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Miniature 5400 and 7200 RPM HDDs Reviewed
PReDiToR writes "At Tom's Hardware I found this favourable review of some remarkable Hard Drives. The article points out that with 40GB units suitable for server or desktop use, life with 2.5" drives could be just around the corner. Heat noise and power consumption are all apparently within acceptable tolerances."
USB keys are not only lighter, but you don't even have to worry about it fsckign because you shook it too much while you were on the bus.And they look waaay cooler too.
Durability. The faster the drive is spinning, the more strain on the bearings if your laptop (I'm assuming laptops are the biggest use for these right now) is moving around at all.
I'm afraid I'd rather a slow drive that'll take all sorts of abuse - using my laptop on the bus, shuffling it around on my lap, turning it around to show somebody something on the screen etc etc - than a fast one that isn't tough enough.
You have to remember .. the "cost" figure is strangely omitted anywhere from his review.
People will pay for performance, but only within reason!
However, inevitably, price will drop on these things and you will see smaller systems (tablets, tiny desktop pcs, consoles). It would be nice to make an even smaller media center PC using one of these.
USB speed is highly dependant on the processing power of the "host" computer. This is one of the main things that differentiates it from firewire. So whilst you may be able to do this you may well need another processer per drive or something silly like that. This would obviously drive up the cost a lot.
Also the cost of all those IDE->USB converters and custom "USB raid controller" is likely to push the cost of the array above that of a (much better) SATA or even SCSI one.
You'd be much better using SATA. It's designed for this sort of thing.
There are a lot of comments up there saying this will allow for smaller desktops, etc.
I don't think that is realistic. For the price you pay, 2.5" drives are horribly inefficient, and nowhere near as fast as 3.5" models.
Pretty much all 2.5" get used for now are notebooks and MP3 players.
Maybe as Mini PCs become more popular and mature these drives will get some use there. But this is hardly something to write home about.
The unofficial
It will lead lots of different things
Like smaller desktop PC'S etc.
Yea, and hover cars. We have been promised smaller computers for 20 years now and the closest thing we have in mass production is a Dell Opti (not bad, I have one). 98% of all pci cards are still the same height as the original ISA (and S100 for that matter). The industry has put more energy into mod cases than smaller designs, and really we have to blame ourselves, since they make what we will buy. While having an aquarium built into your case has a certain degree of cool factor (inverse pun intended) we won't see smaller desktops until people DEMAND them.
We already have the technology and components to make very small and still powerful computers (ie: laptops) but people would rather spend the extra $300 (for the same power) on case mods or better speakers. Perhaps once LCD screens become standard equipment, smaller computers will become more in vogue. Until then, the size of a mid tower doesn't look so big compared to a 19" CRT. Personally I can't wait for computers the size of a CDROM drive, with midlevel+ power, I'm just not holding my breath.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Even full size harddrives have gotten much less reliable lately. I assume this is because the data density keeps growing. I would rather buy a hard drive which is slightly bigger (I guess it would have to be more platters because making the radius bigger will make seek times longer?) but will last for more than 2 years.
I passed the Turing test.
I am a storage consultant so I kinda know what I'm talking about here (just thought I'd get that in before I get slagged off) and assuming that you're not totally joking...
1) The technology used within USB type memory keys is only good for about 10000 write operations max.
2) They are very expensive
3) I don't see any USB -> Fibre Channel converters and none of my suppliers have them on their hardware roadmaps (can't think why)
4) They are staggeringly slow, even if you RAIDed a thousand of the buggers.
5) If anyone took one of these keys into a datacentre in which I was responsible for the storage, I would do some painfully biological things to them.
6) In modern datacentres the mass storage (and quite offen the local system disks as well) are supplied from a consolidated disk array which is hung off a fibrechannel network almost nobody who is anybody does JBOD for mass storage any more.
7) RAID shouldn't ever be controlled by software for serious users
8) can't be arsed to go on, but you get the general idea...