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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."
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.
Hey, it's not the size that counts!
bananas like monkeys.
Unlike the eastern seaboard?
'sok. I'll get my own coat.
What'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
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.
What'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...
/. is still quoting Tom's HG here. The last several articles I have read have caused me to lose all respect for them. All fluff, no facts, lots of generalizations, and no real useful information. This has been discussed here previously, and many are like me, and no longer bothering reading Tom's reviews.
What impresses me is that
They used to be the king, but the king has no clothes. Sorry about the OT, but it's relevent enough if it keeps anyone else from wasting their time.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
...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).
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.
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.
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.
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 also stops it from blowing away in a strong breeze
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
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.
AFAIK the transfer speed of 10,000 and 15,000 SCSI drives isn't so far ahead of the 7,200 offerings, the improvement is in the latency. I have a SCSI system here at home and the combination of low-latency and tagged command-queing (buffering of future disk requests) lets applications start up lightning fast. Loading video and MP3 files is actually faster off the ATA drive though, as it has a higher raw transfer speed.
What would be really useful for workstations in this day and age are 16MB buffer 2.5" 5400 RPM disks running SATA with TCQ. An intelligent pre-buffering system to keep the 16MB buffer full of anticipated data would help the drives perform as well as 7200 RPM drives, and the lower heat generation and power requirements would boost corporate adoption. I'll bet that after a short while these drives could even be cheaper to produce, as there would be about 1/6th the raw materials needed; the only reason they cost more now is the lower volume.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Hmmm I'm not talk about people who wants aquarium in his pc case.
I'm talking about small PC cases, or think how many of this 2.5 7200 rpm drives can fit 1u rack server ?
Also you point about size of PCI and AGP cards. So I'm asking is your VGA do same job your good old VLB cirrus logic card ? Or what. You may look at size of Realtek network cards. Or you may check Linux on chip systems. If Hitachi or Seagate can produce 73 gb SCSI 10.000 RPM 2.5 drive it will lead another options for the system builder.
And remember, if USA live another power shortage goverments may think raise of power prices.
Also I'm not asking to you hold your breath.
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
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...
I'd like to see effort put into making batteries that last longer. Those methanol fuel cells have been two years away for five years now.
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.
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.
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.
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
They must, to stand up to Slashdot linking to a site that measures content in pages per sentence, rather that sentences per page.
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