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.
I was just about to purchase 2 x 200GB drives. Now I can pay thrice as much for storage I'll never use!
2.5" portable external hard drive with 100 MB
Wouldn't that 100GB?
"Bah!" - Dogbert
Is that 5GB in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Seagate is not the first with 400GB disks,
IBM announced them a copule months ago and already ships them.
Is the warrany on this 400GB drive 1 year or 3 years? I didn't find mention on their site of how long it is, and if it is only 1 year why should you trust your data to it?
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
I don't need 400GB, hell I don't need 160GB; I need a hard drive that is more reliable
These are cool and all, i'd love to have one, but I'll rest easier knowing that my 80GB, let alone 400GB is safe and reliable for some time to come.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
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 suppose that this is part of the technology that makes a Windows Longhorn installation possible.
Seagate is the first hdd manufacturer to announce 400 GB 3.5" hard drives.
Seagate tenatively plans to call this line of hard drives the "Pornotopia" series.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Has anybody tested the pr0n transfer rates on these?
This guy is way out there
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!
Meh, size is nothing, speed is everything. Having used a 10k and a 15k rpm scsi disk in my workstation I'm far more eager to see faster rather than larger.
:-)
Now 20k or 30k rpm? *that* would make me drool
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Get multiple drives and RAID them together. A 2-disc RAID-1 is quite reliable, but you can go for more if you are really concerned. Also, go SCSI instead of IDE. SCSI drives tend to be engineered to a higher standard, and are generally warenteed longer to boot.
However, don't bitch about the price. You WILL pay more for less storage, that's the cost of reliability.
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.
Hitachi has had 400GB drives (SATA) for a few months now link
It looks like the only thing unique here is the "highest areal density", meaning (I assume) that Hitachi is using a four platter system, where Seagate's only has three.
Also, I wonder what problems might arise from 16MB caches on normal desktop machines. One of the issues I seem to recall with larger cache drives is the risk of filesystem corruption. If power is lost while data is sitting in cache, waiting for a write, then you could potentially royally screw up your file or filesystem. Hence, the only 16MB cache drives I've seen are notebook drives (almost always gonna have a battery) and SCSI drives (likely in a server or workstation, which will most likely have a UPS). Before you go countering that these aren't meant for desktop use, keep in mind that DV video, digital photgraphy, and music are all things that home users like the idea of, and they are also the things much more likely to consume massive amounts of storage capacity.
That's just amazing. I remember back when I was in college and couldn't afford a good hard drive. Instead, I scrounged several cheap, small drives and an extra IDE card. My PC, built into an old server tower, had seven (7) IDE drives totalling about 5 GB in disk space. There was so much rotating mass, you could balance the PC on its corner and watch the precession.
Unknown host pong.
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
EB = Exabytes = BIGGG
I believe the problem you ran into is only during installs, and is similar to WinNT4's 4GB max boot partition. You can simply put the drive in another Win2K box that's already installed, format the full 160GB and use it nuts. Just be aware of NTFS versions that differ in Win2K/WinXP... I think XP has a newer version, and 2k can't use it, but could be wrong..
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
The default windows 2000 install does not support harddisk sizes over 128gb. SP3 enables the support for 48bit LBA, thus solving this problem.
Here's the related MSKB article.
Drives in their default configuration will not complete a write until it is on disk. You usually have to enable write caching with software. This shouldn't be done except if you have a UPS (or you really know what you're doing). 16MB pseudo-static RAM is one chip, so its not like you save anything making it smaller.
Very useful for those multimedia/movie playing home-built Tivo type machines.
But maybe that's just me.
In response to a recent article on Slashdot, both the RIAA and the MPAA have announced a partnership with Seagate, Inc.
The details of this new partnership are sketchy, but it seems that it will entail the automated delivery of detailed information on everyone that purchases the new Seagate 400GB SATA hard drive. This comes from the assumption that the only reason anyone would really need that amound of drivespace is to store their growing collection of music and movies. Understandably, downloaders and rippers are tired or poor quality movies and audio, and as such this new drive will allow them to contain all their new high-bitrate media in one central location.
In a related story, the RIAA has officially sued Seagate because this new hard drive gives people the capability to store pirated music on their computers. Said an RIAA spokesman, "We feel this is a gross violation of artist's rights, and that it's our responsibility to protect them."
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
The limit should be 2TB 2TB
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Link Has the info on how to get past that.
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.
Yes, but, when the drive tells lies to the OS about the FS metadata having been written you are in a bad place come power failure; journalling or no.
So much to do, so little bandwidth.
--
Try Mozilla
Can't we just say 0.4 TB? It's only a matter of time...
This thing has a native Serial ATA interface... will we ever see a drive with a native FireWire interface?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
You are correct, and if you put an NT disk in an XP machine (say to do data recovery) the XP machine will -automatically and without asking- convert your NT disk to it's version of NTFS, rendering it unbootable.
-dameron
Seagate has redefined a 'Byte' to be 4 bits.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
This is why RAID-1 is so nice. I went from "OHMYGODILOSTADRIVEMYDATAISGONE!!!" to "Oh, a drive failed. How annoying." Cross-ship from the manufacturer (Maxtor in my case), and in two days, I'm back up and running.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I got hit by this recently. Windows 2000 was limited to support for 128GB partition sizes until SP3. Once you have SP3, it takes a registry change to enable "Big LBA" (48-bit).
Here's the relevant document.
This isn't an issue with XP, from my experience. I jacked in a 250GB drive in a USB chassis to my laptop and it worked fine right off the bat.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
6x400GiB in RAID5 would in fact be 2TiB. The general formula is (capacity) * (number of drives -1). For enterprise use this isn't necessarily true as you generally use larger numbers of spindles and leave one or more drives per set as hot spares.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Actually 2^64 byes (1024 TB) equals a Petabyte NOT an Exabyte
It would be nice to see HD's average transfer rate stay closer to it's peak rating for comonly used files.
Some cases will use these drives as internals...but they're a bit thicker than will fit in a standard 2.5" drive bay, so they have to put them into an external enclosure. Some older systems will fit bigger hard drives; in fact, I used to have a Pismo powerbook that I swear could fit TWO laptop drives in it. It was also twice as heavy as my TiBook.
Don't worry....regular 100 gig 2.5" drives are coming soon!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Specs from a WDC 80GB 7200 RPM IDE drive.
Current Requirements and Power Dissipation
Operating Mode RMS Current Power, Typical 1
12 VDC 5 VDC
Spinup 2.2 A 525 mA 17.0 W
Read/Write/Idle 350 mA 800 mA 8.0 W
Seek 900 mA 675 mA 14.0 W
Power Management Commands
Operating Mode RMS Current 1 Power, Typical 1
12 VDC 5 VDC
Idle (E1H) 330 mA 675 mA 7.25 W
Standby (E0H) 20 mA 200 mA 1.25 W
Sleep (E6H) 20 mA 50 mA
0.5 W
Moreover, track buffers allow the disk to de-couple reading
and writing the magnetic media, from transferring data over the
bus. The disk should always be able to read one track in one
spin (after the seek), then transfer it at whatever bus
bandwidth is available.
It could take weeks.
Meanwhile, if another drive fails before the new one is built, then everything is lost.
tcq would make writes less safe, since the drive is deciding on the write order rather than the OS (one alternative to journaling file systems is keeping very close track of write orders/dependencies). for scsi there are commands to skip the cache and write directly to disk for OSes to use, however. the use of such commands (and the performance penalty for writing safely) is why everyone complains about winxp scsi performance. normal ata has no such commands, although you can disable the write cache entirely (which is what microsoft recommends). I don't know if sata added these.
I don't think I understand your question - you think that flash manufacturers are intentionally keeping the performance of their technology down? Or that RAM-based SSD manifacturers are charging too much? Neither really has anything whatsoever to do with the HDDs mentioned in the article.
Can't quite see the source of your exasperation.
sic transit gloria mundi
One important detail when constructing a multi-TB PC is that the 3Ware 8506 series cards can address at most 2TB per card. This is no problem with 250GB drives, but with 400GB drives, it becomes an issue (8 x 400GB = 3.2TB).
The recently announced 3Ware 9506 series can address more storage (4TB per card, I think) but when I looked two months ago, no vendors had it yet.
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu
Hitachi and Maxtor already had 400 gig drives out a while before this article was published. Though the maxtor doesnt have comparable specs. the hitachi does.
"Algebraic expressions are what we sue when we have no clue what were talkign about"