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Western Digital Announces 200 Gig Drives
twilightzero writes "Video capture fanatics and pr0n moguls, rejoice! Today marks the official release of the Western Digital 200 GB hard drive! Never again run out of space for your X-10 video stream of the neighbor's house! See the graphic, specs, and press release. This also marks the release of WD drives using fluid dynamic bearings rather than the old BB type." The glorious march of technology continues forward, and digital video fans rejoice. Update: 07/26 03:34 GMT by M : Headline corrected. Taco's at a conference, cut him a little slack.
Liquid bearings add a little bit to the price. At New Egg, for example, a 40GB ATA133 Maxtor is $3 more with liquid bearings and an 80GB ATA133 Maxtor is $8 more with liquid bearings.
Allegedly they operate with less noise than standard bearings. I haven't verified this personally, but the online reviews I've read seem to indicate that this is true.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I've installed a couple different drives with the fluid bearings, and they do run quieter than the older style bearings. Very nice!
I'm in the market for a new machine, and I've been spec'ing out different parts for my budget...These drives are nice and big, but what happens when you lose a 120 gig drive...I've pretty much decided that I'm going to have to get an IDE RAID card and highly recommend them...the RAID cards at work have saved me hours and hours of restoring from backup...Check out the 3ware Escalade, the Promise SuperTrak, or the Adaptec 2400A. RAID 5 is the way to go (with or without removable drives). I've been watching the prices for 120 Gig drives drop and now it's just about the price where I can afford to spend 150 clams to buy an extra drive that would be used to protect myself from a drive failure.
- grunby
I just asked my dad who's an engineer at WD about this and he said in fact it uses 3 (which is the max they can use) "60GB" platters. I put 60 in quotes because they're not exactly 60GB, really they're ~67GB platters they just round down to the nearest 20GB increment.
This would be funnier if it weren't true :-) Of course they are 66 GB platters and 198 GB drives.
I am a science fantasy fan
The limit is due to having only 28 bits in the IDE registers to selecting the address. There are four 8-bit registers, and the "head" register uses 1 bit for master/slave selection, one bit to select CHS/LBA addressing, and two bits are "reserved" (originally used to select sector sizes, but in modern times sectors are always 512 bytes).
ATA-6 kludges this 28 bit LBA limit to 48 bits by specifying that the host is to write 20 bits twice!
But for the forseeable future, 32 bit computers will only really use 32 of those 48 bits, which turns out to be only 2 terabytes. If the operating system uses a signed integer (common practice, including the linux kernel until only recently), you only end up with 31 bits of sector addressing, or just one terabyte.
Of course, there are probably even more limits lurking. Doesn't linux ext2/ext3 use 32 bit numbers? FAT32 uses 28 bits for cluster numbers, but clusters can be as much as 32k in the standard (apparantly larger in some systems, though Microsoft doesn't document that in the FAT32 specification).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Some people win the lottery.
Some people buy 6 substandard drives from the same manufacturer.
Some people use a 5400rpm CPU fan and 5400 rpm drives and expect they won't set up narrows bridge style resonate frequencies in their cases.
Some people do not properly cool their cases.
Some people bang their boxes around at once a month lan parties and wonder why their drives fail.
Some people overclock their machines but don't use western digital drives because they tend to behave badly.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.