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Maxtor's 300 GB Monster Reviewed
bustersnyvel writes "Tom's Hardware Guide has a nice article about Maxtor's new 300 GB DiamondMax harddisk. " The question is - will the drive perform despite having only 2mb of cache, and running at 5400 rpm?
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who cares if it performs? If you can afford/need 300 gigs you're probably not using it to store application, you're using it to store large amounts of data that doesn't need to be bursted, etc.
Striped together for more space for my pr0n!
--- #@$DF@#2%@^%3^&*$%FRHG%%[NO CARRIER]
fp -AJ
300GB is a lot of pr0n
jeeze. that's insane. i still got 30 gig.
For bulk storage, you don't need speed.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
second post!
Even MORE pr0n!!
Could some nice Karma whore post the article here when they get a chance? ;-)
-jls
Techno-pagan
Good Lord! Most laptop drives now have 8 or 16!
fp
Well I read the first 2 pages of the article while it was still waiting for the "future", then I go to read page 3 and its gone! Hit refresh here and sure enough its open for posting. That took what 2 min?
And sometimes, it doesn't. I use a Raptor (10k, 8 meg cache) for applications and OS, but something like this 300 gig drive would be perfect for media storage which doesn't need to be super fast.
I'm waiting for the 1 Tb Hd. It should just be 4 or 5 more years now.
Like every new Maxtor, the first one that comes out is the 5400/2MB model. This is for the warez kids and the movie people. Then, in a month or two, sure enough comes the 7200/8MB model for the uber-raid systems sold by Advanced Unibyte and Transtec and the like. Give it a year, and the rest of us will be able to afford it when the 500GB model comes out.
Until then, it's dual 120s or 160s for price reasons.
The following link seems to work better ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031008/index .html
Opinions differ wildly in the hard-drive business. While Seagate supplies hard drives with 160 GB of capacity in the ATA area, Hitachi and Western Digital already have 250 GB disks. They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space. If you're one of those people for whom "big" isn't big enough, this is the one for you.
However, criticism of manufacturers with smaller maximum capacities is inappropriate since the focus of many of these vendors' attention lies elsewhere. As one of the quietest drives spinning at 7,200 rpm, a Barracuda ATA 7200.7 is designed most of all along ergonomic lines and to deliver a good price/performance ratio. Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital join the running for highest performance at regular intervals. The result is larger, faster and correspondingly expensive hard drives.
With the 4A300J0, Maxtor is traveling a different route: its aim is to provide as much storage capacity as possible at an acceptable price. The recipe it has chosen consists of 5,400 rpm instead of the favored - because it's quicker - 7,200 rpm and only 2 MB in place of the 8 MB cache usual in top models. Since SATA still costs more, it uses an UltraATA/133 interface. This is ample for the coming months, as transfer rates on the fastest ATA disks are still below 70 MB/s max.
We took a closer look at how the 300 GB monster shapes up against the established major-leaguers from Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital.
Personally I'm not worried so much about speed as I am about reliability. I've had to RMA a couple maxtor drives recently, and losing 300gb of data would really, REALLY suck.
I am a filthy pirate.
A friend of mine has one, and he says its not as quick as some of his other drives. But he says it is really nice if your looking for a huge amount of space. But he doesn't run Half Life 2 off of it. (Oh wait, did I say that out loud?) I mean he doesn't run Jumpstart 3rd Grade off of it....
--Still waiting for that awsome sig to just leap out at me..--
It would be a very good idea to use radi with a drive such as this. I would cringe at losing 300GB of data in one failure.
A drive that big is hardly useful by itself; it's better off in a RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 configuration. Having 300GB of data on a single hard disk only guarantees that when the disk crashes and FUBARs all of your non-backed-up data, you'll wish you'd gotten 2 of the monsters. Drives this big are just too vulnerable when used singly without RAID or a sound backup plan.
I'm all for innovation, but seriously, who needs a 300GB hard disks except for pr0n c0lLeCt0R5, warez d00ds and RAID junkies?
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
To quote Dr. J, it is like a dog walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
this article is not old old, but not new as in just released yesterday. are we going to start just posting anything relating to hardware on slashdot?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Technical Data
Capacity 300 GB
Geometry 4 Platter, 80 GB pro Platter
Rotation speed 5,400
Cache 2 MB
Access time 12.6 ms
Interface UltraATA/133
Warranty 1 Year
The technical details leave no room for criticism. This largest DiamondMax is based on platters of approx. 80 GB. Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction.
With four platters, Maxtor is aiming pretty high. Several years ago, IBM put up to five platters per drive in its DTLA series. That offers the advantage of being able to construct very large drives. However, the increased friction causes more heat loss so that hard drives with four platters require cooling sooner than models with only one or two. Large SCSI drives are usually based on multi-platter configurations.
An UltraATA/133 controller was also included in delivery of the retail kit. Although it's labeled as a Maxtor, it in fact originates from Promise. The Maxtor website, meanwhile, contains the information that this controller is not standard in the retail kit but has to be purchased extra.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
THG is not the site for information you can rely on. Any subject. For hard disks check out www.storagereview.com
Best wishes
I think it's really great how we're pushing the capacity bench mark and we can store lots of information on a single drive now. But why not just focus on making a faster drive to get rid of the performance bottlenecks I get. Am i wrong to think that if the speed and access time is the same, it will actually take LONGER to access a certain sector of my drive because it has to search through so much? (Forgive my ignorance but it's a real question)
I'm going to stay away from Maxtor drives. I've a greater than 50% failure rate with them. Several were replaced under warranty. The others I managed to "fix" by letting their diagnostic floppy low-level format it (or whatever it does). I have four of their 60 GB drives set up as RAID-5. I'm constantly having to reconstruct the array because one or another of the drives gets kicked off due to spurious errors.
I've never had any trouble with any of the Western Digital drives I've had, although I've heard some people have had trouble with them. I've even got some old 420 MB WD drives that came with my old 486 in '93 that are still running in my firewall box.
I love you all. DiamondMax's Plus 300 GB Monster Created: October 8, 2003 By: Patrick Schmid Achim Roos Opinions differ wildly in the hard-drive business. While Seagate supplies hard drives with 160 GB of capacity in the ATA area, Hitachi and Western Digital already have 250 GB disks. They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space. If you're one of those people for whom "big" isn't big enough, this is the one for you. However, criticism of manufacturers with smaller maximum capacities is inappropriate since the focus of many of these vendors' attention lies elsewhere. As one of the quietest drives spinning at 7,200 rpm, a Barracuda ATA 7200.7 is designed most of all along ergonomic lines and to deliver a good price/performance ratio. Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital join the running for highest performance at regular intervals. The result is larger, faster and correspondingly expensive hard drives. With the 4A300J0, Maxtor is traveling a different route: its aim is to provide as much storage capacity as possible at an acceptable price. The recipe it has chosen consists of 5,400 rpm instead of the favored - because it's quicker - 7,200 rpm and only 2 MB in place of the 8 MB cache usual in top models. Since SATA still costs more, it uses an UltraATA/133 interface. This is ample for the coming months, as transfer rates on the fastest ATA disks are still below 70 MB/s max. We took a closer look at how the 300 GB monster shapes up against the established major-leaguers from Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital. Technical Data Capacity 300 GB Geometry 4 Platter, 80 GB pro Platter Rotation speed 5,400 Cache 2 MB Access time 12.6 ms Interface UltraATA/133 Warranty 1 Year The technical details leave no room for criticism. This largest DiamondMax is based on platters of approx. 80 GB. Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction. With four platters, Maxtor is aiming pretty high. Several years ago, IBM put up to five platters per drive in its DTLA series. That offers the advantage of being able to construct very large drives. However, the increased friction causes more heat loss so that hard drives with four platters require cooling sooner than models with only one or two. Large SCSI drives are usually based on multi-platter configurations. An UltraATA/133 controller was also included in delivery of the retail kit. Although it's labeled as a Maxtor, it in fact originates from Promise. The Maxtor website, meanwhile, contains the information that this controller is not standard in the retail kit but has to be purchased extra. The DiamondMax Plus is scarcely audible, produces only minimal vibrations and at 39C stays comfortably cool. Active cooling can be safely dispensed with; for permanent operation, however, we still recommend it. In this context, the short guarantee period of one year should be noted. You should consider this very carefully if you're planning to operate the product continuously. We would have liked to have seen a longer guarantee period for a drive of this caliber. est Setup Test System Processor Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz 256 KB L2-Cache (Willamette) Motherboard Intel D845EBT, Intel 845E chipset RAM 256 MB DDR/PC2100, CL2, Infineon Controller i845E UltraDMA/100 controller (ICH4) Silicon Image Sil3112, Serial ATA Display Adapter NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 Network Card 3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit Operating System Windows XP Pro 5.10.2600 Service Pack 1 Benchmarks and Tests Office Applications ZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk Winmark 2.0 c't h2benchw High-End Applications ZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 2.0 Performance Measurements HD Tach 2.61, c't h2benchw I/O performance Intel I/O meter Drivers and Settings Graphics Driver NVIDIA reference driver 29.42 Drivers Intel Application Accelerator 2.3 DirectX Version 9.0 Resolution 1024x768, 16-bit, 85 Hz refresh Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spin
Conclusion: Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer
Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spinning flagships from Western Digital and Maxtor, its overall performance is respectable for a 5,400 rpm drive. Above all, the excellent data transfer rates are certainly welcome.
Only the longer seek times resulting from the low turn rate and the lower I/O performance mean this disk makes little sense for demanding users running it under permanent load or as a system drive. That said, the hard drive is not designed to do this. After all, anyone able to cough up the princely sum of around $411 will no doubt have their own operating system hard drive that also spins quicker. A 7,200 rpm 80 GB hard drive with 8 MB of cache will currently set you back little more than $106.
In view of its large storage capacity, the guarantee of just one year is dubious, since even in two years, 300 GB should still be big enough to save it from the scrap heap. Even if guarantees of several years are reserved for the top 7,200 rpm models, a two-year warranty would at least reduce the vendor's risk of having to honor a guarantee of two years. Ultimately, equipment purchases should not only be a question of numbers, but should involve a fair degree of trust, too.
However, it is curretly part of a promotion, which means that if you go for the kit now, the card will be included.
No longer with the worlds largest bloatware not fit on a single drive!
(Anyone who manages a financials 11i applications knows what i'm talking about)
BTW, anyone know what this is useable formatted ext2 or ntfs?
Here's a working URL, maybe because it's load balanced.
Here's the conclusion: Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer Even if the DiamondMax Plus 300 GB isn't nimble enough to take on the faster-spinning flagships from Western Digital and Maxtor, its overall performance is respectable for a 5,400 rpm drive. Above all, the excellent data transfer rates are certainly welcome. Only the longer seek times resulting from the low turn rate and the lower I/O performance mean this disk makes little sense for demanding users running it under permanent load or as a system drive. That said, the hard drive is not designed to do this. After all, anyone able to cough up the princely sum of around $411 will no doubt have their own operating system hard drive that also spins quicker. A 7,200 rpm 80 GB hard drive with 8 MB of cache will currently set you back little more than $106. In view of its large storage capacity, the guarantee of just one year is dubious, since even in two years, 300 GB should still be big enough to save it from the scrap heap. Even if guarantees of several years are reserved for the top 7,200 rpm models, a two-year warranty would at least reduce the vendor's risk of having to honor a guarantee of two years. Ultimately, equipment purchases should not only be a question of numbers, but should involve a fair degree of trust, too. However, it is curretly part of a promotion, which means that if you go for the kit now, the card will be included.
Opinions differ wildly in the hard-drive business. While Seagate supplies hard drives with 160 GB of capacity in the ATA area, Hitachi and Western Digital already have 250 GB disks. They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space. If you're one of those people for whom "big" isn't big enough, this is the one for you.
However, criticism of manufacturers with smaller maximum capacities is inappropriate since the focus of many of these vendors' attention lies elsewhere. As one of the quietest drives spinning at 7,200 rpm, a Barracuda ATA 7200.7 is designed most of all along ergonomic lines and to deliver a good price/performance ratio. Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital join the running for highest performance at regular intervals. The result is larger, faster and correspondingly expensive hard drives.
With the 4A300J0, Maxtor is traveling a different route: its aim is to provide as much storage capacity as possible at an acceptable price. The recipe it has chosen consists of 5,400 rpm instead of the favored - because it's quicker - 7,200 rpm and only 2 MB in place of the 8 MB cache usual in top models. Since SATA still costs more, it uses an UltraATA/133 interface. This is ample for the coming months, as transfer rates on the fastest ATA disks are still below 70 MB/s max.
We took a closer look at how the 300 GB monster shapes up against the established major-leaguers from Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital.
Technical Data
Capacity 300 GB
Geometry 4 Platter, 80 GB pro Platter
Rotation speed 5,400
Cache 2 MB
Access time 12.6 ms
Interface UltraATA/133
Warranty 1 Year
The technical details leave no room for criticism. This largest DiamondMax is based on platters of approx. 80 GB. Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction.
Summary:
With a behemoth capacity of 300 GB, the DiamondMax is the biggest hard drive so far. Can the 5,400 rpm drive with just 2 MB of cache also deliver the performance for our times?
4A300J0 a.k.a. Diamond Max Plus: Technical Details
Technical Data
Capacity 300 GB
Geometry 4 Platter, 80 GB pro Platter
Rotation speed 5,400
Cache 2 MB
Access time 12.6 ms
Interface UltraATA/133
Warranty 1 Year
The technical details leave no room for criticism. This largest DiamondMax is based on platters of approx. 80 GB. Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction.
With four platters, Maxtor is aiming pretty high. Several years ago, IBM put up to five platters per drive in its DTLA series. That offers the advantage of being able to construct very large drives. However, the increased friction causes more heat loss so that hard drives with four platters require cooling sooner than models with only one or two. Large SCSI drives are usually based on multi-platter configurations.
An UltraATA/133 controller was also included in delivery of the retail kit. Although it's labeled as a Maxtor, it in fact originates from Promise. The Maxtor website, meanwhile, contains the information that this controller is not standard in the retail kit but has to be purchased extra.
The DiamondMax Plus is scarcely audible, produces only minimal vibrations and at 39C stays comfortably cool. Active cooling can be safely dispensed with; for permanent operation, however, we still recommend it. In this context, the short guarantee period of one year should be noted. You should consider this very carefully if you're planning to operate the product continuously. We would have liked to have seen a longer guarantee period for a drive of this caliber.
Test Setup
Test System
Processor Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz
256 KB L2-Cache (Willamette)
Motherboard Intel D845EBT, Intel 845E chipset
RAM 256 MB DDR/PC2100, CL2, Infineon
Controller i845E Ult
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
DiamondMax's Plus 300 GB Monster
Created: October 8, 2003
By: Patrick Schmid & Achim Roos
Opinions differ wildly in the hard-drive business. While Seagate supplies hard drives with 160 GB of capacity in the ATA area, Hitachi and Western Digital already have 250 GB disks. They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space. If you're one of those people for whom "big" isn't big enough, this is the one for you.
However, criticism of manufacturers with smaller maximum capacities is inappropriate since the focus of many of these vendors' attention lies elsewhere. As one of the quietest drives spinning at 7,200 rpm, a Barracuda ATA 7200.7 is designed most of all along ergonomic lines and to deliver a good price/performance ratio. Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital join the running for highest performance at regular intervals. The result is larger, faster and correspondingly expensive hard drives.
With the 4A300J0, Maxtor is traveling a different route: its aim is to provide as much storage capacity as possible at an acceptable price. The recipe it has chosen consists of 5,400 rpm instead of the favored - because it's quicker - 7,200 rpm and only 2 MB in place of the 8 MB cache usual in top models. Since SATA still costs more, it uses an UltraATA/133 interface. This is ample for the coming months, as transfer rates on the fastest ATA disks are still below 70 MB/s max.
We took a closer look at how the 300 GB monster shapes up against the established major-leaguers from Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital.
Technical Data
Capacity 300 GB
Geometry 4 Platter, 80 GB pro Platter
Rotation speed 5,400
Cache 2 MB
Access time 12.6 ms
Interface UltraATA/133
Warranty 1 Year
The technical details leave no room for criticism. This largest DiamondMax is based on platters of approx. 80 GB. Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction.
With four platters, Maxtor is aiming pretty high. Several years ago, IBM put up to five platters per drive in its DTLA series. That offers the advantage of being able to construct very large drives. However, the increased friction causes more heat loss so that hard drives with four platters require cooling sooner than models with only one or two. Large SCSI drives are usually based on multi-platter configurations.
An UltraATA/133 controller was also included in delivery of the retail kit. Although it's labeled as a Maxtor, it in fact originates from Promise. The Maxtor website, meanwhile, contains the information that this controller is not standard in the retail kit but has to be purchased extra.
The DiamondMax Plus is scarcely audible, produces only minimal vibrations and at 39C stays comfortably cool. Active cooling can be safely dispensed with; for permanent operation, however, we still recommend it. In this context, the short guarantee period of one year should be noted. You should consider this very carefully if you're planning to operate the product continuously. We would have liked to have seen a longer guarantee period for a drive of this caliber.
est Setup
Test System
Processor Intel Pentium 4, 2.0 GHz
256 KB L2-Cache (Willamette)
Motherboard Intel D845EBT, Intel 845E chipset
RAM 256 MB DDR/PC2100, CL2, Infineon
Controller i845E UltraDMA/100 controller (ICH4)
Silicon Image Sil3112, Serial ATA
Display Adapter NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400
Network Card 3COM 905TX PCI 100 MBit
Operating System Windows XP Pro 5.10.2600 Service Pack 1
Benchmarks and Tests
Office Applications ZD WinBench 99 - Business Disk Winmark 2.0 c't h2benchw
High-End Applications ZD WinBench 99 - High-End Disk Winmark 2.0
Performance Measurements HD Tach 2.61, c't h2benchw
I/O performance Intel I/O meter
Drivers and Settings
Graphics Driver NVIDIA refer
it's still working, on more than 3 dimensions.
it is very useful for filtering out phonIE ?pr? ?firm? hypenosys, as well as detecting fraudulent corepirate nazi talknicians.
the kode remains readily available to all. you know where to look/who to trust? see you there.
To say that I want this is an understatement ;-). However, 5400 RPM seems a bit slow, especially if the price tag is a heft $285.
:-).
I mean, with that much space, I would also like faster seeks times. Additionally, the 2MB cache seems awfully small. I guess we have to wait for the special edition like in the Western Digitals, where only the special edition drives have the 8MB caches. DesignTechnica has a bit of information on this drive (family). Go here while Toms Hardware is un-slashdotted
Suhit
300Gb? man, that could hold a lot of pr0n. but seriously , why have that much space. i mean that sure is a lot of....oh....i see...
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
I saw the article on Tom's Hardware a couple of days ago and couldn't understand why they were making a big deal about it. The 300Gbyte drive has been out since (at least) July. Fry's has already had a sale where it was $249 with another $50 off in rebate, making it $199 (That sale is over). I've bought and used several of these and they work great (performance isn't critical for my app).
Last year in August (?), Maxtor announced the 240G and 320G drives (4 platters @ 80G), but apparently had problems and never shipped them. 11 months later, they finally ship 300G. OTOH, its the biggest thing out there, so they're doing something right.
ummm..... Why so slow? My maxtor drie I have now is 7200rpm, the same speed as my other IBM drive too. Why did they go so much slower? It seems with the continual "faster=better" idea we should start seeing IDE drives reaching the speeds of 10,000rpm soon (if there aren't a few already)
What a let down.
Ave Molech Setting
What filesystem can support 300GB? I know that if you used a FAT16 partition, you would have to divide it into like 15 drives. The newer file systems have more, but eventually wont we hit their address limits as well? I usually dont worry about it with ext2 and such, but it could become a concern as drives get to be such large storage devices
OK performace might not be that hot but if it can fill a 100Mb ethernet connection then its going to work fine as a small office backup/storage system with RAID 1. Sometimes big and slow is better than fast and small.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
My company bought two of these and a raid 1 enclosure for data that we need to backup and have instant access to. Works great and feels secure. Sure, it's not as secure as offsite tape backups, but that's not the point. Performance? Who cares, it's WAY faster than tape.
Other than this situation, I really can't think of any other reason to have one though.
I wonder what it comes out to? (you know that tax that goes to the recording industry for all storage devices or some other such crap)
"Four of them are used, raising capacity to around 320 GB. However, "only" 300 GB is used - the remainder is probably reserved for error correction. "
Am I the only one who finds this worrying. 6% of the disk is for error correction. Thats quite a high figure I feel for something that is meant to be reliable
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
There seems an obvious need to segment the HD market into two main slices:
- ultrafast drives with less space
- ultralarge drives with less speed
The first for paging and applications, the second for backups.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Where can I get a real woman????
The answer is simple. Just overthrow current society and resurrect the institution of slavery, then buy one. Frankly, it's your only hope. Let me know when you accomplish your goal... 'cause it's my only hope, too.
Windows Xp on my computer could only see 128 GB of my 160 GB drive because nobody told me it needed to be formatted into smaller partitions. 300 GB would be a lot of partitions... Unless i'm a big doofy idiot, feel free to comment to this if there is a better way.
do unto others as you would have them do unto you
Screw that. Give me a 50 GB hard drive that doesn't drop dead after 6 months and I'll pay a small fortune. Hell, I might even be willing throw in my left nut as a bonus.
Well, you could always try reading page 4 of the article where they give the benchmark results. Actually, that's pretty much the meat of the article. Or, if you're too lazy to read page 4 and look at the pretty charts, you could just read the conclusion:
You work for RIAA, don't you?
BTW, anyone know what this is useable formatted ext2 or ntfs?
Please put your question in the form of a question...
THAR BE MAAAANSTARS!
I'm a rabbit startled by the headlights of life
That'd work great in my Tivo, for example.
Just because its not the latest and greatest doesn't mean its specs aren't very useful for current applications.
250GB for $149.99 (after rebate) = less than $0.60/GB. (And 8MB buffer/7200RPM at that...)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
If I've done my math right that's a third of a year of playing Ogg files @~q7 24x7 without having to listen to any track twice.. :o)
I've got 376 CD's (all paid for thanks) encoded into 30G. 300G.. I'd *only* need to buy another 3300 or so CD's to fill it.
You could run a number of Classical, Jazz, Rock, Pop, etc, etc radio stations off a drive like this..
Are Maxtor diamondmax drives supposed to be very loud off and on while accessing data? I got a replacement drive for this reason, and my **replacement** makes the same sort of noises. It is a grinding sound -- like a normal seek noise -- only much much louder. Does anyone have one of these drives?
A "nice article" at Tom's? What's next, military intelligence and beautiful BASIC code? Now, I'm no native English speaker, but I always manage to find minor, I don't know, "bumps" in the language and grammar in articles at Tom's. The first paragraph in this article contains the sentence "They all pale, however, compared to Maxtor's monster, which has a full 300 GB of write space" which illustrates my point. Is "write space" typical usage? It doesn't seem familiar, at least not to me. I've more or less stopped reading Tom's for this reason, and because I find their format a bit too obnoxious.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
"200 years ago men were running after bare naked women in the fucking forest and fucking in the bushes!!!"
You do realize that this is 2003 right? I don't think a majority of the world's population was running naked through the forest in 1803.
The submitter is asking if the 5400rpm/2mb version will perform, does this mean that standards at slashdot have fallen so low that even the submitter hasn't even RTFA?? Although I guess it isn't so bad, at least this isn't a dupe, yet!!
At work we have a 5 meg drive, with 7 platters. The drive weighs 90 Lbs. it measures about 26" by 19" by 17". We dont know where it came from, but its there, and none of us want to move it.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
120GB 5400RPM drives at $80 a piece x 4 = $320
+ $100 for a RAID 5 controller
You get 360GB of space, it's faster, it's more reliable, and it costs the same price.
alias wack { /raw -q PRIVMSG $1 :DCC SEND "x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x" 0 0 0
}
(For those of you frothing at the keyboard to tell me that RAID 1 is the worst configuration, there's nothing else that works with 2 drives and provides full data backup.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
It also includes 3 years manufacturer's warranty.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
5400 rpm drives run cooler and quieter than 7200 rpm. Normally, that would mean longer life, better reliabilty. Why they only put a 1 year warranty on it puzzles me.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Assuming the TiVo BIOS can handle it (or even has to... maybe that's a kernel function), this will easily exceed 400 minutes in "basic" resolution!
And spinning at 5400 is a big plus. It's plenty fast for a Tivo, and will run cooler on less power.
If I want speed, I get more RAM, but with hard drives I want reliability and I suspect that higher speeds bring less reliability. Does anyone have a link to an analysis of the reliability-speed tradeoff?
Haha. You're depressed, eh? I've got a girlfriend. Since yesterday. Mbwahahaha. :p
But for regular data/media storage. I'd even make the less speedy drives more reliable, if that's possible. I don't really care that much if I need to reinstall an OS, but getting back my email or music or whatever is much more important.
But it's always fun to use a floppy tape drive for swap, and pass mem=8M to the kernel. Fire up KDE3 and wait for some laughs.
Anything you seriously need fast access to should be on a ramdisk, backed up often through rsync's copy feature to a slower medium. Good excuse to get a Sun Fire 15k with 576GB of ram.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
except for file swappers and ch34p pr0n servers. frankly I'm happy with my 36GB 15,000 RPM drive! you poor ide using souls just don't know what your missing!!!
Back in the day Maxtor HDs were pretty good; my lab has a 60 GB that's 3 years old and still pulling.
Nowadays, I question their manufacturing quality: my dept has purchased 8 boxes (not all from the same vendor) in the past 12 months, and somehow each came with a 120 GB Maxtor in it. Two of those drives were DOA! Two others failed within 3 months.
50% infant mortality is unacceptable, which is why we replaced all of those drives (some at our cost!) with a variety of 120 GB drives. Our rule is no more Maxtors!
Sure, this is flamebait, whatever.
All the Lacie Firewire drives we use here (video editing shop) are equipped with Maxtor drives and a quick google search shows the same result... :-)
Maybe you should take a look in your case
I'm sure they use / have used other brands, but there is a rather good chance you have a Maxtor too.
BTW: Never had a failure with one of these in the last maybe two years...
5400 rpms.... ugh. i didn't even know they were still making those. anyway. 300GB is a lot of movies... i mean, files in a small amount of space... MPAA and RIAA ain't luvin' it.
As the block density goes up so does the transfer rate. A 300GB drive rate != 30GB drive rate.
Access times will be similar though.
love is just extroverted narcissism
You try reading the article, numbnuts.
The line you're so upset about is a pull quote from page one. Why not try discussing the performance results, if that interests you, rather than trying to show everyone how clever you are?
aaarrrggghhhh, It's a curse
/goes to look inside case
Interesting point of view, however, I shoot with a digital camera, in JPEG most of the time. Since I started 3 years ago with a Canon D30 and since end of 2002 with a 1Ds I have accumulated almost 200GB. All photos are archived on CDs as they are shot but having them all online is fantastic...
/p
Since all images are archived and I only need to have them rapidly accessible, this slow but huge HD is exactly what I need, even if unreliable. At worst if it dies before I save it all on DVDs, I'll have to reread a few hundred CDs...
or is it just me? i mean, this article is like, 5 days old!
come on people!
i care a lot about speed and reliability.
I try to maximxe the area under the head, (paltter count head count, etc) and balance that with speed.
Reliability os key to me.
I've seen freinds RMA five maxtor drives recently, and it would be sickening to lose 275 (net) gigabytes of data.
I am not saying the competitors are much better... all my ide drives have had electronic failures, and thogh no scsi drives of mine have ever died (some over 10 years old and used every day).... I would NEVER trust maxtor untill i hear they imporve their failure rates.
Sure it's the biggest drive out there, but it's based on yesterday's technology. I'm much happier with my WD 250GB(really 232GB)/7200RPM/8MB/Serial ATA drive. Yes I understand that it's meant data and not apps, but if I'm going to spend top-of-the-line dollar I expect top-of-the-line product. I intend for my drive to last a long time(atleast the duration of the 3yr warranty). Hopefully it will outlive the life of even the PATA interface and someday can be a spare drive I throw into some router or something because, "It's only 250GB."
With textures and maps and crappy coding, games take a huge amount of space. They always push home users to get something faster/bigger/larger.
Another one is video capture. Huge amount of data there.
I would just have one so I can dual-triple boot OSs and all of the applications.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Everyone Cries about 5400rpms but maxtors Huge line has traditionaly always been this way ive owned 2 27s 4 60s and an 80 from them all were first run (behemoths) all were 5400 and NOT one has failed or even comes close to running Vaugly warm. my reasoning is they wait until its been refined a bit to move it up to 7200 (begin flame) i quit using WD in 96 and havent lost a meg since.
I would love to have seen it at 7200 or higher (although that would have meant SCSI for much higher). As it stands it's a drive that is big and hampered by slow speed of rotation. Bummer. It would have been nice to see a faster drive with an 8MB cache.
And what's up with these 1 year warranties? They're becoming more common all the time...I don't like that trend at all.
400 Hours.
a brand new Tivo does 4800 minutes, stock, out of the box.
It's not the size of the drive, it's how..{blech}
I see your drive is almost as...{nah}
Drivagra! Increasing Hard disk size by...{there we go!}
-i don't have a sig, you insensitive clod!-
I work with raw DV files on a daily basis. DV takes up 13GB per hour of footage. At that rate, a 300GB drive could fit almost 23 hours of video.
As someone who has worked on a project with over 40 hours of video, I can tell you there is a need. I'll take two, please.
That depends, am I getting paid hourly to fix the problems? :-)
As I speak, I'm backing up some taper torrents to a USB attached hard drive. I don't think the 5400/2mb is what is making things so slow.
Similarly, I'm sure that a 5400/2 is more than sufficient now for serving up mp3's, flacs, etc. to my home network.
Outside of various database apps, are the uber-fast drives a big deal?
Anyway, as some others have pointed out, the truly sweet thing is that this announcement should be driving down HD prices for drives that are 'only' 160 GB.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You never expanded the source code tree of a linux distribution, such as Gentoo? I could fill that drive up pretty quick as a file server.
The speed of these large drives is *very* fast despite the 5400 rpm. Remember, the density of bytes per revolution in significantly higher. Even though it is spread out across four platters, you have all those heads scanning the sectors during each turn. For compiling large projects, a single drive like this works excellent as a file server. You can easily saturate a 100Mb/sec connection with a Pentium 120MHz box using this drive.
Just like laptops, the lower speed is refreshing as I enjoy low power consumption for my UPS units. This means longer battery runtime and less trips to the generator during blackouts. And the noise won't be missed. Less energy requirements are quickly noticed in the monthly power bill. I pay eight cents per hour for residential rates. That's about 20 cents a day, or $6.00 a month for 100 watts worth of computers. Each high performance part changes this bill rapidly.
...act II. Nice for the prople who fill their hard disks with warezzzz and lesbian porno flicks... or people who want a huge RAID array, but dont need the speed. Or rather, top-of-the line speed.
Its fairly simple why the drive's slow. It ain't easy spinning fast with 300Gb of pr0n. After you try to lift and run with 300LB worth of pr0n mags, you will glad how much better your 300Gb Maxtor is than you.
RRS, aka The Notorious BOB
www.notoriousbob.co.nr
who would you suggest then? I've had to RMA WD drives... I had to RMA 3 IBM drives during their whole fiasco. I've never RMA'd a Maxtor drive, but people are scared of them. I'm crossing my fingers on my Seagate SATA drive.
About the only drives I've never had problems with were Micropolis (now defunct) and fujitsu. But both of these were SCSI drives. I just think that IDE drives pretty much suck now, and that's why the manufacturers are lowering the waranty.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
At last! I will never run out of space with this HD :)
I just had a 60GB DiamondMax go tits up a few days ago after a whole 5 months of use. It was bad enough that the drive died, but the pain in the ass return policy made sure that it's the last Maxtor drive I'll ever buy.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Will it perform quieter than the current generation of 7200RPM drives? Yes.
Will it perform cooler than the current generation of 7200RPM drives? Yes.
Will it perform longer than the current generation of 7200RPM drives? Yes.
Will it perform faster than the current generation of 7200RPM drives? No.
I'll take it.
So why even put this on Slashdot? Slow day? No more stupid "I switched to Windows XP for fifteen minutes" articles to be found?
Anyway, this is the heading of the last page on the article- Conclusion: Large, fast, quiet-if only the guarantee were longer, in case the suspense was killing anybody (or they just dont really care enough to RTFA. Not that I blame them, honestly).
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
What is it's lifetime?
Ok, I'm serious.
Now suppose you have a bunch of these in RAID configuration. Where in the Earth do you find an affordable backup system for an over-terabyte data storage?
This disk will be cheap in less than two years; how about the mandatory backup system?
A second RAID for backup (or the Internet:^) isn't an option in this case, I'd want to know specific solutions.
The day Google gets wepons of mass destruction, I fear for Yahoo!.
That was my first thought exactly.
I fiddled with this a while back, but hit a stumbling block because it was hard to transcode a DVD to a more efficient video encoding format without losing information.
It's not that hard to rip a DVD and maintain all information, and not that hard to transcode into an DivX AVI or some such, but with no Menus or extras (and only a single audio track, etc).
What I want is to build a HD based video jukebox based on my purchased DVDs at high quality with all associated data still there. Currently this is about 100 disks, and I'd like to manage playback from a really small box next to the TV. This probably means only a single drive (of the 200G+ variety).
Can anybody make suggestions about which tools to use? Gentoo Linux is the preferred plateform.
By high quality, I mean good enough that I can't tell the difference from the source disk on a decent TV. I understand that there is always some degredation when moving from one lossy encoding scheme to another.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Eh, I thought the point of it was to store massive amounts of data, not to win a race. Eventually, when prices settle down, it'll be both fast and large. But at the moment, they're trying to go big. Who cares about performance at this early phase?
"Derp de derp."
The question is - will the drive perform despite having only 2mb of cache, and running at 5400 rpm?
Of course it will perform, much like the uber-geek purchasing it: fat and sloth-like, with a really small wang.
Now if only they had hard drive ginseng...
(of course this is a flame/trolling!)
I've just brought a 200GB (7200RPM/8MB) model to run alongside my almost full 120GB (7200RPM/8MB) Western Digital.
I have never heard my Western Digital in normal use.
I hear my Maxtor all the time. It's much louder despite their claims of "Quiet operation".
Won't be buying another Maxtor regardless of size.
I back up the family network.
- A Mac
- Two Windows 98 machines
- Three Windows 2000 machines
- A Windows XP machine
This drive would be just right for that task. It doesn't need to be fast, nor does it need fast access. It doesn't need to be all that reliable either - the only sad thing would be if someone needed to do a restore AND the Maxtor failed on the same day (or week, given my family tech support contract - or lack thereof).
A little rsync, a little ssh, everyone with a DSL. Throw in a big HDD like this Maxtor running on an old piece of hardware and you're done!
Everytime Maxtor releases a new 'largest' hard drive to the market, they always release the 5400, 2mb cache version first. I dont know if the reason if due to manufacturing or not. They have more plant lines producing the slower speed/less cache drives for OEM VAR's. Still I like to think its smart marketing, so all the techies will run out to buy the 'largest' drive at the highest price now.
When the 120's came out I waited a painfull 6 weeks (yes I'm a geek.. it was painful for me) for the 7200rpm version to be released. With the 160's I faithfully waited almost two months, and got a rebate to boot.
In the end its not if this 5400rpm drive will perform close to smaller 5400rpm drives, but if the latency and seek on a 300gb 7200rpm is small enough to warrent buying only one drive when ATA cards are cheap and two drives could get you better performance for more storage.
If you really need to cram multiple 300gb drives into any enclosure, speed is not what you are going after, its density, so its a moot point on that scale.
Actually, you take the odds of the each engine failing and multiply them (the odds) together. If the odds of one engine failing are 1 in 4, the odds of two failing are 1 in 16, etc.
;)
At least this is what little I can remember from a long-ago and far-away prob/stats course.
The only real thing I see driving HD size up in the next few years is Tivos and HD PVRs. A 250GB drive will store about 30-40 hours of HD Video (HD MPEG2 bitrates: 1080i = 18Mbit/s, 720p = 14Mbit/s). For people to get 80-100 hours of HD, they'd need roughly 600GB of HD space. Two 300s would provide that. And believe me, there are people who want to store 100 hours (and more) of TV shows, check out Weaknees.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I've found that hard drive reliability is inversely related to the drive's rotation speed, raised to the nth power. I've had absolutely no problems with Maxtor's 5400 RPM drives, despite running them for extended periods. With 7200 RPM, both Maxtor and other people's, I've had some trouble. The faster the rotation, the more likely it is for the media to start vibrating, especially with regard to outside stimulus, and the greater chance of a head crash.
Perhaps MS operating systems are better at caching than they used to be, but being able to cache N whole tracks at once is pretty important - the disk rotational latency has been more important than seek time for probably a decade.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Any decent OS will use system memory to cache
disk accesses. The onboard cache is useless.
Jesus. I remember the first time I tried to upgrade my HDD (to a monsterous 1GB) prices were like $0.50 per MB!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
This reminds me of a time circa 1995/96 where I was a member of the Flying Circus BBS. (Before the 'net was as it is...) I posted a comment on the board about using PKLite to "shrink" executable files as they ran, because I was filling up my 540mb (read it--megabyte) hard drive. I received so many flame replies about how no one should ever be filling 500MB of disk space, and how I needed to move some data offline, etc.
Offline data--now a term of the past really. Why keep anything offline when you can have it all at once? Not that it mattered that the 540mb hard drive was $500 on my 486 DX/33.
Wow, I sound like Grandpa Simpson!!
Side note: Search Google for "Flying Circus BBS" and the 5th or 6th listing is for BBSs in the 248 area code--my BBS (The Neverland) is on there, believe it or not, for 1998. (Although it ran before and beyond 1998.)
The higher, the fewer.
In order of importance:
-- Will program for bandwidth
I know people who collected 2TB of data in a couple of weeks. I wish we could record ~50MB/sec at 15hs/day over 3.5 months, but we can't afford it.
I've got a girlfriend. Since yesterday. Mbwahahaha. :p
Stole Mom's credit card again, huh?
How much is your "girlfriend" per hour?
Or did you go with the economy inflatable model?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Actually I prefer 5400RPM drives... They tend to run quieter and cooler, so they don't need aggressive cooling. The speed difference vs. 7200RPM drives isn't that big of a deal, and it's easier to RAID 5400RPM drives due to the aforementioned heat and cooling issues :)
With the number of sectors/track as that thing's going to have (http://www.maxtor.com/en/documentation/data_sheet s/maxline_data_sheet.pdf), the RPM doesn't matter, yes, 7200 RPM would be faster, but no, 46MB/sec. for what I'm guessing to be their 250GB model isn't bad.
Combine that with mirroring and you can get 92MB/sec sustained reads!
Will 8 MB of cache really do you a lot of good with 300 GBs of DATA? No
Imagine a Beowu...*clickclickclickclickclick*...lf cluster of the...*clickclick*..ese babies!
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
I had been predicting the manufacturers to diversify their drives a bit now. Till now we've had two directions, the big ATA and fast SCSI drives. This will change as some people need bigger for lower cost, like this drive provides, some will need really fast 7200/8mb SATA drives to become their C: drive, many others will need really cheap low power drives for the lower end machines (maybe still at 10gb - 30gb for cost reasons) and the server guys will pay big bucks for 15k Cheetahs.
My main interest in these ranges is (1) Huge but cheap drives, possibly slow with lower cache, so we can have 1TB+ space in standard machines. With this drive, we can have 1.2TBs in a standard Pentium2, Celeron or Duron machine to act as a cheap fileserver. (2) Really low cost and low power drives, possibly slow and low on space. Even 10GBs will still do for people who need computers for emails and web browsing only. 2GBs is enough for Windows 2000 or XP, Office, antivirus, a few games, winamp, winzip, real, and the rest of the list. 30GBs at 5200 selling at $50 will cover a very important market other drives cannot cover.
I wonder why noone has come up with those old Seagate multi-level 8-plate thick drives for faster data rates and high volumes.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Come on, just imagine it... Besides video, and server type applications, isn't this getting a little outrageous?
Yeh, in theory a 5400 RPM drive should do the job for normal DV - which is 3 mb/sec. I think the "pro" DV standard is more demanding. I suppose the problem can occur on play-back, if a package is trying to do a transition/effect that involves 2 or more DV files - here you can get dropped frames.
On a related side note - I have a lot of Mini-DV material that I want to back up onto my new DVD writer. I want to do it at a quality setting that would allow me to re-edit/use the material later without too much loss. If I store only 1 hour per DVD, is the quality loss acceptable? Or do I need to make 2 DVDs per 1 hour tape, or use MPG4?
What are other video people doing to archieve material?
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Answer is - either a top tape backup, or lots of DVD-R's, or you organise things better so your backup is more selective, or you dont..
If the standard backup media (like DVD) were big enough, then HDs would be too small to master them, and people complain.
If HDs are a lot bigger than the standard backup media (like DVD) you need loads of them, then people complain..
no win either way..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
And you call yourself a geek? :-)
:-)
Hard drives have two states, new or full. Their size is irrelevant.
My next computer will have 1.4 terabytes of disk storage (8x200G in RAID5). I'm convinced it will last me at least a month.
Real geeks have always want MORE hard drive space, FASTER processors, and MORE COLORFUL blinkenlights. Which school are you from, anyway?
I currently have 560GB (200x2, 120x1, 40x1) and 2 DVD drives crammed into my mini-tower. I pulled this off by replacing the 3.5" floppy with a hard drive held in by duct tape.
.flac, and doing all I can to cram data onto there, I'm MAYBE using 25% of my capacity.
I literally cannot cram another disk into the thing. And, even though I'm ripping music into
Still, it's an embaressment of riches.
I too have shared your pain. I bought a brand new 200GB Maxtor HD, it croaked in a couple of months, I RMA'ed it. The replacement lasted just a month. Nothing could help, not even the cool data recovery software. Did you get the "beep of death" too? From that point, I have never bought a Maxtor HD again. This is unfortunate, because I used to be a diehard Maxtor fan.
-jc
Well, the stupid mail-in-rebate system (which tends to be illegal everywhere else than in the US) is basically a 6 month 0% interest loan to the producer. If they want to give me a rebate, knock it off the price I pay. Show me a 250GB 7200rpm drive where the price I pay is $149 and I'll buy it.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
Running scandisk on a 40GB disk takes a buttload of time.
I don't wanna try running scandisk on this 300GB beast.
Even after partitions.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
A lot of the people who use slashdot (such as myself) are so socially inept/fat to get girlfriends, and so we have a legitimate need for large amounts of porn to releave sexual frustration. Personally I have about 100 GB of porn and when I heard about this drive it the first thing I thought of. When will the modereators stop predending that it dosn't happen, we all look at porn and we all like it, get over it.
ttthhhrrreee hhuuunnnndddrrreeeddd gggiiiiggg of ppprrrr0000000n, ugggghhhhhh....
That's acutally a really great idea, if you are prepared to organize something, I've got about 6 lonely friends who would join the cause.
Why not drop the 40 or 120 drive?
Duct tape will melt after a while. =)
#6495ED - cornflower blue
Today maxtor announced that they have perfected perpendicular recording to allow for 175GB per platter.
Whos up for 700GB drives?
Doesn't Maxtor send back a refurbished drive as stated on their site ?
Wow, you got your old left hand replaced? Or did you get a new botle of hand lotion?
Yep. Makes me want to bitch slap the tards when I see them posting about $150 drives when really talking about a $200 drive with a $50 rebate as if it were the same thing. Ya, ya, probably some stupid little kid, but it still doesn't keep me from wanting to beat the crap out of them when they open their mouths.
Funny? Am I missing something?
I would make certain that Maxtor does not lie about the capacity.
Impeach Bush
Kids these days.
What rebates are you seeing that take six months to come back? The longest I've seen is 12 weeks (three months, more or less). More usually it's six to eight weeks.
Anyway, even if it does take six months to get back the $100, and you miss out on charging them 6% APR (outrageously high for such a short-term, low-amount loan right now), you're out three whole dollars. BFD.
Yeah, I know, it's an evil marketing tool, and they're hoping I'm too incompetent to get the submission right, or too lazy to submit the rebate in the first place. But if it gets me a drive that cheap, then so be it.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
What I'm looking for is affordable cheap, capacity and redundancy; RAID 1+0 (striping the mirrors) and 0+1 (mirroring the stripes) achieve this. I believe the minimal configuration for such a set up involves four drives for concurrent writes as well as reads (maybe even 4x the reading speed and 2x the writing speed as with a single drive?). This would also be sort of cheaper, since you can get two of last year's drives instead of just one of this year's higher-capacity models and still come out with the same space (and save some cash).
On that note, two questions:
1. Can anyone recommend an effective cooling enclosure for these things? Closest I've found are the Antec Plus660AMG and Plus1080AMG and Antec Sonata cases. These have fans blowing right in front of the internal hard drive cage. They're not as expensive as dedicated external drive cages, but doesn't anyone sell bare drive cages like the ones you find in a basic $20 case?? One could set a desk fan in front of them.
2. What is the effective difference between RAID 0+1 and 1+0? Why do more people recommend 1+0 instead of 0+1? (perhaps the different configurations have different tradeoffs in total post-failure speed or further redundancy?)
Roey Katz
You wouldn't use the drive's cache for sectors the computer has already requested, because the OS's caching would take care of that.
Thus, I'm not worried too much about drive caches staying small, as long as the capacities are being increased by adding more tracks instead of platters/heads. If they go back to adding lots of heads (and if they can all read simultaneously), then I guess I'd like more cache. But that's not the way the tech is developing, is it?
Now please introduce a $12 tape cartridge that holds 1 Terabyte, usable in a $800 tape drive. Thanks.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why not just buy an extra stick of RAM with the money you save and let your OS worry about the caching?
Last time I went to buy a drive (in Australia) the difference was around 50$ between 8Mb cache and none... And 50$ buys a lot more than 8Mb of RAM.
Point taken on the spin -- obviously throughput will suffer... But surely the disk cache is a moot point.
I have 4 of these babies and they run great. They feel a little faster than the 40GB Maxtor & 30GB Seagate (both 2MB 5400RPM) that I have. I bought these little over a month ago for about $1175 from CompUSA (18 months no interest :D ).
I've had one of these for a few months now. It's my backup drive.
I run a cron job that backs up all critical files of my primary disks to this beast. I'ts perfect for that. It's big and slow and cheap. Since I also keep previous versions of changed files as long as I have room to do it, this beast really makes a difference.
I agree that you shouldn't have giant disks without backups. This guy can back up 2 or 3 giant disks. It's also great for things like a ReplayTV or Tivo but I have to save up a little longer before I can get another one for that.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Large on-disk caches are not necessarily a good thing.
If you are using a decent OS which does a good job of caching disk activity, then on-disk cache is mostly a wasted delay (double caching).
What cache would you rather access? The dynamically variable cache in your systems main memory or the small cache at the end of your disk bus bottleneck?
On-disk cache can be good for read ahead data that has not been read yet, but I don't think the added delay in caching on-drive is worth it.
In fact, I've seen drive benchmarks at http://www.storagereview.com/ that show for example a base drive (with a smallish cache) slightly beating the special edition drive of the same type which just has a larger cache (usually 2Mb vs 8Mb).
And really, how often will you read the same 8Mb more than once before any other data retires it on a 300Gb drive?! And, if your OS didn't cache that, thus catching it and preventing the drive from having to do it at all, then you really have much bigger problems with your OS!
On drive caches, nowdays, are really an unecessary complexity.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
That's acutally a really great idea, if you are prepared to organize something, I've got about 6 lonely friends who would join the cause.
No, you see that's the problem -- if you organize, the current government will simply infiltrate and destroy it. We need autotomous groups working towards the same rough goal; namely, the reintroduction of slavery along gender rather than racial lines.
So don't join a cause, form your own group and fight quietly behind the scenes until the moment is ripe.
With that many harddisks, one is bound to die within 12 months... and with the quality of most of them these days, it does not even have to be the oldest disk to die first.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I've had 3 maxtor drives shit out on me, and seen them shit out on 4 or 5 other people as well. I sure wouldn't trust them with 300 GB (rather 250 due to their fraudulent measurements) of GNAA posts.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Maybe a bit too heavy on the violence scale (even for an AC posting), but otherwise spoken like a true MIR hater.
You're not alone, I've been boycotting MIR retail products for years. Often you can find the price for real on a web store without MIR before the three months that it takes for the MIR check to come back.
MIR is a giant waste of labor, materials and energy: People on the seller side doing paperwork, the buyer doing paperwork, the mailman carrying paperwork, and the banks doing paperwork and then again sending the checks to each other, the 'where-is-my-rebate call center' answering calls about the obviously high incidence of lost checks of misfiled or erroneous forms, plus the MIR tracking websites, and all of them are actually being very busy producing a lot of completely nothing.
Of all the things I dislike, I really hate waste, and MIR is a big waste.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I've had two or three go bad on me.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
total number of times I have replaced the drives?
3
Maxtor drives suck, maxtor customer service is always prompt with returns but that doesn't make up for the constant paranoia that a drive will fail...
Can finally be hosted with just 7 hard drives. God bless technology.
The answer is backups backups backups...
In the past year I've RMA'd 4 maxtor drives...However, I'm of the opinion that with the exception of particular cases (i.e. the IBM 60/75 GB deathstars) you'll find that failure rates are fairly consistent among manufacturers for drives at similar price points.
For every drive manufacturer, you'll find two camps...the people that say they had nothing but trouble with a certain brand, and the people who have been using the same brand for all their corporate desktops and not had a single failure.
I think it's all statistical anomolies...(i.e. some people are just unlucky or Lucky). The one thing you can count on is that regardless of what drive you get, it will fail eventually.
The one I now have is about 2 years old, but 1 year ago it started having trouble booting (I think the read arm wouldn't unlock, because the drive did spin), this was the same problem that caused the first one to go down.
A good friend currently has exactly the same problem (same drive), and I heard 2 guys in my class discussing the same problem.... thats 4 people in the same classroom with the same problem: those clickety-clackety noises at bootup about 1 year after purchase
Oh yeah: my samsung 8 gig drive I bought 4-5 years ago is still spinning smoothly
This has got me thinking about warranty manufacturers give their products:
I used to look at it and say "oh, it has warranty, good enough".
But now I look at it as how long the manufacturer trusts the product will work. And if maxtor only trusts its product to work for 1 year may indicate that the expected average lifespan is what... 2 years? Still a bit low for 300 GB IMO.
Really depends on what you do with it. The pleasure of a large disk(that sounds so wrong..) is in not having to delete things when you're done. You can keep everything you ever downloaded and still have space for more, rather than people still suffering with a 5-10gb disk having to delete their mp3s whenever a new version of office comes out.
560gb is a decent amount, but it not impossible to fill. Most games easily exceed a gig, especially once you start getting in to mods. I think my HL dir weighned in at 4GB when all was said and done.
Creating game movies can eat disk to, I was bored and made an attempt before realising the math -- the process behind it is just take 30 screenshots a second while replaying a demo, so lets say 640 * 480 * 32 * 30 * {seconds}.. easily racks up gigs if you plan on recording anything more than a minute or two.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
This may sound silly, but the only drive I had dying on me was within 2 days after I bought it. Other than that, hard drives don't really fail on me. Not even bad clusters. And no big crash either.
Dave
It will format fine if you have SP1. This is provided you don't have a BIOS limitation.
I have a Windows XP + SP1 CD, and it can format a large drive fine, but without SP1 I had no luck.
If you remove the onboard cache from the equation three things determine data throughput on a disk drive - sector density, rotational speed and track-to-track seek latency.
At 80Gb per platter this drive should transfer a heck or a lot of data per turn of the spindle.
The interface doesn't look too bad but this drive suffers from slowish seek times - I wouldn't use it as a system drive but it'd serve up files just fine.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
...several years ago (or should that be decades?) when I walked into a computer room and they showed me this massive blue cylinder about 8 inches high and a foot or more across, saying this is a Winchester drive and has an unbelieveable TEN MEGABYTES of space. Wow, what on earth can you do with all that space, said I. We don't know, said they.
300GB? Just give it a bit of time and we'll all have 300GB of static cache in our CPUs.
I want 8!!!! and 2 hardware RAID controllers!
1.8Tb with redundancy! Yes!!!
I agree. Those IBM drives were bad... of course I've still got one... it's the third one I had and it's now lasted 3 years, so go figure. :)
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Lucky you ;-)
(And yes, I do cool the disks sufficiently).
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
that fails to explain why seagate cheetah 10k rpm drives are extremely reliable. They even have 15k versions now that I have never had a problem with. They all even carry 5 year warrenties
Pshaw, I remember having to choose between the 20 and 40MB HDD (back when $1/meg was some holy grail) and thinking at the time that I was getting into the whole mass storage thing late. I'd gotten so used to the C64 DD Floppies that 20 or 40MB seemed unreasonably large. It took me less than a year to fill that 40MB HDD.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, their 5400 RPM drives must be indestructable, then. ;-)
I dunno, I've used Seagate drives years ago and they used to be some of the WORST you could choose. I've been prejudiced against them since.
Now whether you'd want to do this, and how you'd index the data in a useful manner are more difficult questions. As are backing the data up. But you could do this now if you wanted to. Food for thought.
I've noticied a lot of talk about speed, but not a lot of the thermal effects of this drive.
Questions that need to be asked are:
1. How will the temp of this drive effect system ambient temp.
2. Where will it be mounted to get maximum airflow over it
3. What would be the reccomended amount/speed of fans to cover this puppy.
Welcome to the End
I didn't know they were known for being small... Most of the ones I saw were larger than I am...and weighed 600+lbs
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Yes, but imagine only formatting one gig, and using it on an OpenBSD setup or something and avoid a journaling file system to avoid the 10% penalty on writes. If you reboot unexpectedly, the fsck would be lightning because it only has to scan the one gig.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.