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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 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
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.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Maybe the platters are smaller and smaller as they go up, forming a stylish cone. Leaving 200 gigs, no 240...
I've installed a couple different drives with the fluid bearings, and they do run quieter than the older style bearings. Very nice!
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
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.
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?"
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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
Hope that clears up the confusion
Now THERE's a new one: a hard drive manufacturer rounding DOWN!