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

Reliability

[jtharpla]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

How Much?

[pbinmt]

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

Re:How Much?

[docbrown42]

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

All of it.

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

[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

[_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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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...

[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!

Aereal Density measured in bits not bytes

[SirDaShadow]

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

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?

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?

[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: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]

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.

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

[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

[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

[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

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

[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

[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.

Re:p0rn

[yobbo]

Video editing, for one.

Or, in your terms, "making pr0n" .

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. :).

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?

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.

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

[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

[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.

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: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?

Pixie Dust, eh?

[Gavitron_zero]

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

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: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

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.

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.

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!

[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?

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.

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?

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.

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

[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: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: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: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.

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>

Re:Drive space increasing like M$ OSes

[lostchicken]

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

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?

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: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... :)

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: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.

Re:p0rn

[be-fan]

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

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.

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

[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)

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.

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: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, 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..

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 ;)

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.

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 ;)

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.

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...)

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: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.

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

[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

[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.