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

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?

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: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.

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.

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