(This is getting silly, but hey, why not? It's only karma).
All facts from the article:
>average seek time of 3.9 milliseconds
Translation: Bullsh*t seek time. Doesn't mean nothing. These numbers are always faked.
>data transfer rates up to 48 Mbytes/second >15,000 rpm
these don't count...
> A 15-k spindle speed helps bring latency down to 2 milliseconds on the Cheetah X15, he explained, compared to 2.99 ms on the company's 10-k rpm class drives and 4.17 ms on its 7,200 rpm drives.
ie. on the same track. Big whoop, still nothing about head speed.
>And a new, speedier actuator design brings seek time down to 3.9 ms, compared to 5.2 ms for the company's 10-k drives.
Kinda sorta counts. But still doesn't tell me anything about how fast the heads are (but they are just faster, I'll guess I'll just have to trust them. Right... 8-P )
>The 15-k drive benchmarks at 140 I/Os per second, Hood said, using Intel's IOmeter benchmark, compared to 84 for 7,500-rpm drives and 105 for 10-k drives. All in all, by Hood's reckoning, the 15-k drive delivers a 33 percent increase in I/Os per second over 10-k drives and a 28 percent improvement in time-to-data.
[sarcasm] And I bet it scores high in MIPS and FIPS too... [/sarcasm]
Now how fast are the heads? They barely get a mention in therem, and the mention they get is useless, and I just PROVED I read the WHOLE article.
It seems all anyone cares about is rotational speed. That's great if I want to rip DVDs to AVI (not that I do), but it isn't a big deal for fileservers (within reason - 3600 RPM obviously is going to be a major performance hit). And most of us use our HDDs for random file access, not watching big huge uncompressed movies.
I want to know how long it takes the head to go from track one to the last track. Things like that would be nice, not vaguely defined things like "average seek time".
14 or so watts (I'm too lazy to calculate) during full use status for seagate 10K RPM drives, 11 watts idle for both seagate 10K RPM and 15K RPM drives.
Not even as much power as a flourescet light bulb.:-)
>an HDD platter is about the same in stiffness as a piece of cardboard nowadays
Which drive did you open? I'd be interested to read the specs on it.
Wouldn't cardboard platters be likely to deform if you used them in a moist environment (must be why they pack them with silica gel).:-)
All those I've opened are about 10X tougher than the computer they are are in (this follows with time - old cases were made of what seemed to be die cast iron, so the hard drive platters are very tough, almost impossible to bend. Today's plastimetal cases usually enclose a somewhat tough, difficult to bend, set of platters, IMHO. Although I haven't opened too many new HDDs lately.).
Oh, and hey, no need to insult (>youre an idiot). And if you feel the need to, try and make sure you post using proper capitalization and punctuation. No need to flame me for it, I'm not trying to flame you.
MFM still works fine. I was running a 486 with 2 40 MB MFM drives (One IBM, one seagate) a short while ago with 2.2.0(pre8). One was/home, the other for / (with boot, root, bin, sbin, var, etc), and the rest was, shall we say, NFStory. NFS over arcnet [the network attached to this computer] was faster than these crappy things, anyways.
FYI: This was with a Full length WD MFM card.
Fun - I remember the cool sound they make. And I still have them. And the very best - a broken one with a serious head problem - it won't stop violently moving it's heads back and forth. A 5 1/4" full height drive doing this means it will move off your desk in 2 or 3 minutes.
Nothing scares people more than when I say "hold this for a minunte" just before I power on that drive. Haha. Almost as fun as throwing charged capacitors at people (I must have been _real_ popular, huh? >:-)
It is very dangerous if something like this were to crack, and fragment into tiny pieces while going at a high rate of speed. But highly improbable that it would happen. The platters are made of metal (or something similar), so they are hard to break. I know, I opened up a (dead) 1 Gig Drive the other day. I was kinda mad so I did a "manual" fdisk on it. It took about 5 minutes of beating on it with a ballpeen hammer before I split it.
As far as fragmenting at high speeds, I experimented with that (for the danger of it...).
[Danger Will Robinson: Don't do this unless you enjoy being blind and hospital stays. If you are really stupid, you might die... You have been warned]
I opened up a (mostly broken) 24X cdrom. I faked it into thinking all the safeties were working fine, and got it spinning my old "abuse" shareware game CD up to full speed (ahh the irony). I closed my eyes (for some safety). I then took an exacto knife and quickly cut into the side of the disc. It shattered, and high velocity peices hit me. Fortunately not at all in the face, but they still hurt.
And that is ONLY a 24X CDROM (how fast is that in RPMs?).
The metal casing on a hard drive would likely be a good protection, so there is little to worry about unless you open it...
>Try reading the article instead of trying to get a fast post (#6 in your case)
Why read when I can just press (in netscape 4.x): Ctrl-F, "head",
and find nothing (but ahead... bad pun, sorry):-)
BTW: I did read it... there isn't too much to read. If you can't read that in 5 minutes, might I reccomend a speed reading course?:-)
Sure, they say 3.9 ms access, and 2.9 ms, and 2.0 ms, that doesn't rule out a head that takes 1/10th second to travel from extremity to extremity... Maybe spindle rotation is the only major important thing in storing uncompressed live motion video, but what about fileserving - for that I don't much care about RPM, I care about full head seek time.
Noise would be important for me too - I like to listen to music while using my computer. Noisy hardrives make that difficult.
Standalone audio CD-Recorders are required to record on CDR-Audio. This is because these discs include "artist compensation" in their price, and therefore you have already paid for the "privelege" of making a copy.
I beleive this information is pre-burned somewhere near the hub of the CDR-Audio disc (but am probably wrong).
CD-Recorders relying on a computer for control are primarialy to be used for data, and therefore no "artist compensation" is necessary. That's why computer CD-Recorders will burn on any CDR. No, I don't get why they will still burn Audio CDs without checks, but I sure ain't gonna complain.:-)
Here in Canada the price difference between CDR-Audio and plain CDR is extreme (or was). Since DR-Audio isn't popular the biggest packs I usually find are 3 packs. These go for about $8 CAN ($2.6 per disc!) . 100 spindles of "normal" CDs can be gotten for $40-50 ($0.4 - $0.5 per disc).
Heh... I'm off to www.futureshop.ca to see if I can get any CDRs before this levy makes its way into their prices.
Slashdot Mirror
>you are rad.
Thanks.
(This is getting silly, but hey, why not? It's only karma).
All facts from the article:
>average seek time of 3.9 milliseconds
Translation: Bullsh*t seek time. Doesn't mean nothing. These numbers are always faked.
>data transfer rates up to 48 Mbytes/second
>15,000 rpm
these don't count...
> A 15-k spindle speed helps bring latency down to 2 milliseconds on the Cheetah X15, he explained, compared to 2.99 ms on the company's 10-k rpm class drives and 4.17 ms on its 7,200 rpm drives.
ie. on the same track. Big whoop, still nothing about head speed.
>And a new, speedier actuator design brings seek time down to 3.9 ms, compared to 5.2 ms for the company's 10-k drives.
Kinda sorta counts. But still doesn't tell me anything about how fast the heads are (but they are just faster, I'll guess I'll just have to trust them. Right... 8-P )
>The 15-k drive benchmarks at 140 I/Os per second, Hood said, using Intel's IOmeter benchmark, compared to 84 for 7,500-rpm drives and 105 for 10-k drives. All in all, by Hood's reckoning, the 15-k drive delivers a 33 percent increase in I/Os per second over 10-k drives and a 28 percent improvement in time-to-data.
[sarcasm] And I bet it scores high in MIPS and FIPS too... [/sarcasm]
Now how fast are the heads? They barely get a mention in therem, and the mention they get is useless, and I just PROVED I read the WHOLE article.
It seems all anyone cares about is rotational speed. That's great if I want to rip DVDs to AVI (not that I do), but it isn't a big deal for fileservers (within reason - 3600 RPM obviously is going to be a major performance hit). And most of us use our HDDs for random file access, not watching big huge uncompressed movies.
I want to know how long it takes the head to go from track one to the last track. Things like that would be nice, not vaguely defined things like "average seek time".
14 or so watts (I'm too lazy to calculate) during full use status for seagate 10K RPM drives, 11 watts idle for both seagate 10K RPM and 15K RPM drives.
:-)
e rprise/tech/0,1131,223,00.shtml
e rprise/tech/0,1131,245,00.shtml
Not even as much power as a flourescet light bulb.
Read these links for the info:
(10K RPM DRIVES): http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/ent
(15K RPM DRIVES): http://www.seagate.com/cda/products/discsales/ent
>an HDD platter is about the same in stiffness as a piece of cardboard nowadays
:-)
Which drive did you open? I'd be interested to read the specs on it.
Wouldn't cardboard platters be likely to deform if you used them in a moist environment (must be why they pack them with silica gel).
All those I've opened are about 10X tougher than the computer they are are in (this follows with time - old cases were made of what seemed to be die cast iron, so the hard drive platters are very tough, almost impossible to bend. Today's plastimetal cases usually enclose a somewhat tough, difficult to bend, set of platters, IMHO. Although I haven't opened too many new HDDs lately.).
Oh, and hey, no need to insult (>youre an idiot). And if you feel the need to, try and make sure you post using proper capitalization and punctuation. No need to flame me for it, I'm not trying to flame you.
MFM still works fine. I was running a 486 with 2 40 MB MFM drives (One IBM, one seagate) a short while ago with 2.2.0(pre8). One was /home, the other for / (with boot, root, bin, sbin, var, etc), and the rest was, shall we say, NFStory. NFS over arcnet [the network attached to this computer] was faster than these crappy things, anyways.
FYI: This was with a Full length WD MFM card.
Fun - I remember the cool sound they make. And I still have them. And the very best - a broken one with a serious head problem - it won't stop violently moving it's heads back and forth. A 5 1/4" full height drive doing this means it will move off your desk in 2 or 3 minutes.
Nothing scares people more than when I say "hold this for a minunte" just before I power on that drive. Haha. Almost as fun as throwing charged capacitors at people (I must have been _real_ popular, huh? >:-)
>That's Alt-F. Oh, wait. You were using Windows, right?
:-)
Sure was...
(Not that I don't like Linux, I use it all the time, but I decided to watch a DVD while I posted that...
It is very dangerous if something like this were to crack, and fragment into tiny pieces while going at a high rate of speed. But highly improbable that it would happen. The platters are made of metal (or something similar), so they are hard to break. I know, I opened up a (dead) 1 Gig Drive the other day. I was kinda mad so I did a "manual" fdisk on it. It took about 5 minutes of beating on it with a ballpeen hammer before I split it.
As far as fragmenting at high speeds, I experimented with that (for the danger of it...).
[Danger Will Robinson: Don't do this unless you enjoy being blind and hospital stays. If you are really stupid, you might die... You have been warned]
I opened up a (mostly broken) 24X cdrom. I faked it into thinking all the safeties were working fine, and got it spinning my old "abuse" shareware game CD up to full speed (ahh the irony). I closed my eyes (for some safety). I then took an exacto knife and quickly cut into the side of the disc. It shattered, and high velocity peices hit me. Fortunately not at all in the face, but they still hurt.
And that is ONLY a 24X CDROM (how fast is that in RPMs?).
The metal casing on a hard drive would likely be a good protection, so there is little to worry about unless you open it...
>Try reading the article instead of trying to get a fast post (#6 in your case)
:-)
:-)
Why read when I can just press (in netscape 4.x): Ctrl-F, "head",
and find nothing (but ahead... bad pun, sorry)
BTW: I did read it... there isn't too much to read. If you can't read that in 5 minutes, might I reccomend a speed reading course?
Sure, they say 3.9 ms access, and 2.9 ms, and 2.0 ms, that doesn't rule out a head that takes 1/10th second to travel from extremity to extremity... Maybe spindle rotation is the only major important thing in storing uncompressed live motion video, but what about fileserving - for that I don't much care about RPM, I care about full head seek time.
Noise would be important for me too - I like to listen to music while using my computer. Noisy hardrives make that difficult.
But how fast do the HEADS move? That's the other most important side of the equation...
and it seems to be showing...
Standalone audio CD-Recorders are required to record on CDR-Audio. This is because these discs include "artist compensation" in their price, and therefore you have already paid for the "privelege" of making a copy.
:-)
I beleive this information is pre-burned somewhere near the hub of the CDR-Audio disc (but am probably wrong).
CD-Recorders relying on a computer for control are primarialy to be used for data, and therefore no "artist compensation" is necessary. That's why computer CD-Recorders will burn on any CDR. No, I don't get why they will still burn Audio CDs without checks, but I sure ain't gonna complain.
Here in Canada the price difference between CDR-Audio and plain CDR is extreme (or was). Since DR-Audio isn't popular the biggest packs I usually find are 3 packs. These go for about $8 CAN ($2.6 per disc!) . 100 spindles of "normal" CDs can be gotten for $40-50 ($0.4 - $0.5 per disc).
Heh... I'm off to www.futureshop.ca to see if I can get any CDRs before this levy makes its way into their prices.