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Latest SCSI Drive Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the ask-your-parents-about-it dept.

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."

12 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Thank you by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Thank you by gl4ss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      too bad for you Moore's obsercation is CALLED "Moore's law".

      it being a real law or just a theory not having much to do with it.

      besides, the whole law is just an old dog for newswriters to kick.

      and as a sidenote(besides that moore's law has very little to do with hd space in any of the usualy things moore's law is stated to mean). it could also mean that scsi is being slowly pushed further and further into it's niche(and thus having smaller and smaller markets compared to other biz the hd companies could do).

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Thank you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Unfortunately the observation is proven to be not accurate. Therefore it fails the test of a law.

  2. Where to begin. . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Large caches by Gldm · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, it would be great to add cache to SATA drives. Or wait, how about an onboard CPU to offload the processor? Oh and wait, let's add RAID5 xoring too! Oh and command queuing, elevator sort seek optimizations, and all the other nice SCSI stuff.

    If only someone made a product like that which supported many drives and most major OSes including linux...

    If only I could find such a thing under this rock where I've been living the last few years!

    --

    Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!

  4. Re:Large caches by darth_silliarse · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    ...and in the event of power failure/child plug socket scenario/accidental powerbutton press/fuse blow/failing psu/nuclear war your install is completely fscked!

    --
    I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
  5. Re:No way by kfg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Clearly mother nature got it right for efficient computation.

    At the cost of deterministic precision and data integrity.

    When designing a computational device the ideal depends a good deal on just what it is you are trying to compute and there are always engineering tradeoffs.

    KFG

  6. Re:Ugh... by NerveGas · · Score: 2, Insightful


    I've bought a lot of Seagates over the past couple of years, and never had a problem - until I got a batch of 120's that started crapping out like flies. Every other drive before then (and after then) has been fine.

    Before that, I'd bought Fujitsus for about a year, until nearly every one of them went belly-up in a short amount of time.

    Wait, I've also had Western Digital drives crap out in large numbers before. And what about the whole IBM "DeathStar" fiasco?

    Every manufacturer gets bad runs. Really.

    steve

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
  7. Curiouser by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  8. Guessssss what? by Ayanami+Rei · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  9. Re:Welcome to the new /. by Sivar · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This misses the point entirely. It doesn't matter that Moore happened to be talking about transistor count when he made his famous observation--the point is that the exponential (rather than linear) growth he observed applies to more than just transistor count. It is a famous observation that is easily recognized, so it was appropriate to compare the slowing of storage technology to the slowing of IC advancement.
    Besides, Slashdot submissions often need a little extra flair to be accepted for publication.

    --
    Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
  10. "You only use 10% of your brain..." by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.