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Hardware

Maxtor's "Sturdy" Hard Drive 186

Posted by Hemos from the interesting-approach-to-things dept.
robkill writes "PCWorld has this article on a new drive by Maxtor, using 1 platter, 1 head and 70% fewer moving parts. Using one side of a 30GB platter, the drive holds 15GB and has a smaller height as well." Well, it's not huge, but it's sufficent size - and with more durability, putting it into mobile devices becomes easier to do.
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Maxtor's "Sturdy" Hard Drive More

Maxtor's "Sturdy" Hard Drive

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  • Re:Solid State Drives (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    True NVRAM (no coninuous power supply, even a battery, needed) is only rated good for about 1000-10000 writes to any one cell. So, after only 10000 file overwrites on the same location on the "disk", the "sector" would have to be flagged as bad. In a server or workstation doing grunt computational work, this state can be reached quite quickly (a matter of days).

    "Fake" NVRAM - really dynamic ram with a battery (as in most PDAs, which have a few k of "Real" nvram for the firmware and really important user data, and the rest battery-bakced dynamic ram), lasts longer - but then you have to worry about the battery eventually running out...

    True NVRAM is also not particularly fast, believe it or not (that's probably just because of less research in the field - in theory it should be faster than HDs)

  • Re:sturdier Maxtor? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Things have changed, quite significantly since then. Their quality has gone up tremendiously. But I still hear this every once in a while.

    That's the danger of making cheap crap, especially when people depend on the quality.

    See all the people in here declaring how horrible WD hard drives are and how they'll never buy or recommend WD products again? Some will wind up going back on their word, but quite a few will not. Maxtor and WD hurt a lot of people by cutting corners and those people will not forget -- or let the companies forget.

    Every Maxtor drive I've seen (admittedly only about 4 or 5) has failed within the warranty period. Maybe they're better now, but all is not forgiven.

  • Sturdy is Marketing - Cost is king (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This drive will only be marginally more robust than a multiple headed drive. The real reason for designing for one head is cost. The heads and disks are right at the top of the cost of the drive. If you design for one head, you can use disks that have failed verification on one surface reducing cost for both the one headed drive and its multi-headed cousins (of course you have to make sure to use the right side). This could save a few cents per drive for all 30GB/platter drives. If you can market it as a "robust drive" and get a small premium, you can make a decent amout of money. Even if you don't get a premium it could be worth alot of money. This drive is also being used as a technology demo. Ramp load has been used in 2.5" laptop drives for some time. Using it in a desktop drive has the advantage of not needing to create a landing zone on the disk, once again reducing cost of the disk. Of course you have the added cost of the ramp. But its not a slam dunk drop in change. The linear velocity of the disk at the outer diameter is almost 50% greater with a 3.5" disk than a 2.5" disk, ~1107 inch/sec vs 706 inch/sec. So when you load, any impact between the inner rail of the head and the disk is much more damaging on the desktop drive. Using it now when it's not absolutely necessary gives you knowledge to use when ramp load will be necessary.

  • well... (Score:1)

    by Slay ( 1349 )
    ...single platter, a single read/write head, and a head-latching mechanism that keeps the fragile head firmly locked out of harm's way when you power down the drive.

    Isnt' this something any hard drive is supposed to do?

    ---
  • Replace your IDE cable with something better. Seriously.
  • I think the 180K ones are double-density -- the original single-sided, single-density ones were 90K.

    --

  • Unfortunately, Woz didn't create the floppy drive for the Apple II until 1978.
    ;-)

    --
  • Jeez, I've got several old tapes for my Atari 400 in a box in my basement. They /sound/ OK if you play them on a stereo (ok, well maybe they sound rather strange), but the Atari doesn't pick up on them very well. I think the 410 (the tape drive) is shot or something. Who knows.
    --
  • I've lost two, one less than a month ago. Incidentally, that one was a Maxtor, and I think the other one was too.

    It's not like I've owned dozens of hard drives in my life. 8-10 is more like it. It's also not like I actually have my backup matters in order (at home) so, yes, this is an issue.

    Even though I know hard drive crashes do happen, I probably won't start backing up the bulk of my data*. Joe sixpack doesn't even know, nor does he do backups or have redundant disks. For people who don't need a lot of storage, these drives are a smart choice (assuming they're actually more robust)

    *) I just copy the really important stuff to my machine at work. Losing the not-really-important stuff is still a big hassle though.
    --

  • Ok Time for a history lesson.

    Back in the olden days (say '91-'93) Maxtor made cheap hard drives, and I don't just mean the price. There was somthing wrong with the berrings in the drives. If you mounted them on their side you almost guarenteed failure in 6mths - 1 year. If you mounted it flat it would probably make it a year. Needless to say they developed quite a bad rep.

    Things have changed, quite significantly since then. Their quality has gone up tremendiously. But I still hear this every once in a while.
  • Jeez, I had no idea people had such bad luck with their drives. My main Linux box (5 year old PPro) has a 5 year old 2.5G drive, a 3 year old 6.4G drive, and a 2 year old 10G drive, and I've never had any trouble with them. Nor with the 9 year old 80M drive in my Quadra 700, although that doesn't get much use anymore... :/
  • more platters = more moving parts

    Um, same number of moving parts, only they're bigger. Two platters bolted onto a common spindle = 1 moving part. It's the same with the heads, they all ride on a common armature.
  • Solid state drives are the quietest, they really don't make any noise (fan noise) but the cost is ridiculouse.
  • I've had both....the usual one is the armiture failer...clunk...clunk...clunk...cry...
  • Well, Just last night having one of the hd's kick the bucket, I would like to see more reliable storage devices. Its a shame that solid state devices are still so expensive, I'll be curious to see how fast the 10 tera byte credit card sized device is. And whether it will be as cheap as they say.

    Reliablility in hardware doesn't seem to be as high of a priority with allot of these companies lately. Its nice to get things cheap but loosing a large hd (whether its backed up or not) is a pain. Its good to see someone thinking about reliability again.
  • Western digital was the best right up to the point they started making 1.6G hd's. After that they changed their manufacturing and they had a very high failure rate. During this time I was building new computer for a small company part time, and its a pain when half the wd drives we put in ended up going back in less than a month. From there we started looking at maxtor and quanum.

    If you look at the low end wd drives they have a strip of tape around the outside of the drive that seals it from dust. I've pulled out allot of these drives where the tape was scrapped partway off just from being inserted in the drive bay. Basicly it is one of the worst hd designs I've seen.

    Western digital lost thier reliablilty a long time ago. Basicly wester digital is cheap...in price and quality. You can disagree, but I've had 2 bad maxtor drives, 5 bad wd drives, and 3 bad quantum drives (2 of the quantums were over 3 years old and are still under warrenty). I stopped using wd after having one die hours after getting all my information on it.

    Oh, and although I like IBM the only problem with thier hd's are that western digital manufatcures them.
  • do they use some other sort of method to make them tough?


    And it has been my experience in the military that most military specific parts are built for reliablily not speed. While allot of stuff breaks pretty regularly (at least most of the stuff I delt with) the specs for it are much higher than the civilian world.

    I would suspect that the drive moter is larger than a standard hd. The components on the drive probably are rated for higher power levels than would ever go through it. Sturdier drive arm with more internal parts to help prevent crashes from impact...might even park the drive head(s) regularly when not in use. Basicly things not really needed for normal people.

    Also I bet the commercial versions are much faster than the military version.
  • I never said I put the drive in...I was usually the one removing the drive to replace it. Actually quite a few were from gateway.
  • If you notice allot of hd manufactures have gone to air shipping only. Some states have very abusive ground people and I have seen bad baches of hd's due to the box they were in was quite abuse. They didn't put big dents in the box but you could tell it had been dropped on many occasions.
  • 8 drives in 11 years. Out of perhaps about 60 drives. Oldest drive I have in use is about 4 years, as I do dump drives that are too small for anything anymore (and in cases where I could do with small drives, I don't trust a 4-year old drive enough).

    Hard drives are unreliable. That's why I always have a hot spare even for a mirror set (3 drives, once the capacity, but at least I sleep well) if the system doesn't need more space than that.

  • This would be very nice for dedicated machines that use hard drives...

    Standalone Digital Audio Workstations:

    MP3 Players:

    • Portables
    • Auto

    These sort of things get knocked around alot. And durability/reliability are doubly important for the multitrack machines. Be a shame to lose a great recording session, just cuz the drummer loses a stick and it whacks the unit halfway across the table.

    (Yeah, a screwy example, but you get the point...)

  • The problems tend to manifest themselves more in the moving parts than in the surface of the platters. For instance, bearings will die or the heads (these are all connected to the same arm, no matter what side of the platter they read/write). Their claims for increased reliability are because they reduced the number of parts which are most likely to fail.

    Another issue is that the target for this drive is mainstream consumers. You'd also somehow have to report the failure of the first platter to the user, while failing over to the other platter (assuming that it still works). To report this, it would require some support from the operating system, most likely. You'd also have to kick the user in the rear to replace the drive while it still works (which might be the most difficult part).

    OT personal beef: I believe that the market won't allow for a consumer PC which is reliable, like you say. Nobody wants to pay $3000 for an IBM PC anymore (in 1985, sure you'd pay approximately that much for an 8088). You'd get a sturdy case, thick reference manuals (complete with "This page is intentionally left blank" scratch paper) and the klackity keyboard. Even if I knew that I were getting a machine that could fall four stories onto concrete and still look pretty (been there, tried that), I probably wouldn't want to spend the extra money for that. It's unfortunate, but I don't know how I'd solve that problem.

  • It's almost like an electronic etch a sketch.

    Just don't shake it up and down when you do flip it over or ... no data any more!

    --
  • Indeed.. following on from the MP3 player idea, people would like that storage built into their cars for MP3s, and there shock is a big problem
    .. depending on how you drive, obviously :>

    The solutions out there at the moment I think have to really baby the HD so it doesn't get destroyed by the shock and vibration. That is to say putting it in shock-absorbant foam, giving it a suspension of its own etc. A hardier hard drive could lead to cheaper systems that didn't need to worry about it so much.

    Sounds like a nice use for a laptop too that you gave: portable MP3 player. Nice.

    --
  • Buy a different model of drive if the space is what you need. :> .. You have to think of OTHER uses of hard drives to appreciate the market for this drive.

    --
  • Just because Maxtor "owns" Quantum, doesn't mean that the've interfered with their factories or quality, quantum still pumps out nice hard drives. Everyone has known for, well ever, that maxtor drives are just cheapier in price and quality.
  • I've seen lots of comments in here about how many disk drives they've got through, and I don't know how they've managed to do it.

    I currently have 10 PC systems with about 14 hard drives between them and I have never totally managed to screw a hard drive beyond repair. The only time I have got rid of drives is when I took a look at the drive space required by my next game purchase and decided that the drive wasn't suitable for my capacity requirements.

    I'm not particularly good to my PCs - all the cases are unscrewed and you can bet at least one will be running with the hood off. Two of the PCs are Linux boxen up 24/6.5 (too many power failures, still got to buy a UPS).

    IMHO, I'm not too impressed by this drive; even I can get rid of 70% of the moving parts by only reading one side of a disk, and as a 3.5" form factor drive it will probably only go in a few laptops/ transportables. My TiVo will be next to get an upgrade; I think I'll stick to the original plan of using 2*80GB Maxtors instead of these babies.
  • Back about eight or ten years ago at Dartmouth, we had a bunch of external Quantum SCSI disks that were purchased for use with Macs. Of course, several ended up on Unix systems (DEC 5000s). Unfortunately, there were firmware bugs in the drives that caused systems to fail to boot after a power failure until you re-power cycled the drives. (I might have the details of the bug wrong, it was a long time ago.) Anyway, I doubt that there is any company that hasn't had a bad product now and then.
  • Actually, Maxtor (IIRC) again have features in this area; their recent drives have 3 modes: normal, fast (but noisy) and slow (but quiet).
  • So what? Maxtor gets to use stuff they wouldn't be able to sell, giving people a device that has some advantages over existing hard drives. The tone of your post implied that this is somehow dishonest, or bad...I can't figure out why. Maxtor makes more money, we get more useful products...isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work?
  • If it has a longer MTBF, it is more reliable. If it does not, it is not. I don't care about the "quality" of the parts...I care about the numbers they generate.

    Projecting your negative experiences at one company onto another company is silly and illogical. If the facts bear out, I don't care about the construction. If they don't, these guys are crooks. Since no drives have been manufactured, it's not useful to speculate, is it?
  • This drive has 70% fewer parts, not 70% fewer moving parts. With 70% fewer moving parts, you'd have a paperweight.
  • You could put it on a tether and use it like a morning star with no need to lose space inside.
    Granted you'd be screwed when your weapon got cut off, but it'd still be cool
  • No, you aren't. I have an external scsi-1 40meg Quantum rebranded with by Apple. The case is about phonebook size, but its not too heavy. I use it for swapspace sometimes.
  • Remember the Bigfoot? Quantum's bright idea for a new design for a hard drive? 1" height, took up a full 5.25" bay in a computer, and designed so that OEM's could shove them in tight places inside proprietary cases. HP, Compaq and others were all over this drive. Too bad they had so many quality control issues that OEM's that were using them were replacing them with different models of drives (if they fit). Spare parts departments were swamped with orders for these drives because they were so lousy. I was a hardware lackey when these things were out, and I had to replace more of those crappy drives than I'd care to admit. Every one I've ever seen went bad. And they were SLOW! The access times on those drives were insanely slow. It made a P166 run like a 486SX25. I'm not saying that this drive is going to have the same problems, but I still don't trust it. If it isn't broke, why fix it?
  • Bah! A pair of plain scissors or an exacto knife... non of those high-tech punches. That's what Real Men[TM] use...

    --
  • >Rumors say that IBM (whose latest 75gxp series are allready quite silent) are to announce a silent drive.

    They did, you just didn't hear... ;-)

    >Also to minimize noise you can get rubber suspensions for you desktop drives to mount them in a 5.25" bay. (Allthough watch the temp. rubber isn't a good heat conductor)

    Well, if you have decent airflow (most of the whisper drives are 5400rpm, and quite cool anyway) it shouldn't be a problem. Heck, the 10krpm drives now are much cooler than they were just a couple years ago.

    --
  • They're mostly used on bigger (physically) vaxen so you can start there. The ones here are for a VAX 4000/200 which is probably going to be decommissioned soon :(

    I had a MicroVAX II which used an RA82 in a 19" rack. That is where I learned that you could indeed fix them with a good socket set [2 drives with different problems = 1 good drive]

  • Fujitsu has recently released out with a series of silent drives. New bearings and a choice of high-performance or silent access patterns (i.e. how the head is moved) makes the difference. They are supposed to keep well below 30dBspl

    WD announced their whisperdrives quite a while ago, but seem to mostly push those into OEM channels.

    Rumors say that IBM (whose latest 75gxp series are allready quite silent) are to announce a silent drive.

    Also to minimize noise you can get rubber suspensions for you desktop drives to mount them in a 5.25" bay. (Allthough watch the temp. rubber isn't a good heat conductor)
  • Everyone is posting about their woes of having drives go down, etc. I've never once had a drive head dive on me, or had the drive physically fail.

    I think I'll go do a long-postponed backup. Heh...hehe. heh.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • So you can write email to your friends from the top of Mt. Everest via your Iridium satellite modem, of course. :-)
  • I think what you're missing here is that this drive is targeted at mobile applications. That seems pretty clear to me from the sturdyness + reduced size. Sure, typical HDs work fine and don't fail all too often when you have them sitting on a desk all day. But put one in your MP3 player in your SUV's stereo and watch the head crashes commence when you go off-road. Or think about a laptop for the extreme-sports set, which gets jounced around all day in a backpack dangling off of someone hanging onto a cliff with three fingers.

    Last year I had to select storage media for a NASA scientific balloon project. We needed something to hold a couple GBs of data that would handle the stresses of a parachute crash landing. I ended up going with a standard IBM laptop HD, since that was the most ruggedized drive I could find on short notice, but had this drive been available then, you can bet I would have gone with it instead. The head-park feature is *really* nice when you start thinking about the drive hitting the ground at five meters/second.

  • MP3s? (Score:2)

    by Madoc ( 107 )
    If your needs run mainly to general office apps, such as word processing and spreadsheets, however, the 531DX should do a good job for you. You might even consider slaving one to your main hard drive and dedicating it to holding your MP3 music files.

    Yeah, sure. If I had to pick one of a) my root filesystem, b) my /home drive, or c) my MP3 collection to save when the shit hit the fan, it sure as heck wouldn't be c).

    ----------

  • If you are losing EVERY drive you buy for lab machines, you might want to take a good look at your lab. Does it shoot up to 200 degrees at night? Frequent earthquakes? Really bad power? Do you buy your drives from the back of a pickup truck? If you just had a whole batch of drives go bad on you (I've seen a whole department of Maxtors come in more or less DOA) then I could belive it, but if you're spreading out your drive vendors, then I have trouble beliveing it is the drives fault.

    Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
  • Real Men use a plain old hole-punch, and eyeball the placement.
  • Trends like this are the reason SMP officially ended in 2001. Computer parts are getting simpler and smaller.
  • On-disk mirroring?

    You have only one side being used in this situation, why not a system that writes the same data to both sides? If a head dies or side of the platter goes bad you still could have access to your data.

    I really do appreciate any effort towards reliability. Most companies seem to treat it as last priority behind 'paper' performance, price and time to market, leaving people that can't tolerate down time out in the cold.

  • Agh! (Score:2)

    by bjb ( 3050 )
    Dammit! And just a few days after I threw out my 5.25" floppy notcher!
    --
  • I've had 3 from different vendors in the last two years on my home computer. Server equiptment lasts much longer than PC
  • Maybe my experience was unusual but I've only had two hard drives fail in the 20 years I've been using computers -- and both were Maxtors. Needless to say, I'm leery about ever buying one again.

  • KISS (Score:2)

    by jjr ( 6873 )
    Keep It Simple Stupid.
    I am glad that some companies are tring to take away complexity instead of adding it to thier products. Sometimes less is more

  • Now when I get the blue screen o death and decide to chuck the box out a 10 story window, the hardrive might still work.
    Unlikely. Such reliable technology will *HAVE* to be used with reliable software, the kind that does not gratify you with a blue screen of death (tm).

    --

  • 4 years later, we were getting disk failures, on average, 2-3 times a week.

    If you were maintaining an 8TB disk farm with 8GB drives, that's 1,000 drives.

    Mean Time Before Failure means that half of all drives will fail before this time, not that a hard drive will last that long.

    So, assume a 40,000 hour MTBF (which was common for hard drives a few years ago). That's about 4.5 years (40,000 hours divided by 24hours/day == 1667 days divided by 365days/year == 4.57years). At that point, about half of the drives would have been expected to fail. 500 drives is half of the total, and that works out to a drive failure every 3 days or so(1667 days divided by 500 drives == 3 days/drive), which is about 2-3 a week.

    Either I royally screwed up my math (always possible) or your drives performed exactly as expected.

    -jon

  • You don't understand it correctly. 30 Gs is enough to make a human body look like it has been through an industrial meat-grinder. Jet fighter pilots are not capable to stand more than 9 Gs in steep turns and these guys and girls are specially trained and selected. Stubbing your toe against a table leg is more in the order of 1 G or even less.
  • "Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important."

    This is a 3.5" drive. You can't fit it into portable devices who use 2.5" drives pretty much universally.

    2.5" drives are allready designed to tolerate large shocks.
  • Where can I get one of these? I would like to collect things like that.

    --
    SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
  • Stupid opera made that anonymous...
  • Dude, not everything is a desktop.

    We built a box that had a requirement to survive a 5-foot drop onto concrete (nonoperating) and a 3-foot drop operating. And we used rotating media.

    Try that with your $150 hard drive.
  • See my previous post [slashdot.org] about droptesting.

    3' operating, 5' non-operating.
  • Not a laptop. Special box for the Air Force.

    Oh, and those drops were onto concrete.

  • Operating Mechanical Shock 30 Gs, 2 ms, no errors Non-operating Mechanical Shock 300 Gs, 2 ms, no damage

    If I understand correctly, a shock of 30 Gs is roughly equivalent to the impact after a straight fall from a desktop to a carpeted floor. (It's also akin to the force your toe receives if you stub it hard against a table leg.) That's not really a lot of shock padding in industrial settings.

    I would say that the shocks encountered by battlebots would be a LOT higher, unless you put your computing unit inside a shock isolation system. Rigid metal banging against rigid metal at moderate speeds is an almost entirely elastic collision (almost a pure velocity bounce). Hundreds of Gs of shock force.


  • Too bad Maxtor has owned Quantum outright for awhile now.

    http://www.quantum.com/quantum/pc/pr/pr00100401.ht m [quantum.com]

  • The only hard drive I've ever had fail so abruptly, and with so little warning, that I lost every bit of data on it was your treasured DiamondMax Plus. The replacement they sent me? well, it works fine in PIO mode, but enable uDMA and it locks the machine, and yes I've tried it with two different motherboards and an add-in udma controller. it wont even do 33 much less 66. After the hassle I had getting the first drive replaced, I'm not even going to bother trying to get this one replaced. I'll just never buy another Maxtor and never recommend them. I wouldn't even try one of these 'sturdy' ones even if they sold them 2-for-one with a bundled raid1 card.
  • Notebooks, notebooks, notebooks. I've lost plenty in my time.
  • This could be good for Maxtor, because I've found that their drives have a nasty tendancy to fail. With fewer moving parts they might actually become dependable.
  • Iomega Jaz disks: 2GB, $80

    This new drive: 15GB, $90

    If this is as sturdy as they say, with the head locked at power-off and all, then this drive should be about as durable as a Jaz drive. Probably more durable.

    You could afford to buy a kit to mount this drive in a pull-out drawer ($30 or so) and still be way ahead on GB per dollar.

    steveha

  • They should just use the existing drives they have the way they are, and do some kind of redundancy.

    I know it doesn't make too much sense to do this, because a single point of failure on the HDD hardware or some other thing like that will make it useless anyway...

    But, if instead of using only one side of the HDD, why not use both sides, as mirrored sets? So instead of 30GB on both sides of the platter, you'd have 15GB on both sides of the platter, possibly with better throughput and some more reliability, if the hardware is done properly. A mirrored set within a drive! The only thing is, it won't be better performance, because the HDDs are already reading and writing with both heads simultaneously now.

    Or, if you have 3 platters and 6 sides, you could just do a raid 5 with 4 platters, one parity, and one spare. So instead of 90GB, you'd have 60GB capacity, and you'd have better reliability in terms of the heads and the sides...the performance still won't be much better than if it was just a regular 6 head HDD...

    But then, how often do you have a HDD failure simply because one of the drive heads or one of the sides of the platter was bad? Do you even know? I guess this, plus the drives are getting cheaper, and that performance won't necessarily be better, makes my scheme kind of worthless. Damn! I though I was onto something with that Raid5-in-an-HDD thing.

  • When you have a sturdy hard drive your mp3s sound better.
  • I used to work, maintaining a multi-terabyte diskfarm (on the order of 8 TB) using 4-8 GB scsi drives. What can I say, it was state of the art when we built the thing.

    4 years later, we were getting disk failures, on average, 2-3 times a week.

    So, you've been lucky, and if I were you, I wouldn't tempt fate.
  • You'd think this would increase the MTBF for drives in heavy usage situations, like web servers, compute servers, TiVo ("always recording"), etc. Statistically speaking, dumping 70% of moving (and therefore more-fragile) parts, you MTBF should increase as well.
  • How many clues does it take to realize the writer of the article knows nothing about harddrives, and is just regurgitating the PR sheet the company wired to him?

    From the article: The drive has an UltraDMA/100 interface... The drive is also compatible with the earlier UltraDMA/66 and UltraDMA/33 interfaces, albeit with reduced performance.
    Drives do not max out the UltraDMA/66 interface as it is, so the only time the /100 makes a difference is on burst, which rarely happens with a modern OS that keeps its own cache. UDMA/100 will be marketing hype for a couple more years

    Maxtor didn't design the 531DX for use in applications--such as video editing--that demand the highest performance, but the company did include a 2MB data buffer.
    The 2MB data buffer is also rather meaningless. It gives improvement, by about half a percent on average. The spindle speed and access time is much more important. Maxtor's spindle speed for this drive is a low 5400RPM and the access time is a high 15 milliseconds.

    But the 531DX uses a technology called ramp loading that locks the head in a plastic latch above the drive surface when you power it down.
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but IBM drives could be purchased with this feature for over a year. And they do it with more than one read/write head.

    Let's not kid ourselves. This is a value market drive, and though it has a nice areal density (30GB a platter), it won't be fast, and even though it uses the IBM head rest technology, it won't be that much more reliable. Everything else is PR fluffery.
    ------------

    It is easy to control all that you see,

  • Ok, why would you put a 15Gb HD in a battle bot?

  • Real Men(tm) would open the drive (scoffing at the warranty seals) and remove the write-protect detection sensor because real men don't use write-protect!

    How much longer can this go on for?

  • WTF? IMHO, Maxtor makes the best IDE hard drives available right now. This article [tomshardware.com] on Tom's Hardware rates the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus at the top of the list!
  • This is mildly offtopic, but does anyone have any data on hard drive crashes per capita in the U.S.? I never really thought about different climates affecting the parts, but if some brands are less prone to fail in certain conditions (cold vs warm, dry vs. wet, etc.), it would definitely be info worth knowing. Obviously climate isn't going to affect servers in controlled rooms, this is for my own information to possibly prevent the aggravation of going through a HD crash again.
  • SHOCK
    Operating Mechanical Shock 30 Gs, 2 ms, no errors Non-operating Mechanical Shock 300 Gs, 2 ms, no damage

    This could be pretty usefull for a lot of industries like robotics (esp battlebots!), mobile research stations, and my favorite, space exploration.
    "Me Ted"
  • Other companies have been making HDDs that are bad-ass sturdy for years, they're used by the USAF in warplanes (I believe that Seagate makes most of them).

    I'm afraid to ask what the USAF pays for those drives. I would guess it's at least as much as a P4 would cost you now. The "news" factor IMO is the fact that it's cheap. I get to picturing where this could used and I think of all those scientist types that camp out in Antarctica in tents the size of catering halls. I hope it's only a matter of time before maxtor applies this technique to laptop drives.
    Cheaper equals more gooder!
    "Me Ted"
  • >As a result, when you turn the drive on and off regularly, it should last much longer and wear less, according to Maxtor. The company rates the drive for at least 50,000 on/off cycles with a component design life of at least five year.

    So if you use windows and you set your sleep cycles and you don't get blue screen of death the drive should last about 50000 / (((3 crashes * 2 reboots) + 4 sleeps )* 365.25 days ) which is 13.689 years or long enough to see it make it till your next upgrade.

    I found this very interesting, because the drive no longer uses a landing area in the platter. It has a ramp feature. Now also it has less moving parts, that's the best thing i could hear. I have an old system that I have to whack every time to boot it up (kicking does not work, only a good slap). yes I should replace the drive but I'm to lazy. I use it for booting up old dos games that i like.

    ONEPOINT



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  • As they make hard drives faster and faster, they keep getting noisier. Why not direct some development dollars toward making a quiet line of hard drives. I'd like nothing more than to have a silent computer. At least someone [quietpc.com] has thoughts in that direction, though engineering it right into the drive would also likely save power. Can anyone say, "Set top box"?

    Tim

  • I don't see how this is breaking news, except for the fact that it's Maxtor doing it and not some other company.
    Other companies have been making HDDs that are bad-ass sturdy for years, they're used by the USAF in warplanes (I believe that Seagate makes most of them).
    Tangentially, does anyone know how the sturdy drives that are used for military applications differ from this one? Are the military drives one side, one platter, too, or do they use some other sort of method to make them tough?


    Brant
  • but:

    > putting it into mobile devices becomes easier to do.

    is not really a good thing.

    Mobile devices translate to

    * more work for someone. They mean that people will never be free from work wherever they go.

    This is not a good thing.

    I can't see anywhere where this is going to have positive benefits in human terms - more wives separated from their husbands, more stress, less time spent by parents with their children, etc.

  • Re:So what? (Score:3)

    by Stormie ( 708 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:50AM (#435312) Homepage

    Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you?

    I reckon this would be good for office use. Hard drives might not crash that often, but if you're supporting 1000 users, you're going to get crashes, so the less common you can make them, the better. Also, the (relatively) small size of this HD is less of a problem in an office situation, where all important stuff should be saved on a fileserver rather than locally. I don't expect the average Slashdotter would want their pr0n & w4r3z collection limited to 15gig. :-)

  • sturdier Maxtor? (Score:3)

    by Haven ( 34895 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:47AM (#435313) Homepage Journal
    Since when has Maxtor been fit for normal PC's? This would only make Maxtors on par with "real" HardDrives (WD, IBM...)

  • Hopefully, this design methodology will spread (Score:3)

    by sherpajohn ( 113531 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:46AM (#435314) Homepage
    I wish they made beds like this. 50,000 on-off operations before mechanical failure would be lovely.

    (damn I miss Deja)

    Going on means going far
    Going far means returning

  • Re:Maxtor ! (Score:3)

    by Strog ( 129969 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:19AM (#435315) Homepage Journal
    I used to work at a computer store that custom built computers to specifications. I ended up testing returned merchandise. In my experience, Maxtors and Western Digital drives have had time frames and models that weren't as good as the rest. There was a time I wouldn't have bought a Seagate IDE drive of less than 4Gb because the smaller ones died way too quick but I would have bought any of their SCSI drives. The only brand I have seen that has been consistently good over the years is Quantum drives. They usually are a few dollars more but I have seen far fewer bad ones. I bought my last one before the merger so I can't comment on current models.

  • Finally! (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @09:18AM (#435316) Journal

    Finally! A Slashdot article on storage technology with a believable figure. 15GB is reasonable, and Maxtor is a real company.

    Even more amazing, I can actually buy one of these. Even more more amazing, I might actually want to buy one of these.

  • So what? (Score:3)

    by woody_jay ( 149371 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:45AM (#435317)
    Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you? With today's technology in back-ups and the such, it just doesn't seem to me that this needs to be an issue. I have been in the Computer/Network racket for about 3 years now, and I have only had two hard drives crash hard on me. One was on a RAID 5 server, so it didn't matter. I just think that this is a waste of time for the "Unsinkable Hardrive". Let's call it Titantic and watch her dive on her maiden voyage. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. (copyright Dennis Miller)

  • Is one platter better? (Score:3)

    by Sebastopol ( 189276 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:52AM (#435318) Homepage
    I've been bitching about this for years. Ever since the density explosion began (~95-96), RPMs have gone up, and MTBF has gone waaaay down. In the lab I work in, we have to buy drives by the dozens. I was surprised to find that the mortality rate of our stock skyrocketed during the 97-98 timeframe. Every 4+ GB drive we bought (western digital, maxtor, ibm) would fail after a week or so of constant operation. That's why I at home I only use ancient 1.2GB Fireballs from six years ago.

    But is one platter better? It seems like the heads would have to move more for just one platter. Fragmentation would make the problem even worse. But if it is as realiable as they claim, I can finally get rid of the noisy and oh-so manful 6 GB RAID array of Quantum FBs that I've been using...


    ---

  • Cool, can you flip it over when it's full? (Score:3)

    by Hairy_Potter ( 219096 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:41AM (#435319) Homepage
    That way you could get 30 gigs.

    This would be a lot like LP's, an obsolete form of analog music reproduction. Ask your mom or dad about them.

  • Re:So what? (Score:3)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:24AM (#435320) Homepage
    Maybe it's just my lack of experince in the real world, but how many times, in all honesty, have you had a hard drive crash on you? With today's technology in back-ups and the such, it just doesn't seem to me that this needs to be an issue. I have been in the Computer/Network racket for about 3 years now, and I have only had two hard drives crash hard on me. One was on a RAID 5 server, so it didn't matter. I just think that this is a waste of time for the "Unsinkable Hardrive". Let's call it Titantic and watch her dive on her maiden voyage. Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. (copyright Dennis Miller)

    I've had a hard drive fail before, too, but mine was a really lousy experience. It was a laptop hard drive and I lived in a city without a decent electronics store. The warranty replacement took a week to arrive, so I was high and dry until it got here; nevermind the fact that the drive started dying slowly well before it was apparent that the hard drive was dying (odd, my display driver seems a bit funky...huh. That file was fine yesterday...damn Windows, why are you crashing now?)

    Bear in mind that the drives used in most decent network centers are already quite well designed and live in well-controlled environments. If you work on a laptop (or even a desktop in a hot, humid climate without air conditioning,) you really do want to have the Unsinkable Hard Drive. Imagine what might happen to your network disks if you went around the server room and gave them a good, sound bump once every few hours.

    Yeah, a hard drive failure doesn't happen often, but it can really, really suck when it does happen; thus, having a good, sturdy hard drive in the first place is a nice thing.

    First they ignore you.
    Then they laugh at you.

  • cool (Score:3)

    by tattered_tux ( 240373 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:42AM (#435321)
    Now when I get the blue screen o death and decide to chuck the box out a 10 story window, the hardrive might still work.

  • Sturdy Is Good (Score:3)

    by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:46AM (#435322)
    It's nice to see some effort being put into durability rather than increasing data density. While high-density is great for certain apps, the idea of drop-testing an IDE or SCSI hd is a joke. Considering that hustle and bustle that most laptops get at the typical airport, this is going to become more and more important.
  • Not all mobile devices are made for annoying the piss out of someone on their day off (although I will admit that the cell-phone/beeper craze has bothered me on more than one vacation day). Now, if you are talking about something that would/could need fifteen GB of storage capacity, I don't really see that as a annoyance device. It would probably be (at a minimum) and entertainment device (like MP3 player, or maybe even movie storage device?) or a full-fledged laptop computer. Granted, a laptop can annoy you at times too, but I've used mine as a portable juke-box to listen to tunes with the wifey while having a picnic out in the middle of nowhere. I don't see every advance as a negative, and I'm having a tough time thinking of some annoyance device that would need fifteen GB of storage. Can anybody else come up with something?

  • Sturdy? HA! (Score:4)

    by sprag ( 38460 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:55AM (#435324)
    I've got a Digital RA82 sitting next to my desk. That is a sturdy drive. Consider these features:
    • 622M capacity using 14" platters
    • weighs 163 lbs
    • can be used as a bench or footstool
    • has a locking air-cylinder to hold up the 'hood'
    • Can be repaired using tools from your garage.
    • Sounds very much like a radial arm saw
    3/4" high disk considered sturdy? What is the world coming to?

  • Re:Sturdy? HA! (Score:4)

    by wiredog ( 43288 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:47AM (#435325) Journal
    Back in '83 I was outside a computer room when a large drive like that had a head crash. The platter (still spinning) got ejected through the side of the case and embedded into the wall. Sounded like a bomb went off.

  • Re:cool (Score:4)

    by b0z ( 191086 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:48AM (#435326) Homepage Journal
    Now when I get the blue screen o death and decide to chuck the box out a 10 story window, the hardrive might still work.

    Wrong. You simply open up your hard drive case, turn the platter upside down and use the other side. I can see some good potential uses. The first dual boot system where to go from windows to linux you simply flip your pc over. It's almost like an electronic etch a sketch [etch-a-sketch.com].

  • Woo hoo! Time to dust off the old tools... (Score:4)

    by glebite ( 206150 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:12AM (#435327)

    With it using only 1 side, I'll just break out my trusty old nibble-notcher and get me a dual-sided drive! Wooooooo!

  • Oh.. (Score:4)

    by caino59 ( 313096 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @07:45AM (#435328) Homepage
    So it's half a hard drive....hmmmm

    *looks in computer case*

    *looks at sawzall*

    Well shit, I can do that!

    -Caino

    Dont't touch my .sig there!

  • Innovator's Dilemma (Score:5)

    by landley ( 9786 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:21AM (#435329) Homepage
    The first third of the book "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen was all about the progress of hard drives from 14 inch washing machines to 2.5 inch laptop models.

    Each switch to a smaller form factor (8 inch, 5 1/4 inch, 3.5 inch, etc) actually LOWERED the price/performance ratio and didn't seem to make sense, but it allowed the drive to be used in new situations (minicomputers for 8 inch, desktops for 5 1/4, early laptops for 3.5, modern laptops for 2.5.)

    Who cares if the drive only has 5 gigs if it'll fit in your palm pilot?

    Rob

  • using just one side (Score:5)

    by MillMan ( 85400 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2001 @08:22AM (#435330)
    I work in the hard drive industry (scary) and there are a few monetary benefits to the company, hopefully passed on to the consumer...

    Basically platter yield goes up. HD companies lose a certain % of platters when the two sides aren't parallel to each other within spec. With a one sided setup this doesn't matter and won't cut into yield. Also, since Si defects will always be there, you can gain some yield back when the defects are only on one side, and simply use the other side.

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