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Maxtor Announces 80GB Platters
mackstann writes "StorageReview has some info on Maxtor's new 80GB hard disk platters. The new drives based on the 80GB platters will come in capacities up to 160GB, with some having Serial ATA and/or 8MB caches. They are also resurrecting the (formerly Quantum) Fireball name, shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year), and adding some slim (38% thinner) drives to their lineup." New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
It's a good thing my silverware isn't magnetic, or I'd wipe out all my food.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
I can't wait for my $300 drive to die on the 366th day, and have to replace it! Way to go, Maxtor!
- 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'll take 80GB and the original warranty, please.
Cutting your warranty by 2/3 does not indicate much confidence in your product. If the smaller capacity platters are more reliable, I'll stick with them.
http://www.westerndigital.com/products/products.as p?driveid=35
You must be downloading the "lite" versions of pr0n.
..with one year warranty. Obviously they don't have any trust in their products if they shorten the warranty time. So why should I trust them?
Whatever. Here in Europe they _must_ give you at least two years warranty (not guarantee!)
more space, smaller package, shorter warranty.
No thanks, I'll stick with my Seagate. While Maxtor will always be on the cheap end, Seagate's warranty track record has been outstanding.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
My experience with Maxtor drives failing left and right makes me wonder what took Maxtor so long to shorten their warranty period. I'll never buy another Maxtor. My data is worth more to me than that.
What a dilemma! Either have a greater variety of porn to sell, and risk heavy downtime when the drive crashes, or stick with a small drive and a collection too small to grab anyone's attention...
This just isn't a poor man's business!
What *really* makes the RIAA nervous?
1. blah
2. blah
3. blah
4. blah
5. CowboyNeal is feeling the vacuum of empty drive space.
Maybe it was just that the first computer that I ever had had only 500 megs of hard drive space. So i got used to removing everything that was no longer usefull or redundant. But I have a 20 gig hard drive on my curent computer, and have yet to even fill it half way. I can see how this is definatly usefull on servers and as data backup, but my question is, for home users, how is this needed? It would seem to me that this would only serve to give most people even more space to install programs that are just going to screw up or slow down your computer.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
Ha ha - I laugh at your puny porn-gathering skills.
...who's got creative ways of filling these drives?
:)
I have a DV camera that records at 13 gigs an hour. Plus I've got a home-brew PVR quietly capturing shows for em.
Anybody else doing anything interesting with 100+ gigs space? I just bought a 120-gig drive so I'm looking for ideas.
looks like maxtor finally has done something about their short lifespans. Crap, i didnt think it would be shortening the warrenty. For IDE, im still happy with the WD line. We have been using some of the 2801 slim series, and they are not only slow, but are loud!! i would have never thought ide would come close to the sound of scsi.
Cheers..
sideone
ITBitch.com Your reason for leaving work!
Now, with a link that works!
160GB should be enough for anyone!
-- Wibble
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Don't keep all your hens in one hen house. All my exes live in texas. My fucking hard drive crashed and I lost ALL of my data.
Torn over which format to choose for your 3000+ CD collection?
Well this settles it!
Now you can load up your hard drive with BOTH formats!
(And still have some space left over for that pr0n)
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
Maxtor already has a 160GB hard drive. The 8MB cache is a nice touch, but once you get to storage levels this high, it's usually dead storage anyway. What do I mean by that? I mean you're throwing a ton of stuff on there, not using it for your system drive (I hope).
Personally, I'm up to 630GB and running a bit low on space (about 220GB free last I checked). Let me know when we get 1TB hard drives, then I'll jump up and down.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
...but naming a hard disk "Fireball" for some reason doesn't bolster my confidence in using a product so named.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Big drives are great and all, but it gives a single place to lose a lot of data at once if you aren't doing some sort of raid/mirroring (backups? errr, no habla).
While stuffing my favorite all purpose Enlight 7237 with drives the other day (I made a plexiglass drive bay unit that would allow me to fit (5) 3.5 HDDs in (3) 5.25 bays) so I could consolidate some of my data, I ran into major heat issues.
The plexiglass got so hot it started to slowly bend and the drives were so hot I could not hold them. They were a mix of older ata66 and ata100 western digitals and ibm deskstars. Not too old, not cutting edge. I've played with a few of the new maxtors that have the ata133 fluid dynamic drives and they do seem quieter, but even those got pretty warm.
I don't need 100 gig of space on a light usage workstation, I'll have a hard time filling 40. I also don't want to add extra fans (the less moving parts the better in my book). How about more conetration on heat output?
3jane:/store/shn 291891992 218132104 50408536 81% /store/shn
- 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 bought a 20gig and its still not full yet. Infact its not even over %25 full. I think the only use for big drives is for pirating and warezing.
http://saveie6.com/
Hmmm....here are some suggestions.
:-)
* p2p movie sharing. Heck, keep your movie archive online.
* programs with support for unlimited undo, where a complete history of actions is stored (if someone beats MS Office to market with this and people get used to it, there will be a nice coup.
* Large http cache
* use flac instead of mp3 for lossless audio. No more worries about compression artifacts.
* Use png instead of jpg for images (granted, there are probably better lossless photo compression algorithms, but png is quite common). No more worries about compression artifacts.
* Copy CD images onto your hard drive and either loopback mount them in Linux or use Daemon Tools in Windows -- no more searching for a CD, and load times are much better.
* Instead of bookmarking web sites you like, use a tool to download them -- you never know when they'll vanish forever.
* Don't uninstall software to save space (a big issue with games on Windows)
* Partition the drive and try out another OS
* Try out freenet, with a nice big cache to speed your (and others near you) access time
* Send it to me. *My* drive is full.
May we never see th
6. ???
7. Profit!
As mentioned is this story, the larger hard drives get using current techologies, the less stable they because as numbers of bits increases and shrink is size to the point of magnetic instability.
maxtor allready makes 160 gig hard drives, ones sittign next to making noise as i write this, but with 8 gig platters shouldn;t they be able to fit twice as much into the same case? 320 gig drives and such, but do most people need this much storage on their machines, even for video editing, uncompresed avi *only* takes up about a gig a minute, i dotn think they make digital tapes that hold more than 60 minutes or so, i could probably use this though (download a few more complete telivison series), but i'm not an average user, most people dont need server sized amounts of storage, also massive drives aren't simple to install, it was a pain in the ass to configure the cntroler card for my 160gb drive, stupid 133 limit...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
>They are also resurrecting the (formerly Quantum) Fireball name, shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year)
Nothing like misleading the customers with another name and then screwing them with a shortened warranty......
No thanks!
Then get to warezin.. er.. work!
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
I still question the use of a name like Fireball for a hard drive... It just doesn't paint the prettiest picture whenever I hear it...
I just wonder who really likes the though of their data going up in a fireball?
Qua^K^K^K Maxtor set us up the bomb!!!
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year)
Obviously these devices are not for storing data - people who store data generally expect to keep it for more than a year - so what are they for?
If you figure in the cost of replacing the drive 3 times as often as you had to replace the old ones, the new drives even cost more per bit than the old ones. This seems to be a product destined for oblivion even before it starts shipping.
it costs less than $1.00 per Gb now... in hard drives. but its funny how expesive per Mb floppies still are....
but what i really want is very high capacity USB keychain storage. like those - but with several GB of capacity - and built in security....
A 1 year warranty? Sounds like that kind of sucks. Basically they are saying that they really don't expect their drives to last longer than a year, or else they would leave it at a 3 year warranty. I know I personally have had 2 hard drives (Western Digital) replaced by warranty, both around 2 years old when they died. That warranty is worth a lot more than many people think.
Would a company buy 160GB drives for its servers if it only had a 1 year warranty? Prolly not, since shortened warranties imply lower quality, which is more of an enemy than high prices and lower capacity, since such a premium is placed on data reliance. Granted, tape backups are in place to help reduce data loss, but still, one year? Any time you have to restore from tape, you're losing *some* data and more importantly, time. Increasing the probability of hardware failure, despite safeguards, is a bad bad thing.
Maybe I'm only one of a few who appreciates the warranty on a hard drive, but I've saved a few hundred bucks because of them, and longer warranties certainly increase the confidence of a consumer that a piece of hardware is backed by the manufacturer.
-AAAWalrus
It looks like their warranty will at last reflect the quality of their products.
Is WD the last holdout for quality drives?
Wow, somebody's going to have 160 gig hard drives soon... but what about the 180 gig drives that are already out?
rooooar
Heh.
The first hard drive I had, on loan, mind you, had 10 Megabytes of space. I was the size of a small beer fridge, weighed 300 pounds, dimmed the lights when it spun up (which took about a minute), sounded like a jet taking off, and cost about $10,000 (which is why I had it on loan).
It sported TWO 5 megabyte platters: one fixed and one removable -- 14" diameter, IIRC. I remember that CDC Hawk well.
It went well with the Alpha Micro computer, portable teletype, two terminals, and a 300 baud Smart Modem that also occupied my room.
'Course, that was way back in 1982.
You could've hired me.
do what i did, download every episode of simpsons, south park, futurama, family guy, sealab 2021, justice leage, invader zim, mission hill, red dwarf, doctor who, the tick, undergrads... and the list goes on, i have over 300 some hours of downloaded tv shows on my 160gb drive, i put em all in winamp3 on shuffle, its like my own tv station, but without commercials or crappy shows *watches replies calling me a theif/pirate :D*
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I've been transferring the old video tapes of my daughter onto DVD (thank you, Superdrive and iDVD), and it's not surprising how fast these things get eaten up. As more people start using their home machines as digital editing stations, they'll be happy they've got these drives.
Well, that and when you try to review Icewind Dale II and it takes up 1.5 Gigs of space...
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
Don't worry, once more people get broadband and decent P2P software running, you'll be glad you've got that extra space.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
... cause that just reeks of confidence in ones product :-O
I just hope the recommendation -- if it is in effect for this series -- figures prominently in the advertising and isn't hidden away in some technote, you know.. like.. IBM tried to sneak it past customers?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
So what's your number one complaint about hard drives:
- Unreliable
- Not enough space
- Not fast enough
- Too expensive
- Makes too much noise
- Generates too much heat
- Is too damn thick!
How are you supposed to back up your data with a drive that big? Consumer-level tape drives seem to be fading away, and were never robust enough to save off that much data anyway. CD burners? Sure, I don't mind using 280 CD's for one backup run.
DVD burners are looking promising, but they're still fairly expensive and of course they have standards issues.
I like (and want) all the space, but I can't afford a tape library!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
In 1992 I paid something like $600 for a stolen full height 1.2gig hard drive. The thing took more than a minute to spin down and sounded almost exactly like a jet turbine during spin up. When the heads parked it was an evil sound that made you afraid to touch the computer.
--- I do not moderate.
I am planning on getting a file server. you know something I can just keep adding disks with logical volume, so I won't run out of space soon.
Things I am looking for
1) IDE
2) atleast capacity for 10+ drives (promise cards okay)
3) big power supply
4) nice ventilation.
5) cheap. I don't have $5,000 to spend on a nifty file server
I am sure other geeks out there have some sort of settup like this. Any advice on how to go about building/buying one?
thanks heaps.
LinuxLover
A 17 inch monitor or a 4 button mouse, perhaps?
Seriously, a product press release from $COMPANY's marketing dept. isn't news.
The warranty thing is just business as usual. What they name the drives doesn't mean anything.
Unless I'm missing something this is just another hard drive. Whoop-de-do. Correct me if I fail to see some groudbreaking technology here.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You bought your last hard drive over a year ago? You're not doing much to help the economy, are you. Maybe you should throw away your old one, and buy this instead. And what's all this talk about warranties? Ending is better than mending, you know.
huxley.net
That's my primary concern as well. I just bought a 120 gig drive to replace an old 6 gig that was about to die. I still have 90 gigs of it that I haven't even partitioned yet, and half the drive can hold the entire contents of my old system.
So I sit here stewing over the fact that should THIS drive die before I purchase a larger one, I will be in no position to back up the data on it. Granted, anything REALLY important I back up frequently, but stuff I download is typically going to be 120 gigs behind a burn. I'll get lazy and not burn ANYTHING until I have no space left, unlike what I SHOULD do and burn as I download, then just delete when space is required. Oh well. Gotta love the bad habits.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
If you've had the 100gb that long and its not at least half full, you're not downloading NEARLY enough porn. Come ON, man!! Get with the program!? This is the Internet we're talking about, history's foremost repository of nudity, filth, and general sexual sin. Slack-ass.
Beer, now there's a temporary solution -- Homer Jay S.
all your mp3s to Ogg Vorbis files. Better yet, keep both.
This shortened warranty worries me greatly. It tells me Maxtor doesn't have much confidence in this new product. Having had hard drives die on me within 2 years quite a few times, I'd stay away from buying these new hard drives from Maxtor.
eTrade SUCKS
And it has a shorter warrenty? Does anyone else think that a name that suggests it might BURST INTO FLAME is a bad thing? Other names that make the product look bad to me: TNT, Rage, Fury, Radeon(I radiates? EMI?), VooDoo,
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
even more room for my .cbn files
>> I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
You know, if you're ever accused of pirating DVD's, this statement should provide proof that you're not.
Whenever my hard drive fills up, games are the first things I look at. It seems like most game installs these days weigh in at over 500 MB, even if you opt to load movies and other things from the disc. So if you have a dozen or so games installed at once, (and I usually do, just in case the urge to play one strikes me) you're looking at the majority of your (or my) 20 GB Drive being 'taken'.
The biggest game I've installed that I can remember was Diablo II, which was over a Gig, but I'm sure there are bigger ones out there.
Yeah, I have a webcomic...
That's a damn bad warranty. My next drive will be a Seagate 15k.3, as soon as a retailer can get them in stock. It's $900 for 72GB, but I don't need more than that, the Seagate is fast as fuck, and the warranty covers five years.
I remember the good 'ol days when your hard drive was 2 years and 11 months old, you'd backup your data, unhook it from your PC and proceed to chuck it against the wall. Then you'd send it in for warranty. They wouldn't have 8GB drives in stock anymore, so they'd likely send you a 20GB. Voila free upgrade.
"Leave it to the Slashdot crowd to cheer for anything that hurts content producers. The only reason anyone would need a 160GB hard drive is to store vast quantities of pirated music and video."
I beg to differ on that naive assumption. put a few of those drives in a raid config, and they become great storage for enterprise networks (network user folders, mail servers at companies with idiot CEO's that email 20mb powerpoint files to everyone in the company, etc.), or for people that do digital video production and editing. Piracy and porn are not the only uses for mass storage.
The Adult Happy Meal - "I'm lovin' it!"
Not Half Full? You must be an optimist. I'd say it's more than half empty.
ScienceSeeker.org
Is there any chance that USB2 (or firewire) drives will catch on.
480 MBS transfer rate, hot plugable, raidable I would presume. These could be a poor man's NAS (or some other marketing buzzword).
The Hamma-mamma-jammer wrote:
Your doctor has several ways of making sure you're "full" nowadays.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
Kind of like when a store has a "blow-out" sell on electronics equipment... Not quite the mental image that inspires confidence!
I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
:)
I bought a 9.4GB drive a number of years ago, and it is not half full yet either
they named it right, thats for sure. I had a Quantum fireball CX (made in ireland) and it did just what the name says...it turned into a fucking fireball. one of the controller micros exploded and flame shot out from under the lid housing. So I took it out and shot it a few times with a .50 cal ; }
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
Don't worry, CowboyNeal... I'm sure there are a lot of Slashdot readers who only have 45 gigs of pr0n.
Well, it had to be said.
Capacity increases very quickly. That's nice. But what I really care about is performance keeping pace.
I mean, the actual transfer rate with which one can get (ever more) data on or off the disks is increasing very slowly.
The ratio of speed vs capacity is getting worse and worse.
I'd much prefer less capacity and much better performance. Yes, I know I could go RAID0, but that means twice the noise, power consumption, and risk to reliability. Maybe they should have something like raid0-in-a-drive?
How do you backup these large drives?
I recently was looking to improve my backup solution (dds2 tape drive, 8G compressed). I was looking for a system that did at least 30G compressed. All the DDS, DLT, and VXA drives that satisfied the requirement were more than $500. Media wasn't cheap either, with the worst being the VXA media at $70/15G.
I gave up and went with a backup 160G hard drive and less-frequent multi-tape backups to the DDS2 drive. Is there a better way?
I bought two 80 gig drives, and they are in two separate computers. Everything that I value is under my home dir. I use unison to keep the filesystems synchronized over the network, and with my laptop. These drives were purchased specifically so I could setup this backup procedure.
Ironically, when I installed one of the 80 gig drives, I screwed up and lost all my stuff. Every last byte, except for the super important stuff. That means that my pr0n, mp3's, all the stuff except for the code I wrote and my website was gone.
So, before you install these drives, make a backup in case you screw up.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I've had too damned many of their drives fail on me, miserably, to ever want to buy another of their products again. Get Western Digital, get Fujitsu for Christ's sake, but DON'T get Maxtor. Friends of mine have gone to Worst Buy or Office Despot and come back with drives that were DOA.
and it's not even half full yet!
...or half empty...
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
With the availability of high quality digital video cameras and Firewire cards and drives and other gear becoming pretty popular, it's now possible to make professional quality video recordings, capture them to a hard drive, edit them with something like Adobe Premiere, and send the final cut back out to be stored on a digital video cassette, or DVD, or whatever.
Unfortunately, in the middle of this process when you're capturing the video to a hard drive, it takes up *MASSIVE* amounts of disk space. The DV stream is something like 25Mbits/sec. One of my college teachers is into DV production and has been teaching classes on it. He purchased a 160GB Maxtor Firewire drive for his classes, and of course I laughed and told him they'd never fill it up. Since then they've filled both that drive and a couple of 80GB drives several times. Even with all that space there isn't room to store the video long-term, there's just enough room to capture it, edit it and store it back to a regular DV medium like the cassette in your video camera.
Once again the parent poster has fallen into the mental trap of "if I've got no use for this, how could anyone else have a use for it?" We all do this, from time to time, unfortunately.
SSIA
comment directly in my journal
Unless a manufacturer has a failure rate of zero/year, a longer warranty increases costs. Drive manufacturers are looking for any way to cut costs so that they can survive in this cut-throat market.
How bad is it? I just paid $49 (after rebate) for a 120GB/7,200rpm/8mb cache Western Digital drive. (Microcenter sells the drive for $149 while CompUSA has a $100 rebate. Made CompUSA match Microcenter's price and then submitted the rebate). I got a Maxtor 40GB, 7,200rpm drive for $10 after discounts and rebates (OfficeDepot: $20 coupon, two $30 rebates, and the drive was on sale for $90). Yes, those were not typical prices, but it helps to show how cheap drives have gotten.
In recent years, hard drive prices have fallen -- even ignoring the cost/megabyte measurement and simply considering the total drive costs. The average cost for a hard drive is less than it was two years ago. And the drives of today still have the same basic parts. There has been no drastic reduction in the cost of aluminum castings, electric motors, and ball bearings. So the manufacturers have to get the money from somewhere. Manufacturing efficiencies are certainly nice, but they don't cover the total cost reductions necessary.
I'd rather have a one-year warranty from a manufacturer that is still in business than a three year warranty from one that went bankrupt. The hard drive manufacturing field is littered with the carcasses of manufacturers. Remember Micropolis, Miniscribe, Quantum, Conner, and Rodime (to name a few)? We are down to a field of two major players: Western Digital and Maxtor. If one of those goes away, what do you think will happen to hard drive prices?
Sorry, I hit "submit" instead of "preview". Wouldn't a drive called "Rocksteady" or "DataSolid" or something be much better? "Cheetah" and "Barracuda" are fine, at least they emphasise speed.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
An increase in data density automatically implies an increase in transfer rate, because more bits are packed into each square centimeter. An 80GB platter turning at 7200 RPM can be read twice as fast as a 40 GB platter also turning at 7200 RPM, precisely because twice as many bits turn underneath the head in the same amount of time.
Not only do you get double the storage space, you also get double the transfer rate (all other things being equal of course).
Or, if you really want a "silent" drive, then turn the drive speed down to 3600 RPM, and get the same old transfer rate but without the 7200 RPM hum. But why you would care whether the drive was silent in a SERVER is totally beyond me.
Build your own RAID. www.3ware.com
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Since I'm really only interested in the SCSI market, I wouldn't call either of those companies "major" players. You're forgetting that it's perfectly possible for a company to charge more by offer a higher quality item.
CowboyNeal turns out to be a real person. And I thought he was just a /. ghost that lives in the polls.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
Not only german customers have 2 year dealer warranty. All customers in the E.U. have that privilege.
I have 80GB of consistently-named, ID3-correct MP3 files I that have ripped myself using a script I wrote called mp3bot, which in turn uses cdparanoia and lame --r3mix. I own every CD represented in my collection, at this point nearly a thousand of them. Some people don't believe this, but I love music -- folk, r&b, rap, pop, metal, industrial, alternative, punk, ska, classical, neo-classical, lounge, blues, cool jazz, acid jazz, swing, and on and on... and eventually you have an entire storage unit rented to hold your empty jewel cases (the discs are in 250-disc flip packs in the closet, in case I need to get at them).
BUT ANYWAY, I have written a shell script called 'jukebox' which allows me to do things like:
jukebox 'sonic youth' 'soundgarden' 'beethoven' -shuffle -continuous
and
jukebox 'interstate love song' 'hey jude'
and
jukebox 'strawberry fields' 'gimme shelter' 'nachtmusik' -burnwavtracks
and
jukebox mytrackslist.txt -repeatall
There's no way I ever want to go back to listening to CDs or creating mix CDs by hand. It's wayyyy to good to have instant access to *all* of your tracks for burning, shuffle-playing, album-playing, in any order, any mix, etc. But every time I buy a new CD and feed it to mp3bot, it adds a few MB to my collection... So I gotta keep adding hard drive space!
Now, I also have a 5mp digital SLR camera and I work as a freelance photographer. Every shot I have taken since 1999 is archived online with database-driven, browser-based interface (with captions and exif data) that I wrote myself. I probably have a total of 100GB or more stored in my photo archive and keeping them all online (instead of on small removable storage media) allows me to quickly search for one or several images across my entire collection. No way I want to start having to insert and remove DVD-RAM discs all day to get at 20 specific images... Not to mention all that clutter!
Now, to manipulate these photos, I also prefer Photoshop most of the time (sorry GIMP lovers!) and at times also use Corel Draw/PhotoPaint. And of course, I sometimes need to use MS Office as well because I also work as a freelance writer (photographer/writer, you can see how it goes together) and most publishers want stuff in Word format. To deal with these needs, I have Win4Lin running a Windows installation. All things told, this takes another 10GB or so on my drives.
The only important caveat is that with all this data in one place, I do have to be sure back up. I don't want to run RAID-1, that's a waste of energy and adds environmental noise. I use 8mm AIT storage for monthlies and an 8505xl for incrementals, which together are enough to be functional for my circumstances.
So there are some everyday uses of storage space -- about 200 GB of it all told -- a huge music collection, a huge photo archive, a Red Hat 7.2 installation with some Loki games and a Win4Lin installation. I bet the video guys can give you a few more uses.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
CowboyNeal, you don't do much digital document collection do you?? :)
Let's see... up until today, I had 360 gigs of space in my desktop.
30 Gigs OS and App installs
80 Gigs Music
80 Gigs Divx backups of my movies and TV shows
10 Gigs of misc downloads, email, docs, etc.
160 Gigs "Adult content" (pr0n is 2 |_33+ for me)
Today I replaced two of my Maxtor 40GB drives with a pair of Maxtor 120GB drives. I now have 520 Gigs of space in my desktop, and my PVR software is really going to eat into that fast.
The next step for me is going to be a pair of ATA133 controller cards, quantity 8 of Maxtor 120GB drives, software RAID5 in Win2k Server, for 840GB effective space. I can't really back up all of the data, let alone take it offsite, so I am hungering for some reasonable redundancy.
Yes, software RAID5 is slow... but I'm not really worried about it.
I have been thought several Maxtor drives. Durring one exchange call the Maxtor guy on the phone told me they had the lowest failure rate in the industry. My response to him was "you must have the ONLY falure rate in the industry". I've not had any other drive manufatures drives fail on me _ever_. (I must be lucky...) With a 1 year warranty I won't touch a Maxtor. BTW Dell uses a ton of Maxtor drives. We will have to watch to see what they do with their warranty...
So who is left in the drive business anyway? Sesgate, Maxtor, and? IBM is droping out Quantum sold out who is left?
Since I'm really only interested in the SCSI market, I wouldn't call either of those companies "major" players. You're forgetting that it's perfectly possible for a company to charge more by offer a higher quality item.
I was referring to their market share of the hard drive industry. It does not matter if you measure in dollars or units, SCSI is an increasingly less important part of the market. That's pretty obvious when you look at the last-years-technology that leaves SCSI drives wanting for capacity.
There are still some applications where SCSI is king, but the performance and capacity increases in IDE drives is making SCSI less and less important. When you can put together an IDE RAID array that holds half a terrabyte for less than you spend on a single 200GB SCSI drive, it's a no-brainer for most applications. Even people doing digital video work are frequently turning away from SCSI to IDE RAID systems. 1U rack systems, fighting against heat problems, also don't typically run 15,000rpm SCSI drives for obvious reasons.
I used to run nothing but SCSI as did a couple of professional acquaintances of mine. None of us have any SCSI drives now.
> If one of those goes away, what do you think will happen to hard drive prices?
:-)
They'd go down because Fujitsu, Samsung, and Seagate would be able to lower their costs with the increased sales revenue they would see.
There's a far wider world of hard drives out there than WD and Maxtor. In fact, any of the other manufacturers rate better in my books, and I was quite angry when Maxtor bought out my favourite drive maker, Quantum (I believe they still honor the Quantum warranties, though). But you can't win them all...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I think your missing a third
- subsolar
The Maxtor Bigfoot 5.25" drives they used to throw in the Compaq 5700s (8.4 GB I believe) were the most failure-prone drives I have ever seen. They would be the point of failure for at LEAST 50% of the Compaqs we got in the shop.
Also, my parents had a HP Pavilion from 1996 or so with a Maxtor 1.2GB disk in it. Died within 2 years. Got a Western Digital, and it hasn't skipped a beat. In fact the ONLY 2 WD Drives I've seen go totally bad, were One I had that I was given because it was bad, and one where they tech who was working on it let the traces on the drive touch the case and powered it on (there's a way to get a new drive, hehe).
Maybe I'm being unfair and they have gotten better, but I as well as many coworkers from that tech shop won't touch the things ever again.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think you left out the argument against the "higher quality" drive. Personally, that's where Seagate takes the cake. I know it's anecdotal, but I've never had a Seagate fail in a RAID array or standalone on a server. It's always the pesky IBM drives. In the seven years I've been fixing computers for my hometown, I've never seen a failed Seagate.
SCSI drives still take the cake when it comes to performance and reliability, IMHO. I run them exclusively in the server farm I operate because I can count on them to be best-of-breed. Sure, there's a premium for them, but I belive the uptime and extra speed make up for it.
The Slashdot headline trumpets the wrong news - the story does not focus on Maxtor announcing 80GB HD platters or 160GB HD's (Maxtor has been selling 160GB drives for several months), but rather the serial ATA interface technology.
Today Maxtor announces its next generation ATA drives, all centered around 80 GB/platter technology.
Not criticizing overly much, but this would have been obvious had the poster actually read the article he submitted (assuming basic literacy skills).
Which leads one to wonder...
Not about basic literacy skills, but about having read the article at all.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Of course when you sent in all those rebates, you were essentially taking a paltry sum in exchange for supplying accurate contact info to direct marketers. The Man just updated your demographic info and spending habits in his database.
Right, it is economics. But part of the equation is confidence in their own products.
If they believe that their products were going to be more reliable, then there would be no need to harm the ecomonic advantage of having a reasonable 3 year warranty.
However, if they believe that their products are going to be less reliable, then it may make economic sense to reduce their warranty. Despite the loss of sales, they'd make out by having fewer repairs... and more "replacement" sales.
Of course, some states don't permit this nonsense of strict warranty limitations. So if it has been out of warranty for only 3 months, I suggest you call them up and give them ask for a free replacement. After all, that's a right you have as a consumer.
And you're right -had drive prices have fallen a lot over the past 10 years. But then again, sales are way way way up, and mfg costs are way way way down. They're a commodity now.
Here's how they could offer a lifetime warranty. Just have the hard drive detonate a little pack of C4 whenever it fails. Of course, this would only work if the user bought the drive.
I have a dead 80GB IBM drive in a box, and a dying one in a working machine, each with about a year of use. This is not good. Those particular drives seem to generate a bad spot every few months. It's getting seriously annoying.
What should I buy next in the 80GB range?
I had two customers who had different models of Maxtors... both died within months. I have a closet full of WD Caviars that I still use whenever I want a backup data drive. OLD disks. Hell, I generally shy away from whatever Best Buy is pushing on folks anyway... I guess that's why I never bought an NVidia based card ;)
Not to mention IBM and Fujitsu
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Don't forget about Toshiba and Samsung. They make tons of drives as well.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
I have bought Maxtor because of their excellent warranty and advance replacement policy...(having had a few bad drives can make this a large consideration for a person...). 1 year is not very long, if they can't stand behind their product for 3 they must not expect it to last for 3.
That's fine, so why not offer a 1-year warranty drive for $BARGAIN_PRICE, and a 3-year warranty drive with advance replacement warranty for $BARGAIN_PRICE + $CUSHION_AMOUNT?
I don't get why all drives they sell must have identical warranties. It seems to me that people would be willing to pay a small price for more security, if they planned on having the drive for awhile.
"New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!"
Oh stop bragging! My MOBO won't even take any drive bigger than 30Gb!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I already had a HD failure. Lost all of my data. 160 GB for 1 year? No thanks, I'll stick with one of those 10 gb SCSI RAID arrays... at least they last much much longer
SCSI drives are no more reliable than IDE drives. The heads, the platters, the casings, nearly everything (except possibly exclusive 15k/10k rpm drives) are manufactured using the exact same factotries. Just because they slap a scsi interface on the back of it doesn't make the whole drive more reliable.
mirroring raid, that's real reliability.
i thought maxtor had been offering 160GB drives for a while... i thought they already had 80gig platters for some time now... and WD has 100Gig platters for a a few months... am i wrong?
Good point, you definately can't count out Toshiba. All laptop hard drives that I know (2.5 inch or whatever the standard size mini-ide) are made by Toshiba and IBM. That's a substantial chunk of the market.
Of course, this is excluding things like Sun notebooks and notebooks that cheat. I'm not sure what Apple uses.
~Will
sig?
Ah, this takes me back to my days of calculus and physics.. :)
How did you arrive at the 42% value? Similar method?
It let one terminal monitor (and, with version 3.x, capture) the output of another (and feed it input), with terminal control translation. That was my dirty work, as a hack, for Udisco, Ltd. (an Alpha Micro dealer), waaaaay back.
You could've hired me.
We've recently had a rash of 2.5GB drives (close to a dozen) fail the past three months. These were all bought about four years ago, so I guess we got our money out of them.
Of course we had about a half dozen Seagate 2.1GB drives fail after about six months
- subsolar
The least you could do is download a few hours of commercials, and put them in the mix. If everyone was like you, television stations wouldn't make any money, and then, umm, uhh, that would be bad! Or something. Think of the children!
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
As far as i know, every new sold product except food must have _two_ years warranty in europe.
How will they sell this drive under these conditions?
I had two customers who had different models of Maxtors... both died within months.
Those poor customers! Do you think it had anything to do with the Maxtor drives?
If you're serious about your data's security don't for a second take that warranty into account! Quality is not measured by the length of the warranty, and quite frankly if the drive dies taking all of your data with it 6 months or 2 years into a 3 year warranty it's no different. (at least IMO) The data's gone, now the time spent retrieving from backup, that's the costly part..
Warranties have always been a tool for sales people, people put a lot of faith on the warranty, which is why you often see not-so-reliable brands with longer warranties. A good example is computer Monitors: Up until about three years ago Sony monitors had only 1 year warranty on them, then the market was flooded with every two dollar brand with a 3 year warranty! Now any Sony owner knows that their 3 year old monitor still beats the pants of most of the competition's new models, but Sony had to follow the market and increase their warranties to three years. Why? Competition.
Another good example can be seen in cars, at least here in Australia in recent years you have seen a flood of new cheap cars; Hyundai's, KIA's, etc all that come with 5 year 100,000k' warranties! But if you look at say VW's or Audi's they still have their 3 year / 40,000 k' warranty. Which one do you think is more reliable???
My point is, if you want confidence in your hard drive purchase, you're looking at the wrong thing!
Didn't IBM sell 80% of its hard drive division to Hitachi? Hitachi's still gotta be in the game.
Didn't IBM subsequently announce new breakthroughs in storage technology? They are not exactly rolling over and dying.
Isn't Fujitsu, the biggest computer company in Japan still in the game, especially in the area of notebook computer hard drives?
I expect that Seagate, a giant in the SCSI drive business and current maker of the quietest IDE drive on the market, the Barracuda IV series would have something to say about this. They recently reported significant progeress in overcoming the superparamagnetic limit.
As you can see, there are more than two players in the hard drive market, although Maxtor and WD are clearly the most visible on the consumer product front. But if one of them dies, there will be by no means a monopoly. Frankly, I am willing to pay for a more expensive drive from Seagate or Fujitsu to get a longer warranty. Although I expect the masses will always go for the product with the largest size for least dollars, there will always be a high end market for businesses, professionals, servers, etc where reliability and support are truly part of the equation. This is where those who are ready to put their money where their mouth is and put quality over quantity will buy their HDDs.
Your TV shows? Did you create them? If you didn't, then technically, they are not "your" tv shows, they are tv shows that you recorded. Call a spade a spade.
Guns are like umbrellas and condoms. Better to have one and not need it, than need it and not have one.
Good luck getting your CompUSA rebate.
They are a PITA.
CSR: "Sorry, yours just went through the shredder. How else can I help you today?"
I'm still running two 13Gb Quantum Fireballs, with never a hassle that wasn't caused by software.
:..(
I miss Quantum
"things like Sun notebooks" Is this a dumb joke or something? Sun doesn't make notebooks to my knowledge. Or are there sun notebooks, just not Sun(tm) notebooks?
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
Nah, just make sure /boot is on a small partition at the start of the drive...... oh, you are probably running one of those legacy systems that uses the BIOS for something other than booting, guess you are just screwed. :)
Or you could just go download your drive manaufacturer's version of drive manager and it can deal with the problem.
Democrat delenda est
Look out! Don't run smartctl unless you absolutely know that the system supports it, or if you are prepared to manually reset it.
I discovered smartctl last night and after having success on some local boxes, tried it on a system about 1000 miles away. I guess either the drive didn't like it or the SCSI driver was sad about its author dying, but the box basically fell over right there.
It was a LOOONNGGG night waiting for someone to come back to the office and force a fsck for me.
Yeah, I know, get a PC Weasel - well, this kind of box has a proprietary reset button connector, so that doesn't work. You can type at it all you want, but when it's frozen, you're pretty much boned.
when are the damn 200+ coming out...
where is serial ATA?
thx
Maxtor, 1 year warranty? No way, at work we've replaced 20 Maxtor drivers during last year. All of them approx 18 months old.
Yes, there are, or once were, Sun notebooks. A quick google search turned up this:
email post.
As far as I could ever tell, they were very bulky. They look like an IPX, of which half is the screen. But, yes, they did exist. There are lots of Intel platforms running Solaris (why, I don't know), but this one specifically describes the 13w3 connector, which if you've ever seen is is unique to sun, and the most convoluted thing in the world. I don't think there ever was a frame buffer with a 13w3 that would work on an intel platform.
~Will
sig?
The 13w3 connector isn't just a Sun thing, SGI uses/used it as well... /Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
80G native, 160G compressed. Scsi ultra 2 lvd, 'round 10G an hour tranfer rate.
---------- ovidius naso
> I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not
> even half full yet!
I bought a 120GB drive a month ago and it's 90% full.
There again, if I will go mirroring Debian...
In fact, when talking about turntables, get an old turntable, and a biggish pizza pan. Fill it up with mercury (or engine oil, if mercury is hard to find), set the turntable to turn. Above the turntable at some distance, depending on the radial velocity, but as CCD (or your webcam, if you haven't got a CCD). This will give you a quite nice and big telescope, and if you've got a good CCD, you can go quite deep.
Let me know if you see something interesting! :-)
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
the first computer that I ever had had only 500 megs of hard drive space
Heh. The first computer I had didn't have a hard drive. ~1-2mhz TI994a with a tape drive!
The first hard drive I got was many years later, and it was only 10 megs. It lasted quite a while, IIRC.
-Ed
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Graphic design services
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I thought this, too, however, I had an IBM representative team (tech guy and sales guy) in last week and made a stab about the 70GXP. They told me that they were still 100% with server class hard drives.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I got a Toshiba laptop with Fujitsu harddrive.
:wq
I think your missing a third ... Seagate DUH.
I just went to CompUSA. Didn't see any Seagate drives. Same thing at Microcenter. Same thing at Circuit City. While Seagate may be a big player in the OEM arena (as is Samsung), their presence in the retail market is not comparable to Maxtor or Western Digital.
I could never get by this name. I mean really, how can you trust your data to a device called a "Fireball"?
-ted
Of course when you sent in all those rebates, you were essentially taking a paltry sum in exchange for supplying accurate contact info to direct marketers. The Man just updated your demographic info and spending habits in his database.
So you think $100 is a paltry sum to tell someone where they can mail advertising to you for computer-related products? It's not like I gave them my real email address (just a throwaway that I get rid of after the rebate arrives).
I don't get why all drives they sell must have identical warranties. It seems to me that people would be willing to pay a small price for more security, if they planned on having the drive for awhile.
Ask about an "extended warranty/product replacement plan." The salesman will be so happy he'll kiss you.
I personally can't imagine keeping a drive in active use for three years. I like to replace my drives before failure becomes likely. I don't want to spend two weeks getting my system put back the way that it was, invariably losing data in the process.
Good luck getting your CompUSA rebate.
They are a PITA.
CSR: "Sorry, yours just went through the shredder. How else can I help you today?"
First of all, it's a Western Digital rebate, not a CompUSA rebate. Secondly, getting it is not luck at all. It's a matter of keeping copies of everything you sent and making reminder calls if the rebate is not sent.
And you're right -had drive prices have fallen a lot over the past 10 years. But then again, sales are way way way up, and mfg costs are way way way down. They're a commodity now.
If all of that balanced out, we'd have a lot more manufacturers from which to choose. Prices have fallen far faster than have manufacturing costs. Drive sales are tightly tied to computer sales, which are down now that consumers are in a replacement (vs. acquisition) mode. The profit margin on drives today is almost non-existent. That's why so many manufacturers have either left the hard drive market or have gone belly-up.
When a manufacturer made $30 profit per drive, a 3-year warranty was reasonable. But at $3 per drive, it's not. (I don't claim the above to be exact figures, just estimates to make the point.)
RIP, you POS
Miniscribe,
I don't remember seeing an announcement about them going out of business, but then again, I haven't seen any for quite awhile either.
Quantum, Conner,
Both bought by the competition - Quantum by Maxtor, Conner by Seagate. Essentially, they still exist.
and Rodime
Who? And don't forget Winchester.
Actually, other posters here have mentioned many others (Seagate, Fujitsu, Samsung, IBM, Toshiba). I wouldn't worry about a monopoly just yet.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
* Let 4 other people use the computer
* Spyware...annoying but fun
but the original point in the thread was that if the manufacturer is giving you a 3 year warranty then the manufacturer is confident that the drive will probably not fail for at least 3 years.
By reducing the warranty period, they're giving the impression to us customers that that they are not confident that the new drives will last 3 years in operation, or to extrapolate further, that new drives are quite likely to develop faults between 1 and 3 years from installation.
If you can't imagine keeping a drive in active use for three years, then it seems that hard drive manufacturers have already caused you to lose confidence in their reliability.
but the original point in the thread was that if the manufacturer is giving you a 3 year warranty then the manufacturer is confident that the drive will probably not fail for at least 3 years.
That's not how warranties work. Manufacturers use statistics. They measure failure rates to project warranty service costs, passing those projected costs along to the consumer in the form of higher drive prices.
It's easy to have a longer warranty: Just increase the drive price to cover the projected warranty replacement costs.
Maxtor apparently decided that the market was more driven by price than warranty. I agree with them. I don't want to pay for a three year warranty when I keep drives an average of one year.
Think about it another way: Hyundai and Kia boasted about new-car warranties of 5 five years/60,000 miles of bumper-to-bumper coverage, plus 10 years/100,000 miles on powertrain and five years/unlimited miles of free roadside assistance.
The Hyundai/Kia warranties are considerably more liberal than those offered by Lexus, the long-time import leader in terms of quality and customer satisfaction. On its 2002 models, Lexus offers four years/50,000 miles bumper-to-bumper coverage, six years/70,000 miles on powertrain and four years/unlimited mileage of free roadside assistance.
So, you see, that a longer warranty does not necessarily mean a more reliable product.
"Mayfly hard drives: Because we care. For, ya know, a day or two."
I'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.
Fujitsu and IBM are both out or moving out of the consumer HD business...
Fujitsu and IBM both announced a while back that they were leaving the consumer HD business...
Uh, Dabs.com is not cheap. There are lots of other good UK places. Sometimes people discuss their favourites in big threads on Slashdot. Look out for them.