Seagate To Stop Making 7200rpm Laptop HDDs 261
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."
Faster notebook drives. (Score:5, 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!
Re:Faster notebook drives. (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.
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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.
Re:Faster notebook drives. (Score:5, 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).
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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 l
Re:Faster notebook drives. (Score:4)
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 [oneandoneis2.org]. 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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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 in
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"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.
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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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"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.
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> 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 sp
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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.
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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 [zdnet.com]
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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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 [wikipedia.org] (and actually slightly faster than the computer itself).
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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
Re:Faster notebook drives. (Score:5, 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).
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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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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.
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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 [wdc.com] .
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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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 p
SSDs still aren't that affordable (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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
Mini-RAID enclosures (Score:3)
I predict there's going to be a few pissed manufacturers of 2.5-inch RAID enclosures.
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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.
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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.
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well, they wont be available problem solved
(TBH I never even knew they made 7200rpm 2.5 inch drives, thats how much I care)
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2.5" rotating enterprise drives (both SATA and SAS) are a standard form factor.
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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.
What they really mean (Score:2)
"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
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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 7
Re:What they really mean (Score:4, 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.
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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.
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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...
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Seagate bought Maxtor. [wikipedia.org]
They're free to do as they please (Score:3)
Re:They're free to do as they please (Score:5, 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.
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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.
So who will do it then? (Score:2)
There are currently more manufacturers of 3.5" Floppy drives, than of Harddisks [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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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.
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No matter how much you white knight a company, it will never reward you with an orgy of sweet capital gains love. Sorry.
SSD (Score:4, Insightful)
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Why do you go through laptopS in "a few years"? What use case are you an example of?
What's strange to me (Score:4, 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.
Sad (Score:3)
Re: 5400s are 90s technology. (Score:3)
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
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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.
Linux still needs support for hybrid technology. (Score:2, 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.
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Remeber when seagate was king of hd (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.
How about (Score:2)
1 TB Flash drives for storage?
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57562725-93/kingston-behold-the-1-terabyte-flash-drive/# [cnet.com]!
the 2.5" formfactor is dead for spinning media (Score:2)
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 user
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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.
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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
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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 e
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The world will be better for it (Score:2)
makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Why no integrated Raid5 SSDs? (Score:2)
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.
Re:SSDs are a fad (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!
You misspelled Commodore.
Re:SSDs are a fad (Score:4, 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.
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don't pick on him just because you can't spell commodore
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Let's see how long it takes you guys to get that jingle out of your heads
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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.
Re:SSDs are a fad (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!
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Re:SSDs are a fad (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!
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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.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trementina_Base [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:SSDs are a fad (Score:5, Insightful)
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Just don't use Evernote to do your backups
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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.
Re:SSDs are a fad (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
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"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 crit
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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
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"Poor" here apparently means "wants more than he can afford".
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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.
Re:SSDs are a fad (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.
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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.
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My laptop hard drives average 1.5 years between failure. If an SSD drive dies in 5, that's a huge improvement.
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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.
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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 b
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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 [wikipedia.org] then?
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> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
WD Scorpio Blue 1TB (5400RPM) outperform the Black drives, btw.
Re: (Score:2)
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Depends on the benchmark / workload. Throw random 4k IOs at both drives and the blue will get trounced.
14.5ms vs 15.7ms average 4K random read latencies.. making you look like a real tool right now.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You only get rotational latency if you seek, so they can be lumped together. But strictly speaking you are right.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Try one. They work well. Until SSDs get cheaper, hybrid drives are a great solution on a price / performance standpoint.