Slashdot Mirror
Seagate Rolls Out 400 GB SATA Drives
SenorCitizen writes "Seagate is the first hdd manufacturer to announce 400 GB 3.5" hard drives. The 7200.8 is SATA native and comes with buffer sizes up to 16 MB. Seagate also announced a 2.5" portable external hard drive with 100 GB, and an external USB2 pocket hard drive with 5 GB. Get leeching!"
Once BIOS supports booting from them, USB pen distros will be really nice. Read and write, and now a whole 5 gig on something easier to transport than a CD.
That could make for some pretty pricy hard drives if it's still in effect...
But not down to my level of use, seems more geared at enterprise solutions....80gb IDE drives are going for what... 50 cents a gb now? last 80gb drive i bought was around $60
Don't know the cost of this drive, but i'll stick to my RAID arrays and be happy as a Joe Consumer.
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
But the only thing short of a really long tape that you can backup these things to in one media is another 400GB hdd. (it would still be 86 4.7GB DVDs)
Now this would be something. ;-)
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
I wonder if 16MB is actually an aid to performance on these drives? What kind of algorithms do they use to ensure efficient usage of all that space? Can anyone here comment?
I seem to recall in chip design that the larger the cash does not always equal more performance, if the cache manager has to search the whole cache everytime time (hash?) to deliver what needs to be used.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
Win2k's is 128GB and I was bitten by this once. I bought a 160GB drive, created one big partition with Redhat 7.3, and formatted it as NTFS under Win2k. Win2k displays it as 160GB but actually when the drive is near full, old data was overwritten by the new one!
Is Win2k's limitation artificial? I'd hate that.
Well, anyway, I've said goodbye to Windows as my desktop.
Someone said enterprises, but at only 7,200 RPMs you'd get better performance RAIDing some smaller drives. I guess if you've only got one slot to spare and you've got a lot of DVDs to store and cash to spend then you might buy one of these, but it's going to have to drop in price or increase in RPMs before this gets popular.
I think you were hit by a limitation of your BIOS, and not your OS. I'd be very surprised to learn that NTFS-5 was limited to 128 gig partitions. Sunny Dubey
But journaling filesystems work under the assumption that writes to the hardware become persistant in-order. Caches (can) violate this.
I've had this sig for three days.
I don't need 400GB, hell I don't need 160GB; I need a hard drive that is more reliable
I need about 500GB and something that is reliable. I'm looking at 3 250GB drives with raid5 which should be close enough to 500GB after the hardrive manufacturers stretching of the facts and formatting.
My question is, where do you go to buy a harddrive nowadays at a good price. I've been looking at pricewatch for sometime, and I realized today that the prices there are too low to be true. Plus if you look at the feedback its miserable.
Does anyone know of a good place to buy harddrives at a decent honest price? (Meaning the price I pay, not the before we jack up the price price, or the charge your credit card and tell you its sold out, oh wanna buy an upgraded part price)
The Seagate is the first with a Native SATA interface. I have no idea what that means, but I assume that to be important. Maybe faster IO?
DoubleMeh!
For large transfers:
For small transfers:
It seems to me a drive with this capacity would most likely be used for something like a PVR or a cheap file server, which would certainly benefit large writes. I don't think you need 400GB for your config files and UI tweaks. So what would you fill this 400GB HDD up with? probably large files.
It's not like saving these config files with a 16MB buffer is even going to be noticably slower.
IDE drives have the shittiest reliability. And it's getting worse, not better. Several years ago, in my experience building fileservers, Maxtor had a failure rate of 25%. Right. Out. Of. The. Box. And that was for 80G drives that they'd been making for several years at that point. Today, they have a 60% failure rate over the first week (about the same OOB.) And this is with their "top of the line, enterprise class" crap. You'd think with a 3yr warantee, they'd spin the damn thing up at least once before shoveling 20 of them in a box.
:-)) which Seagate replaced. Another half dozen developed "stiction" problems after several years and needed a little help to get spun back up.]
SCSI is the only way to get drives that have actually been through any testing. Each drive is individually tested; however, with IDE, only a small sample of drives are tested. This is one reason SCSI is more expensive. But demand, perception, and the money in the enterprise market place also factor into the cost... a 140G SCSI drive does NOT cost 1000$ to build and test. They use the exact same servo hardware as their IDE "white trash" cousins (in many cases -- 10k and 15k speeds aside.)
[Disclaimer: I don't have as much experience with Seagate's IDE (PATA or SATA) lineup. But I can say, I've never had any Seagate drive, SCSI or IDE, fail right out of the box or shortly there after. Of the few that have failed, 2 overheated and melted their logic boards (temp. swapped with another drive to fetch the data
Hmmm, good point. You could defeat it by giving the HD an internal battery, though, similar to the watch batteries that keep your CMOS time accurate. All it would need would be enough power to allow the cache to flush itself out in the event of a power failure.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Well, that's great, but also really really expensive (for now, anyway)
If you really want something like that, I remember hearing about a PCI card with something like 8 or 16 RAM slots, that was made to be used as a drive - you could get one of those and have up to ~16GB (Is 1GB the biggest size for PC-2700?), but it'd cost a heck of a lot of money.
I'd give you a link, but a cursory Google search didn't turn up anything
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Amen, generally within 5-10% of the cheapest prices on pricewatch and you don't get jerked around or lead on a wild goose chase trying to correct the merchants inventory errors.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Here are some interesting numbers:
$250 per drive
400GB per drive
4 drives
1.2 TB in Raid 5
Total cost $1,000
or $0.83 per MB.
So there you have it. A terabyte file server for about $1000 will be a reality soon enough. Nice. Serial ata will lessen cable clutter, and only 4 drives will be doable in any spare decent case and power supply.
Hopefully it won't take too long for prices to drop to $250.
Of course Raid of any level is no replacement for a full backup, but it's certainly better than nothing or relying on a single drive no matter how good the quality/warranty.
It would be nice to see HD's average transfer rate stay closer to it's peak rating for comonly used files.