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

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.

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.