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Seagate To Stop Making 7200rpm Laptop HDDs

jones_supa writes "'We are going stop building our notebook 7200rpm hard disk drives at the end of 2013,' said David Burks, director of marketing and product management at Seagate Technology, during a conversation with X-bit labs. The mainstream market demand is expected shift to different products, such as hybrid drives. Users who need maximum performance and care about battery life have been choosing notebooks with SSDs for years now, whereas those who required capacity and moderate price do not really care about actual performance. With the introduction of third-generation solid-state hybrid drives later this year, Seagate will position them for performance- and capacity-demanding end-users. The company will also continue to offer 5400rpm HDDs for value notebooks."

261 comments

  1. Faster notebook drives. by girlintraining · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They're not just for notebooks. Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV, etc. If all the manufacturers bail out, we'll have to build larger devices like this to fill that niche. Unless, of course, SSDs suddenly drop in price... which they should have done by now, but hey... p-p-profit!

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    1. Re:Faster notebook drives. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 0

      Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV, etc.

      DVRs do not need 7200 RPM drives. 5400 RPM is plenty.

    2. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      even then, SSDs aren't great for things that record a lot like a small form factor security system DVR.

    3. Re:Faster notebook drives. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I suspect that that's why they are killing the faster ones(which are slightly noisier and run slightly hotter). The market for HDDs isn't so much drying up; but strategies other than 'make the hard drive rotate faster' for making storage perform better have been getting cheaper and better pretty aggressively.

      With modern areal densities and codecs, if your bandwidth requirements are routinely saturating a 5400rpm drive, you probably have something a bit more serious than a DVR in mind. If occasional bursts are giving you trouble, you can put in a lot of RAM cache for what it would cost to switch to an SSD of equivalent size, and a mere 7200 probably wouldn't have saved you.

    4. Re:Faster notebook drives. by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      > Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV

      Nonsense. TV, especially HD TV is big, VERY BIG. This is especially true for terrestrial broadcast and cable that's still using outdated codecs like MPEG2.

      If you are talking about "things like Tivos", you need all of the space you can get. The "footprint" issue is not a problem. Neither is noise as such devices have thrived with large desktop style hard drives.

      A Tivo can use all the space it can get. Laptop drives don't provide any value and actually limit functionality while being more expensive. They're a case of "pay more to get less".

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    5. Re:Faster notebook drives. by girlintraining · · Score: 1, Informative

      DVRs do not need 7200 RPM drives. 5400 RPM is plenty.

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

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    6. Re:Faster notebook drives. by squiggleslash · · Score: 4, Informative

      I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.

      RPM is about access times, not about data rate. Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion. For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.

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    7. Re:Faster notebook drives. by jamesh · · Score: 2

      DVRs do not need 7200 RPM drives. 5400 RPM is plenty.

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

      I have a >5 year old PC with 2 USB DVB tuners in it running mythtv that can record 4 shows and have 4 of us watching different previously recorded shows over 802.11bgn wireless without breaking a sweat. It has a 7200RPM drive in it, obviously, but a 5400RPM drive isn't that much slower, and the PC has 2GB memory in it so there is plenty of memory for buffering anyway.

      If i want to fast forward 30 seconds to skip ads, or try and do ad detection or transcoding then it starts to hurt as the CPU just isn't up to it, but IO bandwidth really isn't a problem

    8. Re:Faster notebook drives. by bored · · Score: 4, Informative

      The sequential throughput rates for 5400 RPM hard drives are not noticeably different from 7200 rpm hard drives. At least not as much as a naive assumption of the ratio between rotational rates and a fixed areal density would make you believe (and the density isn't fixed). The big performance advantage of faster spinning harddrives is due to the reductions in rotational latency. For problems where large buffers can be sequentially filled or written between seeks (aka video) you won't notice a difference. At 20MB/sec just about any drive on the market can sustain 4+ streams if the buffers are > than a few MB. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but the increases in density have made modern 5400 RPM drives considerably faster than the 7200 or 10k drives from years past (for problems not related to seeking).

    9. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't understand what you're talking about, but I suspect you didn't understand what the GP was talking about and just continued on that mistaken tangent.

    10. Re:Faster notebook drives. by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      I'd bet that they have gotten much faster as a result of the ever increasing density of the platters as well. With the higher density drives putting bits past the heads twice as fast every time the density doubles, the additional ~40% increase in RPM is likely becoming less important, and for most people it's a better investment increasing the capacity.

    11. Re:Faster notebook drives. by cgenman · · Score: 1

      3.5" and 2.5" drives are very similar once you get to the scale of a TV. And if you need performance, full-sized 3.5" drives go up 10 - 15k RPM. The difference between 7.2k and 5.4k isn't that great. And, of course, 7200 RPM laptop drives are absolutely not quiet, compared to other drives.

    12. Re:Faster notebook drives. by citizenr · · Score: 1

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later

      what have you been smoking? why would you reencode perfectly fine (well, I LOL every time I am reminded that US went with mpeg2 instead of mpeg4 like the rest of civilized world) mpeg2 stream?

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    13. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Umm SSD prices have been drastically dropping over the past few years.

    14. Re:Faster notebook drives. by girlintraining · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.

      A wise decision.

      RPM is about access times, not about data rate.

      And now you've gone retarded. Faster RPMs reduce latency, but because the sectors are also moving past the heads faster, it increases bandwidth as well. Sorry you flunked physics, man.

      Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion.

      Thanks for that, captain obvious. We didn't know.

      For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.

      I can see a very simple reason. It was the reason in my original post: It's called the They Stopped Making Them theory. It goes a little like this: You can't find them anymore, and because they're complex electromechanical devices, we can't just bang rocks together and have a 7200 RPM drive with a SATA connector plop down next to the fire.

      Yes, I can do sarcasm too. Unlike you, however, I also realized that when you're writing something to disk at 20mbit/s times however many channels you want to watch, if you also want to re-encode those so you don't, say, run out of HDD space after watching a few weeks of your favorite shows, you'll need to be reading that data back off again, then doing all your "turing" operations on it, since as you so eloquently put it, your HDD isn't turing complete, and then writing it back to disk.

      The PVR needs to not just write out 1 or more streams, but it also needs to be able to read it out (so you can watch stuff! Amazing!)... and while this is happening, also be able to do an encode/decode, which represents another pair of I/O streams.

      Very quickly, you find that you're running out of bandwidth, and that your freshly minted computer science degree has not prepared you for this elementary realworld example. You'll then promptly core dump, catch fire, and no longer be a source of future snark for thousands of slashdotters who wasted precious minutes of their life reading your comment.

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    15. Re:Faster notebook drives. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Areal density improvements really accentuate the characteristics that disks have always had(in addition to being cheap and huge):

      As you say, the density increases mean that the speed of the head in bits/second has been growing by leaps and bounds, even as actual platter speeds haven't budged in years. And, if you throw a lovely, contiguous, read or write at an HDD, you'll see results to match. Even a lousy little consumer disk can be pretty damn fast.

      Under a random I/O workload, everything collapses into seek hell, and suddenly it mostly comes down to how fast you can get the head into position(which really hasn't improved all that much and has always been a sad story).

    16. Re:Faster notebook drives. by SpiceWare · · Score: 2

      That's one of the benefits of switching to digital later than the US did - the specs for ATSC were published in 1995, a few years before the late 1998 release of MPEG4.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4

      ATSC was updated in 2008 to support H.264.
      http://www.engadget.com/2008/09/22/atsc-2-0-includes-support-for-h-264/

      I've recently cut the cord and implemented a Mac mini + a couple of HD HomeRun tuners and discovered that there are H.264 broadcasts in Houston. However, they're an encrypted as it's for a pay service with a handful of channels targeting the Hispanic community.
      https://www.airbox.com

    17. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but you're wrong. Consumer video recorders do not require a lot of bandwidth. Nor do they require large buffers. And he is right, 7200rpm laptops don't offer much more bandwidth than 5400 anyway.

    18. Re:Faster notebook drives. by pipatron · · Score: 2

      I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete

      This is yet another reason why the PC platform must die, and the Commodore 64 i still the only viable option for serious computing. It may not be the fastest computer available today, but at least its storage medium is turing complete (and actually slightly faster than the computer itself).

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    19. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Just saying... You forgot the bits where computers have RAM. A half hour show normally encodes down to 250-300 megs (or they did years ago last I checked). Also years ago my computer had 2 gigs of ram. Now granted it's been about 5 to 7 years since I had a htpc of my own, but when I was actually doing this on a 5400 rpm drive, the drive speed was not the limiting factor by a long shot.

    20. Re:Faster notebook drives. by TubeSteak · · Score: 1

      I don't know why you would use budget drives when there are drives designed for multi-stream recording and playback.

      http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=150
      Optimized for smooth, .
      (Western Digital also makes a cheaper version that does 5 streams)

      Their specs claim between 5400 and 7200 rpm, but my understanding is that it's much more 5400 than 7200,
      which is how they get less power usage and lower noise levels than 7200 rpm drives.

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    21. Re:Faster notebook drives. by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      It makes me wonder if it would be worth it to have a filesystem that was designed around the huge sizes of HDD's available today that would make an effort to write files as continuous blocks of data, and perhaps allow you to somehow define the approximate size of the file to automatically leave space around and even in the middle of it to be able to modify it and still minimize fragmentation. Something static like a PDF or image file could be set to not need this extra space, but if you were working on a large document you could do a "save as" or the first save the program could give you the option of defining how much space to set aside for the file, and create bins to store your documents in that would help to keep them sequential so you just skip a few deleted tracks instead of having to reposition the heads. That would help speeding up future reads and writes, and make it much easier to figure out if a particular file could go into any used space that is ready to be overwritten by knowing if what you are saving is likely to ever need more space than where you are storing it. Perhaps your image and document directories could be created in 200 MByte chunks to help speed up accessing the directories while previewing documents or flipping through your pictures as well.

      I had some audio and video programs I used to use on my older PC's that would allow you to tell the program in advance how long of a recording you were going to make so that they could prepare a space to be able to write them as continuous files. On my older PC's it made the a huge difference in the quality of recording I was able to make without the occasional stutter, and the responsiveness of the system especially while recording video. Once the drive became close to full, it might take the program 5 - 10 minutes to prepare the disk buffer, but it would not have ever had the horsepower to do it while recording.

      I remember the last XP computer I had at work. The hibernation and pagefile became very badly fragmented, and by turning them off, deleting them, defragmenting the hard drive, and forcing them to be a certain size when I recreated them, the computer was much more responsive when it started having to swap, and it cut the time to hibernation down from 3 - 4 minutes down to 20 - 30 seconds.

      Perhaps it's something the drive firmware could also do, but I think a little guidance from a competent user and some smarter software could help speed up file access times through the OS as well.

    22. Re:Faster notebook drives. by elashish14 · · Score: 3

      That is exactly how the ext2 filesystem works, my friend. Here is a good reference (from 2006) that explains the exact same idea: http://geekblog.oneandoneis2.org/index.php/2006/08/17/why_doesn_t_linux_need_defragmenting. The more advanced behaviour you suggest, I imagine would have to be taken care of at the application level.

      Of course, as soon as any hard disk reaches capacity, it becomes fragmented no matter what.

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    23. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So how about a hybrid 5400RPM drive with 32GB of NAND? Seagate isn't announcing that they've stopped shipping as of today; they are announcing that the 7200 product line in general will be discontinued. To the extent that they're selling drives to customers who need the benefits of 7200, you can bet that they will find a substitute product to offer that meets the same requirements, just not at 7200RPM.

    24. Re:Faster notebook drives. by KalvinB · · Score: 2

      The thing is, the "slower" drives are plenty fast enough for Tivos and whatnot. The drive is not the limiting factor on streaming recorded HD content. It's the CPU that determines whether your digital recorder/player can do full 1080.

      http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/how-higher-rpm-hard-drives-rip-you-off/322

      The other issue is that faster RPMs doesn't necessarily mean better performance for your application. When dealing with large media files, it's pretty irrelevant since you're doing sequential IO the vast majority of the time.

    25. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      "The market for HDDs isn't so much drying up; but strategies other than 'make the hard drive rotate faster' for making storage perform better have been getting cheaper and better pretty aggressively."

      That is so. But unless you want to build huge buffers into your system (and in some circumstances even when you do), latency is still going to be a problem.

      It's a spinning disk. It takes time for data to spin under the head. You aren't going to change that, and faster drives are better.

      To me, this looks like a real bonehead move on the part of Seagate. Unless they know something I don't. Which is quite possible.

    26. Re:Faster notebook drives. by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

      No DVR re-encodes it. They all encode it in real time. If it's digital already (say, digital cable, satellite, ATSC), guess what? Most don't even do a thing - they record the bitstream to disk directly and play it back as-is. If it's analog, a pair of SD class encoders is nothing (analog TV is rarely HD - the only analog signals for HD I've seen are HD boxes outputting component video. In which case it's encoded by the capture box).

      A 5400 RPM drive is more than sufficient for that purpose. Hell, most DVRs also have specialized filesystems that optimize for video - knowing that your video is huge long chunks, they use 1MB+ chunk sizes so fragmentation is a non-issue and can hold a decent amount of video so you're not seeking often at all.

    27. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      RPM is about access times, not about data rate. Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion

      Ugh. RPM is also about data rate. Even more than access times as head moves during linear reads and writes are limited. If you can't believe it imagine the tracks on the spinning platter as a highway. Faster speed = more cars per second. The head would be you on a bridge ove the highway. To complete the analogy someone with a portal gun placed a portal on both ends of the highway.

    28. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The sequential throughput rates for 5400 RPM hard drives are not noticeably different from 7200 rpm hard drives. At least not as much as a naive assumption of the ratio between rotational rates and a fixed areal density would make you believe (and the density isn't fixed). The big performance advantage of faster spinning harddrives is due to the reductions in rotational latency. For problems where large buffers can be sequentially filled or written between seeks (aka video) you won't notice a difference. At 20MB/sec just about any drive on the market can sustain 4+ streams if the buffers are > than a few MB. This wasn't true 10 years ago, but the increases in density have made modern 5400 RPM drives considerably faster than the 7200 or 10k drives from years past (for problems not related to seeking).

      It is noticable and the data rate increase is the ratio between the rotational rates for platters of the same density. If you need the increased throughput is another matter. You wont need it at home, but some science projects accumulate data fast and need all the write speed they can get for a large amount of data and big 10k drives are still better than a lbunch of small(capacity) SSDs.

    29. Re:Faster notebook drives. by im_thatoneguy · · Score: 2

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

      20Mbps is 2MB per second.

      1 hour of HD video is going to be about 7GB at that bitrate. If you put a minimum amount of RAM into a PVR... like 3GB it can buffer at least 3-4 minutes of uncompressed HD video. If you assume 3 streams that's a minute long buffer for the encoder, which is more than enough for a hardware H264 encoder which can handle 2 streams simultaneously. You only really need about 1-2 seconds of buffer. 2GB for 2 streams of video would be serious overkill. You could hold most of a TV program in RAM for playback and not touch the HDD while encoding 2 streams without breaking a sweat. And since it's a sequential write a 5400rpm HDD could handle 20MBs easy. That's 10 20mbps HDTV streams.

      HDDs are not going to be a problem for a PVR.

    30. Re:Faster notebook drives. by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      Thank You, I was (obviously) not aware that's what was done on EXT2. Is that also done with any of the other Linux filesystems?

      It seems logical that leaving the extra space between files would help reduce fragmentation as the disk becomes full as well, because the more room you leave between files, the better chance you have of being able to fit a new file somewhere in one piece. You could write it near the end of the extra space to allow both files to still be modified without having to break the files into pieces. Even having to Dollie up a file into parts to fill space could be written on sequential tracks so the heads don't have to seek to read the file, just skip past the first file as it spins by.

    31. Re:Faster notebook drives. by nabsltd · · Score: 1

      Quiet and small form factor conventional drives have a place in things like Tivos and personal recording devices for TV

      Nonsense. TV, especially HD TV is big, VERY BIG.

      The main sub-channel on my local OTA HDTV channels averages about 6GB/hour. This means you can fit about 300 hours of HDTV on a 2TB drive. DVRs are not intended to be used as an archive or library of everything you ever want to watch, so 300 hours is way more than enough.

      This is why no commercial PVR comes with larger than a 2TB hard drive. You can get 2TB 2.5" drives that are much quieter than equivalent 3.5" drives. They won't fit in a laptop, but they will fit in any PVR. Another advantage for laptop drives is that a PVR could be designed to hold 2-4 drives while still being a reasonable size, and allow expansion in addition to some kind of data protection. And, it would still be very quiet.

    32. Re:Faster notebook drives. by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      which they should have done by now, but hey... p-p-profit!

      Its hillarious to see people try to demonize the concept of "its my product, and I will offer it at whatever price people will pay".

      People are currently willing to pay 0.50/GB for SSDs. If thats too high, how do you suggest we find the right price short of the whole supply / demand concept?

    33. Re:Faster notebook drives. by JK_the_Slacker · · Score: 1

      Footprint would be a huge issue in my case, and I don't think it's all that special. Last I checked, you can get a terabyte 2.5 inch 'conventional' notebook drive for under a hundred dollars. That should be plenty of space for a DVR - the point of which is to catch up on missed episodes, not long-term storage of mass quantities of video. Having limited physical space shouldn't constrain me to have limited digital space too! (Hurray apartment dwelling.)

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    34. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.

      RPM is about access times, not about data rate. Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion. For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.

      Are you high? WTF does Turing complete have to do with a hard drive or a communication protocol?

    35. Re:Faster notebook drives. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      Rotational speed isn't the only factor determining seek time. The head has to move over the disk as well, and it isn't any faster in a 7200 RPM drive. When looking at overall performance in a system having a 7200 RPM drive doesn't make that much difference, especially compared to the vast improvement seen from SSDs and hybrid drives.

      As Seagate point out it just isn't worth it any more.

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    36. Re:Faster notebook drives. by jbolden · · Score: 1

      . Unless, of course, SSDs suddenly drop in price... which they should have done by now, but hey... p-p-profit!

      Where does all this constant paranoia on /. come from? SSDs have dropped in price year after year after year. Flash memory costs aren't 0. SSDs are tracking the costs of the parts in them, not shockingly.

    37. Re:Faster notebook drives. by gnasher719 · · Score: 1

      An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.

      I think your maths is way off. Any old 5400 rpm drive will easily read/write 30 MB/sec or 240 Mb/sec on the innermost and slowest tracks. That's recording two 20 MBit/second channels, playing back one, and encoding another one, and then having 2/3rds of capacity unused. And do you actually have a PVR that encodes stuff?

    38. Re:Faster notebook drives. by damnbunni · · Score: 1

      It really depends on your use case. Some things are more irritated by seek than others.

      I switched from a 5400 rpm 3.5" drive to a 10k RPM 2.5" drive in my main PC a while back, strictly because one game was stuttering on texture load. (Lord of the Rings Online. It stores all its textures in one massive file.)

      I figure the smaller platter is more important than the spindle speed for seek time in my case, but the game ran a heck of a lot smoother after I swapped drives.

      (For what it's worth, I didn't go SSD because I didn't feel like manually moving my games around to keep them on a small drive, and at the time 500+ gig SSDs were still hugely expensive.)

      So if you're looking for access speed, going from a 7200 RPM 3.5" drive to a 7200 RPM 2.5" laptop drive might actually make some sense.

    39. Re:Faster notebook drives. by elashish14 · · Score: 1

      Thank You, I was (obviously) not aware that's what was done on EXT2. Is that also done with any of the other Linux filesystems?

      I believe so. In fact, the article doesn't explicitly state that's what ext2 does specifically, and I'm not very intimate with the file system myself to know for sure, but I'm pretty sure that all reasonably developed Linux filesystems would do the same. I'd recommend ext2 regardless, as it seems to have the most developer mindshare and install base. Maybe you could ask more in a UNIX IRC channel or forum to learn more about what specific filesystems do.

      If you're interested, there's also a number of solutions for reading ext2 from Windows. Here are two system modules that you can install for read/write access:
      http://www.ext2fsd.com/?page_id=2
      http://www.fs-driver.org/ - I've used this one briefly and it worked well.

      Additionally, there are userspace applications for reading it, but they are a bit slower as they operate in userspace.

      Hope this helps you

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    40. Re:Faster notebook drives. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later

      They just record the original encoded stream?

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    41. Re:Faster notebook drives. by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      They don't just record the original stream? Oy...

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    42. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      RPM is about access times, not about data rate.

      You're wrong. RPM is indeed one of the factors! (source: here)

    43. Re:Faster notebook drives. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      All the exts are good about this, but all of them still fragment, and so does xfs. So, there are defragmenters for all of them. Performance impact is usually not very much even when they are relatively fragmented, but then there's special cases like virtual machines trying to order reads and screwing everything up.

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    44. Re:Faster notebook drives. by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      That was a lovely article, but I find the idea of not using most of a disk to get more performance to be very silly. Who does that? Add more disks to bring your latency down.

      In any case, you're right that pretty much any hard disk can stream HD now. But what if you want to store multiple HD streams on one disk at the same time? Now the picture gets a whole lot uglier.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    45. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      "Rotational speed isn't the only factor determining seek time."

      No, it isn't the only factor. But that's beside the point, since that was the factor I was referring to.

      You can change the seek time of the head. But you can't change the rotational latency. That is a fixed number.

    46. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Caveat: that's a fixed number for a given rotational speed and platter size.

      Halve the diameter of the platter, and you will improve the latency due to disk rotation. But the problem is, when higher-density technologies come around, manufacturers have usually put that to use making larger capacity drives, not smaller platters.

    47. Re:Faster notebook drives. by RobbieThe1st · · Score: 1

      If your harddisk controller has enough of a microprocessor in it, it *could* be turing complete, just like the 1541 floppy drive.

    48. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Zenin · · Score: 1

      It should be noted for the sake of intellectual honesty that ext2 was far from first filesystem to implement this and other anti-fragmentation methods. Like most (all?) technology found in Linux, it's been copied, reinvented, or re-evolved from previous efforts by other people in other systems.

      --
      My /. uid is better then your /. uid
    49. Re:Faster notebook drives. by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      Uhhh...my gaming PC is using 5400 RPM drives and ya know what? With plenty of RAM frankly they work just fine and lower the temps a good 20 degrees F on the drives in the unit which is a pretty damned big difference as we know heat is a killer. Sure i could have added more cooling but I like to hear my games, not my fans whining so this gives me 3TB of space for all my games and videos without all the noise and heat so i gotta agree with Seagate on this one.

      BTW if you want the a lot of the benefits of SSDs without the higher cost and smaller capacity? Buy a cheap 32GB-64GB SSD and use it as a caching drive in Readyboost. I have a customer that did this and after playing with his system as soon as things slow down a little at the shop I'm gonna do this as well because thanks to Readyboost all the most used files of the OS, applications and games are kept on the 32GB SSD as part of the cache so he gets a lot of the benefit with ZERO risk as Windows just rebuilds the cache if you yank the drive no problem. The only benefit that I saw he doesn't get is the faster boot times, the Readyboost cache shaves about 20% but no more off the boot because Readyboost has to have the OS initialized before it can work but other than this frankly his system just flies. With a cache that big most of the stuff he uses daily fits into the cache so loads insanely fast but since its just a cache and not the original files which are safely on the HDD he gets most of the upside with none of the down.

      My only advice would be if you do this use Readyboost and NOT the caching software that comes with some of these drives as it bypasses windows caching and I just don't know how trustworthy their software is or what happens if it dies, with readyboost a backup is always on the HDD so even if the SSD drive dies tomorrow it won't affect the system as a whole other than the speed. I'm not sure if the same can be said of their caching software as from what I've seen its pretty low level stuff.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    50. Re:Faster notebook drives. by hairyfeet · · Score: 1

      So quit using the crap DVRs that came with your contract and go DIY? You can get a Phenom low power quad for $68 at Starmicro and VCR style cases that will hold a mATX board really ain't that hard to find friend. I've built a couple of DVRs using this chip and they are low heat while giving you plenty of CPU for processing video and with a DIY you can choose to either have a DVD burner in the system or a second HDD, you can take a 32GB-64GB SSD and use that as a temp drive which will give you plenty of throughput for video and then simply move the recording to the larger 5400 RPM internal.

      Frankly building a DVR has never been easier and cheaper, hell it one of the few places where Windows 8 actually makes sense as metro makes a great 10 foot UI for a DVR and its optimized for speed, its really not hard and at the end of the day you'll have a much nicer system that YOU control and can do with what you will.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    51. Re:Faster notebook drives. by elashish14 · · Score: 1

      Very true - thanks for correcting me

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      I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
    52. Re:Faster notebook drives. by elashish14 · · Score: 1

      Yes, but ext2 is probably the best choice if you're going to access the file system from Windows. I'm not sure about the maturity of ext4 tools and I'm pretty sure that fs-driver ignores the journal. On supported systems, I see no reason not to use ext4. I have no experience with XFS, so i can't recommend it.

      And yes, all file systems fragment to an inconsequential degree when the drive is mostly empty, and to a serious degree if they get too full.

      --
      I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
    53. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I am poor but like performance and have replaced my pc and laptop drives with them the prices were very good at fry's electronics.
      http://www.frys.com/category/Outpost/PC+Components/Solid+State+Drives+-+SSD/
      I put my OS and system cache on it data on the old one.
      My PC rocks.

    54. Re:Faster notebook drives. by viperidaenz · · Score: 1

      a 2.5" 5400 rpm drive will do > 120MB/s buffer-to-disk writes. That's about 1gbit. How many 20mbit streams did you want to record to a single drive?
      As platter density increases, so does write speed.

    55. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      but hey... p-p-profit!

      Isn't that how a market is supposed to work?

    56. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      ATSC has been updated, but it's won't be feasible for broadcasters to switch for a long time because of the large installed base of TVs without H.264 support. The real truth: the FCC should have accepted Sinclair's 2000 petition to scrap 8VSB (and the existing ATSC standard) and adopt COFDM instead; 8VSB is a flawed standard that has cut off many urban residents from OTA reception because of its horrible lack of resistance to multipath. The simplest way would have been to simply adopt DVB-T, which would have come with MPEG-4 support. The cost of the change at the time would have been minimal, as there were almost no HDTV receivers in existence.

    57. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Shirley+Marquez · · Score: 1

      Those are off the original topic of NOTEBOOK drives. The optimized-for-DVR use WD drives are 3.5" drives. They're a nice idea if the tech actually works.

    58. Re:Faster notebook drives. by DutchUncle · · Score: 1

      ... make an effort to write files as continuous blocks of data, and perhaps allow you to somehow define the approximate size of the file to automatically leave space around and even in the middle of it to be able to modify it and still minimize fragmentation.

      You mean like IBM mainframe JCL from the 1960s?

      Those who will not learn from history are doomed to recreate it the hard way. :-) ;-)

    59. Re:Faster notebook drives. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The PC platform does offer an alternative to a Turing-complete storage medium, a Turing-complete MMU. Perhaps you would be willing to accept this?

  2. SSDs still aren't that affordable by rudy_wayne · · Score: 1

    Unless you buy a small one. The 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive in my laptop cost a little over $100, while an SSD of only 512GB is around $350. Close to $1000 for higher capacities.

    When shopping for a hard drive I've found that you really have to look closely at the specs. If you can find them. Even for desktop hard drives, there are still a lot of 5400 and 5900 rpm drives out there.

    1. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well that's why they mentioned hybrid drives. The idea is that with a hybrid drive, all the very heavy IO operations will happen on the NAND storage, and things like movies and pictures, for which a 5400 RPM drive is more than enough, would be perfectly fine.

    2. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by jtownatpunk.net · · Score: 1

      That's what hybrids are for. I just wish we could get large hybrids in the 'doze arena. One of those 3tb "Fusion" drives would be nice in my gaming rig. It seems silly that the biggest hybrid drive I can get with a SATA interface is 750 gigs.

    3. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unless you buy a small one. The 750GB 7200 RPM hard drive in my laptop cost a little over $100, while an SSD of only 512GB is around $350. Close to $1000 for higher capacities...

      I'm curious, at what price point does common sense kick in?

      Sorry, I don't mean to attack you personally here, but I really wish people would stop treating hard drives (especially laptops) like it's their dick, always worried that they don't have the biggest one out there. I'm willing to bet that the number of new laptop users who still have 50% capacity free after two years of use is quite high. Drive sizes got rather ridiculous in recent years, and user or even vendor (OS) demand hasn't exactly been driving a need.

    4. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      WEll idiots like you that only surf the internet? sure.

      But i record video at 1080p on a real camera that costs $3500 and records at 45mbit per second And a real DSLR camera that shoots at 32megapixel

      I need dual 750gig hard drives in my 17" laptop. and I use every drop of space in there.

      Some of us do real work with laptops.

    5. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by corychristison · · Score: 1

      I had this discussion with a friend of mine recently.

      My laptop came with a 500GB drive in it, I've had it since december and I'm barely using 30GB.

      I mentioned to my friend I was looking at an Intel 120GB SSD. He brought up hybrid drives and insisted I get one of them. I don't have the need for a lot of storage on my laptop, that's why I have my desktop with 2x2TB drives in it. My laptop is not used (and it shoulnt be) in the same way as my desktop.

      If in 5 years from now I'm still using the same laptop, and I need more storage, prices on SSD's will have fallen enough that I will buy a higher capacity drive.

    6. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, you're just retarded.

      You store video repository on spinning media, and if you're doing editing that requires an SSD (which your 750GB laptop disk won't help you shit with), then you copy the required data to SSDs. When you are done with it, remove them to free up space.

    7. Re:SSDs still aren't that affordable by damnbunni · · Score: 1

      A lot of people use a laptop as their only computer. So the hard drive has to store everything on it. All their programs, their documents, and - very importantly, for a lot of people - their giant collection of MP3s. And maybe some movies, too. All those eat up a lot of space, fast.

      My laptop has almost nothing on it. Because it's all on my NAS at home - 6TB and about half full.

  3. Re:SSDs are a fad by rudy_wayne · · Score: 4, Funny

    And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!

    You misspelled Commodore.

  4. Mini-RAID enclosures by macraig · · Score: 2

    I predict there's going to be a few pissed manufacturers of 2.5-inch RAID enclosures.

    1. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      Meh; once you have enough spindles, rotational speed is nice, but doesn't mean as much.

    2. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by Osgeld · · Score: 1

      why? the miniscule difference in speed between a 7200 and a 5400 rpm drive doesnt make a fart of difference for redundancy, which is the real reason for raid in the first place.

    3. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by macraig · · Score: 2

      Doesn't matter. Most people will buy 7200RPM drives instead of 5400RPM drives for their RAID box if they are available because the difference in price doesn't make a fart of difference. Those same people won't buy SSDs instead because their price and capacity do make a fart of difference.

    4. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by edmudama · · Score: 1

      2.5" rotating enterprise drives (both SATA and SAS) are a standard form factor.

      --
      More data, damnit!
    5. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by Osgeld · · Score: 1

      well, they wont be available problem solved

      (TBH I never even knew they made 7200rpm 2.5 inch drives, thats how much I care)

    6. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by loosescrews · · Score: 1

      I don't think it is going to make much difference. Not only will there be 7200 RPM drives available from WD and HGST (now part of WD), all of the Seagate Hybrid drives are 7200 RPM. I think the point of this announcement is that Seagate is only going to sell 7200 RPM 2.5" drives as part of a Hybrid drive. The cache in Seagate's Hybrid drives is transparent to the host, so the Hybrid drives should work just fine in a RAID.

    7. Re:Mini-RAID enclosures by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      I thought they were all using WD Raptors spinning at 10k RPM.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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  5. What they really mean by Gonoff · · Score: 1

    "We can't gouge the customer enough if we give them 3 options.

    At the moment, there is cheap and low performance, not cheap and good performance and finally hugely overpriced and theoretically even better performance with an added cool factor.

    Yes, SSDs are faster but there are other bottlenecks in the system so the difference is not always apparent to users.

    The theory is that if they take away the middle option, people will choose the option with higher margins. Hopefully, the practice will be that they get their 7200 drives from a different manufacturer.

    --
    I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
    1. Re:What they really mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hopefully, the practice will be that they get their 7200 drives from a different manufacturer.

      This will absolutely be my solution. I was about 12-years-old when I bought my first Seagate drive, and I've been buying them for as many years now. I've got three 7200rpm 2.5" Seagate drives spinning on my desk at this moment and one 5400rpm 2.5" Seagate drive that has been retired to storage because of it's lesser performance. I'm not sure yet which brand my next harddrive will be, but it won't be a Seagate.

    2. Re:What they really mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Nah, I think what they really mean is that the market for 7200 laptop drives is gone. The middle customer, that wants good performance but decent capacity, is going to choose a hybrid drive 9 times out of 10 relative to a 7200 drive - it's significantly (and more importantly, noticeably) faster for the things that people notice (bootup, often-used programs), and the cost premium is negligible relative to 7200 drives.

      Honestly, I agree - I don't see any mass-market reason why the average person would want a 7200 drive over a hybrid drive. I can see a market for 5400 drives (cheap media storage), for hybrids (relatively cheap storage if you only have 1 hd in the laptop), and SSD's (speed), but the 7200 rpm drives really don't offer anything unique that distinguishes themselves. Maybe when hybrids were more expensive there was room, but as they keep dropping in price they're killing the 7200 market.

    3. Re:What they really mean by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      Meh, I left seagate years ago when their reliability started dropping like a rock. They are horrible drives, as can be seen by them significantly reducing the warranty from 5 years to 2.

      Problem is Maxtor is Seagate now.. so your only choice is the people that bought the IBM Deathstar hard drive facilities...

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    4. Re:What they really mean by cgenman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      SSD's in this laptop cut boot speed in half. This is absolutely apparent, and I'd definitely swear by it as the most effective $200 speed-up I've put into 2 computers.

    5. Re:What they really mean by smash · · Score: 1

      Hybrid in my MBP cut boot time from about 30 seconds to 13-14 seconds (from power button press, including EFI post). 750GB for 150 bucks.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    6. Re:What they really mean by garyoa1 · · Score: 1

      Uhh... WD bought maxtor. That's when WD fell apart. But Seagate also had some problems but they're pretty much solid now.

      --
      Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
    7. Re:What they really mean by theedgeofoblivious · · Score: 2, Informative
    8. Re:What they really mean by PlusFiveTroll · · Score: 1

      Yes, SSDs are faster but there are other bottlenecks in the system so the difference is not always apparent to users.

      WTF are you on? Unless you are network bound the boost in random IO you get from an SSD are by far the biggest benefit a desktop user can get. What other bottlenecks? CPU, processing cores, memory? They have exploded in speed, network and disk are the only ones that haven't.

    9. Re:What they really mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can't say I've noticed a difference in anything other than boot time, which is fairly unimportant when you only boot once a day. Random IO isn't important for the average use case thanks to the vast amount of memory in modern PCs which will have things loaded before you even need it.

    10. Re:What they really mean by Chrontius · · Score: 1

      7200s are available in a size-category larger than hybrids. For example, you can get a 1tb 7200, or a 750 gig hybrid. Also, guess which one's cheaper?

    11. Re:What they really mean by Gonoff · · Score: 1

      That is what I am thinking about. Saving 15 seconds at boot time is where SSDs show. I suppose that there will be someone out there who runs MS SQL Server on their laptop but why would most people want to do anything like that?

      --
      I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
    12. Re:What they really mean by fa2k · · Score: 1

      Nah, I think what they really mean is that the market for 7200 laptop drives is gone. The middle customer, that wants good performance but decent capacity, is going to choose a hybrid drive 9 times out of 10 relative to a 7200 drive - it's significantly (and more importantly, noticeably) faster for the things that people notice (bootup, often-used programs), and the cost premium is negligible relative to 7200 drives.

      I got one of the early hybrids, and it is much faster than the original 5400 drive that came with the laptop. I think that most of the speed is due it (the hybrid drive) running at 7200 RPM, not due to the 4 GB of cache it has. I access more than 4 GB of software regularly, and I wouldn't be surprised if the cache has actually started to wear out on this quite old drive. So the moral is that we need 7200 RPM hybrid drives, or bigger caches with write-back (though that's of course a reliability nightmare)

    13. Re:What they really mean by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SSD's in this laptop cut boot speed in half. This is absolutely apparent, and I'd definitely swear by it as the most effective $200 speed-up I've put into 2 computers.

      You've completely lost your marbles. You're seriously going to sit there and defend spending 200 $ to save yourself 30 seconds of waiting once a month? In fact, you're not just claiming it's worth the money, but you're actually claiming it's the most cost-effective upgrade you ever did? You, dear madam or sir, have completely lost the plot.

  6. Re:SSDs are a fad by alen · · Score: 1

    so are 7200 RPM drives. i remember when they came out in the 1990's and all the benchmarks said they weren't much faster than 5400 in real speed

    NCQ made the biggest difference. along with where the data was stored on the platter.

  7. bullshit... I say what about fucking vibrations? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    if you ever had an under 3.5lbs laptop with a 72K rpm hd you know what I'm talking about. And if you ever called up the laptop company and complained about it, then you really know what I'm talking about, especially after paying a kideny to have a "performance" hd, and an ultra-light laptop. The other kidney would have been for a 32g ssd.

  8. Hello, Western Digital! by immovable_object · · Score: 0

    I use laptop SATA 7200RPM drives in my home servers all the time. They're small, efficient, cheap and fast.

    I'd use SAS if I could easily add SAS to a home server for less than THOUSANDS of dollars.

    If Seagate won't make the product, WD will. They'll get my business. I vote with my dollars.

    I'm glad I sold my STX stock. This is a bad business decision.

    1. Re:Hello, Western Digital! by armanox · · Score: 1

      WD Scorpio Blue 1TB (5400RPM) outperform the Black drives, btw.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    2. Re:Hello, Western Digital! by smash · · Score: 1

      Depends on the benchmark / workload. Throw random 4k IOs at both drives and the blue will get trounced.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    3. Re:Hello, Western Digital! by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      Depends on the benchmark / workload. Throw random 4k IOs at both drives and the blue will get trounced.

      ..and by 'trounced' you mean 'not that big of a difference but I'm going to pretend', right?

      14.5ms vs 15.7ms average 4K random read latencies.. making you look like a real tool right now.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    4. Re:Hello, Western Digital! by nabsltd · · Score: 1

      ..and by 'trounced' you mean 'not that big of a difference but I'm going to pretend', right?

      It looks like the Blue takes about 20% longer on random I/O, based on these tests. Writes are even worse, at 30-40% longer.

      Then, jump to page 8 on those tests, and see that the Black gets 40-60% more IOPS on every workload.

    5. Re:Hello, Western Digital! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I use laptop SATA 7200RPM drives in my home servers all the time. They're small, efficient, cheap and fast.

      I'd use SAS if I could easily add SAS to a home server for less than THOUSANDS of dollars.

      If Seagate won't make the product, WD will. They'll get my business. I vote with my dollars.

      I'm glad I sold my STX stock. This is a bad business decision.

      Heh, you speak like you were some important business customer even though you are just talking about disks in your hacky home servers.

  9. They're free to do as they please by e065c8515d206cb0e190 · · Score: 2

    To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not. As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.

    1. Re:They're free to do as they please by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure, and people are free to complain about them. One way information is exchanged in marketplaces, which helps guide consumer decisions and price signals, is via discussion.

    2. Re:They're free to do as they please by genkernel · · Score: 1

      To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.

      As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.

      Absolutely not. When there are few suppliers available in the market, monopolistic and oligarchic pricing make consumer choice very limited, in some cases to the point where they have no choice but to either purchase a product that is gimped, needlessly inefficient, or priced through the roof, or do without entirely. Consumer-marketed printers and ink/toner, the pre-installed crapware that comes with most PCs, and of course US ISPs are good examples of this I believe.

      This decision by seagate almost certainly doesn't fall into that category, since, as other posters have noted, there may soon not be a substantial market for 7200 RPM laptop hard drives. However, simply stating "they are free to decide what they want to sell or not" is not a good reason to dismiss this.

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
    3. Re:They're free to do as they please by SeaFox · · Score: 2

      To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.
      As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.

      You can say that now. But a couple more buyouts/mergers and there wont be anyone else.

    4. Re:They're free to do as they please by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

      The idea that somehow a company is at fault for choosing not to market a product is absurd, though, and people complaining along those lines are idiots. One person is making the claim that somehow Seagate is now gouging people by not selling their no-longer product? How bout you go out and make your own harddrives, or appreciate that Seagate offers a product that is apparently desirable to you?

      Why has it become so cool on slashdot to blindly make comments denigrating companies just for being companies?

    5. Re:They're free to do as they please by ultranova · · Score: 2

      To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.

      No matter how much you white knight a company, it will never reward you with an orgy of sweet capital gains love. Sorry.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  10. Nooo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    5200rpm laptop hard drives are dog slow. SSD drives may be fast but are unreliable if you give them load. 7200rpm drives are the sane choice for a heavily used laptop.

    1. Re:Nooo by smash · · Score: 1

      No... hybrid 7200 is the sane choice, which is what they are still going to be building. Difference between 5400 large capacity drive and 7200 for same money in a laptop = very little difference, because on a laptop or desktop you're not doing a huge amount of random seek to make the rotational latency vs areal density trade off worth it. Hybrid on the other hand is MUCH faster than even 7200 in day to day use. Noi it's not SSD fast, but it's not SSD price/GB, either.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    2. Re:Nooo by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      What's the people's experience here with hybrid drives, have they been reliable and have you been happy with them otherwise? I'd just like to know in general.

  11. SSD by seifried · · Score: 3, Insightful

    SSD's are definitely the way to go for 99% of laptop users (unless you need more than say half a terabyte of space), SSD == lower power, no vibration/shock issues, and waaaay lower latency. I've been replacing all the drives in my laptops with SSDs for a few years now, I can't imagine going back to spinning rust. As for large file storage in laptops I bet a lot of users can get away with USB sticks now rather than HDs anyways. About the only place for spinning rust now is as a tape like storage medium where latency isn't an issue.

    1. Re:SSD by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 1

      Except for the fact that the spinning rust has 40 years of development behind it

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    2. Re:SSD by Gothmolly · · Score: 2

      Why do you go through laptopS in "a few years"? What use case are you an example of?

      --
      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    3. Re:SSD by demonlapin · · Score: 2

      So does silicon. We've had the technology for SSDs for a long time, just not cheaply.

    4. Re:SSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dork with too much disposable income?

    5. Re:SSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except the 40 year old technology isn't any more reliable than the 5 year old one.

    6. Re:SSD by seifried · · Score: 1

      So by your argument we should be using clay tablets I suppose, they have several thousand years of development behind them!

    7. Re:SSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Posting anon so as to not undo mods.

      Actually, it can be completely the opposite of a dork with too much disposable income.

      I buy the cheapest notebook I can (typically around the $300 mark) because A) I am working (independent contractor, employer doesn't provide resource) in an environment outside the USA where my laptop can be stolen or compromised in unacceptable ways in spite of my vigilance (fortunately, I have never had one stolen, but coworkers have, and there is no insurance available here) or B) if it gets damaged, it is probably going to get mangled (not just a screen crack), so buying a heavier duty notebook isn't going to help. All my non-cloud data is backed up on a weekly (and sometimes daily) basis, because that is what is important, not the CPU the data is used on. Hopefully obviously, I am not using my notebook for gaming or high computation intensive applications, my desktop is where 'work' like that is done.

      If my notebook survives 2 years, I sell or donate it to someone who needs a cheap notebook, and I pick up a new one to start over with. My previous notebook was an AMD single core, currently on an Ivy Bridge dual-core, and my next notebook will probably be whatever follows Haswell if Intel maintains tick-tock. If I had too much disposable income, I might choose to spend more than $600 every four years on carry around compute capacity (or $300, if I wind up selling both notebooks in that time frame), but given my work situation I probably wouldn't. My desktop, however...

    8. Re:SSD by GonzoPhysicist · · Score: 1

      If you take a laptop out to sea don't expect it to last very long.

      --
      horror vacui
    9. Re:SSD by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      And the modern HDD looks nothing like the device of 40 years ago. Only the fundamentals of the technology is 40 years old.

      As for SSDs, both NOR and NAND flash was first developed in 1980 by Toshiba. SSDs effectively have 32 years of development behind them as a memory storage device. But how fundamental do you want to go? Silicon was first used to create transistors in 1954, so the most fundamental components of an SSD has 59 years of development behind it.

    10. Re:SSD by AmiMoJo · · Score: 1

      Kids.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    11. Re:SSD by ultranova · · Score: 1

      So by your argument we should be using clay tablets I suppose, they have several thousand years of development behind them!

      Well, if you want reliability they're hard to beat.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  12. Users do care about perfomance by gweihir · · Score: 0

    However, 7200 rpm is just not much faster than 5400 rpm. It can be slower in practice when the lower rpm allows higher data-densities and seek is not dominant. Also, 7200 rpm consumes more power.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:Users do care about perfomance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well it's 33 percent faster (or looking the other way, 5400 rpm is 25 percent slower), and it's more about rotational latency than seek. Right?

    2. Re:Users do care about perfomance by gweihir · · Score: 1

      You only get rotational latency if you seek, so they can be lumped together. But strictly speaking you are right.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    3. Re:Users do care about perfomance by smash · · Score: 1

      Depends on the workload, but you're right - for desktop users they likely don't do anywhere near as much random IO (vs sequential) to make the rotational speed vs areal density trade-off worth it. However, a hybrid 7200 is much faster in the real world and hardly any more expensive. So i can see why seagate have just canned 7200s. Those who want them for arrays where the SSD cache is of dubious use on a per-drive level will buy 10,000 rpm or faster anyhow.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
  13. SCSI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    they weren't much faster than 5400 in real speed

    I think that was more to do with the I/O card and threading than the actual drive. (Look to the right in the gray/brown box - Google books won't let me cut and paste)

  14. Re:SSDs are a fad by gweihir · · Score: 5, Funny

    And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!

    I agree! And the same is true for computers in general. I mean, even the Mars rover had a computer failure. And HDDs can also fail catastrophically. Who would ever use such an unreliable technologies for anything? Paper is the way to go!

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  15. a different manufacturer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IBM no longer makes hard-drives.
    Maxtor no longer makes hard-drives.
    Hitachi no longer makes hard-drives.
    Samsung no longer makes hard-drives.
    Quantum no longer makes hard-drives.
    etc. no longer makes hard-drives.
    Seagate and Western-Digital are your only choices, and collusion would be the correct term to use.

    1. Re:a different manufacturer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Toshiba makes hard-drives. They have a 3-year warranty compared to Seagate's 2-year. I do miss their 5, but I will stick with the longer warranty.

    2. Re:a different manufacturer? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Toshiba may make hard drives. Curiously though at least several of their 3.5 inch drives are very clearly labelled as being manufactured for Toshiba by Hitachi. It is odd that they're labeling them that way, but they are. It can be seen in the photos for those models at Newegg. I've bought several of them while they are actually the same Hitachi drives I've been pleased with. Only time will tell if the newer models from this arrangement will be as reliable.

  16. Re:SSDs are a fad by seifried · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is true of any storage medium. Also what happens if you laptop gets lost or stolen? Catastrophic loss of data is always just around the corner, as such you need to be making backups, ideally off site in case your home/office/data center/whatever burns down/gets flooded/clobbered by a tornado/hurricane/whatever. Bad things happen to good data, so make copies!

  17. Re:SSDs are a fad by Stormthirst · · Score: 1

    Just don't use Evernote to do your backups

  18. Sad by Grayhand · · Score: 2

    5400s are 90s technology. Sad that better than a dozen years later they are going to be the only option other than SSDs. Some benchmarks haven't been increasing that much since the late 90s.

    1. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      buy a hybrid drive already

    2. Re:Sad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Today's 5400 rpm drives are much more advanced than the ones in the 90s.

      If you want performance and high capacity, then you'll buy a hybrid drive, the extra rpms won't make much difference to those since they'll cache your commonly used files on the SSD part. If you want high capacity and don't care about the performance, then you'll buy a 5400 rpm drive because they are cheaper, quieter and use less power.

    3. Re:Sad by DutchUncle · · Score: 1

      And the internal combustion engine is so last century. But it really really works well, and there's a whole gas infrastructure in place.

      Seriously, rotation speed is not the whole story. Add more cache, add some flash-hybrid control, the areal density is already up, and the data rate is still higher for the AVERAGE use. Sure, random access won't be better, but that's not the average use - and it's better addressed with RAM or SSD anyway.

  19. Linux still needs support for hybrid technology. by WarJolt · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Ubuntu 12.10 still does not support intel smart response technolgy. Added to that UEFI still has a few issues with Linux unless you are comfort with figuring it out yourself and don't even get me started about nvidia optimus. Google bumblebee. I want to keep around 7200rpm drives just for their simplicity.

  20. Re:SSDs are a fad by Lehk228 · · Score: 1

    Implying spinning rust platters are reliable

    --
    Snowden and Manning are heroes.
  21. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!

    A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.

    The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.

    Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.

  22. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Of the many laptop hard disks I have personally owned (Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi and Toshiba) have all failed/are showing pre-fail signs over SMART apart from two. Those two are a 7200rpm 500GB WD Black which is a 2nd disk in my main laptop, and an ancient Hitachi IDE drive in a old laptop I no longer use. I have disassembled a dozen laptop disk drives of mine over the years to destroy the platters. I have 3 sat next to me in an anti-static bubblebag with a few bad sectors each for scratch/temporary use.

    Of the SSDs I have personally owned (Kingston, Corsair, Intel, Samsung and OCZ), not one has failed or is showing problems over SMART. The only issue I have ever had was a compatibility issue between an Intel SSD 330 and the Intel SATA AHCI controller on my main laptop, where the drive would stop responding to the computer (it didn't do it on other SATA controllers).

    True, it is just anecdotal evidence, but I have yet see to see a failed SSD in person.

  23. Remeber when seagate was king of hd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    and didn't need a "director of marketing and product management" tool to justify their decisions. 15 years ago I had a bunch of seagates installed on my servers running 24x7 that lasted at least 10-12 years. In the last 5 years I had 3 seagates on a desktop bite the dust.

  24. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    But paper is highly flammable and prone to decomposition. Baked clay (or stone, if you can afford it) tablets are the way to go!

  25. Re:SSDs are a fad by gweihir · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clay? Stone? Epic fail! It breaks if you drop it! Just like a HDD! We have to carve everything into silicone foam-rubber!

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
  26. Re:bullshit... I say what about fucking vibrations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    PS: I am also a total moron

  27. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 2

    So much for "innovation", right? And in the 90's (and I'm gonna borrow about 2 years from the next decade) we saw the ferocious increase in computer technology ranging from Mac OS System 7 and the invention of Linux and then Windows 3.11 at the beginning, to the first iteration of Mac OS X, solid contributions to Linux, and Win XP. Hardware went from a midline 40mhz with the 486 chip just getting going, to say 3.5 ghz near the end of the Pentium 4 run. Similar increases in hard drives and graphics/sound and other things. I among others was eagerly awaiting each new improvement.

    Now it's 2013, "after even the Mayan apocalypse so to speak, ", and all I got is this "we're going back to 5400 drives" tshirt from Seagate. This is Moore's Law creaking at the seams because the next killer jump in tech to be "disruptive" as the biz types like to call it, is risky as get-out, and no one's taking the chance on it yet.

    --
    My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
  28. How about by bobstreo · · Score: 1
    1. Re:How about by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Considering that their 512gb version costs more than a 1tb SSD and the write endurance is probably less than that of the typical SSD? No, just no.

    2. Re:How about by the+order+of+His+Maj · · Score: 1

      STEC Announces Innovative 2TB Solid-State Drives, New Version of Caching Software
      So you could buy a Kia or two... but still...
      __
      ipsa scientia potestas est
      "knowledge itself is power" - Francis Bacon

      --
      __
      ipsa scientia potestas est
      "knowledge itself is power" - Francis Bacon
  29. the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media by bored · · Score: 1

    I've been predicting the 2.5" form factor being a dead end for a couple years now.

    The reasons are simple. The places where a 2.5" form factor excel are the markets that the SSDs are going to take over. For laptops, the power, physical size and physical ruggedness constraints are strongly in SSD's favor. Especially given the capacity constraints already in place for 2.5" hard drives.

    For enterprise use, the need for IOPS was the driving factor in packing more hard drives into smaller packages. Enterprise users were often strongly in favor of loosing capacity and paying significantly more for small increase in IOP performance. In comes SSD's which are stunning IOP devices. I've seen cases where a single desktop SSD can outrun a hundred thousand dollars of enterprise disk. At those kinds of performance deltas enterprise SSD's are dirt cheap.

    In the end, its simple, you need price sensitive capacity you pick 3.5" hard drives, otherwise you pick SSDs. The additional price/GB increase for 2.5" storage puts it to close to ignore the advantages of SSD. Frankly, just for windows desktop usage replacing a harddrive with an SSD is such a huge advantage its amazing anyone sells laptops with hard drives anymore.

    1. Re:the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      Maybe they'll reintroduce 5.25" HDDs after some time - higher latency, but would be really high capacity and cheaper than multiple smaller drives...

      Frankly, just for windows desktop usage replacing a harddrive with an SSD is such a huge advantage its amazing anyone sells laptops with hard drives anymore.

      Because 1TB SSDs are expensive. Yes, SSD is faster than a HDD, but that does not allow me to store more files on it. On the other hand, I would like a laptop with a 3.5" HDD.

    2. Re:the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media by bored · · Score: 1

      Because 1TB SSDs are expensive. Yes, SSD is faster than a HDD, but that does not allow me to store more files on it. On the other hand, I would like a laptop with a 3.5" HDD.

      Might I suggest NAS? Or for that matter remote computing. RDP/etc clients on tablets/etc provide a pretty darn convincing environment for data heavy applications where the end result isn't a game. The end user can crunch high IO/CPU problem sets on a desktop/server somewhere while using the tablet as little more than a dumb terminal.

      The window between common storage capacities on a laptop and what is possible in a portable form factor is a shrinking market. As that market gets smaller the price will increase further tilting the playing field to SSD.

    3. Re:the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

      A laptop with a 3.5" HDD would be smaller than the combined size of a regular laptop and the NAS (or just external drive).

      And remote data storage can be inconvenient if your internet connection (from the laptop) is via a cellphone (slow and may have bandwidth cap).

      If I don't need a fast CPU and/or lots of storage I can use my UMPC (which has a 32GB SSD and x86 CPU and a keyboard). If for whatever reason I have to bring my big laptop, I'd like for it to have enough data storage so I don't need to bring the external drive. That reason may be that I'm going on vacation and want to take more than two movies with me. I would like the drive to be internal, so I do not need more desk space (ideally, no desk space at all) for that laptop. I can keep the external batteries in my bag (as the battery of my current laptop is too old to hold a charge), but keeping a working hard drive at odd angles in the bag is not that good for the drive.

      For everything else (not video/audio related and when I don't need lots of data where I am) there is my home system and vnc if I really need it.

    4. Re:the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media by pipatron · · Score: 1

      Extremely high capacity in one package isn't that useful unless it's paired with a similar gain in transfer speed. It sucks in a RAID setting if the disk dies, because it will take days to resync. Maybe it's great for a home desktop user, but it would still be better for such users to go with more than one drive.

      --
      c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
    5. Re:the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media by DutchUncle · · Score: 1

      Might I suggest NAS?

      No. Because it's not local to my computer, and I can't take it with me or physically secure it, and I have to be connected. If I wanted a dumb terminal with a remote mainframe, I would have stayed in the 1960s where I started.

  30. The world will be better for it by damn_registrars · · Score: 1

    Seagate's QC has gone down the toilet in recent years anyways. Even worse, it is following their customer support down the drain. They should stop making the 7200rpm drives, then the 5400s, then the SSDs, then everything else and just go away.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  31. Re:SSDs are a fad by cgenman · · Score: 1

    My laptop hard drives average 1.5 years between failure. If an SSD drive dies in 5, that's a huge improvement.

  32. Need SAS ports on the laptops, then by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    7200rpm nearline-SAS drives are not going anywhere, and they are exactly these SATA devices, but with a SAS PHY and firmware, and better sourcing for the electronics (so, less crappy capacitors, and the controller board is not missing half the for-redundancy components that stabilize the circuit over its lifetime and during thermal stress).

    I really wish we had SAS ports instead of SATA in the notebooks. You could still use SATA devices, or you could use properly built spinning rust that work for 3+ years.

    Besides, SAS drives are usually 10k or 15k RPM, and you get nearline if you need 7k2 (higher density, very good electronics, a bit slower)...

  33. What about people who want reliable & fast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The word SSD and reliable don't seem to mix in the real world. This may be due largely to the super capacitor issue and companies cutting corners (not using them)... but... it would seem to me there should still be a demand for traditional 7200 RPM 2.5” hard drives.

    1. Re:What about people who want reliable & fast? by smash · · Score: 2

      The nand in hybrid drives is SLC and not MLC. SLC nand is a lot more reliable than consumer grade MLC.

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    2. Re:What about people who want reliable & fast? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      7.2kRPM 2.5"s are not reliable. Especially not in laptops.

  34. Re:SSDs are a fad by damn_registrars · · Score: 2

    My laptop hard drives average 1.5 years between failure. If an SSD drive dies in 5, that's a huge improvement.

    And if you stop buying Seagate drives you'll see an even bigger improvement. I buy from the other large HD manufacturer and I average at least 3-4 years on my laptop drives with my laptops running on average at least 12-16 hours per day, year round. Generally I end up replacing them due to need for more storage space before I replace them due to failure; I still have a 30gb laptop PATA drive that works fine from 2004.

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  35. Re:SSDs are a fad by whoever57 · · Score: 1

    I stopped buying from WD because:
    1. Advanced format -- who wants to deal with a drive that lies about its layout?
    2. I bought a 1TB drive that the S.M.A.R.T. data shows is perfect, yet would always give I/O errors after I had written 900GB of data (and no, it wasn't my misunderstanding of disk space measurements).

    I was having good luck with Samsung and HGST, but now we really only have 2 manufacturers, who are (I believe) intent on gouging their customers after the tsunami and until they go out of business because SSDs have made them obsolete.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  36. Re:bullshit... I say what about fucking vibrations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Well, 72000 rpms is blindingly fast and you have to expect vibrations with that kind of speed, not to mention the heat.

  37. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not really. We saw Pentiums hit 3.8Ghz, then Intel went a different direction with the Core and Core2 lineup. We saw that it was possible to get more performance with less power using multiple cores, different execution strategies, larger cache, etc.

    Platter density has done a lot to bring 5400RPM drives to yesterday's 7200RPM performance levels. Add in extra cache, NCQ, etc. and we have the Pentium/Core thing all over again.

    That is, unless you think that platter rotational speed should have just continued increasing the way processor speed did between 1995 and 2005. I'm not sure how useful a laptop would be with 10 or 15K RPM drives, nor do I want to deal with a SAN or Server that has 60K-80K RPM drives in it.

  38. makes sense by smash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Having gone from a 7200 rpm drive to a hybrid, the difference is night and day. Yes SSD is faster (i have one in another machine but the difference between plain 7200 and 5400 is nothing like the jump to hybrid. Hybrid is not much more than a regular drive.

    --
    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    1. Re:makes sense by slacker001 · · Score: 1

      ).

  39. Why no integrated Raid5 SSDs? by PerMolestiasEruditio · · Score: 1

    if SSDs were made up of several smaller swappable/replaceable SSD chunks in a Raid 5 or 6 setup then that would basically put a stop to unreliable SSDs by giving a recoverable failure mode. It might also make it more practical to use denser and cheaper but shorter life flash memory in the SSDs.

    1. Re:Why no integrated Raid5 SSDs? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unfortunately, RAID 5 and 6 would only kill the SSD faster.

  40. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nope that stuff decays too.

    Make everything from diamond.

  41. Re:Linux still needs support for hybrid technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Recent linux kernels support cache devices. Cache can be a compressed ram device (UPS or a bit of crazy required), or a faster drive like an SSD. It is a generic solution, and works for most filesystems supported by Linux. If you have an SSD and a spinning disk, you can cache that spinning disk (by default, the cache is optimized for reads since lots of writes to an ssd will kill it).

    ZFS does one better, and separates out the read and write caches, so read can go on MLC and write can go to SLC. ZFS is more stable on Linux that BTRFS now, but you will need to run OOT patches. Might be better off running Debian kfreebsd, or just moving to real Freebsd, if you want to go the ZFS route, though.

  42. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    don't pick on him just because you can't spell commodore

  43. Re:SSDs are a fad by WGFCrafty · · Score: 1

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base

    You're all wrong,There is is only one way to preserve his word from destruction by psychiatrists or evil Xenu.

    According to the CST, an entity formed to manage the Church of Scientology's copyright affairs, the purpose of the base is to provide storage space for an archiving project to preserve Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard's writings, films and recordings for future generations. Hubbard's texts have been engraved on stainless steel tablets and encased in titanium capsules underground. The project began in the late 1980s.

  44. Re:SSDs are a fad by Pentium100 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Any rich computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Poor people do.

    FTFY

  45. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Why not? Distributed backups are the future!

  46. Re:Linux still needs support for hybrid technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Fuck, can we get a "-1, instructs reader to Google something" mod?

  47. Gonna get biggies!!!! by garyoa1 · · Score: 1

    Dropping hard drives? COOL! That meenz they'll finally be comin' out with a 4T SSD! I can't wait! And they'll prolly be really cheep! Like maybe only $35,000 or so! YAY!

    Somebody shoot me.

    --
    Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
  48. What's strange to me by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is Seagate doesn't offer any consumer SSDs. Go to your favourite retailer and look for SSDs. You'll see Intel, Samsung, Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, and so on including a bunch of brands you've probably never heard of. What you won't see is Seagate. They do make SSDs, but only enterprise level drives, the kind of stuff that someone like Dell buys and rebrands to sell to you for servers.

    So what the fuck do they think they are going to do here? If they keep on the current track, they are in for a major shrink in business. There is a growing market for SSDs in the consumer arena, but they are not going to buy high priced SAS SSDs designed for heavy write loads.

    It really surprised me how completely HDD manufacturers seem to have missed the boat on SSDs. They'd be natural companies for people to buy from, already known names in storage, but they've been really pokey. Seagate only does enterprise stuff, WD tried a consumer drive for a bit but it was over priced and underperforming and they've cut it.

    They have a limited time to sort this shit out and get a good lineup of consumer and enterprise SSDs, or they'll find themselves being squeezed out of the market by all the new players.

  49. "Spinning Rust" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I'll bet you think saying "spinning rust" makes you ever so bleeding edge and hip, but really it makes you sound like a douche bag.

    1. Re:"Spinning Rust" by jones_supa · · Score: 1

      I find it sympathetic if someone says "spinning rust", always gives me a jolly laugh.

  50. Re:SSDs are a fad by pipatron · · Score: 1

    I stopped buying from WD because: 1. Advanced format -- who wants to deal with a drive that lies about its layout?

    So you're not a fan of LBA then?

    --
    c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  51. Re:SSDs are a fad by PlusFiveTroll · · Score: 1

    Nope that stuff decays too.

    Make everything from diamond.

    Diamonds burn. Longevity wise, Iron is your best choice, everything will quantum tunnel to iron eventually. Keeping the lighter elements from rusting it before then will be the biggest issue.

  52. Re:SSDs are a fad by PlusFiveTroll · · Score: 2

    I had a client hit his notebook while running. The ceramic platters in the HDD shattered. The Intel and Samsung SSDs I've used so far are all working (knock on wood). I've seen a few OCZs of other peoples die rather randomly though.

    All things die. Professionals backup.

  53. Re:Linux still needs support for hybrid technology by pipatron · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I often wish for a "-1, Factually incorrect" or something.

    --
    c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */
  54. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I stopped buying from WD because:
    1. Advanced format -- who wants to deal with a drive that lies about its layout? .

    That is quite funny, as Advanced format allows for the better use of ECC, which reduces errors and faults in a drive.

    And it only takes a tiny amount of effort to make sure you set it up right at the beginning to make sure you never have problems.

  55. Re:bullshit... I say what about fucking vibrations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yea, I was shocked when the drive casing exploded and the platter cut my leg off and embedded itself in an I beam.

  56. Re:SSDs are a fad by dbIII · · Score: 1

    Maybe he can't keep up with the Commodore.
    Let's see how long it takes you guys to get that jingle out of your heads :)

  57. Re:SSDs are a fad by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

    Poor people don't have any computer. Most people don't have much "data", so a $5 to $20 USB drive can hold everything they need to store. Poor people don't store mission critical data on a single drive, they store it in the cloud from the free computers they use at the library, if they get a chance to between their three minimum wage jobs.

    "Poor people don't drive a Ferrari, they drive a Ford" ignores the fact that many people are too poor to own anything. But I do keep multiple copies of my mission critical data on media less than 1% of the cost of the computer (usually free USB drives gifted from vendors and such).

  58. Re:SSDs are a fad by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

    There are varying levels of "poor" and "rich".

    Having backups of the most critical data is smart and probably not expensive (though for some their photo/home video collection is also most critical and that could take a lot of space), but disregarding the reliability of storage medium is stupid.

    At the very least, then the device fails, I'll have to buy a new one (as HDDs and SSDs are not really repairable) and have the inconvenience of downtime and restoring from backups. Also, I may have the data that, while not critical, is still useful to me and I do not want to lose it (otherwise I would have deleted it already). That means that while I cannot afford RAID1*, I will buy the more expensive enterprise-grade drives hoping that they will last longer than the cheap ones.

    * The way my system is currently set up (multiple hard drives with varying capacities and interfaces), it would be quite expensive to reconfigure it for RAID just for the data I have now, not to mention about adding capacity. I will use RAID (probably 5 or 6) when I save enough money to buy a new server.

    What would be the most reliable way of storing 2TB of data for less than $300 (assuming I have more than one PC, but all with full hard drives)?

  59. Re:SSDs are a fad by AK+Marc · · Score: 1

    SSDs last longer than spinning discs. And, when they fail, they fail operationally - writes fail, but your data is accessible. Spinning discs generally fail non-operational. You can't get anything off them without great expense and specialized labs.

  60. Re:SSDs are a fad by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    Erm with external harddisks well into the sub $100 area, not to mention the availability of various free online storage places, the poor people really have no excuse.

  61. So who will do it then? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    There are currently more manufacturers of 3.5" Floppy drives, than of Harddisks. There's 3 left. Count them WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.

    Just when ARE we allowed to whine and complain? When there's none left? As customers our options of voting with our dollars are getting very restricted indeed.

    1. Re:So who will do it then? by gnasher719 · · Score: 2

      There are currently more manufacturers of 3.5" Floppy drives, than of Harddisks. There's 3 left. Count them WD, Seagate, and Toshiba.

      That was initially surprising, but the reason is probably that there is zero development cost involved with 3.5" Floppy drives. They can use the same machines to build them ten years from now if there is any demand. With a hard drive, try selling a current hard drive two years from now, not a chance against the competition. So staying in the HD business is expensive.

    2. Re:So who will do it then? by evilviper · · Score: 1

      try selling a current hard drive two years from now, not a chance against the competition.

      I guarantee there will be a huge market for cheap, 3TB hard drives, two years from now. Most of the PC market is NOT the bleeding-edge, and they balance specs with price. Keep the price low, with just reasonable specs, and you'll move truck-loads of units.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  62. Pretty much by KalvinB · · Score: 1

    I don't remember that last time I bought a hard drive and looked at the RPM rating on it. SSDs have been around long enough that it's now a question of whether you want to spend the extra money on an SSD for better performance. And with my home server, all I care about is cheap for the drives I know are going to fail and put an end of life sticker on them 1 to 2 years out to start a rotation so I replace them before they fail. And for drives that just need to store a large amount of rarely accessed data, I just care about capacity. I don't need 1/3rd more RPMs to run a robocopy. It's not a race to back up the drives. It just needs to happen.

    High performance standard hard drives are like mid grade fuel. I don't know who buys that stuff.

  63. some people are different than other people by jsepeta · · Score: 1

    and when apple stops making professional desktop units, a lot of people are stuck using their overpriced laptops because our body of work is from OSX and logic. with tons of data (samples, sounds, 12 dual sided DVD installs, etc) one can't just expect an SSD to fit everyone's needs, especially if they're liable to break. that's why i want 7200rpm mechanical drives. oh well.

    --
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    1. Re:some people are different than other people by ultranova · · Score: 1

      and when apple stops making professional desktop units, a lot of people are stuck using their overpriced laptops because our body of work is from OSX and logic.

      It is unwise to use closed systems for professional matters precisely for this reason: you're at the mercy of a single manufacturer with them.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  64. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And, when they fail, they fail operationally - writes fail, but your data is accessible.

    Unless the controller dies. That is a possible failure mode of a spinning disk too, although there seem to be some SSDs that skimp on controllers, and have particularly bad records of dying without possible recovery. Additionally, reading some kinds of flash memory, including kinds used in SSDs, can slowly corrupt the memory if you don't have ability to rewrite it every so often. Although it would take some bad luck or unusual access patterns to have that come up at the same time as running out of writable blocks.

  65. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    >And, when they fail, they fail operationally - writes fail, but your data is accessible.

    That is one of the modes.

    The other mode is that they completely give up and no longer appear at all, as has happened with my OCZ SSD.

    I prefer HDDs, they tend to make sound and have poor performance as a good warning they're going bad. SSDs just give up and then you're done.

  66. Re:SSDs are a fad by deimtee · · Score: 1

    What would be the most reliable way of storing 2TB of data for less than $300 (assuming I have more than one PC, but all with full hard drives)?

    2TB drives are less than $100 now. Make three copies on different branded drives (or at least different batches) and store in different locations. Check every 6 months and replace any drive that is dodgy.

    --
    I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
  67. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    An addendum to my list of SSD manufacturers in the prior post - I purposefully do not buy drives based on SandForce controllers due to known reliability problems (a possibility for the random OCZ deaths maybe, almost all of their older drives were SandForce based). The only drive I have bought that was SandForce based was the Intel SSD 330, and that was the only problematic drive, although as said - it still works.

    Possibly the most surprisingly reliable/resilient drives I have are three 64GB Kingston V100's. All three drives have been through hell and back: WinXP installs/reinstalls with pagefiles, multiple VirtualBox VMs (also with pagefiles), a VMware ESXi install + VMs, one was bought used from a friend who had defragged the thing repeatedly and finally one drive survived a computer that met 240VAC due to an eBay special charger. All still work, and are living happy lives with modern OSes installed.

    Of course you have to back your stuff up; even more so when you know how these things work, and you realise that your photos/sourcecode/etc are being stored as electrons tunneled into a (slowly being damaged over tens of thousands of writes) silicon floating gate or as a series of weak and tiny magnetic fields on a thin layer of metal oxide, which itself is sputtered onto a brittle platter.

  68. Re:SSDs are a fad by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

    > The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.

    SSDs might not the only devices to suffer from critical failures, but they're pretty much the only large-scale storage devices that routinely suffer from critical failures almost at random, with zero advanced warning, and metaphorically go up in smoke & instantly trash gigabytes of data for almost no discernible reason.

    So many people have gotten burned by SSDs (especially Sandforce drives), an entire generation of elite users have come to regard SSDs as the equivalent of automatic data-suicide, barely safe enough to even use as a write-through cache. If you gave me a 512-gig sandforce drive for free tomorrow, the box would probably still be sitting unopened on my desk 6 months later, because I'm so loath to taint my computer with them anymore. SSDs, especially Sandforce-based drives, are the most toxic computer hardware in history. Few things have caused more concentrated misery to so many users within so little time.

    True story: my local CompUSA had a BIN full of (comparatively) cheap 256-gig OCZ SSDs on Black Friday. People saw the price, pounced on a drive or ten, pulled out their phones, did some quick research, and threw the drives BACK into the bin in disgust 10-90 minutes later as if they were radioactive trash. The only sale items in the entire store that got less love than the Sandforce drives were the $39 copies of Windows 8.

  69. Re:SSDs are a fad by Miamicanes · · Score: 1

    SMART is almost useless for predicting failure with SSDs, because SSD failures fall into two categories:

    * Long-term degradation due to limited write life... maybe 1% of SSD failures. This is the failure mode everyone THINKS is important, but it actually causes almost ZERO real-world failures.

    * Spontaneous, often idiopathic, controller failures that instantly render the entire drive inaccessible. Roughly 99% of Sandforce SSD failures fall into this category. Sometimes, it happens because the drive lost power at precisely the worst possible moment. Often, it happens for no obvious reason in particular besides "Sandforce drives suck donkey shit, and commit data-suicide if you so much as have an impure thought or near occasion of computer sin.

  70. Re:Linux still needs support for hybrid technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They didn't say they drop the 10k drives, too. Or did they?

  71. Re:SSDs are a fad by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

    > writes fail, but your data is accessible

    Bullshit. Just TRY recovering data from an OCZ Vertex or Agility 2 drive that decided to spontaneously bork itself. If you're LUCKY, the drive won't interpret dd_rescue as a hack attack, and brick itself into "Panic Mode" as a countermeasure, and "all" you'll have to do to "fix" the drive is run "secure format" to wipe the drive clean and start over again.

  72. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > Platter density has done a lot to bring 5400RPM drives to yesterday's 7200RPM performance levels.

    And the same platter density has done a lot to bring 7200RPM to yesterday's 10kRPM performance levels, and 10kRPM drives to yesterday's 15kRPM performance levels.

  73. Re:SSDs are a fad by AK+Marc · · Score: 2

    SSD is vastly more relaible than spinning discs., so "poor" people would likely stick to USB sticks (which I've seen make it through a clothes washer and come out working on the other end). Ever hear of a spinning disc surviving that? They are simple and easy, ubiquitous, and will likely be supported for 20+ years (with plenty of warning when end of life is coming). Why would anyone consider anything else?

    "Poor" here apparently means "wants more than he can afford".

  74. The only way to sell Hybrid Drives by gspec · · Score: 1

    is to give customers (especially OEMs) no choice but to go Hybrid. I was told Hybrid drive cost about U$10 more to make, that is huge if you buy drives by millions. For budget laptops, why bother to go Hybrid? With 128GB SSD becomes affordable and more and more contents are online, how many people out there needs 300GB or more in their laptops? People who use computers just casually (for entertainment) are switching to tablets, and they only have 64GB max (128GB is coming), a lot of them with 16 and 32GB. I just don't see why Hybrid? My prediction is that most mobile devices will eventually 90% SSD (unless newer OS'es would require like 80GB to install). Desktops and Mainframes will switch to 2.5" form factor for power reasons (I saw an article either by Tom's or Anand that shows 2.5" drives give better performance per watts). Mainframes of course will implement some kind of Non-Volatile caching using Solid State. 3.5" drives probably for media junkies and gamers.

  75. Re:SSDs are a fad by GigaplexNZ · · Score: 1

    Iron rusts fairly readily.

  76. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by LordLimecat · · Score: 1

    Im not sure if youre aware of just how much faster a current top-end chip is compared to even 2004's P4. A modern i7 ranges from "several times" faster-- per core-- than a P4 to "tens or hundreds of times" on certain tasks (encoding, encryption, graphics). That ignores how much less electricity it uses, and how many additional cores it has.

    This is Moore's Law creaking at the seams because the next killer jump in tech to be "disruptive" as the biz types like to call it, is risky as get-out,

    Or, you know, because some things cant scale indefinitely. You dont think AMD would dump out a 6GHz chip that was super fast if it was feasible?

  77. Nice except for the nasty shortcomings of SSDs by sethstorm · · Score: 0

    Whether it is write limits, disk fragmentation, or controllers going berserk, mechanicals still have flash(SSD's) beat on functionality.

    Sounds like they want an excuse since they dont provide any actual evidence to back it up(read: is their 99% just a terminating cliche just to shut people up?). The Thai floods just wont cut it, and I doubt that the existing drives are that unreliable.

    That said, I have one of their 7200 RPM models(ST9750420AS) in a W520 and would gladly replace it with another SSD-free drive. It beats all the other "alternatives" such as USB drives and if I need extra battery life, I can always slap on a slice battery. That and if its horribly fragmented, I dont have the overhead associated with SSD's.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  78. Two strikes: Contractor in a hostile environment by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    Not only do you show the textbook example of why independent contract labor has too many things wrong with it, you also show that such arrangements favor corner-cutting that gets too close to do the job right.

    Get a decent job that will stand by its equipment, buy as high as you can go, and make it last for a long time. Not only will you not have to follow trends as much, the hardware will last, the hardware will be protected, and that your job will be more stable than Fukushima after the tsunami.

    --
    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
  79. It's true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAtRCJIqnk#t=1m0s

  80. Moderating blues by hoboroadie · · Score: 1

    Clicked sloppy and modded something wrong, way wrong, have to post to undo it. Sorry that /. chose a new, treach method to replace what used to work so well. Sorry /. chose to disable the no karma posting option.
    move along

    --
    They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
  81. Re:SSDs are a fad by Stormthirst · · Score: 1

    You didn't see the previous posts on here about Evernote's username/password/email address getting hacked then.

    I was poking fun at Evernote rather then distributed backups.

    On a more serious note, what do people think of Symform?

  82. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    What really surprises me is how HDD manufacturers have largely ignored SSDs. There are a few hybrid drives but you don't see Hitachi, Seagate or Western Digital SSDs in modern laptops. Currently only mid to high end models have SSDs, but in a few years it seems likely that Samsung and people like Hynix will be the biggest suppliers of laptop storage. A few years after that desktops will go the same way, and Seagate will become the next Kodak.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  83. Re:SSDs are a fad by damnbunni · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Amusingly enough, my Commodore does store its data on an SSD.

    Well, sort of. It's Flash, at least. My Commodore 128D has a two gig SD card that it sees as a hard drive.

    Partly because getting that set up was cheaper than buying a bunch of blank 5 1/4" diskettes these days.

  84. One dbit w0rd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Duh.

    Nah seriously, 640k...

  85. Re:SSDs are a fad by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    But paper is highly flammable and prone to decomposition.

    Not on Mars, there's no oxygen and no bacteria. Perfect match for the Curiosity rover, but noooo, they *had* to use flash memory and now their toy is broken. Don't make me say "I told you so".

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  86. Re:SSDs are a fad by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Diamonds burn. Longevity wise, Iron is your best choice, everything will quantum tunnel to iron eventually.

    Actually, I believe that on geological time scale, zircon is your best option.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  87. Re:SSDs are a fad by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 1

    But paper is highly flammable and prone to decomposition.

    Not on Mars, there's no oxygen and no bacteria. Perfect match for the Curiosity rover, but noooo, they *had* to use flash memory and now their toy is broken. Don't make me say "I told you so".

    I am just imagining how different the mars rover would be using punch cards as storage. Maybe that's getting too weird.

    --
    Jumpstart the tartan drive.
  88. Based on Amazon comments that I read by gelfling · · Score: 0

    Most SSDs that aren't the most expensive ones suffer from mind boggling firmware failures and glitches which brick them or just random corruption rendering them unbootable from a simple abrupt power failure.

    Compatibility is still a huge issue with a large number of laptops, and advertised speeds are nowhere near where they actually perform. More often than not, one is forced to use much slower SSA interfaces than the drives are supposed to use so in the end, in practice, these SSDs are not much faster than 7200rpm spindles. The price performance isn't there and unless you're buying top of the line name brands, reliability is for shit.

    1. Re:Based on Amazon comments that I read by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      My Agility 4 512GB is not anywhere close to "the most expensive" (was under $300 when I bought it), and I had to update the firmware to the latest version when I first installed it. It's been 100% perfect since then.

  89. Hybrid drives? by gelfling · · Score: 1

    Oh please. What kind of messy cobbled together 'engineered' solution is that? What next? Numeric coprocessors on a separate chip? What is this? 1989?

    1. Re:Hybrid drives? by Rog7 · · Score: 2

      Try one. They work well. Until SSDs get cheaper, hybrid drives are a great solution on a price / performance standpoint.

  90. Re: some things cant scale indefinitely by TaoPhoenix · · Score: 1

    "some things cant scale indefinitely"
    That's exactly the direction I was aiming at. Except they do *eventually* scale, just that we've hit a slowdown in precisely what scales and how. It's fair that I might be wrong in how each core performed per old P4, though simple proliferation of cores bothers me as a concept that feels like it will have scale problems as well, possibly soon when we begin debating 8-core vs 12-core machines etc. Eventually the OS has to become really good at allocating all those cores cleanly and I don't know if we're there yet.

    What I'm thinking is that we're due for the Big-P from the Biz School land - Paradigm Shift etc. Some kind of advance that just smashes our current abilities to bits. But ... there is probably a big chunk of hard R&D involved to do that before it shows up as "second generation" (aka usable) in UserLand.

    --
    My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
  91. Re:SSDs are a fad by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

    And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!

    A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.

    The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.

    Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.

    Being responsible for many terabytes of corporate data, I can tell you that SSDs have a much higher failure rate for us than does magnetic media. The tradeoff for that, however, is much lower power consumption and higher throughput. However, hybrid devices seem to couple the worst of both devices instead of the best. It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.

    Our backup regime with SSDs is much more rigid than with old fashioned dasd. And, that includes not storing misison critical data on single drives or in single locations. Murphy will always win, but with SSDs, the MTBF is more in his favor than magnetic storage, at least in our companies experience.

  92. Nice except for the nasty shortcomings of HDDs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Whether it is head crashes, spindle motor failures, or controllers going berserk, flash still have mechanicals(HDD's) beat on functionality.

  93. Re:Linux still needs support for hybrid technology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Install root partition on the SSD. Install swap and home partitions on the HDD. Providing you have at least 8 GB of RAM, put /tmp on RAM disk. No need for "Intel Smart Response".

  94. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    True story: my local CompUSA had a BIN full of (comparatively) cheap 256-gig OCZ SSDs on Black Friday. People saw the price, pounced on a drive or ten, pulled out their phones, did some quick research, and threw the drives BACK into the bin in disgust 10-90 minutes later as if they were radioactive trash. The only sale items in the entire store that got less love than the Sandforce drives were the $39 copies of Windows 8.

    My boss bought a load of OCZ 128GB petrol drives (for retail sale) due to their incredibly low cost price. Of course, I was already aware of OCZ's reputation- wouldn't touch them with a bargepole- and pretty sceptical about why these ones were so ludicrously cheap. After a quick lookup, yes, those ones also had problems listed all over various forums. Could this explain why they were so cheap? *cough*

    Anyway, to cut a long story short, my boss expected to have some returned by customers, but he didn't expect to get *quite* so many back *quite* so soon. He doesn't sell them any more :-/

  95. Re:SSDs are a fad by bkmoore · · Score: 1

    I prefer chipping mission critical ones and zeros in marble blocks. The problem is the storage density is pretty poor and erasing is very very slow, requiring a drill hammer.

  96. Re:SSDs are a fad by RobbieThe1st · · Score: 1

    You mean like this 3TB Seagate drive I have next to me? It's got 4K sectors, with "fake" 512B ones exposed to the OS -- and that was inside a 3TB external drive that reports 4K sectors to the OS!
    So, it's not just WD drives doing the lying.

  97. Re:Linux still needs support for hybrid technology by Animal+Farm+Pig · · Score: 1

    While Linux doesn't support SRT, there is no software support required for Seagate's hybrid drives. All of the caching is handled by the drive firmware. It appears as a normal disk to the operating system. It works great with Linux-- I have two in different machines.

  98. they're just bad by slashmydots · · Score: 1

    I've noticed a trend in all the 7200 RPM drives I've seen. A lot don't get a WEI rating of 5.9. A lot fail. A lot get way too hot. A lot have good seek times but terrible sequential throughput. So they needed to go regardless.

  99. Re:SSDs are a fad by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

    SSDs are more durable, not reliable. While a SSD can survive being dropped from a greater height than a HDD, it can wear out quickly and can fail completely in case of PSU failure (while the spinning disk would only need a new controller board, or maybe just repairs on the old controller board).

    Also, leave a modern MLC SSD unplugged for a couple of years and it will lose data, while a HDD can keep its data for decades.

  100. How much cheapper do you want them to get. by ralphaostrander · · Score: 2

    Put one 70 dollar ssd fry's electronics, put your OS on it, put your cache on it. Your data on the old one. You do not need a big ssd. Watch your system fly.

  101. Re:SSDs are a fad by AK+Marc · · Score: 1
    SSDs are more durable and more reliable.

    Also, leave a modern MLC SSD unplugged for a couple of years and it will lose data, while a HDD can keep its data for decades.

    Ah yes, proof you are wrong. When someone must select edge cases of "my best against your worst" to pretend equality, you know they know, deep down, that they are wrong.

  102. Re:SSDs are a fad by Pentium100 · · Score: 1

    SSDs are still more expensive per gigabyte. I doubt that even Google uses SSDs for all the data storage. Using SSDs for system drives, in some laptops or for virtualization (where SSD really outperforms HDD), sure, but not for a 20TB data storage, not even for a 5TB data storage. Or 2TB data storage.

    Also, for the price of a single SSD, you can buy multiple hard drives and have offsite backups.

  103. Re:SSDs are a fad by rjstanford · · Score: 1

    It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.

    We actually ran those back in the day. 1GB SCSI disks with 1GB memory on top of them. Expensive as fuck, but boy would they scream.

    --
    You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
  104. Re:SSDs are a fad by WorBlux · · Score: 1

    I'd bet their using it as Cache, as it's still much cheaper than RAM (1-2 dollars vs 10-20 dollars per GB) and is much better at random access than spinning disks.

  105. Re:SSDs are a fad by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

    It would seem that increasing the on board cache to an un-godly amount would be just as effective and adding a battery or cap to ensure writes were performed if power goes out would minimze the risk from SSD failures.

    We actually ran those back in the day. 1GB SCSI disks with 1GB memory on top of them. Expensive as fuck, but boy would they scream.

    Back in the day they were expensive, but today, they aren't or wouldn't be and they would probably still outperform SSDs which are slower on writes than volatile memory. That said, SSDs would do much better on power consumption, although, with a big enough cache, you could actually spin down your drives and only occasionally bring them up for writes, or run them at a lower speed than even 5400rpm.

    SSDs have their place, but I'm not sure high volume, high availability storage that is constantly updating is the place for them. Wear leveling has improved tremendously, but it still only postpones the inevitable.

  106. Re:SSDs are a fad by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

    And a swindle. Catastrophic failure lurks around the corner for all SSD users. Serious compotore users do not sore mission critical datas on SSDs. Period. Take the kazoo out of your mouth, Slashdort!

    A global user base and a few million MTBF hours makes you wrong.

    The fact that you think only SSDs suffer from critical failures makes you an idiot.

    Any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store "mission critical" data on a single drive, or even in a single location. Idiots do. Running a different type of hard drive isn't going to change that. Murphy will still win.

    The fact that "any knowledgeable computer user doesn't store mission critical data on SSDs kind of proves his point in that they are not as reliable as magnetic media. They are definitely faster, definitely lower power, but definitely a shorter MTBF.

  107. Re:SSDs are a fad by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 1

    Not sure why you were modded down for a troll. All one has to do is look at the MTBF for SSDs versus magnetic media to see that SSDs are less reliable. That is probably why, SSDs are mainly used where speed or low power are the driving factors and not long term reliability.

    Magnetic media can compete with SSDs if you have a large enough cache. However, power consumption for magnetic media will always be worse than an SSD.

    Again, not sure why you were modded down, because technically, you are correct in what you say, even if not politically so.

  108. Re:SSDs are a fad by VanessaE · · Score: 1

    Not to mention the extremely limited number of erase cycles, though this can be improved by exchanging erase cycles for data retention time and/or storage density. At least you get per-symbol erase granularity though!

  109. but they are 10k or 15k by Chirs · · Score: 1

    Enterprise doesn't normally use 7200rpm

    1. Re:but they are 10k or 15k by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not true. 7200RPM Enterprise-class SATA and nearline SAS drives are used in SANs.. They're good for lower-tier storage workloads where a little bit of performance hit isn't a big deal.

  110. Re:SSDs are a fad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fucking know-nothing ar-tards, the only material to use for geologic time scales is unobtanium. Carve your data in unobtanium and it will still be perfectly intact five billion years after the universe implodes.

  111. NTFS was designed with the SAME idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    In mind, & was touted to be "fragmentation resistant" also (& vs. FAT16/FAT32, it is far more resistant) designed in extents/bands of files -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defragmentation (patterned off of IBM's OS/2 HPFS filesystem - NTFS adds journalling for 1 thing, which HPFS lacked).

    ---

    PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:

    "file systems such as NTFS are designed to decrease the likelihood of fragmentation"

    ---

    * :)

    APK

    P.S.=>

    "Of course, as soon as any hard disk reaches capacity, it becomes fragmented no matter what." -

    OR, when a file is so large it 'overflows' the sector/cluster size used in formatting - which is WHY choosing that wisely based on the sizes of data you're going to be storing has to match best, to avoid fragmentation which of course, creates more head movement on mechanical disks & thus, slowing up (or when the situation you describe occurs & the logical filesystem has to find space)...

    ... apk

  112. Re:SSDs are a fad by Osiris+Ani · · Score: 1

    Fucking know-nothing ar-tards, the only material to use for geologic time scales is unobtanium.

    Bah! Clearly wonderflonium would be the better substance for this particular application.

  113. Re: 5400s are 90s technology. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That... or they don't like to burn their brand with drive technology that still has sporadical failures?

    Oh, hold on, this is Seagate we're talking about.
    Forget I said anything.

  114. SSD OEM Prices by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If Seagate is going to make these new SSDs attractive, they're going to have to talk to OEMs about their pricing.

    I just bought a new HP laptop a couple days ago. The default HD option was a 750 GB 5400 RPM HD.

    The upgrade options (relevant to this discussion) were:
    1. 750 GB 7200 RPM Hybrid HD (16 GB SSD caching) = +$60
    2. 160 GB SSD = +$260

    160 GB is a too small for a modern desktop replacement (what I was getting) without an option for a second drive, and that's way overpriced regardless. According to TomsHardware's last value numbers, that should get me at least a 256 GB SSD.

  115. About time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    About time you stop making drives. They have a horrible failure rate compared to others.
    I stopped buying seagate a long time ago.

  116. Re:SSDs are a fad by uninformedLuddite · · Score: 1

    Because everyone has a $100 to spend on a hard disk rather than other more important things like food.

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    The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
  117. Re:SSDs are a fad by thegarbz · · Score: 1

    Wow your brain really doesn't have capacity to understand more than 10 words at a time does it?

    TL;DR: Learn to read dumbass.

  118. Re:SSDs are a fad by uninformedLuddite · · Score: 1

    Learn to swallow

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    The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
  119. Threshold for HDD is a lot higher vs SSD by sethstorm · · Score: 1

    Unlike flash, you have to actually try to break the disk before you get those kinds of failures. Flash only requires a steady stream of writes along with deletions in the wrong places. That's the price you pay for a faster disk.

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    Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.