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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."
"Higher areal densities also allow the drive head access the same amount of data over shorter physical distances, improving performance dramatically in some instances. "
Yes but there is only two heads so it can't be all good.
(although two heads are better than one)
.. 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
I am a packrat, I save everything I can get and I have found that I can't fill more than 1 TB, so I think in a year or so you'll only ever need one HDD (and they'll be cheap enough to get 2 and make a RAID array for security). I burn everything to DVDs and I have a few TB of files on DVDs, so with BluRay/HD-DVD I think pretty much all our storage needs are met. Also, as a preemptive strike, no, none of it is porn.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I bought a Seagate drive 2 weeks ago. It came with a SATA cable. It's incredibly quiet, really fast, and simply a great hard drive value. I also bought 2 other Seagate drives a year ago. They've been running 24-7 and have not crashed once.
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
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.
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.
Most motherboards with SATA connectors come with cables now.
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.
You mean 1 TB ought to be enough for anybody ?
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.
"Although perpendicular recording has yet to make its way into desktop hard drives..."
In case anyone hasn't already seen it: FLASH
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Here at work we used to have a little side business where we assembled PCs from wholesale parts, using IDE drives. We put maybe one together a week, tops, and we've got a drawer completely full of SATA cables.
These things are worse than AOL CD's!
Big box stores don't even know SATA exists yet, so why would they stock them?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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
Interpreting as "the platters are spinning faster".
No really! - with these new HDDs the entire drive spins. Makes it very dangerous to leave the side off your PC.
And hey... watch out, and don't forget, these fly-by-nighters only offer a 5 year warranty on their internal drives. And you can bet their drives are gonna die right after their warranty ends... ok, well, within 5 or 10 years of right after their warranty ends... ok, well... they can't last forever, can they?
The Admin and the Engineer
Serial ATA cables can be purchased for $2.99 at NewEgg, and I've never waited more than three days to get a package from them. Most come the next day if I order before noon. If you know you're going to be purchasing SATA in the future, buy your cables now and store them away. Hell, at that price, no one has an excuse not to buy some even if they don't think they'll be getting SATA in the near future. And a lot of local, mom-and-pop, PC builders will have SATA cables on hand if you MUST have one TODAY.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Why does that make the probability lower?
In all multi platter drives I have seen the heads are connected to each other, so if its going to touch one surface, its going to touch them all, ergo no matter how many surfaces you have they are all fucked.
GP is correct in my book, but please feel free to show me the light.
liqbase
On the other hand it is hitachi, home of the deathstar. Only drives I ever had problems with. NEXT.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
The Raptor is much more expensive than other ATA drives because it's 10,000 RPM. Of course a more expensive drive is faster, but that doesn't necessarily make it better for many customers.
Mobile parts are going to become obsolete when flash memory gets cheaper. I can imagine in 20 years:
"OMG look at that! A SPINNING hard disk! What CPU are you running, a Pentium? PFFT..."
Both Best Buy and CompUSA definitely carry SATA drives and cables in their stores. I would assume Future Shop is the same. You're obviously biased against these stores, but blatant lies aren't going to help your argument.
get real, this is slashdot. sweet hardware links will keep even the trolls at bay
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.
Well, I don't know about you, but I can't see resolution to micrometers with my eye. SO how do you know this is true, given the existence of uncertianty in reality?
Sig
Sounds like an innovative cooling solution, like the rotary engines in planes from the 1910's and 1920's, where the engine spins and the crankshaft stays stationary.
an OEM drive will not come with cables, a retail will.
"Makes it very dangerous to leave the side off your PC"
Hot-swap drive bays are out of the question then, huh?
As for finding S-ATA cables in stores, I can imagine that being hard two and a half years ago, when virtually noone had even heard of S-ATA. These days, I don't think there's a single computer store that does not have them.
Well that might work then. If you spin the platter at 7200 RPM, then spin the drive the same way at 7200 RPM and the head stays stationary then you'd get a faster 14000 RPM drive. I'll leave it to your imagination what the case and mounting would look like :)
It's nice to see these on the SATA drives, but what's keeping things like that from crossing back to SCSI that SATA has taken?
Sure, there are some people who will think cheapness has some good, but I'll take uncompromising quality with speed hands down nearly anytime. 500GB+ SCSI's time is overdue.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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!
actually most mobo and/or SATA cards will come with at least two SATA cables.
Well, [1000 GB is] about 700 [tightly-compressed] movies, I don't know of anyone owning more than 2 :P
What if you're involved in movie production? In that case, you'd probably use a codec that compresses less, such as DV or other intraframe transform codecs (less lossy, no motion dependencies) or Huffyuv (lossless).
Or perhaps you're building big ass database servers and want to put more redundancy into your array.
Someone tell me why this is news?
Is Seagate paying for this publicity?
You don't get an IDE cable with PATA drives either, when you buy an OEM or brown-box drive (which is what you tend to get from online order sites). In both cases, you get the drive cables with the motherboard. You can buy retail packaged drives which come with instructions and cables, but they cost more.
If you bought a complete PC which you want to upgrade later, it's your manufacturer's fault for not including all the spare cables you should have had. In my case, since I upgrade my own motherboards, I have more SATA leads than I know what to do with (my latest board has 8 SATA sockets, so 8 more SATA leads!)
Either way, SATA drives are far more common now than they were 2 1/2 years ago, so SATA leads are dirt cheap and available plenty of places. What's more annoying is you don't get USB leads with printers, a lead you're unlikely to have shipped with any other component.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Actually, I was gonna say that with all of these massive drives, that data loss will be accordingly more massive. I'll take 5 smaller drives on RAID over one big, cheap drive any day. There's really no price that can be put on lost data (usually). 160GB, even, for a single drive, is a LOT of data (unless it's stored in XML, in which case it may just be a single phone number).
I don't respond to AC's.
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)
I beg to differ. SATA cables are FAR more usefull than AOL CD's.
bork bork bork!
I think I remember reading that Hitachi were going to come out with their perpendicular drives later this year. Perhaps we'll be seeing 1TB drives mid next year...
In any case, the standard iPod's hard drive is going to get a massive increase.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Ahh ok, I bought an OEM model. This was a couple years ago, and it was the first computer I ever built myself. Neither the mobo nor the HD came with the SATA cable though which was very frustrating, even though the HD was SATA only and the mobo had SATA support.
Anybody else not notice that the first link goes to the 13th page of the article before going to the next page and seeing Conclusion and going, "Wow, that article was brief...what just happened there?"
Noone said anthing about heat! I once cooked a burrito on an old 4g Seagate Barracuda. You know the one I'm talking about, with the big metal grille on the front. You see, I was at work, and tinkering with my Sparc 5 workstation, when I realized the fan in the external drive had failed, but not my home directory, upon which it lived. Well, of course I had a burrito handy, and figured that once I did a nice fsck -- twice -- that I'd be reasonably okay, so I put the burrito in the front of the bezel, where the faceplate is supposed to go, bounced the workstation, and started the fsck. Then I went outside to smoke cigarettes. After smoking for a while, and socializing with people, the burrito was no longer frozen, but HOT! Voila, instant sysadmin lunch. Ramen noodles are just as easy, simply take...
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Out of curiosity, what drive did you buy 2 weeks ago? There are some good deals on the 300GB 7200.8 but I have heard that they are fairly noisy(for a seagate) and arent really that fast. I still want to buy a seagate because they tend to be quiet and have long warrantys but that 300GB maxtor MaXLineIII (with 5yr) is looking mighty tempting.
Bottles.
In my experiance they cary very little in terms of SATA and they often charge a premium for it (or at least there arent as many rebates). Maybe its changed in the last 2-3 months while I have been away and not reading the sunday ads but before, they were very PATA centric.
Bottles.
"costs under $90"
That's nice, but notice how you can get a normal 160GB for around $70-$75? $80 if you want SATA.
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
Now, lets get this right.. these platters are spinning fast, but not as in rotation :)
/. is good for you.
No, I'm not biased against these stores. They genuinely suck.
Technical knowledge is practically nonexistent, so people get told things like:
"AMD processors are good if you're running one program at once, but if you try to run two programs, it bogs right down to a standstill."
A Future Shop employee told this exact thing to someone I know. That's because FS hires stupid people who look good for their sales department. Best Buy is the same company, and I've seen the same thing there.
I don't honestly know about CompUSA, because I'm not in the USA. From other people's comments, though, they seem to have the same poor service as big box stores here. They're more interested in moving product than having someone who can genuinely help you decide what you need.
No BB or FS store near where I am carries anything SATA. There are a couple of the high end machines that they sell that use it, but you can't get anything part-wise from them.
If you have different experiences, then you're obviously in a different area than I am. Calling me a blatant liar, however, is simply being a jackass, who should be shot and marked as a troll.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Are you sure you didn't just get a dud? I've had 5 Seagate drives in my system for about 3 years and they're still fine.
While in principle I have to agree with you, I think that your post a little off.
Personally, my ultimate setup would be completely mirrored disks. Given that the performance of todays drives outpaces my needs (probably by a few orders of magnitude), and the price of the drives, just using two is good enough for me.
I believe that a mirrored 2 disk array, is much less suseptible to failure than your 5 disk RAID 5. Having only two components, the chances of failure are _MUCH_ lower than 5 disks, and with mirroring you get solid performance with exellent reliability. Plus, are you _SURE_ you could recover from a failed disk in a RAID5 setup? Have you praciced that recovery? RAID 1 is so much easier. A good deal of data is lost while admins try to recover from failed drives, sometimes this loss is caused by the admins actions. Having a simpler solution makes things much safer.
RAID 5 was for a time when small disks were the norm. When you can have a single disk that has 10x the space your needs require, RAID1 makes the most sense to me.
Well, atleast they're consistant....
In your future, probably around June-July, you should see an article about a hard drive manufacture that was able to some how, beyond everyone's expectations, cram approximatly 25% more data per platter than ever before! Infact, using my crystal ball (i.e. xcalc) it'll probably be around 200GB.
There will probably be some people asking if it will run on linux.
There will be some people who say they couldn't imagine needing that much
There will be some people stating how happy they are that they can now store 40 more GB of porn per platter than ever before.
There will probably even be a few dupes.
Good times will be had by all.
-=JML=-
You are only reading or writing to one surface at a time. There is only a single lane between the channel interface and the Head Stack Array.
Yeah, I have seen several drives recently for less than $.033/GB at Frys or after rebate. I think the sweet spot is about 250GB right now.
Keep in mind that the most GB/$ will always be in the $80-$150 range regardless of current densities. The premium product always sells for > $150. Also, the manufacturing costs keep the prices from dropping much less than $50. So if a drive only passes on half the heads you get 1/2 capacity for $50 instead of $80 for all the heads and surfaces.
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.
What, exactly, does that rambling bunch of shit have to do with this hard drive?
-----
jonathan barket
- we have a disk that has two heads instead of eight.
- we have like 20-30% higher plate density
performance math: will be like quite slower
ad campaign: we'll say it's faster, noone will notice anyway
No,the best setup is RAID 5 + 0. But that takes lots of drives. Mirrored is great but you give up 50% of your usable space. On your home system that's not so bad, but when you have 100's of disks in a large SAN that idea gets expensive quick! I've never seen a RAID 5 that couldn't be recovered IF only 1 drive went bad.
You would be surprised at how popular small disks are (73GBs are quite common) as they give excellent performance. Talk to any Oracle DBA that has a large DB and they will tell you they prefer a lot of small disks to lesser big disks (like 300GB).
Oh yeah? Let's see you play frisbee or build a suit of shiny armour out of SATA cables...
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.
Well, that was annoying. All they needed was this:
Well shit, the first group looks like those annoying emoticon things. I give up.
Seagate to create a 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive
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 money's on Seagate over Seagate in the 7th round.
1 DVD is about ~5gb.. probably not that long before 1000 movie collections start floating around.. then 10,000.. or more.
Once storage and transmission technologies work themselves out there will be a tremendous renaissaince of video content generation. Not the crappy stuff we have now, HD video. For everything. When we've filled up the media then, who knows. 3D video. pr0n will find an application.
Right now, we still can't beat that old station wagon full of removable media just yet.
..don't panic
Seagate 7200.7 200GByte drives. Qty (6). 1 Failure in 11 months of use. (2 per system, 3 systems, running 24/7).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
This site says it all: http://www.bestbuysux.org/
The problem with RAID 1 is that the write performance is only that of a single spindle, while the read performance is at best that of a two spindle stripe.
RAID 5 has read performance of an N disk stripe, and write performance that is complex to model but, with a decent battery-backed cache on the controller, approaches that of a stripe of half as many disks. However, read is horrid in degraded (one drive failed) mode.
The second poster's point about ''practicing recovery'' is strange: RAID controllers do all that for you.
These days, I keep data I care about on two disk arrays, with independent RAID controllers. Inside the array it's RAID 5 with a hot spare or three, then it's a mirror over the two arrays. RAID 1+5, but using two arrays. EMC AX100s are so cheap it's almost a no-brainer.
If I can't do that, the mid-range EMC arrays have rapid enough re-syncing of hot spare that RAID5 isn't too nerve wracking. Very large spindles might make things a little more unpleasant, because the time to spin in a hot spare starts to become significant, providing a wide window during which another failure will kill you.
ian
I recently bought 4 250GB 7200.8 drives. They are nice. They are replacing two Maxtor 250gb PATA drives. I have had two Maxtor drives fail in the last month, and another in the last year. At work Maxtor drives have been dropping like flies. I would recommend staying away from them.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
I can buy a complete 733mhz P3 with 128Mb RAM, 10Gb HDD for less than £30. All that needs to be added is a new HDD and extra RAM (bought for £2 per 64mb). Can't beat that price building new
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Last week, I bought a 250GB SATA drive for $89, after rebate. It was a Seagate too.
I had 256Meg RAM for laptops lying around (from my iBook times) and I was bold enough to try if Mac RAM would work. It did. Now I have 512Meg total. The 6Gig became to small last fall and I bought a 80Gig laptop harddisk for 117€.
So for a mere 242€, I now have a nice laptop that does everything I need. Okay, battery life is only 30 minutes, but I don't care.
I know one can get laptops for about 800€ these days, but I paid significantly less and don't need much more power. (Actually, the new harddisk really made a noticeable difference)
Still, the basic configuration of P-III 600MHz, 256Meg RAM and 6Gig harddisk would be more than enough for basic needs. Especially for someone casually surfing the internet and writing the occasional letter.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Simple math and obvious reasoning clearly shows...
;-) The point is that I wasn't claiming independent movement. I was expecting lock-step movement, so you could consider the tracks read simultaneously as part of a larger logical track. Unfortunately, I suspect Agripa knew what he was talking about, and that head alignment can only be achieved on one head at a time.
/. review the Barracuda is the quietest. You fell for it didn't you. I guess there is more to it than what's obvious.
Allow me to interrupt. Does this really shound authoritative to you? My comparison was between multiple platters and a %25 increase in density. If it was triple desnsity, I wouldn't have made the argument. I suppose that's what you meant by "obvious"?
And you might bother to realize that those three pairs of heads cannot move independantly on a modern hard drive
OK, it's now been established that neither of us know much about hard drive engineering. Anywhere else this would make us humble
Finally, would you like an example of a dual platter drive which is much quieter than this supposed gift to modern science? The Samsung Spinpoint is highly recommended for HTPCs. Funny how in the
My advice to you? Be like a hard drive. Read more. Write less.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
Did you RTFA ? I don't find it surprising that the Samsung drive doesn't win this test - as they didn't test any drives from Samsung.
While I agree it would've been interesting to see a test of the Samsung lineup in addition to the drives tested, I've yet to see any reviews that test all types and brands of a certain technology in a field as varied as hard drives. While sponors might account for a bias on some cases, the fact remains that most of these sites have a relatively small budget.
Personaly I'd rather see 4 or 5 disks tested on identical hardware, by the same people, using the same method and meassuring tools, than compare apples to oranges.
On a side note, did anyone else find it interesting that the 80GB drives are listed as using 160GB platters ?
Not in stock right now, but I recently bought a 20cm SATA data cable for 33 pence here in the UK from Ebuyer - they have other cables (longer ones usually) at, oooh, 60 pence or more. SATA cables are *everywhere* (and very cheap) now, hardly surprising considering that all new desktop drives seem to be SATA.
Oh my god, you're so not kidding.
Our business ships desktops units to liquor stores. Last year, every system we've put together uses Maxtor brand drives (one model number is 6E040L0). So far 95% of all those drives have failed. In several cases, we RMA'd the drive for a new one and that one has failed as well. This is all within one year.
Conclusion? Run away from Maxtor brand hard drives. Run as fast as you can.
Damn... short on SATA cables? For work I just built 3 computers based on Asus K8N-DL motherboards, with WD Raptors, and hotswap bays for those raptors. Each motherboard comes with enough SATA cables to put a drive on every SATA connector (thats 8). Each hotswap bay came with its own cables. For each machine, we ended up with 10 cables, and using only two of them. If things remain how they are, you're going to have a garage full of SATA cables every time you build a new PC.
Oh sure, you get the +3 Funny while I get ignored.
You can make chain armor (chain shirt, full chainmail, etc!) and, with enough brading, have a fine frisbee!
Have you people no imagination?!
bork bork bork!
cables? what cables. I am waiting for the 500Gb wifi Seagate HDD. forget ATA/SATA. say hello to the future.
Useless did you know #887: My
(unless it's stored in XML, in which case it may just be a single phone number)
...or it's an X.12 EDI stream -- you'll be lucky if that will cover the tags identifying the segment as a phone number. It makes XML look lean by comparison.
Some days I miss proprietary fixed formats...
Don't be afraid to use terms like bandwidth, throughput, seek time, cache access etc.
Single platter solutions result in reduced amount of heads. Less heads = less weight to push across the platter = higher acceleration at same force applied = lower seek times, the head moves faster, can find the place faster.
But the bottleneck point in throughput lies between the surface of the disk and the head, a single head can read just as many bytes per second, the limits are pushed higher but still this is the point that makes read slow once the seek was finished. So all heads read/write at once, a single large file gets spread over all the platters, but at narrow band of cyllinders, so it can be read whole faster, by using all the heads to read parts of it at once, and reassemble the data in the cache. Less heads = less paralell readouts, lower throughput.
I find much more future in big multi-platter drives based on the new tech, than this single-platter thing, that offers little gain and much loss at a very high price.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
if you need more storage than that? Go offline if possible storing files, or use them RAID'd/striped/spanned!
I use a Raptor as the boot drive, and then a more normal large drive for data. When it's my turn for a new PC next year, I was going to use two of the little Raptors in a RAID 0, but I was still expecting to add a data drive later.
RTFA. The drives are 7200RPM, but the platter is 14 inches in diamater. That's one hell of a linear velocity at the edge!
-Peter
Yeah, 6E040L0s, low profile drives, and OEM drives. My last one to fail was a refrubished drive that I had gotten back from RMA. It stopped spinning up. I had to drop it a few inches to get it to spin up so I could get my data off.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
Did you RTFA ? I don't find it surprising that the Samsung drive doesn't win this test - as they didn't test any drives from Samsung.
That was my point exactly. I need to learn to be more direct here on Slashdot. So they could afford 9 Hard drives, and they happened to choose a field that made that made Seagate look good. You think it's coincidence, I think it's more like a Gartner paid study.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx
much like they came with an ata133 cable, an audio cable, a floppy disk cable, and a nice assortment of screws I will probably never need.
but I didn't use them. I set up a four ata133 hd RAID0. Since the hds were independantly controlled thier continued data transfer was 114% the burst rate of a single sata150 drive according to sissandra.
'twas the nicest setup I ever had. The fear of rebuilding after a failure was too great tho and I had to dismantle the raid.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
Surely you mean $0.33/GB, not $.033/GB, right?
Otherwise, off what truck are you getting a 250 GB drive for $8.25?!
The cheapest I've seen was $0.125/GB ($20 for 160 GB after two mail-in rebates and a $20 off coupon).
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
In my last job, we mapped x.12 EDI formats into XML. Ugh!
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The people in those reviews seem to be complaining about 'Delayed Write Errors'. That is NOT an issue with the hardware, it is a software issue. I also think it is unique to Firewire, at least in my experience. I had that issue with my Maxtors which were Firewire, especially when I daisy-chained them instead of plugging each one into its own port, or unplugged a drive without 'Safely' removing it using the tray icon. I haven't had a single error with the Seagates using USB 2.0 yet and I've had them over 6 months.
I swear, there must be some hidden self-destruct in Maxtor drives.
I had two 40GB Maxtors die on me in the past year, within a month or two of eachother. One had been purchased new by me 2 years prior, the other used about 6 months prior.
Currently about 50% of my drives are Seagates, from the two in my DVR, the RAID1'd pair of 400GB's in my fileserver, and the 6 year old 6GB that's been part of a few of my computers over the years.
Seagate has definitely become my #1 preferred brand, with Western Digital running not too far behind in 2nd.
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!" -Rush
It's cheaper to use one head and one side of a 160GB platter with a flip side that's out of spec. Otherwise, have to toss the platter (or strip the magnetics and replate).