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Seagate Momentus 120GB 2.5" HD
VL writes "A mobile user can never have enough storage space, so we checkout Seagate's latest solution for notebooks. Seagate's warranty is among the best I've seen at five years, which is much better than the one year or so that comes with laptops (and thus their hard drives) or the three years offered by others. Performance is what this drive is targeted to excel at, an it seems to do so fairly well. In our tests we saw it do markedly better than the Hitachi drive in most tests that focused on performance. Battery life was slightly lower than that of the Hitachi drive but within 2% of that drive. "
Well it looks like I'll be able to buy one of these for my external USB HDD interface. This technology has applications everywhere, although I think hard disk drives are about to go boom and then bust, as evidenced by the 500gb beast we just saw on /., up from a 300gb HDD. +200gb in a few months? We need a Moore's law for HDDs.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
Wow. I know what's going into my trusty old Archos mp3 player real soon now...
Da Blog
How much heat do these drives produce? I had a laptop with a 60 GB drive, 4200 RPM, and it would heat up like a mutha.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Comparing two 4200rpm drives against the Seagate running at 5400rpm will always make the Seagate a winner.
It'll become a second natural that a drive spinning faster will consume more energy, even if it's just a bit more than this drive.
I'm not saying this Seagate drive is excellent (reading the specs it really makes me drool) but maybe benchmark testers should do tests with some more "au pair" drives.
May the source be with you!
It is 2.5 inches thick.. runs at 7200 rpm.. has 5 yr warranty. No, I am not trolling. After I bought it, I searched all web for it, but I couldnt find one. I formatted it to make sure it is 200 gb..and I had to believe what windows finally told me - it is a 200 gb harddrive!! I even got the case for this thing to prove it.
I was thinking more in terms of a user's experience, not quantitatively. In a typical consumer-grade laptop, will you be able to feel it through the casing? If you use the laptop on your lap, will you feel the heat from the hard drive on your genitalia?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
These Slashdot hard drive articles never get old.
I can hardly wait for the upcoming artlcles about Maxtor and Western Digital coming out with 2.5 inch 150GB drives.
I'm on the edge of my seat!
---------------------------------------------
SERENITY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Silent PC Review has had a review of this drive up for some time. Some desktop users prefer using notebook drives for generally quieter performance. Naturally, the SPCR review will focus more on the acoustical properties of the drive, but it's at least a different perspective and an interesting read.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
120GB MP3 Player
This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?
I like advances in technology as much as the next person, but I really wonder, what do you need 120 GB in your laptop for? I am only using about 2 GB on my laptop (Slackware install, Firefox, and some notes I take in vim.) On my Mac Mini with a Debian install with Firefox and XMMS, I am using only 2.5 GB of my 40 GB HDD. On my 3.8 GHz P4 FreeBSD server, with Apache, and about thirty mp3's served over NFS, as well as NetBSD sets over FTP, I am only using 4 GB of the 80 GB HDD. My NetBSD router of course suffices with a 1 GB HDD. What do you do with a 120 GB HDD? I realize I don't download any other than source and mp3's to my HDDs, but still, why would I want 120 GB? I think 120 GB HDDs should stay in servers, not that I even need one here. THe only use I see for this is for web hosting and e-mail storage.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
TV shows and movies - I filled up 3 hdd (80GB + 60GB + 14GB) real quick, even with burning older stuff to DVDs.
Can never get enough space if you like video.
A couple of years ago I bought an Inspiron 8200 and paid _lots_ extra to get the 5400RPM 60Gb drive... which failed about 9 months later... I needed the laptop working ASAP - so a warranty repair was not an option... I replaced the drive with an identical one (for a fraction of the upgrade price a few months previously)... and this drive lasted about 9 months before failing even more spectacularly. I then replaced the drive with a Seagate Momentus one... and (touch wood) it's been good since... Noticiably quieter and it even feels a bit faster.
I'd be very wary about buying another Hitachi drive...
You're thinking only of yourself. What applies to you doesn't apply to the rest of us.
I do development work on my laptop, so I have web server, database, several gigs of data, plus source code for several trees that are worked on concurrently. I could easily use up your 80 gig hard drive without an issue.
If I start adding mp3s, movies, backups from my websites, 120 might not even be big enough. I have over 600 gigs in my home computer.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
These large sizes are all good and well, but 120GB is a lot of data to lose. In these mobile application areas, how does the reliability stack up? Can it withstand some battering, or does it fail first time you drop your laptop?
"If anyone needs me, I'm in the angry dome."
At last I can take my pr0n collection on the road!
Well, half of it, at least...
I avoid all pornographic material. A few years ago, I accidientally encountered whitehouse.com, but other than that I have managed to keep the digital scum off my LCDS, CRTs, and off my HDDs. I think pornography an unacceptable influence on children and adults alike. I'd like to see the U.S. follow China and banish it from inside the United States. Isn't there much more interesting things you coul do with 45 GB and your broadband? I admit I use my HDD and broadband mostly for caching Slashdot content and viewing Slashdot. :) However, I am often working on little programming projects or setting up machines. I think you would find you would become much happier if you did away with the pronography.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Did anyone else find it interesting that they're comparing 4200 RPM drives to a 5400 RPM drive?
Also, one reason to have smaller, slower drives in a laptop is the heat. I'd love to find some benchmarks on how this gigantic HD did in the heat test. Who knows, it might have done great - but that review is sorely lacking from a die-hard laptop user.
Apple buys entire inventory of drives. Unless i'm thinking of a different size of drives...
Why does my post history abruptly stop? I want to laugh at the stupid things I posted as a kid.
100 hours of porn.? Who really needs more than 10 to 15 minutes?
While a 2.5" 120GB sounds nice I'm more than happy with a smaller 1.8" disk with 60GB (which already exists). What is currently bugging me most is that only few manufacturers use 1.8" disks yet and (maybe therefore) we have to different standards which are incompatible: some vendors use an IDE interface while others use a ZIF interface.
The obvious answer to your question is "YOU don't."
If you can't imagine why people would want 120GB of storage space in a laptop, then you've got a very limited imagination. Here's an obvious example, since you mentioned a Mac...
* A PowerBook user wants to edit a video project in Final Cut Pro. 30mins of video often involves editing around 4-6 hours of footage. 5 minutes of DV footage is roughly 1GB. So, a single short-length project is going to eat about 50-70GB of space... bring on the 250GB drives!!!
* Storing 10 of your favourite DVDs on your laptop will fill most of that measly 120GB, as well.
* With most games filling a DVD these days, 5-6 games could easily claim 30GB. 25% of the dish just got filled with games!
Anyway... didn't take much wondering...
I bought two pieces and want to buy another four.
1)I bought one last month from Newegg when they first came out, it was $284 (including CA sales tax and shipping). Back then Buy.com sold them for about $265 (tax and shipping included ) but I did not buy from them because I dont like the company.
2) I bought a second one last week from nowdirect.com for only $229 ($259.46 including tax and shiping). Nowdirect is a new company from San Jose. Although new they are good, I purchased 6 or 7 1.8 inch drived from them.
Toshiba and Hitachi also have 120GB laptop drives, they are cheaper but slower (4200rpm).
I disagree with you that the US and UK should be MORE like China - see human rights, pollution, general sanitation and living conditions.
/sarcasum
I disagree with you on the pronography front as well. Any attempt to limit someones freedoms impinges on the rights we all have. What will be next - a book burning? Oh no! Those ideas have to go!
And finally, the on-topic part of my post... I am using ~200gb of storage on my server - most of it applications, tools for work, images and music. Quite a few linux iso archives as well. My friend who does graphics for a living doesn't bother with disks smaller than 200gb in *workstations* these days. His servers are spinning around 1.6TB each (office and home - mirrored).
As disk space becomes availible, you can find usefull ways to fill it.
About 45 seconds suffices for me.
120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music
Obviously, you are not familiar with some of Sven Väth's longer mixes...
Da Blog
And before you know, your 120GB drive will be full. And it's not cheap either.
To me, capacity and performance are more important that disk dimensions and weight. That's why I'll get myself a Firewire (faster) enclosure with a 3.5" disk (cheaper) three times the capacity.
Here we are at the edge, at 120gb. What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD? I have had headache after headache with desktop systems and firewire enclosures that were not fully LBA48 compliant, and so they would detect 160, 180, 200, and 250gb HDs as 128gb. (or not at all...) Since no laptop drives > 128gb have yet been manufactured, I wonder if we will see this problem crop up sometime next year for out laptops?
Or has someone tried cabling a large 3.5" drive into a few laptops to see if we have a nasty surprise waiting for us?
I've got an 80 in my powerbook, and have a good 20 of it free, but y'know how things like that go... I'm sure I'll be hurting for space by start of next year. A 120 would be a nice upgrade. Anyone found a source for these new magic drives? I remember years back with my black powerbook with its "huge" 8gb drive, finding that IBM had made a massive 23 gb drive and having to search high and low to find the ONE retailer that had just TWO of them in stock. I still say I should have bought both and ebayed the other and made a killing.
If someone has found a few sources for them, can you report back on prices so we know how bad it's gonna sting? (that 23 was over $800 at the time, but worth every penny!)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I usually dont keep personal files on my laptops,at least not for a long time, I just have many operating systems installed and for that 120 GB is not enough. The typical structure of the drives of my laptops is the following:
/dev/hda1 - a first Microsoft OS, typically Win XP. /dev/hda2 - a first linux distribution, typically the current SuSE distribution. /dev/hda3 - Solaris on Intel. /dev/hda5 - a second Microsoft OS, win 2k. /dev/hda6 - a second linux distribution, typically Debian. /dev/hda7 - common temporary storage for linux, Reiserfs, about 8GB, unsually mounted in /valhalla; from time to time I also use this partition for playing with other linux distributions and for making DVD images. /dev/hda8 - common temporary storage for all operating systems, about 40GB, fat32 /dev/hda9 -linux swap.
.pdf format, music, movies and so on. With an 120 GB internal drive I would make /dev/hda2, /dev/hda7 and /dev/hda8 bigger.
1)
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For such a partition scheme 100GB is a bare minimum. I don't use the internal drives of my laptops for long terms storage, I have a couple of 100GB external laptop drive in USB/Firewire combo boxes for that; on those I keep my computations, huge experimental data files, my scanned books, scientific papers in
I put this in my Dell D800 laptop and XP Pro couldn't format it. I took it out, put it in an external box with an AC power supply, plugged it into the USB port, and it formatted fine. Then I put it back in the D800 and it works fine there too. This puzzles me, perhaps someone can help me understand it.
Doug Jensen
I have many hundreds of professional society papers and technical reports, many hundreds of PowerPoint presentations (some with embedded videos). Yes, I carry about 64 DVD's of documents in my laptop case, but it is really useful to be able to have immediate access on my HDD to a lot of my documents, and still have room to download hundreds of megs of docs on no notice.
Doug Jensen
I wonder why they compared this 5400 rpm drive with only 4200 rpm Hitachi and Toshiba models...The Hitachi 7k60 is a much better performer with its 7200 rpm and still doesn't slash the laptop's battery life...it would be interesting to know how these two would compare.
I emailed seagate asking for more specs and availaibility. Looks like he picked a very strategic time for a vacation!
I will be out of the office starting 09/10/2005 and will not return until
09/19/2005.
I will have limited access to email and voicemail. If your matter is
urgent, please contact John Paulsen at (831) 439-2499 or
john.paulsen@seagate.com
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
2.5in looks like the future of hard drives, laptop or server, at least if you listen to HP. So far you can only get 72GB in Serial Attached SCSI 2.5in. Wonder how long they'll keep up 3.5in drives, or wether they'll keep those around for bigger servers.
meh. well I would like to know how you impinge on people's rights, yea I know you meant "infringes" but whatever. but getting to the point, sure we all can make choices. whether to look at porn or not. if you don't like it, don't watch it. I avoid it too, but that's my choice. just because you have freedom of speech, you aren't granted an audience automagically. you can't just force your thoughts on people.
I'm not bloody surprised you posted that anonymously...
LBA48 won't be a big deal for laptops, because this problem has already been solved for 3.5" drives and desktops, and that hardware (Firewire bridge chips) and software is already there. It's not like Windows has one driver for 3.5" ATA devices and another for 2.5" ATA devices. The only part that is specific to laptops that I can think of it the BIOS. I guess it's possible that the BIOSes in even recent laptops haven't been updated to boot from LBA48 devices simply because they didn't have to. But I expect most of them (at least in the last year) will be okay.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
There's DDO if you absolutely have to.
I wanna see you filling 120GB of music through a USB 1.1 interface
My Archos is USB 2. Charges through the USB port as well.
Da Blog
Also dual-booting takes up a bunch of space. I have a 60GB 4200 rpm model in my laptop and it is pushing the limit in capacity. Windows and the reason to have Windows at all (Office 2003 and games) takes up a minimum of about 10 GB. A modern Linux install takes up about ~3 GB and that's all before data. And don't forget swap, temp, and such. You really need about 30 GB before any of your own data to even think about dual-booting.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Jesus, man. Buy VMware and save yourself the trouble of having 9 fucking partitions, each with wasted, unused space.
What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD?
We'll find out soon: 160's are due by the end of the year. I already upgraded my 60 to a 100 last year, and it's full already, so I guess I'll find out.
Anyone found a source for these new magic drives?
Newegg has had 120 gig laptop drives for a while now. It's listed at $263.75, so you might want to shop around.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I just ran HD Tach on my 7200rpm 60GB Hitachi 7K60 in my laptop and the Seagate at 5400rpm nearly matched it. I had the same 40MB/s max, 33MB/s average read speed and a slightly faster 14.6ms seek time. Most likely the Seagate can keep up because of the higher density. Even though it spins fewer times in a second, the heads still see the same amount of data.
So, this drive is actually impressive. I paid $200 for my 60GB, I'd consider another $50 for double the space at the same speed a very good deal.
Also, a few people were wondering what you'd do with 120GB of space other than rip DVDs. I need it for what I do with my laptop. I often find myself showing a customer a solution on my laptop and needing to run several virtual computers, a Linux mail server for my mail archiving product, two MS Exchanges server as sample senders and receivers (to show that the product will work with their mail system), and a Windows-based document management system that we've imported the archived mail to. That's 10 to 12GB of drive space just to do a demo.
I wonder if five of these would make a compact, power-efficient and quiet server RAID array? I'm looking forward to the day when 3.5" has gone the way of 5.25" drives of old...
Let's see... 10 minutes at a go * 2 times/day * 7 days/week * 52 weeks/year * .... Yeah, I think 100 hours is a good start
This is (almost) a non-issue.
Windows 95/98/ME is dead. Every OS that isn't DOS-based completely ignores the BIOS drive specs, and detects the specs on it's own, at boot time. You can put a 300GB drive in a 486, and it will boot the OS (as long as the loader is in the first few hundred MBs), and the OS will detect the 300GB hard drive, and be able to use all of it.
Some BIOSes crashed when autodetecting the size of a larger hard drive, but you can manually change those settings to something reasonable, and it will work just fine.
External USB2/Firefire hard drives, my friend... The bus power is just enough to spin-up a lower-power 2.5" drive, so you've got a lot of options. Even if I could have a 2.5" 300GB drive in my notebook, I wouldn't want to. Much easier to back-up external drives, rather than leaving your notebook on, and transfering over the network or whatnot.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There has been a Moore's Law for HDD's longer than Moore's Law has been around. The growth rate is, unfortunately, variable and is driven by both technology and testosterone. Areal density grew at a 30% CAGR from 1956 to 1991, 60% from 1991 to 1997, 100% from 1998 to 2002 and now appears to be growing at a 30% CAGR. Perpendicular recording, coupled with tunneling magnetoresistive read heads may increase this rate. Expect more casualties.
This is where it would be good to have Microsoft SQL Server 200nexGen with it's non-relational database and prediction capabilities.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
http://www.swflug.org/index.php?option=com_conten
Out of curiosity, is there a technical reason why they don't just jump to LBA64 or LBA80 or something else that'll be good for another few decades? Note: "to sell more hardware" isn't a technical reason. :-)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Due to how the LBA48 standard was implemented, a controller chip isn't "LBA48" or not. You just write some registers twice. You can make any controller chip do LBA48 with the right software.
Bridge chips are problematic since they are self-contained and you can't necessarily update the software on them (and they might be out of code space), but laptops don't use bridge chips, they just have an ATA interface that is accessed by the main CPU. Fix the code on the main CPU (OS or BIOS) and you're there.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
As the owner of 6 Seagate HDDs, 3 of which are the ever-popular Barracuda 120GB models, I must say this is a fantastic bit of info. I was looking for s new Hard drive to replace the constantly-failing one in my Thinkpad, and, with my almost 15 years of Seagate drives, all of which are still working to full capacity, I think I've just found my drive.
the reason you can replace them with newer ones that have large drive support is because:
There's more profit in selling you a new card than letting you update the old ones! Ta-Daa!
Anyway, you can just plain skip the logic anyway. I've written ATA drivers for controllers before. I know how it's done, and I personally have done it and know that there is no restriction to what controllers can have LBA48 software written for them.
Go get the spec from t13.org ourself. All you have to do is write 4 registers twice. The drive remembers both the most recently written and the previously written value. The controller does nothing new at all.
As to bridge boards, they could be out of code space, they might have limits on the size of the data to be stored (can't store >28 bits of sector or >8 bits of sector count), or they just might want to sell new chips too.
Oxford might have made a "smart controller" and don't feel like switching over and going to "dumb mode" to get it to work. Or perhaps their controller is "too smart" and thus cannot be made to work in LBA48 mode. I know that the >8 bits of sector count (which allows transfers larger than 512KB at once) means your DMA equipment in your bridge might have to be able to do transfers larger than 128KiB. This was a problem on a device I worked on. It might be a probem on special bridge chips that DMA straight from the drive to the bus (like the Cypress USB chips).
Or perhaps they just want to sell new chips too. It doesn't matter, I never said all bridge chips can be updated to do LBA48, in fact, I believe I gave reasons you perhaps couldn't.
I can assure you this isn't the case with any PC interface, since they all have to work with the standard Windows driver in order to boot Windows, and thus have a "dumb mode" where you can write any registers in any order you'd like. You then write the 4 registers in question twice and run the DMA engine a couple times in a row (actually, Windows doesn't do transfers larger then 128KiB anyway with the default drivers) and you're there.
As I said, any PC controller can do it. Bridge chips can be different, due to various factors.
As to your last paragraph, well, again there is no requirement for LBA48 hardware. And the software is clearly running in LBA48 mode (despite being on what you call "non-LBA48 hardware"), since without it, you can only address 2^28 sectors, and thus you simply have no way to access those sectors above 128GiB.
I do appreciate applying logic to a situation. But in this case, you're wrong, and you should do some research about it before looking even more foolish.
As perhaps something to spur you to this, let me give you a link about how series 1 Tivos (which were released in 1997 or 1998) can use LBA48, with a new kernel.
http://www.courtesan.com/tivo/bigdisk.html
I know this isn't a "knockout blow" to your theory, but perhaps it is enough to spur you to look further and realize your mistake.
Finally, here's the link to the ATA spec site.
http://t13.org/#Project_drafts
Their specs aren't exactly transparent, but maybe you can learn something from those too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Like I said, I already told you that bridge controllers might be different. That doesn't mean there is LBA48 hardware.
As to the extra chip, a 74LCV02A is just a quad 2-input NOR gate. I'm not quite sure why this chip would help them do 48-bit addressing.
I would more expect it is used to block the signal coming from the DMA controller to the drive, so that they can run their DMA controller multiple times in a row without the controller signalling to the drive that the transaction is complete after the first 128KiB.
Again, this is a bridge-specific thing, because their bridge is too smart. On a PC there is no reason you can't run the DMA controller several times back to back without it aborting the transaction without need for additional hardware.
If Maxtor were to put on a different method of doing LBA48 without supporting >256 sector transactions or double writes, then this bridge would work just fine. Do they do that? I dunno.
But again, it's more of a concern with bridge chips. Bridge chips use things like 16MHz CPUs to super-fast transfers, and thus they often have specialized hardware that cannot be reprogrammed. You take this information and expand it too far, to say that there are LBA48 requirements for controllers, not just special-purpose bridge chips.
I think the information that you got from this Oxford person that tells you that LBA48 wasn't even being considered in 1997, yet TiVos that were built in 1997 (surely designed in 1996) are capable of doing it with new software underscores my point about controllers and LBA48 pretty strongly.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95