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Data Storage Hardware

Itty Bitty SCSI Hard Drive Arrives 266

Posted by michael from the little-silver-different dept.
Bender writes "The Tech Report has a review of the new Seagate Savvio hard drive. This little SCSI drive is roughly one-third the size of the Cheetah 10K-RPM drives so popular for servers, but the benchmarks all show it performing about the same. Not only that, but noise levels and power consumption are both lower than 3.5" SCSI drives. Is it time for 1U servers to convert to 2.5" hard drives?"
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Itty Bitty SCSI Hard Drive Arrives More

Itty Bitty SCSI Hard Drive Arrives

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  • It has to be said.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by thewiz ( 24994 ) * on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:34PM (#10538760)
    "Phenomenal H4x0r powers; itty bitty living space!"

  • 1U Servers To 2.5" Drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:34PM (#10538762) Homepage Journal
    The IBM 336 servers that just came out use the new 2.5" SCSI drives. Instead of being able to fit 2 drives, they can fit 4. It's pretty cool stuff. The drives were slightly more expensive, but it was well worth it to us.

    • Re:1U Servers To 2.5" Drives (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      How much is slightly? The article says that these drives cost 3 times as much per drive ($447 vs $150).

    • Re:1U Servers To 2.5" Drives (Score:5, Informative)

      by tmasssey ( 546878 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:45PM (#10538907) Homepage Journal
      I just read about those machines about 2 weeks ago on IBM's site. When I saw them I thought, "Oh crap: IDE notebook drives with a SCSI chip stuck on them in a server. What *were* they thinking?!?"

      I must say, though, now having seen the tests and, more importantly, the photographs, that those look *nothing* like a notebook (IDE) hard drive, with their aluminum foil-quality shell almost no real structure. They look like 3.5" hard drives scaled down: still rugged, just small.

      I say bring it on! Of course, given my (and my client's) needs, I don't buy rackmount servers... :)

      • Re:1U Servers To 2.5" Drives (Score:4, Insightful)

        by geoffspear ( 692508 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:17PM (#10539256) Homepage
        Wait a second... why would you want a more rugged casing on a drive that's in a machine bolted to a rack in a machine room somewhere than you do in a machine you're walking around with all day? Isn't that a bit counterintuitive?

        • Re:1U Servers To 2.5" Drives (Score:5, Insightful)

          by tmasssey ( 546878 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:31PM (#10539430) Homepage Journal
          No. I don't want a part that's more rugged for my servers. I want a more rugged part. Period.

          However, don't forget that the biggest reason notebook hard drives are not more solidly built is because of weight, not size. When every notebook builder is struggling to gain fractions of *ounces*, every bit of extra steel on a hard drive counts. Hence, the cheap, flimsy structure.

          Have you ever seen a notebook hard drive? All of the ones I've seen in the last three years have a warning on them: do not push on drive! The top of the drive is little more than stiff foil. If you push on it, it will break the drive.

          So, no, I do not want a part specifically engineered to be as thin and flimsy as possible in my server. I don't really want them in my notebook, either, but I don't have a choice there...

          • Re:1U Servers To 2.5" Drives (Score:5, Informative)

            by steve_l ( 109732 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @04:01PM (#10539773) Homepage
            Having been involved with notebook engineering in the past, I can assure you that the notebook drives -esp. the hitachi ones- are well engineered for the weight.

            The biggest issue with causes of failures is how well they are mounted, and that is where different ODM designs can vary wildly; or even the same ODM design with a different vendor's case round it.
            Some drives were only mounted on one side, so every shock got amplified. Others were in "quick swap on failure" units that almost guaranteed failure, they were so unsupportive of shock. Same goes for hot swap CD/DVD drive trays, BTW.

            The emergence of "Consumer grade" laptops has actually done a lot to improve the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR). These ones dont have so many hotswap options, but instead can lock down everything to be sure it stays supportive.

            We have also done tests shipping packaged systems around by fedex with a logging accelerometer in place of an HDD. you get some interesting figures, but all well within the safety range of things.

            One tip though, always tuck the laptop in behind a seat safely before you go driving down windy back roads doing italian-style "optimistic overtakes". Some things are way outside the envelope.
        • Wait a second... why would you want a more rugged casing on a drive that's in a machine bolted to a rack in a machine room somewhere than you do in a machine you're walking around with all day? Isn't that a bit counterintuitive?

          Why?

          Fire
          Earthquake
          Flood
          Tornado
          Hurricane
          Tsu nami
          *Incompetent techs* "whoops"

    • Instead of being able to fit 2 drives, they can fit 4. It's pretty cool stuff. The drives were slightly more expensive, but it was well worth it to us.

      As the article states, you'll need at least three of these little drives to reach the capacity of a single 3.5" drive. That seems to work out in favor of the larger drives, since they are cheaper on a storage/dollar basis.

  • Perfect... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Supp0rtLinux ( 594509 ) <Supp0rtLinux@yahoo.com> on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:34PM (#10538771)
    I see two awesome goodies with this:

    1) I can now fit 6 HDs in my 1U server instead of only three

    2) I can finally have SCSI performance on my laptop if I can ever get one with onboard SCSI. Of course, heat is still an issue...

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

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:37PM (#10538805) Homepage
      Actually, now you can fit 10 drives in 1U instead of 4.

      SCSI in laptops? Keep dreaming.

      • Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jcostantino ( 585892 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:09PM (#10539164) Homepage
        If I recall correctly, very early Powerbook (Duo 200 series?) had 2.5" SCSI hard drives.

        • Re:Perfect... (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Up until 1995, all Mac laptops used 2.5" SCSI drives. They switched to IDE drives at about the same time as they switched to PowerPC chips.
        • I know PowerBooks and obscure RISC laptops used to use SCSI drives, but I'm talking about present and future laptops: there's no way you're going to get SCSI, because it's too far out of the mainstream now.
      • SCSI on laptops? <ducks>Maybe if you're hungry on the go and want to cook up an omelette real fast.

        I'm sure that 10 minute battery life would be plenty of time to fry up a few eggs.</ducks>

        Don't get me wrong, I love SCSI. My entire Athlon64 system is all SCSI (can't wait to upgrade to FC3) and it's amazing but I think that's something best left to desktops/servers.

        Regardless, would you want to pay these prices for a laptop drive??
        $447 (36GB)
        $838 (73GB)
      • Hmm... my Tadpole laptop has a 1Gig SCSI drive. Wonder if this would fit?
        It's funny how running Solaris with a 1Gig drive makes you feel a bit cramped.
    • There were 2.5" SCSI drives a long ass time ago. I used to have a Power Series Thinkpad, aka an RS/6000 laptop. It had a pretty low-capacity (I want to say around 500MB) 2.5" SCSI disk in it. Anyway UDMA100 disks will work just fine, it's not the interface that's providing the speedup when you can have one IDE device per bus.

    • Re:Perfect... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      1) just by changing the case (rather inexpensive) you can have better drives than these.

      2) and what exactly is SCSI performance ? do you have an array of disks in your laptop ? Last time I checked, virtually all laptops held one single hdd, which means that you wouldn't see *any* difference between ATA and SCSI interfaces. So, SCSI on laptops means basically sticking in an expensive controller and disks without any performance gain over the cheaper disks. Do your math here.

      BTW: the parent post should have

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

        by Tanktalus ( 794810 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:21PM (#10539297) Journal

        Actually, the performance gain I saw in SCSI was simply the fact that the SCSI card took care of large amounts of my I/O processing, leaving my CPU free to do, you know, CPU stuff.

        SCSI's advantage is not solely in the performance of its devices.

        When I'm burning CDs on my IDE-based CD burner, it chews up nearly all my system resources on my puny 1.8GHz processor. But on my old 486DX2/66MHz system, with 5 SCSI disks (no RAID) and SCSI CDROM, I could have all these lit up without any drain to my system. Do I miss those days or what. <sigh>

        • Re:Perfect... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:45PM (#10539593) Homepage
          When I'm burning CDs on my IDE-based CD burner, it chews up nearly all my system resources on my puny 1.8GHz processor.

          Try enabling DMA and suchlike, so the IDE chipset takes care of large amounts of your I/O processing.

          Between SuSE 8.1 and 9.0, my PC's IDE chipset gained DMA support for writing CDs and stuff. The machine went from being unusable when writing a CD to taking up a few percent of processor time, on my punier 1.1GHz processor. Okay, it's not SCSI performance by any means (although it talks SCSI over the IDE bus, heh) but it's still a big improvement.

          Actually, the last SCSI device I bought new was a 230MB hard disk for my Atari ST, for a few hundred pounds. I take it things have improved since then. :-)
        • Yes, that has always been a major benifit of SCSI vs ATA. Since all the of the work is offloaded onto the controller instead of the CPU, it takes much less resources.

          I remember my friend and I had an argument of SCSI vs ATA once. My system was all SCSI (see reference [slashdot.org]) and his was all ATA (like most). I told him there is a noticable difference, he wouldn't believe me. So we did a test, we copied the entire contents of the Windows 98 CD (yes, this was my frosh year in college - '99) to our harddrive and

      • SCSI Event Request Reordering gives Speed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @06:54PM (#10541365) Journal
        One reason SCSI disks are faster is that the smart controllers get to optimize requests after they've been sent to the disk controller. Typical tricks include reordering requests to take advantage of disk postition information that the CPU doesn't know about. I haven't benchmarked this stuff in years, but basically anybody who does ends up raving about SCSI performance.

        Another reason that SCSI disks are often faster is that they often have higher RPMs. That's not because the controller makes the disk spin faster - AFAIK it's just because the disks that spin faster are usually sold to people who want maximum performance and are willing to pay for it, so they usually want SCSI controllers.

        More spindles is obviously a Good Thing too, but that's not what makes SCSI fast. It would seem obvious that SCSI lets you support more spindles, so that would give you some speed advantages, but most SCSI disks seem to be smaller, so for any given capacity you often need more disks if you're using SCSI.

    • Look up the tech specs. The drives are still thicker than the current thickest laptop hard drive. You'd also need a laptop that has built-in SCSI. I'm not certain if they are still made.

      I'm sure power consumption is an issue. Unless you don't mind the short 1 hour battery life of P4 laptops. If you want a four hour battery life, forget this drive.

      You can get a 7200 RPM ATA drive for laptops though.

  • Is it time? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Roadkills-R-Us ( 122219 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:35PM (#10538783) Homepage
    Or is it past time?

    Either way, it's time now. How many of these can we fit in a 1U front panel and still have room for
    air inlets at reasonable volume, lights and switches? And preferably a video connector and two USB ports?

  • OMG Smaller Hard Disks? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Exmet Paff Daxx ( 535601 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:35PM (#10538790) Homepage Journal
    Shocking.

  • My only problem.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by dadragon ( 177695 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:36PM (#10538800) Homepage
    My only problem with this is that SCSI disks are far too expensive for me. I'd like to have one in my desktop, but it won't happen any time soon. I'll stick with SATA for now.

    • Honestly, in desktop use, the SATA drive will be as fast as a SCSI drive. SCSI really shines in multiple drive configurations under load, like a server. They are handy when you want to stream data to a drive with as little potential interruption from activity to/from other drives as possible (like video capture), but given that SATA drives are on their own channel, that isn't a big advantage anymore.

      • Are you sure?? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ktulu1115 ( 567549 )
        I can't be certain for sure, but I know a *big* limitation of older IDE/ATA drives was that the controller could only talk to one device at a time (per channel maybe?) My guess is SATA would not have that limitation since it's a serial interface (no bus), but I know for sure that with SCSI there is no such limitation.

        IIRC, SATA is also including some of the advanced SCSI abilities - TCQ/NCQ (read more here [wdc.com]), but still falls shy of the complete list (including Packetization, QAS, & Negotiation and Do

    • The price disparity between IDE and SCSI wasn't always there. At the dawn of IDE, back when 200MiB was considered a large drive, IDE and SCSI drive prices were at virtual parity. If there was a difference between two otherwise identical drives, it was usually between USD$5.00 - $10.00. For a $600 drive, that's epsilon.

      Sometime later -- it feels like about seven years ago -- IDE drive prices started plummeting relative to their SCSI counterparts. Now things are at the point where you'll pay three to fi

  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MasTRE ( 588396 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:36PM (#10538802)
    I think that once the trend of "bigger, faster" stops, some sanity will come to computing in general. Some applications don't need the absolutely fastest performance out there, especially when that performance comes at the price of size, power consumption and heat dissipation. Most servers would be better off with a slightly slower-performing drive that uses less power and dissipates less heat. Maybe this is the start of something beautiful ;)

    • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheFlyingGoat ( 161967 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:47PM (#10538929) Homepage Journal
      You make good points, but there's another approach for servers to take. Purchase VMWare and one big server to do the job of many individual servers. You get far less power consumption and heat, make use of most of the processing power of the server (instead of running at 10% processor most of the time), and make it far easier to upgrade (increase RAM in 1 physical machine and you increase it in all the virtual ones).
      • That is a good point, but remember that when you install that RAM in the 1 physical machine, you have to take all of the virtual machines + the physical machine offline. Single point of failure.

        • Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)

          by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:14PM (#10539223)
          That is a good point, but remember that when you install that RAM in the 1 physical machine, you have to take all of the virtual machines + the physical machine offline. Single point of failure.

          Naw, you just move the virtual machines over to secondary systems that have the spare capacity, bring down the box, upgrade it, move the virtual machines back onto it, all without shutting anything down. See VMWare ESX, Vmotion and VirtualCenter for details on their site. Course, to take advantage of moving the machines without shutting them down you need a SAN on the backend. It's mainframes all over again.

          • Sounds nice in theory but has anyone ever done it in reality?
            I mean with servers that actually provide a service, under load?
            With maybe hundreds of TCP connections going at any time?
            No service interruption, none at all?

            • Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)

              by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @05:35PM (#10540713)
              Yes: check out RackForce [rackforce.com]

              They do 'DDS' servers under several plans, the cheaper the plan, the more virtual servers share the same physical hardware. At the top end, you get the whole server yourself.

              The big plus with this system is that they can migrate your server to new hardware by copying a single file or directory - and they will, downtime for server upgrades is in the matter of seconds (copy, turn off old VM, turn on new VM), and you can migrate to new plans with the same ease.

              The VM technology is SWSoft's Virtuozzo [sw-soft.com] which comes with some features to prevent 1 VM from taking over the entire hardware - you can set it so each VM will be guaranteed a minimum amount of resources.

  • Failure rate? (Score:5, Informative)

    by seagar ( 631973 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:36PM (#10538803) Homepage
    That's what i'm most concerned with..I have never cared much about the noise level of SCSI drives in my SERVER ROOM. It's supposed to be loud in there. Lower power consumption is a plus.

    Back to failure rates, I have noticed a slip in the quality of my Seagate drives lately (IDE, SATA, and SCSI). They just seem to fail more often than they used to. I used to brag about how rock solid my Seagates were. However, I also seem to remember Seagate extending their warranty coverage to something like 5 years? Maybe this is a sign that I just had bad luck with my drives..it's been known to happen.

    • Re:Failure rate? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From TFA:

      MTBF:
      Savvio 1,400,000 hours
      Cheetah 10K.6 1,200,000 hours

      So the failure rate's probably about the same as their other SCSI drives, if Seagate's numbers are at all accurate. Warranty's 5 years too.
      • Yea, I'm sure their drives have an average lifespan of 159 years. Next caller.

        • Re:Failure rate? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:18PM (#10539263) Journal
          " Yea, I'm sure their drives have an average lifespan of 159 years. Next caller."

          This is a common misconception. The MTBF refers to the time before a failure in group of drives. So if you have 120 of these 1,400,000 MTBF drives in your server room, then you can expect to go 1 year, 121 days (on average) between replacing drives. That should help you plan your IT spending budget too.

          Or perhaps a company deployed 5000 laptops, all with these drives in them: You can expect to go about 12 days between failures. Back up your drives, people! Even with SCSI-level MTBF numbers, statistically failures are not all that uncommon.

        • Do you actually know how they determine those numbers?
    • From Seagate website [seagate.com]: "Savvio is the new 2.5-inch enterprise disc drive from Seagate"

      These drives aren't performance laptop drives, they are meant to run 24/7 and get lots of work to do.

    • That's what i'm most concerned with..I have never cared much about the noise level of SCSI drives in my SERVER ROOM. It's supposed to be loud in there.

      Actually, quiet servers are a very good idea.

      Because when I inherit some company's old office server for use at home, I want to be able to run it without it being audible from the other side of the building. I've got an elderly HP server thing I acquired that way, with lots of disk space in the form of a 10,000 rpm SCSI hard disk. Very fast, and would be i

  • Is it really an upgrade? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by aardwolf64 ( 160070 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:37PM (#10538814) Homepage
    Is it time for 1U servers to convert to 2.5" hard drives?"

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but why would server owners want to "upgrade" to a smaller, quieter, more expensive drive if they're not even going to get a performance increase? I can easily see these replacing the older drives in new machines, but forget about upgrading...

    • Re:Is it really an upgrade? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:45PM (#10538910)
      "...why would server owners want to "upgrade" to a smaller, quieter, more expensive drive if they're not even going to get a performance increase?"

      More drives equals more performance. A six drive RAID-5 will outperform a three drive RAID-5. With smaller drives you can fit more of them in a 1U system.

      • If you really think the speed difference between a six vs. three drive RAID-5 setup is that important, then I am sure you wouldn't have limited yourself to a 1U system.

        The fact is, you can buy more normal sized drives than smaller sized. More capacity and more speed.

        • "If you really think the speed difference between a six vs. three drive RAID-5 setup is that important, then I am sure you wouldn't have limited yourself to a 1U system."

          Rack space costs money too. The monthy costs of 2U worth of space VS 1U is enough to warent the cost of the extra smaller drives in many cases.

          • I take it you're leasing, then? Rack space costs nothing in our server room.
          • The monthy costs of 2U worth of space VS 1U is enough to warent the cost of the extra smaller drives in many cases.

            Maybe in small hosting plans (20U) but in my (limited) expirience you'd usually be better off to go with 2U-servers instead of 1U simply because all 1U pizza-boxes I have seen get too damn hot to last.

            A nicely cooled 2U host will certainly get you more upgrade choices too (dual cpu, more drives) and save you money either way in the long run.
            • I agree that 2U servers can be better than 1U servers, but not across the board, especially when you're paying for rack space, which can be expensive. If you don't have HUGE storage needs, a 1U server will do fine. Heck, with a Dell 1850, you can get three 146GB drives in the unit, and have close to 300GB available using RAID 5. Most 1U servers are available with dual processors now, too. You are limited in other expansion options - notably just a single PCI slot is available - but for a lot of servers,

    • Density (Score:5, Informative)

      by ZxCv ( 6138 ) * on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:45PM (#10538916) Homepage
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but why would server owners want to "upgrade" to a smaller, quieter, more expensive drive if they're not even going to get a performance increase?

      Perhaps they might see the value in fitting more drives into the same server enclosure?
    • Because an 8-drive RAID-10 array w/10k RPM Savvio drives will probably beat a 4 drive RAID-10 array w/15k RPM Cheetah drives. It will certainly beat a 3-drive RAID-5 array that is even more common on 1U servers, even if it's only 6 drives you can cram into there.
    • Think Blade servers.

      The old 100 pound cases are becoming obsolete as clustering and switched based distributed servers running on thin racks are taking over.

      The benefit is you can put more computing power in smaller space which saves money. Also downtime is not that big of an issue since the other systems will pick up when one fails.

      This is why Windows2k is gaining despite not being as stable as Unix and why sun is having a hard time.

      Small disks would fit nicely in these thin servers or in distributed

  • Dr. Evil (Score:4, Funny)

    by kettleoffish ( 822090 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:38PM (#10538818)
    And I shall call it... MINI-SCSI!

  • specialized boot drives (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:41PM (#10538853) Homepage
    Sounds like someone should be making specialized boot drives, 1.5" or smaller, with 5 gig capacities and super-fast seek times and rotation rates. The smaller the platter diameter, the less strain on the bearings and the more reliable they'll be at ludicrous speed.
    • You can already do that with SSDs (Solid State Drive). Essentially DRAM backed up with a battery. Very fast, no moving parts, expensive as heck.
    • But who the hell needs a fast boot drive? That's the sort of usage pattern where it just won't matter. True, the boot drive doesn't need to be very big, and a 1" drive could serve as a very good boot drive for a server. (2 of them mirrored = better)

      The ludicrous speed is where you want you database, or mail spool, or whatever the server is there for. The speed of the reboot is probably not limited by the disk speed, unless you're booting off floppy drives.
  • It lookes like in the same space of a regular drive you could put two of these drives and RAID 0 them together. That would be a vast improvement in speed with the same amount of space.
    • Even better: Looks like if you dumped the individual enclosures and hard connectors and packed them together, you could probably fit four into the space of a 3.5" drive (although you might be pushing the height by a mm or two).

      Add some electronics and presto -- ultra-fast four-drive RAID5 in one drive enclosure! Of course, over $3,300 for 219GB is a bit pricey.

  • It's time to go 2.5" (Score:5, Informative)

    by egarland ( 120202 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:46PM (#10538920)
    The transition to 2.5" drives should begin now. The 1U server market would be a great place to start because space, airflow and power utilization are all problems with 3.5" drives in 1U servers. History tells us within a few years most drives will probably be 2.5". We are at the point where the 2.5" drives are fast enough and have enough capacity to be appropriate for the common desktop user as well as the high end server user. The price premium is currently too high for wide spread desktop adoption but that's less of an issue in the server realm.

    The material, storage and transportation costs of 2.5" drives are all dramatically lower than 3.5" so in the end, they should become cheaper than 3.5" drives as the technology ages. Since laptop sales are so high the economies of scale for 2.5" drives are there. All we need now is for a company to streamline their manufacturing to bring the cost down to the levels of 3.5" drives and the en-mass transition will begin.

    I for one, can't wait to have 8 drive raid array that fits in two 5.25" drive bays.
    • I will go 2.5", too.
      The very moment i can get a 300GB 2.5" disc for under 200. Until then, 3.5" is small enough....
      (my tower has still tons of unused 5.25" bays...)
      • my tower has still tons of unused 5.25" bays
        That's why they make these [3ware.com].
        • yeah, i know. But the problem with that bays is that they are a) expensive and b) the density is so high you need noisy cooling and c) the 5.25" bays are unreachable with pata (because they are about 60cm away from the board.

          But nice things, otherwise (have seen a 6 2.5" raid bay in 2 5.25", too. But same problem: too expensive....
    • Absolutely! I've been thinking this for a last few years!
    • I was going to say you can do this with 5 normal sized drives right now. But alas, I forgot it took up 3 bays.

      Still, it brought a smile to my face the first time I saw another site selling something like this... seeing that you could fit more drives in just by putting them in sideways.

      Link [stayonline.com]

  • Small SCSI drives are nothing new (Score:4, Interesting)

    by danuary ( 748394 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:48PM (#10538941)
    ...In fact, they're something old -- Macs once upon a time used laptop-sized SCSI disks; so did Sun's SPARCstation Voyager [sun.com]. In the case of the Voyager, a few were made with a 1GB 2.5" (laptop form factor) SCSI disk (the rest had 340MB and 520MB).

    I think the push for IDE came around this time and the market died for 2.5" form factor SCSI. Nice to see it's being revived.

    Wish I still had my trusty old Voyager - because it'd be fun to see if I could get one of these newfangled drives working in it with some sort of an adapter!

    • For you and the others who have said "I've seen SCSI in old Mac laptops long ago": This is less about just being SCSI so much as being on a 10K rpm spindle and getting pretty much the same performance and capacity as 3.5 inch drives.

  • 160 years MTBF (Score:5, Funny)

    by kclittle ( 625128 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:50PM (#10538969)
    1.4e6/(24*365.24) = 159.71 years, to be picky about it. I see these figures on modern drives and, frankly, I don't believe it. But, that doesn't keep me from drooling over them (which would proably shorten the MTBF, yes? :-)

  • Not surprizing (Score:5, Informative)

    by ^BR ( 37824 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @02:52PM (#10538991)

    The platter diameter in fast rotating disks have been smaller and smaller (thus explaining the not so great capacity compared to ATA drive that use full 3"5 platers, not rotating fast).

    The common platter size went from 3"5 to 3" to 2"6 to 1"8, it was only a matter of time that they decided to package it in a smaller enclosure, the 1U market explains a lot... See that very old review [storagereview.com] (Y2K) or that Seagate whitepaper [seagate.com] (pdf) about why smaller is faster...

  • ...worked in the industry for a long time, let me just give my technical impression on these 2.5" drives.

    THEY'RE SO CUTE I WANT ONE

  • teeny (Score:4, Funny)

    by jav1231 ( 539129 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:01PM (#10539091)
    Must have the PreSCSIous!

  • Lower Power? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TFloore ( 27278 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:06PM (#10539125)
    Kind of... but only on a per-drive basis.

    The article talks about putting 3U of 140GB 3.5" HD RAID storage in 2U of 73GB 2.5" HD RAID storage now, for the same total HD space for the array.

    Same storage space. Twice the number of drives. 2/3 the rack space. 44% power use PER DRIVE. That works out to 92% of the power of a 3U RAID stack, in a 2U RAID stack. Which means you just UPPED the power requirement for a fully-populated rack by about 40%.

    Congratulations, your lower power device has you using more power. And therefore dissipating more heat in the same volume. Of course, you DO get a 50% increase in storage capacity for that.

    But you still upped your total power per rack by 40% if you do that.

    Remember your ear protection. The drives are quiet, but that many fans make a lot of noise.

    • Re:Lower Power? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by shirai ( 42309 ) *
      Lower power is only part of the point. With twice as many drives, you have twice the I/Os in less space. Anybody seriously considering performance knows that I/Os are the holy grail of RAID performance, not capacity.

  • dumb, dumb, dumb... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nusratt ( 751548 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:06PM (#10539134) Journal
    What's the point?

    The only substantial savings with a potential dollar-value is space (there's no demonstrable monetary saving for reduced noise in a commercial server-farm).

    I did RTFA -- at least the beginning and end -- and found no basis to believe that either
    (a) the very slight reduction in electricity-usage, or
    (b) the saving in floor-space,
    will *ever* compensate for a 200% price premium --
    especially when you consider
    (a) the low bulk rates likely to be paid for electricity by a large hoster, and
    (b) the likely in-service life in a business environment.
    • And don't forget the fortune companies already have in their present storage units. Two years ago, we paid $1100 per drive for Cheetah 10K U160 181GB so we have no reason to replace or update anytime soon.
    • Drive evolution maybe?
  • Every new size and speed comes with a higher price. When we upgraded from 5 1/4 full height to 3 2/1 half height, we were able to get four drives in the space of two big drives, reduce the current and have almost four times the data. WE also paid a lot more at the time though.

  • Does this mean SCSI for laptops? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by steve426f ( 746013 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:16PM (#10539236)
    Perfect for the Dell Precision M60 (mobile workstation) [dell.com]! Since I'm a non-gamer, hard drives seem to be the main bottleneck for laptops. Most of the high-end laptops last for only an hour or less on battery, users are already accustomed to using A/C, therefore battery isn't an issue for those who want SCSI performance.

    My laptop is used more as a portable workstation. PDA's are for battery powered portability!

  • From a perspective... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:16PM (#10539242) Journal
    Other posts here have mentioned that Apple used to sell it's laptops with 2.5" SCSI hard drives in them.

    Let me just tell you that when I placed an IDE to SCSI adapter plate on a 2.5" laptop drive and placed it in a PowerBook Duo 2300 - there was a HUGE difference in boot time and Photoshop performance (for example) - it almost seemed to be like doubling the processor speed.

    I have been disappointed that the industry decided to go to IDE, but pleased that it may be going to SATA.

    I have been even more disappointed that work isn't being made to actually use flash based (no motor) hard drives a reality - as this is the main bottleneck in laptops (and really desktops)

    Also, I would love to see if this could possibly be adapted to fit in older PowerBooks and would like to see performance tests on a Mac vs the Cheetah and Atlas IV as used in the tests. Maybe even test results froman Xserve.

    I think a true test of performance for something like this - that isn't driver dependent - is only a good test if it can be compared under two different operating systems.

  • Seagate history (Score:5, Insightful)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @03:17PM (#10539262)
    Once upon a time, Seagate listened to its server customers and continued to produce and develop 5.25 inch drives while ignoring the new 3.5 inch format. KaLock and Quantum jumped into the marketplace with 3.5 inch drives and sold them to desktop makers. Seagate lost a LOT of market share by ignoring the push to smaller drives. It seems they are being proactive in moving to 2.5 inch format early before one of the other manufacturers get the jump on them this time.
  • I'm sure someone does

    But really 3.5" drives fit in a 1U just fine and you can fit a good number of them in the right case too. With the size of today's drives unless you're a total media whore you probably don't need more than 1 or 2 drives even mid size ones.

    Not that it doesn't have a certain cool factor. I think that they would be good in certain applications but not most. Most applications requiering small drives don't require the added benifits of SCSI and 2.5" IDE drives are cheap and common and pret
  • 30 disks [seagate.com] in what looks like 3Us of space for 4Gb/s of throughput.

  • I'm more interested in larger capacity at home without having to think much about it. I like the idea of hot-pluggable RAID1 appliances. I've seen two models. Anyone have first-hand feedback on them?

    DynaBacker 2x2.5" RAID1 on FireWire/USB2 [maxpoint.com]

    MediaBank 2x3.5" RAID1 on FireWire [miglia.com]

  • Free idea to HD manufacturers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Friday October 15, 2004 @04:45PM (#10540224) Homepage
    How about a hard drive that has hardware RAID inside it, one virtual HD per plate, with 2 plates for RAID 1, or three plates for RAID5.

    Make one that's 100GB. I don't care about RPMs, I just want to be DAMN sure that it's not going to die on me. I also want to have low cost drives to archive my data to for long term storage. These RAID-ized drives would fit the bill perfectly.
  • If the disc has a greater data density, OBVIOUSLY it'll have the better data throughput than bigger hard drives.

    Just because it's small. And it's also obvious that it'll require less energy to spin the plates, because they're smaller.

    So what's the surprise in here? "Hey, it's faster and requires less power!" DOH, it HAS to be that way. A surprise would be if the disc was bigger but was faster and required less energy.

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