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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.
I'm just a little confused!
Mormon news and discussion at Mahonri.org
Who says they have to be actual files?
:D
/dev/null.
Just create some garbage filesystem entries on an unused hard drive. A 430mb hard drive should be plenty.
You could even survey to find the exact size to the byte of the most popular rips of each track and make sure they're that size.
It may be a bit more elegant if you actually hacked the p2p client or FTP server to just pipe x bytes from
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
I've seen Gnutella clients that automatically respond to search queries by appending ".mp3" or some other extension to the request string. Anytime I've seen it, it's been really small file sizes, so it was obvious, but that could be changed.
I own a computer repair/retail store. I have given up on WD several times. We have mainly used Maxtor for the last several years. I have had 2 Maxtor drives die in 5 years. I have replaced more WD drives for several 3rd party warranty companies than I could count. If one of the warranty companies call and sends a computer through our doors, (especially if it is black with a blue logo silkscreened on the front) and it has a WD drive inside, it's a 90% bet that the drive has developed bad sectors. I have enough dead 4.3gb Caviar drives to build a wall across the front of our shop. We have recently been using the new Maxtor/Quantum drives (Qaxtor I guess) and have not had any returns. These new drives look like a Quantum, but have a Maxtor label. I was a little hesitant at first to use them. However, I wanted to test the new drives and I needed a new server, so I built myself a new box consisting of dual 1800 Athlon MP (Tyan Tiger MP), 1GB Mushkin PC2100 DDR, Promise Supertrak SX6000 and FastTrak100,and 8 Maxtor 80GB drives. 6 drives are in RAID 5 (data) and 2 are in RAID 1 (OS installation). So far I have had no problems, other than gasping over the speed of this beast, but only time will tell. Just my 2cents. =)
For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits? I thought they had fixed things, but here's another one. For the last 20 years it's been an endless parade of hard drive capacity limits, one after the next. I can't remember the last time I installed more than 1 OS on a box without being nagged about dire warnings about hard drive geometry crap.
Why the hell do they need to be so stingy with the address bits? Don't they learn anything from experience? Is it a conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for SCSI?
Here's a hint: Send 64-bits of address to the drive! Store 64-bits of address in the BIOS! Use 64 bits in the device drivers! Use linear addressing! NO EXCEPTIONS ANYWHERE! For once, they wouldn't run out of space in 6 months and cause new headaches for everyone.
Would someone care to educate the Slashdot masses about the differences between the old bearings and these new liquid ones? I'm in the market for a new drive, and I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
Well, I can't speak for hard disk drives, but I can maybe draw an analogy.
Wheel bearings - on cars, trucks, bicycles, whatever - use ball bearings. They're a set of caged balls, and one surface literally rolls over the other on a cushion of tiny little balls or cylindrical rollers. Here's an animated GIF and some other neat stuff. The problem is that, whatever the lubrication, eventually the balls and their races will wear, which increases the clearance between the two surfaces and causes looseness ("play") within the bearings. In wheel bearings, this translates into a shimmy in the wheel and weird tire wear. In a hard disk drive, this would result in a shimmy to the platters, causing less precision in data reading and writing as the platters vibrate nanometers back and forth under the heads. As the drives get to higher and higher capacities with the same physical disk size, the tracks being used must be getting smaller, and therefore this error becomes more crucial. Also, notice that hard drives which have been running for a long time tend to get noisy... Never mind that bits of metal being worn out of bearings have to be contained somehow so that the platters and heads don't get damaged.
Liquid bearings are used in all modern car engines. Oil is pumped from the oil pan into a very tiny space between a relatively soft bearing shell and a very smooth and hard crankshaft or camshaft journal. As the shaft spins, the oil is distributed thoughout the bearing surface and eventually leaks out the sides where it drains back to the pan to be pumped through the system again. Here's a picture of the main bearings of a Ford V8. You can see the little holes where oil is pumped into them. While the engine is running, theoretically, the shaft's journal and the bearing surface never actually touch each other; they ride on a cushion of continually replaced microscopic ball bearings (oil molecules). During circulation, the oil takes the heat away from the bearings, and washes away impurities.
How you'd implement something like this in a hard disk drive, I have no idea, and I'd love to see any real techical info on it. (Marketing hype will not answer the questions I have.) But it's a great idea; in a server, with the hard disks spinning all the time, the hydrodynamics of the situation suggest that the platter bearings would never wear, and would therefore never have their tolerances open up and incur vibration.
But a seal would be required to keep the lubricant off the platters, and that seal would itself eventually wear out. Not to mention that it's unlikely they'll include a provision to do an oil change on these things. Stopping and starting cycles will wear the bearing and journal material, causing tiny abrasive bits to be floating in the oil.
I like the idea, I think it's a great step, and I'll look forward to seeing how hard disk manufacturers have solved the problems.
Would the new bearings come at a price premium?For sure! Even if it costs less to machine these than the super-tight clearance ball-bearings that modern hard disks must use, they'll still be a "new feature" which can enhance prices and profit margins. But I think they will actually cost more to make; it's just that ball bearings (like older stepper motor head actuators) have too many limitations to work with modern capacity and track density demands.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
That's what he's saying... He's saying that with hardware, yes you get what you pay for, but with software, that's generally NOT the case.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This leaves only one common element: I buy all my hard drives from the same place. However, I also bought my new IBM drive from this place, and it hasn't had any problems. If they were mishandling drives, why would they abuse the WD drives but not the IBM drives? Curious.
In high school, a few of my friends and I salvaged PDP's and gigantic 5MB drives from dumpsters outside of a telecommunications building. Those beasts weighed a hell of a lot, made of solid steel, with belt driven spindles and massive motors with heatsinks on 'em.
:)
.. and it was really cool to run long lengths of those skinny little wires to the editing stations. After dealing with FC, I'm seriously looking forward to working with Serial ATA and Serial SCSI -- those complex multi-pin connections just gotta go.
:)
Interesting to think that something that's about 1/10th of a percent of the size of those monsters contains almost 41,000 times more data.
Technology. Great stuff.
Another story to bore your socks off:
When I was working at an animation/film editing studio five years ago, we dropped a serious amount of money on a 200GB fibre channel array to feed three Avid workstations. It was a beast of a box, easily weighing over a hundred pounds
Anyhow. Enough of my drivel.
I'm probably missing something here, but isn't that just what they'd want you to do? It would create so much noise in the P2P system that no one would be able to find the real files they're looking for.
Folks, I hate to be the one to throw water on everyone, but here goes...
:-)
Debating which drive manufacturer is "most reliable" is like debating which God is "correct", or the existance of Santa.
You say in 20 years experience you've only lost two drives, both Maxtors.
Well, in my (let me count) um...23 years experience, Maxtor is one of the only two brands of drives that I've not had a failure (the other one is Fujitsu). And I've also "owned 'em all" too. I've got a pile of dead Western Digital drives a foot tall sitting out in my workshop (figured I'd make clocks out of 'em or something). I once had three Seagate drives fail in a 6 month period, and the second and third ones were warrenty replacements starting when the first one died.
So which one of us is right?!
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.