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Data Storage

Seagate Momentus 120GB 2.5" HD 174

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'll-tell-you-where-to-stick-it dept.
VL writes "A mobile user can never have enough storage space, so we checkout Seagate's latest solution for notebooks. Seagate's warranty is among the best I've seen at five years, which is much better than the one year or so that comes with laptops (and thus their hard drives) or the three years offered by others. Performance is what this drive is targeted to excel at, an it seems to do so fairly well. In our tests we saw it do markedly better than the Hitachi drive in most tests that focused on performance. Battery life was slightly lower than that of the Hitachi drive but within 2% of that drive. "
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Seagate Momentus 120GB 2.5" HD More

Seagate Momentus 120GB 2.5" HD

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  • Wewt (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kawahee ( 901497 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @08:45AM (#13531116) Homepage Journal
    Well it looks like I'll be able to buy one of these for my external USB HDD interface. This technology has applications everywhere, although I think hard disk drives are about to go boom and then bust, as evidenced by the 500gb beast we just saw on /., up from a 300gb HDD. +200gb in a few months? We need a Moore's law for HDDs.

    • Re:Wewt (Score:5, Funny)

      by GNUALMAFUERTE ( 697061 ) <almafuerte AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:02AM (#13531193)
      There is a law for hardrives, the Murphy's law :)
      • There is a law for hardrives, the Murphy's law :)

        As I am just getting done dealing with a hard drive failure on my home machine, it has become apparent that more space is not always better. Sure, you can store tons of whatever on it, but what about when it dies? I spent many hours figuring out how to rearrange the space on my other machines to try and back up my data and it was just a plain chore. It would be nice if backup technology started to pick up the pace a little bit, because backing up 30G onto DV
        • You just have to adopt the mentality that your total usable disk space is exactly half what you can afford.

          Or, put another way, when you are shopping for hard drives you can only buy what you can buy two of at the time of purchase. Simple as that. Then, using any number of methods, you can at least have all your data on 2 drives at once.

    • Well it looks like I'll be able to buy one of these for my external USB HDD interface. This technology has applications everywhere, although I think hard disk drives are about to go boom and then bust, as evidenced by the 500gb beast we just saw on /., up from a 300gb HDD. +200gb in a few months? We need a Moore's law for HDDs.

      Actually harddrives already went boom and bust. From 1GB to 120GB took no time at all, but from 400GB to 500GB took almost a year.

  • 120GB MP3 Player (Score:3, Funny)

    by meehawl ( 73285 ) <meehawl...spam+slashdot@@@gmail...com> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @08:47AM (#13531126) Homepage Journal
    Wow. I know what's going into my trusty old Archos [rockbox.org] mp3 player real soon now...
    • 120GB MP3 Player

      This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?
      • Portable music players are useful for backing up data. Especially photos.
      • I think you could. Downloading whole discographys from bittorrent and audiobooks I believe that you could do it. It might take awhile though.

      • Re:How the hell much music can people use? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Transmogrify_UK ( 902981 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:17AM (#13531272) Homepage

        I travel fairly often and have a pretty extensive music collection on record and CD (around 1000 CDs and about half that of records). I personally like to have ALL or as much of this music with me whenever possible. My MP3 player is only a 20 gig Creative Zen, however I would like a larger capacity player, simply because I could then store all or most of my music (should I get round to ripping it all).

        When I do travel, it tends to be for months at a time rather than a couple of weeks and so it's not practical carrying 1000 CDs and 500 records.

        It's not about listening to 40 days continuous music but having the music to hand.

        Currently I know there's always going to be a time when I want to listen to a particular song or band and I don't have it with me. Had my MP3 player had a 120 gig hard drive, then I know I could take all my music with me.

        • Its not about music.

          I am a software developer who does a lot of travelling, so I use a laptop. I also work on a lot of different projects, and the source code bases can be HUGE.

          Recently, I started using VMWare. I can better isolate my development environments for each project from each other by having them exist in different virtual machines - I can also back them up and create 'snapshots' much easier. But it consumes a hell of a lot of disk space. On one project alone I have a windows XP, 2 different f

      • Re:How the hell much music can people use? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by plumby ( 179557 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:21AM (#13531293)
        At the moment 120 would probably be more than I need, but I will more than fill up my 60GB player when I've finished ripping my CDs. The 41-83 days thing is a bit of a red herring TBH. I'm not planning on sitting down and listening to my entire collection from beginning to end, but I have it on random most of the time and it's great to have that much variety for it to chose from. Also, when I go on holiday, it's handy not to try to guess up front what music I'm likely to be in the mood for during the trip.

      • It's not about continuous music, but about hoarding. How many people that you know back up their downloads in case they might ever need them again?
      • 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music

        Obviously, you are not familiar with some of Sven Väth's longer mixes...
      • This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?

        I dunno, I'm looking at winamp right now just to check how many days worth of music I have. About 35 right now (842 hours.) It's all full albums and stuff I want to listen to. I usually go on Direct Connect, find someone with a fast connec
      • "This isn't a personal attack on you, but your post brings up something I've been wondering about recently: unless you rip your music at ultra-high sampling rates, 120 GB is from 41 to 83 days of music. Can anyone even find that much stuff that they want to listen to?"

        I think most would agree that once you start getting that many songs, having to weed out a bunch to make room for new music sucks. For music, 120 gigs is practicaly infinite. Although, I think it'd be pretty hard core for somebody to find 4
    • Wow. I know what's going into my trusty old Archos mp3 player real soon now...

      Does it really take the 2.5" laptop drives? I thought the going standard for portable media players are the 1.8" drives. You maybe already know this, it's just that it helps to make sure.

  • How much heat do these drives produce? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @08:47AM (#13531127)
    How much heat do these drives produce? I had a laptop with a 60 GB drive, 4200 RPM, and it would heat up like a mutha.

    • I don't know how relevant this will be to your setup, but I have a 2004 1Ghz iBook that shipped with a 30GB, 4200 RPM Hitachi drive. I replaced it with a Hitachi 60GB, 7200 RPM drive with 2MB of cache. I think the max power consumption went up 15% and the average power by a comparable amount. As a result, I get significantly better performance, and, a much warmer iBook. Since overall memory latency is reduced (less time waiting for swap), one would expect performance to increase, but since the CPU and m
    • I switched from a Toshiba 40GB 4200rpm drive to the Hitachi 60GB 7200rpm drive on my 1st gen. 12" PowerBook. It keeps my wrists a LOT cooler as the new drive doesn't seem to generate any. Battery life was markedly improved, I've a 3 year old battery that will still deliver 2.5 hours.

      You can definitely feel it spinning though! It's noisier too, at least for seeking - writing seems more quiet.

  • Biased review (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LynXmaN ( 4317 ) * on Sunday September 11, 2005 @08:49AM (#13531138) Homepage
    Comparing two 4200rpm drives against the Seagate running at 5400rpm will always make the Seagate a winner.
    It'll become a second natural that a drive spinning faster will consume more energy, even if it's just a bit more than this drive.
    I'm not saying this Seagate drive is excellent (reading the specs it really makes me drool) but maybe benchmark testers should do tests with some more "au pair" drives.

    • Re:Biased review (Score:2, Insightful)

      by GeffDE ( 712146 )
      Not necessarily true. Most laptop drives that one can purchase only run at 4200 rpm for the reason you state: they consume less energy. What is remarkable about the Seagate drive is that it runs at 5400 rpm while maintaining a similar energy consumption to a 4200 rpm drive. Its more hard drive bang for your energy buck.
    • Comparing two 4200rpm drives against the Seagate running at 5400rpm will always make the Seagate a winner.

      Not always. Little things like data density can really make-up for small differences in RPMs.

      If the 4200RPM drives were single-platter, and the 5200RPM drive had, say, 4 platters, it's entirely possible the 4200s would come out ahead.

  • Fascinating! (Score:4, Funny)

    by kelzer ( 83087 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:01AM (#13531186) Homepage

    These Slashdot hard drive articles never get old.

    I can hardly wait for the upcoming artlcles about Maxtor and Western Digital coming out with 2.5 inch 150GB drives.

    I'm on the edge of my seat!

    • Re:Fascinating! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CyricZ ( 887944 )
      You realize this is news, correct? This is a site that does attempt to inform the readers about recent events (such as the release of this hard drive). Maybe it's not the most exciting news, but nevertheless it is still news.

      Even though we know there will be new releases of the Linux kernel in the future (just as we know hard drives will have larger and larger capacities), it is important that such news be posted about here, so we can be alerted to the developments.

      • Re:Fascinating! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by m50d ( 797211 )
        Maybe it's not the most exciting news, but nevertheless it is still news.

        News that isn't exciting is just stuff that happened. I wrote an email today, does that qualify as news?

        • News that isn't exciting is just stuff that happened. I wrote an email today, does that qualify as news?

          Yes, you writing that email is news. Perhaps your idea of "news" has been tainted by watching too much FOX, CNN or MSNBC. News doesn't have to involve gratuitous destruction, violence and death.

          That said, it's important that the community be kept up-to-date about technological developments such as this. Had I not been made aware of it now, I may not have found out about these drives existing until I next

      • You realize this is news, correct?

        No, when somebody comes out with an article that says "we've finally hit the size limit for hard drives that use existing technology - they just can't get any bigger than this" - that will be news. New, bigger hard drives in not news - it's a given, just like the sun rising in the east.

        Even though we know there will be new releases of the Linux kernel in the future . . .

        I'm not the biggest fan of Slashdot kernel articles either, but at least they generally discu

        • I'm not the biggest fan of Slashdot kernel articles either, but at least they generally discuss new features.

          These hard drives do indeed have a new feature: increased capacity over previous drives.

          • These hard drives do indeed have a new feature: increased capacity over previous drives.

            No, that's not a new feature. That's the same feature that every fscking new drive has had relative to its predecessors. Hence, it's not newsworthy.

  • For another review: (Score:3, Informative)

    by PoisonousPhat ( 673225 ) <foblichNO@SPAMnetscape.net> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:01AM (#13531188)
    Silent PC Review [silentpcreview.com] has had a review of this drive up for some time. Some desktop users prefer using notebook drives for generally quieter performance. Naturally, the SPCR review will focus more on the acoustical properties of the drive, but it's at least a different perspective and an interesting read.

  • 120 GB... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Zweideutig ( 900045 )
    I like advances in technology as much as the next person, but I really wonder, what do you need 120 GB in your laptop for? I am only using about 2 GB on my laptop (Slackware install, Firefox, and some notes I take in vim.) On my Mac Mini with a Debian install with Firefox and XMMS, I am using only 2.5 GB of my 40 GB HDD. On my 3.8 GHz P4 FreeBSD server, with Apache, and about thirty mp3's served over NFS, as well as NetBSD sets over FTP, I am only using 4 GB of the 80 GB HDD. My NetBSD router of course suff

    • Movies (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 68k geek ( 573999 )
      TV shows and movies - I filled up 3 hdd (80GB + 60GB + 14GB) real quick, even with burning older stuff to DVDs.

      Can never get enough space if you like video.

    • Re:120 GB... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      but I really wonder, what do you need 120 GB in your laptop for?

      45 gigs of porn movies on my laptop right now
      • I avoid all pornographic material. A few years ago, I accidientally encountered whitehouse.com, but other than that I have managed to keep the digital scum off my LCDS, CRTs, and off my HDDs. I think pornography an unacceptable influence on children and adults alike. I'd like to see the U.S. follow China and banish it from inside the United States. Isn't there much more interesting things you coul do with 45 GB and your broadband? I admit I use my HDD and broadband mostly for caching Slashdot content and vi
        • I disagree with you that the US and UK should be MORE like China - see human rights, pollution, general sanitation and living conditions.

          I disagree with you on the pronography front as well. Any attempt to limit someones freedoms impinges on the rights we all have. What will be next - a book burning? Oh no! Those ideas have to go! /sarcasum

          And finally, the on-topic part of my post... I am using ~200gb of storage on my server - most of it applications, tools for work, images and music. Quite a few linux iso

    • Re:120 GB... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by r2q2 ( 50527 )
      You have obviously haven't heard of bittorrent or other peer to peer file sharing applications.
      • I have for downloading a few Rammstein mp3's, distributions and the occasional ebook over those mediums in the past. It never used much space.
    • Three words: Desktop Replacement Laptops.

      As a student who flies home at the start and end of every term, the prospect of buying an extra seat for my computer or trusting it to the postal service 6 times a year does not appeal to me. The 60GB hard drive in my laptop is woefully inadequate to the point where I keep a headless fileserver in both places.

      • As a student who flies home at the start and end of every term, the prospect of buying an extra seat for my computer or trusting it to the postal service 6 times a year does not appeal to me. The 60GB hard drive in my laptop is woefully inadequate to the point where I keep a headless fileserver in both places.

        Why don't you just get some external USB2/FireWire drives?
    • I absolutely would *love* to have more disk space in my laptop. I have 80GB now, and it's not nearly enough. I have an Apple Powerbook, and one reason I bought it was for the ability to do video editing. 80GB isn't much at all when you're downloading a bunch of camcorder footage to go through later and trim down to, say, 45 minutes to 1 hour of final product. Then consider you might want to work on 2 projects at the same time....

      Right now, everyone I know using a laptop for video work carries along an e
      • Not quite. Ever tried lifting a PowerMac? Your PowerBook has a lot more portability, doesn't it? Even with one of those external drives, it's still a lot more portable. If you go on the road a lot with your video equipment and such to film on location, it can be easy enough to store those drives in the glove box, and then swap one for the other when you move between projects. The only problem that remains.... battery life. ... oh, and the van to haul all of your video equipment in.
    • You're thinking only of yourself. What applies to you doesn't apply to the rest of us.

      I do development work on my laptop, so I have web server, database, several gigs of data, plus source code for several trees that are worked on concurrently. I could easily use up your 80 gig hard drive without an issue.

      If I start adding mp3s, movies, backups from my websites, 120 might not even be big enough. I have over 600 gigs in my home computer.
    • I have 50 gigabytes of my main drive used for Windows and games. I then have 100 gigabytes of TV series, mainly scifi (firefly, SG1, etc), anime, family guy, etc. Then, I have about 50 gigabytes of ISOs that I made from all my CDs, so I don't have to swap them in and out. Then, my last 100 gigabytes is reserved for video editing, which often takes up 50 gigabytes per video in temporary uncompressed files. Add on to all of that my massive store of FRAPS...
    • The obvious answer to your question is "YOU don't."

      If you can't imagine why people would want 120GB of storage space in a laptop, then you've got a very limited imagination. Here's an obvious example, since you mentioned a Mac...

      * A PowerBook user wants to edit a video project in Final Cut Pro. 30mins of video often involves editing around 4-6 hours of footage. 5 minutes of DV footage is roughly 1GB. So, a single short-length project is going to eat about 50-70GB of space... bring on the 250GB drives!!!

      * St

    • Re:120 GB... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:44AM (#13531413) Homepage Journal
      My laptop is my music workstation. That's currently the main reason why I like space on a laptop drive. People have different uses for computers, so be wary of generalizing your usage patterns on others.

      Besides, I hate the articifial distinctions between servers/desktops/laptops etc. that have nothing to do with their actual capabilities. Particularly Windows users treat computers as limited appliances. With unix, it's easier to see that a computer is a computer is a computer, and you can use almost any machine for any use. In fact laptops make great servers as they come with a built-in UPS.

      I think 120 GB HDDs should stay in servers

      Yeah, and 120 GB ought to be enough for everyone ;) I mean this as a reminder of the point that you shouldn't impose arbitrary limitations on how technology should be used, because people will always find uses for new inventions.

      • In fact laptops make great servers as they come with a built-in UPS.

        Not IMHO. Laptops are very fragile, in many ways. They usually come with only a single tiny fan that dies pretty quickly, and can be expensive to replace. Laptops hard drives are simply not designed for always-on operation, and really need significant cooling if you want to do that. But of course it's very difficult to install an extra fan into a laptop.

        You talk about the battery in notebooks like a UPS, but you'll find out quick quickl

    • When your laptop is your only computer, it effectively works as that file server you mention. One movie (nice to have on trips if nothing else) is about 1Gb, as is one day's worth of shooting pictures for me (RAW really eats up space). PDF articles are surprisingly space hungry as well; they are not that big individually (my average seems to be at about half a meg), but you tend to collect them like rats collect bedding. All text I have (PDF papers and lots of other stuff) come out to well over 10Gb.

    • Re:120 GB... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by toddestan ( 632714 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:59AM (#13531524)
      There are two types of computer users in this world. Ones that see the computer as a movies/music/media station, and those that see it as a word processing/spreadsheet/email/internet station. For the former, a 400GB drive is too small, and for the latter, a 40GB drive is more than they'll ever need. You clearly are in the latter group.
    • My desktop has a pair of 74 gig 10k RPM Raptors in a Raid-0 and a pair of 250 gig drives. I'm constantly going through and deleting old stuff to make room for new stuff. With a fast internet connection, no hard drive is large enough.
    • I treat my laptop as a backup to my desktop. Whenever my desktop is down for a while, waiting for a part, a system failure, or when I simply can't get to it. If I need to grab some CD or DVD images to test out a distro, I need that space. Having said that, 40-60 GB of space usually does the trick for me. But I assume there are people out there who need more than I do.
    • I have many hundreds of professional society papers and technical reports, many hundreds of PowerPoint presentations (some with embedded videos). Yes, I carry about 64 DVD's of documents in my laptop case, but it is really useful to be able to have immediate access on my HDD to a lot of my documents, and still have room to download hundreds of megs of docs on no notice.

    • Re:120 GB... (Score:2, Funny)

      by glazed ( 122100 )
      Um, I'm having a space crunch here with ~3TB of disk space across the 4 desktop machines I run daily.

      I need much more that 120GB and it needs to be on my desktop.
    • My 60GB (55GB formatted) iBook sorely needs the space.

      25GB for my CD collection in iTunes
      10GB for my scanned photos (ready for cleaning up)
      2.5GB for the OS folders (System and Library)
      5GB for my documents (quite a few pdfs)
      5GB for development apps, IDEs, examples, my own work

      That leaves me with 7.5GB free.

      I'd love a 100GB drive, just for the free room. I'd be able to install a few games, like UT2K4 (which plays acceptably well on the iBook) or Myst IV. I hate buying games that I can't afford the drive space
  • A couple of years ago I bought an Inspiron 8200 and paid _lots_ extra to get the 5400RPM 60Gb drive... which failed about 9 months later... I needed the laptop working ASAP - so a warranty repair was not an option... I replaced the drive with an identical one (for a fraction of the upgrade price a few months previously)... and this drive lasted about 9 months before failing even more spectacularly. I then replaced the drive with a Seagate Momentus one... and (touch wood) it's been good since... Noticiably

  • Reliability (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Walterk ( 124748 ) <<slashdot> <at> <dublet.org>> on Sunday September 11, 2005 @09:29AM (#13531338) Homepage Journal
    These large sizes are all good and well, but 120GB is a lot of data to lose. In these mobile application areas, how does the reliability stack up? Can it withstand some battering, or does it fail first time you drop your laptop?

    • Re:Reliability (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bunco ( 1432 )
      I don't know about you, but any data loss is a bad thing regardless of the amount lost. Anyone who doesn't back up critical data from their laptop on a regular basis can expect a disaster. They're portable and therefore much easier to drop, lose to theft, etc. Expect your laptop HD to fail at some point and plan accordingly.

      I recommend an external firewire/usb2 drive hooked up to a docking station. Better yet, chain it to your docking station. I've heard horror stories of stolen laptops where the "back
  • At last I can take my pr0n collection on the road!

    Well, half of it, at least...
  • Did anyone else find it interesting that they're comparing 4200 RPM drives to a 5400 RPM drive?

    Also, one reason to have smaller, slower drives in a laptop is the heat. I'd love to find some benchmarks on how this gigantic HD did in the heat test. Who knows, it might have done great - but that review is sorely lacking from a die-hard laptop user.
    • being that the article mentioned that the Seagate drive used only slightly more power than the 4200 RPM Hitachi drive, I think you can deduce that heat will be no more of a problem with the Seagate than a normal drive.

  • Firewire vs. USB (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Donny Smith ( 567043 )
    And before you know, your 120GB drive will be full. And it's not cheap either.

    To me, capacity and performance are more important that disk dimensions and weight. That's why I'll get myself a Firewire (faster) enclosure with a 3.5" disk (cheaper) three times the capacity.
    • And while you're fumbling with cables and an external battery to power that 3.5" drive, I'll be in the next seat over with an internal HD and no fuss.

  • laptops LBA48? Availability? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Sunday September 11, 2005 @10:11AM (#13531580) Homepage Journal
    Here we are at the edge, at 120gb. What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD? I have had headache after headache with desktop systems and firewire enclosures that were not fully LBA48 compliant, and so they would detect 160, 180, 200, and 250gb HDs as 128gb. (or not at all...) Since no laptop drives > 128gb have yet been manufactured, I wonder if we will see this problem crop up sometime next year for out laptops?

    Or has someone tried cabling a large 3.5" drive into a few laptops to see if we have a nasty surprise waiting for us?

    I've got an 80 in my powerbook, and have a good 20 of it free, but y'know how things like that go... I'm sure I'll be hurting for space by start of next year. A 120 would be a nice upgrade. Anyone found a source for these new magic drives? I remember years back with my black powerbook with its "huge" 8gb drive, finding that IBM had made a massive 23 gb drive and having to search high and low to find the ONE retailer that had just TWO of them in stock. I still say I should have bought both and ebayed the other and made a killing.

    If someone has found a few sources for them, can you report back on prices so we know how bad it's gonna sting? (that 23 was over $800 at the time, but worth every penny!)
    • 2.5in looks like the future of hard drives, laptop or server, at least if you listen to HP [hp.com]. So far you can only get 72GB in Serial Attached SCSI 2.5in. Wonder how long they'll keep up 3.5in drives, or wether they'll keep those around for bigger servers.
    • LBA48 won't be a big deal for laptops, because this problem has already been solved for 3.5" drives and desktops, and that hardware (Firewire bridge chips) and software is already there. It's not like Windows has one driver for 3.5" ATA devices and another for 2.5" ATA devices. The only part that is specific to laptops that I can think of it the BIOS. I guess it's possible that the BIOSes in even recent laptops haven't been updated to boot from LBA48 devices simply because they didn't have to. But I expect
      • Remember though that there are three important factors in play here.

        (1) the IDE controller chip has to have LBA48-aware firmware. This same issue applies to firewire-to-ide bridge boards in use in many firewire enclosures. I have a handful of bridge boards here that are NOT LBA48 compliant and will only detect 128gb at most. Manufacturers are still making bridge chips that are not LBA48, sadly.

        (2) the software you speak of, the ATA driver in your OS, must also be LBA48. I don't see this being a problem
        • Due to how the LBA48 standard was implemented, a controller chip isn't "LBA48" or not. You just write some registers twice. You can make any controller chip do LBA48 with the right software.

          Bridge chips are problematic since they are self-contained and you can't necessarily update the software on them (and they might be out of code space), but laptops don't use bridge chips, they just have an ATA interface that is accessed by the main CPU. Fix the code on the main CPU (OS or BIOS) and you're there.
          • Explain then why do I have ATA controller cards here that don't support large drives, and yet I can replace them with newer controller cards and suddenly get large drive support?? This appears to be an open-and-shut case for ATA controllers being able to influence LBA48 compliance.

            And talking of bridge boards, you can't necessarily update the software on them is foolish because close to 100% of bridge boards have flashable firmware. All 13 of my boards, from 5 different manufacturers, are flashable. I've
            • the reason you can replace them with newer ones that have large drive support is because:

              There's more profit in selling you a new card than letting you update the old ones! Ta-Daa!

              Anyway, you can just plain skip the logic anyway. I've written ATA drivers for controllers before. I know how it's done, and I personally have done it and know that there is no restriction to what controllers can have LBA48 software written for them.

              Go get the spec from t13.org ourself. All you have to do is write 4 registers twic
              • Some of the dialog that went back and forth between me an an engineer at Oxford Semiconductor (makers of the popular "911" firewire chipset)...

                It was indeed the board that was the problem. After talking with Mr Brown at OS I have checked the boards, and four of the nine 142AS boards were the older revision, including the one I sent to you. (2.0) They lack a small chip "LVC02A" which is what allows them to do LBA48. Apparently the Maxtors do > 128gb by some method other than LBA48, so they all work fine
                • Like I said, I already told you that bridge controllers might be different. That doesn't mean there is LBA48 hardware.

                  As to the extra chip, a 74LCV02A is just a quad 2-input NOR gate. I'm not quite sure why this chip would help them do 48-bit addressing.

                  I would more expect it is used to block the signal coming from the DMA controller to the drive, so that they can run their DMA controller multiple times in a row without the controller signalling to the drive that the transaction is complete after the first
    • What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD?

      We'll find out soon: 160's are due by the end of the year. I already upgraded my 60 to a 100 last year, and it's full already, so I guess I'll find out.

      Anyone found a source for these new magic drives?

      Newegg has had 120 gig laptop drives for a while now. It's listed at $263.75, so you might want to shop around.

    • What happens when they make a 140gb 2.5" HDD? I have had headache after headache with desktop systems and firewire enclosures that were not fully LBA48 compliant, and so they would detect 160, 180, 200, and 250gb HDs as 128gb. (or not at all...)

      This is (almost) a non-issue.

      Windows 95/98/ME is dead. Every OS that isn't DOS-based completely ignores the BIOS drive specs, and detects the specs on it's own, at boot time. You can put a 300GB drive in a 486, and it will boot the OS (as long as the loader is in t

    • It seems like every time IDE drives start to run into an addressing problem, they come up with a new model that's a few times bigger and lasts for another couple of years

      Out of curiosity, is there a technical reason why they don't just jump to LBA64 or LBA80 or something else that'll be good for another few decades? Note: "to sell more hardware" isn't a technical reason. :-)

      • Old style is LBA32, iirc. (correct me if you know better)

        They only use 30 of those bits for block addressing. Not sure on the other two, probably read/write flag and something else.

        2 ^ 30 = big number. It's signed, so we only can use 2^29 of it for positive numbers. There are 256 bytes per HD sector, so add another 8 to the 29 (2^8=256) and you will find 2^37 = 137,000,000,000 or so, which is 128gb, and there is your old LBA30 limit.

        LBA48 adds 18 bits. That's about 262,000 times the capacity.

        I know Moor
  • I put this in my Dell D800 laptop and XP Pro couldn't format it. I took it out, put it in an external box with an AC power supply, plugged it into the USB port, and it formatted fine. Then I put it back in the D800 and it works fine there too. This puzzles me, perhaps someone can help me understand it.
  • I emailed seagate asking for more specs and availaibility. Looks like he picked a very strategic time for a vacation!

    I will be out of the office starting 09/10/2005 and will not return until
    09/19/2005.

    I will have limited access to email and voicemail. If your matter is
    urgent, please contact John Paulsen at (831) 439-2499 or
    john.paulsen@seagate.com
  • I just ran HD Tach on my 7200rpm 60GB Hitachi 7K60 in my laptop and the Seagate at 5400rpm nearly matched it. I had the same 40MB/s max, 33MB/s average read speed and a slightly faster 14.6ms seek time. Most likely the Seagate can keep up because of the higher density. Even though it spins fewer times in a second, the heads still see the same amount of data.

    So, this drive is actually impressive. I paid $200 for my 60GB, I'd consider another $50 for double the space at the same speed a very good deal.

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