even more appealing to people with no skills.

The West European nations all have far higher minimum wages without the ghettos we have, so that kinda blows a hole in your argument, doesn't it?
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 22:52 · Score: 2

The Japanese steel industry, for example, is about twice as productive per worker than the American steel industry. This is mostly the result of investment in infrastructure, which I guess just isn't a sexy thing to do in America.

Actually, one might speculate that during the same period of time, Americans were busy pouring their investment dollars into dot-coms rather than hard infrastructure.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-01 22:58 · Score: 2

I don't know about you, but most of the products I've seen from developing nations are of poorer quality than those from developed nations (Just ask someone if they'ld prefer to drive a Kia or a Toyota)...

The first generation of Japanese automobiles, which arrived in America in the 1970s, also sucked.
Re:US Manufacturing by jeorgen · 2002-07-01 23:03 · Score: 1

I wish this were the case, but it is generally not that American workers are over-paid, but the workers in other countries are under-paid (read exploited).
This is a fundamental misundersanding of how wages develop over time. Truth is, the more work is exported to your so called exploited workers, the higher their salaries will be. See it as development aid that is actually working. If the jobs were not exported, the so called exploited workers would make zilch, nada. Only way to give the poor people something without them producing something is to have a communist system. That is, whether you are aware of it or not, what you're advocating.
Just look at what happens...when was the last time you heard about the cheap imports from France...how about the UK...what about Germany...or Canada...or even Japan (most of the cheap electronics are made in countries like Korea and Hong Kong).
You wish other parts of the world did not exist?
But, in the long run, it helps drive down the cost of an American worker which makes every country's workers suffer.
This would only hold true if everything we produced was utterly useless. Since it is not, everyone gets richer in the long run.
/jeorgen
Re:US Manufacturing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 01:35 · Score: 0

Sorry Mr. Free-market. Cars get made in Canada because (a) shipping parts across the ocean is cheaper than shipping cars (taxes, shipping cost, etc)and (b) Canada is not Taiwan in terms of employment cost, but it sure beats the US.

So you are only half right. A 'better-educated' workforce is not all that useful in drone labor. Try again.
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-02 03:07 · Score: 2

So you are only half right.

There are probably a dozen significant factors and neither of us have given exhaustive lists. But I think that by not mentioning it you are underrating the undervalued-by-25% currency-exchange rate of the Canadian dollar.
Re:US Manufacturing by markmoss · 2002-07-02 06:10 · Score: 2

The West European nations all have far higher minimum wages without the ghettos we have, so that kinda blows a hole in your argument, doesn't it?

They've also got far higher unemployment, youth gangs, and soaring crime rates that really do endanger the middle class (vs. America where the gangbangers stay in their own neighborhoods and mostly shoot each other). I'm not fond of the results of the American "system", but if things seem to be better in Europe, it's just because their reporters don't play up the problems as much.

Most of the unemployed (and virtually unemployable) young Euro criminals are "white", because most of their population is, but where they have "colored" immigrants or guestworkers (Turks, Pakistanis, etc.) they have ghettos. I suspect that some of these are far worse than any American ghetto, and I'm not sure if white English working-class neighborhoods are much better than American ghettos by now - except that their gangbangers can walk over too a better neighborhood without drawing too much attention and find someone actually worth mugging...

Also, Europe has a lot more blatant racist violence - German skinheads burning Turks in their apartment houses, British skinheads hunting for "Pakis", christians and moslems both attacking jews... Sure we have such incidents in the USA - and every single one makes the news coast to coast, causing a reaction strong enough to scare the other racists, homophobes, and other sorts of creeps into staying home for a while. Seems like the Euro authorities try to sweep their incidents under the carpet.
Re:US Manufacturing by markmoss · 2002-07-02 06:30 · Score: 2

Most of the steel infrastructure in Japan is much, much older than the dot-com era. But for obvious reasons it had to be totally rebuilt after WWII (much of this paid for by the same American taxpayers who had paid to demolish it in the first place), while the American steel industry is still running many pre-WWII plants. And I suspect that the Japanese have also replaced equipment faster since the war - there hasn't been much interest in this country in basic industries, or in anything with 20 year payoffs. And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.

By the way, one sort of steelmaking thrives in modern America - small mills producing high quality steels to order. These plants are modern. They don't make steel from ore, but purchase what they can't get by recycling. They get a fairly high price per pound, but quality and quick delivery make it worthwhile for many uses. It's no surprise that such a plant makes fewer tons per man-hour than a gigantic modern plant, which can only make a few kinds of product.
Re:US Manufacturing by markmoss · 2002-07-02 06:38 · Score: 2

The economics of this sort of thing are all relative. If I lived in a third-world country and made one-tenth of my present salary, effectively I would be wealthy beyond all belief. Yeah, I'd sure be exploited!

I was in Malaysia a year ago. (This is one of the relatively successful third-world countries.) Of the half-dozen engineers I dealt with, only the chief engineer owned a car. None of them could afford to marry before 30. We were in a rural region, but the air was polluted enough to affect my sinuses - in particular, around meal-time the air fills up with smoke from all the cookfires. (I didn't ask what kind of solid fuel they were burning...)
Re:US Manufacturing by Citizen+of+Earth · 2002-07-02 07:29 · Score: 2

And it might actually make quite good sense that the US isn't investing in large steel plants - it may be far cheaper to buy it from foreigners than to make it here.

This must be why George W. as erected the latest round of tariffs on imported steel. No, wait a second...
Re:US Manufacturing by OneFix · 2002-07-02 08:43 · Score: 2

As a general rule, the first generation of any product sucks. The Japanese were just beginning to get into the market. Most of these manufacturers do not have that problem. Most are somehow related to companies that have been in the business for years...like it or not, companies like IBM have no excuse for making a bad product.
Re:US Manufacturing by OneFix · 2002-07-02 09:02 · Score: 2

The dollar derives its value from the fact that all Oil consumers MUST pay in dollars

Wrong, The dollar remains high valued because the US is where all of the "money" is...it's the same reason why english is the international language of commerce. It's the whole golden rule concept...those who hold the gold make the rules...

Incidentally, a significant amount of cheap electonics IS made in Europe. (Ever heard of Dell, Compaq, or IBM?)

I don't know a whole lot about Dell or Compaq, but I know that IBM still assembles their machines in their market...so, an american machine gets made somewhere close to the US and a european machine gets assembled in europe. And then again, I don't think many ppl would call Dell, Compaq, or IBM cheap.

And, isn't it funny that at least Dell an IBM are American companies (not certain about Compaq)...this is why the dollar is higher...
Re:US Manufacturing by CommieLib · 2002-07-02 09:38 · Score: 1

What you're saying is generally true, but you're overlooking the benefit of the cheaper production cost...

This lowered cost is a form of wealth. More importantly, it is a REAL form of wealth, as opposed to an artifically inflated wage.

--
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Re:US Manufacturing by ralan · 2002-07-02 15:38 · Score: 1

Your economic theory is collapsing... Canadian factory workers are generally paid about 25 to 30 percent more than their American counterparts. This is why you can't drive across the border, change your US dollars to Canadian, and buy a cheap GM auto... GM autos cost a lot more in Canada... But, in New Zealand, the NZ Dollar is worth about 30 or 40 cents. And, a NZ factory worker is paid on a matching scale as a US worker. If a US worker makes 20kUS, then a NZ worker would make 20kNZ. NZ is a good place to go shopping! I own two homes. One in Shanghai, the other in Washington, DC. The Shanghai home is smaller and not nearly as well built as my American home. However, it cost quite a bit more. I have noticed that whenever, and wherever a factory owner puts up dorms, cafeterias, and pays lowered wages because of these "extra" benefits, the worker is always getting shafted. It was true when it was Blue Diamond Coal Company in Hardburly, Ky and it is true when it is Intel in Indonesia or the Japanese factories in China. American workers are not overpaid. They just can't compete against workers who make 30 dollars a month and work 80 to 100 hours a week. This is going on all over the world. Take a tour of a Chinese factory. You will understand. Americans invented Television. No televisions are made in America. We invented hand held video recorders. None are made here. We invented Personal Computers. Few are made here. We invented disk drives. None are made here. We invented memory chips. None are made here. We invented microwave ovens. None are made here. Our clothes come from Pakistan and China. Our cars come from Japan and Korea. Even our Dell computers are now made in Shanghai. Everything Black and Decker makes comes from China. Now, just how is it that the American worker supposed to compete? Minimum wage employees in the textiles industry are loosing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands. Entire towns in South Carolina are unemployed. These were the lowest paid workers in America, but they could not compete with virtual slaves in Pakistan and China.
Re:US Manufacturing by Dudes · 2002-07-03 03:15 · Score: 1

I think you will find it was a Scotsman who invented television.

The Japanese invented camcorders.

The British invented personal computers.

Good other points though.
Re:US Manufacturing by nuggz · 2002-07-03 03:41 · Score: 2

GM cars are cheaper in Canada then the US.
Check out gmcanada.com

The high US dollar drives down the cost of imports and raises the relative cost of US labour.

Standard of Living in Canada and the US is similar, but the relative curency shift makes some things a little odd.
For instance people only want to spend 50% of their annual income on a car. Your salary is still paid in local currency, the car must be priced in the local currency.
This is why companies hedge against currency fluxuations.
Re:US Manufacturing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-03 09:12 · Score: 0

I suspect that some of these are far worse than any American ghetto, and I'm not sure if white English working-class neighborhoods are much better than American ghettos by now
Wrong.
Seems like the Euro authorities try to sweep their incidents under the carpet.
Wrong again.
US is, by very far, the most violent society of the Western countries (and even, more violent than a number of third world countries).
You are just trying to argue it's not the case, "violence" is magically hidden in Europe. It's not the case.
Re:US Manufacturing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-03 09:16 · Score: 0

And, isn't it funny that at least Dell an IBM are American companies (not certain about Compaq)...
... in many of which almost all components are manufactured in Asia.
Re:US Manufacturing by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-03 09:22 · Score: 0

Interesting. Government subsidies interfere with a free market.
It's also called "investment". Malaysia gives "tax-free" operation, calculating the resulting general balance on Malaysia society is positive. It would be the same in a free market.

who needs a better hard drive? by bigsexyjoe · 2002-07-01 14:36 · Score: 1

I don't. I haven't filled up my 8 GB. I guess if you download lots of music and stuff an 80 GB would be nice but I think most people will never fill their hard drives.

The business is a victim of its own success just success just like the whole computer industry is or will be IMNVHO (in my not very humble opinion).

--
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free

Re:who needs a better hard drive? by kalislashdot · 2002-07-01 14:39 · Score: 1

Or rip DVDs, that takes lots of space too.
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by bigsexyjoe · 2002-07-01 14:47 · Score: 0, Offtopic

yes, i did post before reading and I apologize. I make an ass out of myself every time I post. (I only get modded up if I make a really big ass though.) Replying to myself offtopic is pretty obnoxious so maybe it will all work out for the best...

--
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by dsoltesz · 2002-07-01 16:38 · Score: 2

Uhhh some of us have jobs. We use computers in our jobs. We have lots of spreadsheets, documents, images, data sets, and so forth. In some industries, I'm a low-end user sucking up 60 GB, with a lot of files backed up and deleted to make space for new work. A buddy of mine has around 900 GB, which he can only keep enough free space on for work by transferring stuff off to DVD or tape -- he has single files that won't even fit on a CD. I wonder what kind of disk space the folks at Skywalker Ranch are using...
Yeah, while a number of folks won't use more than 8GB, a whole lot more need much more.
Others of us use our computers for more than checking our e-mail. Not that the hard drive manufacturers give a shit about us at home, but I'm sucking up easily 40 GB with data (not counting my MP3's, downloaded software archive, and pr0n). I've got about 15 CDs worth of data files that have been deleted from my computers. And two of my computers also have (on top of 2GB system partitions and 8GB software partitions) 10GB each reserved for games, which I frequently have to uninstall in order to make room for the lastest-greatest cuz 10 GB just ain't as big as it used to be. Hell, I got 4 GB just for temp space, and sometimes that gets dangerously close to full.
What kind of data sucks up disk space? Digital photos, audio, video, Photoshop, Illustrator, Penthouse screensavers, AutoCAD, GIS data, UltraFractal images, satellite imagery, climate data, financial data, medical imagery, architectural drawings, circuit diagrams, tax records, databases of all flavors, source code, web design work, Bryce, games, digital elevation models, VRML worlds, Matrix wallpaper, fonts, geneology research, Maya, recipes, reference documents... and, of course, e-mail. And if you have enough decent software, there goes even more disk space.
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:59 · Score: 0

I can use up 5-6 gig in keeping KDE current from CVS. This includes the all the source, the object files, the libraries, the resource files, and the then everything installed. About once a month I checkout Xfree86 from CVS and compile it. I also compile my own gtk+ and family from source. All of this can really add up in space.
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:59 · Score: 0

And as Bill Gates once said - "256kb should be enough memory for anyone!"
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:20 · Score: 0

3 GB just for unreal, 8GB for my gamebox is just not enough.
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by FueledByRamen · 2002-07-01 17:37 · Score: 1

Back when I ran Linux, I compiled everything from source. I had KDE3, several flavors of the DRI project, GLIDE (yes, I had a Voodoo3), 2 revisions of the kernel at all times, everything down to my sound drivers (ALSA) were kept in /usr/src. I wondered why I was out of disk space. So, I deleted the whole directory (system working fine for a day - must not need to recompile anymore). Low and behold, 10 gigs free!

--
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 03:47 · Score: 0

I sure do. I have about 5 GB of freespace left between my 120 GB and 45 GB harddrives. 160 GB of space is easy to fill.
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by geekoid · 2002-07-02 08:08 · Score: 2

If the people at Skywalker Ranch are keeping there work files on there local computer, there admin should be slapped.

Your use is in the very, very tiny minority of computer needs.
That said, you should be using a SCSI disk array and not using an IBM clone.

--
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Re:who needs a better hard drive? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 16:28 · Score: 0

I'd have to take issue with the part that says:

"A whole lot more of us needs to use more than 8 gigs"

I realize the photo-industry and the video production industry use a lot of hd space, but they don't use it all at the same time, and those same industries don't keep everything on hd's except for temporary back-ups.

Why the HDD business is ailing... by WIAKywbfatw · 2002-07-01 14:39 · Score: 5, Informative

Hard disk drive production capacity is far higher than demand, hence HDD manufacturers are having a harder time making a profit.

Why is this? Well three simple reasons spring to mind.

1. Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands.

OK, so you have more than one drive in your PC, but how many of the billion PCs sold have more than one? Servers do but they make up a very small (albeit highly profitable) segment of the HDD market. Most are installed in desktop PCs and, nowadays, most people don't use more than a fraction of the 20GB+ drives that come with a modern PC. Heck, even 5GB, the kind of capacity that was typical on an entry-level desktop three years ago is more than most users get through.

(Remember, not everyone is a MP3-fiend.)

2. We're buying fewer PCs.

Companies are buying fewer machines, as are private individuals.

Companies because the desktops that they've being buying lately need to be replaced less frequently than was previously the case (because the desktops they bought three years ago still run today's software comfortably), and because they are finding few new areas (ones that they haven't already covered) where a PC will help streamline operations. The current state of the global economy doesn't help either.

The same is essentially true for private individuals too. Anyone who wants a PC already likely has one, so why buy another one (especially in an uncertain economic climate) if the old one does the trick?

No new PC means no new HDD.

3. HDDs are now commodities.

Once something becomes ubiquitous and readily available, as HDDs have in the last five years, then it no longer demands a price premium. Fiercer competition means small profits, which means less reason to stay in the business, especially a business that ties up so much capital in the first place (in R&D and fabrication costs).

Examining these factors, especially the last one, it's not too hard to see why so many companies have exited the HDD business recently.

--

"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Medevo · 2002-07-01 14:49 · Score: 1

I agree with you completely but I do believe that the first point should be clarified

Within the past few years the difference between PC owners, and Server owners HDD demands has widened. However many hard drive companies try to sell the same hard drives for file servers to normal users.

Servers are a very profitable market, as demand is always there for bigger and better hard drives, but the big customers have been trimming down and buying less, basically leaving more sellers then buyers.

Some HDD companies need to be more like Intel with there products. They need a small 5gb hard drive that is CHEEP for PC buyers (like celeron). But they also need 100gb SCSI hard drives for big business (like p4).

The companies that strike a balance will gain better market share, and more profits, putting them as a leader in the field, without massive R&D costs.

Medevo
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by silverhalide · 2002-07-01 15:14 · Score: 1

The same is essentially true for private individuals too. Anyone who wants a PC already likely has one, so why buy another one (especially in an uncertain economic climate) if the old one does the trick? No new PC means no new HDD.
Lest we forget that recent little IBM drive debacle... I'd say the hard drive industry has plenty of drives to sell!
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 15:19 · Score: 0

Good points, particularly the second one, about how we're buying fewer PC's. Check the industry news sites and you'll see that the recently completed second quarter was an out-and-out disaster for the PC market. Down something like 22.5% from the same quarter last year.
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 15:24 · Score: 0

Heck, even 5GB, the kind of capacity that was typical on an entry-level desktop three years ago is more than most users get through.

You make a good point. Something like this is true even for people who ARE big disk users.

In the bad old days, it was a given that when I bought a new hard drive it would be running at 90% full within a month and I'd have to start deleting files to make room for new stuff.

I installed 80 GB of Raid 0 stripe LAST YEAR, and it's still not full.

I don't ever expect to get to the "forced to delete" stage again, actually. The drives will eventually fill up with cruft, and at that point I'll buy a new drive.
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by essdodson · 2002-07-01 15:29 · Score: 2, Insightful

We're soon approaching critical mass. The point at which everyone who wants a computer has one. Sales will drop off sharply as only those who require the top of the line buy new computers and those who don't require top of the line buy those discarded machines second hand.

--
scott
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by LordLucless · 2002-07-01 16:55 · Score: 1

Another factor would be the prevelance of cheap, large, removable storage devices, such as CD-Rs. Most new PCs come with CD-R drives, and blanks are dirt cheap.

Now I can store a whole swag of information on a CD instead of on my HD, so I dont need as big a HD, or as many.

--
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Buck2 · 2002-07-01 17:09 · Score: 1

(Remember, not everyone is a MP3-fiend.)

pr0n, baby.

Say one movie is a half gig ... that leaves a 20 gb drive with only forty flicks. Split this up among maybe four different genres and you can see it doesn't go very far.

Remember that a company like easynews allows 6gb of downloads for $10 and will max out most home bandwidth (at least 768k from what I've seen).

If you're a true pr0n fiend, you could buy an 80GB hdd for $130, then, given a 768k connection, spend the same amount at the newsserver over the next few weeks filling it up.

--

As my father lik@(munch munch)... ....
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:22 · Score: 0

Change that to "...everyone who can afford a computer and wants one..." and I will say you are halfway right.

There is a fucking tremendous untapped market out there in the third world for computing. As soon as they figure out how to feed and clothe themselves and we big 1st worlders stop shitting all over them they will become good little consumers like the rest of us.

Flame away slashfags!!!!
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by FueledByRamen · 2002-07-01 17:48 · Score: 1

Who the heck downloads a 512mb movie file? I never go for anything less than 1gb, and even then the quality might not be high enough. You want to see high quality movies, go download The Last Castle in 2 CD-parts from eDonkey. Now that's a DVD rip (assuming you get the same ones I did). Damn good movie, too.

--
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 20:53 · Score: 0

If you need the length of a 2CD movie to get you "in the mood", maybe you're downloading the wrong kind of movies...
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Buck2 · 2002-07-01 21:37 · Score: 1

VCD's are ~512 megs, dude ... I'm talking about "the masses" here. Not someone into dl'ing DVD comparable flicks.

If you wanna throw that out as a data point then you're only reinforcing what I was saying, anyways ... which is that people who dl movies are more apt to buy hard drives.

I don't know what eDonkey is. I guess I'll go hunt it's ass down. NYUK NYUK

--

As my father lik@(munch munch)... ....
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Mr+Rohan · 2002-07-01 22:12 · Score: 1

We're soon approaching critical mass. The point at which everyone who wants a computer has one. Sales will drop off sharply as only those who require the top of the line buy new computers and those who don't require top of the line buy those discarded machines second hand.
Maybe this is true in many parts of the developed world, but there are a lot more potential customers than just the US - billions of them in-fact.

Currently price/performance doesn't mean sales in those markets are profitable - but assuming prices can come down enough then there's a huge market still untapped... course it was this sentiment that fuelled many dot.com failures !!
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Jacek+Poplawski · 2002-07-01 22:51 · Score: 2

1. Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands.

So all we need is another generation of Windows, which will increase disk usage. For example every run of application will save on disk detailed log (something like strace) to help find problems when something will halt operating system. This will be extremely useful today, inside "War With Terrorism". Don't let your computer be infected - buy new opearating system with extended logging features. Buy it now, or your computer will be destroyed or will help terrorists. You have been warned.
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 00:37 · Score: 0

Current HDD capacities far exceed most users current demands
That's exactly what they said about the first 100M drives. I remember buying my first machine with a 120M drive and thinking "that's going to take forever to fill up".

Today my VCR is collecting dust, and I capture TV broadcasts on harddisk (capture in real-time mpeg2 8000 kbps, strip commercials and convert to DivX later). I've got two drives in that system, 40 + 80G: sufficient, but a bit more would be nice so I don't have to catch up with DivXing and CD-burning so often to make room for a new capture.

And I'm sure that when 1 TB becomes common, that too will fill up (for example because I don't take the time for DivXing and burning anymore, and leave everything on HD in mpeg2 for fast, easy and HQ access.)
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Surak · 2002-07-02 01:10 · Score: 2

OK, so you have more than one drive in your PC, but how many of the billion PCs sold have more than one? Servers do but they make up a very small (albeit highly profitable) segment of the HDD market. Most are installed in desktop PCs and, nowadays, most people don't use more than a fraction of the 20GB+ drives that come with a modern PC. Heck, even 5GB, the kind of capacity that was typical on an entry-level desktop three years ago is more than most users get through.

Let's add to MP3 fiends: gamers, 3D CAD users (I have assemblies that are 5 GB by themselves), animators, musicians, software developers, videographers, etc. These people need high--end computers.

Everyone else uses them as glorified typewriters and Internet terminals. These people can get by on 500 MHz processors, 128 MB of RAM, and 5-7 GB hard drives.

Unfortunately 'everyone else' is the majority of people. What is needed here is a killer app for this new hardware. Something that REQUIRES all of this newfound processor speed, hard drive capacity and RAM capacity. The Internet has been the killer app.

The Internet, as we all know, doesn't require gobs and gobs of speed. Not yet. Not while dialup lines are the primary way people connect to the Internet. Not until broadband is available everywhere for cheap will the Internet be a viable killer app for new hardware.

Digital photography and video were supposed to be a killer app. But these are a niche market segments, and compression has gotten better and better.....for some people this is a killer app, for others, its not.

The problem is that there is no one universal killer app anymore. Advances in hardware technology are increasingly moving toward being utilized differently by different market niches. And computer manufacturers didn't imagine that the ILECs would try to derail broadband access like they have...because otherwise, this would be THE universal killer app...but it's not, and it's not likely to be anytime in the near future.

We need to abandon this whole concept of Internet as killer app I think for now...if we want technology to progress, it has to have something to rally around. In the late 70s, early 80s it was the spreadsheet. In the late 80s/early 90s it was the GUI and desktop publishing. In the mid-to-late 90s it was the Internet. Now its....?

Right you can't name it without saying "high speed Internet." But that's not a reality... and until that is, I daresay Moore's law will slow to a crawl.

--
My journal has hot /. gossip.
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 01:17 · Score: 0

The original poster talks about pr0n, which doesn't need to be of *that* high quality. Mostly 1 CD DivX rip of a pr0n DVD is more than enough.
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by Lord_Slepnir · 2002-07-02 01:51 · Score: 3, Funny

They actually already have it. It's called windows CEMENT. The power of CE. The stability of ME. The User-Freindlyness of NT
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by jelle · 2002-07-02 03:03 · Score: 2

"3. HDDs are now commodities."

As are operating systems and word processors, but you haven't seen the price of those become marginalized (yet)...

--
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by WhiteWolf666 · 2002-07-02 03:25 · Score: 1

There is a definite killer Internet app, and as broadband deployment rises, it becomes more and more popular: P2P filesharing. Sure, in most cases it is illegal, but that hasn't stopped anyone. My two sisters, who do nothing else but wordprocess and 'surf', do a lot of P2P sharing. So do all of their friends. So do all of my freinds. In fact, myself, who I consider fairly computer literate (runs linux, does some programming, hacks random things together), do very little P2P sharing.

Hell, half of the people I know doing P2P sharing just use it for downloading over their phoneline. They just can't wait till broadband is deployed in their area. Don't worry, its becoming a reality, I feel, even though deployment rates have slowed down lately. I feel that in a few years, prices will have to drop, as there is a lot of untapped demand out there, that is waiting for a commonplace broadband solution in the ~$30/month price range.

--
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Re:Why the HDD business is ailing... by qnonsense · 2002-07-02 11:01 · Score: 1
"3. HDDs are now commodities."
- As are operating systems and word processors, but you haven't seen the price of those become marginalized (yet)...
- - That's why monopolies are illegal.
--
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"

Re:+5 pointless by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:41 · Score: 0

yes, clipboards are hard to use.

You obviously have never used Linux. The linux clipboard is near impossable to use!

Just try cut and paste between 2 different apps!

My experiences don't jibe with yours by Gekko · 2002-07-01 14:42 · Score: 0, Funny

IBM's drives are usually rock solid. They often outlast there competors by a long shot. They had a series of about 1 or 2 drives, I forget which models Im sure someone will remember. I find that in most of my servers IBM drives last longer and perform better.

--
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"

Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours by Ziviyr · 2002-07-01 14:49 · Score: 1

Yeah, thats how it seemed when I bought my first pair of drives, now dubbed "deathstars" by a large number of people.

If IBM had a long time reputation of being junk I wouldn't have bought their drives in the first place.

My point is that I've had a 60% failure rate, and one of those 3 failed drives was actually shorting my powersupply. Which is inexcusable to me.

Note I did give IBM a second chance, which is why the failure rate is 60% and not 75%. But that was out of necessity after both drives in my system started puking on themselves.

--

Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours by kesuki · 2002-07-01 17:37 · Score: 5, Interesting

From what I understand, Maxtor's engineers had reverse engineered the problem and realized that IBM was recertifying old platters stored in hungary for the newer GMR head drives. Those old platters were designed to be used in 20 GB HDs not 80 GB, so basically the problem was the same one as using a hole punch in a Single Density floppy to make it Double density, formatting it might work, but it would be far more prone to errors and data loss.
It's too bad they tarnished their reputation, but on the plus side, IBM drives are now really cheap, and a simple torture test with spinright or any program designed to contsantly overwrite the unused space on a drive should be able to punish the drive into failure, for easy replacment should it be using defective platters.

--
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours by slaker · 2002-07-01 17:44 · Score: 2

I'd *really* like to know where you heard that. I correspond from time to time with folks with @maxtor.com addresses and never heard that particular rumor.

Not that it doesn't make sense.

Visit StorageForum

--
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours by Zathrus · 2002-07-02 00:34 · Score: 1

The info on IBM using refurbished platters from Hungary was on /. awhile back... if you want to find the story, attempt to beat the search engine here into submission.
Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours by AA0 · 2002-07-02 13:34 · Score: 1

That did happen initially, with the 75 GXP series, but the 60s started to fail too, and the 120s have the warning on them, it isn't the used platters (to an extent it is, that is why there are so many more 75 failures then 60s) but the new IBM GMR technology is actually creating a large thermal gradient in the platters, over time, the wear patterns caused by the heat led the drive to failure.

IBM found a way to pack more stuff, and make things faster, for a bunch less money. The problem was IBM did not charge less, they charged more for their drives, and of course, they did not last.
Re:My experiences don't jibe with yours by WNight · 2002-07-04 07:42 · Score: 2

It seems the 120gxp line has problems too.

Check out this graph of access rates on a new 120GB 120GXP.

http://www.storagereview.com/benchimages/IC35L12 0A VVA07_str.png
(Watch for extra spaces)

The spotty performance is likely caused by a ton of bad sectors which were moved to the end of the drive. If it's like that when it ships imagine what it'd be like in a few months. Check the STR graphs for other drives by Maxtor, WD, and Seagate. They aren't perfect smooth lines perhaps, but there's none of what you see on the IBM.

Good for you. I do. by Wakko+Warner · 2002-07-01 14:44 · Score: 1

Here's my SHN partition:

3jane:/store/shn 291891992 195551296 72989344 73% /store/shn

Uh-huh. 300 gigs. 73% full. I put about 10 gigs a week on it (that's about 8 or 9 3-hour concerts at 16 bits/44.1 KHz). That cost me about $1000 to build back in November of last year, and I'm currently looking at 4 160 gig Maxtor drives to fill the remaining 4 slots of my 3ware card.

Now, I may be an extreme case, but I know plenty of people who fill up their hard drives just from the applications and video games they've installed, with a few gigs of of MP3s here and there for good measure. Hell, I throw out 4 gig drives nowadays. I've got 9s and 18s that I don't even use, and about a terabyte of shit online 24/7/365. And it's data I use (MP3s, SHNs, video, 0day juarez, etc), not just shit I keep around for the hell of it (that's all on tape and CD-R.)

Just because you're stuck in 1996 doesn't mean the rest of us haven't found a use for our big hard drives.

- A.P.

--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"

i'm afraid by Lelon · 2002-07-01 14:46 · Score: 1

i'm constantly afraid that computer makers will go the way of american automobile. designs that are purposfully faulty so they fail and you have to buy them again in 3 years. A 3 year old computer is still a pretty damn fast computer in the office environment, this has dramatically decreased the need for companies to by new computers (a p3? send that one over to tech support). although, with dell now offering a 4(!) year warranty, hopefully quality will continue to prevail.

Re:i'm afraid by allrong · 2002-07-01 17:37 · Score: 1

They used to be able to rely on Microsoft churning out bloated software that the majority of users feel they must upgrade to. However, thanks to Microsoft's wonderful licensing structure and less resource hungry alternatives maybe the hardware manufacturers will go this way.

--
What is the inverse of the Matrix?

Cyclical by Em+Emalb · 2002-07-01 14:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

It's just a cycle, like everything else. Hard-drives pretty much outstripped (for most people) the amount of stuff they actually store. Another thing rarely mentioned is that most people are content with what they have, not because they wouldn't like a larger hard-drive, but because it is unnecessary, and things deemed unnecessary are often the first to go when money gets tight.

On the other hand, I know of one insurance company that puts all claims and paperwork in digital form in about 4 different places. This enables them to move the paper work off site and also requires them to get the largest, most top of the line hdd's they can find. Every month or so, they are bringing a new system online with bigger, better, faster.TM So, failing harddrive companies, concentrate on the businesses, not Mom and Dad with their 12GB they wont fill up, until software bloat causes them to.

--
Sent from your iPad.

Re:Cyclical by WaKall · 2002-07-01 15:30 · Score: 4, Funny

Clearly, failing harddrive companies should turn to writing bloated sofware.
Re:Cyclical by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 20:59 · Score: 0

People ripping MP3s has increased the demand for space somewhat. Ripping DVDs has and will increase it some more. And with the launch (finally!) of D-VHS this month, we now have HD video to contend with. When people start ripping their entire movie collection to disk, at HD resolution, then we'll see these hard drives start to fill up again.
Re:Cyclical by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 02:20 · Score: 0

>> failing harddrive companies should turn to writing bloated sofware.

[sarcasm]

Or better yet, hire someone to write bloated apps and a bloated OS... but who? Who could possibly make such mammooths and yet make occasional "upgrade" to get them yet more bloated, while making users keep different versions of the same libraries?

Who could insert OS-unrelated apps into the OS itself and still claim them essential and unremovable?

[/sarcasm]

Yes, my friend, reality is scary!

According to the opposition on Dog Eat Dog by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:56 · Score: 0

Who makes the Pentium processor?

(a) Athlon
(b) Microsoft
(c) IBM
(d) Intel

Cut n paste not a prob in KDE by MsGeek · 2002-07-01 14:57 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Just choose one window manager and its apps. I have learned to stop worrying and love KDE 3, you can too. Cutting and pasting between KDE apps is a no brainer. You can do it the XWindow way or the Windows way. "Easy peasy" as Jamie Oliver would say.

OK, next objection to Linux...

--
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.

Re:Cut n paste not a prob in KDE by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 18:27 · Score: 0

He can't be an idoit, refrenced the naked chef.

Re:+5 pointless by severnaGates · 2002-07-01 14:58 · Score: 1

Wow you have to be a moron to screw up the highlight and middle mouse click. It's a real tuffy.

compound adjective by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 14:58 · Score: 0

They're hyphenated.

I bought a hard drive.

Your hard-drive problems are puzzling.

Not that everyone does this consistently.

Tim

Re:Good for you. I do. by FleaPlus · 2002-07-01 15:01 · Score: 3, Funny

So how many gigs of data on your drives is actually legal?

Komag doesn't make disk drives by origin2k · 2002-07-01 15:02 · Score: 1

about the 'last' HD manufacturer in the U.S.,

Komag makes the media not the complete disk drive

It's a shame that people are willing to pay more for a pair of shoes then a disk drive to store their data on!

Re:Komag doesn't make disk drives by LadyJessica · 2002-07-01 17:12 · Score: 2, Funny

It's a shame that people are willing to pay more for a pair of shoes then [sic.] a disk drive to store their data on!

Are you sure? I think I'd rather go without a hard drive than go barefoot all the time. I think I'd rank shoes higher. Have you ever walked around town barefoot? Watch that broken glass on the sidewalk! You can't go to restaurants either. "No shoes, no shirt, no service." :-)

--
-- Jessica
The mutant geek grrl from Hell.

HD's are on their way out by kwerle · 2002-07-01 15:04 · Score: 5, Interesting

I think that IBM's exit is about more than the marketplace being competative. I think it's about the marketplace being dead. Think about it: how much did you spend on your first 256M HD? How much does a 256M USB NVRAM "drive" cost today?

My bet is that IBM is dumping this business because it's going the way of the tape drive. Yeah, still useful for LARGE amounts of data, but it looks like it should be easy to build NVRAM drives for damn cheap, and that have a MTBF that's longer than most of us will live.

How much would it cost to build a 20G NVRAM drive that performs 10x better than a platter?

Re:HD's are on their way out by Graymalkin · 2002-07-01 15:16 · Score: 2

IBM is one of the primary development interests in MRAM technologies so your idea might have some credibility to it. It also seems like IBM's reseach is netting results that are a bit more fruitful than other groups researching MRAM. They've partnered with Infineon to bring MRAM stuff to market. We might end up seeing IBM MagStar NVRAM drives in the next couple years with decent data density.

--
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Re:HD's are on their way out by tomstdenis · 2002-07-01 15:54 · Score: 1

How much would it cost to build a 20G NVRAM drive that performs 10x better than a platter?

Just to nitpick disk access times are in milliseconds and memory access times are in nanoseconds. That is more than a mere factor of 10.

Of course 20GB of NVRAM would probably difficult to mass-produce....

Tom

--
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Re:HD's are on their way out by billcopc · 2002-07-01 16:20 · Score: 1

I want this NVRAM stuff. I've lost count of the drives that have died at my hands. I must have replaced at least a dozen hard drives in three years, all in my desktop PC. Give me something with no moving parts so that I can finally be rid of this headcrash-a-phobia. I'm just not the kind of guy who does regular backups because there is no suitable backup medium for my kind of quantity. 20gb tape drives cost a fortune, and spare hard drives are just too fragile. DVD-R was looking good, right up until my DVD burner died 3 weeks after purchase.

Now give me something like NVRAM in the 40-80gig amount that I can lug around in a backpack without scratching the platters and I will give you oral pleasure like you have never had before :)

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Re:HD's are on their way out by bjschrock · 2002-07-01 16:25 · Score: 2, Informative

How much does a 256M USB NVRAM "drive" cost today?

The main reason hard disc drives are still around and will be around for a while is because they're cheap. A 128MB USB "drive" from Sony that uses solid-state storage costs about $100... that is about 78 cents/MB. A low-end (7200rpm) 80GB desktop drive costs about $140, that is less than 0.2 cents/MB! Even 15K RPM SCSI drives cost only about 1.2 cents/MB. There are many emerging technologies that will let hard drives grow larger and faster and cheaper.
Re:HD's are on their way out by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:28 · Score: 0

*knocking on wood*

Man, you have the worst luck ever... either that or you are buying crappy stuff to start out with. If that's the case, spend a little more and get the good stuff(tm) and save yourself the headache.

Seagate good, no-name brand bad.
Re:HD's are on their way out by shepd · 2002-07-01 16:39 · Score: 1

Just an idea: You might want to look past the parts you're replacing for the problem (although I'm sure you have already -- just a reminder). I'd start with the power supply, and end with the environment the machine is in.

And which DVD burner did you have? I just bought one and at the price I paid I'm starting to feel uneasy... :-/

--
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Re:HD's are on their way out by shepd · 2002-07-01 16:42 · Score: 1

At the price of NVRAM, you can slowly close the performance gap and possibly increase reliability past that of the NVRAM by buying 100 drives and RAID-1ing them. And you'll still save money!

--
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Re:HD's are on their way out by Milican · 2002-07-01 16:59 · Score: 1

Yes absolutely, milli is 10^-3 seconds... nano is 10^-9 seconds. Which is an order of 100,000!

JOhn

--
Campaign for Liberty
Re:HD's are on their way out by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:03 · Score: 0

As the other guy said, there's probably something wrong with your power supply or something. 12 hard drives and a DVD burner in three years is really exceptionally bad luck. There's probably something in your PC that's killing them (or you're using them as hockey pucks :) The only time I've had any drive problems was when I accidentally knocked a laptop off my desk while it was running.
Re:HD's are on their way out by FueledByRamen · 2002-07-01 17:17 · Score: 1

I second the power supply idea. A bad power supply caused Windowz 2k, which is the most stable Windows to date (yeah, windows, stable...), to freeze 2 minutes from bootup. It then proceeded to fry my Radeon 8500. Now, I RMA'd the Radeon and popped in an SIS card - it starts exhibiting the same behavior. Swapped my power supply out, and everything but the video card starts working properly (fried it partially, I guess)...
The guy at the computer shop showed a machine running an Athlon with 16 hard drives in it off of a 350w power supply - plenty to convince me that mine (4.47v line anyone? perhaps 12.56v) was defective.
Anyways, when in doubt, new power supplies are cheap and replacing something can make you feel better. (especially when you smash the old one with an 8lb sledge!)

--
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Re:HD's are on their way out by sh4de · 2002-07-01 20:40 · Score: 0, Flamebait

We might end up seeing IBM MagStar NVRAM drives in the next couple years with decent data density.

Sure, but can they be used for more than eight hours per day?

Ick, was that flamebait?
Re:HD's are on their way out by SpaceJunkie · 2002-07-01 22:12 · Score: 1

Umm- Thats a very poor statistic. I use my drives and PC intensively. I have 2x20gb HDD's and regularly siphon off data to CD-R's. I have only had one hard drive failure in around 6 years. My current drives are 3 years old. All the others I sold off when I upgraded. Mind you- if youu are lugging it regularly then its a different ballgame.

Ever thought of getting a second lightweight PC for LAN parties?
Just the basics -hdd big enough for skins etc, nice GFX, nice sound,single CD/DVD drive.

But I must admit- 40-80Gig NVRAM is a thought that turns me on too - the speed as well as weight loss and less power consumption(I would assume as there are no motors or servos to drive).

Question - Does anyone here know what heat output is like? I would imagine they're a lot cooler than hard drives. That would be a big advantage in the market.

--
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
Re:HD's are on their way out by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 22:23 · Score: 0

I'm pretty sure that you're dreaming if you expect memory-like speeds from a USB port. No matter how fast NVRAM is it's still going through a bus that is nowhere near the one you'd find on a motherboard. Probably slower even than IDE.

NVRAM doesn't have an infinite MTBF either. The cells that make the chips tend to flake out at around 1 million reads/writes (that's a lot more than it sounds but still...)
Re:HD's are on their way out by MrFredBloggs · 2002-07-02 01:00 · Score: 1

>I've lost count of the drives that have died at my hands.

What are you doing wrong?

>20gb tape drives cost a fortune

Use a Cd burner? Just back up the stuff thats changed since last backup?

>my DVD burner died 3 weeks after purchase

When will your replacement, under guarantee, be turning up?
Re:HD's are on their way out by billcopc · 2002-07-02 02:43 · Score: 1

I had a Pioneer DVR-A03 (retail kit). Cost me 900$ CDN back then (about 575 USD). These days they're 589$ CDN (about 375 USD). I want a new one :)

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Re:HD's are on their way out by billcopc · 2002-07-02 02:49 · Score: 1

Don't ya worry, my gear is fine. The problem is that I'm incredibly violent with my hard drives, they thrash at least 60-80gb daily, lots of video and audio processing going on, with a good deal of iso shuffling).

Many people have told me to go SCSI for the higher quality drives, but I have a hard time justifying the sick price hike. I get 40gb drives for a little over 60$USD, while their scsi counterparts, at 36gb, cost at least 400$ for something half decent. Then I'd need a raid controller, which surely won't be as cheap as my 40$ Abit Hotrod ide card. Now if my PC were a real money maker, I'd make the jump, but this is mostly hobby and entertainment. There is no money made, so there is no money to be spent.

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Re:HD's are on their way out by billcopc · 2002-07-02 02:53 · Score: 1

When will your replacement, under guarantee, be turning up?

When hell freezes over. Pioneer has been having lots of trouble keeping up with demand, so by the time I had returned my burner for repair/replacement, it was already indefinitely out of stock. Here we are 7 months later and they've just started trickling out new units about 35% cheaper than the original, so I vow to get an other as soon as my finances permit.

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Re:HD's are on their way out by mrm677 · 2002-07-02 03:32 · Score: 2

Current NVRAM, based on flash memory, has a limited amount of write cycles before the part fails. Therefore, it does not currently make a viable replacement for magnetic drives in which there are frequent stores and erases.
Re:HD's are on their way out by MrFredBloggs · 2002-07-02 04:31 · Score: 1

That sucks. I agree with you - i`m not going to get a DVD writer for years. I held off getting a CD writer for ages, as i thought `theres no way thats going to work for more than a few months`. Not just moving parts, but something thats uses lasers, susceptible to movement etc. Mine lasted 14 months. Yamaha drive, for the record. I think i`ll be getting a Lacie or some other more-expensive one next time. Either that or the exact opposite - the cheapest one i can find!
Re:HD's are on their way out by Jucius+Maximus · 2002-07-02 06:34 · Score: 2

"Anyways, when in doubt, new power supplies are cheap and replacing something can make you feel better. (especially when you smash the old one with an 8lb sledge!)"
It's more fun to dropkick crappy old Acerview monitors into a dumpster. I did this (with permission, the monitors were dead) back when I was doing co-op in high school. That cRuNcH is indescribable ;-)
Re:HD's are on their way out by Rupert · 2002-07-02 09:00 · Score: 2

I just bought an 7200rpm 80GB drive for $72. So thats about 90 cents/GB

--

--
E_NOSIG
Re:HD's are on their way out by FueledByRamen · 2002-07-02 16:47 · Score: 1

You can get a (decent) SCSI RAID controller for about $40. I have one and paid $36 for it. Go to eBay and search for an IBM ServeRAID controller. The cheap ones have 3 Ultra Wide channels (68pin, the 40MB/s kind), and support up to 45 drives on one controller. Unfortunatly, they're a bit slow - or maybe it was my drives that were slow, but I only got about 20 MB/s out of a 2 drive RAID0 (2x 7200rpm 9.1gig drives). Even nicer to do - pick up a 6-drive SCA80 backplane and get hot-swapping. I got one for $35 and hooked it right up via the Ultra Wide SCSI channel. Worked wonders (except when someone at a net party pulled the drive off my computer while it was on, and definatly in non-hotswap-capable mode - RAID0 hates that).

--
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Re:HD's are on their way out by billcopc · 2002-07-03 00:49 · Score: 1

More expensive ? The only reason La-Cie is more expensive is because they're screwing the unsavvy. Get a Plextor, or go back to Yamaha even. They're really tough to beat these days, when compared to the zillions of other CD writer brands that have popped up in the last year or two. It's fairly simple, cheaper drives are more likely to fail because they're aimed at the casual Kazaa user that burns a disc or two per week, while I burn 30 or 40. Plextor has never let me down, and I've been gazing at a Yamaha 40x for a few months now :)

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Re:HD's are on their way out by MrFredBloggs · 2002-07-03 02:04 · Score: 1

another yamaha? Whats the saying again? "Fool me once, shame on you...fool me twice, shame on me". There are too many manufacturers out there for me to want to risk them again. I used it to write about a disk or 2 a week, i guess. At that rate i expect it to last 3 or 4 years. You know, like other stuff which cost that amount of money does (£150, so same price as my monitor, cpu, hard disk - all have which are working perfectly).

I think i`ll get a plextor then, or at least check them out, and may i humbly suggest you do the same! (the speed of the writer is completely meaningless to me - i dont mind waiting an hour per disk if it means it writes (nearly) every time).

YOU MUST HAVE A BIG PENIS WAKKO WARNER! by Anomolous+Cow+Herd · 2002-07-01 15:04 · Score: 0

Do you talk about how much HD space you have to all the skanky 40-year-olds at the singles bar before they throw their drinks in your face?

--

"I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." - George Bush

Re:YOU MUST HAVE A BIG PENIS WAKKO WARNER! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:23 · Score: 0

how original, an "I fucked your mum" come-back.

-mjl

Re:Good for you. I do. by Wakko+Warner · 2002-07-01 15:05 · Score: 1

Probably nearly all of it, since I own all the CDs on my MP3 server, and all of the SHNs are freely tradeable.

- A.P.

--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"

Uses for this much storage by peterdaly · 2002-07-01 15:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

I agree that storage size has vastly outpaced demand. We have a 2 terabyte chunk of platters attached to a server which will probably triple in the next year or so, but that is not the norm.

Our "large" database servers (10's of millions of records) have more storage than they know what to with. We are currently big on 18.X gig drives at 15k rpm just beacuse we want the spindles to speed up performance. I'd rather have a 12 or 14 drive cage full of fast 18 giger ebay specials than 73 or even 36 gig drives and have a rockin price/performance ratio.

I find myself formatting drives for application servers feeling guilty that I am making partitions so big I know will never be more than a quarter full. We have web servers with less than 4 gig of space used serving about a million hits a month. Why do would we be keeping the demand up for the large drives? This drives the demand, and therefore the price and margin of the high end drives down.

The drive sizes are just growing so fast most users don't need to upgrade. It is not helped by the fact that the upgrade cycle for PC's has slowed down so much. We are replacing PC's at customers sites because the contract says it is time to replace, even though the PC is already more than powerful enough for the job they perform. How many business users really need more than a 450Mhz box on their desk? We are putting 2ghz machines on these desks now. These people run terminal emulation software, browse the web, and type.

There are many factors contributing to this hard drive problem the article talks about, these are just some personal examples I have of the reason give for the slump.

-Pete

--
Soccer Goal Plans

Re:Defending the american car company by bigsexyjoe · 2002-07-01 15:20 · Score: 1

They were bad in the 80's but I think they've improved because of foriegn competitors. I think the car industry killed the demand for low-end cars because the used cars last longer.

--
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free

Can some one explain for me. by q-soe · 2002-07-01 15:29 · Score: 5, Informative

How this :

" which has become the last surviving independent manufacturer of disk-drive platters based in the United States."

Works with this :

" Like many of Silicon Valley's other high-technology companies, Komag has moved all of its manufacturing operations to Asia and cut its cost structure in half in the last two years. There may finally be a payoff: several analysts said the company's turnaround would soon become more visible with the addition of a prominent new customer."

This indicates they don't do any manufacturing in the US? Thus are they a US manufacturer or a US owned Manufacturer ? and does this indicate there are non independant manufacturers in the US - for example IBM with US plants ? The word 'independant' is too important to be edited out of the slashdot story as it spins it in a new direction - there may be other manufacturers in the USA (i have no idea where to find out) but Komag is ONE of the last few independant ones (and i think US owned might be more valid).

This is more interesting :

" The company is left with two modern factories in Malaysia. It is controlled by two New York-based hedge funds, JDS Capital and Cerberus Partners, which specialize in acquiring debt in distressed companies. They currently hold 57.6 percent of the company's shares."

So what manufacturing do they do in the US ? I suspect they have one single disk media plant and the platters are sold to OEM's for use in their drives. (they do - see Komags Website - they supply Seagate, maxtor and WD.

But in fact they don't seem to have a manufacturing plant in the us according to them - from their website

"Komag maintains two R&D centers in the San Francisco Bay Area and manufactures our disks in Malaysia. "

That indicates the plant that the NY Times is talking about is one of their R&D plants and not a production plant. Which it is as Komag lists San Jose and Santa Rosa as their 2 R&D plants - and for my mind R&D isn't manufacture...

So in fact are they a US manufacturer or a US owned manufacturer ? There is a difference to my mind as IBM are a US owned manufacturer.... In fact the article looks like a piece aimed at building the company's stock ahead of their relisting on the share market and not a piece about technology per se.

--
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....

Re:Can some one explain for me. by blastedtokyo · 2002-07-01 17:29 · Score: 1

It's the ideas that count here not the manufacturing. Many major US commercial software publishers (MSFT, Intuit, Adobe to name a few) get their CD's stamped in Malaysia or somewhere outside the US. Does that mean that the software is no longer US based?
Or if you download a piece of software from a mirror based in another country, does that change the nation of origin for the software?
While hardware and software are different in physical form, when it comes to a product that's so highly engineered that production is largely the product of a software application, there's no real separation. It's the brains and ideas behind it, not where it gets stamped. An american subsidiary in another country is still quite different from a local company.
Re:Can some one explain for me. by molo · 2002-07-02 05:46 · Score: 2

Thanks for the details. You should write to the NYT Editor and let him know what a bogus article it is. They might even publish it in the op-ed section.

--
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Re:Can some one explain for me. by q-soe · 2002-07-02 12:16 · Score: 2

Really why bother

The author is John Markoff - as in the man who pushed the line 'Kevin Mitnick is the worlds most dangerous man'and thus was reponsible for him being treated worse than many murderers - as if accuracy in his stories or trifles like the truth are going to to bother him or his employer..

--
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....

One of the other factors. by AA0 · 2002-07-01 15:42 · Score: 1, Troll

HDs are currently the slowest thing in your computer, it is the ultimate bottleneck. This is getting worse and worse each time, the performance jumps just are not present in this industry. People will not go out and buy a new HD like they would a graphics card, because the performance increases just a few percent over the model for HDs. Graphics cards double in speed in 6 to 9 months.

CPUs increase massively, and there is still the enthusiast market to drive it, but there are no HD enthusiast markets, not until the manufacturers think of something creative in design (and no, IBM, unprecidented failure doesn't count). It took this long to get a 8meg cache drive, and we all know how cheap memory is.
There is serious lack of innovation in this field.

Re:One of the other factors. by soupdevil · 2002-07-01 16:42 · Score: 1

If you use audio software, the CPU is definitely still the bottleneck.
Re:One of the other factors. by boa13 · 2002-07-01 18:05 · Score: 5, Informative

HDs are currently the slowest thing in your computer, it is the ultimate bottleneck.

This means nothing. What about CD-Rom drives, DVD-Rom drivers, Zip drives, PCMCIA cards, Ethernet ports, USB devices, parallel ports, serial ports and floppy drives?

This is getting worse and worse each time, the performance jumps just are not present in this industry.

You are trolling big time, or you need a brain upgrade. Or perhaps simply you need to read the article. This industry's failure is that they improved way too fast. They increased the storage capacity by 100% every year! "Moore's Law? Yeah, you mean the thing we got past years ago?"

not until the manufacturers think of something creative in design

Yeah sure, those stupid morons are not creative. Every year, we tell them "There is no way you can put more data on this platter.", and every year these morons come up with new moronic ideas. Doh!

It took this long to get a 8meg cache drive, and we all know how cheap memory is.

Because of course a much bigger cache would mean a much better performance? I'm not so sure. Or else they would already have done it. You are playing a ridiculous game of "listen to me, morons". Except you're talking about very smart guys that know and take into account things you or I cannot even imagine.

There is serious lack of innovation in this field.

You seem to be a serious successful troll. Or a serious moron. You want speed? Buy several hard drives and do some RAID. You'll quickly notice that your PCI bus is very limited, though. We need 64 bits PCI cards at 66 MHz with integrated RAID controllers, and the motherboard companies are not even making them! Sheesh... There is a serious lack of innovation in the motherboard business.
Re:One of the other factors. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 18:22 · Score: 0

Motherboards don't sell on inovation, they sell on being "good enough" and "not randomly rebooting".
Re:One of the other factors. by NovaX · 2002-07-01 19:03 · Score: 1

Sorry, but your neglecting to much when you say drives are the bottleneck. I would have agreed with you a few years ago and I chanted it happily when my old SCSI Pentium system could outperform most early P2s. This was because the CPU is generally starved and so on non-intensive tasks getting faster sub-system made major differences. But that was in a day were RAM was still to small, system busses were clogged, the CPU was stuck doing useless junk (I/O operations), and better algorithms were in dire need.

Today with DMA, faster busses, more ram then can be usefully filled, much improved optimization algorithms (caches, fragmentations, memory management, etc), and higher throughput, your drive isn't sooo bad. I put my old 10k IBM SCSI drive in my new system to give it a wirl, and while it has half the seek time of my WD IDE, its smaller throughput made it perform slower. The CPU utilization was 1-2% verses 8-10%, but on an 1800+ I honestly don't care.

Hard drives are the slowest components, so when the worst case happens (a miss penalty) and a load must occur, the system is busy waiting. This is where larger caches and better algorithms come into play, so the penalty is small due to the unlikely hood of accessing the drive. What about application loads? Well, if you optimize the filesystem then the high throughput and disk cache work well, with this being a one-time hit since your RAM thus stores needed data. And with your RAM so large you can have many processes running so even while your waiting for the drive your not twiddling your thumb.

Hard drives are difficult to improve speed wise through physical changes because they are moving parts. The only way to truely improve hdds speed wise is to dump them and replace them with a non-moving system, such as one similar to RAM. Oh, and the 8mb WD over the 2mb is hardly significant in speed up, as you can see on storage review. It helps, but nothing amazingly.

So your wrong, they are getting better. And its because we're making small improvements speed-wise, large size-wise, and the rest simply algorithmic and less system demand. Stick in a new 15k SCSI and you wont see the amazing speed-up that made SCSI a must for any power-user 5-8 years ago. The problem with hdds is there so big most of us don't need the space - we fill it up with whatever we can, which is usually games, music (mp3s and now videos), and movies. All entertainment and thus sacrificable.

--

"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
Re:One of the other factors. by AA0 · 2002-07-02 08:07 · Score: 1

I am not talking about storage, nobody needs that much storage, we already know that. I am talking about speed, I know my computers, and I always buy the fastest HD possible, since it is the slowest thing that you use. PCI bus may be "technically" slower, but soundcards, network cards, and anything else you have on PCI does not take up much bandwidth, so it is a non issue.

If you knew much about PCI, you know there is a reason why 64bit is not popular, you obviously do not know.... PCI will be like ISA next year anyways.
Take a look at transfer rates for HD benchmarking, you'll notice that 7200rpm drives are barely above that of 5400rpm. I have 800 mp3s, and 50 gigs free, of course I don't need more storage. But I would love if my HD didn't crap out on loading large programs, it takes forever. Sustained transfer rates are pitiful, the whole ATA100 and ATA133 standard is pointless, you don't use nearly that much.

CD-ROM, DVD, thats all removable media, it does not count for being slow, by design, it is slow. Use your brain before you post, really.

I could buy a 100Mhz P1, load it with a couple gigs of RAM... but that doesn't make it faster. When you have large 100+ Gig drives, you need the speed of the drive to actually move that much more space around, and it is just not there.
HD technology has not changed since the P1s, they use higher density storage, but the methods to grab data are essentially the same. That is the lack of innovation, they need to work on multiply reads, bigger bandwidth, caches, etc, not just rpms, that means very little to someone doing a large transfer.
Re:One of the other factors. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 09:05 · Score: 0

The words you're looking for would be stability and reliability.
Re:One of the other factors. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 09:08 · Score: 0

not just rpms, that means very little to someone doing a large transfer.

I was starting to wonder if maybe you were arguing from an intelligent point of view, until I saw this comment at the end. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

You're trying to tell me increasing the RPMs from 5400 to 7200 didn't increase the speed of retrieving data from the platters? You think maybe those extra revolutions are just spent spinning without reading? Go back to troll school.
Re:One of the other factors. by boa13 · 2002-07-02 09:34 · Score: 2

I know you are talking about speed. But your whole "I know better than the professionals" attitude just begged to be answered that way.

It makes no sense to say that hard drives are "the slowest thing that you use". This is completely not true and means nothing, no matter how many times you repeat it. The slowest thing I've used today was a floppy and a remote connection to my box in Europe.

Now that the graphics cards have been moved to their own bus, it's true that in most boxen, the "other" PCI cards don't take much bandwidth. That said, the SoundBlaster Live! designers have had issues with the latency of the bus. But the problem here is to put more than one drive on the PCI bus. I don't religiously read hardware site every morning, but as far as I know, hard drives have a bandwidth somewhere around 35 MB/sec. Put two of them on your bus, use them, and you'll be eating 55% of the bandwidth of the bus. One more drive, and you're done with the PCI bus. Oh, by the way, how can you call 35 MB/sec "pitiful"? What do you compare it against?

Now, I don't know "much" about the PCI bus, though we perhaps don't have the same idea of what "much" is, and I'd like to know what the reason for the unpopularity of the 64-bits bus is. But of course, your didn't lower yourself in giving it.

So, nowadays nothing really differentiates 5400 rpm from 7200 rpm? But there are 15000 rpm disks available, too. Why buy one big slow hard drive when you can buy smaller, faster ones? The choice is yours, so don't whine about it. As for the removable media, it has not been designed to be slow. Like anything in a computer, it has been designed to be as fast as possible, and it is as fast as possible, and as fast as your money can buy.

The end of your post doesn't make much sense, but at least it shows us how much time you've been around; not enough. Yeah, sure HD technology hasn't changed since the Pentium was introduced, you know what, it hasn't changed for 20 years, even. Yet, well, I prefer my new hard drive.

Since you seem to know so well how to save the hard-drive world, go work for them. And bring us faster and cheaper hard drive. It's so easy, I just can't understand why I'm not doing it myself.
Re:One of the other factors. by AA0 · 2002-07-02 12:19 · Score: 1

Removable parts are slow, it is the nature of the beast, always has been. Have you heard a 15k SCSI drive? not something I want running 24/7 in my computer near my TV, I'd like to be able to hear my TV sometimes....

286 HDs were quite a bit different then what we have now, 486s are not, they underwent a large change. 20 years ago, HDs were the same principles, but nothing similar to what we have now.

Realisticly, most computers have 2 or 3 PCI devices as a max. The SB live! was an awful product, causing troubles with new and existing hardware, the drivers and product design is lousy and it uses way too many resources. I've switched to a Santa Cruz card, the difference is simply incredible.

35MB/sec is slow when you consider the space of the current HDs, and the rate at which every other "modern" component is increasing in speed. HD sustained transfers are not getting much better, between model #s you see very little difference. Even in SCSI, the biggest change is the seek times, not transfer rates.

I suggest you stop using floppies and move to something... well, better. It is the only technology to slow down, I have run little tests and found drives out of 486s ran significantly faster then the cheap crap that is sold now. My internet connection is much faster than floppies, several times faster, and far more reliable. I haven't used one in 4 years, maybe more. USB keys are one of my favourite ways to transfer data (if the internet is not available), but I used CD-Rs most of the time.
Re:One of the other factors. by AA0 · 2002-07-02 12:21 · Score: 1

It doesn't increase transfer speed, it just decreases seek times. A new 5400 rpm drive transfers very similar to a 7200rpm drive. Don't post unless you have a brain please.

The primary use of SCSI (15k) is to be able to server up a whole bunch of files very very quickly for a server.

gnutella (was Re:Uses for this much storage) by xpurple · 2002-07-01 15:45 · Score: 1

One word, gnutella. Or any other file sharing package.

I filled my file server in about 2 weeks with that, I'm talking 70 gigs and a fast connection. And I need larger drives now.

Some of us just happen to pickup the slack for everyone else who doesn't take full advantage of what's in front of them.

--
http://www.xpurple.com

Re:gnutella (was Re:Uses for this much storage) by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:58 · Score: 0

Wow, you got Gnutella to download? That in itself is a great feat.

offtopic (iCab) by gerardrj · 2002-07-01 15:58 · Score: 1

iCab 2.8.1pre renders /. perfectly fine for me under 10.1.5.

--
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people

Re:offtopic (iCab) by SirRichardPumpaloaf · 2002-07-01 16:31 · Score: 1

The last time I tried iCab it didn't do "Nested" mode right, the posts were indented only a tiny amount so you couldn't see the threads easily. My favorite browser for reading Slashdot is definitely Chimera Navigator. Check it out at chimera.mozdev.org, highly recommended.

PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by hagbard5235 · 2002-07-01 16:14 · Score: 2

The Hard Drive may be the slowest component, but the PCI bus is the big bottleneck for MANY applications. I can cache enough of the things I need to hit the disk for in memory to render the disk bottleneck irrelavent to many applications. What I can't do is drive stuff across the crappy PCI bus any faster. Could we please move away from PCI towards something better!!

Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by rew · 2002-07-01 19:03 · Score: 2

The Hard Drive may be the slowest component, but the PCI bus is the big bottleneck for MANY applications.

May I ask you what you are doing on your computer that uses your PCI bus?

You should be browsing the web (internet at a couple of megabits), playing mp3s (160k/sec uncompressed audio plus 20k/sec compressed audio), and you'll be editing stuff, and doing things with your screen. That's highbandwidth alright, but doesn't have anything to do with your PCI bus.

Roger.
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by repvik · 2002-07-01 22:01 · Score: 1

Considering the amount of bandwidth generated by my two scsi-disks (Which I easily get 80MB/sec from) for outgoing ftp while watching two towers trailer fullscreen streamed from apple.com, I'm running low on free bandwidth on the PCI-bus.

(Btw, I no longer have sig11, thanks! :)
(p200 without MMX, no-hlt)
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by rew · 2002-07-01 22:18 · Score: 1

640 mbit per second of outgoing ftp?

You can make me believe that you have 10mbs internet. That's 1Mbyte per second.

Roger.
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 22:26 · Score: 0

Unless you have a gigabit ethernet uplink I think you are looking at the wrong place for a bottleneck (seeing as there would be an order of magnitude or more difference between network bandwith and PCI, while your HD's could consume the PCI bandwith they would not be doing so serving anything less than Gb ethernet). If you do have a gigabit ethernet uplink then what the hell are you doing using your server to watch movies? :) You obviously have enough money to put the ftp on a seperate box.
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by repvik · 2002-07-01 22:45 · Score: 1

Now, if you've ever been to Norwegian universities, you'll know that they offer their students 100mbps full duplex internet access. That's easily 6+Mbyte per second :)
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by rew · 2002-07-01 22:55 · Score: 1

OK. That's 100 mbps, or 12 mbyte per second. That's 10% of your available PCI bandwidth. You need that bandwidth twice: once to get it off your disk, once to get it to the network. That's 20% of your PCI bandwidth. That's significant, but not close to saturating your PCI bus. Right?

Roger.
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by hagbard5235 · 2002-07-02 00:51 · Score: 2

Trying to seriously drive a gig ethernet card. Trying to do network capture and analysis for a gig ethernet card. Trying to use multiple fast ethernet ports to simultaneously monitor different network points. Any of these will blow a PCI bus really fast. I currently have to spend a great deal of money on specialized equipment to do poorly what I could do with a Linux box if it the applications didn't choke on the PCI bus speed.
And don't even think about the new 10 gig ethernet you're SOL out of the box on that, curtesy of your crappy PCI bus.
Re:PCI Bus is the biggest bottleneck by rew · 2002-07-02 01:47 · Score: 1

Someone suggested that "for normal use your average PCI bus is not enough". Well. I disagree. For normal use a PCI bus is quite enough.

I fully agree that with several 100mpbs cards, and/or one gigabit ethernet card, you can easily saturate a PCI bus. With specialized applications as well.

I have a system where I need HD troughput. I use the 66MHz PCI bus on that one. If it hadn't been enough I would have had to use 64bit/66MHz PCI. But this is a specialized application and not "normal use".

Roger.

Flawed drives equal lower demand by Billy_D_Goat · 2002-07-01 16:32 · Score: 1

I think a one of the biggest problems in recent years is the decreasing reliability of drives. Personally, I have experienced both the IBM "deathstar" epidemic as well as a new "beeping" issue with Maxtor drives on Macs. (See http://www.macintouch.com/maxtor2.html for more info on beeping Maxtors) I have stopped buying drives for the time being until some of these problems settle down. Fact of the matter is people don't buy shoddy products (ok you got me on Windows!).

Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by LordLucless · 2002-07-01 17:05 · Score: 1

Who buys windows?

You get it on a new PC, or pirate it off your next door neighbour when he buys one.

--
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by Billy_D_Goat · 2002-07-01 17:12 · Score: 1

good point!
Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:14 · Score: 0

>Personally, I have experienced both the IBM "deathstar" epidemic as well as a new "beeping" issue with Maxtor drives on Macs.

Doesn't surprise me.

Maxtor once had a name as one of the worst drive makers on earth (there were worse, though, like JTS).

And then, all of a sudden, the "worst" drive maker goes and buys out their platter supplying "best" drive maker, Quantum. It baffled my mind why a first tier drive maker got bought out by their second tier.

Now I see why -- all sorts of people are now telling me Maxtor rocks.
Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by slaker · 2002-07-01 18:02 · Score: 5, Informative

Maxtor does rock. Put simply, after that down period about six years ago, they got their sh*t together and started making a quality product, and they haven't given up. The price is right, the performance excellent (good to see Maxtor picked up Quantum's tendency to make fast-seeking IDE units.

The other really good product right now is Western Digital. They're IDE only now, unfortunately, but it take a lot of balls to stand up and recall drives from consumers, to fix a manufacturing flaw. They did it, and they earned my respect.

Samsung drives also have a really strong reputation.

In comparison we have IBM, whose last 15k SCSI unit doesn't even best Maxtor's latest 10k Atlas, and whose 7200rpm ATA models are limited by either the "Deathstar" rep or the limitations of a specificied Powered On Hours of Service specification that no one else seems to be using.

We also have Seagate, which makes some fantastic and unique products (the last 50-pin 7200rpm SCSI drive) in SCSI, and has IDE products that, frankly, suck dick. U-series drives have lousy reliability and performance that's matched by two-year old drives that are 1000rpm SLOWER. Even worse, WD's recent 5400rpm products come to wit 2% of Seagate's amazingly quite 7200rpm Barracuda IV in most benchmarks.

Most of my knowledge comes from either Storagereview.com or from Storageforum.net

--
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 03:02 · Score: 0

Samsung drives also have a really strong reputation.

I'll second that. I've got a Samsung 560MB that's almost 10 years old that's still running, outlasting a WD 80MB (replaced by the Samsung when it was just a couple of years old), a Connor 1.6GB (from just before being bought by Seagate), a Fujitsu 2.1GB, and a Quantum 7.6GB. All these drives were ATA.
Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by Erbo · 2002-07-02 03:33 · Score: 2

Remember, Maxtor used to be MiniScribe, who once stooped as far as shipping bricks instead of disk drives to book revenue. But since then, they've reformed and gotten their shit together.
I've been burned by the IBM drives recently, too. The reason Electric Minds is down right now is because the company that made our server put IBM DeskStar drives in it. Even a replacement drive I bought started failing mere months after I installed it, whereas I have Maxtor drives that have been in service for three years and longer, and have never failed once. The server disks are being replaced with new Maxtors now; I don't expect them to give any trouble...but it'll be a cold day in hell before I recommend anyone buy an IBM DeskStar.

--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Re:Flawed drives equal lower demand by o311 · 2002-07-02 06:33 · Score: 1

"good to see Maxtor picked up Quantum's tendency to make fast-seeking IDE units"

Thats because Maxtor bought the remnants of Quantum's hard drive division.

BTW The Atlas was originally a DEC product acquired by Quantum ... err Maxtor

Are hard disks really commodities? by slaker · 2002-07-01 16:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

I suppose I disagree on the very basic point that a hard disk is a commodity purchase. RAM is a commodity. I can buy a stick from any of the major manufacturers and know that I'm getting more or less the same level of quality.

Every hard disk on the market right now has some kind of distinguishing characteristic. Folks doing equipment purchasing may not be *aware* of the distinctions, but they are present nonetheless.

Want a high-performance 5400rpm ATA disk? Look at Western Digital's *AB-series drives. Quiet SCSI? Fujitsu has/had that market cornered. Performance at any cost? Seagate's X15-36LP.

I can't say any similar thing about true commodity items like RAM or floppy disk drives. --

Visit StorageForum

--
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K

Re:Are hard disks really commodities? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 00:08 · Score: 0

sure they are. Cars having varying qualities but are commidty items. it's a commodity, it's not an homogeous product.

Andrew
Re:Are hard disks really commodities? by Reziac · 2002-07-03 02:57 · Score: 2

Actually you can't say the same about floppy drives either. Teac now makes the only good ones, tho back in the 5.25" day, Fujitsu made good FDDs too (I still have several in use with a mfg date of *1986*).

Conversely Mitsumi floppy drives are crap (made cheap, often out of spec and sometimes DOA brand new, and have a limited lifespan). Generics are worse, and if you tear them apart you'll usually find they are Mitsumi 2nds on the inside.

OTOH, you're mostly right about RAM -- in general any brand my dealer hands me will work just fine (and a lot of the generics have name-brand chips). Tho in a mission-critical situation I might still opt for genuine Micron or the like, under the theory that even if the chips are the same, perhaps the rest of the stick's electronics are not.

--
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?

Gotta love it! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 16:47 · Score: 0

Does this mean that hard drives would not be required to comply with the impending Digital Wrongs Management laws the US is brewing up? Of course the US will just state that hard drives will need to comply for import but since I don't live in the US I couldn't care less.

Keep up the good work Taiwan!

Tax Rates? by hackwrench · 2002-07-01 16:48 · Score: 1

Going by tax rates there isn't a level playing field within the U.S. 50 different tax rates on various factors of production.

"pixie dust" by kesuki · 2002-07-01 17:14 · Score: 4, Funny

As stated in the article, IBM had recently started to use "Pixie dust" to push the supermagnetic barrier to squeeze more data on each platter. So obviously, they ran afowl of the Pixie's union, and had to sell the business to hitachi, which relies on the gremlin's union to keep the pixies in-line.

--
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Sad by coli2 · 2002-07-01 17:27 · Score: 1

Only under a flawed economic system will you fail because the technology is too successful. The problem is not of over investment. But one of the economic system that we are under.

Re:Sad by kmellis · 2002-07-01 17:55 · Score: 2

You are so wrong about this.
There is no such thing as being "too successful". The platter manufacturers have not been "too successful", they have made poor business decisions.
Increasing platter capacity far beyond demand is exactly the equivalent of simply charging less for a product than the buyer is willing to pay.
Economically successful means the greatest production of wealth possible. The resources that went into producing a surplus of platter storage capacity could have been better used elsewhere. If you had a designed economy, and you were the designer, wouldn't you allocate just as much resources to research and production of improved platter capacity as there was a demand? Well, no, you wouldn't. If you did, then hopefully you'd recognize your mistake, and then move those resources elsewhere. This is exactly what is happening to the platter industry as a result of market forces. The system is working just fine.
Re:Sad by kmellis · 2002-07-02 03:58 · Score: 2

Er, "Well, no, you wouldn't" should have been the opposite. Or the previous should have been the opposite. Urgh.
I must have read that three times without noticing that stupid error.

Day's Range: 0.004 - 0.009 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:39 · Score: 0

Here is a better link:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=KMAGQ.OB&d=t

Interestingly, this stock traded 1,097,800 shares today. I wonder who bought those shares? I wonder who sold them?

Quality Control by FueledByRamen · 2002-07-01 17:42 · Score: 1

I'm really, really unhappy at the quality control behind hard drives. Just this morning I put my foot on my 20gb Maxtor ATA66 old-and-showing-it drive. I barely set it on there and had only gotten comfortable with it as a foot rest when it made a funny noise and shut down! (No joke, I am this stupid and this did happen, and this isn't the first time.) Damn Maxtor, can't make a drive that head-crashes properly! Anyway, it still works, because it booted the Windows .NET Enterprise Server beta that this message is being typed on...

<BOFH> Next time, I should really put it to the test. Rubber panel-beating mallet: leaves almost no marks while causing a head crash...</BOFH>

--
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)

Re:Quality Control by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 18:59 · Score: 0

that sucks!

I shot my circa 1994 9GB SCSI2 Avid drive with a .38 and it did ship whine nor die. maxtor must suck.

I want a silent hard drive, not a fast hard drive by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 17:45 · Score: 0

How about spinning the drive at 3600 rpm or less, and eliminating all the other little noises that go with it? I am more interested in that feature than capacity. And I am *way* more interested in silence than in access speed.

Do they really mean what they say? by leonbrooks · 2002-07-01 17:54 · Score: 4, Funny

Paraburdoo Tavern once had a sign saying `No admission without shirt and shoes. Tank-tops and thongs not acceptable' until shortly after somebody complied, turning up in a shirt and shoes. Only.

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

No, that's 6 orders by leonbrooks · 2002-07-01 17:56 · Score: 2

AKA 1,000,000x

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

Re:No, that's 6 orders by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 09:01 · Score: 0

I think you mean it's 'six factors of ten', not
six 'orders' of ____

I have a 250MB SamSung from 1993 by leonbrooks · 2002-07-01 18:01 · Score: 2

It's running my gateway machine as I type, and has been for 3 years. Wanna buy it? (-:

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

Re:I have a 250MB SamSung from 1993 by kpetruse · 2002-07-01 20:58 · Score: 1

Nah, but I've still got a 10Mb drive hanging around somewhere. 10Mb! TEN!

Hard drive capacity is the only time when geeks will say "My one is smaller than yours".

Re:Good for you. I do. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 18:09 · Score: 0

Hey buddy, can you spare some space? And while you're at it, some 0day warez and the latest eminem album?

John? by RoC+MasterMind · 2002-07-01 18:18 · Score: 1

Anyone notice that this article was written by John Markoff, the same guy who wrote the slanderous stuff about Kevin Mitnick way back?

--
Hacking the Network

/. now posting Times stories with Reg warning by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 18:52 · Score: 0

Wasn't it just a few days ago when /. went over the registration issue? Now NYT is being quoted without registration warnings?

In other news... by allanj · 2002-07-01 18:56 · Score: 3, Funny

Bill Gates reports that no-one will ever need more than 640KB of memory. Wait a minute - that was like two decades ago? Wow.

--
Black holes are where God divided by zero

Pixie Dust and other musings by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 19:00 · Score: 0

Contrary to what the article states, pixie dust, and the technology/technologists behind it are a failure. IBM hard drive division being sold because the "most successful hard drive in history" was bleeding them, by their own admission. Brutal technological competition? Try not having a backup technology for the failed GXP pixie dust debacle. See: http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494

What do you do when technology that is supposed to put you at the front of the pack puts you into the sewer, and you have no backup strategy? You cut your losses and run like hell.

This story is biased! by pro-mpd · 2002-07-01 19:03 · Score: 1

And I thought that American (US, anyhow) journalism was above bias!

Meh. The author calls IBM a victim- a victim of what? Their own stupidity and inability to produce a good product? Oh, no, I get it... <SARCASM thickness="very">IBM is a victim of companies (such as Komag) who are capable of producing a better product than them. Nasty, underhanded good-product companies!</SARCASM>

Seriously though, IBM is out of the business. Sure the Pixie Dust info. is relevant (i.e. Komag is better because they don't need pixie dust), but the stuff about millipede... how is that relevant if it's still 5-10 years out? It seems like the author is just trying to play up IBM even though they failed out of their own stupidity. Not even a mention of WD's new 200gb drives... Komag even makes the platters for WD!!

Of course not. by Chuck+Chunder · 2002-07-01 19:10 · Score: 1

those problems are caused by violent television, movies and video games.

--
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park

Don't make drives, sell them at a profit. by Pinback · 2002-07-01 19:15 · Score: 1

The profitable part of the storage market is the packaging. The disk drives are the cheap part. Why bother making disks if you can make a fortune pimping someone else's drives?

If you want proof, look at IBM's ESS product. They've gone from using their own fibre channel disks to a SEAGATE U-160 with an add-on shim that adapts the drive to FC.

Re:Don't make drives, sell them at a profit. by apadula · 2002-07-02 15:15 · Score: 1

The ESS doesn't use fibre channel drives, the disks are all SSA (Serial Storage Architecture).

The older disks are all SSA native drives made by IBM. The 73gig drives are Seagate U160's with a converter attached so it can connect to the SSA loops that are in the ESS.
Re:Don't make drives, sell them at a profit. by Pinback · 2002-07-02 15:33 · Score: 1

Oops, yes, you are correct.

The ESS uses SSA. But are the 73GB size the only disks that are setup this way?

Re:Why the HDD business is ailing...better link by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 19:19 · Score: 0

A more up-to-date link on the pixie dust GXP debacle is here: http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/3494

Not without an alternative to photolitography by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 19:28 · Score: 0

With photolitography the cost per bit will remain far too high, even with feature sizes growing ever smaller ... we need something which can do submicron patterning a lot cheaper, when we do companies like rolltronics will be able to mass produce memory with thin film techniques like MRAM/thinfilm.se/Ovonyx. But until that time cheap solid state mass storage is just a dream.

Re:Good for you. I do. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-01 20:28 · Score: 0

Do you think we don't know what "Juarez" is? Huh?

They're definately going under by KidSock · 2002-07-01 20:57 · Score: 1

if their platters can only store one image:

http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/2002/07/01/bus iness/01KOMA.1.jpg

Does it still go? by leonbrooks · 2002-07-01 21:53 · Score: 2

Plug it in and see if it blows up the PSU! (-:

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

Re:I want a silent hard drive, not a fast hard dri by DirkDaring · 2002-07-02 00:03 · Score: 0

I have a 7200rpm drive in my Dell, an IBM, and I can't hear it at all.

Maybe your case just sucks?

Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up by zerofoo · 2002-07-02 00:14 · Score: 4, Insightful

Demand for storage will not increase until backup methods can scale up.

What good is that 120 GB hard drive in your machine if you can only backup 40-60 GB?

Disk storage has been really cheap for years, yet backup systems like tape and DVD are either too small or too damn expensive.

Anybody check out prices on DDS4, AIT, and other tape drives....way too expensive.

Our ability to store stuff is not dictated by hard drive space, it is dictated by backup space.

-ted

Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up by Erbo · 2002-07-02 03:45 · Score: 2

Solution: live backups. Put another machine on your LAN, with the same size drive. Set up a script to run that periodically copies the contents of your primary machine to the backup machine. If your primary machine's drive fails, you haven't lost anything.
Another solution: RAID-1, two drives mirroring one another. If one dies, the other one is still usable.
Of course, these don't provide the multiple-generation archiving you get with traditional backups. Still, it's a way of preventing data loss. (Now there's another solution...use multiple removable hard drives for multi-generation backup. Three big hard drives plus removable-disk trays will probably still cost less than one tape drive, and be more convenient besides.)

--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up by markmoss · 2002-07-02 07:02 · Score: 2

Disk mirroring DOES NOT save your arse when some nitwit MCSE lets a virus infect the server and all the data files. It will whack the mirrors too. If they'd been using the multi-generation tape backups like every _real_ backup plan has, we'd have been back and running in a couple of days, but as it was a lot of stuff simply had to be done over.

Now (a couple of years later), they do the multi-generation tapes religiously. And periodically they yell at everyone to pare their on-line files down so they can continue to backup 100G hard drives to a 40G tape! (In other words, we are limiting drive space _used_, not to what is available or affordable, but to what the backup system can handle. I do that by moving rarely used files to CD-R.)

I'm quite OK with using removable disk drives for a multiple-generation backup, as long as you actually have multiple copies, and some of them are off-site. I'm not sure how the costs compare, but this scheme ought to take care of the insufficient capacity and insufficient time excuses. And one of the worst problems with tape backups is ensuring that after a real disaster - like the computer with the tape drive burning up - you'll still be able to read the tapes. I assume that those removable disks could hook up for read-back to any SCSI equipped computer with a suitable cable?
Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up by Erbo · 2002-07-02 11:51 · Score: 2

I was thinking of those removable IDE drive adapters that have a tray that you bolt the drive into and a housing that fits in the computer's drive bay. If your backup drives were all fitted into those kind of trays, changing them in and out would be a breeze. In a pinch, you could unbolt the drive from its tray and connect it to a computer in the usual way. No doubt similar widgets exist for SCSI drives, should you be using those instead.
Another alternative might involve those external drives that use IEEE 1394 (FireWire, i.LINK) interfaces. Just plug and copy...and plug them into any 1394-equipped computer for recovery. At that point, you might be going beyond the price of a tape drive...but not by much, and the 1394 drives offer easy random access to files in case you need to recover individual ones.

--
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Re:Ability to store, outstrips ability to back up by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 13:29 · Score: 0

Large companies would have live off-site backup systems with a private dedicated line. This is to prevent fire from destroying backup computers that are side-by-side with the machine you are backing up.

I'd say the hard drive industry is limited by the broadband bandwidth. Broadband has not improved much in speed since I got my first cable modem installed almost 4 years ago. In fact, it has slowed somewhat due to the increased traffic on the shared lines.

If everyone has high speed ( > current broadband speeds) things like on-demand high quality video would probably be more popular, and thus fuel the storage demand.

Re:I want a silent hard drive, not a fast hard dri by corey_lawson · 2002-07-02 01:37 · Score: 1

then wear earplugs. Most HDs these days are incredibly quiet.

Geez... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 01:53 · Score: 0

Can't you guys find stories on sites that DON'T require registration??? I don't care about the NY Times, and I don't want to register.

Hm. by Wakko+Warner · 2002-07-02 01:57 · Score: 1

Either you're a total retard, or someone is deliberately sending you broken hardware as a prank. There's absolutely no way you can lose a dozen hard drives in one machine in 3 years and not have it be PEBKAC (or ID-10-T syndrome.)

- A.P.

--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"

Re:Hm. by billcopc · 2002-07-02 02:59 · Score: 1

Nah, I'm not a total retard, I'm just very demanding and trying to make the most of cheap hardware. I just don't have the moolah to invest in better equipment right now, since nobody is buying new PCs or contracting shop-online sites anymore and my expensive services are not in demand. I don't expect much better from a 60$ hard drive, but I figure Maxtor and friends aren't making much money from me after all the warranty service I put them through. If they would put a little 2% extra effort in their manufacturing process, maybe their drives wouldn't crash so damned often in my thrash-hungry workstation.

It's a sad day indeed when I whine about hitting the PCI bus' max bandwidth on my drive array. Yet that's what I want out of my PC for the work I do; give me >200mb/sec speeds on a set of drives that will last more than 6 months. That's all I care about.

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Re:Hm. by T-Ranger · 2002-07-02 05:21 · Score: 1

Ah. Its all becoming clear now. You only ever purchase cheep hardware.
Well, duh, of course its going to break. Stop your whining..
Re:Hm. by Wakko+Warner · 2002-07-02 06:54 · Score: 2

I'm not a total retard

I'm just very demanding and trying to make the most of cheap hardware.

Those two statements are in direct conflict with each other.

There is no such thing as "cheap, fast, and good".

- A.P.

--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Re:Hm. by billcopc · 2002-07-03 00:43 · Score: 1

Cheap ? If by cheap you mean "non-scsi" then yes I go for cheap stuff. Nowadays I run Seagates, and they are doing better than my old Maxtors at any rate. If you can afford those 500$ scsi drives then more power to ya, I'll keep trucking along with my 'cheap' IDEs.

--
-Billco, Fnarg.com

dont throw away those old drives. by gimpboy · 2002-07-02 02:32 · Score: 2

hey.

if you really have alot of drives lying around we can use them. we build computers from old parts and send them off to mexico. if you really have alot of old drives and want to unload them, i'll pay for the postage. email me if you dont mind the hassel.

--
-- john

Destroking by DustMagnet · 2002-07-02 03:12 · Score: 2

In this article I read:

Seagate will drop the capacity of a 60GB platter to 40GB through a technical process it calls destroking.

If margins are so tight, I can't figure out how destroking could be happening. I associate intentional crippling of products with monopolies.

--
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!

Re:Destroking by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 04:57 · Score: 0

> In this article [pcworld.com] I read:
> Seagate will drop the capacity of a 60GB platter to 40GB through a technical process it calls destroking.
> If margins are so tight, I can't figure out how destroking could be happening. I associate intentional crippling of products with monopolies.

From the article's last paragraph:

Seagate will drop the capacity of a 60GB platter to 40GB through a technical process it calls destroking. Why demote a 60GB platter to 40GB? "Because PC makers have certain price points they want to hit," Eisman says, and smaller hard drive sizes are another way to differentiate products.
Re:Destroking by DustMagnet · 2002-07-02 05:58 · Score: 2

I'm sorry I guess I didn't explain my point. If Seagate makes almost no money selling drives with 60GB platters (see parent article), how can they afford to disable 1/3 of the disk space and sell the drive for less. They should be losing money on every destroked drive.
I normally only see behavior like destroking on high margin items. For example, Intel CPUs (before AMD got good again).

--
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!

Re:I want a silent hard drive, not a fast hard dri by Erbo · 2002-07-02 03:37 · Score: 2

I just installed a Maxtor 80 Gb 5400 RPM drive in my PC, and it's very quiet...quieter than my old 13 Gb unit. In fact, it seems like I can't hear the new drive at all. Certainly not when the CD-ROM is spinning...now that makes a racket.

--
Be who you are...and be it in style!

Archive HDTV by Grayswan · 2002-07-02 06:05 · Score: 1

Try archiving HDTV. At 19.4Mbps, you will be shocked at how small an 80Gig drive is. It will hold only about 9.5 hours worth. I've got plenty of large drives and need more.

--
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.

Re:I want a silent hard drive, not a fast hard dri by Jucius+Maximus · 2002-07-02 06:40 · Score: 1

"Certainly not when the CD-ROM is spinning...now that makes a racket."

Try a plextor 40x12x40 IDE CDRw drive. It is worlds QUIETER than my old plextor 16x10x40. Go figure.

HD size linked to broadband speeds? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-02 08:10 · Score: 4, Interesting

Is it just me, or does it seem there's a direct correlation between your download speeds and your hard drive size?

Unless you create huge files (digital movies) there's only so many places a person can get data to fill their hard drive. Since most DVDs are not data, the only other medium is CDs, and 650megs barely makes a dent in even a small 10gig hard drive.

So the only other source for data is the internet. If you have a 56k modem, it would take a long time to download enough to fill even 1 gig. However, with broadband, it's full in a fraction of the time. Anyone with broadband at home would agree: they downloaded a lot more once they had broadband. Whether it's mp3s, movies, games or p0rn.

Before I had broadband I had a 20 gig hard drive and couldn't even fill half of it. After broadband I bought another 20 gig, then sold them for two 40gigs. Now I'm selling those for a 120 and 100gig. All because of broadband.

If I were hard drive manufactures I'd be damn sure to market to the broadband market, either form partnerships or sell directly to customers. Because without broadband no one needs anything larger than 10gigs.

That's 6 orders of magnitude by leonbrooks · 2002-07-02 12:52 · Score: 2

The `of magnitude' is the implied default. With three orders of fries, and shakes all 'round.

--
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing

Min wage creaste unemployement by nuggz · 2002-07-03 03:47 · Score: 2

Lets say the miniumum wage is $5/hr
I have a job opening that will be profitable for me if I pay $5/hr.
I pay $5/hr, make profit everyone wins.

Raise the minimum wage to $6/hr, I don't make a profit at that wage, so I don't hire anyone.
Someone is unemployed, and I don't make profit, and others don't benefit from my service. But at least we didn't exploit that unemployed guy.

No American and Russians invented TV by Anonymous Coward · 2002-07-03 04:34 · Score: 0

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae408 .cfm

Zworykin and Farnsworth, working separately.

Zworykin (Russian) patented what worked like a television camera. Fransworth (American) patented what would allow signal to transfer.

John Logie Baird, the Scottish guy, just had something that transfered silhouetes later on that he dubbed "television." His was later than Zworykin's and mechanical, not electronic.

The creators of the modern television are Zworykin and Fransworth because they used electronics.

Is your television mechanical? No. So obviously Baird did completely nothing except to invent the name television.

You're wrong by GPS+Pilot · 2002-07-03 06:17 · Score: 1

If you're worried that workers in the third world are underpaid (and they are), you should wholeheartedly support globalization of markets. The places where people are suffering are the places where capitalism has not yet worked its mojo.

Take this hard drive industry example. Moving production overseas boosts the standard of living for those workers who now have high-tech jobs. Back in the states, the manufacturers pass along a portion of the labor savings to consumers, which makes computers more affordable. 99.99% of Americans never worked in the hard drive industry, and their standard of living increases in a noticible way by the reduced cost of hard drives and assembled computers. The only people who don't benefit are the 0.01% of Americans who worked as laborers in the hard drive industry. Sorry, but the benefits for the rest of the world far outweigh their loss. The net benefit to the human race is substantial. Moving these types of jobs overseas is the Right Thing To Do.

You are right about one thing: when the American standard of living goes down, it has a deleterious ripple effect on the standard of living in every country.

That is exactly why we should outsource these types of jobs to the third world. Doing so increases the standard of living of the average American.

Here's an excellent analogy. It's possible to grow oranges in Maine. Really, it is. You can build big expensive greenhouses for the orange trees, and heat them in the winter.

Does it make sense to forbid the good people of Maine from outsourcing their orange production to Florida? Well, the Maine agriculture lobby and greenhouse builders in Maine would love it -- they would make a lot of money. But that represents less than 1% of Maine's population. The standard of living of the other 99% would suffer. For them, the price of a glass of orange juice would probably increase by 1500%. And what about the poor orange farmers in Florida whose business would suffer? I'm sure you can see that it makes no sense to cater to small special interest groups (in this case, Maine orange growers).

So, unrestricted free trade is a good thing within these 50 states, and it's no different when you talk about international trade. For some strange reason (perhaps misplaced patriotism), many people can't seem to grok that. But it doesn't matter whether you're talking about oranges or hard drive labor, Florida or Indonesia. Let the money flow where it will, and the human race will soar.

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That that is is that that that that is not is not.

Mexico???!!! by commodoresloat · 2002-07-06 19:53 · Score: 2

You're probably sending them to Juarez!!! Pirate.

Re:Mexico???!!! by gimpboy · 2002-07-06 23:29 · Score: 1

you mean WaReZ? yep we're pirates-eyepatch and everything.

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-- john

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The Hard Business of Selling Hard Drive Platters

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