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Western Digital Announces 200 Gig Drives
twilightzero writes "Video capture fanatics and pr0n moguls, rejoice! Today marks the official release of the Western Digital 200 GB hard drive! Never again run out of space for your X-10 video stream of the neighbor's house! See the graphic, specs, and press release. This also marks the release of WD drives using fluid dynamic bearings rather than the old BB type." The glorious march of technology continues forward, and digital video fans rejoice. Update: 07/26 03:34 GMT by M : Headline corrected. Taco's at a conference, cut him a little slack.
I'm just a little confused!
Mormon news and discussion at Mahonri.org
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?
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?
~ now you know
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???
I've installed a couple different drives with the fluid bearings, and they do run quieter than the older style bearings. Very nice!
Hey, now
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.
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
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... :)
My journal has hot
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.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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!
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...
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
The press release is June 25, but the drives just SHIPPED today, THAT'S the news.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
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.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
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.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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.
I've probably got enough hard drive space to last me another 5 years
Or until you *finally* decide to upgrade Windows...
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
...compared to the new Ford Exorbitant.
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.
Would someone care to educate the Slashdot masses about the differences between the old bearings and these new liquid ones? I'm in the market for a new drive, and I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
Well, I can't speak for hard disk drives, but I can maybe draw an analogy.
Wheel bearings - on cars, trucks, bicycles, whatever - use ball bearings. They're a set of caged balls, and one surface literally rolls over the other on a cushion of tiny little balls or cylindrical rollers. Here's an animated GIF and some other neat stuff. The problem is that, whatever the lubrication, eventually the balls and their races will wear, which increases the clearance between the two surfaces and causes looseness ("play") within the bearings. In wheel bearings, this translates into a shimmy in the wheel and weird tire wear. In a hard disk drive, this would result in a shimmy to the platters, causing less precision in data reading and writing as the platters vibrate nanometers back and forth under the heads. As the drives get to higher and higher capacities with the same physical disk size, the tracks being used must be getting smaller, and therefore this error becomes more crucial. Also, notice that hard drives which have been running for a long time tend to get noisy... Never mind that bits of metal being worn out of bearings have to be contained somehow so that the platters and heads don't get damaged.
Liquid bearings are used in all modern car engines. Oil is pumped from the oil pan into a very tiny space between a relatively soft bearing shell and a very smooth and hard crankshaft or camshaft journal. As the shaft spins, the oil is distributed thoughout the bearing surface and eventually leaks out the sides where it drains back to the pan to be pumped through the system again. Here's a picture of the main bearings of a Ford V8. You can see the little holes where oil is pumped into them. While the engine is running, theoretically, the shaft's journal and the bearing surface never actually touch each other; they ride on a cushion of continually replaced microscopic ball bearings (oil molecules). During circulation, the oil takes the heat away from the bearings, and washes away impurities.
How you'd implement something like this in a hard disk drive, I have no idea, and I'd love to see any real techical info on it. (Marketing hype will not answer the questions I have.) But it's a great idea; in a server, with the hard disks spinning all the time, the hydrodynamics of the situation suggest that the platter bearings would never wear, and would therefore never have their tolerances open up and incur vibration.
But a seal would be required to keep the lubricant off the platters, and that seal would itself eventually wear out. Not to mention that it's unlikely they'll include a provision to do an oil change on these things. Stopping and starting cycles will wear the bearing and journal material, causing tiny abrasive bits to be floating in the oil.
I like the idea, I think it's a great step, and I'll look forward to seeing how hard disk manufacturers have solved the problems.
Would the new bearings come at a price premium?For sure! Even if it costs less to machine these than the super-tight clearance ball-bearings that modern hard disks must use, they'll still be a "new feature" which can enhance prices and profit margins. But I think they will actually cost more to make; it's just that ball bearings (like older stepper motor head actuators) have too many limitations to work with modern capacity and track density demands.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
That's what he's saying... He's saying that with hardware, yes you get what you pay for, but with software, that's generally NOT the case.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
So you think you are old?
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...)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
The limit is due to having only 28 bits in the IDE registers to selecting the address. There are four 8-bit registers, and the "head" register uses 1 bit for master/slave selection, one bit to select CHS/LBA addressing, and two bits are "reserved" (originally used to select sector sizes, but in modern times sectors are always 512 bytes).
ATA-6 kludges this 28 bit LBA limit to 48 bits by specifying that the host is to write 20 bits twice!
But for the forseeable future, 32 bit computers will only really use 32 of those 48 bits, which turns out to be only 2 terabytes. If the operating system uses a signed integer (common practice, including the linux kernel until only recently), you only end up with 31 bits of sector addressing, or just one terabyte.
Of course, there are probably even more limits lurking. Doesn't linux ext2/ext3 use 32 bit numbers? FAT32 uses 28 bits for cluster numbers, but clusters can be as much as 32k in the standard (apparantly larger in some systems, though Microsoft doesn't document that in the FAT32 specification).
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
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.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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.
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
Folks, I hate to be the one to throw water on everyone, but here goes...
:-)
Debating which drive manufacturer is "most reliable" is like debating which God is "correct", or the existance of Santa.
You say in 20 years experience you've only lost two drives, both Maxtors.
Well, in my (let me count) um...23 years experience, Maxtor is one of the only two brands of drives that I've not had a failure (the other one is Fujitsu). And I've also "owned 'em all" too. I've got a pile of dead Western Digital drives a foot tall sitting out in my workshop (figured I'd make clocks out of 'em or something). I once had three Seagate drives fail in a 6 month period, and the second and third ones were warrenty replacements starting when the first one died.
So which one of us is right?!
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
The one thing most people fail to consider is the possibility of incramental backups.
/-/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.] ; )
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+
People seem to forget that tapes are generally an enterprise solution... Not somthing intended for the desktop.
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.
> 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...
More data, damnit!