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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."
My concern would be that anything that could affect a portion of the disk would destroy more data. I know scratches that aren't noticed on a CD can make a DVD unreadable and, while a drive platter may not have the risk of scratches that optical storage does, the general idea is the same. A physical failure, such as a head alignment issue, that wouldn't be noticed with lower densities may be a factor with the higher densities.
Now, I don't have a solution to the problem, but I just want to point out that getting full performance out of something can raise new risks.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Seems like a legit point to me. With 3 platters and 6 heads you could triple your data read rate by filling buffers simultaneously, whereas they haven't even doubled the data density. 25% did they say? On top of that, you don't gain speed for the increased number of tracks, only the increased track capacity. Call it 15% then? I think the power, noise, and speed and just hype, the story here is cost - mostly for Seagate's profit margin if it's a real competitive advantage, but I won't complain.
So where's the 500GB version? Forget low power and noise, I'd rather have 1/2 Terabyte.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Why, this is the most exciting news I've heard since the last time it happened!
Which was about six months ago!
And six months before that, and six months before that, and six months before that, for more than a decade!
Someone tell me why this is news?
Is Seagate paying for this publicity?
Could anyone knowledgeable care to comment on how reliable this drive can be?
Unless a Seagate engineer that worked on this exact model comes forward and reveals a secret serious flaw, then no, NO ONE, not even other Seagate engineers, can tell you much about this drive's reliability.
You'll hear plenty of anecdotes about reliability, and every company has a hard-core "anti-fan" base who will never buy that company's products again, after losing their porn collection back in 1996.
Even within a drive family, you can't always extrapolate reliability data to other members of that family. One simple example I've seen (to my surprise) a lot here on Slashdot - A lot of people consider Maxtor as good for nothing but paperweights, because some of the earlier members of the DiamondMax line really really sucked. I, however, have half a dozen of the later DiamondMaxes in use today, some as old as five years, without a single failure, ever.
So, buy either the cheapest or the largest (or the inflection in that curve, which IMO Maxtor usually solidly holds, thus my using their drives almost exclusively), and just make sure you have everything backed up. Because eventually, you will have a catastrophic HDD failure. And as much as it sucks to waste a few hours reinstalling your OS of choice, it sucks a LOT more if you don't have all your software, porn, data (but I repeat myself), music, and what-have-you readily available on a backup.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a mere 160GB drive anyway, when you can get nearly twice that for $20 more. But this may have one nice side-effect, in that if Seagate pushes out a 4-platter 640GB drive (hey, no one will ever need more than 640GB, right?), the 400s should finally drop down to the golden $100-$150 range.
Hmm, 1024GB = 1TB.