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100GB, 9.5mm thick HD from Toshiba
zmcnulty writes "Toshiba has announced their new hard drive today with a 100GB capacity. It's a 2.5 inch drive, is only 9.5mm tall, and supports ATA/100. The (Japanese) Impress Watch article I translated offers a couple more details, though not many. The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers. The previous capacity title was held by IBM with their 80GB Travelstar."
Looks like atto/zepto/yocto aren't far behind. Maybe we should go back to the naming convention where the metric prefix actually referred to the scale of the item in question; i.e. nanobots on the nanometer scale.
Dropping the power consumption by 20% sounds like a win.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Let's see... 2.5 inch... less than 1cm tall... I've got a drive in my laptop that's 30 GB that size. 100GB is impressive, but is it really worth $1000? I mean if I've got portable storage requirements (video, maybe?) that big, I'd probably be better off with a USB 2.0 external... higher transfer rates and a third the cost...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Being a Japanese company, it makes sense that they would measure the height in millimeters. The 2.5 inches thing is a hard drive standard for laptops which would be why they measured that in imperial measurements.
I can guarantee that's NOT going to be the retail price for this thing when released to the general public. The 80GB laptop drives can be found for as low as $190. Nobody's going to pay 4 times the price for a 25% increase in capacity. (Now if we were talking Intel chip speeds, that'd be different)
Yeah, that's nice and all, but what if your laptop has only a USB 1.0/1.1 interface and no firewire adapter? Have you ever tried moving 300 GB of files over a USB 1.x connection?
Then again, I'll admit that I ran out and bought a WD 120 GB external Firewire/USB 2.0 drive a couple of days before a business trip and my project had its butt saved when one of my cow orkers showed up with a Firewire->Mini Firewire adapter... Firewire moved the files so much faster than the USB 1.1 did.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Or get yourself one of those little Shuttle barebones boxes - they're still pretty portable, and while they're more expensive than the external drive, you can do a lot more with them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My Toshiba CD-RW can only burn ~500MB of a 700MB CD-R without errors, the writable capacity of this drive is probably closer to 71 GB.
And considering that said CD-RW drive can't read a burned file larger than 133MB, the read capacity of this hard drive is probably closer to 19 GB.
I, for one, could care less about the size increases of the newer drives. I would rather have something that works as advertised for longer than the warranty period.
Why would I ever buy a 100 GB hard drive if it was going to fail before I could fully use that capacity?
Why, when hard drive speed is the single largest factor affecting perceived system performance, do manufacturers insist on improving storage capacity at the expense of speed and reliability?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The iPod uses a 1.5" drive, so this isn't going to help iPod capacity unfortunately...
Some people, including you, are in the mindset that a laptop is a portable PC, suitable for use on airplanes, and very little else.
You see, there is a completely different sort of person out there who feels they don't need the configurability or blazing-speed performance of a desktop, and much prefer to have a computer that they can bring to work with them, over to a friends, out on vacation, on a business trip, out in the great outdoors doing whatever it is you want to do. Many of these people don't even have or want a desktop PC for which they will need a seperate monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a desk. All of this takes up significant real-estate.
Hence, the desktop-replacement laptops were born, and these people rejoiced. These people still do use their computer for everything you use it for, though, and still accumulate as much junk on their hard drives as you do, in fact generally quite a bit moreso as they don't always have a network connection, so need to keep a copy of everything they may need to use stored locally.
Random and weird software I've written.
It costs $50 bucks plus shipping to buy a replacement battery from a third party and it takes less than 5 minutes to install it yourself. If you don't want to deal with all of that you can fork out $100 to buy the battery from Apple and they will do the installation for you.
If you're really that concerned about the money, why in the world did you buy an iPod in the first place? Get a portable MP3 CD player that can read CD-RW's and takes regular AA batteries. Need more capacity? Easy, burn a few more CD-RW's and get a carrying case. Problem solved.
Toshiba claims that this design sets "a new benchmark for areal density: 80-gigabits of data per square inch."
I don't know much about HD design, but I'm assuming that the reason you get faster transfers from drives with higher RPM is that the head passes over more bits per second, which it can read in and hand over to the CPU. So, couldn't you get the same effect from a lower RPM drive with the bits packed closer together?
e.g., If you double the areal bit-density, you should multiply the number of bits per track by approximately sqrt(2)=1.4, so the bits per revolution will be multiplied by 1.4, which makes a 4200 RPM drive equivalent to a 5900 RPM drive, in terms of the number of bits the head sees per second. (But also by this theory, physically small drives will always be slower than larger drives with the same RPM, since there are fewer bits per track, unless they can manage to acheive a higher bit-density. So maybe the Toshiba just comes out even with a 4200 RPM desktop drive.)
Where does it mention any speeds???
It talks about accelerations!
If the impact only lasts for 1 msec and in this time it goes from 8.33 m/s to 0 m/s you already have your 850G. In normal gravity it picks up this speed in less than a second. So, pretty good for normal handling accidents (dropping a notebook on a carpet floor) but easy to exceed by throwing it out of a window on a concrete floor.
Sustained transfer rates on 4200 rpm drives can be good. It's the rotational latency, not transfer rate, that's inherently poor. Large sequential IO performance is not a 4200 rpm problem. Power issues conspire to limit seek times as well.
You won't see any 20+ watt 15K drives in notebooks any time soon.
Had it occurred to you that maybe he meant that Japan used the metric system, and thus the engineers defaulted to that for the height, and only used inches for the width because that's the standard name for it? I bet they call 3.5" floppies 3.5" floppies in Japan too!
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