100GB, 9.5mm thick HD from Toshiba

zmcnulty writes "Toshiba has announced their new hard drive today with a 100GB capacity. It's a 2.5 inch drive, is only 9.5mm tall, and supports ATA/100. The (Japanese) Impress Watch article I translated offers a couple more details, though not many. The OEM sample price is about $1,092 USD...but don't ask me what that means for consumers. The previous capacity title was held by IBM with their 80GB Travelstar."

Silly naming conventions

[LordFoo]

From the article:

The key to achieving this was replacing the Pico Sliders attached to the drive's heads, and which maintain the appropriate distance from the disk during read and write operations, with Femto Sliders that are 35% smaller and much lighter.

To echo the sentiments seen in some posts on other topics -- aren't these naming conventions getting a little ridiculous? I know it's been a while since "milli" was cool for referring to small things (and was replaced by "micro"), but it hasn't been that long since "nano" became ubiquitous.

Looks like atto/zepto/yocto aren't far behind. Maybe we should go back to the naming convention where the metric prefix actually referred to the scale of the item in question; i.e. nanobots on the nanometer scale.

20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[billstewart]

Dropping the power consumption by 20% sounds like a win.

Value proposition?

[merlin_jim]

Let's see... 2.5 inch... less than 1cm tall... I've got a drive in my laptop that's 30 GB that size. 100GB is impressive, but is it really worth $1000? I mean if I've got portable storage requirements (video, maybe?) that big, I'd probably be better off with a USB 2.0 external... higher transfer rates and a third the cost...

Re:Interesting measurements, Cmdr

[ERJ]

Being a Japanese company, it makes sense that they would measure the height in millimeters. The 2.5 inches thing is a hard drive standard for laptops which would be why they measured that in imperial measurements.

Re:FUCK! $1,092 USD

[khelms]

I can guarantee that's NOT going to be the retail price for this thing when released to the general public. The 80GB laptop drives can be found for as low as $190. Nobody's going to pay 4 times the price for a 25% increase in capacity. (Now if we were talking Intel chip speeds, that'd be different)

Re:Cool...but no thanks

[Misch]

Yeah, that's nice and all, but what if your laptop has only a USB 1.0/1.1 interface and no firewire adapter? Have you ever tried moving 300 GB of files over a USB 1.x connection?

Then again, I'll admit that I ran out and bought a WD 120 GB external Firewire/USB 2.0 drive a couple of days before a business trip and my project had its butt saved when one of my cow orkers showed up with a Firewire->Mini Firewire adapter... Firewire moved the files so much faster than the USB 1.1 did.

External hard drives - USB/Firewire

[billstewart]

Trusting your laptop's harddrive for data you care about is seriously clueless - you're going to get it fried, so you need off-machine backups. If you don't have a desktop, an external 3.5" disk with USB or Firewire interface will cost you about $100+disk, and you're much more likely to get your backups done than you are to constantly burn CD-ROMs. USB2 is obviously a lot nicer than USB1 for this, but even USB1 is a lot less hassle than burning CDs.

Or get yourself one of those little Shuttle barebones boxes - they're still pretty portable, and while they're more expensive than the external drive, you can do a lot more with them.

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[justMichael]

Unfortunately @ 4200 rpm it's going to be slooow.

If I could find a 7200 rpm drive that didn't destroy the battery life in my PowerBook I would be very happy.

Given that...

[gillbates]

My Toshiba CD-RW can only burn ~500MB of a 700MB CD-R without errors, the writable capacity of this drive is probably closer to 71 GB.

And considering that said CD-RW drive can't read a burned file larger than 133MB, the read capacity of this hard drive is probably closer to 19 GB.

I, for one, could care less about the size increases of the newer drives. I would rather have something that works as advertised for longer than the warranty period.

Why would I ever buy a 100 GB hard drive if it was going to fail before I could fully use that capacity?

Why, when hard drive speed is the single largest factor affecting perceived system performance, do manufacturers insist on improving storage capacity at the expense of speed and reliability?

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[shamino0]

Unfortunately @ 4200 rpm it's going to be slooow.

If I could find a 7200 rpm drive that didn't destroy the battery life in my PowerBook I would be very happy.

Which brings to mind an interesting idea. I wonder if anybody's tried making a hard drive with a variable-speed spindle. Provide a bunch of speeds that your operating system can select from. So you can run at 4200 RPM (or maybe even slower) when you're on batteries and spin up to 7200 when you're plugged into an external power source. Make it configurable through a power-management control panel.

Given that drives already have power modes where they completely turn off at times, this might not be a big stretch for an HD company to design.

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[Gossy]

Now, having a low power DVD player would be much better, watching movies really sucks the life out of a battery.

Is it necessarily the DVD drive sucking the power though?

Surely CPU usage goes up somewhat to decode & handle the video, which (I would have thought) would be the more significant drain.

Re:MP3 players based on this drive?

[rcotran]

The iPod uses a 1.5" drive, so this isn't going to help iPod capacity unfortunately...

Re:One question:

[Cecil]

Some people, including you, are in the mindset that a laptop is a portable PC, suitable for use on airplanes, and very little else.

You see, there is a completely different sort of person out there who feels they don't need the configurability or blazing-speed performance of a desktop, and much prefer to have a computer that they can bring to work with them, over to a friends, out on vacation, on a business trip, out in the great outdoors doing whatever it is you want to do. Many of these people don't even have or want a desktop PC for which they will need a seperate monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a desk. All of this takes up significant real-estate.

Hence, the desktop-replacement laptops were born, and these people rejoiced. These people still do use their computer for everything you use it for, though, and still accumulate as much junk on their hard drives as you do, in fact generally quite a bit moreso as they don't always have a network connection, so need to keep a copy of everything they may need to use stored locally.

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[trentblase]

Isn't VCD a more complex algorithm to decode since most (many?) video cards have hardware MPEG-2 decoding?

Re:Inventions to help iPod

[Luscious868]

I know what would help iPod: a battery that you could actually buy in most stores, and replace just by opening a hatch. No more problem of tossing out the iPod to buy a new one when the battery dies. That would be an advance, no other competitor has a thing like that!

It costs $50 bucks plus shipping to buy a replacement battery from a third party and it takes less than 5 minutes to install it yourself. If you don't want to deal with all of that you can fork out $100 to buy the battery from Apple and they will do the installation for you.

If you're really that concerned about the money, why in the world did you buy an iPod in the first place? Get a portable MP3 CD player that can read CD-RW's and takes regular AA batteries. Need more capacity? Easy, burn a few more CD-RW's and get a carrying case. Problem solved.

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[mst76]

> Isn't VCD a more complex algorithm to decode since most (many?) video cards have hardware MPEG-2 decoding?

A VCD is MPEG-1, which is pretty trivial to decode. (I'm not sure but I think most hardware MPEG-2 decoders will also decode MPEG-1. At least, every DVD player will also play VCDs). MPEG-4 (divx, xvid, wmv9, etc) are much more processor intensive (and there is little hardware accelleration widely available).

Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too!

[Kynde]

Also if you recompress the video to something smaller (say, VCD-like) your CPU won't have to do as much work playing it back either.

Eh? Wouldn't the compression into something smaller result in more CPU work during watching (decompressing)? Storing it into something bigger and simpler, that might help...

Dense data compensates for slow rotation?

[superposed]

Toshiba claims that this design sets "a new benchmark for areal density: 80-gigabits of data per square inch."

I don't know much about HD design, but I'm assuming that the reason you get faster transfers from drives with higher RPM is that the head passes over more bits per second, which it can read in and hand over to the CPU. So, couldn't you get the same effect from a lower RPM drive with the bits packed closer together?

e.g., If you double the areal bit-density, you should multiply the number of bits per track by approximately sqrt(2)=1.4, so the bits per revolution will be multiplied by 1.4, which makes a 4200 RPM drive equivalent to a 5900 RPM drive, in terms of the number of bits the head sees per second. (But also by this theory, physically small drives will always be slower than larger drives with the same RPM, since there are fewer bits per track, unless they can manage to acheive a higher bit-density. So maybe the Toshiba just comes out even with a 4200 RPM desktop drive.)

Re:Notice the shock resistance

[rjkm]

Where does it mention any speeds???
It talks about accelerations!

If the impact only lasts for 1 msec and in this time it goes from 8.33 m/s to 0 m/s you already have your 850G. In normal gravity it picks up this speed in less than a second. So, pretty good for normal handling accidents (dropping a notebook on a carpet floor) but easy to exceed by throwing it out of a window on a concrete floor.

Re:Remember, Kids!

[dfghjk]

Sustained transfer rates on 4200 rpm drives can be good. It's the rotational latency, not transfer rate, that's inherently poor. Large sequential IO performance is not a 4200 rpm problem. Power issues conspire to limit seek times as well.

You won't see any 20+ watt 15K drives in notebooks any time soon.

Re:Interesting measurements, Cmdr

[be-fan]

Had it occurred to you that maybe he meant that Japan used the metric system, and thus the engineers defaulted to that for the height, and only used inches for the width because that's the standard name for it? I bet they call 3.5" floppies 3.5" floppies in Japan too!