100GB, 9.5mm thick HD from Toshiba 269
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."
Remember, Kids! (Score:5, Funny)
Wait...
Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:5, Interesting)
20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:5, Informative)
Well, it doesn't hurt, but it's not a huge deal. When I'm unplugged and working, the hard drive is sitting idle so lowering power consumption doesn't significantly affect battery life.
Now, having a low power DVD player would be much better, watching movies really sucks the life out of a battery.
Of course, with a 100GB drive, I can finally store a decent number of movies on the drive. Still, it'd be better to store movies in smaller sections, load up to a RAM disk and watch from there instead of keeping the drive spinning.
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:5, Interesting)
Your battery life will be much improved watching the video from hard drive. 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.
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:4, Insightful)
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! (Score:2)
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
YMMV - Your mileage may vary. Some systems (200MHz Dell Inspiron 6000 from 1998 or 1999) had a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder (from LuxSonor).
More recently, I think both MPEG1 and MPEG2 is done mostly in software w/ MMX&SSE.
However MPEG1's 1/4 size and less complex algorithm probably makes it less CPU intensive. Buy as I said , YMMV.
It's easy to test, though. Just bring up the task manager and watch the CPU levels decoding MPEG-1 at VCD size vs MPEG-2 at DVD size.
Whiche
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
*However*, ripping to a smaller filesize with the same dimensions (720x480) with a codec like DivX will *greatly* increase CPU usage--the CPU has to decompress ~5x as much to play back. The CPU met
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:4, Insightful)
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:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
Surely CPU usage goes up somewhat to decode & handle the video, which (I would have thought) would be the more significant drain.
I woulda thought it was the screen, personally.
(yes, it's a joke, laugh
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:3, Funny)
I woulda thought it was the screen, personally.
Oh, no it won't be that. I turn that off to save power.
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, with a 100GB drive, I can finally store a decent number of movies on the drive. Still, it'd be better to store movies in smaller sections, load up to a RAM disk and watch from there instead of keeping the drive spinning.
You should look into the Linux 2.6 kernel's laptop mode and xine's big readahead patches.
Laptop mode will spin down your drive and buffer all writes rather than spinning it back up. When you do a read that requires data from the disk, it will spin up the disk, perform the read, perform all pending writes and spin the disk back down. After a user-defined interval (default 10 minutes) it will spin the disk up just to flush writes -- I prefer to set it to an insanely long time and then just tell it to flush manually at appropriate times (by toggling laptop mode off for a moment).
I'm not sure if it's made it into the main line yet, but a while back someone put together some patches for xine that would cause it to allocate huge RAM buffers and fill them with data from the source drive to allow the drive to spin down while the video keeps playing. This may or may not be useful when you're playing straight from DVD, since if your DVD drive may not be able to deliver the data much faster than it plays anyway. However, if you rip the DVD to disk (which is very reasonable with a 100GB drive) while connected to power, you should be able to watch your movie without spinning up the hard drive more than a handful of times (assuming plenty of RAM). Then dim the screen, use a very CPU-efficient video player (like xine), and you should be able to get lots of movie-watching time out of a battery charge.
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
I'm actually not sure if sync will flush writes or not. I'm also not sure whether or not it should. Some applications may issue the sync system call, and I really don't want the system to honor that. I agree that it would be good for it to honor a sync that I explicitly request, but there's obviously no way for the kernel to know the source of the request.
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
There are some other things dealing with color depth, spin down times, acpi integration, etc.., but that's the gist of it.
Color depth? Now you've made me curious. I'd better go look at what color depth has to do with any of this...
There is code in there dealing with syncs while in laptop mode that appears to work, so that is probably the best way to go about forcing a write.
Thanks for the info. My "flushnow" script actually just turns off laptop mode, runs sync, and turns laptop mode back on, so i
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:3, Interesting)
It is a huge deal (well, large-ish, maybe not huge) from the POV of those little portable external drive cases. I'm using a bunch of the firewire (AUD$60) version of this [usbtech.com.au] and also these [usbtech.com.au]. The 60Gb and 80Gb drives (Fujitsu from memory) that I'm using now draw just a little bit more power than USB1.1 and USB2.0 can supply, so I need to use a plugpack power supply or one of those silly little parasite cables that draw keyboard port power to provide the extra po
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:2)
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:3, Insightful)
If I could find a 7200 rpm drive that didn't destroy the battery life in my PowerBook I would be very happy.
Re:20% lower power consumption's nice too! (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
Not really (Score:2)
Disks with higher capacity will naturally have a higher transfer rate at the same RPM.
The RPM helps a lot when it comes to average seek time though.
Dense data compensates for slow rotation? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 pe
Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm running 15,000 RPM drives in my desktop machine with average seek times right around 3ms. No wonder laptops seem so many times slower when loading a program from disk.
(OT) Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:(OT) Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:2)
Writes to the system array go at about 50 MB/sec reads approach 100 MB/sec. The home partition can break 100 MB/sec with both reads and writes. This is just the Linux software RAID with the onboard LSI 53C1030 controllers.
I use SCA-2 (80-pin) drives, so my choices are limited. I'm
Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:2, Insightful)
You won't see any 20+ watt 15K drives in notebooks any time soon.
Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:2)
Just as much as that performance might be nice to have, I'n happy to take a lighter and thinner unit that doesn't require a heavier battery to keep it alive for mo
Re:One question: (Score:4, Insightful)
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:One question: (Score:2)
who said that again..?
Nobody that I know of. From what I hear, Bill Gates didn't say it either. Just an urban legend at best, a misinterpreted comment or taken out of context at worst.
Re:Remember, Kids! (Score:3, Funny)
The next gen i-pod... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The next gen i-pod... (Score:2)
Not the next gen iPod. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The next gen i-pod... (Score:4, Funny)
Mr Consumer, you are out of line!
Don't you realize that you're not supposed to desire or legally need more than 1000 songs! [com.com]
I'm sure you'll come around real soon and agree with us on this. Our good friends at RIAA heartily endorse this point of view for Responsible Hardware Manufacturers United Against Piracy, Pedophaelia and Terrorism. You're not a pedophile, are you?
Besides, why do you think popular radio stations play from a repertoire not to exceed 1000 songs? Like, duh!
Sincerely,
The Man
P.S. Don't be thinking about becoming too attached to non-DRM formats and interfaces like USB 2.0, Ethernet, neither. It upsets us.
Re:The next gen i-pod... (Score:2)
Gahaha... I'm already up to 2890 songs on mine, and I'm still working my way down one side of the cd tower. Perhaps they should replace "Rip. Mix. Burn." with "Rip, Swap, Rip, Swap, Rip, Swap, Rip, Swap, Argh, RSI."
YLFIRe:The next gen i-pod... (Score:2)
Most of the time it's just easier to download the album with bittorrent, but when I can't find it, I have to go through this process (I can find about maybe 5% of what I have).
Re:The next gen i-pod... (Score:2)
Re:The next gen i-pod... (Score:2, Informative)
Start saving!
You can replace an iPod battery yourself for $49 [ipodbattery.com], or pay Apple [apple.com] $105.95 to do it.
You can tell a lot about a man... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You can tell a lot about a man... (Score:2)
Re:You can tell a lot about a man... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can tell a lot about a man... (Score:2, Informative)
Too Costly (Score:4, Funny)
Consumers (Score:2)
It means not many will care to have one for a while. At least not until they are comperable to today's 2.5 inch drives (+/- a 100 USD).
Re:Consumers (Score:2)
It means not many will care to have one for a while. At least not until they are comperable to today's 2.5 inch drives (+/- a 100 USD).
It means absolutely nothing. Engineering samples (especially for a product with an expected high demand) are often very expensive. They're not meant for you to stick in your home PC. They're meant for PC makers like Dell and Compaq to use for testing, so they can ship the drives a
iPod killer... (Score:5, Funny)
Interesting measurements, Cmdr (Score:5, Funny)
I thought I was the only one who used English measurements for measurements longer than 1 inch, and Metric (millimeters, centimeters) for smaller than 1 inch of length. It sure does look odd in print: "The car wash? Oh. Go 2 km down the road. Turn right, and go 100 feet. You can't miss it!"
Re:Interesting measurements, Cmdr (Score:2, Funny)
Oh... wait.
Re:Interesting measurements, Cmdr (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting measurements, Cmdr (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting measurements, Cmdr (Score:2)
Nope, you're in good company even NASA [nasa.gov] does it.
oh... wait....
D'oh! (Score:2)
Re:D'oh! (Score:2)
to prevent slashdotting of the english text & (Score:5, Informative)
Images available Here [hnsg.net]
and
Here [hnsg.net]
Re:to prevent slashdotting of the english text &am (Score:2)
Because for hard drives, 2.5" refers to a standard form factor. Height is expressed more clearly in millimeters, though, since the difference between 9mm and 10mm (for example) is .04".
Re:to prevent slashdotting of the english text &am (Score:2)
Cool...but no thanks (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Cool...but no thanks (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Cool...but no thanks (Score:2)
My laptop only has USB 1. Oddly enough, I've never tried transfering 300GB to or from it, because it only HAS 20GB in it. I find that 90% of the time, I'm moving over a few dozen/hundred MB at most. Takes a minute or 2 tops, maybe 5 if it's a big job. For everything else I do, I just run the files off the external. USB 1 is more than fast enough for pretty much
About damned time (Score:3, Informative)
9.5mm means this will fit in the Powerbooks (and presumably most standard laptops as well) Sign me up for one as soon as they're available to consumers.
Re:About damned time (Score:2)
When you throw 50 GB of that at your music
So why is it that you need 4 months of music on a laptop? Trim it to 40 and grab an iPod already.
Re:About damned time (Score:2)
Silly naming conventions (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
They also seem to have a 100GB 1.8"(!) drive (Score:4, Interesting)
Would that be that the drive that's going into... (Score:2)
Re:They also seem to have a 100GB 1.8"(!) drive (Score:2)
ata/100 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ata/100 (Score:2)
Value proposition? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Value proposition? (Score:2)
enough said.
What this means for consumers (Score:3, Interesting)
What this means for consumers is that, after prices come down, we are talking about some serious storage capabilities in portable devices. Something like the ipod mini, except more on the order of 150gigs, 200gigs, who knows by the time the price comes down.
It would be a mini personal server, where you could carry around with you almost all convenient data you would want, really. Your entire music collection...your entire divx collection...both? How about something like your resume, all of your email, some source code you are working on. Whatever. This idea has been thrown around here on slashdot before, it's nothing new. But at least now it would be more applicable.
Re:What this means for consumers (Score:5, Informative)
Finally! (Score:2, Funny)
Given that... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 goin
$100 / GB? (Score:2, Funny)
(yes, I know it will be cheaper in the future with demand/etc...)
Re:$100 / GB? (Score:3, Informative)
Last time I checked, $1000 / 100GB = $10/GB
Re:$100 / GB? (Score:2)
Re:FUCK! $1,092 USD (Score:4, Funny)
still looking for a wife...
Too bad I divorced mine, you could have had her.
Re:FUCK! $1,092 USD (Score:2)
External hard drives - USB/Firewire (Score:5, Insightful)
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:External hard drives - USB/Firewire (Score:2)
Even better would be an external 2.5" in an enclosure for backups. Make sure you also have windows installed on the backup HD. If your laptop HD dies, you simply use the one in the enclosure, and order a new one for the enclosure. Advantage: almost zero downtime. Disadvantage: the risk that the second HD fails before your replacement drive arrives.
Re:External hard drives - USB/Firewire (Score:2)
Re:FUCK! $1,092 USD (Score:2, Insightful)
Or do what I do... (Score:2)
It's not that hard.
When I need to carry files around, they get written to the disc. When not, I don't store them. 256,512,etc USB keychains work VERY well, too.
For those of you who will go 'Well, you can't very well carry that around all the time' - I don't. It's a drop box. It gets plugged into the deskbox when not in use, so I can sftp and grab what I need if needbe.
I've
Re:Or do what I do... (Score:2)
Wrap that one around your mind.
And it is my signature.
Re:RPMs (Score:4, Funny)
1800 RPM.
Re:MP3 players based on this drive? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem here is that most people wouldn't need something like this: people can listen to music and do a million things. You can't do much but watch video while it's on.
Then again, the video for portable entertainment on long plane flights is appealing.
Re:MP3 players based on this drive? (Score:2)
Except, I'd have to hold the farking video iPod at arms length for an hour, or stare at my lap at a crooked angle. Not worth the bother. Wake me up again when ultralight head mounted displays are $100. As soon as that happens, and I can watch a movie while wearing a pair of sunglasses, and lou
Re:MP3 players based on this drive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Inventions to help iPod (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Inventions to help iPod (Score:2)
Re:nice! (Score:2)
According to this article [macminute.com], you usually find drives shipping a few months after engineering samples become available. First to computer makers, and then retail.
Since samples will ship in May, I would expect to see them bundled with new systems around August/September, and available retail before the end of the year.
Re:What will this mean (Score:2, Funny)
Re:You know... (Score:2, Informative)
wow. (Score:2)
Re:Notice the shock resistance (Score:2, Insightful)
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.