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Data Storage Technology

Miniature 5400 and 7200 RPM HDDs Reviewed 235

Posted by CowboyNeal from the small-sizes-and-big-storage dept.
PReDiToR writes "At Tom's Hardware I found this favourable review of some remarkable Hard Drives. The article points out that with 40GB units suitable for server or desktop use, life with 2.5" drives could be just around the corner. Heat noise and power consumption are all apparently within acceptable tolerances."
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Miniature 5400 and 7200 RPM HDDs Reviewed More

Miniature 5400 and 7200 RPM HDDs Reviewed

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  • Is that a hard drive in your pocket... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:04AM (#6704202)
    Or are you just happy to see me?

  • USB Key's (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Heartz ( 562803 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:04AM (#6704203) Homepage
    With USB keys being much smaller and storage sizes increasing exponentionally,will the spinning disk still be a relavant tool for easy to carry around storage.

    USB keys are not only lighter, but you don't even have to worry about it fsckign because you shook it too much while you were on the bus.And they look waaay cooler too.

    • Re:USB Key's (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis&gmail,com> on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:07AM (#6704216) Homepage
      Yeah, right until after you re-write a sector that 100k'th time......

      Normal IDE disks are rated for a billion re-writes at least. [provided the motor lasts that long]. That's why "them there funny rotating disc like objects" are used to store data.

      Until they invent a lower-power [recall flash requires around 10V or higher to write, from a 3V source that's a loss!] and longer-lasting high density flash you won't see "them funny discs" replaced any time soon.

      Tom

      • Re:USB Key's (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @07:06AM (#6704499) Homepage Journal
        Your points are invalid. First, where did you get the idea that flash uses more power than a hard disk? Probably not even if you compare the power consumption on a byte per byte basis. I think it's plain wrong, and the burden of proof for such an outrageous statement is on you. As to your second point, I quote [datarescue.com]:
        NAND - Flash based media uses a complex low level sector virtualization called "wear leveling algorithm" to distribute the wear evenly across the memory array and maximize the number of write cycles it can sustain.
        What this means is, your flash gizmo will beign to fail only once all sectors have been worn out. Even with heavy usage, this could take a long time, probably a decade or more, e.g. for a typical CompactFlash card. I had a 4MB CF card that I used on a daily basis for about 5 years in my Psion handheld, and I had no problems with it until I sold the Psion last year. Another factor is, the bigger the flash device, the longer it will take to wear it out. 4GB CF cards are already on the market.

        The actual point is, when carrying stuff around, there's a very high probability that it will experience some sort of impact, and you probably know what happens when you drop your hard drive. OTOH, there's no real replacement yet for HDDs in your vanilla PC or laptop. Continuous writing, i.e. having a swap file on flash memory, would probably really wear it out pretty quickly.

        • Re:USB Key's (Score:2, Interesting)

          by tomstdenis ( 446163 )
          I didn't say flash takes more power. I said it takes enough power to make it non-trivial. [e.g. conversion to 10V or whatever it uses].

          Second, where do you think these "re-map" sectors come from? They're not free.

          Third, reading flash doesn't really wear it down. How much did you write to it? Also I was trying to point out that replacing a HARD DISK with flash isn't entirely viable. I mean what of the logs, swaps and other temp files routinely created [and deleted, and re-created and so on].

          Tom

          • Re:USB Key's (Score:4, Informative)

            by Rolo Tomasi ( 538414 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @10:00AM (#6705401) Homepage Journal
            Addressing your points in the order presented ...

            Sorry, can't quite follow you about the 10V thing. Yes, first generation flash chips had a Vpp of 12V, but that was about 15 years ago. The later chips all have integrated charge pumps to generate whatever voltages they need internally, so it's completely transparent to the circuit designer.

            It's not about remapping the sectors, it's about distributing the wear so that all sectors get worn out equally. Once you get an error, the flash chip is probably already breathing its last. The point is that it takes so long for all sectors to wear out that it doesn't really matter.

            The card I used had my calendar, contacts and database files on it, which got modified (i.e. written) a lot during a business day.

            Flash isn't really suited for replacing HDDs in PCs, as I said, but this thread was about USB keys vs. hard disks for carrying around storage, and my point was just that flash cards or sticks or whatever are better suited for that than hard disks, and of course that the flash memories wearing out quickly is a bit of an urban legend.

      • Perhaps what we need, both for USB keys, and for CD-RW, DVD-RW, is a new filesystem.

        The goal of such a filesystem would be to minimize the re-use of any given sector. It would be a no-no to have a single superblock that never moves, for example. Even if the disk is mostly empty, but I keep re-writing the same text file, the filesystem would try to uniformly manage the use of the sectors on the disk in such a way that each subsequent rewrite of the small file goes into a different set of sectors.

        • Why a new file system just for that? UDF already handles wear leveling for CD-RW and DVD-RW. And there is JFFS for flash memory. And, those are even necessary for Compact Flash, SD, Smart Media, or those USB flash drives as they incorporate hardware wear leveling. Those will last the same length no matter what file system you use.

    • Re:USB Key's (Score:2, Insightful)

      by fr0z ( 658466 )
      But USB keys don't have enough space to store my pr0n...

    • Re:USB Key's (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Alien Being ( 18488 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:17AM (#6704236)
      "will the spinning disk still be a relavant tool for easy to carry around storage."

      It's about 100x cheaper than solid state and storage "requirements" keep going up, so I'd say yes. Disk based digital video recorders will probably catch on at some point.

    • Re:USB Key's (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Phroggy ( 441 ) *
      Find me a USB key that holds 40GB for under $200 and we'll talk.

    • Re:USB Key's (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Friday August 15, 2003 @07:01AM (#6704482) Homepage
      Who's to say that USB keys will not be made containing a small hard disk?

  • 2.5" drives (Score:5, Funny)

    by FryGuy1013 ( 664126 ) * on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:11AM (#6704225) Homepage
    Hey, it's not the size that counts!

  • Power consumption (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:15AM (#6704232)
    ...power consumption [is] apparently within acceptable tolerances

    Unlike the eastern seaboard?

    'sok. I'll get my own coat.

    • I find it funny that my $50 UPS has better technology than the U.S. Power Grid.

      Hell, all they need is heavy-duty brown-out protection to prevent these problems from spreading... I used to do simple little things like this is small electronics experiements by soldering a $0.05 resistor across the positive and negative leads, to prevent this kind of thing on a small scale.

      The answer is obvious isn't it? Make power companies financially responsible for power outages, and within a year you will see the US p

  • Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mrselfdestrukt ( 149193 ) <nollie_A7_firstcounsel_com> on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:19AM (#6704244) Homepage Journal
    What's impressive to me is that Tom's HG is still this fast , even with all of us checking out the drives. Tom must be the hardware king...

    • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Pharmboy ( 216950 )
      What's impressive to me is that Tom's HG is still this fast , even with all of us checking out the drives. Tom must be the hardware king...

      What impresses me is that /. is still quoting Tom's HG here. The last several articles I have read have caused me to lose all respect for them. All fluff, no facts, lots of generalizations, and no real useful information. This has been discussed here previously, and many are like me, and no longer bothering reading Tom's reviews.

      They used to be the king, but the ki
      • They've sold out all the way, the site has gone all commercial. I stopped frequenting them regularly when they started reviewing movies and games. It seems most of their "serious" hardware and new tech articles hang around forever without any updates.
    • Tom must be the hardware king...

      Either that, or Pair Networks [pair.com] know what they're doing.

      • Re:Wow! (Score:3, Funny)

        by sharkey ( 16670 )
        Either that, or Pair Networks know what they're doing.

        They must, to stand up to Slashdot linking to a site that measures content in pages per sentence, rather that sentences per page.

  • What they didn't touch on is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Colitis ( 8283 ) <jj.walker@NOSpaM.outlook.co.nz> on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:23AM (#6704249)
    Durability. The faster the drive is spinning, the more strain on the bearings if your laptop (I'm assuming laptops are the biggest use for these right now) is moving around at all.

    I'm afraid I'd rather a slow drive that'll take all sorts of abuse - using my laptop on the bus, shuffling it around on my lap, turning it around to show somebody something on the screen etc etc - than a fast one that isn't tough enough.

  • 40GB? (Score:5, Funny)

    by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:24AM (#6704255)
    The article points out that with 40GB units suitable for server or desktop use,...

    But 40GB isn't nearly enough for all that pr0n... erm... I mean all those illegal mp3's... erm... I mean, oh never mind.

  • Meanwhile... (Score:5, Informative)

    by RMH101 ( 636144 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:32AM (#6704268)
    ...I just got a WD Raptor 10,000rpm SATA drive witha 5 year warranty (under 100UKP) for my desktop. Try and keep up, people!

  • slightly ot (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fyonn ( 115426 ) <dave@fyonn.net> on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:33AM (#6704270) Homepage

    what I'm thinking might be interesting for doing servers on the cheap would be to do raid arrays with usb based drives. 2.5" drives are small and low powered enough to be powered completely via the usb bus, usb2 (well, the version of usb that does 480mbps) has enough bandwidth, if you dedicated one usb controller per drive and had your 2.5" drives each mounted in a small metal container with a ide2usb adaptor in it then you would have a nice, cheap raid array with easily removeable drives. usb controllers cost buttons and you could either do software raid or even a hardware controller which could be built for the purpose.

    it could be alot cheaper than removeable scsi drives, the raiding software could mark the drives so that they can be put in in any order.

    what do you folks think?

    dave

    • Re:slightly ot (Score:2, Insightful)

      by patch-rustem ( 641321 )
      what I'm thinking might be interesting for doing servers on the cheap would be to do raid arrays with usb based drives...

      Put down the crack pipe, sir, and move away from the keyboard.

    • Re:slightly ot (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jtcampbell ( 199660 )
      USB speed is highly dependant on the processing power of the "host" computer. This is one of the main things that differentiates it from firewire. So whilst you may be able to do this you may well need another processer per drive or something silly like that. This would obviously drive up the cost a lot.

      Also the cost of all those IDE->USB converters and custom "USB raid controller" is likely to push the cost of the array above that of a (much better) SATA or even SCSI one.

      You'd be much better using SAT
      • my only issue with sata is that while it has tiny cables for data it still has a huge great big power cable. usb gives enough power over the cable for a 2.5" hd (is it enough for a 3.5" drive? not sure, it would be nice) so it's a single plug thats designed for easy addition and removal.

        you could have little caddies with usb ports on and a 2x5.25" bay in a computer that could take 4 or 5 drives. I wouldn't really advocate a hardware raid adaptor as that would be expensive. software raid would do.

        afaik ide
    • Do you have any idea ho terrible USB is for pumping disk-storage type data? Watch your CPU-monitor while you write to a USB drive sometime and you'll never want to use one again.

      You know how your system gets a bit 'laggy' when you write to a floppy? USB is worse. Hell, my mouse can't even keep up when I burn CDs over USB!

      USB is for low-impact perhipherals like cameras, scanners, input devices, and pocket-drives. Firewire and SATA are much better suited for use with mass-storage devices. Already most mothe
      • Firewire and SATA are much better suited for use with mass-storage devices.

        alright then, firewire instead as thats another bus that transfers power along the same cable as data, which makes things very easy. it's the concept I'm putting out there, not necessarily the specific implementation.

        dave

    • A couple of points... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15, 2003 @08:16AM (#6704843)
      I am a storage consultant so I kinda know what I'm talking about here (just thought I'd get that in before I get slagged off) and assuming that you're not totally joking...

      1) The technology used within USB type memory keys is only good for about 10000 write operations max.

      2) They are very expensive

      3) I don't see any USB -> Fibre Channel converters and none of my suppliers have them on their hardware roadmaps (can't think why)

      4) They are staggeringly slow, even if you RAIDed a thousand of the buggers.

      5) If anyone took one of these keys into a datacentre in which I was responsible for the storage, I would do some painfully biological things to them.

      6) In modern datacentres the mass storage (and quite offen the local system disks as well) are supplied from a consolidated disk array which is hung off a fibrechannel network almost nobody who is anybody does JBOD for mass storage any more.

      7) RAID shouldn't ever be controlled by software for serious users

      8) can't be arsed to go on, but you get the general idea...

      • 1) I mean usb interfaced ide drives, not usb keys.
        2) see 1
        3) fibre channel is getting way too expensive, this is all about being on the cheap
        4) see 1
        5) see 1
        6) yeah, I've worked in a datacentre, I know. this is not about being for enterprise storage and such but just a cheapie method for home use. people buy usb and firewire drives after all, this is expanding on that a little
        7) for business use I agree with you, for home use I would say that it is acceptable depending on the situation
        8) :)

        people seem to t

        • Re:A couple of points... (Score:5, Informative)

          by dissy ( 172727 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @10:04AM (#6705438)
          Ok, here's a positive reply.
          Ive started on this very thing myself, using firewire however.

          Unfortunatly I started getting all sorts of ideas and tacked them on, and now 'cheapie' is out of the question.

          I built a system with 4 firewire buses just for disks.
          I also chose not to power the disks from the firewire bus (explained bellow why)

          The master plan is to have 6 firewire buses (two groups of three, and they only had dual bus cards, thus why i have 4 ports now.. One is not used yet, and will be used with the 3rd dual fw card i do not yet have)
          These three buses connect to firewire hubs.
          Then, you connect three disks per hub.

          Now is the confusing part.
          On bus A, you have 3 disks. These are disk A from 3 different raid-5 groups.
          Bus B has 3 disks which are disk B of the same raid-5 groups. and so on for C.

          Then you setup a raid 5 group out of just those 3 disks. Which in this case gives me 3 groups, and with the 3rd firewire card (bus 5 and 6) this concept will double.

          Then you use LVM to link all of the raid-5 groups together into one big volume.

          Reasonings:

          If any one firewire bus failed (or was unplugged) only ONE disk from each raid-5 group is offline. Raid-5 can survive this.

          I dont use power over firewire because a) the PCs supply can not handle all of that, and b) I now have 3 power supplys, each one chained to the disks in the same order as the firewire buses. This way if a power supply failed, it only takes down one disk per raid-5 group, and again raid can survive that.

          Firewire is multi-host (IE you can have more than one host controller on the same bus) so with two computers on the bus, doing heartbeat monitoring over a serial link between them, if a computer failed, the other can pick up the disks on the bus and continue file serving.

          Using LVM to link the raid 5 groups together means after i start getting disk failures 4-5 years down the road (well, hopefully that long) and it starts to get hard/expensive to find disks of the size i am currently using, I can move the data off the raid-5 group to unused space, and decomition that group. Then it can be pulled off the bus, and replaced with current newer disks which ideally will be much higher capasity, without replacing ALL the disks in my array (as would be the case with a single raid-5 array of all the disks)
          Then you recycle the failing disk, and have two disks spare to use for other machines (IE a mirror to boot a new machine off of, spare single disks, etc)

          Some links you may find interesting:

          - http://www.fwdepot.com/
          Best source of firewire controllers, bridgeboards (firewire -> IDE, firewire -> scsi, usb->ide, enclosures, clamshells you mentioned, etc etc)

          - http://evms.sourceforge.net/
          EVMS = Enterprise Volume Management System. Linux software that lets you manage raid, lvm, clustering, etc all from a server setup. Comes with cli, curses, and X11 interfaces. Not quite 100% there yet, and still has a couple problems for enterprise use, but almost all of them are related to the 2.4 kernel and promised to be fixed when 2.6 is out/stable (and in the past month very well could have been, i havent been keeping up)

          (Please please dont slashdot my poor little file server here!
          If anyone would like to mirror, its ok with me. This is a p2 200 and will die if more than a few peope hit it at once)

          - http://photo.brokensphere.net/index.cgi?mode=view& album=home/fileserver
          (Watch for slashdot injected spaces!)
          This is pictures of some of the parts at the start of my project.
          Havent added new picts yet, nor had much time to work on it.
          These picts show the disks all on one bus and interlinked, which is not good for speed, but I was just testing the EVMS software at the time.

          In the end, I plan to make my own case, which may be a sheet of half-inch think wood screwed into a wall, with disks hanging on it as so their tops face out, and a plexigl
          • thank you :) yay, a positive reply. well done, your project looks quite interesting. you've gone to alot more effort than I have. I've just thought about this a bit and lamented it's none existence, you've actually done something.

            like many people, I used to have a harddisk in one of those removeable caddies for taking stuff to friends, usually pirated software, back when I was into that sort of thing. the problem with that was that it was big, clunky, not hot swappable and different caddy manufacturers all
    • USB 2.0 and enough bandwith for RAID? Lets see 480 Megabits a second divide by 8 for a whopping 60 Megabytes a second half duplex. I have single SCSI drives that do more than that. OK maybe it's reliability your after I dont think anybody has ever written multipath for USB though it could work with existing Mulipath drivers so we will give it the benifit of the doubt. So you need something with a pile of USB root hubs on a PCI-X card.

      Now if you dont care about speed and just realibility maybe a little

  • 5600rpm? (Score:5, Informative)

    by stevenrieder ( 698445 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:37AM (#6704278)
    I believe that's 5400 rpm...

  • The connoisseur's view (Score:5, Funny)

    by vevva ( 693964 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:38AM (#6704280)
    Much as I admire 40Gb in a 2.5" package I'm going to stick with my 100kb 8" floppies. I find the quiet modern drives don't have the same sound quality as the original 8" floppies. It's the whirring sound and the "kerchink" as I swap floppies 3 times per mp3 that adds depth to the listening experience. Nope.. these new fangled drives have no place in the system of a true connoisseur. (PS If any of your readers have replacement valves for a Collossus Mk 1 I would like to hear from you).
    • Floppy disk RAID system here [8k.com] for the cutting-edge Luddite.

    • Re:The connoisseur's view (Score:4, Funny)

      by Pharmboy ( 216950 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @07:17AM (#6704552) Journal
      It's the whirring sound and the "kerchink" as I swap floppies 3 times per mp3 that adds depth to the listening experience.

      If you love the "kerchink" of an older floppy drive, I have some older ZIP drives for you that you will LOVE, with a quite distict "CLICK" sound....price negociable or best offer. :D


      • Nothing compares to the gentle, lilting, swish-swixh noise as your Commodore spends fifteen minutes booting a text type adventure from a audio cassette. It's as calming as a whale song.

        Don't forget to be kind and rewind.

        NOW THAT'S STORAGE!
    • I certainly know the feeling... I never got over the love of hearing MFM hard drives.

      Now I just sit right next to coffee makers, which have some audible similarites to the good old drives.

      You know, I still have a couple sitting around... Maybe it's time to find my old 286, plug it in, watch as my electric bill goes through the roof, and spend about an hour recording the sounds of MFM drives. I may even make a CD out of it, and sell it to geeks trying to fill a void in their lives, caused by the disappe
      • You know, I still have a couple sitting around... Maybe it's time to find my old 286, plug it in, watch as my electric bill goes through the roof, and spend about an hour recording the sounds of MFM drives. I may even make a CD out of it, and sell it to geeks trying to fill a void in their lives, caused by the disappearance of MFM drives.

        Let me know. I'll fire up the $2500 "gigabrick" (Seagate 1 gig, SCSI-1, full height that has enough spinning mass to make a full-tower rock back and forth on startup if

  • Interesting, but what does it cost? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dphoenix ( 623525 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @05:50AM (#6704313)
    You have to remember .. the "cost" figure is strangely omitted anywhere from his review. People will pay for performance, but only within reason! However, inevitably, price will drop on these things and you will see smaller systems (tablets, tiny desktop pcs, consoles). It would be nice to make an even smaller media center PC using one of these.

  • Bigger & faster, but not in my notebook (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bushcat ( 615449 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @06:02AM (#6704345)
    I routinely upgrade drives in my various notebooks, but I've discovered a drive in an external case can be much faster than swapping out the internal drive. To get maximum benefit out of the newer 7200rpm drives, one needs to use Mode 5, right? Do any current notebooks do that?

    Hitachi have piles of info available on their drives here [hgst.com], and a discussion of 7200rpm drives here [hgst.com]. The IBM legacy shines through.
  • These hard drives are truly remarkable in size. It makes me wonder what the deal is with the hard drive inside Apple's iPods. The largest one can fit 30 gb and a firewire controller into an enclosure the size of a deck of cards, and may indeed be one of the 2.5" hard drives reviewed in the article, or at least in the same class.

    I can only imagine what an array of 40 of these bad-boys inside a rack enclosure could provide in terms of storage and redundancy. :)

  • For Non-USians: The drive is 63.5 mm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15, 2003 @06:07AM (#6704360)
    That's more likely to impress the ladies.
  • I always wondered if I turned on my laptop in a car should I maybe put the drive to sleep when going around tight curves or over bumpy roads. 'Course I no longer have that problem as the battery died, but does anybody know? Someone with knowledge of precession too.. would it be better to hold the drive vertical or horizontal? I thought smaller drives were stronger, does anyone know how much and whether the speedup for these drives hurts them in reliability?

    I think I'd mostly like these to put a huge rai

    • Actually, the smaller and faster the drives get, the more reliable they are (as long as component quality remains the same, etc). Also, depending on the use, the drives won't be spun up all the time. A drive with its heads unloaded can take a shock much greater than anything you could give it in your car without any trouble. And to answer your question: mount it horizontally, that will reduce the chance of HDI (Head-Disc Interaction, i.e. a crash) when you turn a sharp corner. A bumpy road would be wors

  • Oh please (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @06:48AM (#6704450) Journal
    There are a lot of comments up there saying this will allow for smaller desktops, etc.

    I don't think that is realistic. For the price you pay, 2.5" drives are horribly inefficient, and nowhere near as fast as 3.5" models.

    Pretty much all 2.5" get used for now are notebooks and MP3 players.

    Maybe as Mini PCs become more popular and mature these drives will get some use there. But this is hardly something to write home about.

    • For the price you pay, 2.5" drives are horribly inefficient, and nowhere near as fast as 3.5" models.

      With 2.5" hard drives at 7200RPMs, how could they possibly be called "nowhere near as fast as 3.5" models."

      They whole point is that they ARE as fast... 3.5" HDDs have been stuck at 7200RPMs for some time now, and that is allowing for some very interesting competition.

      Pretty much all 2.5" get used for now are notebooks and MP3 players.

      Thank-You Mr. Obvious... The issue is not what they are used for now

      • Thank you for comming to /. and spreading your incredible lack of foresight, and sheepish consumer-istic attitude.

        Lack of foresight? Its more like a lack of enthusiasm.

        2.5" drives are improving at almost the same rate 3.5" drives are.

        BFD

    • Re:Oh please (Score:3, Informative)

      by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) *
      the only reason they perform so badly is because there's no decent buffering in ATA drives. With Tagged Command Queing and big prefetch and write buffers they could perform well at all but transferring very large data files (not a common case on most desktops, BTW).

      Also, why don't modern operating systems aggressively prefetch file system metadata and keep it in cache? It seems to me that with most systems having more than adequate RAM it would make sense to keep the entire directory listing and metadata c
      • These aren't servers with redundant power supplies we're talking about. The more you prefetch or write cache, the more you risk loosing data.

    • Re:Oh please (Score:3, Informative)

      by bjschrock ( 557973 ) *
      For the price you pay, 2.5" drives are horribly inefficient, and nowhere near as fast as 3.5" models.

      Talking about the models reviewed, yes, but that's soon to change, very soon. Seagate's Small Form Factor drives [seagate.com] will be around next year. At 10,000 rpm and with a U320 SCSI, Fibre Channel, or Serial-Attached SCSI interface, they're as fast or faster than most of the 3.5" drives out there. The platters in the 3.5" enterprise drives are as small as the ones in the 2.5" anyway, and you'll (almost) be abl

  • smaller != better (Score:4, Insightful)

    by meshko ( 413657 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @07:48AM (#6704715) Homepage
    Even full size harddrives have gotten much less reliable lately. I assume this is because the data density keeps growing. I would rather buy a hard drive which is slightly bigger (I guess it would have to be more platters because making the radius bigger will make seek times longer?) but will last for more than 2 years.
    • Smaller drives would result in less worry about "wobble" (of the drive platters) in the case of shock, and less travel-distance for the needle. Now the real question is, are drives dying to demagnetism (caused by greater cluster density) or just shitty design? The lost one I had frag out on me (30GB maxtor) overheated to death, and others have been issues with the needle, so I'm guessing that the less movement that is required of mechanical components the better!

  • HP has plans for 2.5" server drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 15, 2003 @08:43AM (#6704980)
    According to a server roadmap that HP presented at HP World [hpworld.com] this week, HP is planning to standardize on 2.5" drives in new Proliant servers in the 2004-2005 timeframe. The reason that was given is that with platter sizes getting so large on 3.5" drives and leading to larger drive capacities, customers want smaller drives for their servers for performance purposes. By switching to 2.5" drives, HP can offer more drive spindles in the same space that current 3.5" drives reside in. I didn't think to ask the presenter about drive speeds, however, since it was an end-of-day presentation, but I'm sure the gains from increased spindle counts don't come anywhere close to making up for the slower RPM's of the current and near-term 2.5" drives. BTW, this was an NDA presentation, thus the reason for the AC posting.
    • Today's SCSI drives are almost exclusively 2.5" and smaller. They just come in big packages... That is, internally the platters and electronics are easily small enough to fit in a 2.5" drive (taller than notebook drives admittedly).

      It will be interesting to see if 2.5" server drives will arrive as parallel SCSI, serial SCSI, or SATA first... Either way, 2.5" 15k drives are just around the corner. They will not work in a normal notebook though; it would melt.

  • Autonomous Computing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by fygment ( 444210 ) on Friday August 15, 2003 @09:50AM (#6705325)
    Right our university has a mix of Unix and Win2K computers with different settings as you go from dept to dept. All I/O is to floppy or some rather rare CD RW.

    It would be nice if all the university computers were without a HD. A student would be issued a 2.5". To log on, insert the drive into a bay (like a 2.5" slot or something) on a computer. Voila the computer boots to your personal settings with all I/O going to your drive. Done, pull the drive and walk away. Any computer you use will always give you the same environment.

    Just a thought that seems closer with these size drives.

    • the problem with using 2.5" drives for user customised machines is that EVERY machine has to be exactly the same as next one. Well, not exactly, cpu and ram can be different. However, Motherboard, video card, whatever peripherals, sound cards (if any) would need to be exactly the same as win2k and unix do not take so kindly to hardware chaning on them from one bootup to another. what may work is a FAT32 home partition on the unix boxen which will just pop up as another drive on the 2k boxen. just my tho

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