Slashdot Mirror
Seagate Pushes Hard Drive Platters to 160GB
TheRainDog writes "Although perpendicular recording has yet to make its way into desktop hard drives, Seagate continues to push platter densities the old fashioned way. The company's 160GB platters have the highest areal density in the industry by over 25%, allowing Seagate to create a 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive that uses a single platter and costs under $90. The single-platter design has lower noise levels and power consumption than multi-platter designs, and a lower probability of a catastrophic head crash. Higher areal densities also allow the drive head access the same amount of data over shorter physical distances, improving performance dramatically in some instances. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the 160GB Barracuda 7200.9's performance against eight competitors from Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital."
A lot has happened in two years, my friend. Finding SATA cables is really easy and cheap now. Shoot, 2 came with each of the motherboards I recently bought when I built a pair of computers for a friend.
antipaucity
Mwave.com will include a cable with your order for an additional $3.50. Most online hardware places seem to carry cables in this price range as well, while yes shipping just a cable by itself is extranious you can still order them independantly.
Scratches on Hard disks come from the freakin' head smashing into the disk while it is spinning at 7200rpm, there is no such thing as a benign head crash, when it happens it is bad, the head is gonna skip off the surface of the disk like a pebble on a lake. It is going to be bad no matter what the data density is.
So the difference between scratches and head crashes is miles apart, not just due to data density. In actuality the data density differences are insignificant compared to the other issues.
Faster than what? All 7200 rpm drives have platters that spin at... 7200 rpm. Drives of this speed have been around for years and years. 10k and 15k rpm drives have been around for a while, too.
Just what, exactly, are you making a comparison against?
PATA is not cheaper than SATA. Prices of both technologies are generally within 5% of each other.
Agreed. I work for an ISP in a small somewhat-rural Ohio town. *We* sell SATA cables and power adapters.
They are not that hard to find.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Yes, they are also available in PATA configuration. Check the website. Just got the SATA version, let's see how they perform. BTW, I am not affiliated with Seagate.
My cellphone ringtone is a ring tone.
dont forget to check the bios supports 48bit LBA or you will only be able to use 130gb of that 160gb drive
SATA controllers are really cheap ($20) so its moot really, unless you dont have a free pci slot
Didn't you happen to notice the results for 7200 RPM drives are about the same?
did you buy an OEM model or a retail model?
If you bought an OEM, then you shouldn't have expected it to ship with a cable.
OTOH, what kind of geek doesn't have spare cables laying around (SATA OR IDE)?
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
If you increase the bits per track then performance increases. However, if you increase the total number of tracks your data rates doesn't increase. In fact, you make it harder to settle on track which hurts seek times.
All the latest increases in areal density have been due to increased TPI (tracks per inch). This is the reason (besides spinning faster) that the Raptor has held the performance crown for so long.
Simple math and obvious reasoning clearly shows why two heads are better than six:
Suppose that we have two disks: One with one platter/two heads, and another with three platters/six heads. Both hold 160GB of data. And for the sake of argument, the platters of each disk have equal physical area to one another.
Now, sure, the three-platter sandwich has 3 times as much read/write hardware, but it is only a third the density of the double-sided disk (else, it would be 480GB). (Oh: And you might bother to realize that those three pairs of heads cannot move independantly on a modern hard drive.)
So anyway, plainly there is no advantage to using a lot of low density platters. It's something like d*3/3=d for the three-plattered machine, and just d=d for the single platter drive. It is therefore the same bloody thing in terms of potential data rate.
However, by having removed 2/3 of the moving parts, you also substantially increase the potential for reliability, by simple virtue of having fewer things which can break. This is important: What good is 160GB of data that just ate itself?
And, power consumption DOES go down - there's a lot less work to be done by removing a bunch of excess mass, and therefore less power is required. (If you think otherwise, please document your beliefs and submit them for consideration for the next Nobel prize - perpetual motion is within your reach.)
And when power consumption goes down, so does heat generation (hard drives turn almost all of the energy they consume into heat).
And noise. There's a lot less rotating mass, and therefore a lot less noise from the bearings and motor. There's also a lot less mass in the head assembly, therefore a lot less noise/vibration gets transferred to the case of the machine by the head actuator by simple inertia and momentum. (Fewer heads means less radiating area for any direct accoustic output from the head mechanism, as well.)
I mean: Think about it. Please.
Or don't: It doesn't matter one way or the other, to me, whether or not you're an idiot. But listen, kid, the only reason we've even GOT 160GB drives at ALL is the development of a whole fuckton of small, largely measningless, incremental improvements in density, and motor design, and bearings, and heads, and controllers, and so on.
This is just another step in the same forward direction that the storage industry has been moving in for decades.
You can get a nice, high end PIII box used for about $100-$150 now. Computers like used HP and Dell workstations that are going to be pretty reliable, and have all the speed a casual web surfer will need.
On the otherhand, you would be doing really well if you could get a Socket A chip, cooler, and a nForce2 board with some kind of inegrated video for $50. Then add in a cheap case and power supply, optical drive, cheap memory, and you're going to go over $100. And for that money you'll have a piece of crap system that will likely have all kinds of problems due to the extremely low end motherboard, power supply, and memory you be using. No thanks.
I agree with you on the PC100/PC133 memory though. Best bet is to buy a P3 system that someone has already taken to 512MB (or atleast 256MB). I've seen P3 systems with 512MB sell for less than what the two 256MB SDRAM sticks inside of it would cost new.