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Seagate Barracuda V Serial ATA Drive Reviewed
Mike Parsons writes "Andrew and Adam over at Explosive Labs have a nice review up on the Seagate Barracuda V, one of the first production Serial ATA drives. Keep in mind, Generation 1 of Serial ATA was not meant to be a 'incredible performance jump.' Rather, its intended purpose was to make the industry transition seamless to allow time to mature the future generations of SATA. Generation 2 and 3 of SATA show more promise for those interested in performance, as white papers behind them gives you the nice fuzzy feeling for speed!"
I always thought parallel was faster
*shrug*
Why is this serial stuff so much quicker than the older parallel connections?
Three generations mean you can buy SATA three times. The SATA controller I have is only version 1. So I'll stick my neck out and suggest that 2 and three will parallel the release of their respective drives.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What's all that about then?
Hardware monitoring maybe?
Is there some new power standard about to be unleashed on us?
Of course Serial ATA is going to be great when they get all the kinks out but for now, the Seagate Barracuda is barely faster than the WD SE drives with 8mb cache (which is a bit cheaper for now).
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
I'm not so much interested in the performance advantages of S-ATA, rather the fact that it finally kills off ribbon cables. It must be the most limiting factor inside any desktop PC. In my tower I have trouble making even long cables reach drives at the top of the case, so they have to be mounted halfway down. In my Shuttle XPC the cables are shorter, but even they have to be 'rounded' and routed around clips to reach the combo drive without taking up all the space inside. Other people complain about the airflow restrictions several ribbon cables cause inside a machine.
In short, I don't care that (Gen-1) S-ATA starts at 150mb transfer instead of 'older' 133mb. I care that it makes building a PC easier, more space inside future barebones machines and PC manufacturers can use more interesting cases than the usual rectangular stuff. I'm excited about the possibilities it offers right now.
insignificant sig
1. Smaller Cables. 2. Hot Swappable :)
3. Small speed bump to 150
Thats all I can think of at the moment :/
What, me worry?
theres another review at storage review
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
Anyone know why this was implemented? The article (now /.'ed) doesn't explain the reasoning, just that it exists. Why get rid of the old MOLEX? Since an adapter is included with the drive it doesn't seem that there are any new voltages required. What's the deal?
Is this just another one of those PITA upgrades?
What do people think is going to happen to the price of old ATA drives once the serial drives kick in?
Are they gonna tumble down in price as the hard disk is usually one part of the computer that you move to the upgraded PC and so you will want to get the serial ones to ensure you can still use them later. This will make the old disks nice and cheap. (like SDRAM)
Or will the old disks become so rare that they are more expencive than the new versions (Like old EDO SIMMs).
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Yay! No more jumpers! The days of mechanical configuration are finally drawing to a close!
But why did they include a new power connector? Specifically, a 15-pole connector not used in any current computers, with only 4 power leads going into it?
Oh, and the 'review' reads like a press release. They claim independence, but are they really?
Seems that the server has already taken damage, has anyone mirrored this?
Portion of the article sound an awful lot like a seagate advertisement.
I'm not shouting "astroturfing!", but it really does seem pretty cheesy!
and here's google cache:
s J: www.explosivelabs.com/reviews/barracudav_sata/+%22 %2Bwww.explosivelabs.%2Bcom/reviews/barracudav_sat a/%22&hl=fi&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:AXz0ph7JjF
The article wasn't clear about the SATA power "problem" ...Is the solution just a simple four-pin to fifteen-pin adaptor or do you have to get a special feed from the power supply?
Thomas
I couldn't find out nowhere answers to this 2 questions:
;-)
- does ALL SATA adapters + disks supports hotswap?
- does SATA under Linux support hotswap?
And yes, I know www.serialata.org
Just found the perfect product.
It's USB 2.0, even!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
And how does it stack up?
Read Tommorow's News Today
OK, I'm not a luddite, I understand that progress is a Good Thing (TM) but am I the only one getting dizzy at the speed at which the hard disk drive industry seems to be moving?
In the last five years, typical hard disk drive sizes have increased more than ten-fold, transfer speeds have shot up too and prices have come right down.
The net effect of all these factors is that HDDs have now become commodities and many manufacturers - put off by both the shrinking profit margins available and the high investment costs of developing the next generation of drives - have left the business.
There are now only four major players left, and all of them are doing whatever they can to maintain profitability. Cranking up volume only works so far - there are only so many customers out there, especially in today's economy - so manufacturers have looked to cut costs elsewhere.
Two critical areas that seem to have taken a major hit are quality control and warranties. More and more drives (and in some cases, entire drive families) seem to be failing at every given opportunity. Meanwhile, the length for which they're covered has shrunk back from (typically) three years to the minimum one.
Sure, at the high-end, speed will always be appreciated, but how many of us run render farms?
The market is near-saturated (not everyone needs 200GB or even 20GB, because not everyone is a MP3/MPEG/whatever addict) and that situation isn't going to change any time soon.
I would be much happier with an industry that still has some real competition and offers customers reliable, well-supported products in five years time than one that has breakneck-speed products from top to bottom but which break down every five minutes.
For 99% of users, data integrity is the holy grail and everything else comes a distant second. I wish manufacturers would remember that.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Firewire. IEEE1394.
You can get Firewire hard drives right now. You don't have to wait for them. You can get Firewire enabled motherboards right now, too. Nice round, thin cables. Nice hotpluggable connectors. Faster transfer speeds (Firewire2 will leave SATA in the dust).
Martin
Storage Review is, IMO, the best site for hard drive reviews.
Seagate Barracuda ATA V, Serial ATA Version
And don't forget to contribute to their Drive Reliability Database!
You can get multiple voltages from any difference in potential. (Voltage is just a term describing the difference between the charge density, or 'pressure' between two points)
For example, if I placed two 1 KOhm resistors in series between "GND" and "-12V", at the contacts between the two resistors, the voltage compared to GND is -6V, and the voltage compared to "-12V" is actually +6V.
However, due to resistor tolerances and Thevenin resistance, it's much more preferrable to have the power supply give a steady, regulated supply of -6V and +6V, if you need them.
What's this Submit thingy do?
That's system memory, you mean 30MB should be enough for anybody.
It's rather mind numbing to see the density of today's drives and recall when an entire information system ran in 128K Words (256KB) of memory and on two DEC RP04 88MB hard drives (I performed the offline backups myself, oof)
Besides, Gates denies ever making that statement, but more humorous, "The next generation of interesting software will be done on Macintosh, not the IBM PC."-- Bill Gates, 1984
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
And IEEE1394 is just serial SCSI, so why bother with that technology, just buy Ultra-LVD SCSI drives, operators are available right now.
The point is serial ATA is a simple ATA-style replacement. The drives will be cheap because the controllers will be cheap.
Firewire (or SCSI) are not cheap. They are not an equivalent product. Sure, it's BETTER, but it comes at a price some are not willing to pay for an desktop, MP3 server or what have you.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
SSA had this years ago (up to 160 MBytes/s), as well as Fibre Channel. The only reason for not going serial was a large installed IDE base to be accomodated.
Alright so far most of the posts are misguided, so I'll answer a few questions. But first, this was mentioned in the slashback that is still on the front page. Please post any corrections.
1a. Yeah!, faster drives.
No. Find me a drive that can use PATA-100 to the max let alone PATA-133 and I'll be a very happy customer. Current drives do not use current capacity, the only time the bus becomes an issue is where you are bursting from the drive cache to the controller, which is not enough to really worry about except in certain situations (The same data is read continuously).
b. Yeah!, Faster drives.
No. Why a second point? The first point dealt with bandwidth. This one is for latency. Please remember that most SATA controllers on motherboards, etc (atm at least) are actually a bridging chip to a PATA controller. This incurs a slight latency delay. If you do a lot of small file accesses you will be effected.
2. Whats the point we already have enough speed?(ie I already know 1.)
a.The point is smaller cabling, making cases less cluttered, meaning better cooling, and easier to keep wiring neat and out of the way. Why no use rounded cables? You didn't think the cables where a ribbon shape for looks did you? The cables are meant to be ribbons to reduce the interference between each pair (limits it to the pair on each side). Rounding the cables causes all pairs to interfere with each other resulting in a much shorter maximum cable length before there are too many interference errors on the bus.
b. Point to point cabling, knock a cable loose, or have a misbehaving drive and you loose one drive. With PATA you can loose 2, or with SCSI you can loose up to 14 (Wide, not typically a problem on modern auto-terminating devices)
c. You can disconnect a drive from a powered controller without risking blowing the controller chip (Possible with PATA). Making removable hard drive cradles finally usefull on ATA systems.
d. Longer in-spec cable lengths. PATA cables (Sorry I forget the length off hand) can't reach the top 5 1/4" drive bay in a full tower case. SATA cables can. Why not use longer PATA cables? Cables longer than PATA spec tend to suffer badly from interference based errors, resulting in a lot of resends on the bus, sometimes causing bad data on drives.
3. The performance isn't what I hoped (or a WD JB is faster)
This drive isn't intended to be the fastest on the block, it is meant to be quiet. Seagate drives have the new fluid bearings, they haven't been the fastest on the block for a while now, what makes you think this one would be different?
I personally think this is a good drive to be first to SATA, as the people likely to appreciate the quiet drive would also desire the better air flow offered by smaller cables, meaning slower case fans, and a quiter PC.
4. Why don't they compare a PATA Barracuda V vs a SATA Barracuda V.
The PATA has a 2mb cache the SATA has an 8mb cache (and a slightly faster access time, by 0.6ms). They aren't directly comparable, the SATA version is obviously aimed to be the top of the line model.
5. The power connecters. The Barracuda V requires the same power voltages that current PATA drives do, so an adapter works fine. However it was intended to supply drives with multiple voltages (such as 3.3v, 5v, etc) so that the electronics can use a different voltage than the drive motors, reducing the power consumption of the electronics, and therefore the heat output. Some drives get very hot, and every little bit helps.
I think thats all.
Interesting "problem" for Finns as we prepend the letter n to indicate possessive.
I for one will not use SATAn to connect my drives.
You don't say that this has very little effect on what people buy. I don't currently know anyone who buys IDE hard disks with an eye to reliability. Most people I know just go on size to price ratio, next they either look at speed or they look at noise and choose a Barracuda.
Perhaps reviewers could try to test the hard disks to destruction to find how reliable they are, but even constant reads and writes to opposite sectors of the disk, interspersed with stopping and then respinning the disks would hopefully take weeks/months to kill a disk. Although its a rather dangerous thing to have out there does anyone know of any hard disk torture setups, or even what usually kills them.
-
I lost an IBM drive to a power spike caused by my desklamp (one of those funky 12v halogen ones with a lousy switch I'd put in the cable).
- I've had a drive dead on arrival from scan.co.uk sent out with only two layers of thin bubble wrap. (-replaced no problem)
- The only drive I've had die of natural causes was a quantum which serves me right for buying a "fireball"
So if no-one buys disks based on reliability because there is no information about this until it is too late and if waranties are usless to most users who need to buy another drive rather than wait 6 weeks for a replacement to be shipped to them, then whatever peoples holy grail is said to be this will have little effect on manufacturers.Q: What does any of this have to do with the review, or serial ATA?
A: Nothing. This is a karma-whoring troll!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
High speed USB is 480 megaBITS/second
which translates to 60megaBYTES/second
Serial ATA is faster.
--
God forbid we get any kind of substantial performance leap all at once... Might drive the prices down too early.. ;)
Look at the price of old ram, when serial ATA kicks in the demand for old IDE drives will drop, reducing volumes and increasing overheads. The price will go down for a litle bit to clear out ond drives and then climb.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Faster transfer speeds (Firewire2 will leave SATA in the dust).
Firewire 2 = 800 Mbps = 100MBps
SATA = 150MBps
Firewire 2 faster? Don't think so. Sure, Firewire 2 will ramp up to twice that speed eventually, but so will SATA...
SATA is also a lot simpler to implement: chipset manufacturers can reuse most of their old, highly-optimized Parallel ATA controller core. Similarly, OS writers can reuse most of their old ATA drivers. SATA has less overhead than Firewire, it's designed for data storage and data storage alone, and it doesn't do daisy chaining.
Firewire's a nice technology, and it would work for hooking hard drives up internally, but it doesn't do the job as well as SATA does, it's over-complicated (and thus expensive), doesn't have the track record, and probably most importantly, has some serious political opposition (Intel anyone?). It's always going to be the Cinderella of the ball.
Find me one disk that can push more than 40-50MB/sec and I'll give you a cookie.
So, Serial ATA would be faster, if the disks were faster.
Karnal
I guess giving technical facts is something the slashdot community is not prepared for, they consider it trolling. Oh well, you cannot please everyone.
I'm playing with my first two SATA drives, and one thing I find very careless is that the connectors are very easy to knock off the drives. This is not a problem for me as I am designing a RAID box where they slide in, but for a PC, somebody is going to have to add detents or friction locks to these connectors or we are in a world o' hurt. By the way, my IBM SATA drives have the conventional Molex 4 pin power connector for legacy PC applications which you can use instead of the SATA power connector. Seagate was too lazy to put one on their drive, or maybe they need the 3.3V input on the SATA power connector which is not provided for on the Molex connector which is only 5V/12V. Oh, and one other thing, SATA 2.0 phase 2 which will be 300 MB/s won't help at all with performance until and unless the drives go past their present 50 MB/s native transfer rate. Hell, the 150 vs 133 vs 100 agrument of SATA vs PATA is silly when you consider the modest speed requirements of the drives being built today. Raw transfer rate only appears to be increasing 25% per year anyway, so it will be years before we even give a damn about the 150 MB/s "limit".
What are you talking about? USB is slower than SerialATA not faster... Much much slower in fact.
Here's a quick comparison
SerialATA 1.0 - 1.2Gbps (150Mb/sec)
USB 2.0 - 480 Mbps
USB 1.1 - 12 Mbps
Firewire (IEEE1394) - 400 Mbps
Parallel Port - 1 Mbps
Serial Port - 0.115 Mbps
Figures taken from the actual spec on serialata.org and from here.
Nick...
> SerialATA 1.0 - 1.2Gbps (150Mb/sec)
Sorry that's 150Mbytes/sec (MBps?) not Mbits/sec, to avoid confusion...
Nick...
Perfect only if you don't mind buying a new one of these every year:
Warranty Period 3 1 year (USA), 2 year (Europe)
Opening the USB hard drive case will void the warranty
And that's not even mentioning that WD probably has the most unreliable, loudest drives on the market.
Except it's half the speed of a SerialATA drive and twice the price. That makes it 4 times worse in my book :)
Hardly perfect.
Nick...
> And that's not even mentioning that WD
> probably has the most unreliable, loudest
> drives on the market.
I strongly disagree with this statement. Unlike Fujitsu and IBM, Western Digital do not have the reputation of making unreliable drives.
Their new drives feature Fluid Dynamic Bearings and make almost no noise whatsoever (I have 80Gig ones in my computer). You can just hear it spinning up if you put your ear to the case, but I promise you it's silent from then on - even while it's moving the heads.
Nick...
I have been using IDE drives for years, shure they have come a long way but I feel SCSI is much better. I have had several IDE drives fail months of years after purchase, but my SCSI drives in my Sun boxes still keep on working. And even the old drives in my Ultra 2 give the ATA 100s in my linux box a run for their money.
I'll gladly spend more for drives that have MTBFs of a 1,000,000 hours over IDEs 100,000 or so.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Well, I'm just speaking from anecdotal evidence of my own use and the people that I know. The last few WD's that I saw were in family members' computers and they had to be replaced because they were so incredibly loud. As far as reliability, I've lost many, many more WD's in my lifetime than Quantum, Maxtor, Conner, and IBM drives combined. That seems to be the consensus with my friends, also.
Basically this means that rather than treating the wire as a fixed capacitance, inductance, resistance, it must be treated as a distributed system. Each dx has a dc, dl, dr. The longer the wire the higher the impedence. Now you have to take into account the bundling the wires ans assuring that they are all equal length and impedence. This is why IDE went from a 40 pin connector to an 80 pin conector. The data pin count remained the same, but the grounds increased.
Next you have to take into account the drivers and receivers. Each has certain variations in their physical properties. Taken as an individual, you minimize the tollerances. BUT when you add many of them in parallel, the tollerances add as well. The end result is that the overall speed is limited due to the summation of tollerances in the wire AND in the silicon. This is physics and no real way around it.
Intresting choice of name :)
-- / The whole history of this invention has been a struggle
A few more and a correction.
SATA 1.5 Gbps (not 1.2)
GIGe ~1.06 Gbps
Fibrechannel 2.125 Gbps
Serial Attached SCSI 3.0 Gbps (Coming soon)
FYI
SAS and SATA both share a physical layer and are roadmapped at 3,6,12 Gbps. 12 maybe hard but 6 is doable, maybe in 2006-7. SATA will lag behind mostly because of cost reasons, 3Gbps is possible today its just not cheap.
No that's because these new drives replicate all their contents via a super-secret protocol back thru the power supply, and thru the power grid so the gubmint can monitor your computer activities better.
:-|
Laugh, that's supposed to be funny... hahahah.
...rapidly, all of a sudden there won't be any any "legacy" IDE ATA100 or 133 drives available and all there will be is SATA drives with mandatory hardware DRM built in.
lol I already know science.box.sk for almost 2 years!!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The specs for Generation 2 have already been releasd. Generation 2 is backwards compatible with Generation 1.
The degree of compatibiltiy between Gen-3 and other Generations is an open issue.
Strange.
SCSI is here. Firewire is here. I should give a crap about SATA why? I think companies would do much better to unify standards than diversify, and leave the markets in limbo for months or years.
Hey, if they just used Firewire internally, they could have all tthe advantages they are working on, and be able to focus on improving firewire. In addition, internal and external hard drives would be identical.
In addition, they could focus on improving firewire, instead of starting from scratch.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
8 meg cache
dipshit.
One. The 180GXP's outer-zone transfer rates weigh in at a respectable 56.2 MB/sec
Two. The drive more properly act like twins in WB99's transfer rate tests. Here both drives post an outer-zone score of 56.5 MB/sec
Does this mean you will give me two cookies? I like chocolate chip.
On the other hand, with every Western Digital drive you get a free white noise machine. Let's see Seagate match that offer.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
> A few more and a correction.
> SATA 1.5 Gbps (not 1.2)
No - I was correct! Please actually read the specification yourself if you don't believe me! It's here - look in section 2.2 on page 12(13 in acrobat).
It's definitely 1.2Gbps which equates to 150MB/sec.
1.5Gbps would be 187.5MB/sec which is wrong.
Unless of course you think there are 10 bits in a byte which of course there aren't - there are 8. Always.
Nick...
...is DivX.
In fact it's such a huge driver I'm surprised they don't sponsor video codec development and P2P infrastructure outright openly. I recently bought 400 new gigs to grow my media archive slightly; from what my friends and I talk about, I am not the only one who works like this.
So we're talking volume, volume, volume. Not speed. Not reliability. Not even interface technology. Volume. Higher numbers.
Am I just blind or has somebody seen a downright sponsorship? It would certainly pay them back...
While you're right about sustained transfer rate, would you want to limit your interface to something that has a maximum theoretical transfer rate only a little bit faster than what's currently possible?
Even if you say "fine with me" realize that USB2 doesn't actually get anywhere close to 480 Mbps, but rather closer to 300-360. At that point you are affecting the performance of your drive.
I think the ATA-100/133 SATA-150/300/600 comparisons are equally vapid, but that doesn't mean I want to drop down to ATA-66.
Oh, and while it makes rather minimal difference, cache-to-host transfer speed is performed at the maximum possible transfer rate... it doesn't save you more than a couple milliseconds before the cache is exhausted though.
. Unlike Fujitsu and IBM, Western Digital do not have the reputation of making unreliable drives.
Says you.
WD had a reliability problem in the early to mid 90s. And until the recent debacle with IBM drives they were widely considered some of the most reliable drives available.
Every manufacturer has had drive lines that sucked, and sucked badly. Most of them handle it poorly. And they all have lines that work flawlessly for most users as well. If you look over the last 20 years the drive that stinks rotates between manufacturers, as does the most reliable drive. The end result? Buy the drive that's priced right, has good performance, and keep backups. Because it's not a question of if it will fail - it's a question of when.
Actually, Serial ATA does transfer 10 bits for every byte. It's part of the serial encoding scheme that is used in order to encode the clock into the data stream and not have a pin dedicated just for the clock. So technically, SATA does transfer 1.5Gbps. However, only 8 of those bits are useful data when all is said and done.
This 8bit->10bit conversion scheme is an IEEE standard and can be found in ethernet as well as the new PCI-Express spec.
FireWire has the same problem relative to USB2. It may or may not be better than USB2, but USB1 is ubiquitous and USB2 is mostly transparent to software--it's just faster.
Effectively, the same happened with USB1 and USB2: it moved in because it was cheap and they later upped the performance.
that: "This drive can make your site take on the /. effect"
Get off the darned server and lemme read the review :).
This is the second time it has happened to us and we moved to good servers too :)
I only buy quality drives. I used to use only SCSI, but I switched a couple years to IDE.
I currently actively use about 7 hard drives almost every day (not counting at work or in my iPod). This is more than at any time during my life.
Despite this, I haven't had a drive fail since an old Quantum Grand Prix 4GB (3.5" full height, about 6 years ago).
Why? Because I don't buy junk. Drives are at least as reliable as ever AFAICT, you just need to be careful what you buy.
What I currently use:
180GB Western Digital
80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV in my TiVo (very heavy use)
80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV in my PC.
80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV in my 2nd PC.
80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV in my Mac tower.
60GB Western Digital in my Mac tower.
60GB Western Digital in my XBox
other good drives I've used.
30GB Seagate Barracuda ATA II.
Buy quality and companies will produce quality. Buy bad drives at rock bottom prices and see what they make...
Moved to good servers? Oh, did you meen 'gooder' servers?
If I was building a system where I had a choice between an additional IDE controller for more drives, or SCSI, I'd go with the latter(unless of course it was built into the motherboard, but that's neither here nor there). So you pay +50$ extra per drive... you gain reliability and speed. But in the same respect, I've configured many machines without SCSI and the performance is top notch with plain old UltraATA (master and slave, even!) Sometimes you have to avoid the crappier drive manufacturers, and make sure you OS is set up right (IE, it isn't 95-Me). Then you can spend that extra money you saved up on a graphics card that'll give you that 5 FPS edge and make you KING FRAGMASTER. Usually, if you have tons of RAM, it doesn't matter what kind of shitty drives (or nice ones) are backing it. As soon as everything is slurped into RAM, you don't touch the disk for a good long while. I had a Linux PC with 1GB of RAM that would sit all day with the drives powered down, while I happily tore at it. :-)
You have to remember that 480 Mb is a THEORETICAL maximum throughput. If your USB 2.0 is tied to the PCI bus then you won't get beyond 133 Mb.
I ran into a similar problem with a PCI Firewire card between 2 computers. I coud only transfer at what the PCI bus limited me to.
The answer is 42.
I'd hate to point out that Science.box.sk's main headline as of this writting is a headline that's been on slashdot for atleast a day.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
As Administrator:
/etc/fstab has all swap lines commented out too, so it remembers after reboot. ^_^
Start->Control Panel->System
Then select the advanced tab, and click the "settings" button under performance.
Then select the advanced tab in the new dialog, and click "change" at the bottom under Virtual memory.
Select the radio button for no swap file. Reboot, if asked.
Wahoo.
In linux, issue as root:
swapoff -a
make sure
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
"Linux was made by foreign terrorists to take money from true US companies
like Microsoft." - Some AOL'er.
"To this end we dedicate ourselves..." -Don
-- From the sig of "Don", don@cs.byu.edu
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