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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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh yeah? Let's see you play frisbee or build a suit of shiny armour out of SATA cables...
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.
Hmm, 1024GB = 1TB.