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IBM Introduces 'Air Bags' For Laptop Hard Drives
Ruger writes "Reported in PCWorld this morning, IBM has introduced a technology for their new laptop hard discs which has a similar concept to airbags in cars. Active Protection System (APS) is a microchip put on the system board that senses acceleration. It parks the head of a hard drive inside a tenth of a second, significantly reducing the risk of damage to data. IBM also has a a press release on the new ThinkPad R50 and T41 models that include this technology, for those interested in the company line."
Topics > Systems > Notebooks >
IBM Updates ThinkPads
New notebooks feature built-in hard drive protection.
Tom Sullivan, InfoWorld.com
Monday, October 06, 2003
IBM on Monday is adding two systems to its ThinkPad roster of notebooks and boosting the capabilities of several others.
Big Blue is releasing the R50 and T41 models, both of which come with a new Active Protection System that is designed to better protect hard drives.
Comparing APS to automobile air bags, IBM officials explained that the system can detect sudden motion--such as the notebook being dropped or jerked because of a kicked power cord--and react by stabilizing the head of the hard drive.
"APS is a microchip that we put on the system board that senses acceleration. It parks the head of a hard drive inside a tenth of a second. You get four times greater impact with APS than you do without it," said Joe Doria, manager of IBM's ThinkPad product line.
Doria added that APS will protect the data in a hard drive, and IBM hopes it will reduce downtime and support costs.
Additional Details
In addition to APS, the R50 is available in 14- and 15-inch models. The systems weigh in at fewer than 6 pounds, and IBM claims are capable of a battery life reaching nearly 10 hours.
Customers can elect to use the Intel Centrino chip in the R50 and T41 notebooks, Doria said, as well as integrated 802.11 a/b/g wireless functionality.
Big Blue also upgraded the X31, R40, R40e, and G40 models with faster processors and integrated wireless technology.
--Just mod this down if not needed as the server is fine
iPods are reported to have 25 minutes of skip protection. I doubt this would be of much concern.
I highly doubt IBM would make this technology a "dead stop" measure. More than likely, the drive that parks itself in a 10th of a second also returns itself to operation just as quickly once the conditions return to normal. I'd say it's similar to setting your HD to spin down after inactivity, but the platters don't even have to stop turning, just the read arms move out of the way to prevent a head crash. More than likely you wouldn't notice this protective measure kicking in, which is just how it should be.
I'm not sure if this is still the case with IBM laptops today but my A20m had some really nasty overheating issues.
The way it cools the CPU is via a tiny horizontaly mounted fan and a heatpipe running through a big aluminum block...which did virtualy nothing.
Worse yet it was fairly common for that fan system to die. There was a controller card which regulated the fan based on the CPU temptriture. In my laptop that part failed three times during 2 years. Worse yet the ONLY way to fix it is to replace the mothereboard, $400 (the fan itself which can die is $50).
I personaly find it odd that they're so concerend with HDs. I dropped that very same laptop numerous times and that never resulted in a damaged HD or even damaged plastic. (I can't say the same about Dell laptops)
10 Hour battery life on the other hand is something I'm curious about.
Also another HUGE weakness IMO are ports.
Like keyboard, network, USB etc. On a PC those ports are used maybe 10 times a year, on a laptop several times a day, at times roughly.
My current laptop can't play any sound because the 'sound out' port is broken (it's all made of plastic, cord got yanked sideways and the plug just shattered). A friend of mine has a useless laptop because the ethernet jack is broken. I have seen plenty of dell and IBM laptops where the powercable refuses to stay in.
Personaly I'm baffled how the designers didn't see these issues comming.
Fact is the laptops are NOT used gently for more than the first few days. Then they get tossed about and "ripped out" of networks at the end of a long day.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
RTFA.... or at least the story headlines?
It only locks the head to stop it from damaging the hard drive. That hardly has an explosive mechanism in it.
Um. Head parking is not a permanent state requiring a reboot to get out of!
In fact you can have an unsaved text document open and after some inactivity the head in the laptop drive will get parked automatically. With modern mobile hard drives this is likely to happen in as little as 30sec of idling. This does not in any way mean that your data is lost. Once you have the need to use the hard drive heads (for purposes such as saving data) they will be unparked promptly.
i/o systems generally have some notion of buffering and can also cope with latencies (just think of a network socket) so that even in the case of a blocking write operation no data is lost even if the said blocking will take any measurable period of time.
That's because the iPod has a 32 MB RAM buffer into which it loads the music that it's playing. (So for most of the time, when you aren't skipping around tracks, it is essentially a solid-state MP3 player.)
It doesn't have the hard disk spinning all the time. This is not only to prevent skipping but also to dramatically increase battery life.
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
According to this article at Techweb, the head park time was not "specified" in IDE drives, so they had to get drive manufacturers to meet their 200-300 millisecond requirement...
Thats a little slower than a 1/10 of a second.
This is only good for "Air Heads" who move their laptop while it's on.
Don't forget about iPods and other new portable media devices that use hard drives! This could vastly improve performance on them.
I've not seen enough to make me think it's a serious problem, but I have seen a few iPods that have serious hard drive failures that I can't fix, even with low-level formatting. It seems to me a lot of those errors are just because of people moving around too much with an iPod.
There's a 20-minute buffer. Skipping is not a problem.
The reason for that is Sierra games were written by a bunch of professional sadists.
... and dying.
It wasn't just the cruel timing puzzles. It wasn't just trying to type GIVE CUBE PUZZLE TO LABION TERROR BEAST before being Tasmanian Deviled. It wasn't having to walk treacherous mountain paths or doing arcade sequences. It was not even tripping over a stupid cat and falling 2 steps
It was the Your Game Is Hopeless and You Don't Know It scenario.
The one that comes to mind is King's Quest 5. If you don't get the *mumble* in the very first area of the game, you can't get to the island castle at the end. (Actually, there were a lot in that one. Another one involved a leg of lamb and a pie...)
Modern gaming does many things wrong, but at least you don't find out at the end of Half-Life that you missed the switch in Unforeseen Consequences which would have activated the button in Power Up which would have set off the explosives on the cliffside in Surface Tension, which would have revealed the cave which had the keycard inside that you needed to activate the elevator in Lambda Core.
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
I use a (now) old IBM Thinkpad T-22, but any of the T-Series can be set to run normally in a "closed" position. They weigh in between 4 and 5 lbs, and can be purchased with very nice 1400x1050 screens. They're not insanely expensive, either, unless you have to have the absolute latest and greatest model. Some do have Centrino, but you can also buy them with IBM's 802.11a/b/g solution. Thinkpads have typically handled Linux extremely well (mine does, anyway).
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