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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."
.. and for many others, I suspect:
Will be be sold with an ATA-133 interface as well as the usual SATA?
Some may argue that a drive like this is overkill, or even wasted, on an old machine but people like me - who spruce up old P3s bought on eBay by adding faster drives and RAM to make economical web PCs for friends and family - would love to get our grubby little mitts on a drive like this !
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
After looking over all the pretty graphs, it seems the 74gb Western Digital Raptor spanks the other drives in everything but platter density. And to push this farther I saw nothing about its reliability published. The 500gb hd isn't using the new platter technology and the 160gb drive is crippled compared to the larger brethren because of its smaller cache. The only thing I got from this review was that if I needed a drive that performs I should buy a Raptor.
I bought an external drive from Seagate and my experience with the drive was absolutely horrendous.
It was so unreliable that I had to return the drive and paid a restocking fee.
I thought it was just me, but these user reviews suggest otherwise.
Personally I would not touch another Seagate product with a 10 foot pole.
It used to be possible to do what you describe however once track pitch became high enough they had to switch to using embedded servo data because head alignment was not longer consistent between platters. Not only is there platter to platter variation in track alignment but the tracks themselves are eccentric. The only way you can keep more then one head in alignment is to have more then one servo actuator.
The last drive I had with dedicated servo tracks was a Micropolis 8760E 5.25 inch full height drive. Note that these types of drives actually can be low level formatted since the servo data is not involved.
Actually, I say they new hard disks will be obsolete in just 11 years.
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Read about it here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddis
The gist of it is that right now your dollar buys about 130 times more hard disk space than flash memory. In almost every year, you can buy more space for your dollar than you could last year. This improvement for hard disks in the last two years was measured at 44% per annum. The annualised improvement for flash storage over the same period was measured at 118%. By simply extrapolating these figures into the future until the megs per dollar figure for flash beats that of hard disks gives the date of 2017 or in just 11 years time.
The rest of it covers why performace shouldnt be an issue is 11 years time.