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Hardware

Maxtor's 80GB Drive 217

Posted by CmdrTaco from the 100-days-of-music-on-/dev/hdb dept.
debren writes: "Just as I fork out the cash for a pair of 60GB drives, Maxtor brings out an 80-gigger, which they're claiming is a world record. It's the big story on their main page." Yeah I bought a 40 weeks before they released 60s. Remember when a harddrive was still a big deal?
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Maxtor's 80GB Drive

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  • DiamondMax 80 is teh four platter, 20 GB per platter hard drive solution

    ittm four surface, not four platter. unless they don't read from the bottom side of the platter, or something.

    also, i think it would be hard to fit four platters in a 1" high drive, but i'm only guessing ok bye.

    loev,

  • >Yeah, but you have to get a SCSI adapter, too.

    They don't cost that much. Check out the local swapfests and such. I'm sure you could get a symbios/ncr/lsi adapter for $50 or so. A small cable is not too much and a used drive can be found anywhere for $100 or less.

    Even if you get one without a bootable BIOS, and/or your motherboard doesn't include it, all you have to do is set up a boot partition to hold the kernel on an IDE.

    A couple of other nice things about SCSI is their *external* portability and the addressing. With a little forethought, you can set up a universal address allocation scheme. There is no fiddling with master/slave jumpers or limitations to 2 or 4 devices per box. HDs are ID 1-4, tapes are 6, CDROMs are 5, zips(this really helps) are 0 and so forth. It's a piece of cake to take my zip and disconnect from the laptop, plug in to the desktop, and boot. I just set up all the scsi systems(that I admin) with ID 0 free. No problem to "rescue" a scsi system, just plug in whatever you want to boot with drive ID 0 and go. You can have a full fledged system without the limitations of "what can I pack into a floppy" and no messing with BIOS boot-order settings either. You can plug in any kind of drive from zip to a multi-gig hard drive at ID 0 and the system will try to boot it when it comes up. I have two of these, one is the zip drive, and another is a 2G hard drive with external power supply. The HD has a 500MB partition with windos, another with a basic linux system, lilo setup to boot windos and a selection of kernels with different drivers, 100MB swap, and space for more. It's the ultimate "rescue" package that's usable in *any* x86 system with SCSI.
  • Though I agree with you that such a system is possibly a requirement for even the home user, the book's emphasis is on the vast systems used for information retrieval, combining not only the fixed-format information traditinally placed within the databases, but also a free-form multimedia information, such as video clips, images, text documents with formatting, etc., and querying for content.

    As an example from the book, the author lists a database designed to assist the police in apprehending a suspect, by feeding it a recent video of a drug-run into the system, and not only positively identifying the person, but also showing who the suspect's associates are.

    That kind of system is almost a possibility with today's technologies (and it is naive to think that institutions such as the FBI and the ATF do not have systems similar in capabilities as this), but is non-trivial in both the computational requirements and in storage space.

  • How about 128K for ~$25,000 (back in the 60's)? Big (12" diam.) monsters. They were used to run/collect data from the cyclotron in my department. There are still a couple lying around that are used for demonstrations of rotational motion. In fact, in those days, one could not cycle power more than ~12 times before the read-heads cut grooves into the storage media and the device was rendered useless!
  • They've been able to fit 4 platters into a 19mm laptop drive since at least 1995:

    http://www.q uantum.com/products/archive/daytona/daytona_specs_ page.htm [quantum.com]

    (Most laptop drives are around 6mm these days, so I'd guess they'd only have one or two platters.)

  • Ok. First of all: Duke nukem was merely a reference.

    Secondly, How do you propose that a Game company create a game like Diablo 2? Diablo 2 is a 2d based game that is heavily based on Tiles (jpegs/bmps or any similar format), Animations, and Cinematics. The tiles are only created for one resolution (640 x 480) as no other resolutions are supported. The videos use Bink technology which is likely Mpeg-4 based. (Note: The videos are contained in the Collectors edition on a DVD, which gives you an idea to their length and quality).
    The files are stored in Blizzard proprietart MoPaQ format, which provides custom tuned compression, aside from other features (encryption, etc). This obviously means the files aren't wasting space on your hard drive 'in the open' and are rather expanded as needed.

    Back to the topic at hand, my point is that perhaps my mother won't use 80 gigs, nor even 8, but enough people will find applications for 8 or 80 gigs to warrant companies to put out new and more technologies. There will be no shortage of applications lining up to make use of the extra space, and also no shortage of users willing to use or find those applications.

    I remember when a 1 gig drive was considered to be massive, and i never imagined what could fill up that much space. Now, 1 gig is peanuts and makes for a better ornament than go in an end-users PC. The same is true today, one may not see what can fill 80 gigs, but it will happen. Wait 2 years, you'll see.

  • Official International SI norm [nist.gov]:

    1 MegaByte (MB) is 1,000,000 bytes..
    1 MebiByte (MiB) is 1,048,576 bytes...

    Get your facts straight, Maxtor is right..

    And yes, about Maxtors timing issues.., own two myself (not the 80GB) and they suck...

    More details: Large-Disk-HOWTO [linuxdoc.org]
  • This is like saying that everyone needs a dual Alpha system because "I need to solve systems of thousands of equations."

    No, it's like saying "I have a certain amount of space and it's not enough". I never claimed anyone's PDA needed 100 gigs.

    But the thread started with "nobody needs this space". But of course as more people store MP3's (many first-time hard-drive buyers I know are there for MP3 downloads) and do home video editing (which is why I pointed out we don't even use firewire -- too much data!) your mom really will be able to use this space...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.
  • I've seen the larger drives coming in about $6-$7
    a gigabye. In a year or two we'll break a buck a gigabyte.

  • The only HDD I've ever had crash was a Maxtor. All I did was drop it in the driveway.
  • Someone does. Saw them at MS TechEd (shoot me) about a year ago. They said they were putting the 'I' back in "RAID". It was all PCI-based, and looked very nice for the price.
    If I find their name I'll post it here.

  • 80 GB? (Score:2)

    by kris ( 824 )
    That's slightly over two months of MP3, played 24/7. You'll need more than 26000 titles at 3.5 minutes each to fill it, or 2200 CDs with 12 titles each.

    Or in other words, it is well past anything your average radio station is playing. It is not video which killed the radio star, it's MP3.
    © Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
  • And I've only had one Maxtor fail on me in years of PC work. In fact I've had a 7.2GB Maxtor spinning (with only a few power offs) doing over 8GB in transfer/day (2+GB file base) for almost three years. I also ran a nice old 650MB Maxtor SCSI drive that was mmm....8 years old I think, powered on most of that time (christ, it was a 650M...at the time it was pulled from service, there were still very few multi gigabyte hard disks out there...so I know it came from a server) and it only died about a year later. Wouldn't spin up *sigh*. Let's face it, every vendor has their bad years. I swear by Western Dig personally, but have had two of their drives die on me; I RMA'd them, no questions asked. Nontheless, I'd agree, the IBM drives ROCK! :) And somehow old IBM's seem to work with them when the BIOS only supports 4GB drives *grin*...it's wierd, IBM told me they weren't even supposed to work and here I am sitting with 8gb platters on old p100's where the comparative Maxtor wouldn't work.

    --Dox
  • Hahaha, OMG, now that brings back memories :)

    --Dox

  • Terrabyte (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I can now make, a pretty close a 1 terrabyte machine for under $5000. I can have a promise card with 4 attached, a motherboard with 4 attached and a intel controller with 4 attached. The is 960 gigs. Screw thos $100,000 terrabyte machines. P.S. My experience with maxtor drives have been good. However Quantum, just plain is a hardend floppy drive.
  • i took apart an old like 200 meg drive and it had four platters evidently they can fit four in.
  • Now, I do coding, gaming, graphics editing, etc. at home and I hardly use even half of my 12 Gig HD. My biggest problem is data integrity, not storage space. Hard drive manufacturers, are you listening? Here is what we need:

    Better Fault tolerant drives! A standard disk drive has 2 platters/ four heads, right? Well, why not implement an internal Raid 5 with four disks, one for each platter side? Then your 80 gig drive would turn into a 60 gig raid 5 array. If one of sides should go bad, the user could be alerted and could transfer the data to a new hard drive before the data is _really_ lost when one of the other sides craps out.
  • When are people going to start using Ultra160 SCSI for something other than digital video?

    When they start making it less expensive than an Air Force fighter jet.

  • One of the biggest limitations the hard drives faced were the number of sectors. Originally a hard drive had to have the same number of sectors on track 0 that it had on track n. I'm sure you can see where the problem is. If you have 1024 sectors each holding x KB's on the inner most track you need to have 1024 sectors holding x KB's on the outter most track. Therefor there is a lot of wasted space as you move from the inner most to the outter most track on the platter. Recently they found a way to over come this with variable speed platters and heads so you could better utilize the space on the platter.
  • Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
  • that 80 gig drive is 40 times bigger than the drive that came with my computer. I should be ashamed. are 80 gig drives for home use ever going to catch on? it's cool to see how big they can get, but won't it get to the point where people just have no use for the extra space
  • I bought a 6.5G Maxtor drive several years ago... After my 5th RMA, I now have a ~10G UDMA 66 drive, which just died a few days ago (it won't spin up anymore...). I have learned my lesson, I do back-ups on a regular bases :)

    They have a great "no hassle" RMA policy, they are cheap, but that is about all maxtor has going for them.

    80Gs? No thank you. Sure, space would be great for an mp3 server, but not if you loose all the data every 6months. Of course, I have no experience with their newer products... have they gotten any better? Maybe its just me and that has had horible luck with maxtor drives...

    Dorao
  • You're right, it was RAM, and it was an urban legend.

    But us old farts remember a time when DOS had trouble dealing with disks larger than 32 Meg. (The first of many limits. 512 Meg. 2 Gig. What next?)
  • The 80GB drive is 5400 RPM and only has 4 platters, and therefore 8 heads. The claimed media speed (I assume for a sustained contiguous transfer, which is best case) is 46.7MB/sec. The claimed average seek time is " None of these numbers are too horribly bad for a 5400 RPM IDE disk. My problems are:

    • If you really only use 2-12GB of data, and the other "junk" you'd fill this drive with is archival stuff you're not going to access hardly at all, write your junk out to tape/CD/DVD-RAM or something
    • If you really have close to 80GB of working data to work with, accessing it all from a single 80GB drive is going to be much slower than using 4 20GB drives in a Raid-1 (striped) config... or even just as a 4 disks with different data on them.
    • Of course, it goes without saying that regardless of any of the above, SCSI is better than IDE for serious data access.

    The IDE bus is at 66 on modern motherboards now, with 100 on it's way out the door as we speak (these Maxtor's in question are Ultra-100, incidentally). The very least they could do with these mammoth drives is get the internal speed of the media closer to the bus speed, so that there isn't so much performance loss (versus same data set split over multiple smaller drives).

  • When I got a computer with a 100MB HD over eight years ago, I thought that it would be more than I would ever need. Ditto my 16GB HD two years ago. Wrong! I was being short-sighted.

    Now I am convinced that I will always be able to use all the space provided by the latest consumer hard drive offerings. What takes up so much space? Multimedia. I like to store and edit the stuff. Therefore, I need as much space as possible. 80GB is just one step along the way. (I'm not buying one, BTW. I just bought a Maxtor 40GB drive in January, and I'm holding out for maybe a 160GB HD. :) Sure, most people don't need anywhere near that amount of space (for the time being, at least). But things like high-capacity hard drives facilitate computing enjoyment for this power user.

    Just wait... In a couple years, it will be commonplace. In a couple more, it will be absolutely paltry -- even for average users! :)

  • 1394 isn't 400 megabytes a second it's 400 megaBITS a second. that's 50 megabytes per second. you can easily max that out with a couple newer drives on the bus.
  • My webserver/SMTP server is on a 486/DX2 50. I have two 340meg IDE disks. Works great.

  • OOOOOOOH, 5 gigs more than a IBM Deskstar (Score:3)

    by ashpool7 ( 18172 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:58AM (#920472) Homepage Journal
    The 75GXP has been out since march, supports ATA/100, spins at 7200, and is overall a better drive. Why does Maxtor, a low-end hard drive supplier compared to IBM or Seagage (or WD, but I don't like their quality), get props on slashdot? I mean, seriously, this ISN'T a big deal, except to Maxtor. I'd never buy this drive. Maxtor has serious quality issues. I had a friend get his hard drive replaced THREE TIMES before they just sent him a newer model. Even with that one, it would have problems booting occasionally. (The fact that Maxtor wouldn't help him recover his data, point him in the right direction, or send him the hard drive back to do it himself pissed him off too)

    Yes, this is probably a flame, maybe a troll. But I strongly advise against anyone even considering this drive.
  • Well, I'm a bit of a data packrat, but I'd kinda expect that you can fill just about any drive in about 6 months. Now, granted, it might take a while to fill 80GB from the net without a high speed connection, but anybody who's going to buy one of these drives is going to have a whole stack of other toys.

    If, for example, you're sucking data from your Digital Video Camera, it's not going to take that long before you're choosing which clip to delete to store that latest 'cool' clip.

    Back around 1989, my work went from 280MB (2x70 + 140) to 1.7GB (1x 1GB plus a 700MB drive [all 5" full height drives]). I predicted that the drives would be over 75% full within 6 months. This had nothing to do with current data acquisition rates -- The 280MB had lasted a couple of years. It had to do with the fact that the space was available.

    Needless to say, I was right.
    Data expands to fill available space. -- Murphy


  • You have to remember something though - we only have 4 IDE connectors. You can't just toss an arbitrary number of IDE drivers in there.

    Still, you have a point.
  • So you need to back up 60 or 80 gigs? D-VHS tapes can hold about 44GB of data (so get two). Looks like all you'd need is to get a deck (about $700 these days for the best-in-category PV-HD1000 [panasonic.com]), connect it with 1394, and dump out all that data onto tape ($15 a pop -- less than 50 cents a gigabyte). Plus, it's a VHS-compatible VCR. Nifty, yes/no?
  • [Hopeful-corrective-reply-stoppage]

    I meant Raid-0 (Striped), Not Raid-1, which is mirroring... not that it's material to the comment.

  • I knew there must be some reason. Thanks for the education.
  • They already exist -- Solid State RAM Disks. These are memory chip arrays (usually with battery back-up.) Just like early hard drives they are very expensive.

    $30,000+, 3.2GB, 30+MB/s, and 9000+ I/Os per sec, see .

    Aside from the above, it is easy to see that all hard drive makes are going be shipping 100GB drives by the November time-frame.
  • I currently run a 60 gig hard disk with a BIOS that can only see 8. I created a 500k boot partition
    and the rest is one large partition and it works fine. I have another drive in the system to split things up a bit.
  • Hard drives, like everything else, is a balance: you can get larger capacity, with only limited performance gains that are associated with bigger platters. Or you can get memory-like speed (50 us access time) with "solid state" drives [quantum.com] at the expense of cost, and size (available from 268 MB to 3.20 GB). These babies, however, work on SCSI-3 at can only do 30 MB/s transfer speed. Hooks them up in a RAID striping configuration, and it's even faster.

    There are also, I believe, some solid state - normal hybrids, where there are platters like in mainstream drives but the cache on the drives are huge - the only issue that a battery is required so data can be written to the platters during power outages.

    Ultimately, however, we're going to have to get away from the parallel interface to an uber-fast serial interface (hmm... OC-3 for hard drives?). I think another limiting factor is simply the physics of hard drives... so maybe some sort of holographic sugar-cube storage (this message will dissolve in 5 seconds...). Of course, being able to accurately predict reading & writing locations is good too.
  • Ethernet typically falls over dead when the net reaches about 40% of capacity.

    I don't think so.

    Please see Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality [compaq.com].

  • You'll find that games under Windoze will quickly suck up a lot of drive space. For instance a full install of Diablo II (which I'm on the last part of) takes 1500 megs and a multiplayer install is 950 megs. Now add that up with a full install of Baldur's gate (2.5 gigs) and about a dozen other games at 500 megs to 1 gig, and it's time for a new hard drive. Admittedly my amiga 2000 has an 82 meg SCSI hardrive (full height 5.25...ouch!) and I'm only useing about 10 megs of it (gotta love it!). True is your final comment that drives are full of junk and most of it's not used. I use about 2-2.5 gigs for a custom install of SuSE on each of my 8 or so machines that are running it. I only use around 20-30 packages on a regular basis. Do some rendering with blender, download some MP3s, forget where you compiled a program and recompile it, and soon you do have a drive full of junk...not to mention if you have Star Office or Applixware installed (Applix rules!!!) This all boils down to the fact that with a normal person playing games and using office suites, playing mp3s and using some other applications you do need more space. This will continue until people learn how to program efficiently. On this note, I took a 41k mod file created in Octamed and converted it to MP3. It's now 2.5 megs. How's that for compression....how much drive space did I lose?
  • In the past year, I've bought bought 9 Maxtors... 7 of which are gathered on my desk here awaiting return. 4 DOA. and they won't even talk to you about returns until you run their DOS-based diagnostic program; which is a bitch when the drive is so screwed that having it connected causes the computer to hang hard during the boot sequence. I'm worried about the 2 that're still running, I'm aiming to replace them ASAP 'cuz I don't trust maxtor no more.

    Maxtor used to be pretty reliable (my old 120Mb maxtor's are still running), but it seems like about two years ago they went down the tubes.

    # end rant

  • I'm not sure if those words were actually ever spoken, but that was a limitation in MS-DOS at one time. I believe that it was corrected to allow 256MB in ver 3.3.
    ________________
  • Yeah, and a Ferrari 360 Modena is superior to a Mazda MX-3. That doesn't mean the Mazda doesn't have its place, nor that Mazda's shouldn't be available.

    -----------------------

  • well, Some month ago, our HPuX server's one scsi drive failed. So out to buy a replacment. Unfortunetly, The serrver had Fast-Wide disk's and they are incompatible with the LVD disks they sell all around. And ofcourse, The server has it's SCSI controller connected to a propierty bus, And HP doesn't sell Ultra-Wide controller for it. (new servers come with pci bus)

    At this point, you begin to panic, realizing, that people are starting to need the services that where on the broken disc.

    So the options I found: By a new server (and scrap all the working Fast-Wide disc's - You can't Connect them to the Ultra-Wide Bus. Or by an Fast-Wide disc, with gross overprice (4x the price of a twice a large UW disc!)

    The myriad of scsi variants makes The life of using them a utter pain in the ass. The thumb rule is that nothing works with nothing but the same variant.

    And IRL I have seen no evidence to back the fact that SCSI disc's would be more reliable than IDE ones.

  • From the IBM Deskstar 40GV and 75EXP product spec at http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/prodspe c/dtla_spw.pdf - I get: (Glossary):

    GB 1,000,000,000 bytes
    MB 1,000,000 Bytes
    KB 1,000 bytes unless otherwise specified

    and a "Customer usable data bytes" of 76,869,918,720.

    Where are you getting 80,530,636,800 from?

  • yes it might hold 80gb of pr0n....or....games, but if it sounds like a leer jet taking off in the middle of my house i wouldnt want to deal with it!

  • There's an interesting book called Pricinciples of Multimedia Database Systems (ISBN: 1558604669). This is one of the books used for one of my undergraduate course in the same topic.

    Of course, something like this would be completely overkill for the home user, but with something like a large archive of videos and such, it would be invaluable.

    With latest versions of Informix, building datablades for supporting this is possible, but such an undertaking is obviously nontrivial.

  • 14.4 modem, circa Netscape 1. Hit a pr0n site the first day AOL discovered the internet. $1,000,000 connection charges for March.

  • I lost a 60 gig drive that was 95% full of MP3s -- backup is a big problem at that size. All due to the f%cking highpoint controller card. Next time I'm buying a promise controller and setting up RAID, which is surprisingly the cheapest backup method...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.
  • Actually I have 97 partitions on that disk.

    not really, just seeing if you're paying attention...

    Someday when you buy your very own computer, I hope you can afford a disk that's bigger than 8 gigs. That way you will see for yourself that if LILO cannot see the disk properly, then probably fdisk will also not see the disk properly. You won't be able to create partitions above that 8 gig boundary unless you've got either BIOS support, or EZ-DRIVE installed.

    My current machine has a new BIOS, and I didn't have to do anything special with my other 13.5 gig drive.

  • We've got 100 gigs on our video system and it's not close to being enough. We don't even use the firewire interface because the files would be too big -- we still capture analog so we can get better compression...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.
  • I don't know a whole lot about hard drive construction (of course i've take them apart and whatnot), and I was wondering if there is a limit to how much can fit on your typical 3.5" platter and is there a limit to how many platters you can have? I suppose there would be, otherwise it would slow access times quite a bit since all of the arms on the drive move at the same time to the same place. any hard drive experts out there that know the physical limits? For the most part, I just stick them in my machine and plug away. As a matter of fact, I have never had any problems with a hard drive going out, except when I dropped one a while back.
  • Is Taco old enough to remember? :)

    I was using one for development in 82, and by 87 it was kind of strange not to have one . . .

    OTOH, I remember being excited about Apple adding the *floppy* as an available peripheral :)

  • Have to... (Score:3)

    by Colin Winters ( 24529 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:29AM (#920502)
    It works out to 56.89 days of playing MP3s. Wow.

    Colin Winters

  • Take a trip down memory lane ... (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:29AM (#920504)
    Take a trip down memory lane with me, if you will.

    I remember a number of years ago(the number is about 10, I think), I was bugging my parents for a 10MB drive. Why did I want the drive? Not for capacity, of course. I mean, even in the days of DOS 3.3(I think I used DR-DOS, actually), 10MB wasn't a whole heck of a lot. What was it? Fourteen 720k floppies? And with most programs, you could fit four of five on a single disk. Nope, it was SPEED.

    A hard drive was so much faster in those days, compared to the alternatives. So, if you were incredibly rich, you could afford a big fat 20-30MB hard drive, and your machine would be blazing. Incredibly fast(relatively) non-volatile storage.

    Now what do we have? Honestly? Compared to ever other component on our system, our non-volatile storage is damned slow. Even slower than RAMBUS ;) We're solving these problems with RAID and such, but those are really just stop-gap measures. So, today, when you really want to make your system faster, you(generally) buy more RAM. Hard drives just don't get a whole heck of a lot faster over time. I have an old 730M drive I use for my home directories, and it does 8M/second(unbuffered). My relatively-new IBM DeskStar drive gets 16M/s(again, unbuffered).

    So, I ask you this: When are we going to get fast nonvolatile storage?

    Dave
  • Highpoint 370 chip [...] Can you say FAST????

    can you say BUGGY???? those highpoint ATA 66 and ATA 100 controllers that come with teh ABIT mobos suck and blow at once. spend an extra us$30 for a promise ATA card that actually works. not as good as scsi, but damned fast and damned cheap and stable. to do ATA raid on teh promise card go here:

    http://detonate.net/raid/

    have fun ok bye.

    loev,

  • I can saw "fast", but I don't think that setup will be. I mean, not relatively speaking. If you're using PC100 ram sticks, that'll give you somewhere around a theoretical 800MB/s(I think it's more like 327MB/s). Anyways, that nice little 50-60M/s seems pretty paltry.

  • I'll wait on this just like every other new item (Score:3)

    by pogle ( 71293 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @08:04AM (#920511) Homepage
    The hard drive size increase, the 3-D video card improvements, and the processor speed madness all mean one thing to me: wait. Wait until one of two things happens:

    1. The race slows down. Prices settle, bugs are found and fixed. Support is available.

    2. I require something better than what I have. I've used up my 27 gig drive, and need more. Or my current Voodoo3 dies in a power surge. Or I actually notice performance loss from my celeron 500.

    I see no reason to run out and spend large amounts of money just so I can have the computer with the biggest [insert part here] in the neighborhood. I wait until one of the reasons above--then I usually get it cheaper, and of better quality. I'm not just an average computer user either--I play the best games and do programming, as well as some dabbling into graphics design and animation. I get the fullest use from what I have. And until that doesnt suffice, I wont spend more money on a new product. I dont keep up with specifics, but I do recall hearing about both 3dfx and Intel rushing certain developmental aspects of their products just to release them to match a competitor. I could be wrong, but even just hearing that is enough to make me think twice about buying from them.
    And now, with harddrive sizes increasing drastically, how long until we hit a limit? Or implement a new storage medium thats better and faster? I'd rather wait an extra year for something like that instead of blowing more money every day for the newest old technology with more stuff squeezed onto it.

    Just my $0.02, but unless you really need the space/speed/pretty colors, wait a bit and watch the price go down as quality goes up.

  • Re:BIOS and such (Score:4)

    by PD ( 9577 ) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @08:05AM (#920512) Homepage Journal
    You can safely use EZ-DRIVE. LILO knows all about it. A couple years ago I bought an 11.5 gig maxstor drive, and the BIOS could only see 8 gigs of it. Since LILO gets the drive info from the BIOS, LILO could also only see 8 gigs of the drive.

    My solution was to install the EZ-DRIVE program which allowed LILO to see the entire drive.

  • I thought it was a gel cube about that size that held a terrabyte and it was well before 100Mhz was even on the horizon (late 80's, early 90's maybe?)
  • Troll!?!?!?

    Moderator points are way too easy to get these days.
  • I feel that that's the problem. What do people buy more RAM for, really? The OS just starts cashing the hard drive. So, gosh darn it, why doesn't somebody make our drives faster?

    Dave

    P.S.: The memory industry must be just eating this up, it's so yummy.

  • Does anyone have recommendations for backup units? Anyone know of any good low-cost solutions? I'm having enough trouble deciding how to backup 5-10 gigs, much less 60!

    I recently bought one of those amazingly inexpensive Sony Superstations, which I was pretty pleased with, except I've had 2 tapes out of 6 fail in the last 6 months of use. On the other hand, I live 2 blocks from the beach, and the environment is incredibly hostile to computer equipment.


    --

  • I have a hard enough time backing up my 6gb drive at home. Where are you going to get an affordable backup solution for that huge 60gb drive of yours?

    I know I'd rather have a few 9gb LVD SCSI drives than one huge IDE. That way, if one fails, you're only screwed a fraction of what you'd be screwed over if your 60gb failed. Besides, SCSI has that ability to do multiple things at once (I think?). Copy a file while writing another, like that. Maybe it's because I grew up a Mac addict, but I've always believed in SCSI over IDE.

    I dunno, something that big just seems to be asking to fail catastrophically.
  • I recently bought a Maxor 60 GB to replace my 17.2 GB drive. I was strangely confused when I had to jumper on the cylinder translation feature to make it work. I figured since my BIOS supported the 17.5 GB drive just fine, 60 GB would be okay too.

    In the past I've run across the 80MB limit, the ~2GB limit, and the ~16 GB limit, but you would think after all that they would have figured out how to overcome the BIOS translation issue permamently now. Is'nt that what LBA addressing mode is all about?
  • I'm starting to think that such a system may soon be necessary, even for the home user. As we start doing more and more of our work on the computer, and as it starts augmenting the television and radio, we need some way to keep track of where in the filesystem it's located. For example, I sometimes archive realaudio broadcasts by saving the link. However, the filename is usually a machine-readble index, and rarely has any information about the actual broadcast. Regardless of my filing system, there is still no easy way to search the actual broadcast for an interesting comment.
    I have a similar problem at work with the "paperless" (Hahahaaaa) image solution that was implemented on a filesystem. Remember the old commercial line "Roaches check in but they don't check out." That's sort of how our document filing system works. We can check images into it and get a document number. However, without that document number there is no way to search the image catalog. We have maybe 100 vendors we use. 8 of these are major vendors and searching on their name returns thousands of entries. OCR may help eventually, but given the quality of our invoices (many printed on carbon copy, many bent, folded, spindled and mutilated) it's not a workable option.
    Also, an ideal filesystem would have some sort of revision control a la RCS/CVS. Because we have so much *space*, it may not even be necessary to delete files, merely show the latest version with the option to always recover an earlier version, regardless of the application.
  • The max theoretical transfer rate of ultra ATA 100 is 100 MB/second. So what??!! You'd be hard pressed to convince me that this 5400 RPM drive is going to outperform my 10,000 RPM SCSI Cheetah. And what is often missed when SCSI and IDE interfaces are compared has nothing to do with the transfer rate of the interface, but the fact that the processing of I/O from the hard drive is greatly offloaded from the processor to the SCSI controller, freeing up cpu cycles to do other stuff. After using SCSI for some time, wouldn't think of switching to IDE again. I can't remember the last time I made a frisbee out of a CD-R. And yes, I can actually use my computer when I am making a CD without having to worry about ruining the disk. That is the true power of SCSI.
  • The 75GXP is only marginally smaller than the Maxtor 80GB. Maxtor Megabtyes are actually smaller than real Megabytes - No kidding! (read small print on the 1 page owners manual included with each Maxtor) Maxtor considers 1,000,000 bytes to be a megabyte, whereas most propellor heads like myself consider 1,048,576 to be a megabyte.

    Deskstar: 80,530,636,800 bytes
    Maxtor: 81,964,000,000 bytes

    Not that big a difference. My money is on the deskstar, I've not had a single Deskstar or Travelstar fail on me, while I've tossed plenty of WDs and Maxtors. I would be willing to bet that ATA-66@7200rpm beats ATA-100@5400rpm in the trenches...Increase rotational latency by about 25%.

  • ...I just sent a check for about US$150 for a brand-new 20-gigger. I'd only want an 80 if I had access to a T3 line and was a hardcore Napsterite.
  • 1394 isn't 400 megabytes a second it's 400 megaBITS a second. that's 50 megabytes per second. you can easily max that out with a couple newer drives on the bus.

    Crap... that really disappoints me. That means that the gigabit Ethernet shipping with the G4's is effectively faster than the Firewire ports. The only advantage being the plug&play device management. That really pokes holes in my thinking of Firewire being a valuable storage technology. I guess those SCSI cards are still essential after all.



    -carl
  • Think in terms of the big apps running these days, and the machinery behind them. Can our OSs handle these huge drives? Can Oracle or Informix or Sybase effectively use this much space? Or will we have to partition these physical drives into 8-10 smaller spaces, thereby pandering to the limitations of our software technologies?

    I can forsee a whole lot of wasted space as folks start defining multi-meg partitions. I'm pretty sure my BIOS won't understand it, either (but I'm sure there's a nice CDROM with the drive package that'll take care of that for me).

    Wonder when the software folks (OSs, DBs) are going to start building products that will be able to use the hardware of their futures, and not their pasts?

  • 5 meg, $5000, 1980. For an Apple ][.


    ...phil
  • Please see Measured Capacity of an Ethernet: Myths and Reality.

    Nice paper. Quite old though. Things have changed a bit. The speed of the ethernet "bus" has incresed, but the packet size hasn't. However the very nice change for Ethernet is that switches are far far far more common now then in 1988ish. Cheaper per port then a repeater was in '88 by a lot. I havn't even seen a Gigabit "hub" that wasn't a switch.

    Tieing in with that, full duplex Ethernet is now failry common. And you can get almost 100% utilisation with two hosts on a net and full duplex Ethernet. You can do that with more hosts if you have all switched ports and the right access patterns (no overcommit). Assuming the switches don't suck of corse.

    I still have a soft spot in my heart for FDDI, but all switched ethernet is pretty good.

  • That's right - if your running Linux and boot off a SCSI drive you dont even NEED to install the disk drive in BIOS! The kernel drivers will find it. However, if you do need to boot off the beyond-bios-capability disk, sometimes they have jumpers that make it report fewer cylinders, just to get around BIOS (if it locks up or otherwise freaks out), and then the Linux kernel will still use the entire disk.
  • A few months back I bought an external IDE box with a USB interface so I could connect a 20Gig hard drive to my Ultralight PC. It's mostly for playing MP3s off of and other really low bandwidth things. I had no problems and it cost 30% less than the 170MB hard drive I bought for my 386 about 10 years ago (I have a job now and all ;). The prices are inane, the sizes insane. You can easily connect more than one HDD to any PC these days, what does it matter if it's 60Gig or 80Gig? There's even network drives - Quantum has an ad in the latest APC - that plug into any 10/100 network. Storage is trivial, so why the story?
  • Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231 [kuro5hin.org]. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!

    --

  • Whats the big deal? The main harddrive on my most important machine has had a capacity of 80 for years.

    Oh, and whats with replacing the M with a G in there? Some new ISO thing?

    Seriously though, I still boot my old 386 from a 80 meg drive, which cranks out about 3 rc5 blocks a day. Makes a good router though, and except for a little noise isn't a bad foot rest. Haven't had a monitor in a while.

  • Whoa there.

    You have apparently confused the speed of the interface with the speed of the device.

    Serial ATA is just a faster interface. That only helps getting stuff out of the on-drive cache (typically about 1 MB). The real problem is just getting the bits off of the drive platter is still slow. So slow, in fact, that for casual applications there is little difference between the old UDMA and even the new ATA-66.

    It's a mechanical problem, not an interface problem

    By the way, why doesn't someone make a PCI controller card that presents a fast, low-overhead SCSI interface to the CPU and software, but is really a smart RAID controller for a bunch of cheap IDE drives in a RAID config?

    Imagine hooking up five of those Maxtor 80GB drives in a striped config, set up to look like a single, wicked-fast 400 GB SCSI drive?

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • We've got 100 gigs on our video system and it's not close to being enough.

    This is like saying that everyone needs a dual Alpha system because "I need to solve systems of thousands of equations." There's a difference between someone working at, say, Pixar, are Joe Linux Tinkerer (as much as Joe hates to admit it).
  • I bought a 6 gigabyte HD in 1998. I have a 2MB linux partition and a 4MB Windows partition. I have some big Windows apps installed, like Delphi and the Corel Draw suite, plus some kids multimedia software, and that machine gets used for both software development and graphics arts. Even so, I'm using only about a third of the space, maybe a bit more. Most of that is for operating systems and software; I'm using less than 50 MB for data files (mostly Photo Paint images).

    Heck, I still have a Power Macintosh with a 350MB hard drive. It'ss used for software development, web design, email, and a maintaining a database. There's still about 160MB free.

    I tend to think that most hard drives are filled with junk, like application suites of which only a few parts get used, or preinstalled software, or MP3 collections. As such, I don't see much point in them getting bigger, or at least in headlines about them getting bigger.
  • What about Serial ATA? Serial ATA, which is on target to be out to the consumer by Christmas, which will have a max data transfer rate of 1.5-2 gigabits/sec, and there will be solutions out later than that that will have multiple channels, imagine a HD with 8 gbs of bandwith, it is happening....

    Unless i am mistaken, ram does not even get 8 gbs of bandwith, last time i checked it was in the 5-6 gbs.

  • RPMs matter a lot for some applications (Score:5)

    by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @08:18AM (#920589) Journal
    What are you trying to _do_ with an 80GB drive? If you're going for maximum playback or recording rate for streaming material, that's one thing; going for fast seek times for an SQL database is another, and file systems are also different.

    RPMs matter for video, in that they help a drive crank out data at a high rate, but that also depends on how much data is on a track (and controllers and such). An 80GB drive probably has lot more per track than the once-fuge-and-fast 10GB 7200RPM drives you need for video, so going 5400RPM instead of 7200 probably isn't a big difference, because it's probably still fast enough for real-time.

    Most Unix and other file systems tend to be optimized to minimize seek time. This is because back when the theory developed, in the mid 80s, seek times were a lot slower than rotational latency, and you dealt with rotational latency by track caching, especially as memory got cheap enough to cache tracks in the disk drive's controller. Margo Seltzer did some work in the early 90s showing that this was no longer really the case - seek times were down under 10ms, and rotation speeds were mostly 3600rpm, with newer drives using 5400, which meant average rotational delay was 6-8ms. This means that it makes more sense to schedule disk accesses based on expected rotational latency as well as seek time between tracks, because they're now of similar magnitude. That was a few years ago, and seek times have gotten a bit faster, and RPMs have gotten higher, so if you're trying to do cutting-edge random-access file system performance, yeah, you want the high-RPM drive. But if you've got a spare 64MB of RAM for disk cache, you'll optimize most of that away. And if you're using the 80GB for high-performance SQL databases, you can't wait for moving parts anyway, so you've spent the extra thousand dollars for the extra GB of RAM.

  • Ethernet typically falls over dead when the net reaches about 40% of capacity. 40% of 1Gb/S = 400 Mb/sec. That's why they came up with switching hubs.


    ...phil

  • Slow hard drives are fine, as long as they hold what they're designed to and can read streaming media *ahem* at an acceptable rate (Which they can just fine; they're stupid fast for video and audio streaming, albeit single user).

    What you need is a 1gb disk of solid-state storage that's fast, just like the high-speed SRAM cache that's on your motherboard/processor and how it talks to the slower (normal) dynamic memory.

    I think you'd get interesting results if this was supported on the operating system level. I use huge hard drives for a central database of (my) mp3's and movies - this is really convienent. I don't need speed for that, cheap-ass 20gb 5400rpm drives are already overkill!

    If you selectively filtered streaming content from a NVRAM cache that's big, and let things like games get loaded in there (and operating system libraries, etc) I think a real speedup would be possible. I wonder if anyone knows if this is planned for the next generation of hard drives? I know there's research into non-volatile solid state storage being done by IBM and Quantum.

    For the record, I remember buggin my mom to get a abhorently expensive 10MB drive for my Commodore 64 (yeah, they existed!).. heh heh.

  • As it stands, we treat our hard drives like really big bags in which to keep all of our stuff.

    We don't have the bus speeds or the interfaces to really take advantage of drives this big. You can spin that drive as many RPMs as you want, but do you really think that ATA/100 is going to amount to that much real-world speed? Even the firewire spec, which everybody talks about being such hot shit, doesn't come near to the promised 400MB/s throughputs.

    Sure, you can keep a whole heap of DVD movies and MP3's on these huge drives, but it's gonna be some time before technologies start catching up to drives of this capacity.

    Also, I'm not an expert on Linux file systems. Can Linux take advantage of huge drives like this for fast searching? Apple's HFS+ does a pretty good job, but the lag starts to show at hefty drive sizes.

    -carl
  • Raid as "backup" is bullshit.
    A second disk as "backup" is bullshit.

    Say a kiddie breaks into your computer and you don't notice it for a week. In the meantime you've deleted the pre-breakin backup to make room for the current backup. Then you're fucked and have to start from scratch.

    What good is a backup if you delete it every week? What's the point? Raid is even worse. One "rm *" and your data is gone. What kind of backup is that?

    Ryan
  • I have to disagree with the people saying that 80GB is out of control. Even for the home user...

    With video capture getting more and more popular, even mom and dad will need more room for their vids. And it never takes long for the software people to come along with something and fill up any remaining space!

    Plus, anything bigger and nicer that comes out, drives down the cost of yesterday's model, which is just fine for me!

    I have 2 hard drives on my machine. The first one is used for the Operating System and Applications only. It's 8 GB, and I'm constantly running out of space. True... my girlfriend seems to download her gymnastic videos to this drive instead of the other drive... but even after I clean it up, I'm still hovering around 7 GB just for apps, o/s, and 2 games.

    Picture a family with one comptuer: where the kids both have their mp3's piling up from napster, games getting added on a monthly basis. dad sneaking some porn at night, and mom filling it up with cookbooks, and ligit video editing, and you have a system I wouldn't sell without atleast 20GB. It'll only get worse/better... So bring on the 80Gigs!

    I'm still looking forward to the day that I can buy *ONE* hard drive that will hold my whole MP3 collection.

    Rader

  • Isn't it slow though? (Score:3)

    by evanbd ( 210358 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:31AM (#920602)
    The info says it runs at 5400RPM for "fast performance" so that it can support ATA100. Is it me, or is 5400 now considered somewhat old and slow, with 7200 asthe new standard for good performance (in IDE). BTW, SCSI is up to 15000RPM on 160MB/s -- the Seagate Cheetah X15.
  • Buy another hard drive and mirror the first one.

    With the low prices and insane capacities of hard drives now, that honestly seems like the best thing.

    For example, backing up your 5-10 GB can be done at least twice on the $129 dollar Seagate 20GB drive I bought last month.

    Then just use CD-R's for the really critical stuff, and stick them in a safety deposit box.

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • My strategy is to mirror two disks on the server, and nightly copy important data to a backup server with a single similarly sized disk. Then you have three copies over two machines. If you must have tapes a (relatively expensive but nice) DLT tape drive and/or library will handle it. I think they go to 80Gigs compressed, and are fast. Yep, my 8Gig-compressed DAT is getting smaller every day.
  • The downside of this is that it this new hard-drive is a maxtor, and not a more reliable drive, like an IBM. only a matter of time i guess tho... mind you I have not had that many problems with the 6GB maxtor I got, but the 30GB died within a week. just gotta find a way to flush out all the mp3's, warez, and pr0n before i return it. :)

    I have been insanely happy with the pair of 45GB deskstars i got to replace it *grin*

  • Bigger is not better (Score:5)

    by Slashdolt ( 166321 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:35AM (#920626)
    I keep hearing people talk about faster processors, faster memory (for the faster processors) and claims that RAM speed is the bottle-neck. Hard drives have made very little speed improvements in the last few years. I bought a WD 340MB drive a few years back that was (I believe) 11 ms. Most of the drives now are what 7, 8, 9ms? I used the drive on a 486DX-40. I now have a Celeron 466. My processor is 10's of times faster, whereas my HD is maybe 50% faster at the most. Yes, it holds a lot more, but it's still slowing my system down.

    If SCSI became the standard as opposed to IDE, it may help the situation to an extent, but shouldn't we really be looking at new technologies? What about using flash-drives or something similar. Maybe a 200MB flash-drive to cache the most commonly accessed files (thanks to some new OS enhancement that doesn't currently exist).

    Face it. Hard drives are bigger but it would be nice if you could have something smaller that was 10 times faster.

  • BIOS and such (Score:5)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:36AM (#920627) Homepage Journal
    Be careful when buying these large drives. BIOSes often don't support them. I got a motherboard less than a year ago and discovered that it doesn't directly support the 40 gig I just bought. Yes, you can get around it with software like their EZ-BIOS, but that itself has some problems, especially when you are trying to recover. I'm not saying avoid it. Just be aware that it isn't always as foolproof as you'd like. If your motherboard only supports a 40, you might be better off buying to 40s rather than an 80. (Not to mention that you'll get better performance out of two 40s.)

    Note to BIOS designers: Would it kill you to design your BIOSes so that they lasted more than a month? I mean, if you're designing a BIOS now, why not allow all sorts of "unreasonable" values, like 4 billion cyclinders, tracks, sectors, etc? Then perhaps we wouldn't have to go through so many gyrations when the terabyte drives arrive.

  • 80GB is quite a bit (Score:3)

    by Segfault 11 ( 201269 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @07:41AM (#920633) Homepage
    I just bought an ATA/100 7200rpm 2MB buffer IBM for less than the 540MB Conner I got five years ago, blah, blah blah -- it's NEVER going to be enough storage for your lifetime, we all know that. What I'd like to rant about is this: Why can't the speed and size of RAM increase at the same level as hard drives? At the very least, why can't they make the price DECREASE at the same rate as hard drives? I always spend ~$200 on HDD's, and I remember back in 95 or 96, a "gig" hit that golden price. Now a "gig" means RAM. 1GB RAM ain't much cheaper than it was four years ago, and my mobo wouldn't even be able to see it!

  • Not much point in faster hard drives (Score:3)

    by Erich ( 151 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @08:38AM (#920641) Homepage Journal
    Pump more RAM in your system. Bandwith has never increased as fast as processing speed or storage size. Thus, instead of reading to and from RAM every time, you stick a bunch of cache in your processor. Poof, with a little L1 and L2 cache you can run most of your processor out of cache (for many things, cache hits on the processor are like 99.9%). This is good, because your RAM has lots of latency in addition to not transmitting the information back to your processor very fast. Usually, going to RAM inflicts any where from 5 to 50 CPU cycles waiting for the RAM (or more!).

    Disk is worse. While RAM is, say, 10ns, a disk access is 10ms. That's 1 Million times slower. But we do the same thing... we can keep off the disk if we keep everything in RAM. And since we are multitasking and the disk is sooooo slow, if a process reads from disk we just take it off the processor and wait until the disk comes back with information before we will allow the process to come back on to the processor.

    Now, since we're really smart, we do clever things to make sure that we have to go to Ram (or disk) as few times as possible. In cache, we load more than just the one byte or word that we want, we load the words next to it into cache as well, as that means that the next read from memory will (hopefully) be in cache already. This increases the penalty for going to RAM, but tends to pay off. Likewise, when we read a byte from disk, we load the 32K after it (or whatever we decide is appropriate) so that if we have to read the next byte it's in memory already.

    Thus, we have really decreased the problems with the bottlenecks we do have. And it's very important... half the pins on modern processors are ground or power. That doesn't leave too many pins for I/O, and if you want to increase bandwith you usually want to increase the width of the bus in addition to bus speed. But unless you're Cray, it's really hard to run 1024 signals into your processors.

    That's not to say that faster disks don't help, but you're not relying on your disk's speed every time you read or write a byte to your disk (thank goodness). Instead of trying to get the fastest disk, you may just want to increase the disk cache (IE, get more RAM). On my workstation, I can run Netscape and my terminals and text editor, and after I have opened them once or so, they just sit in RAM. When Netscape crashes and I have to start it up again, it pulls almost all of the program out of memory instead of having to go to disk. Instead of spending the money on a 10,000RPM Ultra Wide Fast Loose SCSI card and drive, I bought another 128M of RAM, and for most desktopish stuff (and a lot of heavier I/O, even) I can beat someone with less memory but a bigger disk.

  • >well, Some month ago, our HPuX server's one scsi
    >drive failed. So out to buy a replacment.
    >Unfortunetly, The serrver had Fast-Wide disk's
    >and they are incompatible with the LVD disks they
    >sell all around.

    Actually, your problem here isn't that fast-wide is incompatible with lvd; it's that fast-wide DIFFERENTIAL is incompatible with lvd.

    It's an easy thing to miss, since HP simply labeled the ports on the machines as fast-wide in most instances, but until a couple years ago all wide connectors on the 9000 series were differential scsi rather than single-ended.

    >The myriad of scsi variants makes The life of
    >using them a utter pain in the ass. The thumb
    >rule is that nothing works with nothing but the
    >same variant.

    This is patently untrue. The following scsi protocals are backwards and forwards compatible:

    SCSI-1
    SCSI-2 (fast scsi or fast wide scsi)
    SCSI-3 (ultra scsi or ultra wide scsi)
    Ultra2 (lvd)
    Ultra/160
    Ultra3 (not finalized yet)

    In otherwords, ALL varities of scsi back to the original implementation.

    The only thing you have to watch out for is the issue with traditional differential scsi (high-voltage differential) with single-ended or low-voltage differential. Everything else will negotiate.

    Of all the issues SCSI has, compatibility is NOT one of them.

    (If you want to complain about something, why not complain about the myriad of connectors used due to the scsi spec not specifying one, or the restrictions on cable-length with single-ended scsi?)

  • Re:Need is quite real... (Score:3)

    by NoWhere Man ( 68627 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @10:58AM (#920644) Homepage
    I would have to disagree with you.
    I am probably the last person to say hard drive space is spirling out of control, because I love HD space. I am going to be RAIDing a few HDs soon and I might even pick up one of these eventually.
    Howver, most gamers don't need 8 games on thier computer. After they have beaten the game, it most likely gets deleted afterwards for the next new, hotest game. And if you still play Duke Nukem 3D after 4 years, you need help.
    And I believe, personally, that Diablo 2 could have been scaled down and programmed more efficiently. Now, I don't know the specifics of the programming methods used, but almost all programs these days could be done more efficently...and thus made smaller.

    Floppy drives are pretty much obselete, I agree there. That was the point of the LS-120's, but by then anyone who needed 120MB probably already bought a zip drive (which were out for awhile). The need died a year before it came out.
    CDs are still very useful, mostly for backing up data. But I believe the DVD-RW drives in the next couple years will become the standard in information storage/transfer.

    However, I believe the standard user does not need 80 Gigs of space, and if you happen to fill a hard drive of that size in a matter of months, then you might be a little too attached to your information.

  • Need is quite real... (Score:3)

    by NoWhere Man ( 68627 ) on Wednesday July 19, 2000 @08:39AM (#920646) Homepage
    People are starting to realize that along with processors, hard drive space seems to be spiriling out of control. Its getting to the point where people are asking do I really need that much space again.
    I believe some one once said. "Who is ever going to need more than 640K or memory?" or something to that effect. (We all know who). Luckily, RAM is only becoming more efficiant, and not larger to the point where we have gigabytes of it.

    I can understand why some people would need more space. But mainly, only people running servers with mass amounts of downloads per day. A good deal of those people are in fact those who store warez and other related material. More and more popular these days are the downloading of movies. Vast archives are rare and if you want to keep up with current movies and still retain older files, more space is needed.
    Technology is moving faster than people want it to now, which is different from a number of years ago. I can personally remember a friend of mine who upgraded from a 386 to a 486, a significant upgrade at the time, leaving my old 386 in the dust. And that 486 was used for a number of years with no problems (nothing like: low memory, not enough space, video card too slow, etc). Technology progressed steadily, and of course it became obselete, but only after a few years.
    Now it seems as soon as you purchase a piece of equipment, it becomes obselete the second you fork over the money. True your computer may operate for a number of years with software with no difficulty, but the average gamer most likely has to make a significant upgrade every 6 months to stay "in the game".
    But I don't believe that technology is to blame. It seems that maybe the programmers are getting a little too careless. Minimum requirements are sky rocketing along with technology (Or I should say, software is pushing it there). Maybe software developers should concentrate more on making thier programs more efficient.
    Hell, the min requirements for Windows 9X are a 386, but if I had the need to run it on that system, I should have to wait a year for it to load up.
  • This is not a problem if you run Linux on your computer. I bought a 12 GB drive 2 years ago, and was dissapointed to find out that my BIOS would only support the first 8 GB of it. Fortunately, after I installed Linux a few months later, I noticed that it saw my disk as a full 12 GB. So, I created a new 4 GB ext2 partition in the previously unused space, without having to muck around with my bios or any other strange settings.
  • 5400rpm is comparatively slow.

    Whilst with the huge data density i'm sure the actual disk->buffer transfer rates are almost as fast as a 36Gig 10000rpm disk the spindle speed is still some sort of a limitation.

    Consider when you seek for a file on the disk. Two things must happen before the read can start - The head must position itself over the track, and the disk must rotate to the position required.

    5400rpm means an average angular seek time of 5.56msec compared with 3msec for a 10krpm drive.

    I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes but it is probably quite a big deal when it comes to booting your operating system.
  • While you are correct that the speed of hard-drives hasn't improved at anywhere near a Moore's law rate, the seek time is only one part of the equation. If I'm not mistaken, the overall transfer rate has improved quite a bit over the last ten years.

    The seek time is the amount of time it takes the head to get to the right spot on the disk. If the filesystem is designed appropriately, most reads will be of many consecutive sectors, so that the seek time is only the time to start reading. After that, it is the transfer rate that is important.

    That's where the spin rate comes in. That's why a 7200 RPM drive performs better than a 5400 RPM drive. (This 80 gb drive is a 5400 RPM, by the way.) Unfortunately, we are talking about mechanics here, and not silicon. The faster you spin something, the harder it is going to be to control.

    (And yes, there's a lot of other factors, between IDE and SCSI.)
  • Raid as "backup" is bullshit.A second disk as "backup" is bullshit....
    What kind of backup is that?

    WEll, if you know of a way to back up 110 gigs of data without buying a $10,000 tape controller I'd love to know about it. Unfortunately, buying a whole second hard drive really is the cheapest method of protecting against the kind of errors I've found most common (though doing it in the same box probably isn't a great idea).

    I have the best security a system can get -- it doesn't connect to the internet at all and I live by myself. My biggest problems are FAT errors and physical damage, not hackers...

    I'm an investigator. I followed a trail there.
    Q.Tell me what the trail was.

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