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Data Storage Hardware Technology

Seagate Pushes Hard Drive Platters to 160GB 244

Posted by CowboyNeal from the more-data-crammed-in dept.
TheRainDog writes "Although perpendicular recording has yet to make its way into desktop hard drives, Seagate continues to push platter densities the old fashioned way. The company's 160GB platters have the highest areal density in the industry by over 25%, allowing Seagate to create a 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive that uses a single platter and costs under $90. The single-platter design has lower noise levels and power consumption than multi-platter designs, and a lower probability of a catastrophic head crash. Higher areal densities also allow the drive head access the same amount of data over shorter physical distances, improving performance dramatically in some instances. The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the 160GB Barracuda 7200.9's performance against eight competitors from Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital."
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Seagate Pushes Hard Drive Platters to 160GB More

Seagate Pushes Hard Drive Platters to 160GB

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  • most important question for me.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CdBee ( 742846 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:21PM (#14268426)
    .. and for many others, I suspect:

    Will be be sold with an ATA-133 interface as well as the usual SATA?

    Some may argue that a drive like this is overkill, or even wasted, on an old machine but people like me - who spruce up old P3s bought on eBay by adding faster drives and RAM to make economical web PCs for friends and family - would love to get our grubby little mitts on a drive like this !
    • I hope both because I use the cheaper ATA at home and SATA in my servers. Guess I will be able to upgrade my servers (that only have rackmount space for two drives each) to 1TB per server now. Yippie! Before my supplier only offered up to 400GB SATA hdd's. Kick ass. I'll use it all too.
      • I use the cheaper ATA at home and SATA in my servers.

        PATA is not cheaper than SATA. Prices of both technologies are generally within 5% of each other.

        • I buy a dozen or more drives a year and the price is always noticable in my experience. Hopefully that's changing as SATA becomes more standard.
        • PATA is not cheaper than SATA. Prices of both technologies are generally within 5% of each other.

          All the rebates are still mainly for PATA drives though. Techbargains had a 300gb pata at best buy for 69 bux after rebate. Good luck finding a similar special for SATA.

          I do agree though that without rebate they are priced the same, wtih SATA is strangly like 2-5 dollars more.

    • If you're going to waste good money on a P3, why not go totally crazy and add a SATA controller while you are at it?

      /greger

      • I'm about to do exactly that. I'm buying a new drive for my main machine which already has a SATA drive. It is cheaper to buy a $20 SATA controller than a whole new drive for what will be a dual PIII fileserver (especially considering it's either deal with ATA-66 speed or pay bug money for scsi since the system was originally a dual PII 440BX workstation)
    • Yes, they are also available in PATA configuration. Check the website. Just got the SATA version, let's see how they perform. BTW, I am not affiliated with Seagate.
  • I am a packrat, I save everything I can get and I have found that I can't fill more than 1 TB, so I think in a year or so you'll only ever need one HDD (and they'll be cheap enough to get 2 and make a RAID array for security). I burn everything to DVDs and I have a few TB of files on DVDs, so with BluRay/HD-DVD I think pretty much all our storage needs are met. Also, as a preemptive strike, no, none of it is porn.

    • 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (Score:5, Funny)

      by this great guy ( 922511 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:37PM (#14268523)

      You mean 1 TB ought to be enough for anybody ?

    • Re:No need after a while. (Score:5, Funny)

      by cbiltcliffe ( 186293 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:46PM (#14268578) Homepage Journal
      Also, as a preemptive strike, no, none of it is porn.
      That's why you don't need more than 1TB. :)
    • That made no sense to me. You began by saying you couldn't fill more than 1 TB but then you gone on to say you have a few TB backed up onto disks. I'm assuming the few TB consists of porn which doesn't count because you deleted it from your computer.
    • Mobile parts are going to become obsolete when flash memory gets cheaper. I can imagine in 20 years:
      "OMG look at that! A SPINNING hard disk! What CPU are you running, a Pentium? PFFT..."
      • I certainly agree with your vision of the future, but its not just about falsh getting cheaper. Flash still isn't great at high throughput. A while ago I built a PC with a falsh harddrive (via IDE to Flash adapter). Now I have to benchmark data for this, but it was very fast in a responsive way, but things like copying big files, launching large applications, or any activity where lots of data is read off the disk it seemed slower than a normal disk.

        Now my setup (of the adapter) I'm sure isn't ideal a

      • Re:Think long term... (Score:2, Insightful)

        by sageman ( 726742 )
        Doubtful that this will happen anytime soon, considering that many organizations still use large scale tape drives for backup (example: http://www.exabyte.com/ [exabyte.com]). If tape drives are still around today, who's to say hard disks won't exist 20 years from now? What's more likely is that flash drives may become more viable for mainstream desktop computers but larger-density hard disks could be used in some other market. You'll see the drives fulfilling a different niche, perhaps.

        Guess we'll all just see.

        • Re:Think long term... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by matt21811 ( 830841 ) * on Friday December 16, 2005 @12:27AM (#14270090) Homepage
          Actually, I say they new hard disks will be obsolete in just 11 years.

          Read about it here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/flashvsharddisk .html [mattscomputertrends.com]

          The gist of it is that right now your dollar buys about 130 times more hard disk space than flash memory. In almost every year, you can buy more space for your dollar than you could last year. This improvement for hard disks in the last two years was measured at 44% per annum. The annualised improvement for flash storage over the same period was measured at 118%. By simply extrapolating these figures into the future until the megs per dollar figure for flash beats that of hard disks gives the date of 2017 or in just 11 years time.
           
          The rest of it covers why performace shouldnt be an issue is 11 years time.
    • Ripping my DVD collection ate up 500 gigs like candy. Thank god I don't have Netflix!!
    • I doubt we'll be seeing 1TB soon. Right now, the top drive you can buy is 500GB. A year ago, the top drive was 400GB. At that rate, 1TB is still a few years away. Advances in drive storage space just don't seem to be happening at the rate it was a 4-5 years ago.

      On the other hand, if Seagate was to cram 4 of these platters into a single drive (not an uncommon configuration), it would be a 640GB drive. 640GB ought to be big enough for anyone! :)

    • Video.. (Score:2)

      by xtal ( 49134 )
      1 DVD is about ~5gb.. probably not that long before 1000 movie collections start floating around.. then 10,000.. or more.

      Once storage and transmission technologies work themselves out there will be a tremendous renaissaince of video content generation. Not the crappy stuff we have now, HD video. For everything. When we've filled up the media then, who knows. 3D video. pr0n will find an application.

      Right now, we still can't beat that old station wagon full of removable media just yet.

  • Risk of High Data Density (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bender0x7D1 ( 536254 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:31PM (#14268484)
    My concern would be that anything that could affect a portion of the disk would destroy more data. I know scratches that aren't noticed on a CD can make a DVD unreadable and, while a drive platter may not have the risk of scratches that optical storage does, the general idea is the same. A physical failure, such as a head alignment issue, that wouldn't be noticed with lower densities may be a factor with the higher densities.

    Now, I don't have a solution to the problem, but I just want to point out that getting full performance out of something can raise new risks.

    • Re:Risk of High Data Density (Score:5, Informative)

      by John.P.Jones ( 601028 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:38PM (#14268533)
      Scratches on optical media come from handling the media, this happens at all sorts of velocities and thus there are a wide variety of scratches with varying degrees of damage.

      Scratches on Hard disks come from the freakin' head smashing into the disk while it is spinning at 7200rpm, there is no such thing as a benign head crash, when it happens it is bad, the head is gonna skip off the surface of the disk like a pebble on a lake. It is going to be bad no matter what the data density is.

      So the difference between scratches and head crashes is miles apart, not just due to data density. In actuality the data density differences are insignificant compared to the other issues.

      • Uh, you kind of made the GP's point for him. Now, instead of having 6 harddrives and one of them failing (thus, only losing 1/6th of your data), you have 3. When one of those three fails, you lose twice the data, which sucks (imagine if you only had one HD...)

        Good news is, the old harddisks will become cheaper, thus making it easier to back up your shit. But the point remains that as density increases, so does your chance of losing all of your data.

  • the review suggests they aren't so great (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GenKreton ( 884088 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @06:35PM (#14268515) Journal
    After looking over all the pretty graphs, it seems the 74gb Western Digital Raptor spanks the other drives in everything but platter density. And to push this farther I saw nothing about its reliability published. The 500gb hd isn't using the new platter technology and the 160gb drive is crippled compared to the larger brethren because of its smaller cache. The only thing I got from this review was that if I needed a drive that performs I should buy a Raptor.
  • "Although perpendicular recording has yet to make its way into desktop hard drives..."

    In case anyone hasn't already seen it: FLASH [hitachigst.com]
    • On the other hand it is hitachi, home of the deathstar. Only drives I ever had problems with. NEXT.
      • To be fair, though, Hitachi isn't the originator of the Deathstar. That's IBM. They just own the technology now, and it's probable they've improved its reliability. It's IBM I hate for the Deathstar fiasco - I owned one too.
        • Nope.

          A client of mine recently requested a Ciprico Huge array, not knowing it used 10 Hitachi 160GB Deathstars.

          One drive failed within an hour.

          Luckily, Ciprico does have a 30 day no questions asked return policy.

          One more more good reason we use Rorke Data arrays. Besides the fact that they don't choke on simultaneous R/W or common Adaptec controller cards like the Huge boxes do.

    • Well, that was annoying. All they needed was this:

      Current storage:

      -_+ -_+ -_+ -_+

      Perpendicular storage:
      ++++
      ||||
      ----

      Well shit, the first group looks like those annoying emoticon things. I give up.

  • reliability issues (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pario ( 675744 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:11PM (#14268706)
    Could anyone knowledgeable care to comment on how reliable this drive can be?

    I bought an external drive from Seagate and my experience with the drive was absolutely horrendous.
    It was so unreliable that I had to return the drive and paid a restocking fee.
    I thought it was just me, but these user reviews [amazon.com] suggest otherwise.
    Personally I would not touch another Seagate product with a 10 foot pole.

    • The user reviews suggest the 400 GB drive has problems, either in design or manufacturing. However, in general I've seen a lot of good things about Seagate products. I personally have two 200 GB drives which I am very happy with, and I don't plan on switching brands any time soon.
      • I have a Seagate 103MB (or thereabouts) hard drive from my first PC ever, which still spins up and still has all the original data on it, bit-perfect.

        Seagate gets my vote by a wide margin, for that feat.

        • Re:reliability issues (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ezzzD55J ( 697465 )
          I have a Seagate 103MB (or thereabouts) hard drive from my first PC ever, which still spins up and still has all the original data on it, bit-perfect.

          That's great, but the problem with these 10-year reliability indications is that it's an indication of a drive (and company) 10 years old.. who knows what corners they've cut since then? 160GB drives are not the same as 103MB either..

    • I use exclusivly Seagate internal drives for all the computers I build. They are very reliable drives that come with a good warinty. The fact that they had some USB external drive with problems says nothing about the long term experence with Seagate. It sounds like that USB drive had some programing issues on the drive, not problems with the drive itself IMHO. I personaly would tend to stay away from USB external drives if possible.
    • I work in computer building (partly), and over the last 10 years or so I've had good and bad drives from all manufacturers. All my recent failures have been western digital, so I'm sticking to samsung, seagate and maxtor for the moment, but no doubt I'll get a dodgy batch from one of them eventually and will drop them for a while.

      Seagate are no better or worse generally than other makers in my experience, and they do offer a pretty decent warranty, though I've had a lot more experience of internal drives ra

    • Re:reliability issues (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pla ( 258480 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:53PM (#14268998) Journal
      Could anyone knowledgeable care to comment on how reliable this drive can be?

      Unless a Seagate engineer that worked on this exact model comes forward and reveals a secret serious flaw, then no, NO ONE, not even other Seagate engineers, can tell you much about this drive's reliability.

      You'll hear plenty of anecdotes about reliability, and every company has a hard-core "anti-fan" base who will never buy that company's products again, after losing their porn collection back in 1996.


      Even within a drive family, you can't always extrapolate reliability data to other members of that family. One simple example I've seen (to my surprise) a lot here on Slashdot - A lot of people consider Maxtor as good for nothing but paperweights, because some of the earlier members of the DiamondMax line really really sucked. I, however, have half a dozen of the later DiamondMaxes in use today, some as old as five years, without a single failure, ever.


      So, buy either the cheapest or the largest (or the inflection in that curve, which IMO Maxtor usually solidly holds, thus my using their drives almost exclusively), and just make sure you have everything backed up. Because eventually, you will have a catastrophic HDD failure. And as much as it sucks to waste a few hours reinstalling your OS of choice, it sucks a LOT more if you don't have all your software, porn, data (but I repeat myself), music, and what-have-you readily available on a backup.


      Personally, I wouldn't buy a mere 160GB drive anyway, when you can get nearly twice that for $20 more. But this may have one nice side-effect, in that if Seagate pushes out a 4-platter 640GB drive (hey, no one will ever need more than 640GB, right?), the 400s should finally drop down to the golden $100-$150 range.
      • A lot of people consider Maxtor as good for nothing but paperweights, because some of the earlier members of the DiamondMax line really really sucked.

        If they hadn't replaced those drives for customers with just as low quality ones that would also fail rather quickly, they probably wouldn't have experienced such a long-lasting backlash from the geek community.

        When replacing problem hardware, companies should never send a replacement that they know damned well is likely to be a problem. People will of
      • "make sure you have everything backed up. Because eventually, you will have a catastrophic HDD failure."

        When will people learn?

        Hard disks fail.
        I care little for "my 100 hdds have been running 24/7 for 10 years with out a single failure" anecdotes.
        Moving parts fail.

        Make your backups.

        Don't come crying to me when you lose data.

        You just need to ask one question:
        Do I care if I lose my data?
        No: Fine.
        Yes: Backup. Properly. Off your PC. Preferably off-site.
        Yes, but my drive will not fail: Take your hands off the ke
    • Usually the 1 platter designs tend to be really reliable. There is less mass to spin around, so the motor has it easier. There are less heads to fail, and less heat generated from the fewer moving parts.

      With that said, no one except for Seagate really knows how reliable this particular drive will be. However, I have had good luck with Seagate. I don't have any Seagate drives over 40GB, but all the ones I do have, even down to the old sub-1GB ones, have been very reliable. They also tend to be quite and
  • It's nice to see these on the SATA drives, but what's keeping things like that from crossing back to SCSI that SATA has taken?
    Sure, there are some people who will think cheapness has some good, but I'll take uncompromising quality with speed hands down nearly anytime. 500GB+ SCSI's time is overdue.

  • 25% more hard drive density? Stop the presses! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by roystgnr ( 4015 ) <`gro.srengots' `ta' `yor'> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:35PM (#14268875) Homepage
    Why, this is the most exciting news I've heard since the last time it happened!

    Which was about six months ago!

    And six months before that, and six months before that, and six months before that, for more than a decade!

  • snore (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Khashishi ( 775369 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @07:42PM (#14268931) Journal
    Someone tell me why this is news?
    Is Seagate paying for this publicity?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • HEAT! (Score:5, Funny)

    by drewzhrodague ( 606182 ) <drew&zhrodague,net> on Thursday December 15, 2005 @08:15PM (#14269113) Homepage Journal
    Noone said anthing about heat! I once cooked a burrito on an old 4g Seagate Barracuda. You know the one I'm talking about, with the big metal grille on the front. You see, I was at work, and tinkering with my Sparc 5 workstation, when I realized the fan in the external drive had failed, but not my home directory, upon which it lived. Well, of course I had a burrito handy, and figured that once I did a nice fsck -- twice -- that I'd be reasonably okay, so I put the burrito in the front of the bezel, where the faceplate is supposed to go, bounced the workstation, and started the fsck. Then I went outside to smoke cigarettes. After smoking for a while, and socializing with people, the burrito was no longer frozen, but HOT! Voila, instant sysadmin lunch. Ramen noodles are just as easy, simply take...
    • I have an old server with dual-Pentium Pros (hot enough already, right?) that has 2 IDE drives and 4 of those 4 GB Seagates SCSIs in a RAID (imagine a day when 8 redundant GBs was a lot).

      Anyhow, I can lend some credence to this story. The tower is like a chimney and I'm sure I could have cooked an egg on top of that case. :). In the winter I can heat my lab with it. I'd disconnect the RAID in the summer.

  • Density =! Performance (Score:3, Informative)

    by fredistheking ( 464407 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @09:25PM (#14269387)
    If you increase the bits per track then performance increases. However, if you increase the total number of tracks your data rates doesn't increase. In fact, you make it harder to settle on track which hurts seek times.

    All the latest increases in areal density have been due to increased TPI (tracks per inch). This is the reason (besides spinning faster) that the Raptor has held the performance crown for so long.

  • Seagate vs. Seagate (Score:3, Funny)

    by mattwarden ( 699984 ) on Thursday December 15, 2005 @11:12PM (#14269844)

    Seagate to create a 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive

    The Tech Report has an in-depth review of the 160GB Barracuda 7200.9's performance against eight competitors from Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital.

    My money's on Seagate over Seagate in the 7th round.

  • Slower, faster, it's tech news damnit! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Vo0k ( 760020 ) on Friday December 16, 2005 @09:13AM (#14271316) Journal
    Don't be afraid to use terms like bandwidth, throughput, seek time, cache access etc.

    Single platter solutions result in reduced amount of heads. Less heads = less weight to push across the platter = higher acceleration at same force applied = lower seek times, the head moves faster, can find the place faster.
    But the bottleneck point in throughput lies between the surface of the disk and the head, a single head can read just as many bytes per second, the limits are pushed higher but still this is the point that makes read slow once the seek was finished. So all heads read/write at once, a single large file gets spread over all the platters, but at narrow band of cyllinders, so it can be read whole faster, by using all the heads to read parts of it at once, and reassemble the data in the cache. Less heads = less paralell readouts, lower throughput.

    I find much more future in big multi-platter drives based on the new tech, than this single-platter thing, that offers little gain and much loss at a very high price.

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