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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."
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!
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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!
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
I predict there's going to be a few pissed manufacturers of 2.5-inch RAID enclosures.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: I am also a total moron
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
1 TB Flash drives for storage?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57562725-93/kingston-behold-the-1-terabyte-flash-drive/#!
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.
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.
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)...
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.
Well, 72000 rpms is blindingly fast and you have to expect vibrations with that kind of speed, not to mention the heat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
to fight what has interest in having Bloc in order to national g=ay nigger
Fuck, can we get a "-1, instructs reader to Google something" mod?
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
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.
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.
Yeah, I often wish for a "-1, Factually incorrect" or something.
c++;
Yea, I was shocked when the drive casing exploded and the platter cut my leg off and embedded itself in an I beam.
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.
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.
Work Safe Porn
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.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
They didn't say they drop the 10k drives, too. Or did they?
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAtRCJIqnk#t=1m0s
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.
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
Duh.
Nah seriously, 640k...
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.
Oh please. What kind of messy cobbled together 'engineered' solution is that? What next? Numeric coprocessors on a separate chip? What is this? 1989?
"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
Whether it is head crashes, spindle motor failures, or controllers going berserk, flash still have mechanicals(HDD's) beat on functionality.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Enterprise doesn't normally use 7200rpm
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
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.
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.
About time you stop making drives. They have a horrible failure rate compared to others.
I stopped buying seagate a long time ago.
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.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.