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

Time for an upgrade...

[Anonymous Coward]

This 20 megger is beginning to feel cramped. I might even be able to upgrade to MS DOS 5.0!

Re:Time for an upgrade...

[The Dobber]

Just imagine what Doublespace could do.

Is it Maxtor or WD?

[mahonri]

I'm just a little confused!

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Sivar]

Western Digital already announced 200GB drives a few weeks ago, so this is probably a Maxtor announcement.

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Anonymous Cowrad]

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

Easy. Large values of 60 or small values of 200.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[slaker]

Hey Sivar.

Mickey, who likes to deny that he's a WD employee, over at Storagereview.com says the top-of-the-line model will probably, actually be three 66.7GB platters while the lesser models the in lineup will remain 60GB/platter.

IIRC, that's the same thing WD did for their 100GB drive.

If you're the Sivar who frequents SR, you'll probably know me btter as Mercutio.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[wheany]

Everybodu knows that a "real" gigabyte is 1024*1024*1024 bytes, or 1073741824 bytes, while a "hard drive" gigabyte is 1000000000 bytes. If you put 3 60 "real" gigabyte platters together, you get 193273528320. That is close enough to 200. Especially if you insret some marketing-speak there to fill the 7 remaining gigabytes.

Of course, the 60 gigabyte platters are "hd" gigs, so you are really getting 167 "real" gigs, but who's counting...

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Xeriar]

Easy. Large values of 60 or small values of 200.

This would be funnier if it weren't true :-) Of course they are 66 GB platters and 198 GB drives.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Sivar]

Ahh, thankyou. I have read several posts on the drive, but it never seemed to be agreed upon whether the drive was smaller or larger, the platters were not exactly 60GB, or if the remainder of the space was simply not mapped on the drive for marketing reasons. Good to know it's been cleared up. :-)

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[robbieduncan]

Mostly. But there is an overhead for file-system data as well (which of course varies in size with drive and file-system).

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Zocalo]

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

That 60GB is two sides at 30GB apiece, so I'd guess they've used 4 platters, but are only using seven sides to keep the phyiscal drive height down. That still leaves an error of 10GB mind you, but hey, that's only 5% for the sake of a round number.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Fweeky]

Aren't the Caviar's all WD's stuff? Although I imagine the distinction will loose importance after a while.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[colmore]

actually they're using 3 66gb platters for 198, which i think is "close enough" marketspeak dictates that when the consumer wants something, you use big round multiples of a power of ten, or a big round multiple of a power of ten + 1. When you have something the sonsumer doesn't want, like the price, you use big round multiples of powers of ten - 1 or - 2. it bugs me too, but you can't blame the guys for existing in a competitive and advertizing based industry, and it's not like real specs are that hard to find.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[jonnythan]

Not true at all. My WD 20 GB disk has four platters. Once upon a time, they didn't make four platter disks, but they switched. Unless they switched back in the past year or so, they're still making four platter drives.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[edmudama]

they aren't currently making 4 platter drives.

I have no idea what they were doing 3 years ago, I've only been in the industry now for about 20 months.

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?

[blincoln]

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.

Re:Differences?

[jorlando]

Instead of using ball-bearings (for the disc plates) it uses a liquid-suspension system. It's more reliable, you'll have a higher durability, possibly it's less noisy and can run faster. Since it's a new technology (and cool) it'll cost higher too...

Re:Differences?

[x136]

I recently bought a Maxtor D740X drive, but as it turns out, it's the ball bearing version. This thing is loud. I have to shut the computer down at night now. (It'd be great if Linux could spin it down...) I've talked to others with the same drive but with liquid bearings. They say it's almost dead silent.

Oh well, that's what I get for buying the cheapest hard drive I could find. :)

Re:Differences?

[H3XA]

I have also heard a story about a Seagate drive being used in a RAID array which stopped working..... turns out the drive leaked oil everywhere.

Oily Barracuda

- HeXa

Re:Differences?

[Shanep]

It'd be great if Linux could spin it down...

Have you tried hdparm?

Re:Differences?

[slaker]

The 740X is a Quantum design. If you aren't used to "quantum-type" noises, they can be a little off-putting. Seeks are usually a little bit louder than most other brands and of course there's a worrisome "THOK" sound when you power one down. Those are characteristics of Quantum IDE drives.

I understand there are vast difference in the quality of the 740X depending on country of manufacture as well. Usually Singapore is implicated as the "bad" source for drives. I have a good number of 740Xs (nine, at last count, all BB versions). I *don't* find my drives to be loud in the least - WD800BBs and Fireball ASes are both much worse.

Maxtor has a no-quibble exchange policy. If you think the drive is loud, they WILL take it back and ship you another. If it really bothers you, look into using it. Ball-bearing drives regardless of manufacture get louder over time.

Re:Differences?

[fheart]

Seagates recent (May 28, 2002) US patent entitled "Antiwear lubrication coating for bearing surfaces for hydrodynamic fluid bearings" explains very well the advantages, the structure and the operation of fluid disc drive bearings. Go here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm and enter this patent # : 6394654

Re:Differences?

[pjrc]

It'd be great if Linux could spin it down...

Have you tried hdparm?

I have. Always spins right back up within several seconds.

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?

[ultrapenguin]

Oh, and don't forget to

# killall -CONT kupdated

if you want to bring the disk-caching daemon back up.

2.2 and older 2.4 did not have kupdated, the same work was done by updated or update or some other userland program, killing that has the same effect.

Re:Differences?

[Shanep]

Wouldn't it be nice if that kind of thing was sitting under a nice big uber-option entitled Power Savings or such?

Yes, but lack of knowledge about something does not entitle someone to make statements about something not existing.

It would have been better to ask, "can Linux spin hard drives down?".

Which is actually why I didn't say, "use hdparm", because for all I know, he has a drive that does'nt behave properly when issued a spin down command, in which case he may have tried it.

Some Linux distros might have a big button for this. I'd blame the ones that don't and not Linux itself, which is just a kernel. ; )

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

Re:Differences?

[dbrutus]

I remember that drive. I worked on an old mac once that had that model and whenever you stopped it, you couldn't get it to run again unless you gave it a whack, just so, on a certain spot on the side of the case. I was the best at it so I got to place the target spot to guide anybody else who needed to do it. Why didn't we fix it? The recall had already expired, we were on tight deadline and by that time it really was a very old mac.

Re:Differences?

[DJPenguin]

Yes - most BIOSes can and do spin the hard disk down after a period of inactivity. However - most Linux distribution flush to disk every 5-10 seconds, which of course means there is never a period to spin down.

I did read about a hack to disable to bdflush on laptops somewhere, but it was a while ago.

Re:Differences?

[Jucius Maximus]

"I've got one of the seagate drives in one of my machines at work. It really *is* silent. Of course, it really doesn't make much difference unless the fans on the machine are also very quiet... (luckily for me, they gave me a new machine which actually has quiet fans... makes an incredible difference in the noise...) I think that if you're worrying about noise though, most of the modern crop of hard drives are pretty quiet compared to most fans. All of my maxtor and WD drives in my home computer from the last 3 years are unnoticable unless I conentrate on them."

I am currently in the process of making my personal box at home as quiet as possible. Since it is an Athlon XP (which generates mad levels of heat) that came with a really noisy "Ball Cooler Master" stock heatsink, it was really annoying me. I found that investing in an excellent 80 mm heatsink (Alpha PAL8045, CAD$65 in my case)** allows you to use a lower powered CPU fan, thus reducing noise. It make sense to have the silent heatsink do more work than the noisy fan. [Try looking into Swiftech 4xx series for 80 mm P4 cooling. ] Also, heatsinks allowing the installation of 80 mm fans (such as mine) are excellent because you can use a slower fan to get the same airflow. I've got a Vantec Stealth 80 mm on my heatsink plus identical ones at the front and back of my case.*

Once those are in place, plus possibly a replacement fan in your power supply (because many PSUs are very noisy,) the noise level really goes down. At this point, the HDDs will sould a lot louder, and you will notice that the Quantum IV's are not entirely silent (but still close.) If you really want to get into mad cooling, then you could look into 'molex silentdrive' units for dampening HDD sound. You can also get Akasa pax mate or Noise Control Magic Fleece to line your case and again dampen sound.

The cost of all this is a) time, b) money, and c) the ability to overclock. You can't overclock well with lower power fans and lower airflow. And a related note: Getting rounded cables does not improve airflow, but still is helpful if you are wiring in tight constraints and ribbon cables are too bulky.

*Panaflo lovers, I know the 80 mm panaflos "lows" are way cheaper. But Vantec gives you somewhat better performance for the same noise level.

**If you are looking into the Alpha or those Swiftech heatsinks, make sure you look up the '4-holes' motherboard installation requirement before you buy or you will be stuck with an unusable heatsink!

Re:Differences?

[Keeper]

I don't have a non-liquid filled bearing drive to compare with, but the 80gb Maxtor w/liquid bearings is very quiet. So quiet in fact, that I wasn't sure the drive was getting power when I first turned it on ...

I've only got a few older Quantums and a 27gb IBM drive to compare with, which are a few years old.

The heads are also very quiet, and with the cover on the Tivo you can't tell that it's got a 2nd drive in there -- the factory drive makes significantly more noise.

Re:Differences?

[SkulkCU]

The munching is louder. As the owner of 2 Maxtor 80 gigs, I can also attest to this.

What the hell am I saying?

Re:Differences?

[Shanep]

Then, people who like to show how superior they are will take the opportunity to demonstrate their superiority.

Ahh, too true. I forgot, this is /. after all.

Here I was thinking this was some online utopia or something!

Re:Differences?

[Shanep]

Having to know about some command that would be rather, err, weird to find out about (hard to do a search for something when you don't know it exists or if it does by what name!!) is not good a good 'user experiance"

Actually, a simple search for "Linux hard drive spin down" at Google reveals the first match is a good start.

People first need to learn how to search the net.

Re:Differences?

[Shanep]

Should not be a prerequisit for getting an OS to work or do what you want it too.

Spinning down hard drives hardly seems to me to be "getting an OS to work". I prefer to have my spindles spinning to avoid placing the hdds under their maximum load too often or without good cause.

For fucks sake folks, it is computer. It is the culmination of all of mankinds current technological acheivements, why the hell can't we make it work out of the box?

Why have we not a simple cure for cancer, AIDS or the common flu? Computers are very complex beasts. Designs are rarely perfect. When I started getting into computing seriously almost 15 years ago, dead tree docco suggested calling BBS' for software, driver and firmware updates.

The internet just makes it easier to deploy this kind of stuff to the masses and at the same time is supposed to make it easier for the masses to find it! The weak link here, is the users.

For a user who wants to know how to spin down his hard drive under Linux, searching for "Linux hard drive spin down" in a search engine is not an unrealistic expectation. For the user who does not like this, there is always Mac OS X or Windows XP. Seriously, what is a user like that doing using Linux and complaining about it?

"from the pr0n-glorious-pr0n dept"

[Jucius Maximus]

At last we have a proven honest-to-goodness* editor.

*(ok, maybe not goodness, depending on your point of view ;-)

In other news

[schroet]

Intel today announced the availability of the Athlon 3000XP!

Re:In other news

[Emugamer]

hehe doh well there goes my other comment as redundant ...

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?

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[Jonny 290]

Who says they have to be actual files?

Just create some garbage filesystem entries on an unused hard drive. A 430mb hard drive should be plenty. :D

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 /dev/null.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[edwdig]

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.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[gmhowell]

Too easy to compress /dev/null. I'd send /dev/urandom.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[ZigMonty]

/dev/null is just an endless supply of EOFs. If you try to read from it you just immediately get EOF and stop. /dev/zero would give you endless zeroed bytes. /dev/random would also give you something but /dev/null would just be an empty file.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[guttentag]

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.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[Hektor_Troy]

Because the judicial system aparently thinks that might makes right and that money makes might ... ?

I haven't heard of the case in question, but given what you hear about the US legal system it sounds perfectly plausible.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[Jonny 290]

Thank you all for pointing that out. Yes, I meant /dev/[u]random instead of /dev/null. :)

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??

[redhairedneo]

Maybe the platters are smaller and smaller as they go up, forming a stylish cone. Leaving 200 gigs, no 240...

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Bitsy Boffin]

You got to remember, this is Maxtor we're talking about, 40G is probably reasonable knowing that !

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Magila]

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.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[smoondog]

You know, I bought a Cobalt server (Raq3). Cobalt (Sun now) claims that only one drive is supported. Well, I split the ide did the master/slave thing and fashioned a hack spot for them. One problem, after a couple of weeks of use, the new drive *always* starts to click and chunk around. I have yet to get a second drive working in this machine.... I have not explanation for this behavior...........

-Sean

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Wonko42]

Sounds like the exact same thing I've been experiencing. As far as I can tell, it seems like the drive head is disengaging, then re-engaging, but I have no clue what causes it to do this.

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...

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Wonko42]

I'm really not sure. My main system (in which three of the drives have died) has no case on it, and has several high-flow fans and is in a cool, well-ventilated room. The power supply could be the culprit, but after my WD drives died I bought a 120GB IBM drive and it's been doing just fine (whereas a WD drive would typically be clunking painfully by now). I never dropped any of my drives, nor did I move the computer around with the drives in it.

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.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[togtog]

DEVO-Drives?

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[SkeptiNerd75]

Now THERE's a new one: a hard drive manufacturer rounding DOWN!

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Fweeky]

I have a Quantum Fireball that had some nasty problems; it would click and sometimes disappear from the system and refuse to come back up for a while.

I noticed it was running very hot, so I put an old Pentium heatsink on top of it and mounted a card cooler blowing into my case (it's open, since airflow in my case really bites). It's been fine since.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Reziac]

Could be a problem with their shipper from each manufacturer. Could be going thru different warehouse procedures. You'd really have to backtrack the entire route and compare/contrast handling procedures all the way to determine if there was any mishandling.

Considering the high fail rate on some recent IBM HDs (see articles posted here and elsewhere) could be you got lucky and got the only live IBM in the batch, too :)

phat pr0n archives

[Jucius Maximus]

I did not come up with the following, but found it somewhere in here.

Our yellow sun yields to the dark
as I begin my web based lark
Flowing, turning, through the pipe
I grep for text and dump the hype...

But as I ride the fiber trail
I test my faith as I read my mail,
Even as my bandwidth fattens,
I question life and 1-click patents...

Although I ask, and though I query,
I know the truth, I grock the theory
Life is a multimedia of sins
so he who collects the most pr0n wins.

(must not laugh ...)

Maxtor = Fluid, WD=200mb

[simetra]

I noticed the Fluid bearings thing on newegg.com on a Maxtor, 40gb drive, earlier today.

Re:Maxtor = Fluid, WD=200mb

[twilightzero]

Read the press release, WD's releasing FDB drives now also. Also Maxtor's FDB drives I believe are all 5400 RPM whereas the new WD's will be 7200 RPM.

It appears to be slashdots fault...

[powerlinekid]

First of all i'm not complaining about "editor" mistakes... i could care less. But this is a western digital drive not a maxtor one, things like that seem rather silly to let slip through the cracks. And just to be sure I checked maxtor to see if they had anything, but all i could really find (in about 15 seconds worth of time) was a page about > 137 gig drives.

Re:It appears to be slashdots fault...

[JFMulder]

Didn't Maxtor buy Western Digital earlier this year? That should explain the minor slip-up.

Re:It appears to be slashdots fault...

[ottffssent]

Maxtor bought Quantum. Thus Maxtor Atlas 10K IIIs. I cringe every time I see Maxtor on a SCSI drive.

It's true.

[SaDan]

I've installed a couple different drives with the fluid bearings, and they do run quieter than the older style bearings. Very nice!

200 GB

[the eric conspiracy]

Hey, now /dev/null has a competitor in the capacity department.

Re:200 GB

[tcc]

Yeah, just wait and see in 2-3 months when people will return their drives because of failure like one of their previous models that got a recall.

200 gigs is a lot to lose, the only place I was game enough to do it is on my datacenter with an escalade 7850 since I can make a raid-5 out of them (1TB+ goodness), now if 2 drives decide to fail at the same time... I'm screwed :)

Re:200 GB

[baptiste]

now if 2 drives decide to fail at the same time... I'm screwed :)

And it DOES happen. I bought 2 15GB DeathStars for my email and every other internet app under the sun server before they had a reputation (I used a 27GB RAID-5 SCSI array for data - these were just system). From day one, LInux SW Raid couldn't handle all teh bad sectors that kept popping up. The mirror would drop to degraded modle almost every other day. So I tossed them on a 3ware 6200 - ah true HW RAID-1 goodness. Once 3ware released the firmware with dynamic sector correction - all was good, I was no longer getting daily 'Bad sector' emails from the card utiltiy.

I knew I should get them replaced but never got around to it, well...

Sunday night, both drives failed within 2 hours of each other and my server was SOL. It corrupted a number of base OS files (mingetty and bash anyone?) so it couldn't even drop me into shell to run fsck. Even in rescue mode - the drive would never fsck - it would get stuck on a given section of the drive.

So I've spent he good part of a week recovering everything. Needless to say the Deathstars are in teh trash and two nice new Seagates with fluid bearings, which I should have bought from day one for $20 extra bucks, are now running along nicely. Good news is this gave me an opportunity to move from RH 6.1 to 7.3!

Re:200 GB

[the eric conspiracy]

Well, /dev/null doesn't really hold all the bytes forever,

Hard drives don't hold all of your bytes forever either.

Drive Debacle Deep-sixes Cmdr Taco

[jjames]

In what appears to be another technology industry layoff, the (in)famous Cmdr Taco of Slashdot fame was fired today. According to sources within OSDN, the continuous spelling errors, Freudian slips and dyslexia-like juxtapositions of company names led to the dismissal.

Cmdr Taco was quoted as "being disappointed" with the decision, but was "looking forward" to spending more time at home with his computer.

In related news, OSDN has banned drugs, alcohol, controlled substances and Cowboy Neal from the Slashdot campus.

Re:Drive Debacle Deep-sixes Cmdr Taco

[digitalsushi]

That's kinda mean. It's funny too, I know its just a playful ribbing, but I'm thankful that this thing exists for free. I spend maybe an hour-ish every other day or so here, and for what I am paying, I think its a good deal. So I counterbalance in that I appreciate this project.

Need an ATA133 controller

[SaDan]

You'll need an ATA133 controller, or a RAID controller that can address drives beyond the current limitation of most ATA100 controllers.

Promise makes one, I'm sure. Maxtor 160gig drives are sometimes bundled with a controller.

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[twilightzero]

The drive will be bundled with a Promise controller, says right on the site.

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[megabeck42]

You have two situations here. Most of the "RAID" cards are just a PCI-IDE interface, with special drivers. For example, the Promise FastTrack and the HighPoint chips. Software raid, and it sits on top of the block and IDED layers, that, at least in the linux kernel, already talks the > 160 gig addressing. There, you have no problem.

Note, even if your BIOS doesn't support the new addressing, that's not a problem. If the drive is not your boot drive, you don't need to worry at all. If the drive IS your boot drive, you can tell the chipset that your drive is however large you care (I usually say about 100 megs), and enable LBA. Then you make /boot within the first 100 megs, and keep your kernel there. Once the kernel has booted, you can use the complete drive.

You could use one of these new 200 gig drives on those old, ghetto ISA IDE interfaces, you remember them, they shipped with CDROMS, they had a few jumpers, two 74 hundred TTL chips, and a PAL or a GAL? Yeah, well, it's an IDE interface, the same as those PCI ones, just without the DMA and other functionality.

Anyways, next problem, The SuperTrak's, Escalade's, and Adaptec 2400's. They have custom processors and firmware that actually take all the RAID processing off of your chip effectively Hardware Raid, unlike the Win-Raid above (ala winmodem).

Those are probably fixable with a controller BIOS upgrade, pending, of course, vendor support. People have shown that, given a fast enough processor, your peak throughput from those software RAID cards can surpass the hardware raid solutions. I want to see how that falls, when the processor is stressed.

Anyways, poing being, unless you're using hardware raid, you've got no problems, buddy.

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[AntiNorm]

Promise makes one, I'm sure

Yup, the Promise PDC20269 has been out for quite some time now. I got mine several months ago (came with my new 80 GB Maxtor drive).

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[AntiNorm]

Does any Linux distribution support Promise Ultra100-TX2 PCI mass-storage cards "out of the box"?

SuSE 8.0 does.

Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scary..

[grunby]

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

Re:It's Western Digital

[Surak]

Now I hear people say this all the time. But in my nearly (oh wait, this is 2002...we can skip the 'nearly' part now :-P) 20 years of computing experience, I have only had 2 drives that ever died on me (like totally dead, not just developed a few bad sectors or whatever) and they were both Maxtor drives. And I have owned drives that were manufactured by Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, Seagate, Kalok, Fuji, Quantum, Toshiba and another company that I can't remember the name of right now... :)

Up the ante

[Hektor_Troy]

Instead of piping bytes from /dev/null have it repeat instances of something like the Copyright Law or the DMCA.

For kicks, get sued by the MPAA/RIAA and get them to open your files in something like notepad - in court. Smack them with a countersuit for being insanely stupid (which you're bound to win for obvious reasons), retire and live happily ever after, knowing that you've done us all a big favor.

Re:Up the ante

[Jonny 290]

Or just kill two birds with one stone and have it loop decss.c . :)

Backup

[xigxag]

Backing up this sucker ought to be fun. Hmm, I only need 138,888 floppies! Lessee, at the rate of one floppy inserted a minute, that'll take me over 96 days straight!

If I get started right away, I'll be well prepared for the inevitable HD crash that will follow my installation of WinXP SP-1.

Re:Backup

[rabidcow]

There's 1024 megabytes per gigabyte, not 1000.

Ah, back in the good old days, they made gigabytes *right* and there were 1024 megabytes in one of 'em. Now that those cheap metric bastards have gotten into the system, a gigabyte only has 1000 megabytes, and they want us to use some crappy name like "gibibyte" for 1024 "mebibytes." If you ask me, it's just a plot to make us all sound like toddlers.

Re:Backup

[blankmange]

Be brave! Build your system without a floppy! Death to legacy ports!

Anyway, what were we talking about??? Oh, yeah, backups..... gee, aren't CD-R drives about $50 now?.... how many CD-R's would it take???

Re:Backup

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Don't forget about the time it would take to track down and re-copy the 10,000 or so corrupt floppies. Fun fun fun...

I had to copy ~1000 floppies to CD once. It was not a nice experience--tedious, slow, and boring. It took me about a week to do it (a real week, including sleeping eating, play etc. Not a straight week....thank goodness).

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!

Re:Backups..

[Quixote]

ARGH! You guys make up your minds: is it 138888 or 138889 ??? The suspense is killing me.

Re:Backups..

[xigxag]

I forgot to round up, so the other guy was right. But that's not the real issue at all. The real problem here is that with all my mp3's, mpgs and jpgs deemed illegal due to the RIAA, MPAA and Forgent, I frankly don't have anything to store on that monster except a couple of Excel worksheets from 1994. Oh yeah, and that old Visual Basic "Hello World!" program from college. But even VBRUN200.DLL can't make a dent in this WD beast.

Re:Maxtor Or... Western Digital?

[twilightzero]

It's WD, I submitted the article with a different title and it got edited...to the wrong company LOL! I laughed so hard I almost wet myself when I read it...

Re:really old news

[twilightzero]

The press release is June 25, but the drives just SHIPPED today, THAT'S the news.

Re:It's Western Digital

[MaxVlast]

Conner?

I've had several Micropolis 4.3GB SCSI drives (the 3240AV, if I recall) and those are the most damned unreliable drives ever. They go into 'airplane mode' and sound like a prop plane about to take off.

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[ZxCv]

I bought a Maxtor 160GB drive that came bundled with an ATA/133 card. I ended up putting the drive into an ADS Firewire enclosure, which seems to be just as capable as addressing the whole drive as the bundled ATA/133 card.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[Polo]

What about economics?

I was thinking that raid-5 might be a really cool way to go, but when I looked into it, it seems that raid-1 on the motherboard might be cheaper.

Wouldn't 4 x 120gig drives + raid-1 cost less than 3 x 120gig drives plus a raid-5 controller?

I wonder where the break-even point is...

Re:The bottom of the bottom platter is not used

[SensitiveMale]

That makes sense.

3 platters = 6 sides.
5 sides for dats (40 gigs each) and the bottom of the bottom platter for positioning.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[Polo]

(That was assuming you're using linux and raid-5 controllers cost around $250-$300...)

"Cut him a little slack"?

[Wakko Warner]

Yeah, Taco's grammar, spelling, punctuation, and fact-checking abilities are severely impaired by all the Linux Bong-Hits he's been doing.

When he returns on Monday, he'll be back in top form!

- A.P.

Re:"Cut him a little slack"?

[gmhowell]

Amen. The rest of us don't get cut that much slack when doing our JOBS! Why should Taco?

Re:It's Western Digital

[duckbillplatypus]

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. =)

Re:how ironic ...

[twilightzero]

I have but one thing to say...

LMAO!!

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[Waffle Iron]

Hrm, my motherboards don't recognize drives over 120 gigs due to some weird LBA limit of 132 gigs.

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.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[grunby]

I guess it depends on how much drive space you want...You'd still be paying for the RAID 1 functionality on the mobo (albeit not as much as a separate card). 4x120gig with raid 1 on the mobo would probably be around the same price as 3x120gig with a separate raid 5 controller. $/gig with raid 1 is the most expensive so I guess if storage space isn't that great, raid 1 would be the way to go. But as you get more drives with raid 5, the $/gig (or the obligatory $/.jpg of pr0n) goes down...In my situation, I was thinking of getting 4 120 gig drives. I've got about 6 months of the howard stern show (set up a cron job to record it every morning and I've been to lazy to burn it all), vmware images of 3 different os's, and my family's vast mp3 collection all stored between three machines...but hey that's my situation...

oh yeah - and the pr0n...

- grunby

Re:Who Needs 200 GB?

[AntiNorm]

I've probably got enough hard drive space to last me another 5 years

Or until you *finally* decide to upgrade Windows...

That's nothing...

[scubacuda]

...compared to the new Ford Exorbitant.

The drive for Longhorn

[levik]

Microsoft today announced that due to the revealed Western Digital technology, they can disclose that Windows Longhorn will actually be a Full-Motion Video (FMV) Operating System, which will require a 200Gig drive to install on.

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.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[Alizarin Erythrosin]

I recently had it happen with a 1.5 year old or so 30 gig 7200rpm drive... thankfully it was a part of my RAID 0+1 array, and is still covered under warranty :-) Other then that one drive, I have yet to have a problem with my other ones... if only I could afford to upgrade to bigger drives. (I like how these 4 sound when operating though... nice harmony)

Re:Western Digital reliability

[Perdo]

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.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[Saeger]

200 terabyte drives will cost little more than the value of the raw materials used to build the thing.

For that to be the case would require molecular manufacturing, and we sure as hell won't still be storing data on spinning platters once have the ability to manipulate atoms like bits.

--

Re:Western Digital reliability

[Sycraft-fu]

No offence, but I'm very inclined to believe this is due to something you have been doing, and not a fault of WD. It might be improper cooling, a bad powersupply, physical abuse, power surges, or a whole lot more but the fact that ALL your WD drives fail on you seems to indicate a problem on your part, not theirs. All drive manufacturers make drives that are bad, and WD is no exception. Receantly I bought one and it was broken straight out of the anti-static bag. However I have seen literally hunderds of other WDs that have owrker perfectly until they were retired (3-6 years usually).

I notice that generally the people that seem to have the most problems with their harddrives are those that don't get the idea of proper case cooling (Athlon owners seem to have the problem particularly). It's not a matter of having more fans or waht not but having a case with good airflow that maintains a reasonable temperature (like, say, not much over 45 degrees C).

Ironically, many overclockers actually make matters worse by adding frivilous fans that ont only fail to do a good job of improvinng airflow, but actually make matters worse by messing it up and blowing air back around in the case.

At any rate if you have huge harddrive failure rates, you need to take a serious look at your setup and what you are doing, I am betting the problem is almost entirely on your end.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[cjpez]

Huh. I must be the odd one out here, because I've been using basically nothing *but* WD drives for some time now (they're usually the cheapest in the area), and I've never had any problems with them at all. In my Linux box right now, I've got a 20GB, 30GB, and 40GB drive, and they've all been in there for some time, and I've had nary a problem with them.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[PD]

If you've got a high capacity server, get good stuff. I was only using my old drive because all I cared was that the drive worked. If they were slow it didn't matter on that computer.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[DeadMeat (TM)]

Funny, I'm holding one in my hand right now that I bought in 1992.

Bingo. WD drives started really going downhill in the mid 90s. A good example of this is the fact that WD drives don't/didn't do proper CRC checks as part of the UDMA specs. (See Andre Hedrick's rantings on the linux-kernel list for more info.)

Incidentally, I've had nothing but trouble from every single WD drive I've bought since 1996. (Needless to say, I don't buy them anymore.) I'd be doubly wary of storing 200GB (!) of data on a WD drive.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[Reziac]

I have *16* working W.D. HDs here at the moment. The oldest dates to 1991 and is still 100% perfect.

I've had one that was DOA (from a bad batch) and 3 that failed, but one of those had 6 years of hard milage, and another had been in an unprotected environment (lots of power spikes).

I also put W.D. HDs in all my clients' machines, and so far NONE have failed.

Every HD maker has bad batches, W.D. too, but they've been real good about catching up with their mistakes in a timely manner, and they're very easy to deal with on warranty replacements.
Plus on average W.D. drives run cooler and quieter than other brands. Most models use fewer CPU cycles than comparable IDE drives (average ~10%, vs 20-25% for other brands). And they tend to perform about 20% better than their specs.

If you're getting a lot of HD failures, check out your system's power supply (lots of cheap cases come with a dodgy p/s) and definitely be sure to use a good quality UPS or at the very least a high-end surge unit -- APC, Belkin, or Newpoint, not something you got from Fry's. Power glitches are a major cause of HD problems.

Save disk space!

[r6144]

Better use sparse files like this:

dd of=m00z4k.mp3 bs=1 seek=1874373 count=0

so that no disk space (except the dentry and the inode) is wasted... Oh, you have just bought a shiny 200gb disk, haven't you?

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[PD]

Use unison and two drives to synchronize the filesystems. I actually use unison with two desktop computers and a server to keep all 3 in sync! With copies of everything on 3 hard drives, I don't worry too much.

Ball Bearings versus Liquid Bearings

[BigBlockMopar]

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.

Re:Ball Bearings versus Liquid Bearings

[Anna Merikin]

As an auto mechanic, I can clarify a few things, although you got almost all of it right:

Ball/roller bearings are (generally) much more expensive to make than most implementations of fluid-dynamic bearings.

Hydrodynamic bearings' load capacity goes up with rpm, meaning a small, fast rotating bearing works better than the same bearing at a slower speed.

Roller-element bearings have limited high-rpm applications. The higher the rpm, the more scuffing the rolling elements are subject to.

Plain hydrodynamic bearings usually require a pump to provide adequate fluid-dynamic pressure.

A "plain" bearing rides on a wedge of oil which is related to the viscosity of the oil, the velocity of rotation and the clearance between the elements. A roller bearing's capacity and max rpm are determined by the surface finish of the rolling elements, the tolerance of the cage (if any) that retains them, and the radial runout of the assembly.

In automobile use, plain (hydrodynamic) bearings are much, much cheaper to make than rolling element bearings because of their ease of manufacture.

Getting there

[Pope]

Still not enough space to rip my whole CD collection. Guess I'll just keep listening to them on my phat stereo, the way music should be! :)

Re: Sig

[sconeu]

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.

Cold hard disk drive = cold car engine analogy

[BigBlockMopar]

Does anyone know if fluid dynamic bearings would change the minimum temperature that a drive requires to spin up?

Well, assuming that these fluid bearings are smooth races with a "ball bearing" of oil molecules in between (ie. like bearings in any car engine since the 1930s), absolutely.

From the descriptions, from what I can tell, we're only talking about bringing automotive engine main bearing technology, on some scale, to hard disk drives.

Whatever the liquid lubricant, when it's cold, it's likely to be thicker. Which will mean that it will take more motor torque to get it spinning when it's cold. (Think of how much slower your starter motor turns your engine on a really cold day; not all of that is the reduced efficiency of the battery in cold weather!)

I think, in cold environments, these drives might take a while longer to spin up, but once they're spinning, the turbulence in the oil in the bearings will warm it up quickly enough. Also, when it's really cold, the bearing clearances will be smaller because they probably will have contracted more than the journals.

Compared to ball bearings which will have no fluid filling the bearing clearances as the temperature changes, I'd imagine these will be less prone to vibration and read/write errors as the bearing temperature changes. (Not that it matters much, all modern hard disk drives use a closed-loop servo system to detect the position of the heads relative to the platters.)

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...)

Re:Early Nineties? Try 1982!

[King Babar]

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 [99er.net]! :) I had a 5.25" single-sided single-density floppy disk drive, with a whopping 90k per diskette.

Floppy drives (and both Apple and TI hardware) were for wusses. Real men used Scotch brand cassette tapes with the "data recorders" on the radically new and innovative VIC-20 system. We ruled, not like those johnny-come-lately scum with their Radio Shack Color Computers. (Sorry to have to mention the members of that particular psycho cult; if you want to revisit the horror, see the web site of the kookoo CoCo High Priest. The best link on that page is about an innovative 4 MHz acceleration project they are putting together. I'm not kidding.)

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[PD]

Probably the same reason that the AIX box at work (1 gig of ram, 18 gigs of disk space, quad processor) chokes when you try to grep a file with lines longer than 2048 characters.

Keep ranting about stupid limits, maybe it'll do some good. At least I won't feel lonesome.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[asv108]

Just check to make sure the card is supported by your favorite distro first. I still can't get my integrated raid to work with linux on my soyo dragon plus mobo. Its especially wierd that linux has poor ide raid support considering the people who are most likely to run ide-raid are also big linux fans.

Re:This is going to be a hoot for personal securit

[puppetman]

Long and irrelevant? Nah. Kind of interesting. A little slice of life.

If someone had put a scene like that in a movie, it would have been called "over the top" and "cliche".

If you edit this down to the best 10 minutes every week, post it somewhere and then post the URL.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[miracle69]

You don't need RAID cards to do RAID-5 under linux. Just get a couple of IDE cards, plug in the drives, and make them IDE. IIRC, Linux Software RAID is faster than hardware RAID, and cheaper too. ATA-100 cards are around 30 bucks and you can do A nice RAID5 with 2 cards. I did just that with the 99 dollar 120 GB 5400 RPM WD drives purchased at Frys here in Phoenix.

Methinks it's time...

[Pollux]

...for Western Digital to rethink their webserver strategies.

Here's what filled my web window in my attempt to view the specs of this 200GB hard drive:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'

Script timed out /products/products.asp

The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

I mean, I really didn't think that a company as big as Western Digital could actually be /.ed, but I guess they can!

(For those of you complaining about how 200GB hard drive is not any worthy news, there certainly was enough people interested to still bring the server to a standstill.)

neat.

[peatbakke]

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.

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 .. 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.

Anyhow. Enough of my drivel. :)

Re:It's Western Digital

[kwishot]

I've worked at a computer store (read: *computer* store, not some Best Buy know-nothing dept) and I've seen a LOT of hard drives either fail or come to us dead in the service department. IBM and Seagate by far have the best track record (aside from those few IBM drives that were having problems). Maxtor, while having a few more failures, has an excellent RMA dept -- it seems like you have your replacement before you even hang up the phone. Fujitsu is crap. Quantum Bigfoot....if you have any important data on one of these drives, back it up! And last but not least, Western Digital. The more recent ones look a lot like IBM drives (buyout? whats the deal?) and seem more reliable than older ones, but those older ones........ They are terrible.
I'm currently running 3 Seagate Barracuda's(40gb and two 80gb's RAIDed) and my only complaint with them is the heat that they generate (did someone mention micropolis? Those things can heat a small room!)
-kwishot

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[pjrc]

For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits?

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).

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:But you need at least two.

[gerardrj]

Erg. CR-R was off.

time is 3.3 mins per disk, 15 hours total time

Re:But you need at least two.

[gerardrj]

But a 20 pack of flopies weigh 13oz without packaging and will not make the $.37 rate class.
Sending 20 loose floppies in a large envelope by 1st class US mail: $3.13.
Using the "Media Mail" rate you acn get down to $1.45 each pack.
I'm too lazy to calculate what it would cost to bulk-ship that many floppies on several pallets via a ground shipping line.

That makes your shipping costs more like $21,737 and $10,070 respectively. I'd imaging you could send the 2.8 tons of floppies via bulk carrier for somewhat less than that.

Re:But you need at least two.

[gerardrj]

I think you forgot a 5. It's 555,556 (200,000,000KB / 360KB)
That comes out to 206 weeks(48 months or 2 years) ( 555,556 disks / 16 disks/hr)

Re:The bottom of the bottom platter is not used

[squire geek]

In my last 5 years I regularly worked on the servo controller block of a drive controller ASIC so I'd like to point out some much under appreciated issues and correct some recurring miss understandings: a) the servo system, b) the real benefit of fluid bearings, c) error correction, d) why an unused surface, e) spin speed

Some short answers are:
b) Worn ball bearings seriously disturbs the servo system from keeping the read head or the write head on true center of data track. This puts a ceiling on increasing track densities.
c) Very strong error correcting codes are applied to every data block (about 512 bytes) and not on any unused surface.
d) As for unused surfaces, there are multiple issues in this decision, but a new feature from some manufacturers is to reserve one outside surface for a template servo pattern & BIOS code so that the drive can self write its own servo patterning and more cheaply load its BIOS code. This reduces / obviates the many hours it takes of very expensive capital equipment to write servo patterns to drives.
e) Spin speeds above 10K introduce horrendous resonances at the outside of platters that make servoing tracks much harder. One remedy has been to reduce platter diameter & capacity (by about 10% as I recall).

And the long version of a) & b) or 101 of disk drive servoing:
For atleast a decade, hard drives have used embedded servo patterns on every surface that are intermingled with the data areas. Using a dedicated surface for servo worked long ago only because track & data bit densities were much lower. Todays drives typically have 120 or more curved radial servo wedges that costs 5-7% of the surface area. User data tracks nestle between these servo wedges.
1) In these short servo wedge areas, servo tracks contain a few tiny fields of digital servo data followed by several analog modulations so that the servo processor can sense its fractional position within any servo track. Servo tracks actually abutt each other and the only bit change between adjacent servo tracks is in the Gray coded track no. Since IBM patented this many years ago (1980's ?), manufacturers have since added proprietry extra small digital fields to correct for read errors in the digital fields & analog modulations to continuously improve servo tracking and hense improve data track densities.
2) The user data tracks are not neccessarily pitched to be inlign with servo tracks and may be reduced to 2/3 the density of servo tracks. This provides guard space and reduces inter track symbol interference. As the disk spins from servo wedge area on into user data area, it becomes an increasing act of faith that the read head or the write head is indeed still following a track center until we reach the next servo wedge. Such miss tracking is called runout.
A major source for Non-Repeatable Runout comes from worn bearings which introduces random wobbling, and this degrades the servoing and limits tracks densities.

Fluid bearings improve upon ball bearings because they don't introduce this NRR so spinning is quiter but more importantly track densities can keep climbing.
There are quite a few other NRR & RR terms impacting on servo tracking.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[whitewlf]

I've used several 3ware escalade cards and they are faster than my old software raid5 in everyway. Plus, they setup in their own BIOS, can use hot spares, and were seen instantly by Linux Mandrake on installation (as a scsi disk). The 4 port 6410 escalade can be found for 89MB/sec sustained in Raid5, with bursts WAY higher using WDC120's. It takes some serious U320scsi to do those numbers in the real world.

Fujitsu did this for years.

[Inoshiro]

Their drives were always whisper quiet, and very cool to the touch. The only drives I used for the longest time were Fujitsus. Then Fujitsu went out of the consumer HD business to focus on the high-end business (where the big margins are).

My 20gb Fujitsu of only a year started to not work in my PC a few weeks back, and it's been replaced by a 20gb WD. It's also quiet, and seems to be about the same speed. However, it took WD 1.5 years to catch up to Fujitsu in this respect. And it doesn't (like my Quantums) have any S.M.A.R.T. temperature sensors, even though every Fujitsu I've ever tried supported this :-/

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[GoRK]

A big clarification I would like to make here is that most cheap "hardware raid" controllers are NOT hardware raid controllers. They are clever hacks to implement RAID using a combination of a bios handler for software RAID and an OS driver implementing software RAID at the driver level. That is why linux md running raid5 is often faster - the implementation is better than the device driver provides.

Now, when comparing performance to a real live IDE RAID controller (Adaptec AAA or 3Ware, etc.), it is not as fast. These controllers have an on chip implementation of RAID 5 (ie hardware XOR etc. usually implemented on an intel i960 or somesuch) and perhaps some cache memory, and they interface with the OS using the standard SCSI drive api.

Now software raid 0 or raid 1 is often just as fast as hardware raid 0 or 1 because the implementation is so simple and the drive r/w speeds are the limiting factor.

BTW: does anyone know exactly what to call things like the promise and Highpoint "Raid" controllers that rely on BIOS hooks and software drivers to do the RAID dirty work? -- "Hardware" doesnt work and "Software" doesnt work -- is there a word for it?!?

~GoRK

Re:This is going to be a hoot for personal securit

[Pengo]

Hmmm.. I had a similar issue at an apt. I was at, drunk people kept banging on the back door so I finally stuck a camera up. Then I captured video of drunk people banging on the door at 2am looking for friends.. hmm... I wish I had thought of how un-useful that footage was before going through the effort of hanging a camera in my back window.

oh well

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.

At last - tribology now has geek cred

[Mandelbrute]

For more information on how bearings work, and wear in general, do a search on the field of "tribology". It's all there.

Re:It's Western Digital

[davmoo]

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?! :-)

Re:This is going to be a hoot for personal securit

[t0qer]

Correction.
(any true get gets pissed when someone breaks their concentration)

Should read
(any true geek gets pissed when someone breaks their concentration)

I write my flow without spelling or punctuation, maybe CowboyNeal can check it for me :P

--toq

Re:Beowulf Joke, the Next Generation!

[slashdoter]

Or NIC card... god that pisses me off.

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)?

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[frank249]

Didn't anybody read the actual article? The drive comes with a free Promise Technology Ultra ATA Controller Card.

The also explain the 137 gig barrier

28-bit addressing, there are only 28 bits available to access a given address on the hard drive, which when all bits are set equates to 137 GB.

By doubling the number of bits that can be used to access a given address, 48-bit LBA addressing pushes the maximum storage limit to 144 petabytes.

Hmmm, how does going from 28 to 48 bits double the number of bits?

Well how long before we will need to change again? It was not long ago that they came up with the 28 bit system. 137 gigs - no one will ever need that much memory. Now its 144 petabytes - no one will ever need that much memory. Hell a quantum transporter will need at least 4 yottabytes. I say go to 128 bit addressing just to be safe.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[phaze3000]

When I tried software raid5 the performance was pretty terrible. Software raid1 adds pretty much no overhead though, so that's certainally an option to consider..

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[bedessen]

For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits?

FYI, for anyone interested in reading a nice list of all such limits with a technical description for each one, I suggest this link.

Re:It's Western Digital

[Surak]

Yeah. By far my favorite hard drive manufacturer is IBM...most of the Deskstar hard drives I've had have been good, fast (in their time), reliable and relatively cheap. My primary box has an ultra ATA 100 120GB IBM Deskstar and I'm pretty happy with it so far. Its fast, quiet and only cost me $125. :) I don't usually do RAID for desktops, but I might RAID 5 this with another drive sometime because they are so cheap. :)

Re:200GB from four 60GB platters

[edmudama]

> 40% on-disk errors before low-level (factory) format?

Coming from a firmware engineer from a disk drive company, that sentence makes no sense whatsoever.

The "stretched capacity formats" that drive companies are using to reach their 200GB or larger drives are almost purely a function of the heads used in the drive, and have almost nothing to do with the specific media. From the plots I have seen, if media had 1% surface defects I would be surprised...

RAID is OK, but....

[martinde]

What about when lightning fries your whole machine - both drives? Or what about if you accidently erase an important file and you don't notice in time to recover it (assuming that's possible.) Offsite tape backups would address both of these problems.

I agree with you that drives this size are scary, mostly because there is no affordable way to make tape backups of them. I decided a while back that one should only purchase as much space as they can actually backup, but that isn't going to even be possible for much longer - soon 60G will be the bottom end!

Re:Let me get this straight

[Lord_Slepnir]

Not any more. You just made it 10. Silly Macintosh. Unix is for real computers.

The little cartoon character looks like...

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

a cross between a lizard, a borg, and spongebob squarepants?

Re:ASP error messages pander to MCSEs

[Mr.Sharpy]

Well the site's administrator COULD put on a custom error page. What I never really understood about IIS overloading is that if the webserver does not have time to process your request, how does it have time to create a fancy error page.

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[Quixadhal]

Yes, and this is from old-school thinking where they feel compelled to encode control information into data streams. Rather than using a 32-bit "structure" they should have spent the extra few dollars and used a 32-bit data bus and a synchronized 8-bit control bus. Then we'd have been able to easily have 32-bit addressing and would probably be able to hang 63 devices off the bus.

RANT MODE, ENGAGE!

This could be done pretty easily if the PC world would just LET GO. Stop clinging to compatiblity with things that you'll never use again anyways! When's the last time YOU plugged in a hard drive 1 Gig? Do you really PLAN to use that on a new system? Then why should it matter if the new system can read antique hardware? Bah! The entire industry is hopeless.

RANT MODE, dissolve.

Re:Who Needs 200 GB?

[ncc74656]

Why did I get rid of it? Because the WD 80 GB model was only $100 after rebate. And now that I have all this space, guess how much of it I use? 8 GB. This is after I loaded every conceivable thing I had (and every option available in each program. Yep, Street Atlas no longer needs a CD to run.

You must not do any video editing. My home machine has 165 GB installed (120 of it in RAID-0), and a significant chunk of that is usually filled. One "60-minute" TV show at 480x480 23.976 fps, with CD-quality audio and with the ads cut out (bringing the length down to about 45 minutes), takes about 20 GB when compressed with Huffyuv. I only keep that file around long enough to crunch it down to a 790-MB MPEG-2 that I can burn to SVCD, but just a few shows will take up a significant amount of space while they're waiting to be compressed.

Re:Who Needs 200 GB?

[ncc74656]

I recently encountered a problem that I was not able to scan a photograph in at the resolution that I wanted to because I did not have enough free space on my drive. . . .

A mere 13Gigs was free, heh.

Um...I have a ScanJet 5470C that delivers 2400 dpi optical resolution. A letter-size scan in 24-bit color at 2400 dpi only takes about 1.5 GB. Given that most photos are smaller and don't need to be scanned at that resolution (about the only time you really need 2400 dpi is when you're scanning negatives and slides), how is it that you'd need more than 13 GB to store a scan?

(If you're going beyond your scanner's optical resolution, you're wasting time and disk space. Nearly everybody advertises a "9600-dpi" scanner nowadays, but no flatbed scanner that I've ever heard of can deliver anything even close to that. (Maybe some ultra-high-end model that might be used in the printing industry or something like that, but certainly not anything that you'd pull off a store shelf. FWIW, a letter-size scan @ 9600 dpi would take about 24 GB...but with currently-available scanners, 94% or more of the information in the image would be redundant.)

Re:Who Needs 200 GB?

[Van Halen]

Digital video. The MiniDV format (most popular for digital camcorders these days) clocks in at nearly 13 GB per hour. When you're trying to edit several hours of footage, space gets slurped up in no time flat.

My wife and I bought a DV cam to record our wedding and honeymoon. We shot about 5.5 hours total footage and now I'm in the process of editing it down to 1/2 hour to an hour to make a DVD. We added a 120 GB drive to our Mac and the thing now has about 40 GB free. It will continue to lose space as I copy clips around during the editing process.

Only real problem with such huge capacities is that backup media consistently lags behind. When I finish this project, there's no way I'll be able to backup all the source media as that would take 15-20 data DVDs. It's not so bad since I'll be throwing out a majority of the raw footage and can backup just what goes into the final video, but I'd hate to have 200 GB of data I really cared about! Backing up that much to reliable offline media is cost prohibitive to the home user.

You get what you pay for

[DragonHawk]

"Is it a conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for SCSI?"

People often complain that SCSI costs 3X more than ATA, when the HDA (Hard Disk Assembly) is often the same in both. "Why does SCSI cost so much more?" they ask.

That is the wrong question. They should instead ask, "Why does ATA cost so much less?"

The minimum quality level you see with ATA is significantly lower than for SCSI. You can find some really crappy ATA parts out there, and you can find vendors to sell them, and people to buy them. The least-effort engineering that ATA gets is why you can buy a 100 GB hard disk for a buck or whatever. They simply do not put a lot of engineering into a product that cheap.

Now, compare that to the market SCSI gets used in. You are not going to build a $10,000 workstation or server and then put a crap hard disk in it. About the only place SCSI gets used is in that kind of high-end equipment, so the demand is for well-engineered SCSI products. Anyone pushing the kind of crap that ATA is would be laughed at.

So, in the end, you get what you pay for.

That would be...

[DragonHawk]

"does anyone know exactly what to call things like the promise and Highpoint "Raid" controllers that rely on BIOS hooks and software drivers to do the RAID dirty work?"

Junk?

It's not just Western Digital

[Brian Knotts]

In our tiny company, we've had about five IBM IDE drives go down, and one WD within a year.

I've come to the conclusion that pretty much all IDE drives currently being sold suck.

I have had zero problems with our IBM SCSI drives.

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[pjrc]

What are you smoking?

this is from old-school thinking where they feel compelled to encode control information into data streams.

ATA uses separate registers for control. Data transfer takes place as a separate operation of successive reads of the data register (PIO mode), or as its own DMA transfer.

Rather than using a 32-bit "structure" they should have spent the extra few dollars and used a 32-bit data bus and a synchronized 8-bit control bus.

Sure, that would have made a lot of sense when ATA was standardized in the days before PCI and other 32 bit busses were common. Even today, that'd be a really dumb move, to dedicate a bus to sending the commands and reading status which is such a tiny fraction of all the data transfer. Even with a (senseless) dedicated 8 bit control bus, you'd still need four 8 bit writes to send the sector number to the drive, which is more or less what happens today. In the ATA standard 4 of those bits are for something other than the sector address (LBA mode). Even if your proposed scheme used 32 bits, that's still a "barrier" of 2 terabytes. ATA-6 defines a 48 bit LBA extension, which amounts to just writing a few more bytes over the bus. 2^48 sectors of 512 bytes each is a LOT.

Wide SCSI is only 16 bits wide, by the way. Future disk standards will be serial access, using LVDS signals (1 bit wide) Welcome to the modern world, where transistors are free and wires are what costs money!

Then we'd have been able to easily have 32-bit addressing and would probably be able to hang 63 devices off the bus.

The two device limit is due to electrical signaling requirements. There's two more bits in the "head" register that could have easily been assigned to allow 8 devices to be addressed instead of 2 (and if one of the six unused bytes on the second chip selected had been used, 256 devices could have been addressed). The IDE bus is not terminated. The electrical design allows for only two devices to reliably communicate with one host. The protocol only provides one bit in one register to select between them... but the real limitation is physical, not logical.

This could be done pretty easily if the PC world would just LET GO. Stop clinging to compatiblity with things that you'll never use again anyways!

Sure, go write up your business plan that involves hundreds of millions of PC owners (and operating system vendors) all converting to a new motherboard, new drives, and new software.

Of course, it IS happening with serial ATA, but everyone involved has very realistic goals that make good business and technological sense. The main thing that's driving it is the difficulty of providing 5 volt tollerance and TTL logic levels in modern chips, where the transistor gate-to-substrate and drain-to-substrate breakdown voltages are getting lower and lower as the gate width shrinks (making many more, much faster transistors available). The large number of signals required (over 50 for two controllers) also makes poor usage of a LVDS capable process (UDMA133 is only 66.5 MHz signals on each pin, when LVDS can support gigabit speeds). Silicon gets cheaper and cheaper (per transitor), but the physical packaging technology doesn't move that way, so pins are at a premium. In the not-too-distant future, drives will use a tiny connector (4 pins as I recall), and the same basic protocol as used today.... more or less in exactly the opposite direction as your rant suggesting a 32+8 bit bus and a completely new protocol that throws backwards compatibility to the wind.

You Trendsetter

[4of12]

Right on.

MiniDV format clocks in at nearly 13 GB per hour.

...
backup media consistently lags

I've got about 0.3 TB of disk space at home between my 2 TiVo's. They have more disk space than my two computers do. They never get backed up, either, because there's nothing to back them up to. They're their own archive.

Video is driving desire for

• low noise
• high capacity
• random access (linear tape sux!)
• high reliability (no backup, remember!)

and what I see coming (while last mile service is still unacceptably slow) are home NAS systems connected via 802.11b to TiVo-looking consumer electronic devices and to wireless tablets just for watching shows.

If I were a disk manufacturer, I'd goad the consumer video recording technology to shift into higher gear (come out with TiVo's with built-in 802.11b and a NAS repackaged as a "VideoArchive") and be ready with all the pieces to satisfy this market.

[I've got a Mini-DV recorder, too, but haven't worked up the courage yet to figure out which IEEE-1394 card to buy for my Linux box and how to get it to work.]

WTF: 72 pin SIMMs in a TRS-80 CoCo3! Picture!

[BigBlockMopar]

see the web site of the kookoo CoCo High Priest. The best link on that page is about an innovative 4 MHz acceleration project they are putting together. I'm not kidding.

We had one in the TI world. The TI-99/4A had a TMS 9900 16-bit processor (in *1979*, boys and girls), but back then, memory was super-expensive. The ROM, video processor and TMS9901 coontroller were on the 16 bit bus, everything else was on a kludged together 8-bit bus... including the RAM.

A popular TI hack was to solder 8 bit static RAMs piggybacked over the 2x8bit ROMs which resided on the 16 bit bus. A little address decode logic (piggyback some 74xx chips onto some other ICs, and a little point to point wiring) and you had a TI-99/4A with full 16-bit memory. Instant speed increase of over 40%. And because of the bus bottleneck and the *really slow* doubly-interpreted BASIC, those machines desperately needed speed upgrades. Running object code instead of BASIC, on a TI with that upgrade, was lightning fast.

And I thought that was an impressive TI hack until I saw this. My God, that looks like a bank of 72 pin SIMMs in a TRS-80.

*grins*

[Burning1]

Young SWM seeking solution to ponogrophy archival issues? : )

Still, there's enough room on a 1GB DAT for a weekly incremental.

Thanks for the spelling correction, by the way. Me inglish not soo good, which is sad because I'm actually a native english speaker. -_-; I blame fatigue, and cheating on all the spelling assignments in grade school.

Re:It's Western Digital

[SkulkCU]

So which one of us is right?! :-)

You are.

I've had more than a couple WDs go on me, as well as Seagate, Quantum, others.
I've only had one IBM, but both it and ALL of my Maxtors (including a 200mb drive) still work.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[TeddyR]

Junk?

the problem is getting the point across to the misinformed/ brainwashed masses when you try to explain to them why those devices really are NOT true raid.. "but it says so on the box"... Especially when in a specification quote you list "hardware RAID recommended" and they think that one of those cards would do the job and balk at the price of a real raid card.

What is unfortunate is that other manufacturers have caught on and use the same tactics to sell their hardware as well... like USR advertising 802.11b at 22mb when the only way to do that is using their cards with their modified software... or my current pet peeve... the PCI standard. boards that say they use PCI2.2 are NOT backwards compatible with PCI2.1; when getting a new card, check for SPECIFIC compatibiliy [ie: if it says it works in PCI2.2, then that may not necessaryily mean it would work in a PCI2.1 mb, and vice versa... but anyways... this is going a little offtopic... so to bring it back on topic.... Hard drive sizes that are reaching/exceeding the 200gb range are still doorstops that used to hold gb of data if it crashes and there are no backups..

For me, I would only use such a drive as a "live virual CD jukebox" for my frequently used ISOs...

Re:A Microsoft Fan Confronts Me Over My .SIG

[BigBlockMopar]

You are the among the last of a dying breed. Long gone are the days of Kiss The Blade, sociology/ethics/physics/psychology major and euroderf. Almost all the trolls left here are mindless crapflooders. I salute you.

Anyone else feel pulled around?

[TibbonZero]

Not that it really matters, but I would like to know the actually size in bytes of a drive that they are selling me, and in mb (where 1mb == 1024kb, 1kb == 1024 bytes, not 1 == 1000)
Would it really be much trouble for them to say 198 gb hard drive? I remember when they used to sell 40mb hard drives, and say they were 40mb, and if it was off by 2gb in size, people would have been pissed (or really happy).
People used to get accuraccy, for sizes, and speeds, but now it's all so fluffy