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2.5" Drives On the Desktop
An anonymous reader points out an article on XYZ Computing exploring the use of a 2.5" notebook hard drive in a desktop computer. From the article: "The tradeoff for these qualities has always been limited capacities, high costs, and slow transfer rates, but a the recent progression in portable storage techology has changed the 2.5" drive greatly. We put the Seagate Momentus 5400.3 160GB SATA notebook drive in our test system and took it for a spin."
Its a good idea until you find out that the drive 224 dollars and 99 cents when the desktop competition runs about 70 bucks. The drives in laptop are the slowest component; I wish laptops could reverse rolls and use dektop drives instead. Maybe one day the power levels will drop to an acceptable level to do this.
There is a growing demand for quiet home computers, and this is going to be more commmon (especially for media center PC's). There are even people who are hoping for mobile graphics chipsets to find their way onto PCI-E cards to help with low power and silent operation. Low power systems can make a huge difference in energy conservation, and they are becoming more and more popular. Desktops with a hybrid of laptop parts are always going to beat out mainstream desktop counterparts in noise and power consumption.
The average cost for the drive under review is around $200, which isn't bad. What I think is interesting is the cost behind setting up, say, a 4 Element SRAID system with these. Could heat be a problem here?
Whatever the answer, the advance of smaller (physically) but larger (storage) has arrisen from perpendicular recording on the discs, which is itself a cool find.
ilovegeorgebush
next to an ordinary drive
In the other pictures the drive is by itself, so it could be as big as a lawnmower for all I can tell.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I don't think there are many Mac Mini owners who wouldn't jump at the chance of a slightly larger Mac Mini with a proper hard drive. Putting laptop drives in desktops is an exceptionally bad idea.
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
"Its a good idea until you find out that the drive 224 dollars and 99 cents [newegg.com] when the desktop competition runs about 70 bucks [newegg.com]. The drives in laptop are the slowest component; I wish laptops could reverse rolls and use dektop drives instead. Maybe one day the power levels will drop to an acceptable level to do this."
Many laptop manufacturers now give options for 7200 spin HDD's in laptops. I have one from Dell, it somehow runs as cool and quiet as a slower 5400
You can pack quite a few 2.5" drives in a desktop to create some neat raid setups. An example would be http://www.maxpoint.com/home/products/perph/spec_p g/es-252/index.htm
You can also find solutions that will hold several more drives. This could be usefull for small form factor setups that people (myself included) use for pvrs. Small, reliable, cool running.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Some Dell SX series desktop machines already use 2.5" drives.
So somebody tried a 2.5" drive in their desktop? What is the big deal? What did the results show? Who cares? I figure we could easly assume what the results showed. Maybe they should try to put an array into a laptop, that would be cool. "And Furthermore Susan, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that all four of them habitually smoke marijuana cigarettes"
Anyone know what type of drive is in a mac mini?
I think the future of desktop computing lies not in performance and speed, but size and heat output. This goes for about 95% of computer users; obviously, gamers want ultimate performance, but my parents (and the majority of computer users) would rather sacrifice the speed for silence.
The next generation of laptop hard disks have performance characteristics that are competitive with three generations old desktop hard disk drives. I fail to see a story. I'd be much more interested to see them compare these new 'hybrid' laptop hard drives with genuine top-of-the-line desktop drives.
And the newest hard disks aren't that loud. I just upgraded my iMac G5 with a WD Raptor (10kRPM SATA). You can definitely hear it more clearly when large files are being written or under swap conditions, but most of the time the difference in noise levels is indistinguishable -- meaning silent. And my subjective benchmarks reveal an almost 4x increase in the speed of common tasks.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
A 2.5 inch lawnmower? You do know the "2.5 inch" name for that category of hard drives refers to the physical size of the drive, right? No reference for scale is necessary.
The cost differential might be large now, but at some point, it's going to be way cheaper in the long run to make only one type of drive for end user machines(you need a different kind of drive for servers....you just do). I have seen many desktops and alot of servers use a laptop CD/DVD drive in them. Eventually, they will make a desktop with a motherboard similar in size to a notebook motherboard, but it will have PCI Express or some other new connector for adding peripherals. You can already purchase PC card sound cards. It's a logical progression. On Dell's site, they have a new XPS machine in the notebook section and it's really just a very small and very powerful desktop. I have also seen the Pentium M being used in desktops now. The age of tall towers is going to start to wane. There will always be a need for larger cases, but those cases will now hold much more in storage and other hardware.
Gorkman
You want quiet? Solid state storage is going to catch up someday soon. I'm more than willing to wait. I'm not interested in paying three times as much for a slow notebook HD with low storage capacity.
(end of post)
I ordered a 7200 RPM SATA drive for my NONexploding Dell ....I didn't see any
power hit and it is just as quiet as the 5400 rpm that it came with.
I've recently grown fond of external USB2 HDD cases.
Combining an internal 2.5" drive and external USB drives would be quite practical. You could leave the external drives off (and quiet) most of the time, hot pluging them only when you need them.
You knew it was coming!
h ead/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html
"This high capacity is made possible by perpendicular recording, a technology which records data on the hard drive perpendicularly instead of longitudinally,"
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_
I am not trying to troll here, but why?
I have found notebook harddisks run hotter, they are slower, more expensive and because they are not meant for use within a tower will require some creative mounting. If you need to mount a large amount of drive space in a MicroATX, use one 600+GB drive instead of 10x60GB.
The only conclusion they came to is that it was quieter and that there were other ways of silencing your desktop. I have a pocket 2.5" in a travel case, and it isn't very quiet. One day in the future we may see this HDD form-factor taking over the desktop market as we move towards miniturization, but IMHO the technology just doesn't seem mature enough.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
I think for the money and time wasted on that project, that you should just get a 10,000 SATA Raptor to put into a desktop. Desktop computing is all about high-end hardware compared to portable computer s (PDAs, Laptops, etc). And for a desktop having a 5400 rpm harddrive (as a new project) is pretty slow. 7200 rpm harddrives are very cheap now. Also, you're not going to find a laptop with a high Front Side Bus speed, so I don't see why there's hype on this project. That is all.
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
These guys are good.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Like a nice, compact, almost-silent, energy-efficient, but slightly-underperforming Mac Mini?
How could anyone write a whole article about 2.5" drives in desktops without even mentioning the Mac Mini?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When I worked at the "helpdesk" at my college, we put laptop HD's in a desktop machine all the time. Adaptors from the laptop bus to standard IDE are not that hard to find. I will grant that we were doing it with a dedicated PC in an effort to recover a dammaged HD. It's still nothing new. The only real advantage (if the limited space on the small HD's doesn't out-weigh it) is the ability to cram more drives in less space. Even then, heat is going to be a major issue.
I may just be getting long in the tooth, but I'm starting to get nostalgic for the old sounds of the the early computer age. Back when you could put your hand against the heavy steel chassis and listen and feel to exactly what your computer was doing.
Gone is the satisfying click-click-click feedback of the heavy tactile keyboards.
Gone is the deafening WHEEEEE-WHEEEEEE-WHEEEEEE of the dot matrix printer.
Gone is the atmospheric chuk-chuk-chuk grind of the hard disk.
Gone is the ultrasonic whistle of the screen changing resolutions.
Gone is the inquisitive thuka-thuka-thuka of a floppy disk scan on bootup.
Gone is the warm handshake WEEE-ERRR-HISS of the modem.
If the POST BEEP ever dissapears, I think the beauty and mystique of a computer coming to life will have been lost forever.
Sorry folks, I just don't see a need for a smaller hard drive when shortly there won't be a need for any hard drive whatsoever.
Cheaper, faster, more reliable, higher-capacity Flash memory is coming.
I'll wait for that particular bandwagon when it comes.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
The article does not gives as sigle lame reason.
Sad.
On the plus side, it's a lot easier to remove and securely store 2.5" drives than 3.5" drives.
On the minus side it's a lot easier to remove and pilfer 2.5" drives than 3.5" drives.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Mac minis have been using 2.5-inch drives on the desktop for quite some time now, and Sun has been using enterprise grade 2.5-inch SAS drives on many of their newer models of servers.
The desktop is dead. Long live the laptop.
I keep reading about people wanting a computer that
is quiet, energy efficient and doesn't produce 80,000
BTU of heat. Many people see the solution to the
problem as retrofitting a desktop with huge heatsinks,
remote DC power supplies, special home closets for the
computer with long KVM cables and installing laptop
hard drives in your desktops. That's just crazy talk.
Folks, bit the bullet. Pay double (versus a desktop)
for a laptop and docking station and be done with it.
I haven't had a desktop in seven years and I don't
miss it at all. It was a little rough at first with
early laptop but we have long since passed the point
where performance is limited in a laptop. My latest
laptop is an IBM Thinkpad (well, Lenovo) Z60m. With
a wide screen, 1.5GB RAM, 100-gig drive and 2gHz
Pentium M processor, it is more than fast enough
for anything 92% of all, even advanced, computer
users would want.
Docked, I am able to pretend it is a desktop, even
using it with two monitors (a requirement in my
computing book). Yet, I sip power, am quiet as a
church mouse and produce next to no heat (compared
to a desktop).
As an extra bonus, I can take my computer with me
wherever I go.
(The 8% of you who really do need a desktop need
not respond. You know who you are and why you
can't make a laptop do what you need it to do.
I'm okay with you not having a laptop.)
Matt
Yeah ... I used to do this with my Amiga 10 years ago!!
In a personal computing context, I'd suspect that there is a small part of the contents of the hard disk that are R/W quite frequently, and then there is a lot of the capacity of the disk that is taken by media files, which are read/written at different pace.
I don't know about the majority of users, but maybe it would make sense to have some faster storage for the OS and a few other apps and then a 2nd grade storage for everything else. Even the same might apply for portable PCs... one faster flash drive (or something like that) for the first 1GB, plus a normal disk for /home...
considering the price of RAM these days, I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to have more PCs set up like that, even with RAMdrives.
Apple's Macc Mini does this already so it can keep it's really small size, small.
Thanks. I'm not even all that old and I miss most of those sounds (particularly the keyboard clicks). Actually, I hadn't even noticed how much I missed them until you mentioned them...
Just for that I need to figure out Objective-C so that I can make a program that replicates those sounds on my mac mini. Which ironically does have a sound I like-- when it wakes from sleep mode it makes a satisfying click-whirr.
no mod points, so I'll just have to pretend. score +1, Nostalgic tear.
"Putting laptop drives in desktops is an exceptionally bad idea."
boy, that's pretty bad!
You don't leave much room in your vocabulary for people like Micheal Jackson & the guy who drove a rocket car into a mountain!
Personally I want to take up 2 5.25" drive bays and position as many 2.5" drives as I can fit on their side for a RAID array, at 1-1.5cm that would be 8-13 drives although you'd need to remove a few to leave room for cooling which would be supplied by a large fan at the front & back for cooling. It would make a great raid array. Of course with 8-13 drives I'd want them to be SCSI (on different controllers of course) - but damn 2.5" SCSI drives are expensive, like this baby - at ~£300 a pop you're talking £2400-£3900 excluding the conrollers... but it would be very nice... especially if you had an led above each drive telling you if there was a failure on any of the disks.
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
I was about to moderate as flamebait, because the first page of the article answers why.
Then I read the last page of the article, which basically says use a portable drive for a portable application. no-where would you use it in a actuall Desktop.
heck the mentioned use in a media center PC sucks, cause you will need many of the notebook drives to replace a single PC drive, then you'll want a raid setup to get the speed up, which ends up using more space than they save.
My first thought was, it would be much easier to mount a notebook drive in my tivo as the second drive (requires custom bracket, and cooling flow consideration), but the Tivo only has 2 IDE slots, and the biggest 7200rpm notebook ide drive I found was 60 GB. Hardly worth the effort, cheaper/easier/more convient to replace the first drive with 500Gb and still have plenty of $$$ left to pay for any extra power consumed.
What about the loud bang when you hit the case with the side of your fist so that the hard disk will spin up?
Yes, I had one of those...
I still think that the dot-matrix noise did actually deafen me.
> no, yes, maybe (tagging beta)
If you listen close, you can hear the capacitors.
Several new HPs don't include an on-board speaker. Personally I think that's a crime.
Why? Because it's hard to fit a normal sized system disk in a 3U server with 16 drive bays. There's a tiny sliver of space above the drives that can hold a laptop CD ROM, Floppy, and 2.5" Hard drive. I've built several of these as head nodes for clusters using dual 3ware SATA RAID controllers and quad AMD boards. The new Escalade cards use Infiniband wiring from the RAID cards to the SATA backplane, so there's only four cables instead of sixteen, which is much nicer than trying to fit 16 SATA cables, two IDE cables, a floppy cable and 8 power cables past the six fans that sit in the middle of the box.
Yes, yes I can picture a Beowulf cluster of those, though I actually use ROCKS.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Dell's Optiplex SX line tried to do this. They basically attempted to create a compact desktop quality machine and went with laptop hard drives. If you over look the machines constantly blowing capacitors on the motherboard, you'll see that you're spending more for drive capacity and sacrificing performance for workspace. Not a good idea on the desktop in my most humble opinion.
One day the toilets of the world will rise up... And I'm going to nuke them.
I work for an oilfield service company that has normal desktop computers strapped down inside some of our units. Sometimes the guys would leave the computers running while they drove to the next location. The lease roads are almost always in very very bad condition - its just the way things are - and those cheap 3.5" desktop drives just cannot handle the vibration and bumps. We've started to use the little 2.5" laptop hard drives because they are rated to handle a lot more Gs and vibration than their big brothers. They may be slower and not have as much capacity but we're talking about computers who are used (for the most part) data aquisition (pressures, rates, depths, etc.) and Microsoft Word/Excel - not trying to load up the next BF2 level as fast as possible. A smaller hard drive also means less data lost when it goes down.
Try this tip: Listen to an old fashioned typwriter while typing.
Of course now you don't have a 30 pound beast with a 5 inch screen. But it is the exact same concept.
Man, you really need that seminar!
...that those things are gone, or that I'm actually old enough to have heard all of them regularly.
Of course, my first two computer screens didn't whistle, either... 'cause they only had one resolution.
I can't think of any uses other than the one time I actually did this:
I had a laptop. I upgraded the hard drive. The laptop got old. When I went to sell the laptop on eBay for $50 I popped the 'new' hard drive out and put the old one back in. Then connected the 'new' 2.5" drive to my desktop so that I had a spare drive, and so I didn't have to tranfer the data over.
Other than that, I don't know...
... pursuant to some of the comments, why not just rip the mobo out of the laptop case and stick it into a desktop case. Use the laptop power supply, a desktop hard drive (cheap,higher speed), monitor, keyboard, etc. Result: a much quieter computer. Would there be any significant challenges vis-a-vis hardware? The only downside might be a lack of expansion slots but for most users this isn't such a big deal.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Can any one tell me if the output cables from power supply in desktops can be used to power these small drives... it looks like power input slot for these drives is different than normal hard-drives in desktops.
The way desktops are these days, you'd be lucky to hear them over your PSU/CPU/HD fans.
I love the power my system has, but the heat and noise the thing puts out is driving me up the wall these days. I'm starting to put a lot of consideration into either watercooling the thing or going mini-ITX.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
You're not the only one. I still remember the long, drawn-out BEEEEEEEEP BOOOOOOOP of loading programs off of cassette tapes....
... Besides the whole quiet and compact thing, 2.5" (or smaller) drives should be a relative godsend to folks who like to drive lots of smallish random IO to a collection of disks. A dense array of these (preferably with 7200/10k) would make a DBA's day I'd think.
Think of them as being "only the inner cylinders".
I still have an M-Style keyboard. I don't know what I'd do without it. I agree that the noises computers used to make were soothing. They also provided very good context clues to what was "wrong" with the computer.
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
Not a single funny on an article with 2.5" right in the title?... you all should be ashamed of yourselves...
Here's the deal, me hearty: He's going to get his "Yes" to saving the $8 a month, after which he'll be treated to the live version of the opening animation from the Jetsons...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Ohh whan that happens I always pop in my DVD copy of Real Genius and fast forward to the part where Mitch finds Lazlo's secret computer lair. The MIT scfreensaver on his UNIX box, the dot-matrix printer dotting away, the home made automated contest winner.
Always... brings... a tear.... to my eye.
Sniffle
I need some Kleenex.
That "whopping $8/month" savings would let me buy one more six-pack of Samuel Adams beer per month.
I'd say it's definitely worth it.
Operator's voice: "We're sorry, we have reached a person who is completely socially inept, or is no longer in touch with humanity. Please make a note of it.
If you'd like to post a flaming troll post, please press 1."
*ReluctantWizard presses 1 thousands of times*
Operator's voice: "We're sorry, you have reached a system where people actually care about other human beings and have not sucked up into their own arse.
Do not pass go, do not collect $200, please go directly back to your hermit cave. Have a nice day."
8x 2.5" SAS drives in 2x 5.25" bays, available now from Supermicro.
Xtore has a 2U 24x SAS JBOD here
I imagine that an array with vertical bays and a pull-out shelf type arrangement could comfortably handle about 80 2.5" SAS drives in 3U of space. Power and cooling issues abound, however.
LSI and others have 36 port expander ICs arriving in the pipe now. HP recently unveiled a few new server models that house more than a dozen drives (Proliant ML570 G4 with 18x drives.) 2.5" SAS is going to make a big impact. DBAs love spindles and 2.5" drives make lots of spindles easy.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
When I replaced the hard drive in my laptop with a bigger one, that old drive went into a firewall computer that I was building since that was the smallest sized drive I needed for that particular project. Tracking down a 2.5 to 3.5 bracket was a pain since shipping cost more than the bracket. I would not buy a brand new drive unless I'm using a case that takes laptop drives without a buying an additional bracket.
Yeah, I'll concur, that's just crazy talk. Funny how silencing my desktop involved neither. But, hey, don't let reality get in the way of a good "my laptop beats your desktop" round of crazy talk.
Whoa, whoa... not so fast... why would I look forward to paying double for something that does the same bloody job? As conspicuous consumption, or what? (Conspicuous consumption == buying expensive and visible stuff like fur coats or sports cars or whatever, just to show everyone that you can afford it.) I mean, seriously, wtf? It's not like money's tight or anything, but I can think of better uses for them than just blowing them on something whose only advantage is "but it's a laptop."
I.e., the question becomes very much reversed. It's not "but do you really need a desktop?" but rather "do you need a laptop enough to justify the price difference?"
As opposed to getting the same in a desktop computer? Sorry to rain on your parade, but a desktop with the same Pentium M processor (yes, you can get it in a desktop too) and the same components uses exactly as much power, produces exactly as much heat, and actually produces even _less_ noise. You know why? Due to being able to use larger and slower fans, have better airflow in the case, and/or being able to have heavily soundproofed cases. (And no, you don't have to take it apart to soundproof it, although thatt's easy too. A lot of cases nowadays, e.g., Antec or Arctic cooling, are already designed with silence in mind. Go figure.)
Basically it's just absurd to pretend that there's some sort of magic that makes desktops inherently hot and noisy, and laptops inherently cool and quiet. The same CPU draws exactly as much current or power in a desktop as in a laptop, and the same applies to graphics cards, chipsets, whatever. And power supplies aren't more efficient for laptops either. Just that a quarter of the dissipated power is in a separate brick doesn't really make your rig more efficient or cooler.
And you don't even have to go that expensive to get an even more silent desktop. Get an Antec fanless PSU, an energy-efficient CPU (either AMD or Intel mobile CPUs will do just fine, but AMD are cheaper and fit in a cheap normal desktop mobo), a good passively cooled motherboard (e.g., a SiS), a good passively cooled graphics card, and a good heatsink for the CPU. (It doesn't even mean something oversized. A simple K8 Silencer and a 12 dBA Papst fan worked like a charm for me) Get a good Seagate or Samsung HDD, both are very quiet. Now all that remains is a good case. There are plenty of silent ones from Asus, Antec, or Arctic cooling, or just get one with lots of holes (e.g., a mesh case) and you don't even need fans.
There you go: a system that's every bit as cool as your laptop and actually more silent. The only fan is on the CPU, and since it's an 80mm fan on a full sized copper heatsink, it can barely rotate to keep it cool. (I'll assume that the mobo does support fan speed control, but I think all do nowadays.) The hard drive is actually more silent too.
Or if you want to one-up even that, use some of the money you saved by _not_ getting a laptop, and get one of the new 32 GB Flash "HDDs" fro
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well for one thing, 98.7% of all desktop users could give a crap about the slower transfer speeds in a 2.5" drive.
Second, 98.7% of all desktop users are for a smaller and quieter system sitting on their desktop.
(example: my PC with an Antec Sonata "super quiet" case sits next to my mac mini on my desktop, and it sounds like a 747 in comparison)
Unless you are putting it in a drive array on your server, who gives a rats a-hole?
Why is this even an issue?
Flame On.
I agree - most laptop disks are awful, and an incredible brake on otherwise speedy systems. I'm always amazed to see a 2GHz Core Duo laptop shipped with a 5400RPM (sometimes even 4200RPM) disk.
Mine was, for example. I spent the extra 7% to add an after-market 72kRPM SATA disk (80gb vs 120GB, but hey, the 120GB is still useful in an external enclosure) and the laptop's performance about doubled for many tasks. It's worth every cent. The fact that Apple offer 72kRPM disks in their laptops is one of the biggest reaons, if not the only reason, why they get such excellent benchmark scores, and it astounds me that few other manufacturers are doing it.
I haven't seen any lately with a built-in screen. Or an 8" floppy drive.
Man, you really need that seminar!
I've been using ArcoIDE's hardware RAID (real hardware RAID! no software drivers!) for years, and my latest SFF PC machine has two 2.5" drives sitting in a 3.5" bay on top of their MicroRAID controller. Small, quiet, reliable ... this is a no brainer! The only drawback is that current affordable 2.5" drives run around 80-100 GB, so you can't do the 250 GB monster video setups. Personally 80 GB is plenty for me.
One simple rule for its versus it's
The clack lives on for specialty keyboard users: see the Matias Tactile Pro and the Unicomp Customizer.
The motor would speed up on the inner tracks, slow down on the outer tracks, and went through three levels of speed in between. The motor was nice and loud, so there was in effect a 5-note musical scale. There were rumors of people composing music for the floppy drives.
This solution, like most RAID solutions, requires software drivers to integrate with the OS. I prefer pure hardware RAID as discussed here.
One simple rule for its versus it's
jobs' new slogan should be-
buy yourself an apple laptop and come home to a real fire!
You don't even need to do that. Seriously. (Well, unless you enjoy paying the premium for the laptop, and then modding the desktop case, etc, anyway.)
There are desktop motherboards that take a Pentium M CPU, and have the same chipset as a laptop motherboard anyway. Plus, they have AGP or PCI-E ports in case you want to put in a more powerful graphics card, have a standard ATX power connector, etc. Or you can get one of AMD's mobile CPUs, which plug into any el-cheapo desktop motherboard just fine. And AMD mainboards don't include only ultra-hot NForce 4 cheapsets, but also SiS chipsets that run cool with a tiny fanless heatsink.
Couple it with a good silent PSU with a temperature-controlled 120mm fan, and there you go, you have a silent computer. Or if you have a mesh case (or no kids or pets, so you can just leave the case open) and don't have much more heat-producing stuff in that case, get something like an Antec Phantom PSU and not even have that noise.
Heck, you may not even have to fork the cash over for a notebook CPU, if you don't need _extreme_ silence. I used to have a brand new (and back then top-of-the-line) A64 3200+ and it could be cooled just fine by a simple K8 Silencer heatsink and a 12 dBA 80mm Papst fan. Nowadays I run a 4000+ with the same heatsink. Sure, it's all copper and with _lots_ of fins, but, you know, it's just a traditional normal sized heatsink. No fancy heatpipes, no water cooling, no giant radiators with 120mm fans, no special retention kit, no nothing. Just push it on the CPU, turn the lever, and that's it.
And since virtually all K8 mainboards support fan speed control and Cool'n'Quiet speed-trottling when you're just browsing the web, that fan almost always ran slower than even that low speed and noise level. The Asus monitor program that came with the new mobo used to make a fuss all the time for thinking that the CPU fan had stopped, so I had to disable that warning.
Or going in the other direction, you may want to have a look at Zalman's TNN (Totally No Noise) cases. They come with a fanless PSU and heatpipes to the case itself for both the CPU and the GPU. They do put a maximum temperature dissipation limit on both, but it still allow for some relatively high-end CPUs and a pretty good mid-range graphics card. Now the cases themselves _are_ expensive, but, still, it won't cost more than a laptop with the same specs and it'll actually be even more quiet.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
To give an historical perspective on this, the Amiga 1200 had room for only a 2.5" drive inside its wedgie keyboard/case. Hacks to put in a 3.5" drive (bumping out the internal floppy drive) were quite common. You had the choice of losing the ability to boot from floppy without cracking open the case, or hacking the motherboard (with an exacto-knife and jumper wires, if I remember correctly) to boot from an external floppy.
Now, either Seagate shipped me an unofficial experimental laptop disk with built-in nuclear reactor to power the spindle motor, or I screwed up. I see no giant smoking hole where the platter left for orbit when I turned my laptop, so I figure I won't be selling this off to the competition anytime soon.
Good catch. Too used to 10k RPM disks.
*sigh*
/me raises a glass of Crystal Pepsi to the good 'ol days.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
spot on dude
why mod him down you c***s?????
Given how vocal the apple minority are, there has to be more to this kind of thing than meets the eye; indeed there is a definate psychological pay-off for certain groups - they like to isolate themselves and make a real mission out of their choices. In what seems like a heartless world they need something to believe in, to fight for, and if they lose sight of the fact that at the core of their cause is a bunch of overpriced plastic tat then thats exactly what it takes, thats why they are apple fans.
On the simplest level, its seems hard for you apple fanbots to understand why other people wouldn't want to use their computers as a lifestyle-choice, or indeed realise that this might appear a bit tacky or mindless (in a sad consumerist way.)
The point is that you should keep your f****** self-esteem issues to yourselves, as the parent states.
They say that 2.5" drives have caught up to 3.5" drives. Their proof: Seagate 5400.3 SATA 150 drive.
Capacity: 160GB
Cache: 8MB
Speed: 5400 RPM
Newegg Price: $224.99
Also on Newegg: WD5000KS 3.5" SATA 3.0GB/s drive
Capacity: 500GB
Cache: 16MB
Speed: 7200 RPM
Newegg Price: $219.99
Where, exactly, are the 2.5" drives catching up?
Price: no
Capacity: no
Performance: no
Failure rate: no
Crystal Pepsi tasted like carbonated hot dog water...
In a laptop / media center / "thinner client" for business, why hasnt anyone come up with a 10-20 gig drive that is insanely fast?
I dont need 80-400 gigs on any of those, that is what servers are for.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
But it still makes me nostalgic...
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
They spent all this time putting together the test rig, test these two not-really-comparable drives side-by-side, and then come to the "duh" conclusion. They framed the matchup as a way to show that a laptop drive in a desktop would be worthwhile in terms of efficiency and noise.
And yet they didn't bother to test the power consumption or the emitted noise! The closest they came to it was to compare the mfg's specs for power consumption and emitted noise. But that was buried in the text at the bottom of page 3, and one must always take those numbers with a grain of salt. They compared specs of the 2.5" drive against a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, which was not a drive they did any of their subsequent performance testing on.
Sloppy. I'd say they missed their own point.
Sure laptop drives have gotten faster, but desktop drives have also. the next wave on the internet will require regular users to have space for HD content, and chances are, desktop drive will continue to hold their ~5x lead in storage per drive. That along with the increased reliability, speed, etc has me sold.
I fear the Y2038 bug
Sometime in the late 90's I pulled a 2.5 inch drive out of a desktop computer. I believe it was a CTX brand (known more for their monitors). The drive was connected to the IDE cable using a notebook-to-IDE adapter. I replaced the drive with a 5.25" HDD and kept the IDE adapter for using a desktop computer to recover data off of laptop drives. It has been very useful.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd rather go the other way. When everyone else had 6gb top there was a 12gig Quantum Bigfoot 5.25". It wasn't the biggest but who the hell cares.
That would apply even more today. Most of our large disk uses are video and audio. There's a limit to how fast those need to be read and by my calcuations a bigfoot would be over a tb by now. I'd love that. 2 of my 3 3.5" drives are in 5.25" bays anyway.
I love the power my system has, but the heat and noise the thing puts out is driving me up the wall these days. I'm starting to put a lot of consideration into either watercooling the thing or going mini-ITX.
A good case can fix a bit of that.
Using 80mm case fans? Switch to a case that uses 120mm fans (same airflow, fewer RPMs, less noise). Using old noisy ball-bearing drives? Switch to the newer fluid ones (FDBs). Noisy CPU fan? Go shopping for a new quieter one. Using half a dozen small drives? Switch to a pair of large ones.
Definitely can be a lengthy process.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I have one from Dell, it somehow runs as cool and quiet as a slower 5400
And the upgrade cost from Dell is greater than the cost of buying the same drive new from NewEgg AND having Dell ship the original. Unfortunately, to then simply unscrew a cover, pop out a drive, pop in another and reinstall the OS completely invalidates your warranty which is that much more essential on laptops.
5400 RPM drives are a curse on laptops. Unfortunately, Dell knows it has the customers who know better over a barrel and thus gouges happily for the upgrade to reasonable performance.
Not likely. Provided it's not some commercial-grade monstrosity. I spent a summer doing employee dosimeter serveys for a company to determine which job descriptions should be included in yearly hearing tests required by OSHA. In the testing process, I left one on top of one of the dot matrix printers within an inch of the write head. After an 8 hour shift, the average exposure was still 10 dBa below OSHA's maximum allowable. This was no light service either. The printer ran essentially all day (monthly reporting) and the machine consumed 3-4 reams of papper, iirc.
So, unless you were using them as headphones, you are unlikely to have suffered any lasting damage.
For the record, the highest values recorded during the survey was when one employee forgot to take off the device when he left for lunch. He drove one of those really loud boom-boom minitrucks that pervaded the streets back in the early 90's.
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I don't know what the article/article summary was referring to, but I'm pretty sure this isn't even a SATA drive. At the very least the links they provide to, say, NewEgg for buying one aren't SATA. I'm pretty sure the SATA version of these 160GB perpendicular drives isn't actually available yet.
Reminds me of the first hard drive I ever used, on a Z-80 system. It was about the size of two PC's laying down, side-by-side. You flipped the big switch, and heard, rrr, rrrrr, rrrrrrr, rrrrrrr, as it ever-so-slowly started spinning up it's huge platters. Took a good few minutes to come up to speed. And I think it's capacity was around 5 Megabytes.
If I don't transfer 5 megabytes in a fraction of a second now, there's something wrong with the configuration of my system! Even my first PC-based hard drive was 20mb; incredible to note that 30-50mb per *second* are standard transfer rates.
Even with all the nostalgia, I use my pc's so much for personal and media purposes, that silence would definitely be a step in the right direction, though.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I have one ... I don't know what's wrong with it because I can't figure out what it's saying.
It depends on what you are using the computer for. I use one of my desktops for:
(a) DHCP/ICS/etc... (doesn't need hdd)
(b) to run Windows programs on (is slow because of Remote Desktop and the slow processor, so slow hdd isn't noticed)
(c) print server (doesn't need hdd)
(d) permanent storage/ backup (is not frequently used, so being a little slow is ok)
(e) CGIproxy (low hdd usage)
(f) Streaming Audio/Video (has set, continous hdd usage that any hdd can handle)
The advantages of having a 2.5" hdd can be quite distinct, for having virtually no speed difference:
(a) very low noise (virtually inaudible)
(b) low power consumption ( ~2.5 watts ) so it costs less to run
(c) size difference
assures me that they are still working. Buy cheap, buy often. Keep 'em fresh and growing each generation.
to err is human, to forgive is divine, to forget is... umm...
Does the Tatias Tactile Pro use buckling spring technology? Right now my wife is away so I can enjoy the old BS keyboard but she gets rather annoyed at it quickly. I've noticed that some older keyboards (mainly in wyse terminals which I love) have a similar feel but don't seem to use buckling springs. They make a sound, but not a sharp clack.
"Why? Flash goes down in price per capacity linearly while HDD's go down in price per capacity nearly exponentially."
l
m l
Wrong!
This page charts the annual improvement of price per capacity of hard disks (amongst other things): http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.htm
This page does the same thing for flash: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashmemory.ht
Here is a key quote: "The improvement rate for flash for the last three years comes in at 109% a year whereas for hard disks over the same period the figure is only 35%."
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
I think that statement is full of crap.
Its about time!
Why not create bigger capacity storage flash drives, which give less problems and noiseless?
In meanwhile, why not better desktop pc's ?
miniaturize a bit..and keep it silent, please!
Thats the way to the future, if you dare!
http://www.codingheaven.net/
Gone is the deafening WHEEEEE-WHEEEEEE-WHEEEEEE of the dot matrix printer.
Enh. It paled in comparison to the CLACK-CLACK-CLACK of teletypes and daisy-wheel printers (yes, I had one).
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
I have to agree with you on half of those, but I'm also glad as hell the other half are gone.
In moderation, only. The attraction wears off pretty quickly. Try listening to a room-full of typists for 8 hours a day (two loud clicks per every single button-press) and you'll appreciate quiet keyboards.
It was a nice sound in the old, slow days. Shortly before the jump to laser printers, though, they were getting very fast, and turning into just an irritating, constant rattle.
I really miss MFM hard drives. Their nice, soft percolating sound when seeking was really unique. Though I'm not as euphoric as I was during the '90s, when 5400RPM drives, with their ear-piercing high-pitched whine, could drive anyone mad.
I still have one around. I've considered powering it up just once more, and recording about an hour of audio of it. Maybe some would be interested in a program which makes their GHz computer sound like a 286.
And on that note, let me add my own, soon-to-be obsolete sound... The static CRUNCH of any CRT, when the whole screen quickly changes from dark (black) to bright (white). And the static crispy sparkling sound when it goes the other way (or is turned off).
Can't say I miss that one at all. Pretty much an uneven metronome sound (sequential reads/writes), intermingled with a slowed-down European ambulance siren (seeking).
Yes, back when they had a real speaker on the modem. By the 33.6/56k era, they were using cheap, tiny, tin tweaters on everything, which made it the most painfully shrill, ear-piercing squawk.
See: modems. When it was a real 2" speaker, it was a plesant sound. Now with crappy $1 tweaters, I'd rather not hear it at all.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Everything else being equal, it is easier to carry the drive from your machine to your safe and easier to find space for it in your lockable desk drawer.
Or your briefcase or pocket, if you are looking to steal.
You are correct, the actual removal is a wash. You could even argue the big drives are easier to people without good manual dexterity and close-up vision.
I should have clarified.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
; )
I only mod funny =D
Laptops have a problem with surface area: they don't have enough to dissipate a heck of a lot of heat, but adding more means adding more [empty] volume, which reduces the number of laps they can fit on top of.
But a desktop is not optimized for volume/mass. using low-power components would definately allow cooler, quieter, and even slightly smaller designs.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
... as a power of 10.
So, something that is 10 timos slower is accurately described as one order of magnitude slower (10^1).
If something was 2 orders of magnitude slower we would be talking at least 100 tomes slower, or 10 at the power of 2, and so on.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.