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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."

26 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Is that a hard drive in your pocket... by mikeophile · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or are you just happy to see me?

    1. Re:Is that a hard drive in your pocket... by dcw3 · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or are you just happy to see me?

      Better than than a floppy

      --
      Just another day in Paradise
    2. Re:Is that a hard drive in your pocket... by Dogtanian · · Score: 5, Funny

      Is that a hard drive in your pocket...
      Or are you just happy to see me?

      Uh, huh. All this talk of 2.5" disks is going to impress the girls even less than the normal 3.5" (*).

      Personally, I have 8", and that's just when it's floppy.

      (*) Although posting regularly to Slashdot won't impress them much either.

      --
      "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  2. USB Key's by Heartz · · Score: 5, Insightful
    With USB keys being much smaller and storage sizes increasing exponentionally,will the spinning disk still be a relavant tool for easy to carry around storage.

    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.

    1. Re:USB Key's by tomstdenis · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yeah, right until after you re-write a sector that 100k'th time......

      Normal IDE disks are rated for a billion re-writes at least. [provided the motor lasts that long]. That's why "them there funny rotating disc like objects" are used to store data.

      Until they invent a lower-power [recall flash requires around 10V or higher to write, from a 3V source that's a loss!] and longer-lasting high density flash you won't see "them funny discs" replaced any time soon.

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:USB Key's by Alien+Being · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "will the spinning disk still be a relavant tool for easy to carry around storage."

      It's about 100x cheaper than solid state and storage "requirements" keep going up, so I'd say yes. Disk based digital video recorders will probably catch on at some point.

    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 dsb3 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Find me a USB key that holds 40GB for under $200 and we'll talk.

      How big is your keyring? :-)

      --

      Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
  3. 2.5" drives by FryGuy1013 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hey, it's not the size that counts!

    --
    bananas like monkeys.
  4. Power consumption by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...power consumption [is] apparently within acceptable tolerances

    Unlike the eastern seaboard?

    'sok. I'll get my own coat.

  5. What they didn't touch on is... by Colitis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:What they didn't touch on is... by cperciva · · Score: 4, Informative

      On the other hand, smaller drives are likely to be more durable. Smaller platters means shorter arms, which means less "flapping" if you apply a shock to the drive.

      As far as the "abuse" is concerned, I think head crashes are a greater danger than bearings dying.

      --
      Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
  6. 40GB? by phalse+phace · · Score: 5, Funny
    The article points out that with 40GB units suitable for server or desktop use,...

    But 40GB isn't nearly enough for all that pr0n... erm... I mean all those illegal mp3's... erm... I mean, oh never mind.

  7. Meanwhile... by RMH101 · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...I just got a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive witha 5 year warranty (under 100UKP) for my desktop. Try and keep up, people!

  8. 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

  9. 5600rpm? by stevenrieder · · Score: 5, Informative

    I believe that's 5400 rpm...

    --
    Hier staat een stukje tekst.
    1. Re:5600rpm? by x136 · · Score: 4, Funny

      You don't overclock your hard drives?

      --
      SIGFEH
  10. The connoisseur's view by vevva · · Score: 5, Funny

    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).

  11. Interesting, but what does it cost? by dphoenix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. 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.

  13. For Non-USians: The drive is 63.5 mm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    That's more likely to impress the ladies.

  14. Re:Very Nice by Pharmboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  15. A couple of points... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:A couple of points... by dissy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ok, here's a positive reply.
      Ive started on this very thing myself, using firewire however.

      Unfortunatly I started getting all sorts of ideas and tacked them on, and now 'cheapie' is out of the question.

      I built a system with 4 firewire buses just for disks.
      I also chose not to power the disks from the firewire bus (explained bellow why)

      The master plan is to have 6 firewire buses (two groups of three, and they only had dual bus cards, thus why i have 4 ports now.. One is not used yet, and will be used with the 3rd dual fw card i do not yet have)
      These three buses connect to firewire hubs.
      Then, you connect three disks per hub.

      Now is the confusing part.
      On bus A, you have 3 disks. These are disk A from 3 different raid-5 groups.
      Bus B has 3 disks which are disk B of the same raid-5 groups. and so on for C.

      Then you setup a raid 5 group out of just those 3 disks. Which in this case gives me 3 groups, and with the 3rd firewire card (bus 5 and 6) this concept will double.

      Then you use LVM to link all of the raid-5 groups together into one big volume.

      Reasonings:

      If any one firewire bus failed (or was unplugged) only ONE disk from each raid-5 group is offline. Raid-5 can survive this.

      I dont use power over firewire because a) the PCs supply can not handle all of that, and b) I now have 3 power supplys, each one chained to the disks in the same order as the firewire buses. This way if a power supply failed, it only takes down one disk per raid-5 group, and again raid can survive that.

      Firewire is multi-host (IE you can have more than one host controller on the same bus) so with two computers on the bus, doing heartbeat monitoring over a serial link between them, if a computer failed, the other can pick up the disks on the bus and continue file serving.

      Using LVM to link the raid 5 groups together means after i start getting disk failures 4-5 years down the road (well, hopefully that long) and it starts to get hard/expensive to find disks of the size i am currently using, I can move the data off the raid-5 group to unused space, and decomition that group. Then it can be pulled off the bus, and replaced with current newer disks which ideally will be much higher capasity, without replacing ALL the disks in my array (as would be the case with a single raid-5 array of all the disks)
      Then you recycle the failing disk, and have two disks spare to use for other machines (IE a mirror to boot a new machine off of, spare single disks, etc)

      Some links you may find interesting:

      - http://www.fwdepot.com/
      Best source of firewire controllers, bridgeboards (firewire -> IDE, firewire -> scsi, usb->ide, enclosures, clamshells you mentioned, etc etc)

      - http://evms.sourceforge.net/
      EVMS = Enterprise Volume Management System. Linux software that lets you manage raid, lvm, clustering, etc all from a server setup. Comes with cli, curses, and X11 interfaces. Not quite 100% there yet, and still has a couple problems for enterprise use, but almost all of them are related to the 2.4 kernel and promised to be fixed when 2.6 is out/stable (and in the past month very well could have been, i havent been keeping up)

      (Please please dont slashdot my poor little file server here!
      If anyone would like to mirror, its ok with me. This is a p2 200 and will die if more than a few peope hit it at once)

      - http://photo.brokensphere.net/index.cgi?mode=view& album=home/fileserver
      (Watch for slashdot injected spaces!)
      This is pictures of some of the parts at the start of my project.
      Havent added new picts yet, nor had much time to work on it.
      These picts show the disks all on one bus and interlinked, which is not good for speed, but I was just testing the EVMS software at the time.

      In the end, I plan to make my own case, which may be a sheet of half-inch think wood screwed into a wall, with disks hanging on it as so their tops face out, and a plexigl

  16. 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.