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Miniature 5400 and 7200 RPM HDDs Reviewed

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the small-sizes-and-big-storage dept.

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."

6 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. slightly ot by fyonn · · Score: 4, Interesting


    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

  2. Bigger & faster, but not in my notebook by Bushcat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:USB Key's by Ed+Avis · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  4. Re:USB Key's by Rolo+Tomasi · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
  5. Re:USB Key's by whovian · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
  6. HP has plans for 2.5" server drives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.