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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
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.
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.
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
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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
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
That made no sense to me. You began by saying you couldn't fill more than 1 TB but then you gone on to say you have a few TB backed up onto disks. I'm assuming the few TB consists of porn which doesn't count because you deleted it from your computer.
I remember people saying the same thing about 500MB drives, and 2GB drives and 10GB drives and 40GB drives. Today, many programs install well over 500MB of data for only themselves, and many games exceed 2GB quite easily. When Bluray or HD-DVD comes to PC, I can see 10-15GB game installs becoming common. The space will get filled, one way or another.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
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'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!
Someone tell me why this is news?
Is Seagate paying for this publicity?
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)
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.
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.
Doubtful that this will happen anytime soon, considering that many organizations still use large scale tape drives for backup (example: http://www.exabyte.com/). If tape drives are still around today, who's to say hard disks won't exist 20 years from now? What's more likely is that flash drives may become more viable for mainstream desktop computers but larger-density hard disks could be used in some other market. You'll see the drives fulfilling a different niche, perhaps.
Guess we'll all just see.
--- "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." -- Robert Heller
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, I say they new hard disks will be obsolete in just 11 years.
k .html
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.
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"
Hmm, 1024GB = 1TB.