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.

Comments

Differences?

[Night Goat]

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. Would the new bearings come at a price premium?

Re:Differences?

[ultrapenguin]

to make it not spin back up after a few seconds
(and if you are running 2.4.x kernels (and possibly 2.5) you can do this:

# killall -STOP kupdated

however, be warned that this will stop frequent flushes of disk cache to disk, and if your machine happens to lock up for some reason there's a chance you might lose some data.
But for personal machine that you want quiet at night, this works wonders.
Also consider slowing down syslog --MARK-- output (which might spin up the disk by adding -m 1440 (time in minutes) to syslog startup line.

Re:Differences?

[Chris Siegler]

I have two identical Maxtor drives except that one has liquid bearings and one not (6L040L2 and 6L040J2, which are both 40G 7200RPM drives). And the L is slightly quieter, but mostly it just sounds different. They are both so damn quiet it's hard to hear them above my CPU fan, but here goes. The L sounds like a chipmunk nibbling on a twig, while the J would be a chipmunk munching on a twig.

Hope that clears up the confusion

This brings an interesting question to mind....

[Uttles]

Would it be possible to launch a reverse DOS attack on the RIAA by storing hundreds of thousands of fake mp3 files with song names on a 200 gig hard drive, or better yet a network of computers with 200 gig hard drives?

Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[AaronPSU79]

60 gigs a platter, so to get to 200 gigs there must be 4 of them. 4 times 60 is 240. What gives?? Is this one of those deals where they lock out sections of the drive so they can release a larger model later???

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Likely that you either have poor cooling or poor power or both. One reason the raq may be spec'd for only one drive is that the power supply can't support two without running into the ragged edge. When a power supply is over-extended but not completely overwhelmed it will continue to "work" just you won't get nice clean power out, instead it will be all noisy and full of ugly fluctations that can end up damaging electrical components, like, disk drive controller boards.

If you keep killing drives in the same machine, it is a pretty good chance that the problem is not the drives but something about the machine.

Always spend the extra $20-$40 for a good power supply (if it is lightweight, it ain't a good power supply, heavy means good, as long they don't put a brick in it) and don't skimp on cooling either...

Backups..

[J4]

gotta be a bitch. That's something like
138,889 floppies. If they're 1/8 inch
that's a stack about a quarter mile
high!

Western Digital reliability

[Wonko42]

Am I the only one who has had every single Western Digital drive I've ever bought fail completely within months? The failure is usually preceded by a horrible clunking noise that lasts a month or two, followed by catastrophic data loss. And it's happened with every WD drive I've purchased (and that's six so far). Needless to say, I've stopped buying WD drives.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[PD]

Funny, I'm holding one in my hand right now that I bought in 1992. It's only 1000 times smaller than the one listed here - 200 megabytes. It still works perfectly and up until a month ago it was a swap drive on one of my computers. The swap was very lightly used, but it felt GOOD dammit to be using the second hard disk I ever bought in a Linux box.

Anyway, 1000 times increase in capacity in just 10 years. To extrapolate, that means that in the year 2012, we'll have 200 terabyte drives. Actually, it's more complicated than that.

I paid $500 for my 200 meg drive, and these new 200 gigers are going to be selling for less than that. What it'll turn out to be is that our 200 terabyte drives will cost little more than the value of the raw materials used to build the thing.

What WON'T change is that the handful of hard disk manufacturers around will have might thin margins and heavy competition.

Early Nineties? Try 1982!

[BigBlockMopar]

So you think you are old? ....I'm not old (26) but HD didn't exists on the consumer market when I started. ....my first real personal computer was an Apple II. and then the macintosh. Anyway, just remember how much application you could put on a single 800k floppy.

TI-99/4A! :) I had a 5.25" single-sided single-density floppy disk drive, with a whopping 90k per diskette. The average application was about 20k, word processor, Editor/Assembler development package, etc. Sticking in another diskette was like adding a new hard disk drive to your machine today! :)

Then some nut in the TI User's Group realized that we could stick two of the new half-height double-sided drives then becoming popular in PC/XTs into the disk drive bay. 180k per drive, two drives at once! (TI Disk Controller cards wouldn't run double-density, so we didn't get the full 360k/disk.) Literally, you could go weeks or months using nothing but the two diskettes in the two drives.

I kinda miss that. But, then again, that was before the good porn came in large, high-resolution 1+ megabyte JPGs. (16 colors was enough back then, too...)

But you need at least two.

[gerardrj]

Others have mentioned backup problems with these large drives and joked about the number of floppies the drive equates to. Assuming my math went okay, here's a list of popular backup media and their estimated time to backup such a beast.
What these large drives mean to users is that you can't just buy one drive, as there is no feasable way to back up the entire drive. You'll need to purchase two identical drives and mirror them for backup purposes. While 200BG seems like a lot, you'll need at least 400GB in reality. You can't let all that good prOn get lost in a head crash.

Drive type
(Native capacity) (native xfer rate)
(time to fill one media)
Time to complete a full 200GB backup* (approx media cost)**

DLT-8000
40GB 6MB/s
2hrs per tape
5 tapes 10 hrs $200

DVD-R
4.7G 2.6MB/s (2x write speed)
30 mins per disk
43 disks 21 hrs $43

CD-R
700MB 3.5MB/s (~20x write speed)
20mins per disk
286 disks 4 days $45

Floppy
1.44MB 25K/s
1.5Mins per disk
138889 disks 20 weeks $13,888

*These times assume 100% efficiency. IE: That the next media will be available immediately after the preceeding one is full. I did not allow any time for insert/eject, preperation/formatting or phyisical movement of the media. You would never be able to achieve these times. Perhaps * 1.5 would be more realistic.
*For media cost, I used pricewatch and took the lowest price I could find for bulk media. In the case of floppies that was 10/$1. These costs do not reflect the price of the device to write to the media.

Liquid Bearings and centrifugal bearings

[Mashiki]

BigBlockMopar, a Chrysler man I see. Well I might be able to fill this in a bit. Back when I was working in heavy manufactureing, we used alot of liquid bearings and such. Before the pre-start and early startup of the motors, a micro-oil pump would pump some oil into the sleves. I mean, small the pumps we used were itty itty bitty. Probbly 2" long, and 1/4" in diamiter. It would surpise me that they use something similar for a pre-start application.

The other thing is, once you get the drive spinning, you no longer need to use this pump. Since you can build a micro-pump into the base of the spindle to draw the oil up and into the bearing.

Now, the other thing I can see is a "dry start" since the drives are spinning at 5400-10000RPM the ammount of time that the drive takes to bring the pressure up in the pump, and the ammount of cold ware you get from start up, since most people use their computer every day, I can see this being a possible idea.

The last and best idea is called a centrifugal oil reserve. Where the oil is stored in a center chamber and when the drive powers up the oil is almost immediatly sloshed from the center to the outside, resulting in a very low chance of dry starts. It's cheap, inexpensive and very common on side mount high speed, high load bearings in machines.

Not an IT assistant are we..?

[Burning1]

The one thing most people fail to consider is the possibility of incramental backups.

Consider that on a 200gigabyte drive, it's improbable that there will be more than a couple gigs of new content in any given week (even if you're a major porn hound.)

2 gigabytes worth of data is plenty small to do incramental archives nightly on a tape drive.

With that said, you're right... A second hard disk is far more efficent for the needs of the average consumer.

Most IT industries use tape drives as well as RAID arrays simply because it creates a sort history of the data on the drive. Where RAID won't protect you from stupid user errors and 1e3+ /-/4xx04z where tapes will. Additionally, a proper backup procedure should also include a monthly backup to be taken off site in case of a fire, flood, act of god, or act of pissed off ex employee who is owed a lot of money by ex employer (you hear me, you bastards? [yes, I'm joking. Don't sue me.] ; )

People seem to forget that tapes are generally an enterprise solution... Not somthing intended for the desktop.

Disc Noise and bearings: Slightly offtopic

[joshsnow]

The use of liquid disk bearings and the subsequent discussion about drive noise bring to mind a question I've been meaning to ask for some time. I've noticed that my drive (20GB unbranded, 4GB ext3 partition, 16GB FAT32 partition) under Linux makes much more noise than it does under Windows2000. A couple of years back when I first got Linux installed (SuSE5,2) on a different drive in a different machine, I noticed that the drive made less noise under linux than it did under Win95. Has anyone else noticed anything similar? Is there a reason for this? Should I be using a different format (Reiser, XFS or whatever)?