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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.
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.
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.
160GB should be enough for anyone!
-- Wibble
"What *really* makes the RIAA nervous?"
Maybe that's the REAL reason behind the 1 yr warranty... Once Palladium/TCPA/SSSCA/CBPTA arrives, all the pre-ban hardware will have conveniently "expired".
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
If you think that seagate has a good warranty record, you never had to fucking deal with the original Barracudas. I had one conversation that went like this:
And so forth. This went on for about two hours, with Seagate telling me that it was not possible that I had a drive their computer said was in Singapore.Over the course of a year, we had over 30 failures of SCSI Barracudas, mostly ST12550N (Yes, I do still remember the model number.) The drive changed several times, giving a different number of sectors with each firmware rev and each warranty replacement, which made it hell to use them in a RAID array (and suicide not to). We had to send two off for replacement at a time, and pray that we got two that had the same number of sectors... and rebuild all of our RAID-1 arrays periodically with new disks just so that we could pair them. Granted, that was mostly the fault of the DPT controllers (PM2122 EISA, with 8M of cache and hardware RAID in 1993. w00t.)
Still, the replacements were sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, and any RAID system would have been fux0r3d by these drives shrinking. As I said, we had over 30 failures, but we only owned 24 drives! I know that Seagate has improved now, and I use their drives again, but it took years.
The point of the rant? Seagate's warranty track record is not outstanding. At all.
-30-
So, which one of those two does porn come under?
Kind of like when a store has a "blow-out" sell on electronics equipment... Not quite the mental image that inspires confidence!
Must be nice.
My laptop came with a 20 gig HD.
Add XP, Office, Photoshop, Resin, SQLServer, token Oracle install, a few hundred MB databases, and a few of my favorite IDE's and guess what? I have 1.5 gigs free.
No warez. No games. No
I bought an external firewire disk JUST so I could have a half decent
I remember the days when I thought my 80 MB disk was hot shit. The fact that it was running on my 386@25mhz is irreleavant.
Times change. I wanna big disk.
_Am
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 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.
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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