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."

Comments

slightly ot

[fyonn]

what I'm thinking might be interesting for doing servers on the cheap would be to do raid arrays with usb based drives. 2.5" drives are small and low powered enough to be powered completely via the usb bus, usb2 (well, the version of usb that does 480mbps) has enough bandwidth, if you dedicated one usb controller per drive and had your 2.5" drives each mounted in a small metal container with a ide2usb adaptor in it then you would have a nice, cheap raid array with easily removeable drives. usb controllers cost buttons and you could either do software raid or even a hardware controller which could be built for the purpose.

it could be alot cheaper than removeable scsi drives, the raiding software could mark the drives so that they can be put in in any order.

what do you folks think?

dave

Bigger & faster, but not in my notebook

[Bushcat]

I routinely upgrade drives in my various notebooks, but I've discovered a drive in an external case can be much faster than swapping out the internal drive. To get maximum benefit out of the newer 7200rpm drives, one needs to use Mode 5, right? Do any current notebooks do that?

Hitachi have piles of info available on their drives here, and a discussion of 7200rpm drives here. The IBM legacy shines through.

What about iPod hard drives?

[__aavhli5779]

These hard drives are truly remarkable in size. It makes me wonder what the deal is with the hard drive inside Apple's iPods. The largest one can fit 30 gb and a firewire controller into an enclosure the size of a deck of cards, and may indeed be one of the 2.5" hard drives reviewed in the article, or at least in the same class.

I can only imagine what an array of 40 of these bad-boys inside a rack enclosure could provide in terms of storage and redundancy. :)

Re:USB Key's

[Ed Avis]

Who's to say that USB keys will not be made containing a small hard disk?

Re:USB Key's

[Rolo Tomasi]

Your points are invalid. First, where did you get the idea that flash uses more power than a hard disk? Probably not even if you compare the power consumption on a byte per byte basis. I think it's plain wrong, and the burden of proof for such an outrageous statement is on you. As to your second point, I quote:

NAND - Flash based media uses a complex low level sector virtualization called "wear leveling algorithm" to distribute the wear evenly across the memory array and maximize the number of write cycles it can sustain.

What this means is, your flash gizmo will beign to fail only once all sectors have been worn out. Even with heavy usage, this could take a long time, probably a decade or more, e.g. for a typical CompactFlash card. I had a 4MB CF card that I used on a daily basis for about 5 years in my Psion handheld, and I had no problems with it until I sold the Psion last year. Another factor is, the bigger the flash device, the longer it will take to wear it out. 4GB CF cards are already on the market.

The actual point is, when carrying stuff around, there's a very high probability that it will experience some sort of impact, and you probably know what happens when you drop your hard drive. OTOH, there's no real replacement yet for HDDs in your vanilla PC or laptop. Continuous writing, i.e. having a swap file on flash memory, would probably really wear it out pretty quickly.

Re:USB Key's

[tomstdenis]

I didn't say flash takes more power. I said it takes enough power to make it non-trivial. [e.g. conversion to 10V or whatever it uses].

Second, where do you think these "re-map" sectors come from? They're not free.

Third, reading flash doesn't really wear it down. How much did you write to it? Also I was trying to point out that replacing a HARD DISK with flash isn't entirely viable. I mean what of the logs, swaps and other temp files routinely created [and deleted, and re-created and so on].

Tom

Re:USB Key's

[whovian]

Good point. Don't see why not .. somehow ... eventually, considering that micro-drives are available for use with electronic equipment, notably digital cameras. It looks at though 1 GB is available now, with 4 GB perhaps this fall.

Re:USB Keys with HDs - already happening

[ioliver]

Cornice Inc's 1" sized and 1.5G capabity Storage Element (that's a HD to you and me!) is going in to consumer devices such as cameras, and now also in to a USB "key".

http://www.hpcwire.com/dsstar/03/0610/106016.htm l

HP has plans for 2.5" server drives

[Anonymous Coward]

According to a server roadmap that HP presented at HP World this week, HP is planning to standardize on 2.5" drives in new Proliant servers in the 2004-2005 timeframe. The reason that was given is that with platter sizes getting so large on 3.5" drives and leading to larger drive capacities, customers want smaller drives for their servers for performance purposes. By switching to 2.5" drives, HP can offer more drive spindles in the same space that current 3.5" drives reside in. I didn't think to ask the presenter about drive speeds, however, since it was an end-of-day presentation, but I'm sure the gains from increased spindle counts don't come anywhere close to making up for the slower RPM's of the current and near-term 2.5" drives. BTW, this was an NDA presentation, thus the reason for the AC posting.

Re:HP has plans for 2.5" server drives

[amorsen]

Today's SCSI drives are almost exclusively 2.5" and smaller. They just come in big packages... That is, internally the platters and electronics are easily small enough to fit in a 2.5" drive (taller than notebook drives admittedly).

It will be interesting to see if 2.5" server drives will arrive as parallel SCSI, serial SCSI, or SATA first... Either way, 2.5" 15k drives are just around the corner. They will not work in a normal notebook though; it would melt.

Autonomous Computing?

[fygment]

Right our university has a mix of Unix and Win2K computers with different settings as you go from dept to dept. All I/O is to floppy or some rather rare CD RW.

It would be nice if all the university computers were without a HD. A student would be issued a 2.5". To log on, insert the drive into a bay (like a 2.5" slot or something) on a computer. Voila the computer boots to your personal settings with all I/O going to your drive. Done, pull the drive and walk away. Any computer you use will always give you the same environment.

Just a thought that seems closer with these size drives.

Below cost

[SuperKendall]

You might have a point except that if you try to buy a Toshiba HD all by itself, it ends up costing about the same as the iPod that contains the same model...

A current use...

[Anonymous Coward]

We are already currently using these in our blade servers. I love these little things, they make maintaining a blade as easy as a full size enterprise server.