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Latest SCSI Drive Reviewed
Sivar writes "StorageReview got their hands
on a Maxtor Atlas 10K V, the first SCSI hard drive in more than two years to double
capacity. Considering how quickly storage was improving just a few years ago, and other news like Intel's cancellation of the 4GHz Pentium IV despite AMD's lead you have to wonder if the traditional predictions of the end of Moore's Observation are actually beginning to come true."
the traditional predictions of the end of Moore's Observation
Thank you for correctly not calling Moore's observation "Moore's law". It's refreshing once in a while.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The other two models are 73 and 147 according to the article.
What the fuck do hard drive capacities have to do with "Moore's Observation," which was about transistors?
[
Welcome to the new /. where we just LOOK like we know what the hell we are talking about.
So how many MB/sec are you getting from your
It's a doubling of the density of transistors every 18 months. It doesn't say anything about magnetic storage density or the clock speed of chips. Intel cancelling the 4GHz P4 was just admitting (and it's about time) that cranking up the clock speed is not the best way to improve CPU performance. There is no indication that will prevent Moore's Law from continuing
Jason
ProfQuotes
The article claims that hard drives are starting to clammer for 16 mb caches. It seems odd that no one has come out with a standard cache expansion kit.
A mother board with an ATA chipset that could plug in older dirt cheap SRAM or even newer DDR or better. Imagine a 4 gig cache of SRAM attached to your harddrives. A machine left on for a while would start to smoke.
I have some really highend SCSI raid controllers that allow 256 megs of cache...I wonder why there is a product out there to add cache to an existing ATA system. Obviously cost is an issue, but it seems like this sort of thing would give a big bang for the buck. High end games will pay anything for a 5% perf increase.
i wont be moving back to IDE.
Is there much point to new SCSI drives, as Serial ATA becomes a more widespread technology? From what I've heard, it can hit similar speeds but has several benefits over SCSI (not least of which is those nice thin cables) at a lower price.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
A. Moore's Law is a marketing gimmick at best.
B. The relationship between Moore's Law and advances in magnetic storage is tenuous.
B. Magnetic storage is actually expanding quite quickly because it doesn't have the heat problems. Shrinking features aren't really a problem. Heat is a problem for processors.
Clock speed aside, if performance continues to double does moore's law hold true?
First, Moore's Law has nothing to do with hard drive storage space. That said, hard drive capacities have been growing at a pace exceeding Moore's Law for several years now. If that rate slows down, it'll probably still be a pretty fast pace. Besides, these are fast SCSI hard drives. You have to look at IDE hard drives to really see storage space improvements.
Second, Intel cancelled their 4GHz CPU because of heat problems. It turns out that Intel's engineers just can't get the leakage current down to low enough levels. But again, Moore's law has nothing to do with clock speed... the metric is the number of transistors on the chip. In this regard, Moore's law is still on track. To counter the heat issue, logic designers will have to rethink their designs to do more work per clock cycle. AMD already does this with their chips. Intel is going down this route too with its Pentium M. Same with IBM's G5. The Pentium 4 is a horrendous example because Intel designed it to be inefficient so they could ramp its clock speed. Well now the consequences of that stupidity is showing.
You know, I've heard that the human brain operates at about a 10Hz frequency, has 100Bln neurons, and trillions of interconnections. Amazingly, its power dissipation is at around 40W. (And its MIPS rating is on the order of 10^15 instructions per second). Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation.
So which is better, in light of this? Are the diehard SCSI fans right, or is SATA the real wave of the future? Asking 'cause I'm about to build a new system.
"StorageReview got their hands on a Maxtor Atlas 10K V, the first SCSI hard drive in more than two years to double capacity. "
Here's a question for the audiance. Shouldn't the capacity be keeping up with IDE because the only difference is the interface?
SCSI drive capacities have stayed where they were while IDE drive capacities got bigger because for real-world RAID arrays (where SCSI drives are used) capacity isn't the goal. It's speed. If you need 1 Terabyte of really fast RAID storage it makes far more sense to put in 15 73gbyte3 SCSI drives (10K RPM, 15K RPM) than it does to use 4 300 GB IDE drives (7.2K RPM).
In the meantime IDE drives have begun to be used in RAID arrays, but usually where capacity matters and not performance. Admittedly the lines have blurred, especially for network-connected storage arrays where ethernet pipes are the limit and you cannot really tell the difference between a good IDE array and a regular SCSI array.
Its been three years since RAM prices changed significantly. Its still $100 - $200 a gigabyte. The current chip fell to its commodity price of @$4 fairly quickly after introduction and stayed there. Some RAM companies have been fine for price colussion. In the meantime flash memory price has plumented from $500 a gigabyte to $100.
"You know, I've heard that the human brain operates at about a 10Hz frequency, has 100Bln neurons, and trillions of interconnections. Amazingly, its power dissipation is at around 40W. (And its MIPS rating is on the order of 10^15 instructions per second). Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation."
Try calculating PI on it.
Since when does Moore's law apply to hard drives? Does fitting double the transistors in half the space make your hard drive have a higher capacity?
Obviously, nobody remembers the hard drive capacity lull that happened about `99 or so. Hard drives were quickly nearing their technological limits. Then, IBM got GMR heads working in hard drives, and everyone has been pushing that technology as fast as they could. Perhaps that technology, too, has reached it's limit.
You could be an optimist and say that another break-through will come along soon enough, but I'm not so optimistic. IBM's exit from the Hard Drive market is just another sign of what's happening. The trend is to cut costs down to nill, so you can sell your product a few cents cheaper than the competition. This results both in product development and manufacturing being outsourced, and in research unlikely to produce short-term results, being extensively cut, if not eliminated.
So, we may see a new technology comming along that will allow for increased storage capacity, but I think that's much less likely now than it was just a few years ago. What's more, this trend has more of a long-term impact. We might find something new this time around, but could still be in trouble, let's say, 5 years from now, when we need something new, and nothing is forthcomming due to lack of research.
I can already see the solid-state advocates scrambling to reply, so I'll also add that research is needed to improve the capacity and lower the price of memory chips as well.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
SCSI drives are used in servers, and number of spindles is more important than capacity. If you could sell a 1TB SCSI drive with the same seek times as a 100GB SCSI drive, but the 1TB drive cost 4x as much, it'd fail in the marketplace, because no one wants 1TB of data accessible only with a single head.
(I knew someone who actually said this to a computer salesperson when the guy was just quickly outlining to her some of what was included in a particular computer system that she was considering buying)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We've said recently that as machines get faster, the software gets slower, so the work we have to do doesn't get sped up much (though the expectation for bells and whistles like fancy typesetting go up and up...), so would it really make such a big difference in our lives?
Here's one nifty thing that will break with Moore's Observation: the optimal slack time for large computations. If you're doing large computations, it would suck to see your slack time evaporate!
See what I've been reading.
id rather have a fibredrive:m /content/prod ucts/fibredrive/default.asp
http://www.studionetworksolutions.co
when they drop in price of course, or when some outfit in china busts out a similar, cheaper product.
This is a low performing SCSI drive when compared to the 15k RPM ultra 320 drives out there. With things like out of order execution tags SCSI beats the snot out of IDE when used in database servers and the like.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
whether hard drive technology is maxing out.
All you need to do is observe how many platters are being used. If there truly is no way to increase the density of platters, you can simply add more platters. Since we're still seeing drives with two to three platters then it is safe to assume there is still a capacity ramp in the works.
SRam defined
SDRam defined
SRAM is *VERY* costly and is typicaly only used for cache.
First of all, Moore said nothing about storage, only transistors in semiconductors.
If we assume there is a similar correlation with density on magnetic media, it still doesn't necessarily mean it's slowing down now.
AFAIK, drives had a major slowdown in the past around the 8GB mark and then suddenly 20GB->120GB appeared very rapidly, and then slowed down a bit then. I'd need to do alot of research and get some actual data before making a statement about exponential growth of magnetic storage density and whether or not it is feasible to continue or at what rate in the future.
Also, narrowing the comparison to just SCSI devices is foolish, as they are rapidly being supplanted by cheaper ATA based devices. Yes SCSI is superior, it always has been. Except in one place, cost per unit storage. And as they say, quantity has a quality all its own.
Also, lower costs disks such as SATA enable alternate means of increasing capacity and performance such as low cost RAID. SCSI used the RAID argument over mainframe SLED solutions to win in the market. Now mainstream SATA drives are using the exact same argument vs SCSI. The same principles that were true in the 80s and 90s are true now: more disks have inherant advantages, and can be flexibly arranged to provide whichever one you want whether it's performance, capacity, or reliability, in varying degrees. All for lower cost even with the added hardware overhead of the controller.
Finally, there's one more factor that can be causing the slowdown in disk expansion. The fact that file sizes do not expand at the same rate, so demand for larger storage is being outpaced by the increase in density. I'd be interested in seeing what the average webpage size is from 1994-2004. I'm sure it goes up really quick as features like image support and frames first come in, but then mostly levels off. Word processor documents, even bloated by modern office suites, are still not more than an order of magnitude larger than they were 20 years ago. People still put their school papers and resumes on (GASP!) floppy disks. And their rate of density increase has been zero for quite some time, discounting alternate formats such as zip and usb flash.
As storage continues to increase, we're seeing people actually have enough storage. I remember having to pick which games I could install on my 286 and 486. Now I just throw them on and by the time my disk fills in a year I just buy more disk as it's that cheap. My 105MB hardcard for my 286 cost ~$700 in 1989 or so. The 1.7GB fast SCSI-2 Micropolis HD I upgraded my 486 with the 525MB SCSI-2 Conner cost $900 in 1994. These days I could go grab a 200GB disk for $99 on sale. But the point isn't that the technology is better. In 1994 the biggest disk I could get was about 9GB and cost thousands. These days if I want the bigest thing on the block it's 400GB and costs under $400. What the average user gets in a new machine is much closer to the most advanced part in the market than it was 15 years ago when we had 340GB HDs in home machines and 4GB HDs in highend servers. Where did the highend disks go? RAID replaced them. These days if you want an order of magnitude more than what a major OEM ships as standard (Say, 160GB*10) you go for a RAID, either SCSI or ATA.
Once you're paying for RAID hardware you're getting performance levels in the enabling hardware that make SCSI irrelevant. SCSI has a 320MB/sec bus, command queueing on drives, and a dedicated CPU and cache on the host controller. A highend SATA RAID like 3Ware has 150MB/sec per drive non-shared switched bandwidth, command queuing on drives, and a dedicated CPU and cache on the host controller. Only the 3Ware setup will give you VASTLY more bang for the buck because you can buy more and larger disks to give whatever performance/capacity/reliability you want. A 12 drive SATA RAID10 is going to utterly destroy a 5 drive SCSI RAID5 in every possible way except for thermal output and physical space, which can be
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
It's 300GB. Are the editors even trying?
Kind thoughts do not change the world
It uses the same type of cable as SATA, but offers double the bandwidth (300 MB/s per port).
However, it's not just about getting a fancy new cable with the same old high-reliability, heavy-duty, high performance drives of old. There are some interesting new features:
You'll be able to get SAS hubs - plug 8 or 12 drives into a single controller port.
Optional dual-channel connections - connect 1 drive to 2 controllers, or to 2 ports on the same controller. Get double bandwidth, or improved reliability - if the cable or controller malfunctions, the drive just disconnects the faulty port and keeps on running.
Backwards compatible with SATA - need to upgrade capacity on your server but don't need high performance - just plug some cheap SATA drives into your SAS card (or hub).
Maxtor...
After losing a total of twelve DiamondMax drives to hardware failure, never again. Eight I had purchased, the other four were replacements for four failures.
I had four in two separate mirror configurations fail within minutes of each other. The original eight were bad within twelve weeks of purchase.
My local retailer honored the replacement warranties with more DiamondMax drives. I accepted on the first four failures and those died within 6 months.
Never, EVER again will I buy anything from Maxtor.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
Well, when I saw it was Maxtor, I kind of giggled.
They've got a shitty reputation for a reason, duh.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I'm serious. Is there some way around the PCI bottleneck? Is it not as bad as I think it is? Should we all be using PCI-X anyway?
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
... how many Libraries of Congress is that?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/02/2 320218
You must be new here...
1. 150MB/s is waaay more than a single drive can push, so it is more than sufficient.SATA is a point-to-point connection, one drive per channel. SCSI may be 320MB/s and support up to 15 devices, but that bandwidth is *shared* among all of them. By the time we have HDs that can actually deliver 150MB/s transfer rate, faster SATA will be available.
2. Maximum number of devices: that's a number you pulled out of your ass. You can have as many SATA devices as SATA ports. 3ware makes nice 12-port RAID controllers.
3. Spindle speed & seek time are the properties of the *hard drive*, not the *interface* (Do you understand the difference?). A SCSI and SATA HD with otherwise identical specs will have the same performance. Also, there are 10000RPM SATA HDs -- the WD Raptors, though they are not very cost-effective. If reasonably-priced 10K and 15K RPM SATA drives are released, they will totally kill SCSI market (which is, I suspect, the main reason they are not available).
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
There is a reason high end servers use SCSI drives and not IDE arrays. MTBF being one, sustained transfer rate being another. Your analogy is flawed, because a SCSI array truely is superior to an ATA/SATA array.
Hey whatever works for you.
Blar.
Then all those software companies making investments on more and more inefficient software are gonna take a hit big time. It would definatly be nice to see a good sine curve to moorse's law, whereas you get peaks of developement (meaning, progress is doubling every year or so) and drops (where tech is only gaining in 1.2-1.3 times capacity every 2 or so years). Gives technicians a chance to catch up and spend time unionizing, gives companies time to review their strategies and focus their designers on better materials and more feature filled hardware, and it forces software designers and especially their bosses to rethink their strategy of creating ultimatly trashy, inefficient, flashy software tools.
As for moors law coming to an end, we'll have to see. There's been an auful lot of new stuff on the horizon, and I think we've gotten to the growing pains number 4, where major hardware changes are occuring; the first started with the 80386 and 80486, virtual mode, simm memory, EISA, IDE, and AT standards. The second with the pentium, EIDE, PCI, AGP, MMX, 3dNow, widespread modem use, and CD-rom's with the ATX standard. The third with the pentium 4/ddr/qdr, DVD-rom drives, PCI taking off into never never land (how many different kinds of cards is that?), LANing PC's together via DSL lines. Now we're in the 4th generation, where we've got 64 bit datapaths, new instruction set additions, SATA, PCI-X and PCI-express, DVD burners, Gigabit ethernet, usable, pretty linux, mini-ITX standards.
The first set of changes turned the PC into a mutli-user inexpensive platform. The second gave it internetworkability and spurred the internet, as well as drove it into some multimedia stuff. The third added 3d gaming to the platform, perfected the networking aspect, and added a lot more data features and especially, and most importantly, stability. Now, we're getting into the most significant of those stages; making machines a *lot* more powerful and easier to configure. Just look at some of the newer 3d games coming out, I remembered watching some Cutscene's from old FF games as well as some old computer games, and Doom3 blows their socks off. Again, after these changes have occured, we'll move into another term of relative peace.
The 5th generation tech I fully expect to come in around 2007-2008, and will be centered around public wireless networks (more or less, people leaving open wifi all over the place), porability, altered reality (think virtual grafitti, waypointing your friends, ect). It'll also be marked by a major freedom vs corporatism; DRM vs the internet, for example; DRM will probably seek to segment the internet into trade zones, or as the companies will call them, "trustworthy zones"(example message: You are leaving the safe zone, if you leave the safe zone, you will be subject to viruses, trojan's, malware, and bad stuff. Do you wish to continue?"). As malicious software becomes more prevalent and voracious, we'll see the open source movement gaining a lot of steam considering these corps will begin digitally enslaving people. Why spend a billion on advertising when you could simply serve it to people off of their own computers?
So, within the next few years, we're going to see a lot of bad and good things happening, and most likely, some people's lives turning to hell, namely, those who don't care. Those who choose to fight it out will probably be persecuted; breaking DRM is, afterall, against the DMCA, and if MS gets angry, they can pull strings to have your linux-coding monkey ass assassinated or thrown into jail as a terrorist. Things'll get interesting, to say the least.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
it's more that technology is reaching practical useful limits. Sure, you can find ways to fill even a 300GB drive, but most people won't. CPU speeds, RAM, graphics- they're all approaching the limit of what we ordinarily use or need.
If something gets better/bigger/faster AND cheaper to make, the improvements will continue, but otherwise we're seeing that Moore's "law" or observation is bumping into the law of diminishing returns.
I'm not trying to be an ass (I actually don't know anything about SAS), but is this substantially different from FC_AL?
(Other than the bandwidth -- do SAS disks have one or two ports?)
Will SAS support a switched fabric?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
... I can guarantee you most DB guys I know would shit their pants in joy if they could get 15k RPM 9GB drives in bulk. I know of DBAs that buy 18g drives and only use half of them. In theory you only use the inner cylinders, but internal geometry these days is largely divorced from logical geometry.. DBAs who deal with random small writes want lots and lots of spindles striping using lots and lots of hardware RAID adapters.
The super exciting thing about the 2.5" drives IMHO for SCSI is the possibility of boosting rotational speed thanks to reduced media weight. If you could get 1" 20-40kRPM 9GB SCSI or SAS drives and join together 100 of them that would be unbelievable.
Newton's laws of motion were also eventually "proven to be not accurate" in favor of Einstein's, but because they still hold reasonably well at familiar scales and speeds, they remain useful and are still considered "laws." Perhaps Moore's law of IC density just needs a rewording such that it applies to a specific set of calendar years.
What the fuck do hard drive capacities have to do with "Moore's Observation," which was about transistors?
Other than the curious observation that both IC density and magnetic storage density happen to be ceasing to scale up at the same time?
The fact that file sizes do not expand at the same rate
It appears you haven't used Microsoft Office ;) But seriously, as each new storage capacity comes out, somebody will find an application for it. People will start to edit home movies and build or buy HDTV DVRs, as you pointed out. You'll also start seeing people store intermediate video editing results in lossless Huffyuv rather than lossy DivX to make the effects cleaner. And watch people build huge lookup tables for cracking NTLM passwords.
A 12 drive SATA RAID10 is going to utterly destroy a 5 drive SCSI RAID5 in every possible way except for thermal output and physical space, which can be a concern in racks where it hasn't been planned for.
"I've got no strings to hold me down." As more of the developed world goes wireless like Pinocchio, data storage in PCs of laptop and tablet form factors will become an issue. SMB over 802.11 to a home NAS box isn't always the answer because the unlicensed frequency bands just aren't wide enough.
According to this graph your guess that it levels of is correct.
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
All operating systems do this anyway with your system RAM.
The memory on the drive is just there as a holding pen for pending reads and writes so that it can give the drive head a chance to get to where it needs to be, perhaps killing multiple birds with one stone.
At a certain capacity you start needing more cache because you'll be dealing with potentially more complex access patterns (more disparate regions to access data, larger transfer units per track)
It is not a substitute for a file-system/block cache.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
You are all forgetting about SAS.
t ml
http://www.lsilogic.com/features/20041025_sas.h
My god man. Your about to build a system and you don't have clue one about scsi. You don't know if sata is the wave of the future and now your asking slashdot if the system you were planning (but not specified) to build is ok?
On what information or knowledge were you originally planning to build your system? I can only suggest that you go with what you know until you have opportunity to both study and save up which is especially true in the scsi world.
As far as SCSI fans (as you put it) go it breaks down into those who are either 1) willing to pay the premium or 2)need the speed regardless of cost, to get the performance. In many cases scsi isn't an option rather the only choice.
The point is this. Ask questions as needed but please let them be measured. If you had done a nickels worth of investigation considering disk systems while planning your new system you would invariably have come across the scsi option. If you had so much as a sliver of curiosity and an ounce of initiative you could have found most of what you need to know from the web in under an hour.
But as you stand on the brink of building your new system you have done none of that. This leads me to ask just how it has come to pass and on what basis you have selected components up to this point. Motherboards for example: many are coming with ATA and SATA and a few with SCSI controllers built in. Do you not know the difference in capability, desireability and cost? Why not? These are questions derived from your own bill of materials. Don't you wish to understand what it is your buying, what your building and what the expected level of performance should be considering?
The answer is you never looked. You lack the curiosity and the initiative, crucial criteria for any individual wishing to engage themselves not only in the realm of computer building but many other technical aspects of life as well. So far the only attribute you have displayed is laziness.
The collection of parts you need come preassembled costing $498 and is available at walmart.
I realize this doesn't meet your cool factor or your DIY bloodline so stuff the guts in some alienware case with a bay window, get a cold cathode blacklight for the interior, a couple of 80mm LED case fans and a velocity stack for your CPU cooler not that a 2.8ghz Celeron needs it but that's not the point. We understand and won't tell anybody if you refer to it as a 3.4ghz EE-P4 overclocked with your own personal performance boosting bios settings making it the baddest box on the block.
But let me be clear on one issue. Regardless whether a person is in hardware, software or systems, we invest a great deal of time and effort pouring over documentation, asking ourselves questions, figuring out answers and testing the theories. It is hard work that never ends as technology marches ever forward. We share this information among our peers and freely give of ourselves in helping young people along. What we don't like to do is waste the time and effort giving of ourselves to help those who won't or don't lift a finger to help themselves. Prove yourself worthy. Proof of that is found in the quality of your questions.
The key advantage of SCSI drives over SATA drives is the number of simultaneous I/Os they can process, not transfer rates or access times. This advantage holds even among drives of equal speed and density. According to StorageReview.com, the fastest 10k RPM SCSI drive (Maxtor Atlas 10k) can handle 275 I/Os per second, while the fastest 10k RPM SATA drive (Western Digital Raptor WD740GD) can only do 226 I/Os per second. The fastest available SCSI drive ( the 15k RPM Fujitsu MAS3735) can process a whopping 366 I/Os per second! You won't notice the difference for local disk, but that's a huge difference when multiple processes are reading/writing to the disk simultaneously, as in a typical SAN/NAS shared disk environment: a SATA drive will hang on some processes, while a SCSI drive won't.
The 10% utilization number is bunk, based on some early magnetic scans that showed that typically, only about 10% of the physical regions of the brain were active at any one time.
Different activities like sleeping, eating, listening, talking, etc. are controlled locally by different areas of the brain, and you usually aren't doing all those things at once.
Had nothing to do with hard drives, or even processor speed. It merely stated that technology was advancing such that the number of transistors on a chip doubled every 18 months.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The ZTX form factor is in. 32Gb of RAM is required to start Windows. Bill Gates STILL isn't getting any ass. The Intel socket is the size of an Eggo waffle and reads, "Socket 16318" on the side. IBM now offers fries with your shake, Apple who?. Aibo, the robotic dogs, are now the perfect pet and have found a way to breed. Toasters not only toast bread and butter it too with HP butter cartridges, but also act as a scanner, copier, and shredder too. HAL has locked us out of the Space Station again and says we can come pick up our box of "stuff" sometime on Saturday. Air tanks are considered fashionable and the trendiest design is the Hello Kitty Respirator because the flower-shaped regulator knob goes great with the pink bio-suit and Batdz-Maru Geigercounter. Chevrolet now offers moon-rovers with GPS and Ford is still #1. Vacations to Mars seem to be popular, especially the hiking tour near Cydonia - apparently there's a killer restaurant there called "Zybob's Kibabs". To top it all off, x86 architecture still exists, but only in various things like pencil sharpeners and talking Coke cans.
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!