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Data Storage Hardware

Seagate Rolls Out 400 GB SATA Drives 418

Posted by simoniker from the rather-significant dept.
SenorCitizen writes "Seagate is the first hdd manufacturer to announce 400 GB 3.5" hard drives. The 7200.8 is SATA native and comes with buffer sizes up to 16 MB. Seagate also announced a 2.5" portable external hard drive with 100 GB, and an external USB2 pocket hard drive with 5 GB. Get leeching!"
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Seagate Rolls Out 400 GB SATA Drives More

Seagate Rolls Out 400 GB SATA Drives

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  • USB pen distros (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mastergoon ( 648848 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:53PM (#9423985) Homepage
    Once BIOS supports booting from them, USB pen distros will be really nice. Read and write, and now a whole 5 gig on something easier to transport than a CD.

    • Re:USB pen distros (Score:5, Informative)

      by wo1verin3 ( 473094 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:24PM (#9424302) Homepage
      My IBM ThinkPad already allows me to boot from a USB Memory key.. and the ThinkPad is almost 2 years old.

    • Re:USB pen distros (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sielle ( 785160 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:32PM (#9424366)
      Most current BIOS's will already support booting off of USB drives.

    • Re:USB pen distros (Score:3, Interesting)

      by szap ( 201293 )
      You can already install Debian Sarge from USB drives: Debian Installer Test Candidate 1 [debian.org].

      As for running a full fledged distro on it, you'd need something like a LiveCD setup to automagically reconfigure most of your hardware and network settings though, if you change computers around.

      Off into a rambling tangent:
      Hmmm... used to be that a computer/OS needs to support multiple users on a single computer, now it's time to add support (persistent hardware profiles, for example) for multiple, different users

  • Finally! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:53PM (#9423990)
    I was just about to purchase 2 x 200GB drives. Now I can pay thrice as much for storage I'll never use!

  • Ooops... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cheerio Boy ( 82178 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:54PM (#9423993) Homepage Journal
    2.5" portable external hard drive with 100 MB

    Wouldn't that 100GB?

  • Oh my (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:54PM (#9423998)
    Is that 5GB in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

  • IBM already ships 400GB SATA disks (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:55PM (#9424004)
    Seagate is not the first with 400GB disks,
    IBM announced them a copule months ago and already ships them.

  • Length of Warranty? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:55PM (#9424014) Journal
    Is the warrany on this 400GB drive 1 year or 3 years? I didn't find mention on their site of how long it is, and if it is only 1 year why should you trust your data to it?

  • Just out of curiosity... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blackula ( 584329 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:55PM (#9424016)
    Does anyone know what ever became of the $1/GB tax on hard drives [slashdot.org] in France?

    That could make for some pretty pricy hard drives if it's still in effect...

  • Sure, good stuff... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eric(b0mb)Dennis ( 629047 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:55PM (#9424018)
    But not down to my level of use, seems more geared at enterprise solutions....80gb IDE drives are going for what... 50 cents a gb now? last 80gb drive i bought was around $60

    Don't know the cost of this drive, but i'll stick to my RAID arrays and be happy as a Joe Consumer.
    • "Don't know the cost of this drive, but i'll stick to my RAID arrays and be happy as a Joe Consumer. "

      That statement is amusing to be, since "Joe Consumer" does not use RAID. Joe Gearhead, and/or Joe Supergeek might, but not Mr. Consumer.

      • What he meant was that he would use the ID part of RAID (Inexpensive Disks) to the extreme. He would act as a Joe Consumer and buy normal size drives and then just array them...instead of buying server oriented gear...

  • It's been said before (Score:5, Insightful)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:55PM (#9424020) Homepage
    I don't need 400GB, hell I don't need 160GB; I need a hard drive that is more reliable

    These are cool and all, i'd love to have one, but I'll rest easier knowing that my 80GB, let alone 400GB is safe and reliable for some time to come.

    • No problem (Score:5, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:58PM (#9424073)
      Get multiple drives and RAID them together. A 2-disc RAID-1 is quite reliable, but you can go for more if you are really concerned. Also, go SCSI instead of IDE. SCSI drives tend to be engineered to a higher standard, and are generally warenteed longer to boot.

      However, don't bitch about the price. You WILL pay more for less storage, that's the cost of reliability.

      • Re:No problem (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 )

        Unfortunately, both are solutions that will only tackle a few problems by rather brute methods, such as RAID redundancy. ( Hehehe )

        What IT currently needs are solid state harddisks. FAR higher reliablity, far higher speeds, close to no issues anymore with cooling... How do you think 40gb SS HDs would sell? They'd sell like hot cakes for database solutions: just slap 10 of them together in a RAID 0 configuration and you just got yourself one 400gb drive with speeds that are somewhere between SCSI 15k ac

        • Re:No problem (Score:3, Interesting)

          by mrchaotica ( 681592 )
          Well, that's great, but also really really expensive (for now, anyway)

          If you really want something like that, I remember hearing about a PCI card with something like 8 or 16 RAM slots, that was made to be used as a drive - you could get one of those and have up to ~16GB (Is 1GB the biggest size for PC-2700?), but it'd cost a heck of a lot of money.

          I'd give you a link, but a cursory Google search didn't turn up anything

        • Re:No problem (Score:3, Insightful)

          by afidel ( 530433 )
          Wrong. Solid state memory has MORE failures per time period. Check out the IBM chipkill [ibm.com] memory whitepaper. IBM has decided that multiword ECC simply isn't enough. To get acceptable reliability you need multiword ECC AND RAID across modules.
    • I really think they're just trying to get it to where everyone will upgrade their hardware every year...and therefore not needing to worry about long term reliability.

      But I think eventually they'll hit the intel roadblock of can't get an faster without breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

      Steven Vallarian>
    • I don't need 400GB, hell I don't need 160GB; I need a hard drive that is more reliable

      I need about 500GB and something that is reliable. I'm looking at 3 250GB drives with raid5 which should be close enough to 500GB after the hardrive manufacturers stretching of the facts and formatting.

      My question is, where do you go to buy a harddrive nowadays at a good price. I've been looking at pricewatch [pricewatch.com] for sometime, and I realized today that the prices there are too low to be true. Plus if you look at the fee

  • Backups... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CompSurfer ( 759218 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:55PM (#9424021)
    But the only thing short of a really long tape that you can backup these things to in one media is another 400GB hdd. (it would still be 86 4.7GB DVDs)

    • Re:Backups... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by anthonyclark ( 17109 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:02PM (#9424103)
      A LTO-2 tape will hold 400GB compressed, 200GB uncompressed. The LTO-1 (200GB compressed) library I use to back up my little corner of the net can hold 7.2TB worth of data.

      Of course, those tapes cost like 50 bucks each and the drives cost several thousand...

      A large and *affordable* backup medium would be nice.

  • Bah! Still too small... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by plj ( 673710 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:56PM (#9424029)
    Now this [lacie.com] would be something. ;-)

  • system requirement (Score:5, Funny)

    by gandalphthegreen ( 751209 ) <copeland.tjNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:56PM (#9424032)
    I suppose that this is part of the technology that makes a Windows Longhorn installation possible.
  • Seagate is the first hdd manufacturer to announce 400 GB 3.5" hard drives.

    Seagate tenatively plans to call this line of hard drives the "Pornotopia" series.

  • Pr0n (Score:3, Funny)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:58PM (#9424060) Homepage Journal
    Has anybody tested the pr0n transfer rates on these?

  • 16MB Cache? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by cerebralsugar ( 203167 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:58PM (#9424067)
    I wonder if 16MB is actually an aid to performance on these drives? What kind of algorithms do they use to ensure efficient usage of all that space? Can anyone here comment?

    I seem to recall in chip design that the larger the cash does not always equal more performance, if the cache manager has to search the whole cache everytime time (hash?) to deliver what needs to be used.

    • Re:16MB Cache? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )
      I cannot comment very intelligently, but I can say that I have read that even modern 7200 RPM drives could really use more cache than the 8MB that the more expensive ones tend to come with now. I seem to recall reading that they should have more like 32MB or 64MB and that only cost is keeping that from happening today since you can get that much memory on a single chip now - if you're willing to pay for it.

      P.S. If more cash does not equal more performance, you are not spending your money carefully :)

  • Speeds? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by anthonyclark ( 17109 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:58PM (#9424069)
    Meh, size is nothing, speed is everything. Having used a 10k and a 15k rpm scsi disk in my workstation I'm far more eager to see faster rather than larger.

    Now 20k or 30k rpm? *that* would make me drool :-)

    • Re:Speeds? (Score:3, Funny)

      by tntguy ( 516721 ) *
      Perhaps, but the drool would evaporate from the generated heat before it even left the corner of your mouth.

    • Re:Speeds? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:09PM (#9424166) Homepage Journal
      Rather than suffer the machanical difficulties associated with a 20k rpm drive, putting a stripe set across three 7200 rpm drives will move data very quickly and last longer. Yeah, the seek time is still slower, but the sustained rate is just as high, and smart caching will eliminate a lot of the differences in seek time.

      That said, I'd adore a drive that fast for my swap space.

    • Re:Speeds? (Score:4, Informative)

      by ron_ivi ( 607351 ) <sdotno@NOSpAM.cheapcomplexdevices.com> on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:18PM (#9424245)
      With higher density platters often comes more speed.

      Higher density = more "bits - per - revolution"
      More "bits/revolution" * same RPM = faster data rate

      (of course if they just added platters, you wouldn't get faster - but it seems they're getting more bits by increasing the density/platter)

  • What's the maximum partition size in WinXP/Win2003 (Score:4, Interesting)

    by davegaramond ( 632107 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:59PM (#9424077)
    Win2k's is 128GB and I was bitten by this once. I bought a 160GB drive, created one big partition with Redhat 7.3, and formatted it as NTFS under Win2k. Win2k displays it as 160GB but actually when the drive is near full, old data was overwritten by the new one!

    Is Win2k's limitation artificial? I'd hate that.

    Well, anyway, I've said goodbye to Windows as my desktop.

  • Except for Hitachi (Score:5, Informative)

    by UserChrisCanter4 ( 464072 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:01PM (#9424091)
    Hitachi has had 400GB drives (SATA) for a few months now link [hitachigst.com]
    It looks like the only thing unique here is the "highest areal density", meaning (I assume) that Hitachi is using a four platter system, where Seagate's only has three.

    Also, I wonder what problems might arise from 16MB caches on normal desktop machines. One of the issues I seem to recall with larger cache drives is the risk of filesystem corruption. If power is lost while data is sitting in cache, waiting for a write, then you could potentially royally screw up your file or filesystem. Hence, the only 16MB cache drives I've seen are notebook drives (almost always gonna have a battery) and SCSI drives (likely in a server or workstation, which will most likely have a UPS). Before you go countering that these aren't meant for desktop use, keep in mind that DV video, digital photgraphy, and music are all things that home users like the idea of, and they are also the things much more likely to consume massive amounts of storage capacity.

    • That's the point of journaling, to ensure that the file system is never left in an inconsistent state, even in the event of a failure during write. You can loose data, of course, but that has always been true. Any data not comitted to disk will be lost, regardless of if it's in RAM or a disk buffer. However on a journaled file system (ext3, NTFS, etc) make it a near zero possibility that the file system be in an inconsistent state.
    • Hmmm, good point. You could defeat it by giving the HD an internal battery, though, similar to the watch batteries that keep your CMOS time accurate. All it would need would be enough power to allow the cache to flush itself out in the event of a power failure.
  • That's just amazing. I remember back when I was in college and couldn't afford a good hard drive. Instead, I scrounged several cheap, small drives and an extra IDE card. My PC, built into an old server tower, had seven (7) IDE drives totalling about 5 GB in disk space. There was so much rotating mass, you could balance the PC on its corner and watch the precession.

    • Re:Wow 400 GB in a single drive (Score:4, Funny)

      by eSims ( 723865 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:17PM (#9424809) Homepage
      At the risk of sounding on-ups-man some might find this intersting/amusing.

      Due to lack of cash flow I had at one point 22 Drives attached to my poor Duron 700 for almost 200GB of disk space. There were 12 IDE (4 builin, 4 on each of 2 add in cards) the rest were scsi.

      I set it up in a FreeBSD vinum raid5 array and although performance was abysmal I had reliability even though many of the scsi were salvaged 4.5 or 9gb disks!

      Some would call me crazy (or worse), but I got by until better times and was able to purchase a decent drive to replace them.

  • Someone said enterprises, but at only 7,200 RPMs you'd get better performance RAIDing some smaller drives. I guess if you've only got one slot to spare and you've got a lot of DVDs to store and cash to spend then you might buy one of these, but it's going to have to drop in price or increase in RPMs before this gets popular.
    • Video capture.

      7200 RPM is quick enough to capture a DV stream; I know, because that's exactly what I use to capture DV. :) But it blows away chunks of drive space; 1 GB = 5 minutes of capture. Each 400GB drive would give you about 30 hours of raw footage. That could help a lot.

  • This just out... (Score:5, Funny)

    by nmb3000 ( 741169 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:12PM (#9424203) Journal
    AP Story:

    In response to a recent article on Slashdot [slashdot.org], both the RIAA and the MPAA have announced a partnership with Seagate, Inc.

    The details of this new partnership are sketchy, but it seems that it will entail the automated delivery of detailed information on everyone that purchases the new Seagate 400GB SATA hard drive [seagate.com]. This comes from the assumption that the only reason anyone would really need that amound of drivespace is to store their growing collection of music and movies. Understandably, downloaders and rippers are tired or poor quality movies and audio, and as such this new drive will allow them to contain all their new high-bitrate media in one central location.

    In a related story, the RIAA has officially sued Seagate because this new hard drive gives people the capability to store pirated music on their computers. Said an RIAA spokesman, "We feel this is a gross violation of artist's rights, and that it's our responsibility to protect them."

  • Come on! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yttrium ( 88756 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:19PM (#9424255)
    Can't we just say 0.4 TB? It's only a matter of time...

  • What happened to native FireWire drives? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GPS Pilot ( 3683 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:21PM (#9424270)
    This thing has a native Serial ATA interface... will we ever see a drive with a native FireWire interface?

  • in other news (Score:5, Funny)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <{moc.oohay} {ta} {dnaltropnidad}> on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:22PM (#9424281) Homepage Journal
    Seagate has redefined a 'Byte' to be 4 bits.

  • RAM drives (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Charcharodon ( 611187 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:53PM (#9425104)
    My question is when are they going to quit fooling around with these small cache sizes and start putting in 256mb-1gb+ of memory in there to be used as a RAM drive that is fed by it's HD component.

    It would be nice to see HD's average transfer rate stay closer to it's peak rating for comonly used files.

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