IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved

jeffroe writes "Infoworld has an article stating that IBM has enhanced it's 'Pixie Dust' technology yet again. The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops." IBM's also predicted hard drives to have 100gb per square inch by 2003. Storage space just keeps increasing.

Comments

the usual

[Anonymous Coward]

blah blah

fp

Reliability

[jtharpla]

Yeah, but what's the reliability? 330 hours uptime? :-P

Re:Reliability

[Chicks_Hate_Me]

Look, I had absolute hell with the IBM 75GXP Deskstar HDD, but that whole 330 hour uptime was a whole other story. The fact is, if you're going to have a server that you're always going to keep on and EXPECT it to be reliable, don't use IDE. IDE is known not to be reliable, go with SCSI, they're made for servers.

Of course, since the Deskstar fiasco, I will never buy another hard drive from that company ever again. I use the HDD for desktop use and didn't leave it on that long, I installed a fan on it, just to keep it cool. That think broke down twice. I hated it. I've heard people saying "mine hasn't had anything go wrong with it." I'm sorry bub, but if half their drives are crapping out, and the other half isn't, you still have a major problem. Whatever IBM did to make those 75GXP Deskstars, I hope they never repeat it again.

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

SCSI only in severs has become the Token Ring debate of the 2000's.

In terms of quantity, I bet there are more IDE servers out there... just because they are cheap and work.

Re:Reliability

[woogieoogieboogie]

IDE is known not to be reliable, go with SCSI, they're made for servers.

Ever hear of IDE raid. It makes the whole reliability point of scsi a moot point.

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Unless the whole raid dies at once as happened to several deskstar users.

Raid is not a means of combatting unreliabillity.

Re:Reliability

[AntiNorm]

I will never buy another hard drive from that company ever again.

Neither will I. A few years ago, an IBM hard drive I bought turned out not to work, so I of course RMAd it to IBM. The replacement drive they sent me didn't work. The drive they sent me to replace that one didn't work. It almost took a trip to small claims court to get this settled. Their customer service is, to put it nicely, nonexistent.

Re:Reliability

[Corfe]

Unless the whole raid dies at once as happened to several deskstar users.

Raid is not a means of combatting unreliabillity.

True the whole raid CAN die at once, but the odds of such a thing happening all at once are much lower than a single drive failing on its own - your second statement is false - Raid, BY DEFINITION, is a means of combatting unreliability - the "R" stands for redundant = )

Re:Reliability

[woogieoogieboogie]

Raid is not a means of combatting unreliabillity.

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives.

There should be nothing else to say.

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Yes but redundant is only usefull when youve taken other steps to make everything else as reliable as possible.

I simply don't buy the statement that 2 unreliable parts can be combined into someting that's more reliable than something that's better than both of them in the first place.

I've watched not one but 2 high profile projects have multi day outages because they bet their buisness on IDE raid.

Re:Reliability

[gmack]

Yeah it's a great help if the odds of a drive failing is rare but you can't risk it.

The problem here is that thanks to a general lack of quality in the desktop ICE space from vendors like IBM and fujitsu who will continue to sell known faulty drives the odds of losing 2 drives at once are sadly not in your favor.

Re:Reliability

[JebusIsLord]

agreed, same thing here. my 3rd 75gxp is sitting in the closet now collecting dust while i write this with my new WD. I even asked them to send me an older slower model instead and they refused. There is no way I am putting important data on this one.

Re:Reliability

[jthorpe]

IBM Drives are just terrible and they don't seem to be very quick to be of assistance even when they do break down. Any improvement should be on reliability rather than storage capacity - the reliability of current "pixie dust" drives is poor, imagine what these would be like? Last year, I bought two Deskstar 40Gb drives for a small development server on a RAID. When the first drive failed, I swapped the drives with others and used the second drive in a desktop PC. Surprise, surprise the second drive died a few days ago and thought it might be a good idea to return both drives. When I contacted IBM about returning the drives, I was horrified to find that I have to post the drives to Singapore (I live in Sydney, Australia). This is not cheap, costing me $30 per drive to get it to Singapore from here. Would anyone happen to know of any cheaper alternatives to getting these drives back to IBM (under RMA)?

Re:Reliability

[Myco]

How does that happen? If a single disk has some chance of failure, say 0.01, in a given time period, then it seems like n disks should have a 0.01^n chance of all failing. For reasonable values of 0.01 and n (heh), the odds against simultaneous failure should be vanishingly small even if single disks fail fairly often. Is there a cascade failure effect or something?

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad that's not what it really stands for.

Re:Reliability

[vidarh]

The whole point of RAID is to combine unreliable parts into something that's more reliable than each of the components. But you have to make a judgement as to how reliable you want something, and cost.

Often you can choose between a free standing drive that's high quality and expensive, or several cheap drives combined in a RAID at the same price. If the chance of the single drive failing any given day is 1% (which is of course ridiculously high), and the alternative is two cheaper drives mirrored with 5% likelyhood of either of them dying, then provided that the RAID controller is as reliable as the controller for the other drive, the mirror solution is 5%*5% = 0.25% likely to lose data every day, and is indeed the better choice.

RAID doesn't automatically give you more reliability to a single drive, but for mirroring and RAID-5 it gives you more reliability than a single drive of the same type that you build your RAID array with. Sometimes you use RAID in order to get high reliability, sometimes you use it to be able to cut cost but retain reasonable reliability.

Sounds like in the projects you mentioned, they had equated RAID with reliability, and then gone with a cheap solution believing that RAID is RAID regardless of the quality of the individual components, not because of an inherent problem with IDE RAID.

Re:Reliability

[mary_will_grow]

How is IDE less reliable than SCSI? What are the problems with it?

Re:Reliability

[epukinsk]

Yeah it's a great help if the odds of a drive failing is rare but you can't risk it.

Thank god they make drives that don't ever fail, or we'd ALL have to take that risk.

Re:Reliability

[mito]

plus theses IBM GXP drives are extremely noisy,
they emit a distinctive high-pitched whine that wears one done after a few minutes.

Seagate Baracudas are almost totally silent in
comparaison, and very reliable.

Never from IBM again, as they clearly don't care
about acoustic confort of there users.

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course, SCSI drives NEVER fail right? Pffft. I've gone through more SCSI drives than IDE drives in the last 6 years. My 545 meg Maxtor is still buzzing away just fine, I have numerous 2 gig drives working fine, and my 30GB IBM IDE drive is still working fine in my main workstation. Meanwhile I've gone through a half dozen Quantum SCSI drives and a bunch of Seagates.

Re:Reliability

[JHelgie]

You wont have to worry about this, since they are selling off that part of the company to hitachi, which has been posted on slashdot before, but im too lazy to post a link to the story, just search for hitachi.

Re:Reliability

[Delphis]

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)nexpensive (D)isks.

Re:Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

30 Australian dollars = about $1.25

Re:Reliability

[woogieoogieboogie]

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)nexpensive (D)isks.

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)nexpensive (D)drives.

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)ndependant(D)isks.

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)ndependant(D)drives.

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)DE(D)disks.

(R)edundant (A)rray of (I)DE(D)drives.

There is no OFFICIAL definition of RAID.

p0rn

[Anonymous Coward]

porn drives the industry

we need more harddisk space for more p0rn

porn porn porn porn

why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?

Re:p0rn

[jimmy_dean]

Porn is pretty disgusting if you ask me. Though you're probably not too far off by saying porn does drive the hard disk industry. Where else can you find as many videos and pictures that take up a ton of space?

Re:p0rn

[Trusty Penfold]

why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?

Movies. Why pay for pay-per-view when you're on a business trip when you can bring 50 with you.

Of course, some of them may be porn, so your argument is partially correct.

Re:p0rn

[Anonymous Coward]

That would refer to the aureal density, rather than the areal density.

Re:p0rn

[Anonymous Coward]

You crazy purist. Geek world would collapse without porn. Who would take care of all the technical stuff if there were millions of horny geeks just running around making suggestion to marketing babes and ending up in jail for sexual harrasement.

Re:p0rn

[Anonymous Coward]

No one asked you.

Re:p0rn

[yobbo]

Video editing, for one.

Or, in your terms, "making pr0n" .

Re:p0rn

[domninus.DDR]

Attually I have over 70 gigs of unlicenced anime thats fansubed. Seems like a pretty legitimate use to me. Some of the servers I get anime off of have over a terabyte of anime, but alot of that is licenced in america or dvd isos.

Re:p0rn

[Anonymous Coward]

One day when you grow pubes, you'll understand.

Re:p0rn

[woogieoogieboogie]

Porn is pretty disgusting if you ask me.

what is disgusting abotu pr0n?

Re:p0rn

[rodgerd]

MP3s and ordinary movies and TV. A season of Buffy is a 6 DVD (40+ GB compressed) boxed set. A porn film is half an hour (an hour if you're watching upmarket stuff with a lame attempt at a story line) and the consumers are probably only interested in half the footage, anyway.

Re:p0rn

[rodgerd]

Porn is pretty disgusting if you ask me.

Don't look at it then.

Where else can you find as many videos and pictures that take up a ton of space?

Mainstream movies and CDs. I have hundreds of music CDs, which equals far more porn pulled off the net than I'll ever likely have. Factor in mainstream movies, and there's no contest.

Re:p0rn

[GoatPigSheep]

why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?

Two words: Desktop replacements.

There is a good niche industry of making laptops that are powerful enough to run the latest games ect.... An 80 gig drive would suit a laptop which had a fast 3d video card and a nice 15-inch screen. Of course you COULD use that 4 or 5 thousand dollar laptop for porn.

Re:p0rn

[be-fan]

And not having to power that DVD drive saves enough juice that you can actually watch that full-length movie!

Re:p0rn

[llamaluvr]

Mainstream movies and CDs. I have hundreds of music CDs, which equals far more porn pulled off the net than I'll ever likely have. Factor in mainstream movies, and there's no contest.

I'm guessing that those movies and songs are backup copies of media that you actually own, right? Not a troll/ flame, just a rhetorical question targeted at the audience in general. I'm all for making backups, as long as it's stuff that you own- I just know for a fact that that is not what is usually going on.

Besides the dude below who copies all his bills 'n stuff (which only took up 27 gigs, he said), is there any other legitimate reason for Joe User to have so much disk space? Or is the quest for more gigabytes just for us to feel more proud/macho/cool/sexy/etc? (in addition to being able to collect as many stolen movies/mp3s as possible)

Re:p0rn

[timmyf2371]

For some of us, the CDs themselves are the backups. Most of my day is sitting in front of a computer, and I don't have time to switch CDs every time I get fed up of a certain band.

I'm sure there's quite a lot of people who download MP3s and other files without paying, but there are also many people who buy their CDs and will convert libraries to MP3, for ease of use.

Tim

Re:p0rn

[Fweeky]

is there any other legitimate reason for Joe User to have so much disk space?

For a start, generally you want to have plenty of free space around to limit fragmentation. Cut about 30% from usable capacity there: 75GB usable -> 52GB you'd want to use.

Now, let's install a few games:

UT2k3 is 2.4GB, more if you have some custom maps. Except UT2k3 also wants the CD; you don't want to constantly swap in originals, so you rip the play CD and mount in daemon tools. That's over 3GB for one game.

NOLF 2 is ~1.6GB, plus easily 50MB+ of savegames, so let's say 1.7GB, plus daemontooled CD, that's 2.4GB.

Ditto for Battlefield 1942, which also needs the CD: 0.9GB + 0.7GB.

That's 3 games, eating a grand total of 7.1GB, or nearly 15% of our available disk space Addons can easily push this higher pretty easily, and savegames soon pile up to sizes that make Word .doc's look lean. I have a lot more than 3 games installed.

Email: I recieve a tonne of it, and I keep all of it, too. This year I chalked up 1.3GB.

Windows: 1.8GB here. Oh, and another 1GB of swap.

Backups: I mirror my ~/ and various other dirs to my Windows machine, that's another 1-2GB of junk, easily.

Logs: I log a lot. IRC, SSH sessions, email, firewall hits, all sorts. If I want to keep a few years worth, I want to be able to, because, damnit, it might be useful! One day I *will* make a nice graph using rrdtool of [whatever I logged].

Music: I'll admit I don't own much, and the RIAA probably would be rather irriated at my collection, but what I do own, I rip; the CD's barely get taken out once, purely because my computer is my sound system, and OGG's are the most useful format for me. 50-100MB per CD, multiplied by however many CD's I might own. 100 CD's isn't uncommon; 5-10GB, assuming I use OGG and not FLAC or another lossless codec. 20GB+ if I go lossless.

Movies: Ditto for MP3's; although legitimate use is probably closer to "If I want to make my own edit of I want the space to do it in". 10-15GB, easy. Plus maybe I want to keep those 6GB VOB's on my HD so I don't have to hunt for the DVD's and risk damaging/exploding them :)

8 DVD's * 6GB = 48GB. Oops. A friend of mine owns over 150 DVD's, I'm sure he'd love a couple of TB to store them in rather than hunt around his shelf for them.

TV: Let's not forget TiVo and friends. Hands up who wants multi-TB HD's for their PVR?

Alternate OS's: When I want to try out RH 8 or FreeBSD-CURRENT, I want the disk space to try it out. 5GB (at least) for the spare partitions.

Cache: 3 browsers, each with 200MB+ cache dirs. 600MB of tiny files that probably bloat to 800MB easily. I might like to give squid half a gig or more.

Source code repositories: I have 1.2GB of tarballs and source direcories, most aren't even full CVS repositories.

Versioning: I dream of a time when my filesystem is one big version controled repository. I want to keep every modification I make to my HD, at least in certain directories. Multiply current requirements by about 100.

That's about 55GB there, and I've not even got onto applications or central storage for all my digital data, or filesystem version control, and my requirements are only going to get bigger while I'm allowed to purchase permanent licenses for data.

Conclusion: Relatively average users could quite happily make use of multiple TB's of quiet, reliable, backupable, rollbackable and relatively portable storage.

Now, which of these count for laptops might be questionable, but then, how many people have a laptop as their primary machine because their £2000 machine cost them their entire tech budget? How many laptops come with DVD's? Wouldn't you like to have all your data at your fingertips wherever you are?

If not, well, you're not geeky enough for SlashDot. Get out ;)

Re:p0rn

[rodgerd]

The hundreds of CDs I most certainly own, and rip to MP3 so I can pipe them around the house via the magic of ethernet. I don't bother with DVDs, but if I did, I'd start needing hundreds of gig, or even terabytes. So yeah, that's all legit.

I only have a low-end digital camera (a little Powershot A10), but I convert the JPEGs it produces into TIFFs so I can work with them without losing any more quality. Even with only low quality pics, it's very easy to rattle through significant amounts of storage. If I were a more avid photographer I'd be using gigabytes a month, between a better quality camera and more pics. If I were an artist a la Dave McKean I'd likewise go through gigs of storage for my digitally composited work.

In a similar vein, I have friends who like to make moves. Setting up your own non-linear editing suite is quite affordable these days, and editing hours of video, even if it's only consumer/prosumer quality, will chew though huge amounts of storage.

Likewise, I know a few musicians who'd be delighted to build their own edit suite (some have), which goes through the storage.

People are more creative than they're given credit for. A lot of the crap from big media companies is trying to keep people in their place as consumers, not creators, and make sure people can't do their own work, still less distribute it.

Finally...

[Quaoar]

Ample gigabytes that I can store up my nose.

IBM seems to have a good track record

[jimmy_dean]

IBM seems to have a good track record in hard drives. This is pretty amazing stuff. It is very refreshing to see a large company innovating.

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[porky_pig_jr]

No, it's not. Apparently you don't follow the news.

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[STREMF]

When you have such a good track record, its a really big deal when things go wrong

IBM DeskStar 75GXP Hard Drive Failures?

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[sixthofmay]

I bought five 45GB 75GXP drives a year and a half ago. Three have failed so far. Doesn't seem like a very good track record to me...

75GXP tales from hell: 75GXP class-action suit filed

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[howlingmoki]

I'm plenty happy with the one IBM hard drive I own. All 256megs of it is still spinning happily away in the BBS-turned-router in the closet, not a bad sector to date and it's been running almost constantly for nine years. I wish the Maxtor (1GB) drive in that machine was 1/10 as reliable as that IBM drive...

sometimes smaller is better?

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[Shardis]

Eh, it's a known problem with certain models of that drive I believe. Some plant screwed up, they were recalled numerous times. I've had three and know of 20-25 more...umm, what were they called, DLTA-3070's... not sure what the trade name was, but they've been running for two years or better damn near non-stop (my three anyway, with heavy disk access/usage and intermittant power cycling) and haven't had any problems yet...

Gah, to be totally honest, two *have* died, but they were both on the same system, and the guy that I put it together for is frighteningly abusive to hardware.

"Arg! Don't kick the server you (unintelligible)!!!"

Some people...

Truly insightful

[NeMon'ess]

Storage space just keeps increasing.

shut up

Re:Truly insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch your typing. Acronym typed wrong: "RFTA" = Really Fucked The Acronym!

Hello? That's not an acronym, it's an abbreviation.

Re:Truly insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

One entry found for acronym.
Main Entry: acronym
Pronunciation: 'a-kr&-"nim
Function: noun
Etymology: acr- + -onym
Date: 1943
: a word (as NATO, radar, or snafu) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term

RTFA is an acronym for Read The Fucking Article

How Much?

[pbinmt]

So, how much porn do you need to cary on a business trip anyway?

Re:How Much?

[CrazyDuke]

Its not how much porn you can carry on a business trip, but how much you can leech while your one the campus/corporate wifi. It beats the hell out of dialup if you can't get broadband at home.

Re:How Much?

[legojenn]

Or have bandwidth limits on your boradband account.

Re:How Much?

[docbrown42]

So, how much porn do you need to cary on a business trip anyway?

All of it.

Re:How Much?

[wombling]

At least you might just have enough disk space for the next version of M$ Office

Who cares

[geek]

The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

What we need is faster drives. I'm personally sick of how slow ATA drives are. Every other aspect of computers has made leaps and bounds in speed, with this one exception. Why? A fast hard drive makes all the difference in system speed.

Re:Who cares

[JohnZed]

If you read the article, you would care, because you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops. Finally!

Re:Who cares

[agnosonga]

I think the point is not necessarily about having bigger drives, but having smaller drives with adequate space.

however, I totally agree. we need faster drives

Re:Who cares

[monthos]

There are improvements in Speed for hard disks, ATA has been getting faster and faster, but if your talking about blazing fast speeds, dont use IDE at all, use SCSI.

Re:Who cares

[Lord_Slepnir]

I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs,

My porn collection is more than that...I need all the storage i can get (Can't leave CDs of it laying around since they tend to get noticed by significant others)

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

The 1% performance increase over a 5400 isn't exactly noticable.

Re:Who cares

[_ph1ux_]

why? will he really get that mad knowing that your watching porn behind his back?

Re:Who cares

[rtaylor]

The only way to speed up harddrives is to pass more bits infront of the drive head in a set amount of time.

Add more platters and/or readheads, spin them faster, or compress the bits so that more pass per revolution as more fit in the same space.

Since anything faster than 10k seems to heat up in a hurry you won't find them in a home system soon. Nor will you find 'large sized' drives soon. Good chance platters could become thinner, and put more into the housing but thats an expensive proposition. Data compression (physical, not mathematical) like IBM is doing is a very effective method of complying with your request.

Re:Who cares

[pVoid]

I don't know why everyone talks about SCSI as if it were some sort of god sent. UDMA 100 is actually faster than SCSI.

The only thing SCSI is better at really is multiple paralel operations on a single chain. (which is useful in RAID kind of stuff -- which you wouldn't really need in a Desktop anyways)

Given that, the price of UDMA sure as hell beats SCSI.

Re:Who cares

[borgasm]

my 640k is working out just fine for me as well

60gb?

I have 280GB on my workstation and another 200GB in a fileserver under my desk....give me more space

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

For the average user storage capacity maybe enough but we are producing more data than ever but the storage means that we have haven't changed much....

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

video editing / sound editing / Porn editing / editing editing

Re:Who cares

[Graspee_Leemoor]

*You* may need more speed from your drives and not see a need for more storage space but a lot of other people, myself included, are crying out for my hard drive space.

Here are some of the reasons: (NB some already mentioned)

* movies, other AVIs like anime (one series of anime is typically about 4-5 Gig).
* CDs (especially take up more space in .flac format)
* video editing - you can have loads of 10G + files all over the place.
* scanned photo collections (hires takes a lot of space)
* games - a > 2Gig install is normal these days.
* ISOs for playstation emulator (These really add up)
* P2P download: if you have a decent amount of things downloading you need AT LEAST 40G just for your temp directory, and another 20G for the incoming folder.

So, I hope you were in fact trolling because your comment really looks like the modern version of "640K should be more than enough for anybody" (whether the Billster said that or not).

graspee

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

How else am I going to get the internet on my computer.. geezz

Re:Who cares

[19Buck]

"What we need is faster drives."

This is already being addressed, and it's coming soon.

http://www.serialata.org/

As it is, current ATA specs rival that of SCSI( though in real world performance, SCSI is stil of course faster, primarily due to queueing.), but ATA is quite a bit more economical for the home user. There is simply no reason for Joe Shmoe sitting at home playing Sims/Unreal/Quake/etc to blow so much money on SCSI since the full potential of it will never be realized.

First generation performance estimates of Serial ATA really aren't all that impressive, but looking forward, serial ATA is going to scale very nicely, providing plenty of performance, without burning a huge hole in your pocket either.

BTW, rotational speed is really indicative of nothing. Average seek speed is a much more important performance indicator.

Granted, typically faster rotation ~SHOULD~ translate into lower seek times, but that's not always true.

Aside from the above URL, I ~could~ cite about a billion different "previews" and discussion articles from various HW news/review sites, but that's pointless. you know how to use www.google.com, have at it if you want more information.

Re:Who cares

[Hadlock]

yeah, but a 7200 rpm drive eats roughly double the power (and produces more heat, too) than a 4800 rpm laptop drive. there's a reason drive makers prefer 4800 rpm drives for battery life...

Re:Who cares

[monthos]

I do use UDMA 100, and it all depends on the kind of SCSI were talking about performance wise, the point is, if you want the speed, its there its just that its of a higher price, cant afford it? (i know i cant) then perhaps its not for you right now.

Re:Who cares

[kaphka]

The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

I have about 200 CDs on my HD right now, losslessly compressed into 43 GB. Many folks have two or three times as much music.

However, more importantly, I also have... oh... let's say 1300 GB worth of DVDs on the shelf. When I can fit all of those on my notebook's HD, along with room for future growth, then I won't need more space. (Of course, by the time that happens, we'll probably have switched to HD-DVDs...)

Re:Who cares

[Metrol]

...you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops.

Which has the additional benefit of acting as an in-flight gyroscope. Never have an unlevel lap again!

Re:Who cares

[bunicula]

I use more than that. Ever do any video editing? I've got one project going right now that is taking up almost 30 gig. And that's _just_ that project, and I'm pretty much a "well armed novice" (lots of tools, little skill).

People I know that do "real" video and audio work chew through space like mad.

Re:Who cares

[CrazyDuke]

You don't know my boss aparently, with his 600GB in IDE drives in one computer. Then there is the 2 100's, 80, and the 36GB total in 10,000+RPM SCSI Drives in his other computer, then there is the 60GB in his other one... Oh, and I have 100GB in my main box alone with about 47GB in my other boxes total. 60GB is enough if you don't do any serious leeching and don't serve much yourself ATM.

Re:Who cares

[be-fan]

Um, I don't really know what kind of people you know, but I know lot's of people who push near 100 GB. My 30 GB laptop drive was barely enough for Windows XP and a few games, and I'm not even much of a gamer. In Linux, my base system (bare-bones GNOME install, full KDE install, including KOffice) takes up 4 GB. Add in a relatively small number of MP3s (6GB) and some videos, etc, and my 30 GB drive is getting cramped, and I barely do anything! I've got one friend who's nearly filled his 100 GB HD with free bluegrass music! Imagine how much HD space a heavy gamer/MP3er uses!

Re:Who cares

[tunah]

P2P download: if you have a decent amount of things downloading you need AT LEAST 40G just for your temp directory, and another 20G for the incoming folder.

You, my friend, have too much money.

Re:Who cares

[be-fan]

Even the multiple operation advantage is diminishing thanks to Tagged Command Queueing, which is implemented in modern ATA drives.

Re:Who cares

[Tower]

Ah, but the IBM drives can speed throttle, so you can run at full speed while on AC power, and run at reduced speed on battery... The best of both worlds (aside from the heat issues).

Re:Who cares

[Com2Kid]

• I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

We have these things called "videos" now and they display moving pictures, with sound even!!!

Why combine that with that new fangled P2P thingy and you got yourself 60GB of data in no time! (ok so about three weeks to a month over broadband)

Re:Who cares

[JebusIsLord]

Actually as areal density increases so does read (but not seek) speed. This is because by packing more bits into one concentric ring, one spin of the drive reads more data even at the same speed (7200rpm usually for a good IDE drive). If you look at the performance of IDE drives they have been increasing steadily for years despite staying at 7200. This is why they keep having to bump the DMA mode, UDMA/33 was fast enough a few years ago on a 7200rpm'er, but slows down modern drives.

Re:Who cares

[Monkelectric]

rant mode: on.

The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years.

God I hate people with attitudes like yours. Doing an ok job is not enough. We went to the moon because it was there, and we make our hard drives bigger because we can Being *able* to increase the storage capacity of a HD is all the reason enough to do it. This is how *progress* is made.

The 30 meg hard drive I had in the late 80's was *huge*. It was big enuf for dos, word perfect, and a videogame. Then a couple years later Wing Commander II came out and I couldn't play it. Why? it required ~30 megs of free HD space. Why was that possible? Because even though 30 megs *seemed* like alot of space whoever made the HD's back then knew we'd want more. What I'm trying to get at is as storage reachs ceartin milestones, different applications become possible. MP3 was invented in 1991 but HD's didnt become a practical storage medium till the mid 90's because HD space was far more valuable than music. HD's have become large enough that you can now comfortably edit audio, and soon they'll be large enough to comfortabaly edit video ... And that my friend is the point of making them larger now.

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

You are apparently not very well informed.
15 years ago one was proud of having a 1:1 interleaved RLL controller that would transfer an amazing 600 kilobytes per second. A high-end server system had drives that could do about twice that speed.
Now, a low-end IDE drive does over 40 MB per second, and this has been increasing all the time over the past years.

Re:Who cares

[vidarh]

I HATE IDE. Both my desktops (work, home) are crippled by shitty IDE controllers and drivers. Moving the data fast enough isn't all of it - the thing that gets to me is the way the machine almost freeze up whenever disk activity is high. That's why I prefer SCSI wherever budgets allow (and I'll certainly be adding a SCSI drive to my home machine soon).

It's depressing to have a 1GHz Athlon system with 128MB RAM and see system responsiveness being worse that classic Pentium servers I used 7-8 years ago whenever there's disk activity...

Re:Who cares

[Hadlock]

iiiiinteresting. so is this supported internally (the drive itself does this), or is it somthing the board has to support? it seems like most people who would end up buying this wouldn't have support for speed throttling, negating this feature. or can all laptop drives speed throttle?

Re:Who cares

[mcdade]

Well then you must only use your computer for email and browsing the internet. Sure then 40 gigs is enough for you, and 60 will last you forever. But if you do any sort of audio video editing or producing then 60 gig's is nothing! There are lots of laptop dj's out there bringing huge amounts of music to play, let alone trying to edit anything. Any one who has done just a bit of video editing work knows that you can eat thru 100gig's super fast. We have a 1/2 TB server just to hold audio tracks. and in reality that fileserver should be about 3 times that amount.

Re:Who cares

[doomdog]

It's depressing to have a 1GHz Athlon system with 128MB RAM

What's depressing is that you actually think you have a decent setup... You know, for $40 or so you can have 512Mb of memory in your system. Try upgrading to a decent amount of memory and you will amazed at the performance increase...

It doesn't really matter what OS you're running, 128mb really isn't enough. 512 on the other hand, is comfortable and sufficient for most tasks.

Re:Who cares

[vidarh]

No, I won't be amazed at the performance increase, because my system rarely touch swap, and regularly have 40-50 MB allocated to buffers. I've happily run Linux with X in 16MB with good performance on systems with a decent SCSI disk.

Your attitude is a good demonstration of what's wrong with advances in computing these days. The main chokepoints for an ordinary home desktop is shitty IO subsystems and bloated software, not RAM or CPU.

When I DO get around to upgrading my machine, a good SCSI controller and a decent disk will be far higher on my list than more memory.

Re:Who cares

[doomdog]

When you find that "good SCSI controller" for less than the $40 you'd spend on more memory, please let me know - I'd like to pick one up myself...

So you're getting good performance with 16 MB, eh? I guess that means you aren't running Mozilla, Open Office or anything related to Java...

Oh, and the "main chokepoint" for "ordinary home desktops" most certainly *is* a lack of memory, but you're just too clueless to understand that. The "ordinary" home desktop is purchased from CompUSA or similar type of store that pushes out commodity boxes by the thousands. These machines never have enough memory installed, because they're shipped with the amount of "minimum recommended memory", per Microsoft's requirements. This turns out to be 64 mb or 128mb in most cases (which for a Windows user, is completely inadequate), although some systems are shipping with 256mb now...

Additionally, these system ship with all sorts of programs pre-loaded in the system tray, in addition to the pre-loaded Microsoft viruses (MS Office quick launch and Find Fast) -- all of which use up precious memory. In this case, adding memory is the EASIEST thing that can be done -- certainly far easier than reducing the size of the bloatware that is being shipped.

The I/O in a home machine is only stressed, really, when the computer has to constantly swap things in and out -- and this happens because there isn't enough RAM. If you bump up the memory, you eliminate a lot of the I/O -- which means that crappy I/O isn't much of a problem anymore....

Quit being a hippie throwback to the old days... Yes, it would be nice if we didn't need so much memory, but the fact is that we DO need all the memory we can stuff into the machine. My laptop, with a 486-25 and 12MB of memory (running OS/2 2.11) was "faster" and snappier to use than a Pentium III-500 with 256MB running Windows NT... That's unfortunate, but that's the way things are.

Right now, in today's environment, the BEST and CHEAPEST and EASIEST and MOST NOTICEABLE improvement to your system can be achieved by simply adding more memory until you get to the 512MB mark (for now). And you're complaining about how you don't want to spend $40????

Re:Who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought a few gigs was a lot... damn.

Re:Who cares

[Reece400]

How would the speed throtling work?? it sounds like it could be a Major cause of problems to me....

Reece,

Re:Who cares

[Hadlock]

i'm guessing there's some sort of a variable resistor somewhere, that decreases the speed. somthing upstream of the variable resistor would know how much the speed would be decreased, and the read head would be adjusted accordingly. i doubt there'd be any extra moving parts in a throttled hard drive than a normal one.

Re:Who cares

[vidarh]

I didn't say I'd spend less than $40 on a SCSI controller. I certainly won't, and I'll spend quite a bit more on a good drive. But that money will be a hell of a lot better spent than spending $40 on more memory for a box that already has 128MB and practically never swaps.

As for what I've used to run on a 16MB box, you're right: No Mozilla, Open Office or anything related to Java. That wasn't the point. The point is that even if I just start X on my box at home, with 128MB of RAM, and still have more than 64MB left any heavy disk activity will still make the box slow to a crawl, even for basic things like moving windows. When doing the same on an old, classic Pentium box I used to run, with 16MB RAM and a good SCSI controller and disk, the same thing was never a problem.

You demonstrate very clearly that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. The issue isn't IO throughput - IO throughput is good in my current system, but at the expense of good interactivity.

And most home users DO notice this, whenever they try to start an application. Try starting OpenOffice on a system with a crappy IDE controller, regardless of the amount of RAM. Try the same with Mozilla. The only benefit extra RAM will buy you in a system that hardly ever swaps in the first place is caching of more apps in the buffercache, but that will only help you if you keep starting the same apps. In my case I tend to load Mozilla and Evolution and keep them running more or less permanently (and my system still rarely swaps, in fact to verify that swapping didn't affect the performance much, I turned off my swap partition and had no problems but the performance issues were still as bad).

If you truly believe that anyone would see significant improvements from adding more memory when their system rarely swaps, and you rarely start any large apps more than once after booting the machine, then you're deluded.

Yes, for your example, if someone is running a setup that waste tons of memory at startup, they might benefit. But that's not the case here, and not even that common - I've never come across a manufacturer that don't adapt their setup to perform reasonably with the amount of memory it ships with, including keeping the amount of crap that gets loaded at startup down in "low memory" machines.

And if you think I'm complaining about not wanting to spend $40, you obviously can't even read properly, considering that what I've been saying is that I'd prefer to spend my money on getting a proper SCSI setup, and that will cost significantly more than $40. But contrary to buying more meory, it won't be money straight down the toilet.

Fact is, we don't NEED more memory, unless we keep on running more and more bloated software. I run my share of bloated software, but certainly not enough to need any more than 128MB, and more most of what I do I'd have no problems working with much less without noticing. Same goes for CPU. My current box has a 1GHz Athlon, but I'm practically never close to 100% CPU utilization - even passing 20% would be uncommon. That's not what slow my system down. Disk is. Not primarily transfer rates, though they suck too (though the gap in transfer rates between IDE and SCSI is closing). Whats much more important is latency, and for cheap IDE controllers the way they slow the rest of the system to a crawl whenever I do IO.

This is a growing problem with low cost PC's: All the emphasis is on raising CPU speeds etc., and the way they finance that is by cutting corners all over the place, including junk like Winmodems (which has the same issues - ever tried a Conexant based one under Linux? It makes the box extremely unresponsive while dialling, for instance) and cheap IDE. Those things are quickly becoming much more noticable on low cost PC's than memory limitations.

Re:Who cares

[Reece400]

I suppose that something of the sort could work,, but IBM drives are already finicky at times... i could see it getting out of calbration, and it acccidentally overwriting the wrong data etc.. maybe i'm just afraid of change tho too... only time will tell...

Reece,

If these laptops are at college...

[grungebox]

...then the extra space is being used for three things (all during class):
1)pr0n
2)AIM
3)Anime

The score is now IBM: 1, Education: 0 (unless you're in a class about sending anime porn to your friends via IM)

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[lowtekneq]

AIM? I happen to be in a highschool were students have laptops, and are connected to the internet via 802.11b. I'm also an "assistant admin" (whatever you want to call it) and from the amount of bandwidth that is being sucked up, and from what i see in class, most people are downloading mp3s. Anime or video of any sort isn't so much of a problem because someone can't download that in one sitting.

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[Anonymous Coward]

score:

me: +1
them: ???
wft?: profit!

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[Mitchell Mebane]

You forgot teh ROMz.

Seriously. My collection of arcade games and discontinued video game systems is almost 30 gigs. And I only have ~20% if everything.

But anime is definately by biggest space eater. Cowboy Bebop + Hand Maid May + Gundam + several others.

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[Anonymous Coward]

God, from the quote I see that you are probably a pathetic latin geek like I am.

For those who don't know, when semper ubi sub ubi is translated word-for-word it comes out as:

always, where, under, where

Always wear underwear. Pathetic, I love it.

Here's one for you:

Tuus mater laboro in via.

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[The Cydonian]

I happen to be in a highschool were students have laptops

... but not in a high school where they teach spelling and grammar?

Not to troll, but this is really getting irritating folks; please, please PLEASE check your posts before posting!

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[phreaknb]

They may not have time to download big movies/anime, but they do have time to download a music video, or short video clips [sick things (faces of death, death things), or funy video clips]. In my english class someone sits next to me and does it all during class with kazzaa.

Re:If these laptops are at college...

[Anonymous Coward]

/me bleches a prolonged, wet, and highly modluated beer belch at Teh Cydonian..

/me perviews post.

/me satsifed with teh misspelings...

Lighten up, d00d.

Aereal Density measured in bits not bytes

[SirDaShadow]

FYI when they say an area of 70gb they mean 70gigabits per square inch not bytes...

Wait

[dubbayu_d_40]

I thought IBM sold their HD business to Hitachi?

Aren't they getting out?

[Faizdog]

Isn't IBM leaving the Harddrive market? I'm glad they're working on this though. IBM has recently been on the cutting edge of personal computing devices with being the driving force beyond harddrive research and technoligies such as MRAM.

Re:Aren't they getting out?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, they're not manufacturing hard drives but they are researching.

Re:Aren't they getting out?

[siegesama]

Yes and no. Hitachi bought out that sector, and rather than shifting things around, Hitachi and IBM are forming a child company (whose name I do not know). The new company exists on IBM location, on IBM infrastructure.

Re:Aren't they getting out?

[ecki]

The new company will first be owned by Hitachi (70%) and IBM (30%) together. After three years, it will be owned 100% by Hitachi.

Re:Aren't they getting out?

[ashpool7]

Right. IBM is a patent company. They just sold the unit that manufactures the newfangled stuff that comes out of the labs. They kept the labs. If you can't sell drives, at least you can still sell technology to other manufacturers.

ObMonty Python

[sconeu]

And now, a man with a hard drive up his nose!

Re:ObMonty Python

[Masami Eiri]

*man sticks his finger in his nose*
*a loud grinding and clicking sound ensues*
We're sorry, but the man with a hard drive up his nose has been canceled due to technical problems. Now here is a man with a DVD player up his nose.

Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Wake me up when they come out with 100GB backup drives.

Looks like the only hard drive backup solution these days is another hard drive.

Re:Backup

[coryboehne]

Of course the backup tech is actually getting more expensive than the hard drives are.... Consider trying to backup an 80 gig HDD onto 250meg zip disks...... that would really suck, or even onto 650-700 MB CD-Roms, that would still take 115 disks... at a cost of 50c each that's still 50 bucks, and when you consider the weeks time needed to make the back up... you see my point, the hard drives are cheaper backup storage than most other solutions.... Maybe this is a good thing though, consider, 1 small hard drive for backups, or,,,, a library of other media... I'll take the hard drive please.......

Re:Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

for less backups, try less rough anal sex.

Re:Backup

[Brian_rts]

Well yeah for the home user backing up a 80+gb drive I'd recommend another HD.. but in the enterprise market there is plenty of storage vendors that can do 100gb native per tape..

Re:Backup

[Loki_1929]

"Consider trying to backup an 80 gig HDD onto 250meg zip disks...... that would really suck, or even onto 650-700 MB CD-Roms, that would still take 115 disks... at a cost of 50c each that's still 50 bucks, and when you consider the weeks time needed to make the back up... you see my point, the hard drives are cheaper backup storage than most other solutions"

I have approx 630GB of disk storage and less than 100GB free. Backups are not an option, however thanks to File Scavenger, I'm at least able to run JBOD arrays without worrying about losing data. I just went through a clean install as my system partition became completely corrupted. Bought this product to try it out, and voila, everything recovered nicely. (Sorry kiddies, I'm pretty sure it only works on NTFS) Suddenly, I'm not nearly so worried about backups. (yes, I'll plug software that TRULY impresses me) I was considering tape backups, but I can see something going wrong on tape 15 or something. I could buy more hard drives, but I end up needing the space anyway. Video editing and database work tends to eat up HUGE amounts of space. :/

If anyone has a reasonable suggestion for backups, be my guest. I've considered DVD-r's, DVD-RW's, CD-R/W's, Tapes, and more hard drives, but nothing seems to really offer a solution.

P.S. Before the trolls/kids start with their "that's a lot of pr0n d00dz!", I have a small amount of porn, only a few gigs, so chill.

Re:Backup

[Akumapwr]

You can find a DVD burner for less than $199 if you shop around well. Also DVD-R media is less than $1 from ebay or some online sites. So let's do the math..

$199 for a DVD burner
50x $1 disks

250$ for 50 x 4.5gb = 225gb (dvd aren't 4.7gb that's a marketing trick).

So for $250 bucks you got yourself a dvd that can be used in anyone's dvd drive and is good for 100 years in the storage box.

Not to mention you have a DVD burner too =)

Re:Backup

[karnal]

Heck, try using tape sometime. Zip disks are expensive (and a little unreliable, the last time I used them anyways...)

I've got a DDS3 drive that was donated to me (ahem) and has worked perfectly since the installation. However, I almost balked at the current retail price of tapes. I believe Microcenter wants 10-12$ PER TAPE, of which, if you're storing MP3's, you only get about 11gig out of a tape. (The hardware compression is not good on decently compressed files, and actually ends up eating more space than the raw data would.....)

So, for 80 gigs (estimation), you need 8 tapes. Minimum 10$/tape, that is 80$. May as well buy another drive; let alone the speed of backup / restore and the tape change duties.

I've won 2 bids on ebay and now have 30+ tapes, brand new, for around 60$ total investment. Now I've got enough tapes to do 2 full backups of my server, and have some spares for incrementals and "oddball" machines. But sometimes, the time invested makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get a removable rack + a few 120gig drives........ and sell the tape drive....

Re:Backup

[addaon]

Where's that 100 years number from? I generally assume (based on experience) that CDs are good for 10-15 years in the box; I have no sense of the lifetime of DVDs, but I'd be surprised if it's that much higher. Never mind that $1 DVDs from ebay are almost certainly the cheapest and lowest quality possible; I'd be very reluctant to assume more than 5 years for such a disc. Any source?

Re:Backup

[IndependentVik]

Well, I don't have any information on the lifetime of DVDs, but I know I've heard a quote bandied about on /. a lot that Kodak photo CDs supposedly last for 100 years.

. . . with 95% confidence, 95% of the population of KODAK Writable CD Media will have a data lifetime of greater than 217 years if stored in the dark at 25C, 40% Relative Humiditiy . . .

Source can be found here.

Of course, these disks are stored under ideal conditions, but my own personal experience is that CDs, if handled gingerly, can last a long while. Whether you want to blame the media or the user for the typical lifespan of a cd, which is usually quite a bit shy of 100 years, is your perogative.

Re:Backup

[csnydermvpsoft]

It'd be cheaper to get another hard drive.

My company is run out of the house next to mine, and we have a cat5 cable running under the driveway to connect the two. This allows me to have a backup server at home that provides automatic offsite backup. I put together a machine that includes a 2ghz Athlon and two 120 gig 7200 RPM drives in a RAID array for backup. The box runs Gentoo Linux and uses BackupPC for automatic unattended backups.

Of course, most people don't have the extra cash for that lying around (I had the business credit card, hehehe) but it is certainly easier and more cost effective than tape.

BTW, the backup server backs up around 10 machines (mix of Linux and Windows) with around 120 gig of data. It keeps up to two weeks of backups at a time (two full backups and twelve incremental backups). Current HD usage is about 33% due to compression.

Re:Backup

[Rinikusu]

And, in all honesty, I have a feeling you'll always be able to find a machine (ancient or no)with a working IDE port to plug it into (with the assumption that the HD works). Can't exactly say the same thing for other media that seems to have gone by the wayside (I think /. had a story about VCR backup tapes and the like).

Re:Backup

[Wdomburg]

>Cool! Wake me up when they come out with 100GB
>backup drives.

You want to be woken up in 1999? Sorry, you'll have to wait until I invent a time machine. How about I just wake you up when the 200GB native LTO cartidges come out next year?

Matt

Re:Backup

[MeepMeep]

This site has a longevity review of CD-Rs, but not DVD-R, sorry...

http://www.silverace.com/dottyspotty/issue12.htm l

Re:Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

Where the hell did you get a 2ghz Athlon? They don't even make those yet.

RIAA

[imsirovic5]

Sweeeeeeet...

Now RIAA is gonna be even more pissed at me ;o)))

smaller form factors

[inepom01]

The article mentions how they are cramming more space into existing form factors. I am guessing the 2.5" laptop HD standard. I would like to see them introduce new smaller form factors for ultra-portables.

Maybe they can finally cram an HD into a PDA? A 20 gig HD coupled with a Crusoe would make for a nifty phone/computer.

Re:smaller form factors

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

Magnetic drives are probably too fragile and sensitive for use in ultraportables. However, this technology will probably see use in the ultraportable market, once it gets going.

Re:smaller form factors

[dhovis]

What, like the IBM microdrive? You can put that in a PDA. Same for the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive the iPod uses.

Re:smaller form factors

[djmurdoch]

They've already introduced a smaller form facter, the 1" microdrive. They currently only go up to 1 gig, but presumably that will increase over time.

Re:smaller form factors

[demaria]

Size is not the factor in traditional hard drives when putting it in a PDA. Power consumption is.

Re:smaller form factors

[Wesley Felter]

The smaller form factors are PCMCIA and CompactFlash. Toshiba makes a laptop with a 20GB PCMCIA drive (the same one that's in the iPod).

Re:smaller form factors

[zbuffered]

A 20 gig HD coupled with a Crusoe would make for a nifty phone/computer.

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of them.

Wait, where have I heard that before?

Re:smaller form factors

[ottffssent]

Check out Toshiba's 1.8" hard drives. They're found (surprise) in Toshiba's ultra-portables, as well as the Apple iPod, and other devices.

While the reduction from 2.5" to 1.8" doesn't seem like much (about 25%), it's actually enormous in terms of platter area. A 2.5" diameter platter has almost 10 square inches of surface area, whereas a 1.8" diameter platter has just over half that. The situation becomes even more pronounced when you account for a drive motor in the center. That's why Tosh's drive tops out at 20G whereas IBM's talking about an 80G drive in the 2.5" form factor.

Great

[eamber]

That is just wonderful. More IBM drives that can be RMAed. I'm not trying to flame IBM here, but I honestly RMAed one of their drives 5 times before I gave up and used it as a 30 gig paperweight. I thought they were out of the hard drive business?

gB not gb

[pctainto]

There's a little difference there. Call me a troll but I have a point.

Re:gB not gb

[cgadd]

> Call me a troll but I have a point.

Wear a hat, no one will notice....

70GB/sq in.?!

[NotAnotherReboot]

70GB/sq in.?! Those IBM engineers must be smoking something..and it sure ain't pixie dust.

Re:70GB/sq in.?!

[DarkSkiesAhead]

70GB/sq in.?! Those IBM engineers must be smoking something..and it sure ain't pixie dust.

gigibits. whose smoking what now?

I did

[geek]

but 7,200 RPM's just doesn't do it for me, not since I had a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive 5 YEARS AGO!

Re:I did

[FuegoFuerte]

Think for a second... 10,000 RPM SCSI drive 5 years ago... how big was it? What was the areal density? I'm not going to bother to do the math right now, but a 40 GB, 4200 rpm laptop drive may very well have the same I/O speeds (or a lot better) as a 2.1GB, 10,000 rpm scsi drive from 5 years ago would've had. As areal density increases, I/O speed increases when linear velocity remains constant. Think about it, and don't hurt yourself. :).

Parent: +1, Insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to say that myself, but this dude beat me to it. It's the truth.

Real hard-hitting commentary there, CowboyNeal. Way to go. You'll get that Pulitzer in no time.

Re:Parent: +1, Insightful

[Anonymous Coward]

You pathetic piece of shit, your post got modded down, build a bridge and get over it.

Fucking anonymous coward reply to your own post, sheesh!

Stupid me.

[eddy]

Stupid me, I first though improved in the context of IBM drive tech referred to MTBF, not capacity.

Back to the usual mudslinging from SCSI-only-people.

What to use this space for.

[FuzzyDaddy]

I like to think of it as a challenge. I just bought a new hard drive, and I can save all my photographs on them. (Not that I don't need to back up to CD-ROM...)

What to do with 10 times as much storage? I could start keeping home videos on there. Or store all the network traffic that comes on and off my computer indefinitely. Or keep track of the voltage waveform coming in off the power lines, and post processing it after a year to look for frequency shifts.

But this talk of "no-one but video pirates would need this" is silly. Just give it to me, I'll think of something.

Re:What to use this space for.

[jafuser]

Or keep track of the voltage waveform coming in off the power lines, and post processing it after a year to look for frequency shifts.

Curious... What significance can this information provide? It seems like there is some significance to it, though I can't immediately put my finger on it.

Re:What to use this space for.

[FuzzyDaddy]

What significance can this information provide?

Significance? Well, the frequency of the power is a good indication of the load on the grid as a whole (the cycle slows down under heavy loads, and speeds up under lighter loads.) Voltage monitoring tells you about power consumption close to you.

Whether this is significant is a matter of taste, I guess. But wouldn't it be cool to keep track of the load on the power grid? I think so. Of course, my wife tells me I'm a nerd...

Re:What to use this space for.

[tgrigsby]

Home videos? BAH! I laugh at your puny imagination. I'd use it to store music videos. What with the demise of MTV into dumb-and-dumber shlock programs, I've got to get my dose of Chemical Brothers and ATB from somewhere. Enter the 'net!

Whatever, I can definitely fill that disk....

*whew*

[just another cynic]

I'll finally have enough space to back up /dev/zero

Old solution. It's called raid

[xtal]

Get a raid card or raid-supporting mobo. Run striped. I have a two way striped raid at work that is very, very fast, constructed from IDE drives. It benches favorably against single high-speed SCSI drives for a small fraction of the price. I am unsure of 4-way striping is available on IDE drives, but would improve things even more.

Stuck on the notebooks though. Solution there is to put as much ram as possible in them so you don't have to hit the disk much.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[jandrese]

I hope you keep good backups, because that two ATA drive plex is more than twice as likely to fail as the a single high-speed SCSI drive. Your MTBF is much shorter now since loosing either drive will be fatal.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[xtal]

I get rid of drives after a year, or put them doing something not that important. My drives are properly cooled. I have never had a hard drive fail in 10 years of computing with them, although the 4 years before I got a HD kinda sucked.

What's the big deal with backup? I have all my data online in two places. Work files get dumped to CVS, which is backed up, and as I decomission drives, I use them for redundant copies of media.

No worries about backup or MTBF here. If it bothers you, get 4 drives and run a stripe/mirror configuration on them, and use a regimen as above. Really, there isn't a problem that I can see.

This whole MTBF thing is blown way out of proportion IMHO.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[Uller-RM]

Four-channel ATA-100 RAID-5 cards can be had for under $200 today. Even if you only used one drive per channel and four 70GB drives that's still 210GB of space that can recover from a single drive failure, with solid read speeds and acceptable write speeds. (To recover from two or more drives failing at once means moving to P+Q redundancy, aka RAID-6, and you start moving into price ranges beyond the reach of the average hobbyist.)

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[skeedlelee]

6 channel ATA-100 raid 0+1/0/1/3/5 ain't much more. You can get one from Promise for about $250, w/out memory though (one cheap DIMM). Seems to me things only get really expensive if you care about hotswap capabilities, which the average hobbist probably doesn't need. And 6 disks begins to get expensive, even at today's prices. 'course 3 way striped and fully mirrored does sound pretty nice.

PROMISE SUPERTRAK SX6000 ULTRA-ATA/100 6-CHANNEL RAID 5 CONTROLLER CARD NO MEMORY - needs 1 DIMM

On a related note. This is a PCI card. What's the bandwidth for PCI? If this were all RAID 0, would 6 fold striped ATA-100 out pace the bandwidth of a 32bit-33MHz PCI slot?

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[afidel]

If your going to go 4 drives just go raid5, you get an extra drives capacity, sustained reads will be faster, random reads will vary by controller but probably comperable, and of course writes will probably be slower due to parity writes.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[afidel]

umm most 4 channel raid5 cards can swamp 32-33 pci. If you only have 32-33 pci then just get a 4 channel card and get slighty bigger drives, it will cost less and be just as fast for most applications.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[Uller-RM]

Assuming that you get a decent bus-mastering card and that the only other cards on the bus are the NICs (i.e. the video card is AGP) you can probably do 4-way with 33MHz... barely. If you want to do any more than that you should start looking into 64bit transfers.

There's a reason that SGI's unfortunately short-lived NT boxen had a single PCI-64 slot on the Cobalt mobos, and that every configuration sold put a drive controller in there. Those were unbelievably sexy boxes for their day. At a time when the GF2 was a few months old and the 1GHz P3 had just been announced, I was able to load up six windowed 640x480 copies of Q3 and have them botmatch each other in q3dm12. ^_^ Dual 733MHz P3s, 512MB of RAM (of which 192MB was dedicated to framebuffering and texturing... selectable in a graphical BIOS)... too bad they went down the tube along with the rest of SGI.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[Snover]

I'd like to know where you found a four-channel ATA/100 RAID-5 card for under $200. I really want a RAID-5 array but haven't been able to find the proper controller.

We're losing our heads

[davecb]

There is a downside to high areal densities. If you need eight drives striped together get the bandwidth for video, for example, you have to buy eight times 80 GB of space to keep the same speed.

Unfortunately the departmental accountant knows you only need 160 GB total, so he cancels the other six "unneeded" drives, not realizing it's the eight heads you needed.

--dave

Re:We're losing our heads

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when did they stop manufacturing lower than the current highest size?

Re:We're losing our heads

[Anonymous Coward]

Just stripe smaller units. Base price for hard drives have gone down over time. Also aerial densities increase the speed from the platter to the buffer.

I don't know what you are concerned about at all.

Source Code...

[hackwrench]

Those source trees can grow pretty big, you know!

yeah

[geek]

I do use SCSI for servers etc, thats just common sense. But consider ATA is still slower than SCSI was 5 years ago, or heck even 7 years ago. That's just pathetic. SCSI is just to expensive to be sensible for the average Joe.

Re:yeah

[nevershower]

Apple used SCSI on nearly all of their computers from the late 80s until '97. That included the consumer Performa models.

Re:yeah

[Masami Eiri]

I remember that... I used to have a Performa 575.. CD Rom drive died, and it cost me $60 to replace. It was only a 4x

Re:yeah

[Hes Nikke]

Apple used SCSI on nearly all of their computers from the late 80s until '97. That included the consumer Performa models.

bzzzzz, i'm so sorry, but Quada/LC/Performa 630 series released in 1994 used an IDE hard drive.

thankyou for playing, as a consolation prize we have a 10 lifetime supply of spam, enjoy :)

Re:yeah

[nevershower]

Yes, but they did have SCSI port on the back. =)

Re:yeah

[Tassach]

What part of "nearly" didn't you get? If apple made N models and N-1 had SCSI instead of IDE, that qualifies as "nearly all" in my book.

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record-PT Barnum

[Anonymous Coward]

" No, it's not. Apparently you don't follow the news."

Shhhhh....we need someone to jumpstart the economy.

don't people learn English anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't people learn English anymore, and why do we accept stories from illiterates?

Gigabyte is abbreviated GB (gb means nothing, but is closer to gigabit), and its has no apostrophe.

Re:don't people learn English anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

English is pretty much trashed even when it comes directly from the mouths of Oxford English majors. Try conjugating some verbs sometime.

Re:don't people learn English anymore?

[TallPeter]

Yes we do - even in Europe! However, it seems to me that many of us are lazy when it comes to pushing the shift button. So it may not have anything to do with being illiterate. It may have something to do with

1. difficulties hitting the right keys on the keyboard
2. not being a native English speaker (the internet crosses any border - and so does /.)
3. focusing on contents rather than form
4. not giving a damn

I think everybody understood "gb" in this context.

Re:don't people learn English anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes we do - even in Europe!

More like only in Europe. Most native English speakers speak English quite poorly and write at least as badly.

Re:don't people learn English anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the author actually meant gigabits, in which case "Gb" would have been the correct notation.

It's this laziness that leads to a lack of understanding. Is it really so hard to be precise and use "b" when bit is intended and "B" when byte is intended?

Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[TullyTyro]

Drive space is increasing at a rate that is directly proportional to the bloated size of Mircosoft Operating Systems.

1991 - DOS 6.22 about 5MB for the OS on a 40MB HDD
1996 - Win95 about 300MB for the OS on a 1.7GB HDD
2002 - WinXPPro about 2.5GB for the OS on a 40GB HDD.
2007 - LonghornSP4 about 20GIG!? for the OS on maybe 400GB drives?

How far out am I? Probably heaps but you get the idea.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[RebelTycoon]

How about we do this as a ratio... Its later into the evening and your stats require me to think.

1991 - DOS 6.22 about 12% of HDD
1996 - Win95 about 17%of HDD
2002 - WinXPPro about 6% of HDD.
2007 - LonghornSP4 about 5% of HDD?

I really don't see the point of your post. The OS is shrinking proportionally to the amount of storage bought by the average consumer. The OS does more then it ever did (good or bad), but still leaves ample room for true bloat apps like MS Office, movies, and MP3s.

1991 - DOS 6.22 about 5MB for the OS on a 40MB HDD
1996 - Win95 about 300MB for the OS on a 1.7GB HDD
2002 - WinXPPro about 2.5GB for the OS on a 40GB HDD.
2007 - LonghornSP4 about 20GIG!? for the OS on maybe 400GB drives?

Thanks for coming out.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[Doppler00]

Don't forget about some of the Linux distros becoming bloated. Redhat 8.0 for example uses at minimum 400MB for a standard install and my redhat install was about 2.5GB. Seems like redhat is starting to catch up on Microsoft's.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[lostchicken]

I'll bet that install come with almost every app you use under Linux, right?

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[TullyTyro]

fair call...but i was just pulling out figures from memory.i was more interested in seeing if others get the same sort of figures.
agree with the applications bloating out as well - probably more so than the OS.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right, and I am sure Windows also installs with multiple office and word processing programs, multimedia applications, a gazillion different utilities for services like IRC and instant messaging, lots of games, and at least two different graphical environments, right?

Oh, wait, no it doesn't. I guess Windows is just bloated, with nowhere near the same amount of features in the same amount of space.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[be-fan]

The difference is that 2.5 GB of RedHat has tons more tools than the 1.5 GB of Windows XP. Give me 1.5 GB, I can fit the base install, KDE, KOffice, and a bunch of utilities, along with a full development environment.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP Pro is not 2.5GB. Well maybe yours is, but what the hell do you install ... unless you're taking MS Office into account but then I still don't know how that totals 2.5GB. I had XP Pro installed for awhile and it ate up something just shy of 800MB.

So its more like 800/4000 = 2%

I seriously doubt Longhorn will be 20GB unless it comes with some DVD movies installed on the HD. If it was that big, it would have to come on like 13-15 CDs or 2 DVDs - maybe more like 1.5-2.5GB max. Although big enough since you dont get any office applications, compiler, etc... that you would with the equivalent "workstation" install on a Linux distro.

You're just being stupidly anti-MS.

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude! Ok, check it out... I have 25GB allocated to Mandrake 9.0 . In hind sight, I realize that that is really generous. Lets compare some numbers, shall we?

Windows Partition = 50GB
Linux = 25GB

My collection of WinApps that don't have Linux counterparts on my box:
NWN
HalfLife: Platinum
Enzip
QuickTime
about 1GB of Pictures
Comcrap *ahem* Compaq tools
NAV

Linux Apps that don't have Windows counterparts or Extra Linux apps:
Oh, helluvalotta games - 27... in KDE. I shut off the Mandrake menu, so I KNOW there are more. Sure, none match NWN, but think about it... 27+. Plus, I have tux racing. Who needs any other game... really?
A couple IDEs - I have Dev-C++ for Win32
A few dozen text editors
I have at least 3 different ways for each: printing, viewing, and editing images
2 Word processors... Kword and OpenOffice
A couple AIM, ICQ, and IRC clients
About 5 (Konqueror, Galeon, Lynx, Opera, Mozilla) web browsers - 3 in windows (Moz, IE, Pheonix)
At least 3 different manuals for every single app. (man, info, and html docs)
Themes comming out my ears! I have copies of every major and minor OS as a theme on my drive, though I prefer greymatrix. Awesome theme for KDE. Especially with the Conectiva Crystal 0.8 icon set.

Now, disk usage:
Remember:
50GB = WinXP
25GB = Mandrake 9.0

My NT usage = 36.6%
My /var/www usage = 9.7% of 500MB /var = 8.3% of 3.1GB
/ = 12% of 2GB /usr = 40.5% of 5.8GB /home = 3.7% of 12.5GB /var/ftp = 6.7% of 981MB

That ammounts to 3423.03 MB used in Linux, as compared to 18300MB used in Windows! Come on! No contest. Yeah, ok. Take away the pictures, the NWN, NAV, and 5.5GB of personal files... So Ok, Windows really only takes 9300MB. Still... that is 3 times larger... give or take.

To have Linux functionality in Windows requires a heck of a lot more space! I have a webserver and an FTP (has yet to be setup in Linux) running in Windows and Linux... well FTP isn't running in Linux, but it is there. I have chat clients running in both. PIMs, hotsync utilities, calculators, patience (love that game), etc, etc, ad nauseum in both! But who takes more room? XP. And it is not from the slick luna interface that I find disgusting because that is easy enough to put in KDE.

This is interesting... Mandrake 9.0 will apparently install in 100MB. Sure, it uses a whopping 64MB of RAM (a lot for a Linux distro, I think), but I think Windows needs at least a few GIGs and it only really runs well with 256MB of RAM. The bloat you are talking about in Linux is your imagination. During install, deselect a few dozen packages. Who needs 4 different ways to read internet news anyway?

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you need all Linux software you have installed. But my Debian testing takes about 1.5GiB including ungzipped and untarred and compiled kernel sources, lots of developmen libraries and headers, complete Tex, OpenOffice... simply all I need. Sure you can install all eight CDs, or a DVD (when will M$ give us that much amount of data?), but you will never know, what you have installed and will never use.
Sorry for my English, I'm not native English speaker. Sorry for OT.

hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

make laptop physical drive size standard across the board (for desktop harddrives too). then increase harddrive speed and space and all will be well. in harddrive land.

Obligitory D to the C First Post.

[Anonymous Coward]

D to the Motherfuckin' C Niggaz!

Re:Obligitory D to the C First Post.

[TullyTyro]

LOL. You're about post #64 clown.
Some people are too stupid to fp.

Pixie Dust, eh?

[Gavitron_zero]

Why don't them make the next enhancement to the name?

Re:Pixie Dust, eh?

[RebelTycoon]

Why don't them make the next enhancement to the name?

Maybe they just should call it SMACK, or ROCKS...

Either way dude, lay off the cheap stuff for in 10 words you managed to say jack shit. Though in one regard, our politicans say hundreds of words and still say jackshit... the big difference is they usually put them in the correct order.

Speed

[hackwrench]

But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities, and a 10000 RPM drive would be very fast indeed.

Re:Speed

[AJWM]

But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities

Faster at transfer rate, yes.

Faster at track-to-track seek time, very likely (tracks being closer together).

But faster in rotational latency, which is the major bottleneck, no fscking way.

Re:Speed

[Akumapwr]

Not exactly true, higher densities usually means lower seek rates. Especially I would imagine that positioning with these drives would take a little while longer since they have to be so precise.

I own a 15k Seagate drive, seek times with hdtach are around 5.2ms while my ide western digital special edition is around 13ms.

The seagate drive gets around 60-45mb/sec while my western digital is around 45-35mb/sec. Now on one of my systems which contains the same exact hardware *and* software my ide drive usually spends quite a deal of time seeking around which really slows things down. The bottleneck here is *not* the transfer rates.

Windows, Linux, or Mac OS. All these operating systems have 10k+ files and most of the 'daily joe' people will never ever run the defragementer so what happens?

Well you guessed it, data transfer speeds barely mean anything when the drive is seeking all day! I'd rather have 18gb flash drives instead of all this fancy 1000gb per square inch mobojombo.

Re:Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The major speed bottleneck in seek time is in moving the head between cylinders. After moving it to the correct cylinder, the drive has to wait for it to settle down enough for reading and writing. This process takes several rotations of the disk. Meanwhile, average rotational delay is exactly the time it takes for half a rotation of the disk.

Re:Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

The other thing to keep in mind is that with huge drives, all your data will be on a single track and the rest will be empty, so your seek times go down even more.

It's seems as though...

[esobofh]

Hard Drive Manufacturers pour alot of money into researching how much more life they can get out of their existing manufacturing equipment and processess. Too bad that money wasn't spent on doing things in an entirely different, better way.

Magnetic medium.. these guys are still using 8-track technology.. c'mon. Change is good.. let's see some of that lazeropticalneuro shit happenin..

Re:It's seems as though...

[Anonymous Coward]

You wanna bitch about this? How about you go out and make some of that "lazeropticalneuro shit happenin..", no? Yeah that's what I thought, so shut your pie hole assclown

Re:It's seems as though...

[esobofh]

Not bitching at all.. I thought it was a healthy bit of encouragement for all of those reading at IBM.

That said though, if they want to front the bucks for it, I'd gladly lead an R&D team for this purpose.

IBM: Email me for Resume, and salary expectations. Um yeah, buh bye.

Re:It's seems as though...

[ArsonPerBuilding]

see some of that lazeropticalneuro shit happenin..


Are you willing to donate your brain for the sake of hard drive space? The research will only go on as long as people are donating good, clean brains. Yours may be questionable, but /. needs to start a donate-a-brain fund for this idea.

Simple Sandwich

[mdechene]

It involves sandwiching a three-atom-thick layer of the precious metal ruthenium between two magnetic layers. That seemingly simple step allowed researchers to increase the areal storage density.

I'm pretty sure that making a 3 atom sandwich doesn't seem simple to me.

Re:Simple Sandwich

[Jace of Fuse!]

I'm pretty sure that making a 3 atom sandwich doesn't seem simple to me.

You aren't kidding. And the number it would take to satisfy my hunger would take several lifetimes just to count.

what about heat

[Zod000]

Does this mean that they may make drives with the same capacity as current ones that are smaller or put out less heat? I don't know about the rest of you, but any less heat coming from my laptop would be a big plus. My lap feels like its been slow roasted after I use my laptop for an hour or so.

Re:what about heat

[be-fan]

laptop HDs are still 4800 rpm. They don't put out much heat at all. What really puts out heat are those mobile P4s. I can feel mine through my 3/4" wooden desk. You *definately* don't want to use P4 laptops on your lap, not if you ever want to have children anyway. That'd be a funny statistic to know. Are P4 laptop owners less fertile than the population as a whole? What is it, 50% drop in sperm count for each 10 degrees over normal temp?

Re:what about heat

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'd rather have a less heat/noise yet small laptop formfactor.

The IBM drives would certainly be nice, maybe toss a C3 processor on the thing. I'm half tempted to get an iBook, but I really have an aversion to anything apple-flavored.

Guess that requires a little more pixie dust.

Re:what about heat

[foniksonik]

I have a Toshiba 40GB GX in my TiPB that runs at 5400 rpm and it is the quietest thing you've never heard... seriously the only noise it makes is a little bleepity that seems to only be there to let you know it is working. Ahhhhh fluid-dynamic bearings, beautiful. The latest IBM 2.5 drives also have the same specs, 5400 plu f-d bearings. But mine also has 16 MB of disk cache... ;-p only cost $200 w/ shipping.

The hard drive was the biggest bottleneck on my machine, now I'll have to get a faster laptop to get any more performance... already have a gig of RAM and the GPU is, well it's a laptop.

Perhaps For Non Notebooks

[Rareul]

At work I constantly am burning work files up my 20GB HD on my 1-year old Inspiron 8100(in the South and Southwest US reffered to as the Inspiration, I swear).
Work files do not include illegal software, MP3s, or pr0n. I could use some more storage space--too many spreadsheets and databases.

?sp

Learn to spell, you brainless asshole.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, and fuck that shit between your ears. DIE, GAS PUMPER. DIE.

Re:Learn to spell, you brainless asshole.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill G is back! What's up Bill.

laptops care!!

[Flamesplash]

Granted my laptop is about 2.5 years old, but it came with a 12 GB HD and well I really hope that they'll be 100 GB ones I can swap out for with with new technology, or at least something half decent if I buy a new system

Fo Shizzle My Nizzle

[Anonymous Coward]

G to the deathstar

Claim failed

Reliability

[_ph1ux_]

The only problem is how reliable these things will be. Its one thing to be able to pack shit-loads of data onto a tiny little spot - but its another thing to pack that same data on a spot thats going to hold it reliably without going bad or corrupting it.

This new hard drive enhancement has a precedence of being faulty after launch.

a message from the case-sensitivity police

[Anonymous Coward]

gb = grambit
GB = gigabyte

Re:a message from the case-sensitivity police

[TheDanish]

Right, so if, hypothetically speaking (i.e. no research involved), the platters had a total mass of .5 kg, that translates to 500 g, and at 80 gb (grambits) that comes out to about 39 kb.

Imagine the possibilities!

P.S. Yes, I'm aware that that's if it was bits per gram, and it's not, but frankly, I couldn't care less. Live with it. :p

Reliability ?

[freaker_TuC]

How reliable will these drives be ? since the spot is smaller a head-crash could crash your entire harddrive instead of loosing a "few" files.

Maybe such systems will be reliable (in laptops) by putting in 2 of such harddrives (RAID5?).

I would be worried with such small harddrives, sure in movable PC's and sure if it is coming from IBM which is known for having certain bad drives.

Re:Reliability ?

[Xtraneous]

Quote: Maybe such systems will be reliable (in laptops) by putting in 2 of such harddrives (RAID5?).

Nope, you are probably thinking about raid 1 (which requires at least 2 drives) where the drives are mirrored.

Raid 5 on the other hand requires at least 3 drives

One good source for the different levels of RAID is ACNC's Raid.edu

BTW: "raid.edu" is not the URL of the site, only the title.

Re:Reliability ?

[freaker_TuC]

I tought about it as soon as pressed submit but was too lazy to send a correction email ...

Our servers also run RAID1 .. though the idea is still correct to have some more rendundancy/reliability with 2 drives ...

Re:Reliability ?

[Toraz Chryx]

"since the spot is smaller a head-crash could crash your entire harddrive instead of loosing a "few" files."

Um, I've never seen a disk that was remotely usable after a headcrash?... for starters the head itself will be wrecked?

I have an entire TERABYTE!

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

I've posted about it before.

I simply noticed how many CDs I had sitting around, and got sick of it -- so I plunked down around $1500 for 9 Western Digital 120GB hard drives a few months ago.

I have 140GB of OGGs and MP3s, 500GB of DivXs and VCDs (including porn), 100GB of installed games, 6 different OSes, and all kinds of other crap. I also have about 150GB free, still, that gets used for various tasks.

But if you don't need the memory, run Linux off of flash memory or one of those pocket USB drives, or some other form of solid state memory. However, the prices for it are still exorbitant.

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've posted about it before.

And although you have now posted about it twice, I'm still only going to offer you one cookie.

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a word... LEGEND!! Interesting you make no mention whatsoever of redundancy or backup...? What if all that hentai, pirated s/w etc. was crucial data? As far as the oggs go, I'm sure you could just rip 'em again from the originals... ;) And 6 os? I prefer to settle on one for my desktop workstation since I really loathe rebooting! Can you guess which os I *don't* use? ;)

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that SexyKellyOsbourne is a NAZI and deserves no cookies at all. Or perhaps even negative cookies.

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, exactly.

MOD: -1; Double Dipping for Karma.

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[jonbrewer]

I have 140GB of OGGs and MP3s, 500GB of DivXs and VCDs (including porn), 100GB of installed games, 6 different OSes, and all kinds of other crap.

Yes, but do you have a life?

Re:I have an entire TERABYTE!

[zonker]

/me wonders how he backs up his data... :)

Moving parts bad! Solid State good!

[Syn Ack]

Enough with storage space! I don't care about having a 480GB drive. I want a drive that doesn't have any moving parts. A 100% solid state harddrive for the cost of a regular IDE. I'd even pay twice or three times as much to have 40-60-80GB worth of solid state goodness.

My computer sits here beside me and the only mechanical part that will destroy it if it fails is the spinning disk inside the drive. Sure there are still fans but my computer will quickly notice that and shutdown. However if the drive fails, you're toast.

I know we still need storage but can't some of these cycles be put into getting us off the old pre-space age magnetic disc technology and get us into something that doesn't need moving parts!

Come on IBM, where's my Holographic or Memory Based solid state storage. I don't care if it's twice the size of my current drive either, I just don't want any more moving parts!

Syn Ack

Library of Congress

[CatWrangler]

How many of these laptops will fit inside of the Library of Congress? Maybe I asked the question backwards.

rofl

[Anonymous Coward]

rofl

but it's you're, as in "you are," not your.

funny thing about non-pr0n

[Publicus]

The funny thing is that as these drives become mainstream, users in my company will think they need 80 GB of space on their laptops. They can't fathom how many word documents would fit on it, but they're convinced anything less would be inadequate.

I'm still amazed when I set up servers that do a lot of logging (firewall, web, ids, etc...) and I give a big /var partition (10+ GB) how little is filled up after several months. I suppose it differs with traffic, but 10 GB alone is tons of space!

Re:funny thing about non-pr0n

[PigleT]

"when I set up servers that do a lot of logging (firewall, web, ids, etc...) and I give a big /var partition (10+ GB) how little is filled up after several months."

Some sites' webserver logfiles are of the order a gig a day. Fortunately, apache CLF is well compressible, so an archival CD only needs burnt every 3-4 days.

Some sites' traffic in reporting a handful of servers' firewall hits back to a loghost contribute 4K/s of syslog traffic alone.

Do we have any stats for our great esteemed slashdot to compare?

Teach a man to fish

[sporty]

Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.

Re:Teach a man to fish

[Anonymous Coward]

And if it had a color screen that you could only see when having a spotlight shine on it, it'd be GBA.

Re:Teach a man to fish

[tswinzig]

Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.

So laptops can now fit 80 gameboys on your hard drive?

I think the guy you're replying to was simply correcting the person that posted the story, who clearly doesn't know the difference. To wit:

"The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops."

Yee haw! Laptops will finally get 10GB drives!!

Oh.

Re:Teach a man to fish

[sporty]

You are right. 100%. I was making a joke about the gameboy part, but I just wanted to point out why it was bit and not byte.

Guess the humour went over some people's heads :)

This would be exciting news...

[Anonymous Coward]

... if it wasn't for IBM's -appalling- track record in this sector (haha, sector, get it?)

I wouldn't -touch- another IBM drive with a 50ft. pole, even if there were flaming naked ninja-women threatening to cut my head off if I didn't.

Re:This would be exciting news...

[vidarh]

Despite that, whatever harddrive you are running is quite likely to make use of one or more patents licensed from IBM, or is likely to have been manufacturing using a process licensed from IBM. They may not be the most reliable drive manufacturer, but they are on the leading edge of developing harddrive technology.

In the past they've even licensed their technology to their partners before they started using in their own manufacturing in some cases, in order to ensure acceptance in the market ("you buy this tech, and you'll have an advantage over everyone for a while, us included").

Re:p0rn - paper free people

[esobofh]

I try to lead my life as paper free as possible, all my personal info (bills, letters etc.) are scanned and stored on my home server that can be accessed from the internet anywhere, any time. You can imagine how much space this takes (27 g's - not including porn) the same box controls my home theatre and stores all types of media that regularly keep 150GB chocked full.

Of course.. I scan all the documents in 300dpi in case I need to.. 'adjust' them later...

First Open Firmware Post

[Anonymous Coward]

nvedit
devalias hd /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disc@0
^C
nv store
nvrun
setenv boot-device hd:,yaboot
boot

G to tha muthafuckin oatse
Claim failed, pigfuckers

Fuel Cells, Battery Life, and Bad Track Record

[Sean Clifford]

I'm glad they're pushing the envelope, with 100Gbpsi densities and 7200rpm notebooks we'll see notebook drives in the 100GB range that will bring disk subsystem performance to within desktop range. Wonder how long it will take for RAID 0/1 to be integrated into the MOBO?

I wouldn't fret too much about battery time, though. Fuel cells are just around the corner and will realize a 4-5x boost in battery power in the near term with the potential to go to 10x+ range. Near-instant recharge, half-weight in same volume.

That said, it's rant time:

<rant>
IMHO, IBM's track record with desktop drives sucks ass. I'm one of those unfortunate souls who got hit hard with failing GXP series drives. IBM dropped the ball big time and their behaviour during the whole debacle put them on my blacklist. Before I get hit with objections, let me say that it wasn't the fact that their drives failed (got them from different runs, different dates) that torqued me off. It happens; happened to Maxtor in '96-'97.

No, what gives me the red ass is their poor product replacement (after 4 replacements I still had bad drives; drives from Maxtor/WD worked fine - still working, in fact), shipping me DOA refurbs, and giving me the run around the whole time. That was the first (and last time) I've gotten bad customer service from IBM. I won't do business with a company that leaves me swinging in the breeze.
</rant>

Pixie Dust?

[Mmmrky]

Last thing we need is for IBM to get the youth of America hooked on Pixie Dust.

Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?

Re:p0rn - paper free people

[Anonymous Coward]

You -- scan -- your -- bills. Dude, you don't need to scan your bills, you need to get a date.

Statistics

[Grieveq]

Raid is not a means of combatting unreliabillity.

P(A intersect B) = P(A | B) * P(B)

Where,
Event A = first drive failing
Event B = second drive failing

Re:Moving parts bad! Solid State good!

[karnal]

Heck with that! Memory has MBTF's as well....I want an interface to my brain, so I can keep all important data with me at all times....

And if it ever fails, I won't care, since it'd probably be because I am dead... :)

Wow now I can loose twice as much data

[BagOBones]

Hmm lets see after the last batch of Desk Stars who is going to trust thier data to these larger version.. Almost every tech sit that has reviewed an IBM has had to RMA a few of them.. Even I had one die.. IBM never issued a recall and luck me it was under warrenty and I had backup..
Once bitten twice shy.

Re:Wow now I can loose twice as much data

[Anonymous Coward]

...only one? you are lucky. In the past year, our gateway server has died 5x and guess why... they keep sending us 9gb ibm scsi drives that keep dying, and it makes gateway look bad. most of the staff in the company no longer consider a gateway when they make their system purchases cuz they know everytime we were down, what brand of server we had switched to last year... ...to their defense, gateway support has been swapping them out for us but they need to give us a different solution after the 2nd, 3rd failure... so they dont look like they don't give a damn that we lose productivity in the entire company everytime their server goes down for a day or two...
Yes, sorry, i'm bashing 2 vendors for the price of one...

I even put a drive fan on the 'deathstar' now but no bloody good. they still crap out. IDE or SCSI, looks like IBM cant make em worth a damn...

meanwhile, in our other systems we have 20+ WD and Maxtor IDEs running for over a year on a number of them and not a single one has gone bad... yet...

Re:Moving parts bad! Solid State good!

[be-fan]

However if the drive fails, you're toast.
>>>>>>>>
Heh heh, all my data is stored 650 miles away in a nice safe server. I've been in my dorm room for 2 months now, and I've already got two spare HDDs sitting in my desk drawer. I figure that if my main HD dies, I'll be up and running again, with all my data, within an hour.

SSDs are around, but expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

About $1000 per gigabyte

which would you rather pay:
$450 for 450 gb
or
$450,000 for 450gb

Pixie Dust?

[Reggie Funk]

Wow, I have new found respect for the marketing people at IBM. They should develop a new interface and call it "Freebase". That way you could Freebase your Pixie Dust, a powerful metaphor for getting the most out of your hard drive experience.

70GB per square inch? Great!

[Lord Bitman]

The SD slot on my Zaurus is about that size, and I've been refusing to pay 200$ for 256mb of memory, when I can see that technology be put to use to give me a 200$ 20GB drive for my Zaurus? What's that? Never? Fuck you.

Imagine?

[joejoejoejoe]

Can you imagine a beowolf cluster (tm) running with these?

You'd need N+N just to keep up with the MTBF rates and down time to swap the HDD's.

Bwahahaha! I did it! my first Imagine-a-beowolf-cluster (tm) post!

Heh, I'd be playing DoD now, but my cable modem sucks!

Researchers do more than this ...

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is not spending all their money on this, you know. They are making advancements in different fields (holographic memory, magnetic RAM), that will most likely replace HD's in the future. Memory that will enable you to have instant-on computers, and terrabytes of storage. But, to fund this new research, they need to make advancements that will pay off now. It is pretty dumb to spend all your time researching something that will take 20 years, and expect to do it without making money in any other way.

.. Just trying to stay in the market, to fund future technologies.

IBM/Hitachi child company name

[tswinzig]

Hitachi bought out that sector, and rather than shifting things around, Hitachi and IBM are forming a child company (whose name I do not know).

Why don't they take the name "IBM," and just shift each letter one character to the right in the alphabet?

"I'm sorry, I don't think they can do that."

Re:IBM/Hitachi child company name

[Myco]

LCN?

And, let you think I'm asking because I'm simply thickheaded, "Daisy."

Re:IBM/Hitachi child company name

[Anonymous Coward]

JCN surely? Unless the alphabet's been restructured recently.

Re:IBM/Hitachi child company name

[Datafage]

Must be thickheaded, thinking L is one to the right of H...

Re:IBM/Hitachi child company name

[tswinzig]

Damn! I meant to say LEFT not RIGHT.

The joke was IBM shifted to the left is HAL, as in HAL 9000. But now that I have to explain it because I screwed up, it's just pitiful...

This is how I backup....

[zardie]

I've got a DLT80 drive here. It stores around 40GB/tape of raw data (80GB with hardware compression) but unfortunately a lot of my data is already compressed in some shape or form.

It averaged around 5MB/sec across over 340MB of data I store on my ATA RAID array + a few other disks in the machine. It took up a total of ten tapes and took endless hours to do (plus I need to be around to switch tapes - audoloaders are hardly accessible to home users).

I find the ATA RAID1 solution more elegant. The only issue that bites is that you can't do historical backups or pull data off the drive you deleted two months ago but now decide you need (it's happened to me). But disk mirroring is realtime and provides an easy way to cut over to the other disk (as opposed to reformat, reinstall, restore with tapes)

I had a 60GB IBM notebook drive die after a month.

[zardie]

Yes, in my new Dell Inspiron 8200, my 60GB 5400RPM IBM Travelstar 60GH died after a month, taking some of the data down with it. I had a Dell service tech come out and replace it the next day, but it's rather distressing that such a drive, brand new, dies within a month. 60GB is a LOT of data, especially on a notebook where the information changes a lot more frequently than on a desktop system and backups are a lot harder to perform compared to datacentre/home use.

Interestingly, the 80GB drive is 4200RPM, claiming 30% more data transfer rate than the 60GB 5400RPM disk (which is on par with the 60GB Toshiba drive).

Oh, and Apple's new Tibook no longer ships with the IBM 5400RPM disks - they ship them with the 4200RPM 60GB 2.5" notebook drives (and IBM don't make any 2.5" 4200RPM drives)

In short, IBM's recent track record for reliability isn't the best and reliability on a notebook drive is far more critical than a desktop drive because it's harder to back it up.

stoned thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

The way i see it this whole "HD space increasing faster than we can use it thing is great. It goes to show that we're getting to point where we don't even have to worry about HD space, the concept of files taking up space will cease to exist. I think the future's gonna be cool.

Are you on crack?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM does NOT have a good track record in hard drives. Remember the Deathstar (Deskstar) series?

Current hard drives

[56ker]

The size of current hard drives at the moment is big enough for me. I don't mind if IBM's technology remains as it is at the moment - literally "pixie dust".

They really should've thought of a better name - if they'd called it "geek dust" I'm sure they would've had lots more sales. ;o)

Use correct prefixes, PLEASE!

[tomas.bjornerback]

I'm getting really tired of people not using the correct prefixes, and even more on computer-savvy people not understanding the difference between bit and byte. Learn this list by heart or at least between 10^9 and 10^-9:

b = bit
B = byte

E = exa = 10^18
P = peta = 10^15
T = tera = 10^12
G = giga = 10^9
M = mega = 10^6
k = kilo = 10^3
h = hekto = 10^2
D = deka = 10^1
d = deci = 10^-1
c = centi = 10^-2
m = milli = 10^-3
u = micro = 10^-6
n = nano = 10^-9
p = pico = 10^-12
f = femto = 10^-15
a = atto = 10^-18

Those writing "mb" for megabyte, are actually writing "milli-bit". How do I split a single bit into one thousand pieces? Is that what micro processors is all about? ;)

To avoid any discussion between k=1000 and k=1024, please turn to www.iec.org and read about binary prefixes (kibi-, mebi- et.c.).

Ask anyone working with digital video.

[Anonymous Coward]

60 Gigs is not nearly enough. While faster drives would be nice for those of us doing real-time video mixing, larger drives would be helpful. (Really sucks constantly swapping out drives...)

RAID in mobility

[foniksonik]

I've been thinking that it is about time for RAID with faster I/O to make it into laptops... seems like you could get really nice performance from two IDEs (and two controllers) with moderate rpms.

Re:p0rn, not just for breakfast anymore

[Hott of the World]

Games nowadays take up about 500 to 1.5 gigabytes of harddisk space (Diablo 2; Sims; etc..) not to mention having the webpage backed up (those are hi-rez images, thank you) a music server (yes I own the CD's, no I do not want to get a 200 disk CD changer, but yes I do want them encoded at the highest kbps for my enjoyment) Also have tons of editing software with picture libraries on here and God forbid we have school software (Mathlab, Adobe Acrobat Office XP ) But thats just the stuff I can think of. Imagine all the people out there with motion picture software that are editing movies and adding graphics... Thats a harddrive hog if I ever saw one..

Bigger drives are good.

[debilo]

Finally, I can install emacs. Beautiful!

it is reliable, here's a possible explanation

[caveat]

that's the point of the article, it is a (reasonably) reliable way to store the data on the drive.
everybody's so impressed when the chip manufacturers drop the fab sizes down, but nobody really seems to appreciate how amazing hd tech is these days. chip people, even down at 90nm (nothing to sniff at!), are still dealing with bulk matter and (generally) free from worrying about quantum effects, while hd tech has runs smack into quantum-scale events - normal thermal energy kicking the magnetic states of the bits around (superparamagnetic effert). while it's not strictly a QM problem, eliminating it definitely involves quite a bit of heavy quantum work.

just looking quickly at the outershell configuration for ruthenium, and assuning they still use iron oxide as the magnetic media, it seems that the 3-layer thinck layer of atoms leaves some interesting unfilled oribitals exposed to the magnetic layer (the bonding to the middle layer of atoms will bump another electron down into the 5s orbital, filling it and leaving some vacancies in the 4d orbitals). i'd have to check the energy levels, but i'd guess that the empty orbitals on the Ru atoms can grab some of the electrons from the magnetic materials; not forming a true bond, but holding tightly enough to stabilize the induced magnetic state, increasing the energy requited to flip the polarity to well above normal thermal energy.

disclaimer: i am not a physical chemist, i just got my BS in may. did get three As in phys chem I&II and advanced inorganic, though.

further disclaimer: i have'n't had all my coffee yet so i may just be babbling, if there are any physical chemists who know better than i, feel free to tear me apart ;)

Re:it is reliable, here's a possible explanation

[router]

Heya, related tech part here:
http://www.stoner.leeds.ac.uk/research/gmr. htm

Spin coupled ferromagnetic layers, so, this is my reading and may be (is probably) wrong:

Top layer is magnetized one direction, intermediate layer of "pixie dust" is unmagnetized, bottom layer is magnetized in opposite direction (think herterostructural anti-ferromagnetism). The "pixie dust" with that thickness is what forces the anti-ferromagnetic behavior, thicker or thinner would allow either less anti-ferromagnetic behavior or no anti-ferromagnetism at all (its periodic; same reason for existence of anti-ferromagnetic and ferromagnetic behavior in other materials). Coupling causes much more resilient (harder) magnetization because Boltzmann thermal effects have to take effect on both layers at once. So entropic forces are hindered, and order is preserved accross the "pixie dust" layer.
May be my mis-reading of the situation, however.
Anyone else got a better idea?

andy

Stuck at 30 MB/sec

[heroine]

If only access speeds were any faster than they were in 1997.

"Faster"? Not really.

[Arker]

The supposed speed there is mostly marketing hype. Show me an IDE drive with a sustained transfer rate that even comes close to maxing out UDMA/66? You can't, they don't exist.

SCSI will spin 8 disks at once on the same channel, and that's the only way you'll max out the transfer capacity of the channel. IDE only handles 2 drives per channel, so the difference between UDMA/66 and UDMA/100 amounts to nothing other than feeling 'l33t'. Yes, very rarely, when you have drives that are doing burst transfer from their own cache, you might actually use the difference. But the UDMA/66 will catch right up the next millisecond anyway, no one would actually notice it even then.

80GB Great!, 4200 RPM Not Great

[N8F8]

Bigger laptop drives are wonderfull, but even my 5400 RPM drive seem horribly slow compared to my desktop.

Re:Moving parts bad! Solid State good!

[Syn Ack]

Watch out for those short cicuits.

Paul

guh!

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM additionally announced that it plans for a new class of Travelstar mobile hard disk drives with rotational speeds of 7,200 revolutions per minute (rpm). That compares to the 5,400 rpm speed of IBM's current fastest mobile disk drives and is similar to the speed of drives found in most desktop computers.

IBM USED to have a good track record

[Andy Dodd]

Until recently, IBM Deskstars were the best drives you could get.

Then the 75GXP came out... And Deskstars became Deathstars.

Conversely, Maxtor and WD used to SUCK. From what I've heard, both companies have really shaped up. (I hope so, my home machine's new drive is a Maxtor...)

B.G.A.T. ****TROLL ALERT****

[Anonymous Coward]

B.G.A.T. (Billy Goats Against Trolls)is proud to announce that SexyKellyOsbourne has made our most wanted list. Normally it is pretty hard for us to prove our case against such people. But Ms. Osbourne has taken special care to ensure that the world knows she is a troll. Example #1 Right from her own journal. As much as B.G.A.T. would like to take credit for this, it does all come right from the trolls mouth!That one wasn't enough to convince you. How about This one? And then there is this one. She has also taken a moment to tell her something about herself. A quick glance at her posting History tells it all. Here is one of my favorites. So please take this time to spend just one mod point to keep this genital wart on society out of sight. MOD HER DOWN AS A TROLL!!!! Not because I said so, but remeber she is a self confesed troll.

new ad campain?

[Anonymous Coward]

He sprinkles a little pixie dust, and he gets more harddrive!
-- IBM

He sprinkles a little fairy dust, and he gets more bandwidth!
-- SBC Internet ad from a while ago

Too little too late.

[Guspaz]

Maxtor announced 80B platters ages ago, and didnt try to claim it was due to Pixie Dust either. And as its been pointed out before, IBM announced they were leaving the HD market, and most people said good riddance, so why are they pestering us again?

Re:Too little too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is spelled warranty, dumb fuck.

So much for Millipede

[DaveOf9thKey]

So basically, IBM is saying that Millipede is still going to be vaporware for another decade, and until then, they'll just keep cramming more space onto hard drives until either the oxide falls off or laptops start burning holes into your khakis.

Woo. Wake me when I can buy the breakthrough stuff at Best Buy.

'course I gave up my 80 gb laptop HD long ago

[Anonymous Coward]

...or did you mean 80 GB?

How much more heat?

[digitalgimpus]

How much more heat will those 7200 RPM drives generate?

Would love to put one of them in my Thinkpad, which really stinks with my 4200RPM drive (from factory)....

The drive runs constantly. A 7200 RPM drive would really make things much smoother.

But will it generate to much heat for current laptops? Is it something for only new laptops?

So...

[chrisv]

So, when will I be seeing my 70G IBM MicroDrive? ;)

If they can fit 70G of storage into a square inch, I would certainly think that they could fit 70G into a drive that has little more than a square inch of surface area. :)

Imagination is just that

[hackwrench]

You have a rather vague imagination. Care to explain why precision would make it take longer?

AIT or DLT DDS-X

[Magus311X]

AIT-2 can store 130GB/tape. AIT-3 can store 250G+.

Some versions of DLT I *think* can store around 400GB per cartridge.
-----

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont know, people who are cheap fucks such as yourself who think IDE drives are "good performance" care about companies getting into price wards to make things cheaper.

and you get shit warranties and no 10K or 15K drives.

and you fucking fools act like the king of the ide market is a king. more like a retarded drive that gay-merz such as yourself drool over. freak.

you cant afford real equipment. HAHAHAHAHA.

Can't be that relieable...

[Reece400]

in my experience, the bigger and faster the drives are getting, the bigger the errors, and the faster they happen,, i have a RAID of 3 IBM 2gb SCSC drives, they run hot enough to cook eggs on (i've tried it... don't ask) and they've been running 24/6 pretty much since i've got them... i had a newer IBM drive for my desktop a couple years ago.. it's already dead, and the old 2gb ones are still heating my room,,,

Reece,

Sounds familiar

[john82]

The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

1) Who would want a personal computer?
2) 640 KB is enough for anyone

Someone always figures out a way to use the available resources and more. My point is that this will have an impact.

Holographic storage

[tgrigsby]

Anyone ever wonder what happened to holographic storage? It occurs to me that as long as the R&D powerhouse at IBM continues coming up with radical new ways to magnetically store data, we're not going to see the promise of holographic/crystal storage come to fruition anytime soon. And as long as there's no money in it, I've got to wonder, who's still working on this and have there been any real breakthroughs in the past year? I for one haven't heard a peep.

Re:Holographic storage

[feronti]

I don't know the details, but I have a buddy who sells specialty chemicals used in coatings and one of his customers is working on a holographic storage device. They use one of his company's chemicals to modify the refactive index or something. Not much info, but people are working on it.

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Guspaz]

SCSI is pointless these days in all but high end servers. IDE technology is currently catching up with SCSI and will soon pass it, once this happens you will see your precious 10K and 15K RPM drives on IDE.

SerialATA was the first big step towards making SCSI useless.

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA.

what a fucking idiot.

Poverty man. Hahahahaha.

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Anonymous Coward]

what about the warranty? the sparing? the reliability?

oh, you dont care. you are a gamer, fat, sexless, and live at home with mom and dad.

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Guspaz]

Warrenty? There are high-priced IDE drives that cater to people who feel they need a longer warrenty. Most IDE manufacturers have "premier" or "professional" versions of their drives.

Sparing? What do you mean?

Reliability? Again, that's why the higher-priced drives are available. Still, I'd trust an expensive 5400RPM drive much more than a 15000RPM drive. Those high-speed drives pump out enormous heat, and I'd be surprised if their reliability was any better than an IDE drive.

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Anonymous Coward]

- No IDE drives have a 5 year warranty [this speaks volumes about reliability]. SCSI drives are for concerned professionals. IDE drives are cheap, general purpose, and store MP3 files and unimportant outlook PST files and word documents.

- Sparing. It is a significant percentage of the disk that is there solely to remap bad sectors if the come to pass. on IDE it gets marked as bad and detracts from the useable space. On scsi, its remapped. The bad section becomes a pointer in the drive map to a spare location. Its sad you don't even know what reliability features exist and you cast disparaging remarks against SCSI.

- The MTBF is a reliability statement. MTBF for WD 8MB is 500,000 POH.
The MTBF for a 15K cheetah is 'Distinctions Extremely low power consumption allows easy integration for high performance. 1,200,000-hour MTBF

One fifth the warranty. Less than half the MTBF. 8.9ms seek vs 3.6ms. One half the spindle speed. And the 15K drives are actually quieter. (31db for the 15K vs 35db for the 7200)! And the disparity in wattage/power is less than 30% [7 watts vs 10 watts, but the spindle speed is TWICE as fast]! Oh man, you really don't know a good drive if it smashed you in the face.

Shows what you know about drive technology. This is the most retarded statements I have ever seen on Slashdot, and this festering quagmire of an online "communisty" has a veritable myriad - no - a plethora of retards,

Still, I'd trust an expensive 5400RPM drive much more than a 15000RPM drive. Those high-speed drives pump out enormous heat, and I'd be surprised if their reliability was any better than an IDE drive.

You said. You are baseless, without knowledge, incorrect and spread FUD to justify the fact that either you are extremely poor and cannot afford good equipment or you are a direct descendant of Shylock and are the epitome of a cheap ass.

Re:Too little too late. tsarkon report

[Anonymous Coward]

dont waste time on that stupid quake bitch. he is a fucking pseudointellectual troll asshole that pollutes this place with anti american xeonophobic crap while living on the dole. the day he dies is the day the atoms in his body can become useful again, even as worm food.

Last Post!

[alpg]

Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.27

- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...