Slashdot Mirror
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."
Man, must be a slow news day.
it's raining in Athabasca, and I've got nothing to say (but FP)
http://geek.is-a-geek.com/
P.S. power's back on
I don't want to review Cowboyneal's miniture hard drive. I want a big one up my ass so I can be Goatseized! GNAA please run shitstorm on this crappy article!
Suckaaaaaaa!!!
Librarians are the most ass-kickingly cool people in the world.
Is it just me, or is microsoft.com completely unreachable now?
Or are you just happy to see me?
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.
Maybe this'll let Microsoft produce a console that isn't the size of a two breeze blocks. Although now I think about it, I don't why they didn't just use a laptop HD for their first console.
I must know what SCO really is up to!
- The new file dialog
- The Galeon web browser. We chose January6 instead, because who wants tabbed browsing except you jerks. Look at mozilla, and you will see why we choose this lovley netscape 2 clone.
- We will make file extration harder, because we don't want to waste space on the context menu. We have removed "Extract here" and you will now have to go though 5 menus to avoid going into the console and typing tar xjvzfcaq file.tar.gz.
- We have made panel configuaration harder. Instead of an intuitve size dropdown with small large ect we have repaced it with a harder to use spinbox. This is beaucse the sizes upset stallman because we didn't have his trouser size in it so we replaced it. Have fun taking 20 clicks instead of 2. PS we removed the cute goat logo in the about box, now you have to look at the foot!
- We will STILL not be including a media player, sure you can reboot into windows or play with mplayer from the command line. Why because our media libray sucks and we don't want to use a superior implemnetation.
We have included some features, but they only did it because you were willing to suck havoc penningtons cock!- We added fake cmyk support in the gimp. Sure it LOOKs like it, but when you try to prepress or print it will look like monkey shit
- We added a better weather applet, but it won't work on rainy days
- Wanda the fish actually looks like a fish now
- We added a menu editor, but when you use it you have to reboot for the changes to take effect
- We made the gnome-terminal compatible with emacs, but you will need a czech keyboard to be compatible with the obscure keybindings.
- As usual, we took more options away from the prefrences dialog and hid them in gconf where they belong
Please send all complaints, complements and gay porn to havocpennington@gnome.orgDid you even RTFA before modding? Hint, look at the picture.
Hey, it's not the size that counts!
bananas like monkeys.
- The new file dialog
- The Galeon web browser. We chose January6 [mozdev.org] instead, because who wants tabbed browsing except you jerks. Look at mozilla, and you will see why we choose this lovley netscape 2 clone.
- We will make file extration harder, because we don't want to waste space on the context menu. We have removed "Extract here" and you will now have to go though 5 menus to avoid going into the console and typing tar xjvzfcaq file.tar.gz.
- We have made panel configuaration harder. Instead of an intuitve size dropdown with small large ect we have repaced it with a harder to use spinbox. This is beaucse the sizes upset stallman because we didn't have his trouser size in it so we replaced it. Have fun taking 20 clicks instead of 2. PS we removed the cute goat logo in the about box, now you have to look at the foot!
- We will STILL not be including a media player, sure you can reboot into windows or play with mplayer from the command line. Why because our media libray [gstreamer.net] sucks and we don't want to use a superior [xine.org] implemnetation.
We have included some features, but they only did it because you were willing to suck havoc penningtons cock!- We added fake cmyk support in the gimp. Sure it LOOKs like it, but when you try to prepress or print it will look like monkey shit
- We added a better weather applet, but it won't work on rainy days
- Wanda the fish actually looks like a fish now
- We added a menu editor, but when you use it you have to reboot for the changes to take effect
- We made the gnome-terminal compatible with emacs, but you will need a czech keyboard to be compatible with the obscure keybindings.
- As usual, we took more options away from the prefrences dialog and hid them in gconf where they belong
Please send all complaints, complements and gay porn to havocpennington@gnome.orgUnlike the eastern seaboard?
'sok. I'll get my own coat.
- The new file dialog
- The Galeon web browser. We chose January6 [mozdev.org] instead, because who wants tabbed browsing except you jerks. Look at mozilla, and you will see why we choose this lovley netscape 2 clone.
- We will make file extration harder, because we don't want to waste space on the context menu. We have removed "Extract here" and you will now have to go though 5 menus to avoid going into the console and typing tar xjvzfcaq file.tar.gz.
- We have made panel configuaration harder. Instead of an intuitve size dropdown with small large ect we have repaced it with a harder to use spinbox. This is beaucse the sizes upset stallman because we didn't have his trouser size in it so we replaced it. Have fun taking 20 clicks instead of 2. PS we removed the cute goat logo in the about box, now you have to look at the foot!
- We will STILL not be including a media player, sure you can reboot into windows or play with mplayer from the command line. Why because our media libray [gstreamer.net] sucks and we don't want to use a superior [xine.org] implemnetation.
We have included some features, but they only did it because you were willing to suck havoc penningtons cock!- We added fake cmyk support in the gimp. Sure it LOOKs like it, but when you try to prepress or print it will look like monkey shit
- We added a better weather applet, but it won't work on rainy days
- Wanda the fish actually looks like a fish now
- We added a menu editor, but when you use it you have to reboot for the changes to take effect
- We made the gnome-terminal compatible with emacs, but you will need a czech keyboard to be compatible with the obscure keybindings.
- As usual, we took more options away from the prefrences dialog and hid them in gconf where they belong
Please send all complaints, complements and gay porn to havocpennington@gnome.orgWhat's impressive to me is that Tom's HG is still this fast , even with all of us checking out the drives. Tom must be the hardware king...
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
It will lead lots of different things
Like smaller desktop PC'S etc.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
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.
But 40GB isn't nearly enough for all that pr0n... erm... I mean all those illegal mp3's... erm... I mean, oh never mind.
...I just got a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive witha 5 year warranty (under 100UKP) for my desktop. Try and keep up, people!
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
I believe that's 5400 rpm...
Hier staat een stukje tekst.
Much as I admire 40Gb in a 2.5" package I'm going to stick with my 100kb 8" floppies. I find the quiet modern drives don't have the same sound quality as the original 8" floppies. It's the whirring sound and the "kerchink" as I swap floppies 3 times per mp3 that adds depth to the listening experience. Nope.. these new fangled drives have no place in the system of a true connoisseur. (PS If any of your readers have replacement valves for a Collossus Mk 1 I would like to hear from you).
- The new file dialog
- The Galeon web browser. We chose January6 [mozdev.org] instead, because who wants tabbed browsing except you jerks. Look at mozilla, and you will see why we choose this lovley netscape 2 clone.
- We will make file extration harder, because we don't want to waste space on the context menu. We have removed "Extract here" and you will now have to go though 5 menus to avoid going into the console and typing tar xjvzfcaq file.tar.gz.
- We have made panel configuaration harder. Instead of an intuitve size dropdown with small large ect we have repaced it with a harder to use spinbox. This is beaucse the sizes upset stallman because we didn't have his trouser size in it so we replaced it. Have fun taking 20 clicks instead of 2. PS we removed the cute goat logo in the about box, now you have to look at the foot!
- We will STILL not be including a media player, sure you can reboot into windows or play with mplayer from the command line. Why because our media libray [gstreamer.net] sucks and we don't want to use a superior [xine.org] implemnetation.
We have included some features, but they only did it because you were willing to suck havoc penningtons cock!- We added fake cmyk support in the gimp. Sure it LOOKs like it, but when you try to prepress or print it will look like monkey shit
- We added a better weather applet, but it won't work on rainy days
- Wanda the fish actually looks like a fish now
- We added a menu editor, but when you use it you have to reboot for the changes to take effect
- We made the gnome-terminal compatible with emacs, but you will need a czech keyboard to be compatible with the obscure keybindings.
- As usual, we took more options away from the prefrences dialog and hid them in gconf where they belong
Please send all complaints, complements and gay porn to havocpennington@gnome.org- The new file dialog
- The Galeon web browser. We chose January6 [mozdev.org] instead, because who wants tabbed browsing except you jerks. Look at mozilla, and you will see why we choose this lovley netscape 2 clone.
- We will make file extration harder, because we don't want to waste space on the context menu. We have removed "Extract here" and you will now have to go though 5 menus to avoid going into the console and typing tar xjvzfcaq file.tar.gz.
- We have made panel configuaration harder. Instead of an intuitve size dropdown with small large ect we have repaced it with a harder to use spinbox. This is beaucse the sizes upset stallman because we didn't have his trouser size in it so we replaced it. Have fun taking 20 clicks instead of 2. PS we removed the cute goat logo in the about box, now you have to look at the foot!
- We will STILL not be including a media player, sure you can reboot into windows or play with mplayer from the command line. Why because our media libray [gstreamer.net] sucks and we don't want to use a superior [xine.org] implemnetation.
We have included some features, but they only did it because you were willing to suck havoc penningtons cock!- We added fake cmyk support in the gimp. Sure it LOOKs like it, but when you try to prepress or print it will look like monkey shit
- We added a better weather applet, but it won't work on rainy days
- Wanda the fish actually looks like a fish now
- We added a menu editor, but when you use it you have to reboot for the changes to take effect
- We made the gnome-terminal compatible with emacs, but you will need a czech keyboard to be compatible with the obscure keybindings.
- As usual, we took more options away from the prefrences dialog and hid them in gconf where they belong
Please send all complaints, complements and gay porn to havocpennington@gnome.orgSo what the author is trying to tell us is that things are getting smaller and faster.
Never heard of that, good I have no life and read fagdot.
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.
With motors and bearings getting better, the biggest, baddest drives are pushing 25k rpms now. How does a 5k or 7.2k rpm drive keep up?
:)
Not being the one to state the obvious, but since the rest of my computer is getting faster, why should I even consider a slower soltution because it's smaller? I mean, size would matter if the case of my computer had to be larger to house it (like a big drive in a little laptop), but since a hard drive is so small in comparison, I see no push for these to be adopted in workstations.
I do understand it being used in consoles and mp3 players. Just not in a workstation. Why must you say silly things in the headlines?
WOW!
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.
want to see 2.5" cdrom drives (just pretend backwards compatibility wasnt an issue).
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
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.
That's more likely to impress the ladies.
And these drives with higher rotational speeds could alleviate the last severe bottleneck to good laptop performance.
I read this article 2 days ago. Since when do tomshardware reviews get posted to Slashdot?
And jeez.. its just a couple of high quality 2.5" drives, nothing important.
I think I'd mostly like these to put a huge raid in a laptop or small case.
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
You mean 1 Db, 1 Calorie/square inch surface dissipation, and 1 Watt usage, all under maximum load in continuous use, along with 5ns seek and 1GB/s non-burst read/write? I find those to be acceptable levels for hard drives.
No, Seriously (except for missing all the other contingencies: physical size, cost, interface, GB capacity etc.). Until that happens, I'm just putting up with a (crappy?) industry design.
Similar to automobiles.
8-PP
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.
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".
m l
http://www.hpcwire.com/dsstar/03/0610/106016.ht
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...
They've sold out all the way, the site has gone all commercial. I stopped frequenting them regularly when they started reviewing movies and games. It seems most of their "serious" hardware and new tech articles hang around forever without any updates.
Don't you really mean...
Is that a hard di_k in your pocket?
Mmmmmm. My favorite kind.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
Perhaps what we need, both for USB keys, and for CD-RW, DVD-RW, is a new filesystem.
The goal of such a filesystem would be to minimize the re-use of any given sector. It would be a no-no to have a single superblock that never moves, for example. Even if the disk is mostly empty, but I keep re-writing the same text file, the filesystem would try to uniformly manage the use of the sectors on the disk in such a way that each subsequent rewrite of the small file goes into a different set of sectors.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Transferring 1.5 GB over USB?!? I think not. Firewire 800 maybe...
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Wow. What did you have for breakfast this morning? Quaker Instant Bitch?
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.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I have one of those also, but I have had a 15Krpm Seagate cheetah for over a year now. The cheetah smokes the WD drive, but that is to be expected. The WD is about on par with a 10Krpm scsi drive from last year( performance and price ). Still with Sata they have removed most of the difference between Scsi and Ide( to be fair Sata is more like scsi than it is like Ide, but I won't complain :). Oh and to keep this at least a little bit on topic the platters in my cheetah are only 2.5 inches. They made them smaller so they could improve seek times and reduce the power draw when running at 15Krpm.
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...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I do understand it being used in consoles and mp3 players. Just not in a workstation.
Depending if they go down enough in price (and after a few years, they likely shall). If they become common - we could see something to the extent of a hot-swappable minidrive enclosure for microdrive. Basically it would be like floppies except a lot bigger and of course using hard-disk architecture.
Really convenient when, say, you're a tech or something else that might involve transferring large amounts of files (of course, DVD's are 4.3GB and drives getting cheaper, but not really so convenient to rewrite).
Smaller drives would result in less worry about "wobble" (of the drive platters) in the case of shock, and less travel-distance for the needle. Now the real question is, are drives dying to demagnetism (caused by greater cluster density) or just shitty design? The lost one I had frag out on me (30GB maxtor) overheated to death, and others have been issues with the needle, so I'm guessing that the less movement that is required of mechanical components the better!
Become smaller?, why should they?
... (may be if you can afford the cost of a Crouse ... )
:)
Laptops are cute (i have an _old_ travelmate : ), doesn't have enough power yet
But at home i have my 91 cm Full-Tower 5 1/4, 2 3/12 Case!
Small Computers Sucks
Let's go back to 5 1/4 '' 2 GB Big Foot Hard Drives
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Nothing compares to the gentle, lilting, swish-swixh noise as your Commodore spends fifteen minutes booting a text type adventure from a audio cassette. It's as calming as a whale song.
Don't forget to be kind and rewind.
NOW THAT'S STORAGE!
Does the sleek design and trim size prevent your kitchen table from wobbling after you accidentally drop it for the first time, or the second time?
(Personally, carrying around a $300+ hard drive scares the living crap out of old butterfingers here.)
I use a full HD snapshot program http://www.drivesnapshot.com/en/index.htm to make full images of my notebook HD onto an external USB2 HD. Agonisingly slow with USB1.1 but about a minute per gig (before compression) with USB2. Ian
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.
Switch from USB to firewire (which ups the cost), and it sounds great to me! The concept is good. In fact, if you ever build something like this, please post an article to SlashDot about how it turns out. I might even try something similar myself, next time I do a major server upgrade.
That said, USB is just a clunky protocol, and would involve a huge CPU drain to run heavily, especially with multiple buses. Also, because USB is known as being slow, all the people along the way were less worried about being efficient. This means the drivers, the USB to IDE hardware, the USB adapter, everything.
I'd really be suprised if anyone has every examined and optimized drivers (for any OS) to handle multiple adapters well.
Firewire is a smarter protocol, there is less CPU involvement, and it known as a 'higher-end' solution, so most of the people involved would have tried harder to perform well.
I would try it with just two drives to see if the raid software would really work with external devices, especially with live connects and disconnects. I'd be suprised if any raid software could handle having devices created and destroyed under them (as compared to just going into an error status) without some issues, but there is a good chance that the fixes would just be minor tweaks.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Yes, I just read that in this excellent hard drive reference. There's a chart showing that 10K drives are 3.0" and 15K drives are 2.5". It also explains why smaller platters are better.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
It's been done.. usb floppy raid!
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
One we can get this done in tight bundles. It could be a replacement for hard drives. Theoretically we could criss-cross a present day platter with a R/W array. And don't forget quantumn dots in the future
I was thinking of upgrading my laptop's hard drive to a 7200rpm 8MB cache 60 gig but I couldn't tell if Tom's was testing the one w/ the 8MB cache.
This guy is way out there
Ugh... I skipped right over "giga".
That's terabytes, not petabytes. Sorry.
Computers are big because big things are easier to handle. Imagine having a wrist-watch sized PC. Every DIY guy will now how to buy a robot attached to a microscope to replace that microchip sized PCI card.
Get an iPod or any of the other portable mp3 players out there today and you can use it just like you described, especially with the new dock.
Since I bought these pills I saw advertised in my Hotmail, I now have a 13" dick and can beat people to death with it....!
yeah, the general consensus is that usb isn;t the best idea, and as it happens I have a single 2.5" bus powered firewire disk, not usb. (which freebsd doesn't work correctly with, which is annoying :)
I hadn;t realised that usb had such a bad rep but firewire is just as good, although the controllers might be a tad more expensive. only thing is that atm I really can't afford to play around like that atm, I've just had a lappie pinched so
one day perhaps, mind you, the other guy seems to be doing the idea well enough.
dave