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Hardware

Maxtor Announces 80GB Platters 370

Posted by CowboyNeal from the sure-we've-got-space-for-that dept.
mackstann writes "StorageReview has some info on Maxtor's new 80GB hard disk platters. The new drives based on the 80GB platters will come in capacities up to 160GB, with some having Serial ATA and/or 8MB caches. They are also resurrecting the (formerly Quantum) Fireball name, shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year), and adding some slim (38% thinner) drives to their lineup." New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!
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Maxtor Announces 80GB Platters More

Maxtor Announces 80GB Platters

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  • Mmm, magnetic platters (Score:5, Funny)

    by shrikel ( 535309 ) <hlagfarj&gmail,com> on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:06PM (#4202597)
    It's a good thing my silverware isn't magnetic, or I'd wipe out all my food.

  • Wow, sounds deal-tastic! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:07PM (#4202600) Homepage Journal
    I can't wait for my $300 drive to die on the 366th day, and have to replace it! Way to go, Maxtor!

    - A.P.
    • the 1-year warrenty thing isnt completely new. CompUSA brand (maxtor) drives I have seen had stickers on the side of the box saying "1 year warrenty". The sticker was placed over the spot that had formerly said "3 year warrenty".


    • I wonder if the warranties are going to become proportional to the amount they get onto a disk platter... I'll be getting worried when you're drive is expected to bugger up sooner than you think (warranty of a few weeks). ;-)

    • If you get nervous about a week before the warranty expires, just power it up and smack it against something hard, but not hard enough to dent it. Then call them and say it just died.
      • If you get nervous about a week before the warranty expires, just power it up and smack it against something hard, but not hard enough to dent it. Then call them and say it just died.
        Should I back it up first???
    • I'd be surprised if they make it that far. My experience with Maxtors MaxAttach NAS product destroyed my confidence in them.
      Unfortunately, the best peformance/feature/value combo I'm finding out there to replace them is the new Quantum guardian. I know that Maxtor owns Quantum's hard drive business, but I'm hoping they can't get their grubby hands on the NAS.

  • I'll take half the storage ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hollins ( 83264 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:07PM (#4202606) Homepage
    I'll take 80GB and the original warranty, please.

    Cutting your warranty by 2/3 does not indicate much confidence in your product. If the smaller capacity platters are more reliable, I'll stick with them.
    • Well, I just had a Maxtor 80G eat a chunk of my data about a week ago (luckily it hit /usr and not /home), so I don't know if they really are any more reliable.

      I don't know if I'd be eligible for any warranty-replacement, because (A) I didn't buy this drive directly, but got it from a liquidated dot-com and (B) now that I've run it through their zero-fill utility it's reporting that my "drive is certified error-free" again.

      p.s. Does anyone know how to get a Maxtor, or any other ATA drive, to print out a "grown defect list" or some other indication of how many sectors have gone bad and been re-mapped? The closest I've found so far is a SMART attribute, but it's normalized to a 0-253 range with no obvious way to translate back to real numbers.
      • Just as an FYI, I had a VERY similar problem with my IBM 60gb. I was getting ticked off, because it would not write the same thing twice, and yet the diag from IBM kept saying it was perfect. Turned out to be the memory module (512MB DDR). Got it replaced, and now my drive writes perfectly.

        Go figure, I was blaming IBM, because of all the failures I had read about on /.
    • I work on computers now and then as summer jobs, for school, friends, etc. and I have to say I think I've seen more Maxtor drives die than all other brands combined. I've never taken notice of what portion of the population they compose (i.e., if they make 90% of the harddrives in existance, they may have only average chance of failure), but it's spooked me enough that I won't buy any of their drives. I bought a 120 GB Western Dig. drive yesterday for $150 new (they're even cheaper on pricewatch), so I don't think Maxtor has the best product for the price any more.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @06:34PM (#4203211)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • We are down to a field of two major players: Western Digital and Maxtor. If one of those goes away, what do you think will happen to hard drive prices?

        I think your missing a third ... Seagate DUH.


        - subsolar

      • Right, it is economics. But part of the equation is confidence in their own products.

        If they believe that their products were going to be more reliable, then there would be no need to harm the ecomonic advantage of having a reasonable 3 year warranty.

        However, if they believe that their products are going to be less reliable, then it may make economic sense to reduce their warranty. Despite the loss of sales, they'd make out by having fewer repairs... and more "replacement" sales.

        Of course, some states don't permit this nonsense of strict warranty limitations. So if it has been out of warranty for only 3 months, I suggest you call them up and give them ask for a free replacement. After all, that's a right you have as a consumer.

        And you're right -had drive prices have fallen a lot over the past 10 years. But then again, sales are way way way up, and mfg costs are way way way down. They're a commodity now.
    • I've bought quite a few of 80/100 Gig hard drives from Maxtor and WD over the past two years (probably about 60 of them). And I have to say, I've found them to be far less reliable than other drives I've used. Probably about 5 or 6 (close to 10%) of the drives we bought failed in under a month's use.

      So I'm not surprised at the shortening of the warrantee. Yes, it's probably a "cost cutting measure," but only because I'm sure their warrantee costs have shot up with the less reliable drives they're now producing.

      Just one guy's empirical experience of these bigger drives...

      -me

  • Hmm... (Score:2)

    by Lxy ( 80823 )
    more space, smaller package, shorter warranty.

    No thanks, I'll stick with my Seagate. While Maxtor will always be on the cheap end, Seagate's warranty track record has been outstanding.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)

      by buysse ( 5473 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:51PM (#4202912) Homepage

      If you think that seagate has a good warranty record, you never had to fucking deal with the original Barracudas. I had one conversation that went like this:

      Me: "Hi, I have another dead Barracuda. It's a ST12550N, serial number XXXXXX."

      Me: "Really. I'm holding it in my hand. That's serial XXXXXX."
      ST: "No, that drive is in Singapore in our warehouse by my records. Apparently you have a stolen drive, what was your name again?"
      Me: "This fucking drive was a warranty replacement that I got last month, and it's already dead. "
      And so forth. This went on for about two hours, with Seagate telling me that it was not possible that I had a drive their computer said was in Singapore.

      Over the course of a year, we had over 30 failures of SCSI Barracudas, mostly ST12550N (Yes, I do still remember the model number.) The drive changed several times, giving a different number of sectors with each firmware rev and each warranty replacement, which made it hell to use them in a RAID array (and suicide not to). We had to send two off for replacement at a time, and pray that we got two that had the same number of sectors... and rebuild all of our RAID-1 arrays periodically with new disks just so that we could pair them. Granted, that was mostly the fault of the DPT controllers (PM2122 EISA, with 8M of cache and hardware RAID in 1993. w00t.)

      Still, the replacements were sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, and any RAID system would have been fux0r3d by these drives shrinking. As I said, we had over 30 failures, but we only owned 24 drives! I know that Seagate has improved now, and I use their drives again, but it took years.

      The point of the rant? Seagate's warranty track record is not outstanding. At all.

      • THANK YOU.

        I had similar problems with the barracudas.... we had 20 servers with about 10 drives each. we had failures left and right - and were using the DPT controllers as well.

        We had a slew of spare drives in the closet for failure replacements - and each one of these drives cost about 900.00 at the time.

        crappy ass drives.

        We eventually replaced all of them with new ones - and now I have a happy little raid box at home, I have all the "known goods" from that time.

        funny thing is they are all 9Gb drives...

        I still have a 3Gb drive that I bought ~95 for shitloads of money... still works too. gotta love the size/power and price of components these days.

        Only thing is - with all this power I still dont seem to get more done.

  • The shortened warranty doesn't surprise me... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SSonnentag ( 203358 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:10PM (#4202631) Homepage
    My experience with Maxtor drives failing left and right makes me wonder what took Maxtor so long to shorten their warranty period. I'll never buy another Maxtor. My data is worth more to me than that.
    • I've been using Maxtor for almost 5 years now, never had a problem that was their fault (Windows rage once caused the death of a 4GB drive, but that was an isolated incident). Aside from that, I've never had a bad sector.
    • My data is worth more to me than that.
      If your data means much to you, then you're already safe from drive failure, thanks to RAID and probably backups.

      Maxtors are a good deal if you stay on top of things and replace them fast enough to keep your array synced. ;-)

    • Same here... My Maxtor drives are purely non-critical storage now.

      So far I've had great reliability with Western Digital (same price as Maxtor, with the same 3-year warranty), as well as Seagate (the best, if you are willing to pay more).

      Better yet, if you want reliability, go with SCSI... Compared to IDE, SCSI drives never die.
    • I had two customers who had different models of Maxtors... both died within months. I have a closet full of WD Caviars that I still use whenever I want a backup data drive. OLD disks. Hell, I generally shy away from whatever Best Buy is pushing on folks anyway... I guess that's why I never bought an NVidia based card ;)
  • Maybe it was just that the first computer that I ever had had only 500 megs of hard drive space. So i got used to removing everything that was no longer usefull or redundant. But I have a 20 gig hard drive on my curent computer, and have yet to even fill it half way. I can see how this is definatly usefull on servers and as data backup, but my question is, for home users, how is this needed? It would seem to me that this would only serve to give most people even more space to install programs that are just going to screw up or slow down your computer.

    • Nostalgia (Score:4, Interesting)

      by renehollan ( 138013 ) <[rhollan] [at] [clearwire.net]> on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:30PM (#4202790) Homepage Journal
      Maybe it was just that the first computer that I ever had had only 500 megs of hard drive space

      Heh.

      The first hard drive I had, on loan, mind you, had 10 Megabytes of space. I was the size of a small beer fridge, weighed 300 pounds, dimmed the lights when it spun up (which took about a minute), sounded like a jet taking off, and cost about $10,000 (which is why I had it on loan).

      It sported TWO 5 megabyte platters: one fixed and one removable -- 14" diameter, IIRC. I remember that CDC Hawk well.

      It went well with the Alpha Micro computer, portable teletype, two terminals, and a 300 baud Smart Modem that also occupied my room.

      'Course, that was way back in 1982.

      • My first computer had NO hard-drive at all, and you booted up from floppy every time! So There!
      • That's crazy. My company *still* services Alpha Micros. Granted, we only have a few clients (3, I think, and one of them we just fix their wyse terminals). I'm still amazed that they haven't gotten rid of them yet. Anyway, now they use FH SCSI drives, although it's a bit of a bugger finding one that is compatible...

  • Feh (Score:5, Funny)

    by ryanvm ( 247662 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:12PM (#4202652)
    I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!

    Ha ha - I laugh at your puny porn-gathering skills.
  • ...who's got creative ways of filling these drives?

    I have a DV camera that records at 13 gigs an hour. Plus I've got a home-brew PVR quietly capturing shows for em.

    Anybody else doing anything interesting with 100+ gigs space? I just bought a 120-gig drive so I'm looking for ideas. :)

    • Filling drives (Score:5, Funny)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:22PM (#4202741) Journal
      Hmmm....here are some suggestions.

      * p2p movie sharing. Heck, keep your movie archive online.
      * programs with support for unlimited undo, where a complete history of actions is stored (if someone beats MS Office to market with this and people get used to it, there will be a nice coup.
      * Large http cache
      * use flac instead of mp3 for lossless audio. No more worries about compression artifacts.
      * Use png instead of jpg for images (granted, there are probably better lossless photo compression algorithms, but png is quite common). No more worries about compression artifacts.
      * Copy CD images onto your hard drive and either loopback mount them in Linux or use Daemon Tools in Windows -- no more searching for a CD, and load times are much better.
      * Instead of bookmarking web sites you like, use a tool to download them -- you never know when they'll vanish forever.
      * Don't uninstall software to save space (a big issue with games on Windows)
      * Partition the drive and try out another OS
      * Try out freenet, with a nice big cache to speed your (and others near you) access time
      * Send it to me. *My* drive is full. :-)
      • programs with support for unlimited undo, where a complete history of actions is stored (if someone beats MS Office to market with this and people get used to it, there will be a nice coup.

        Actually, that was a feature in Visicalc [bricklin.com], the first electronic spreadsheet circa 1979, which ran on a 16k (or so) Apple ][ (heck, the Apple ][ maxed out at 64k... think about that).

        You could undo any file (even after saving), step by step, back to the original empty document.

        --
        Evan (no reference)

      • use flac instead of mp3 for lossless audio. No more worries about compression artifacts.

        My MP3 collection currently spans 120 CDs. Assuming 650mb per disk (some are less, many are 698mb or so) we get 76GB. Or in other words, all I would have to do is double the size of my MP3 collection (mostly from usenet) to fill up one of these disks.

        With a good internet connection this could take less than a month. This is a puny amount of disk space. Until we get into TB sizes, I won't be impressed in the least with how big disks have gotten. My ability to use up disk space is, as usual, outstripping the industry's ability to make bigger disks.

    • Stop Watchign TV (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Cyno01 ( 573917 )
      do what i did, download every episode of simpsons, south park, futurama, family guy, sealab 2021, justice leage, invader zim, mission hill, red dwarf, doctor who, the tick, undergrads... and the list goes on, i have over 300 some hours of downloaded tv shows on my 160gb drive, i put em all in winamp3 on shuffle, its like my own tv station, but without commercials or crappy shows *watches replies calling me a theif/pirate :D*

  • Someone had to do it... (Score:3, Funny)

    by davidsansome ( 563576 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:15PM (#4202686)
    160GB should be enough for anyone!
  • Torn over which format to choose for your 3000+ CD collection?
    Well this settles it!
    Now you can load up your hard drive with BOTH formats!

    (And still have some space left over for that pr0n)

  • Dead storage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:17PM (#4202703) Journal
    Maxtor already has [ibuyernet.com] a 160GB hard drive. The 8MB cache is a nice touch, but once you get to storage levels this high, it's usually dead storage anyway. What do I mean by that? I mean you're throwing a ton of stuff on there, not using it for your system drive (I hope).

    Personally, I'm up to 630GB and running a bit low on space (about 220GB free last I checked). Let me know when we get 1TB hard drives, then I'll jump up and down.

    • "I mean you're throwing a ton of stuff on there,
      not using it for your system drive (I hope)"

      Well, it depends on what you're doing. I have a DV camera that dumps the raw data from the tape to the computer via Firewire. It runs about 13 gigs an hour. Not only is it easier to capture than analog format, but it's lossless as well. You edit the video then play it back through your video camera at full broadcast quality.

      I don't think it'll be too long (2-3 years maybe?) before these devices are extremely common. You can buy a Mac laptop right now, plug a DV camera in, Download/edit video, then burn it to a DVD that will play in most players.

      I feel pretty good that it won't be long before people consider 100 gigs to be limiting.

  • Quantum surely meant well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by trudyscousin ( 258684 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:18PM (#4202708)
    ...but naming a hard disk "Fireball" for some reason doesn't bolster my confidence in using a product so named.
    • Kind of like when a store has a "blow-out" sell on electronics equipment... Not quite the mental image that inspires confidence!
    • What about "Barracuda"? Now that's a hard drive name that just demands respect.

      I'm still not a fan of Maxtor. I'm not convinced that they can honestly maintain the same quality while trying to jump so far ahead.

  • Big drives are great and all, but it gives a single place to lose a lot of data at once if you aren't doing some sort of raid/mirroring (backups? errr, no habla).

    While stuffing my favorite all purpose Enlight 7237 with drives the other day (I made a plexiglass drive bay unit that would allow me to fit (5) 3.5 HDDs in (3) 5.25 bays) so I could consolidate some of my data, I ran into major heat issues.

    The plexiglass got so hot it started to slowly bend and the drives were so hot I could not hold them. They were a mix of older ata66 and ata100 western digitals and ibm deskstars. Not too old, not cutting edge. I've played with a few of the new maxtors that have the ata133 fluid dynamic drives and they do seem quieter, but even those got pretty warm.

    I don't need 100 gig of space on a light usage workstation, I'll have a hard time filling 40. I also don't want to add extra fans (the less moving parts the better in my book). How about more conetration on heat output?
  • "I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet! "


    I bought a 20gig and its still not full yet. Infact its not even over %25 full. I think the only use for big drives is for pirating and warezing.

    • So, which one of those two does porn come under?

    • Re:Thats funny... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AndyMan! ( 31066 ) <chicagoandy&gmail,com> on Thursday September 05, 2002 @06:14PM (#4203065)
      I think the only use for big drives is for pirating and warezing.


      Must be nice.

      My laptop came with a 20 gig HD.

      Add XP, Office, Photoshop, Resin, SQLServer, token Oracle install, a few hundred MB databases, and a few of my favorite IDE's and guess what? I have 1.5 gigs free.

      No warez. No games. No .mp3's.

      I bought an external firewire disk JUST so I could have a half decent .mp3 collection.

      I remember the days when I thought my 80 MB disk was hot shit. The fact that it was running on my 386@25mhz is irreleavant.

      Times change. I wanna big disk.

      _Am
    • Oh yeah?

      Try this:

      Build up a new linux system from scratch, following the instructions at linuxfromscratch.org.

      Then, build and install XFree.
      Then GTK, Enlightenment (plus all its dependencies) then Mozilla (plus its dependencies).

      DO NOT run make clean, and don't remove the original tarballs.

      Now shoot about 200 digital photos over a period of several months. Store all the photos on the hard drive.

      You still think you've got plenty of room? Think again. Sure, you can make clean once you get the stuff installed properly, but if you keep downloading newer versions and building and installing them, and you keep taking digital photos, you are going to run out of space again.

      Personally, I like 40-80 gig drives.

    • 200GB of everyday storage use... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @06:52PM (#4203308) Homepage
      I have 80GB of consistently-named, ID3-correct MP3 files I that have ripped myself using a script I wrote called mp3bot, which in turn uses cdparanoia and lame --r3mix. I own every CD represented in my collection, at this point nearly a thousand of them. Some people don't believe this, but I love music -- folk, r&b, rap, pop, metal, industrial, alternative, punk, ska, classical, neo-classical, lounge, blues, cool jazz, acid jazz, swing, and on and on... and eventually you have an entire storage unit rented to hold your empty jewel cases (the discs are in 250-disc flip packs in the closet, in case I need to get at them).

      BUT ANYWAY, I have written a shell script called 'jukebox' which allows me to do things like:

      jukebox 'sonic youth' 'soundgarden' 'beethoven' -shuffle -continuous

      and

      jukebox 'interstate love song' 'hey jude'

      and

      jukebox 'strawberry fields' 'gimme shelter' 'nachtmusik' -burnwavtracks

      and

      jukebox mytrackslist.txt -repeatall

      There's no way I ever want to go back to listening to CDs or creating mix CDs by hand. It's wayyyy to good to have instant access to *all* of your tracks for burning, shuffle-playing, album-playing, in any order, any mix, etc. But every time I buy a new CD and feed it to mp3bot, it adds a few MB to my collection... So I gotta keep adding hard drive space!

      Now, I also have a 5mp digital SLR camera and I work as a freelance photographer. Every shot I have taken since 1999 is archived online with database-driven, browser-based interface (with captions and exif data) that I wrote myself. I probably have a total of 100GB or more stored in my photo archive and keeping them all online (instead of on small removable storage media) allows me to quickly search for one or several images across my entire collection. No way I want to start having to insert and remove DVD-RAM discs all day to get at 20 specific images... Not to mention all that clutter!

      Now, to manipulate these photos, I also prefer Photoshop most of the time (sorry GIMP lovers!) and at times also use Corel Draw/PhotoPaint. And of course, I sometimes need to use MS Office as well because I also work as a freelance writer (photographer/writer, you can see how it goes together) and most publishers want stuff in Word format. To deal with these needs, I have Win4Lin running a Windows installation. All things told, this takes another 10GB or so on my drives.

      The only important caveat is that with all this data in one place, I do have to be sure back up. I don't want to run RAID-1, that's a waste of energy and adds environmental noise. I use 8mm AIT storage for monthlies and an 8505xl for incrementals, which together are enough to be functional for my circumstances.

      So there are some everyday uses of storage space -- about 200 GB of it all told -- a huge music collection, a huge photo archive, a Red Hat 7.2 installation with some Loki games and a Win4Lin installation. I bet the video guys can give you a few more uses.
  • >They are also resurrecting the (formerly Quantum) Fireball name, shortening their warranty (previously 3 years, now 1 year)

    Nothing like misleading the customers with another name and then screwing them with a shortened warranty......

    No thanks!
  • it costs less than $1.00 per Gb now... in hard drives. but its funny how expesive per Mb floppies still are....

    but what i really want is very high capacity USB keychain storage [thinkgeek.com]. like those - but with several GB of capacity - and built in security....

  • Urm... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Evro ( 18923 )
    Wow, somebody's going to have 160 gig hard drives soon... but what about the 180 gig drives that are already out [zoovy.com]?
    • They're not "already out". Just TRY to find one. Western Digital isn't shipping them for "another 2-3 weeks." I was supposed to have a batch of 200 gigers in my paws two weeks ago, but excuses abound.

      While you're at it, try to even find a 160GB drive about now. It's impossible. Maxtor was the only one making them, and they are out of stock nationwide. I spent the better part of 2 hours today trying to locate anyone who had them in stock. No dice.

  • Video editing, anyone? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dark Paladin ( 116525 ) <jhummel.johnhummel@net> on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:31PM (#4202798) Homepage
    I've been transferring the old video tapes of my daughter onto DVD (thank you, Superdrive and iDVD), and it's not surprising how fast these things get eaten up. As more people start using their home machines as digital editing stations, they'll be happy they've got these drives.

    Well, that and when you try to review Icewind Dale II and it takes up 1.5 Gigs of space...

  • ... cause that just reeks of confidence in ones product :-O

    I just hope the recommendation -- if it is in effect for this series -- figures prominently in the advertising and isn't hidden away in some technote, you know.. like.. IBM tried to sneak it past customers?

  • 38% thinner? WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by kinnunen ( 197981 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:34PM (#4202822)
    So what's your number one complaint about hard drives:
    - Unreliable
    - Not enough space
    - Not fast enough
    - Too expensive
    - Makes too much noise
    - Generates too much heat
    - Is too damn thick!

    • Re:38% thinner? WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by adamwright ( 536224 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:43PM (#4202869) Homepage
      Thinner drives make the possibiliy of huge capacity 3.5 disks in laptops, rather than the (relativly) expensive and smaller 2.5s that are currently used. Good for 1U rackmounts as well.

      Also adds the posibility that they can be used in things like Tivo without adding excess overhead.

      adamw
    • Let me get this straight... a comment that ridicules the fact that a commonly embedded computer item is getting smaller gets rated +5 on slashdot, home of the techno-geek?

      Christ-on-a-cracker!
  • How are you supposed to back up your data with a drive that big? Consumer-level tape drives seem to be fading away, and were never robust enough to save off that much data anyway. CD burners? Sure, I don't mind using 280 CD's for one backup run.

    DVD burners are looking promising, but they're still fairly expensive and of course they have standards issues.

    I like (and want) all the space, but I can't afford a tape library!
    • So you'll back up your 160GB drive onto 30 4.7G DVDs?
    • How are you supposed to back up your data with a drive that big?

      Buy another drive to back it up onto.

      Seriously, HDs are cheap enough now that if you want a good, quick, randomly accessible backup of your data, just duplicate the data on another HD.
    • Typical consumers don't buy backup products, so none are marketed to them (or priced for them). Besides, most people don't have more then 600MB of data that is worth any significant amount of money to them. Sure it would be annoying to loose it but most people don't have irreplaceable data that they can't live without. If you happen to be in the minority and can't live with any data loss, and you only have 160GB of data, you can use a DDS4 drive with amanda. A tape a day wouldn't put your last partial level 0 too far back in the tapeset if you need to do a single file restore, and you could do a full restore from four tapes. You can get a single DDS4 drive on ebay for fairly little money. I got one recently for $150. Add 10 tapes for another $150, and you're set for a year.
  • I am planning on getting a file server. you know something I can just keep adding disks with logical volume, so I won't run out of space soon.
    Things I am looking for
    1) IDE
    2) atleast capacity for 10+ drives (promise cards okay)
    3) big power supply
    4) nice ventilation.
    5) cheap. I don't have $5,000 to spend on a nifty file server

    I am sure other geeks out there have some sort of settup like this. Any advice on how to go about building/buying one?

    thanks heaps.
    LinuxLover
  • New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!

    If you've had the 100gb that long and its not at least half full, you're not downloading NEARLY enough porn. Come ON, man!! Get with the program!? This is the Internet we're talking about, history's foremost repository of nudity, filth, and general sexual sin. Slack-ass.

  • And it has a shorter warrenty? Does anyone else think that a name that suggests it might BURST INTO FLAME is a bad thing? Other names that make the product look bad to me: TNT, Rage, Fury, Radeon(I radiates? EMI?), VooDoo,
  • >> I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!

    You know, if you're ever accused of pirating DVD's, this statement should provide proof that you're not.

  • Sad warranty (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @05:50PM (#4202908)
    That's a damn bad warranty. My next drive will be a Seagate 15k.3, as soon as a retailer can get them in stock. It's $900 for 72GB, but I don't need more than that, the Seagate is fast as fuck, and the warranty covers five years.
  • they named it right, thats for sure. I had a Quantum fireball CX (made in ireland) and it did just what the name says...it turned into a fucking fireball. one of the controller micros exploded and flame shot out from under the lid housing. So I took it out and shot it a few times with a .50 cal ; }

  • New products like this make me feel like I'm not keeping up fast enough. I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!

    Don't worry, CowboyNeal... I'm sure there are a lot of Slashdot readers who only have 45 gigs of pr0n.
  • Capacity increases very quickly. That's nice. But what I really care about is performance keeping pace.

    I mean, the actual transfer rate with which one can get (ever more) data on or off the disks is increasing very slowly.

    The ratio of speed vs capacity is getting worse and worse.

    I'd much prefer less capacity and much better performance. Yes, I know I could go RAID0, but that means twice the noise, power consumption, and risk to reliability. Maybe they should have something like raid0-in-a-drive?

    • Buy a Seagate Cheetah X15. I just bought a second generation 36GB X15 on ebay for $260. I always buy SCSI peripherals for my high performance systems and EIDE for my cheap-ass game systems.

      My X15 can transfer 50MB/s rather easily. If you put that in an SMP workstation with a SCSI RAID host adapter, you should see some truly monstrous transfer rates. Don't forget adequate cooling. You can never have too many fans. I'd recommend an Antec case. They're very, very nice.

      I haven't yet been able to afford the SCSI RAID host adapter that I want. Seeing as how they start at around $400 new, I might have to settle for a used one off ebay. Oh well.
  • How do you backup these large drives?

    I recently was looking to improve my backup solution (dds2 tape drive, 8G compressed). I was looking for a system that did at least 30G compressed. All the DDS, DLT, and VXA drives that satisfied the requirement were more than $500. Media wasn't cheap either, with the worst being the VXA media at $70/15G.

    I gave up and went with a backup 160G hard drive and less-frequent multi-tape backups to the DDS2 drive. Is there a better way?
    • You buy an identical drive and a RAID card and mirror.
    • I've gone with a OnStream [onstream.com] ADR50 drive. 50GB compressed per tape will set you back a couple hundred for the drive and about 150 or so for a three pack of tapes.
      Bought mine on eBay and went for the ADR equipment, not the newer more expensive (but faster) ADR2, and ended up getting 250GB backup space for $300 or so.

      4MB/s transfer speed isn't too shabby either for a cheap tape drive, and the system works perfectly under Linux with Arkeia [arkeia.com], who have just released version 5 of a damn good enterprise-level backup system. Their current free-for-3-linux-server version (4.2) is not quite as good, but they've said version 5 free will be available soon.

  • CowboyNeal turns out to be a real person. And I thought he was just a /. ghost that lives in the polls.

  • Maxtor is junk. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by John Courtland ( 585609 ) on Thursday September 05, 2002 @07:21PM (#4203500)
    The Maxtor Bigfoot 5.25" drives they used to throw in the Compaq 5700s (8.4 GB I believe) were the most failure-prone drives I have ever seen. They would be the point of failure for at LEAST 50% of the Compaqs we got in the shop.
    Also, my parents had a HP Pavilion from 1996 or so with a Maxtor 1.2GB disk in it. Died within 2 years. Got a Western Digital, and it hasn't skipped a beat. In fact the ONLY 2 WD Drives I've seen go totally bad, were One I had that I was given because it was bad, and one where they tech who was working on it let the traces on the drive touch the case and powered it on (there's a way to get a new drive, hehe).
    Maybe I'm being unfair and they have gotten better, but I as well as many coworkers from that tech shop won't touch the things ever again.

  • Wrong News (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Chasuk ( 62477 ) <chasuk@gmail.com> on Thursday September 05, 2002 @08:10PM (#4203718)
    The Slashdot headline trumpets the wrong news - the story does not focus on Maxtor announcing 80GB HD platters or 160GB HD's (Maxtor has been selling 160GB drives for several months), but rather the serial ATA interface technology.

    Today Maxtor announces its next generation ATA drives, all centered around 80 GB/platter technology.

    Not criticizing overly much, but this would have been obvious had the poster actually read the article he submitted (assuming basic literacy skills).

    Which leads one to wonder...

    Not about basic literacy skills, but about having read the article at all.
  • 3 year warranty to 1 year warranty? Bad.

    I have a dead 80GB IBM drive in a box, and a dying one in a working machine, each with about a year of use. This is not good. Those particular drives seem to generate a bad spot every few months. It's getting seriously annoying.

    What should I buy next in the 80GB range?

  • I bought a 100GB drive last spring and it's not even half full yet!

    ..half empty.

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