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."

Comments

Large caches

[Twillerror]

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.

Re:Large caches

[BeerCat]

The more serious response...

It seems odd that no one has come out with a standard cache expansion kit.

What about a cache expansion kit that is a small daughterboard that can take multiple RAM type designs (SIMM / DIMM / SO-DIMM etc), and which then plugs into the drive's cache socket. This would mean that all the old RAM that you had to remove to upgrade your machine could be put to good use. Even though it would not be as fast as the RAM in main use, it would still be around 1000 times faster than the HD itself. OK, so trying to integrate 30-pin SIMMs would probably be a bit silly (especially with a limit of something like 8Mb), but anything from about 168-pin would do.

Re:Large caches

[jacksonj04]

Get a couple of big hard disks with nice large caches.

One is a storage disk for things like documents, one is an applications disk. Partitions may be useful to prevent fragmentation.

Then (if you're on Windows) get another smaller but FAST drive and use it exclusively as a swap file.

I have 120gb program HDD, an 80gb storage HDD (2 partitions), and an old 6gb 10K RPM HDD as a swap file and nothing more (please, no complaints about Windows. The 3 linux boxes under my desk get on with life and Windows is my desktop PC for compatability purposes). All with 8mb cache, the swap is on its own ATA channel and the two big buggers are on SATA.

My pc, despite only being a 1.2gHz CPU, is shit hot. The 2gb of RAM probably helps here, but even getting Windows XP and a plethora of background tasks up and running takes all of 30 seconds. Not to mention that working with 200mb+ PSDs is a breeze :D

RAM. Big HDDs. Fast busses. Good configuration.

Re:Large caches

[zakezuke]

What about a cache expansion kit that is a small daughterboard that can take multiple RAM type designs (SIMM / DIMM / SO-DIMM etc), and which then plugs into the drive's cache socket. This would mean that all the old RAM that you had to remove to upgrade your machine could be put to good use. Even though it would not be as fast as the RAM in main use, it would still be around 1000 times faster than the HD itself. OK, so trying to integrate 30-pin SIMMs would probably be a bit silly (especially with a limit of something like 8Mb), but anything from about 168-pin would do.
The Legacy Observation...

The moment you design something to use anything older it will end up costing as much or more than new. While sure you might be able to find old POS memory on the used market, it would be wise to use things in current production so if a large company wishes to order thousands of units, you can build your board and get thousands of units of ram. This would not work well with 2nd hand RAM.

Re:Large caches

[immovable_object]

The fundamental thing that everybody seems to be missing is the use of *WRITE* cache. If you add a big write cache to a HD, along with a small battery to keep it going should the system fail, you'll blow the doors off of everything. That's what the large fibre-channel RAID arrays do.

That's why the increase in cache sizes helps so tremendously. You can avoid the spindle delay entirely.

Re:Thank you

[Jason1729]

What makes you think "Moore's Law" is not a correct term?

From Wikipedia under "physical law": A physical law or a law of nature is a scientific generalization based on empirical observations.

Moore's LAW is the empirical observation that every 18 months the transistor density of high-end chips doubles.

Jason
ProfQuotes

SCSI vs IDE, price points, and NOT MOORE'S LAW

[shoppa]

Forget Moore's law.

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.

Re:How many MB/sec in RAID under Linux?

[Gadzinka]

I think this is more or less irrelevant, because... ...for the premium on these "large" scsi drives you can buy several times more space in ATA/SATA drives, connect them to some SMART controller and join them in stripping mode, achieving higher peak as well as continuous bandwidth.

What's really interesting, is that there are controllers visible by computer as SCSI drive which allow you to connect lots of cheap ATA/SATA drives and configure them however you like.

These overpriced, overhyped scsi drives IMO are for the same people that buy "gold-coated-plug optical tos-link cables" and "distilled water for cleaning CDs" for couple of bucks per ounce.

Robert

PS Yes, I really saw those gold-coated optical cables.

Re:SATA

[Charcharodon]

That is true, you might be think of a pair of SATA, such as the WD Raptor, drives together in a RAID as approaching the performance of a SCSI drive, but individually nope no how no way.

It would be nice to see more hours out of the SATA drives, after all the big huff about the warrenty reduction by Maxtor and WD I picked up one of their "3 year" drives, it still shit the bed after 6 months. Yeah! 2 years worth of pr0n, Enterprise and Red Dwarf episodes gone. Guess you'll still have to role the dice on dependability.

So, if Moore's Observation does fail

[RealAlaskan]

So, if Moore's Observation does fail, how bad is it?

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!

Re:SATA

[katz]

SATA maximum spindle speeds are definitely not 7200 RPM. Western Digital's SATA Raptor drives are 10,000 RPM.

PCI

[dspeyer]

What difference does it make whether your controller/disk interface is 150MB/s or 320MB/s when your data is going to sit on the controller waiting for the 132MB/s PCI bus anyway?

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?

If there's an end to moore's law...

[TyrranzzX]

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.

Re:It's not technology max-ing out

[kiddygrinder]

nah, cpu and ram will be used up by higher and higher levels of programming languages. Just look at .net, easy enough but a simple hello world has a 40 meg footprint