IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved

jeffroe writes "Infoworld has an article stating that IBM has enhanced it's 'Pixie Dust' technology yet again. The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops." IBM's also predicted hard drives to have 100gb per square inch by 2003. Storage space just keeps increasing.

Aereal Density measured in bits not bytes

[SirDaShadow]

FYI when they say an area of 70gb they mean 70gigabits per square inch not bytes...

Re:Who cares

[JohnZed]

If you read the article, you would care, because you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops. Finally!

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[sixthofmay]

I bought five 45GB 75GXP drives a year and a half ago. Three have failed so far. Doesn't seem like a very good track record to me...

75GXP tales from hell: 75GXP class-action suit filed [tech-report.com]

I have an entire TERABYTE!

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

I've posted [slashdot.org] about it before.

I simply noticed how many CDs I had sitting around, and got sick of it -- so I plunked down around $1500 for 9 Western Digital 120GB hard drives a few months ago.

I have 140GB of OGGs and MP3s, 500GB of DivXs and VCDs (including porn), 100GB of installed games, 6 different OSes, and all kinds of other crap. I also have about 150GB free, still, that gets used for various tasks.

But if you don't need the memory, run Linux off of flash memory or one of those pocket USB drives, or some other form of solid state memory. However, the prices for it are still exorbitant.

Re:Old solution. It's called raid

[Uller-RM]

Four-channel ATA-100 RAID-5 cards can be had for under $200 today. Even if you only used one drive per channel and four 70GB drives that's still 210GB of space that can recover from a single drive failure, with solid read speeds and acceptable write speeds. (To recover from two or more drives failing at once means moving to P+Q redundancy, aka RAID-6, and you start moving into price ranges beyond the reach of the average hobbyist.)

Re:Who cares

[Graspee_Leemoor]

*You* may need more speed from your drives and not see a need for more storage space but a lot of other people, myself included, are crying out for my hard drive space.

Here are some of the reasons: (NB some already mentioned)

* movies, other AVIs like anime (one series of anime is typically about 4-5 Gig).
* CDs (especially take up more space in .flac format)
* video editing - you can have loads of 10G + files all over the place.
* scanned photo collections (hires takes a lot of space)
* games - a > 2Gig install is normal these days.
* ISOs for playstation emulator (These really add up)
* P2P download: if you have a decent amount of things downloading you need AT LEAST 40G just for your temp directory, and another 20G for the incoming folder.

So, I hope you were in fact trolling because your comment really looks like the modern version of "640K should be more than enough for anybody" (whether the Billster said that or not).

graspee

Re:Who cares

[19Buck]

"What we need is faster drives."

This is already being addressed, and it's coming soon.

http://www.serialata.org/

As it is, current ATA specs rival that of SCSI( though in real world performance, SCSI is stil of course faster, primarily due to queueing.), but ATA is quite a bit more economical for the home user. There is simply no reason for Joe Shmoe sitting at home playing Sims/Unreal/Quake/etc to blow so much money on SCSI since the full potential of it will never be realized.

First generation performance estimates of Serial ATA really aren't all that impressive, but looking forward, serial ATA is going to scale very nicely, providing plenty of performance, without burning a huge hole in your pocket either.

BTW, rotational speed is really indicative of nothing. Average seek speed is a much more important performance indicator.

Granted, typically faster rotation ~SHOULD~ translate into lower seek times, but that's not always true.

Aside from the above URL, I ~could~ cite about a billion different "previews" and discussion articles from various HW news/review sites, but that's pointless. you know how to use www.google.com, have at it if you want more information.

Re:Aren't they getting out?

[siegesama]

Yes and no. Hitachi bought out that sector, and rather than shifting things around, Hitachi and IBM are forming a child company (whose name I do not know). The new company exists on IBM location, on IBM infrastructure.

Re:Who cares

[Hadlock]

yeah, but a 7200 rpm drive eats roughly double the power (and produces more heat, too) than a 4800 rpm laptop drive. there's a reason drive makers prefer 4800 rpm drives for battery life...

Re:Reliability

[AntiNorm]

I will never buy another hard drive from that company ever again.

Neither will I. A few years ago, an IBM hard drive I bought turned out not to work, so I of course RMAd it to IBM. The replacement drive they sent me didn't work. The drive they sent me to replace that one didn't work. It almost took a trip to small claims court to get this settled. Their customer service is, to put it nicely, nonexistent.

Re:Who cares

[JebusIsLord]

Actually as areal density increases so does read (but not seek) speed. This is because by packing more bits into one concentric ring, one spin of the drive reads more data even at the same speed (7200rpm usually for a good IDE drive). If you look at the performance of IDE drives they have been increasing steadily for years despite staying at 7200. This is why they keep having to bump the DMA mode, UDMA/33 was fast enough a few years ago on a 7200rpm'er, but slows down modern drives.