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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!
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.
Wow, somebody's going to have 160 gig hard drives soon... but what about the 180 gig drives that are already out?
rooooar
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!
Maxtors are a good deal if you stay on top of things and replace them fast enough to keep your array synced. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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?
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
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.
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