Western Digital Announces 200 Gig Drives

twilightzero writes "Video capture fanatics and pr0n moguls, rejoice! Today marks the official release of the Western Digital 200 GB hard drive! Never again run out of space for your X-10 video stream of the neighbor's house! See the graphic, specs, and press release. This also marks the release of WD drives using fluid dynamic bearings rather than the old BB type." The glorious march of technology continues forward, and digital video fans rejoice. Update: 07/26 03:34 GMT by M : Headline corrected. Taco's at a conference, cut him a little slack.

Time for an upgrade...

[Anonymous Coward]

This 20 megger is beginning to feel cramped. I might even be able to upgrade to MS DOS 5.0!

Re:Time for an upgrade...

[The Dobber]

Just imagine what Doublespace could do.

Is it Maxtor or WD?

[mahonri]

I'm just a little confused!

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Sivar]

Western Digital already announced [wdc.com] 200GB drives a few weeks ago, so this is probably a Maxtor announcement.

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Anonymous Cowrad]

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

Easy. Large values of 60 or small values of 200.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Xeriar]

Easy. Large values of 60 or small values of 200.

This would be funnier if it weren't true :-) Of course they are 66 GB platters and 198 GB drives.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[slaker]

Hey Sivar.

Mickey, who likes to deny that he's a WD employee, over at Storagereview.com [storagereview.com] says the top-of-the-line model will probably, actually be three 66.7GB platters while the lesser models the in lineup will remain 60GB/platter.

IIRC, that's the same thing WD did for their 100GB drive.

If you're the Sivar who frequents SR, you'll probably know me btter as Mercutio.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[Zocalo]

What I want to know is how they made a 200GB hard drive with 60GB platters. Doesn't seem to add up.

That 60GB is two sides at 30GB apiece, so I'd guess they've used 4 platters, but are only using seven sides to keep the phyiscal drive height down. That still leaves an error of 10GB mind you, but hey, that's only 5% for the sake of a round number.

Re: Sig

[sconeu]

That's what he's saying... He's saying that with hardware, yes you get what you pay for, but with software, that's generally NOT the case.

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[wheany]

Everybodu knows that a "real" gigabyte is 1024*1024*1024 bytes, or 1073741824 bytes, while a "hard drive" gigabyte is 1000000000 bytes. If you put 3 60 "real" gigabyte platters together, you get 193273528320. That is close enough to 200. Especially if you insret some marketing-speak there to fill the 7 remaining gigabytes.

Of course, the 60 gigabyte platters are "hd" gigs, so you are really getting 167 "real" gigs, but who's counting...

Re:Is it Maxtor or WD?

[robbieduncan]

Mostly. But there is an overhead for file-system data as well (which of course varies in size with drive and file-system).

Re:200GB from four 60GB platters

[edmudama]

> 40% on-disk errors before low-level (factory) format?

Coming from a firmware engineer from a disk drive company, that sentence makes no sense whatsoever.

The "stretched capacity formats" that drive companies are using to reach their 200GB or larger drives are almost purely a function of the heads used in the drive, and have almost nothing to do with the specific media. From the plots I have seen, if media had 1% surface defects I would be surprised...

Re:Who Needs 200 GB?

[AntiNorm]

I've probably got enough hard drive space to last me another 5 years

Or until you *finally* decide to upgrade Windows...

Differences?

[Night Goat]

Would someone care to educate the Slashdot masses about the differences between the old bearings and these new liquid ones? I'm in the market for a new drive, and I'd be curious to know what the difference is. Would the new bearings come at a price premium?

Re:Differences?

[blincoln]

Liquid bearings add a little bit to the price. At New Egg [newegg.com], for example, a 40GB ATA133 Maxtor is $3 more with liquid bearings and an 80GB ATA133 Maxtor is $8 more with liquid bearings.

Allegedly they operate with less noise than standard bearings. I haven't verified this personally, but the online reviews I've read seem to indicate that this is true.

It's true.

[SaDan]

I've installed a couple different drives with the fluid bearings, and they do run quieter than the older style bearings. Very nice!

Re:Differences?

[H3XA]

I have also heard a story about a Seagate drive being used in a RAID array which stopped working..... turns out the drive leaked oil everywhere.

Oily Barracuda [overclockers.com.au]

- HeXa

Re:Differences?

[Chris Siegler]

I have two identical Maxtor drives except that one has liquid bearings and one not (6L040L2 and 6L040J2, which are both 40G 7200RPM drives). And the L is slightly quieter, but mostly it just sounds different. They are both so damn quiet it's hard to hear them above my CPU fan, but here goes. The L sounds like a chipmunk nibbling on a twig, while the J would be a chipmunk munching on a twig.

Hope that clears up the confusion

Re:Differences?

[jorlando]

Instead of using ball-bearings (for the disc plates) it uses a liquid-suspension system. It's more reliable, you'll have a higher durability, possibly it's less noisy and can run faster. Since it's a new technology (and cool) it'll cost higher too...

Re:Differences?

[x136]

I recently bought a Maxtor D740X drive, but as it turns out, it's the ball bearing version. This thing is loud. I have to shut the computer down at night now. (It'd be great if Linux could spin it down...) I've talked to others with the same drive but with liquid bearings. They say it's almost dead silent.

Oh well, that's what I get for buying the cheapest hard drive I could find. :)

Re:Differences?

[Shanep]

It'd be great if Linux could spin it down...

Have you tried hdparm?

Re:Differences?

[ultrapenguin]

to make it not spin back up after a few seconds
(and if you are running 2.4.x kernels (and possibly 2.5) you can do this:

# killall -STOP kupdated

however, be warned that this will stop frequent flushes of disk cache to disk, and if your machine happens to lock up for some reason there's a chance you might lose some data.
But for personal machine that you want quiet at night, this works wonders.
Also consider slowing down syslog --MARK-- output (which might spin up the disk by adding -m 1440 (time in minutes) to syslog startup line.

Re:Differences?

[slaker]

The 740X is a Quantum design. If you aren't used to "quantum-type" noises, they can be a little off-putting. Seeks are usually a little bit louder than most other brands and of course there's a worrisome "THOK" sound when you power one down. Those are characteristics of Quantum IDE drives.

I understand there are vast difference in the quality of the 740X depending on country of manufacture as well. Usually Singapore is implicated as the "bad" source for drives. I have a good number of 740Xs (nine, at last count, all BB versions). I *don't* find my drives to be loud in the least - WD800BBs and Fireball ASes are both much worse.

Maxtor has a no-quibble exchange policy. If you think the drive is loud, they WILL take it back and ship you another. If it really bothers you, look into using it. Ball-bearing drives regardless of manufacture get louder over time.

Ball Bearings versus Liquid Bearings

[BigBlockMopar]

Would someone care to educate the Slashdot masses about the differences between the old bearings and these new liquid ones? I'm in the market for a new drive, and I'd be curious to know what the difference is.

Well, I can't speak for hard disk drives, but I can maybe draw an analogy.

Wheel bearings - on cars, trucks, bicycles, whatever - use ball bearings. They're a set of caged balls, and one surface literally rolls over the other on a cushion of tiny little balls or cylindrical rollers. Here's an animated GIF and some other neat stuff. [howstuffworks.com] The problem is that, whatever the lubrication, eventually the balls and their races will wear, which increases the clearance between the two surfaces and causes looseness ("play") within the bearings. In wheel bearings, this translates into a shimmy in the wheel and weird tire wear. In a hard disk drive, this would result in a shimmy to the platters, causing less precision in data reading and writing as the platters vibrate nanometers back and forth under the heads. As the drives get to higher and higher capacities with the same physical disk size, the tracks being used must be getting smaller, and therefore this error becomes more crucial. Also, notice that hard drives which have been running for a long time tend to get noisy... Never mind that bits of metal being worn out of bearings have to be contained somehow so that the platters and heads don't get damaged.

Liquid bearings are used in all modern car engines. Oil is pumped from the oil pan into a very tiny space between a relatively soft bearing shell and a very smooth and hard crankshaft or camshaft journal. As the shaft spins, the oil is distributed thoughout the bearing surface and eventually leaks out the sides where it drains back to the pan to be pumped through the system again. Here's a picture of the main bearings of a Ford V8. You can see the little holes where oil is pumped into them. [fast351.com] While the engine is running, theoretically, the shaft's journal and the bearing surface never actually touch each other; they ride on a cushion of continually replaced microscopic ball bearings (oil molecules). During circulation, the oil takes the heat away from the bearings, and washes away impurities.

How you'd implement something like this in a hard disk drive, I have no idea, and I'd love to see any real techical info on it. (Marketing hype will not answer the questions I have.) But it's a great idea; in a server, with the hard disks spinning all the time, the hydrodynamics of the situation suggest that the platter bearings would never wear, and would therefore never have their tolerances open up and incur vibration.

But a seal would be required to keep the lubricant off the platters, and that seal would itself eventually wear out. Not to mention that it's unlikely they'll include a provision to do an oil change on these things. Stopping and starting cycles will wear the bearing and journal material, causing tiny abrasive bits to be floating in the oil.

I like the idea, I think it's a great step, and I'll look forward to seeing how hard disk manufacturers have solved the problems.

Would the new bearings come at a price premium?

For sure! Even if it costs less to machine these than the super-tight clearance ball-bearings that modern hard disks must use, they'll still be a "new feature" which can enhance prices and profit margins. But I think they will actually cost more to make; it's just that ball bearings (like older stepper motor head actuators) have too many limitations to work with modern capacity and track density demands.

Re:Differences?

[fheart]

Seagates recent (May 28, 2002) US patent entitled "Antiwear lubrication coating for bearing surfaces for hydrodynamic fluid bearings" explains very well the advantages, the structure and the operation of fluid disc drive bearings. Go here: http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/srchnum.htm and enter this patent # : 6394654

"from the pr0n-glorious-pr0n dept"

[Jucius Maximus]

At last we have a proven honest-to-goodness* editor.

*(ok, maybe not goodness, depending on your point of view ;-)

In other news

[schroet]

Intel today announced the availability of the Athlon 3000XP!

Re:In other news

[Emugamer]

hehe doh well there goes my other comment [slashdot.org] as redundant ...

This brings an interesting question to mind....

[Uttles]

Would it be possible to launch a reverse DOS attack on the RIAA by storing hundreds of thousands of fake mp3 files with song names on a 200 gig hard drive, or better yet a network of computers with 200 gig hard drives?

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[Jonny 290]

Who says they have to be actual files?

Just create some garbage filesystem entries on an unused hard drive. A 430mb hard drive should be plenty. :D

You could even survey to find the exact size to the byte of the most popular rips of each track and make sure they're that size.

It may be a bit more elegant if you actually hacked the p2p client or FTP server to just pipe x bytes from /dev/null.

Up the ante

[Hektor_Troy]

Instead of piping bytes from /dev/null have it repeat instances of something like the Copyright Law or the DMCA.

For kicks, get sued by the MPAA/RIAA and get them to open your files in something like notepad - in court. Smack them with a countersuit for being insanely stupid (which you're bound to win for obvious reasons), retire and live happily ever after, knowing that you've done us all a big favor.

Re:Up the ante

[Jonny 290]

Or just kill two birds with one stone and have it loop decss.c . :)

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[gmhowell]

Too easy to compress /dev/null. I'd send /dev/urandom.

Save disk space!

[r6144]

Better use sparse files like this:

dd of=m00z4k.mp3 bs=1 seek=1874373 count=0

so that no disk space (except the dentry and the inode) is wasted... Oh, you have just bought a shiny 200gb disk, haven't you?

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[edwdig]

I've seen Gnutella clients that automatically respond to search queries by appending ".mp3" or some other extension to the request string. Anytime I've seen it, it's been really small file sizes, so it was obvious, but that could be changed.

Re:This brings an interesting question to mind....

[guttentag]

I'm probably missing something here, but isn't that just what they'd want you to do? It would create so much noise in the P2P system that no one would be able to find the real files they're looking for.

Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[AaronPSU79]

60 gigs a platter, so to get to 200 gigs there must be 4 of them. 4 times 60 is 240. What gives?? Is this one of those deals where they lock out sections of the drive so they can release a larger model later???

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[redhairedneo]

Maybe the platters are smaller and smaller as they go up, forming a stylish cone. Leaving 200 gigs, no 240...

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Magila]

I just asked my dad who's an engineer at WD about this and he said in fact it uses 3 (which is the max they can use) "60GB" platters. I put 60 in quotes because they're not exactly 60GB, really they're ~67GB platters they just round down to the nearest 20GB increment.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[SkeptiNerd75]

Now THERE's a new one: a hard drive manufacturer rounding DOWN!

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[smoondog]

You know, I bought a Cobalt server (Raq3). Cobalt (Sun now) claims that only one drive is supported. Well, I split the ide did the master/slave thing and fashioned a hack spot for them. One problem, after a couple of weeks of use, the new drive *always* starts to click and chunk around. I have yet to get a second drive working in this machine.... I have not explanation for this behavior...........

-Sean

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Wonko42]

Sounds like the exact same thing I've been experiencing. As far as I can tell, it seems like the drive head is disengaging, then re-engaging, but I have no clue what causes it to do this.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Likely that you either have poor cooling or poor power or both. One reason the raq may be spec'd for only one drive is that the power supply can't support two without running into the ragged edge. When a power supply is over-extended but not completely overwhelmed it will continue to "work" just you won't get nice clean power out, instead it will be all noisy and full of ugly fluctations that can end up damaging electrical components, like, disk drive controller boards.

If you keep killing drives in the same machine, it is a pretty good chance that the problem is not the drives but something about the machine.

Always spend the extra $20-$40 for a good power supply (if it is lightweight, it ain't a good power supply, heavy means good, as long they don't put a brick in it) and don't skimp on cooling either...

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Fweeky]

I have a Quantum Fireball that had some nasty problems; it would click and sometimes disappear from the system and refuse to come back up for a while.

I noticed it was running very hot, so I put an old Pentium heatsink on top of it and mounted a card cooler blowing into my case (it's open, since airflow in my case really bites). It's been fine since.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Wonko42]

I'm really not sure. My main system (in which three of the drives have died) has no case on it, and has several high-flow fans and is in a cool, well-ventilated room. The power supply could be the culprit, but after my WD drives died I bought a 120GB IBM drive and it's been doing just fine (whereas a WD drive would typically be clunking painfully by now). I never dropped any of my drives, nor did I move the computer around with the drives in it.

This leaves only one common element: I buy all my hard drives from the same place. However, I also bought my new IBM drive from this place, and it hasn't had any problems. If they were mishandling drives, why would they abuse the WD drives but not the IBM drives? Curious.

Re:Why is this drive only 200 GB??

[Bitsy Boffin]

You got to remember, this is Maxtor we're talking about, 40G is probably reasonable knowing that !

Re:The bottom of the bottom platter is not used

[squire geek]

In my last 5 years I regularly worked on the servo controller block of a drive controller ASIC so I'd like to point out some much under appreciated issues and correct some recurring miss understandings: a) the servo system, b) the real benefit of fluid bearings, c) error correction, d) why an unused surface, e) spin speed

Some short answers are:
b) Worn ball bearings seriously disturbs the servo system from keeping the read head or the write head on true center of data track. This puts a ceiling on increasing track densities.
c) Very strong error correcting codes are applied to every data block (about 512 bytes) and not on any unused surface.
d) As for unused surfaces, there are multiple issues in this decision, but a new feature from some manufacturers is to reserve one outside surface for a template servo pattern & BIOS code so that the drive can self write its own servo patterning and more cheaply load its BIOS code. This reduces / obviates the many hours it takes of very expensive capital equipment to write servo patterns to drives.
e) Spin speeds above 10K introduce horrendous resonances at the outside of platters that make servoing tracks much harder. One remedy has been to reduce platter diameter & capacity (by about 10% as I recall).

And the long version of a) & b) or 101 of disk drive servoing:
For atleast a decade, hard drives have used embedded servo patterns on every surface that are intermingled with the data areas. Using a dedicated surface for servo worked long ago only because track & data bit densities were much lower. Todays drives typically have 120 or more curved radial servo wedges that costs 5-7% of the surface area. User data tracks nestle between these servo wedges.
1) In these short servo wedge areas, servo tracks contain a few tiny fields of digital servo data followed by several analog modulations so that the servo processor can sense its fractional position within any servo track. Servo tracks actually abutt each other and the only bit change between adjacent servo tracks is in the Gray coded track no. Since IBM patented this many years ago (1980's ?), manufacturers have since added proprietry extra small digital fields to correct for read errors in the digital fields & analog modulations to continuously improve servo tracking and hense improve data track densities.
2) The user data tracks are not neccessarily pitched to be inlign with servo tracks and may be reduced to 2/3 the density of servo tracks. This provides guard space and reduces inter track symbol interference. As the disk spins from servo wedge area on into user data area, it becomes an increasing act of faith that the read head or the write head is indeed still following a track center until we reach the next servo wedge. Such miss tracking is called runout.
A major source for Non-Repeatable Runout comes from worn bearings which introduces random wobbling, and this degrades the servoing and limits tracks densities.

Fluid bearings improve upon ball bearings because they don't introduce this NRR so spinning is quiter but more importantly track densities can keep climbing.
There are quite a few other NRR & RR terms impacting on servo tracking.

Re:The bottom of the bottom platter is not used

[SensitiveMale]

That makes sense.

3 platters = 6 sides.
5 sides for dats (40 gigs each) and the bottom of the bottom platter for positioning.

The title and logo

[duren686]

Somehow, "DRIVEZILLA" and "Caviar" seem like two completely exclusive things, and yet their title graphic [wdc.com] shows the concepts holding hands and hugging and frolicking as if they were meant to be together. Does anyone have an explanation?

phat pr0n archives

[Jucius Maximus]

I did not come up with the following, but found it somewhere in here [userfriendly.org].

Our yellow sun yields to the dark
as I begin my web based lark
Flowing, turning, through the pipe
I grep for text and dump the hype...

But as I ride the fiber trail
I test my faith as I read my mail,
Even as my bandwidth fattens,
I question life and 1-click patents...

Although I ask, and though I query,
I know the truth, I grock the theory
Life is a multimedia of sins
so he who collects the most pr0n wins.

(must not laugh ...)

Maxtor = Fluid, WD=200mb

[simetra]

I noticed the Fluid bearings thing on newegg.com on a Maxtor, 40gb drive, earlier today.

Re:Maxtor = Fluid, WD=200mb

[twilightzero]

Read the press release, WD's releasing FDB drives now also. Also Maxtor's FDB drives I believe are all 5400 RPM whereas the new WD's will be 7200 RPM.

It appears to be slashdots fault...

[powerlinekid]

First of all i'm not complaining about "editor" mistakes... i could care less. But this is a western digital drive not a maxtor one, things like that seem rather silly to let slip through the cracks. And just to be sure I checked maxtor [maxtor.com] to see if they had anything, but all i could really find (in about 15 seconds worth of time) was a page about > 137 gig drives.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

200 GB

[the eric conspiracy]

Hey, now /dev/null has a competitor in the capacity department.

Drive Debacle Deep-sixes Cmdr Taco

[jjames]

In what appears to be another technology industry layoff, the (in)famous Cmdr Taco of Slashdot fame was fired today. According to sources within OSDN, the continuous spelling errors, Freudian slips and dyslexia-like juxtapositions of company names led to the dismissal.

Cmdr Taco was quoted as "being disappointed" with the decision, but was "looking forward" to spending more time at home with his computer.

In related news, OSDN has banned drugs, alcohol, controlled substances and Cowboy Neal from the Slashdot campus.

Re:Drive Debacle Deep-sixes Cmdr Taco

[digitalsushi]

That's kinda mean. It's funny too, I know its just a playful ribbing, but I'm thankful that this thing exists for free. I spend maybe an hour-ish every other day or so here, and for what I am paying, I think its a good deal. So I counterbalance in that I appreciate this project.

Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scary..

[grunby]

I'm in the market for a new machine, and I've been spec'ing out different parts for my budget...These drives are nice and big, but what happens when you lose a 120 gig drive...I've pretty much decided that I'm going to have to get an IDE RAID card and highly recommend them...the RAID cards at work have saved me hours and hours of restoring from backup...Check out the 3ware Escalade [3ware.com], the Promise SuperTrak [promise.com], or the Adaptec 2400A [adaptec.com]. RAID 5 is the way to go (with or without removable drives). I've been watching the prices for 120 Gig drives drop and now it's just about the price where I can afford to spend 150 clams to buy an extra drive that would be used to protect myself from a drive failure.

- grunby

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[Polo]

What about economics?

I was thinking that raid-5 might be a really cool way to go, but when I looked into it, it seems that raid-1 on the motherboard might be cheaper.

Wouldn't 4 x 120gig drives + raid-1 cost less than 3 x 120gig drives plus a raid-5 controller?

I wonder where the break-even point is...

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[Polo]

(That was assuming you're using linux and raid-5 controllers cost around $250-$300...)

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[grunby]

I guess it depends on how much drive space you want...You'd still be paying for the RAID 1 functionality on the mobo (albeit not as much as a separate card). 4x120gig with raid 1 on the mobo would probably be around the same price as 3x120gig with a separate raid 5 controller. $/gig with raid 1 is the most expensive so I guess if storage space isn't that great, raid 1 would be the way to go. But as you get more drives with raid 5, the $/gig (or the obligatory $/.jpg of pr0n) goes down...In my situation, I was thinking of getting 4 120 gig drives. I've got about 6 months of the howard stern show (set up a cron job to record it every morning and I've been to lazy to burn it all), vmware images of 3 different os's, and my family's vast mp3 collection all stored between three machines...but hey that's my situation...

oh yeah - and the pr0n...

- grunby

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[PD]

Use unison and two drives to synchronize the filesystems. I actually use unison with two desktop computers and a server to keep all 3 in sync! With copies of everything on 3 hard drives, I don't worry too much.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[asv108]

Just check to make sure the card is supported by your favorite distro first. I still can't get my integrated raid to work with linux on my soyo dragon plus mobo. Its especially wierd that linux has poor ide raid support considering the people who are most likely to run ide-raid are also big linux fans.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[miracle69]

You don't need RAID cards to do RAID-5 under linux. Just get a couple of IDE cards, plug in the drives, and make them IDE. IIRC, Linux Software RAID is faster than hardware RAID, and cheaper too. ATA-100 cards are around 30 bucks and you can do A nice RAID5 with 2 cards. I did just that with the 99 dollar 120 GB 5400 RPM WD drives purchased at Frys here in Phoenix.

Re:Jeez...Drives this size are appetizing but scar

[GoRK]

A big clarification I would like to make here is that most cheap "hardware raid" controllers are NOT hardware raid controllers. They are clever hacks to implement RAID using a combination of a bios handler for software RAID and an OS driver implementing software RAID at the driver level. That is why linux md running raid5 is often faster - the implementation is better than the device driver provides.

Now, when comparing performance to a real live IDE RAID controller (Adaptec AAA or 3Ware, etc.), it is not as fast. These controllers have an on chip implementation of RAID 5 (ie hardware XOR etc. usually implemented on an intel i960 or somesuch) and perhaps some cache memory, and they interface with the OS using the standard SCSI drive api.

Now software raid 0 or raid 1 is often just as fast as hardware raid 0 or 1 because the implementation is so simple and the drive r/w speeds are the limiting factor.

BTW: does anyone know exactly what to call things like the promise and Highpoint "Raid" controllers that rely on BIOS hooks and software drivers to do the RAID dirty work? -- "Hardware" doesnt work and "Software" doesnt work -- is there a word for it?!?

~GoRK

Backup

[xigxag]

Backing up this sucker ought to be fun. Hmm, I only need 138,888 floppies! Lessee, at the rate of one floppy inserted a minute, that'll take me over 96 days straight!

If I get started right away, I'll be well prepared for the inevitable HD crash that will follow my installation of WinXP SP-1.

Backups..

[J4]

gotta be a bitch. That's something like
138,889 floppies. If they're 1/8 inch
that's a stack about a quarter mile
high!

Re:Backups..

[Quixote]

ARGH! You guys make up your minds: is it 138888 or 138889 ??? The suspense is killing me.

Re:Backups..

[xigxag]

I forgot to round up, so the other guy was right. But that's not the real issue at all. The real problem here is that with all my mp3's, mpgs and jpgs deemed illegal due to the RIAA, MPAA and Forgent, I frankly don't have anything to store on that monster except a couple of Excel worksheets from 1994. Oh yeah, and that old Visual Basic "Hello World!" program from college. But even VBRUN200.DLL can't make a dent in this WD beast.

"Cut him a little slack"?

[Wakko Warner]

Yeah, Taco's grammar, spelling, punctuation, and fact-checking abilities are severely impaired by all the Linux Bong-Hits he's been doing.

When he returns on Monday, he'll be back in top form!

- A.P.

Re:"Cut him a little slack"?

[gmhowell]

Amen. The rest of us don't get cut that much slack when doing our JOBS! Why should Taco?

The drive for Longhorn

[levik]

Microsoft today announced that due to the revealed Western Digital technology, they can disclose that Windows Longhorn will actually be a Full-Motion Video (FMV) Operating System, which will require a 200Gig drive to install on.

Western Digital reliability

[Wonko42]

Am I the only one who has had every single Western Digital drive I've ever bought fail completely within months? The failure is usually preceded by a horrible clunking noise that lasts a month or two, followed by catastrophic data loss. And it's happened with every WD drive I've purchased (and that's six so far). Needless to say, I've stopped buying WD drives.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[PD]

Funny, I'm holding one in my hand right now that I bought in 1992. It's only 1000 times smaller than the one listed here - 200 megabytes. It still works perfectly and up until a month ago it was a swap drive on one of my computers. The swap was very lightly used, but it felt GOOD dammit to be using the second hard disk I ever bought in a Linux box.

Anyway, 1000 times increase in capacity in just 10 years. To extrapolate, that means that in the year 2012, we'll have 200 terabyte drives. Actually, it's more complicated than that.

I paid $500 for my 200 meg drive, and these new 200 gigers are going to be selling for less than that. What it'll turn out to be is that our 200 terabyte drives will cost little more than the value of the raw materials used to build the thing.

What WON'T change is that the handful of hard disk manufacturers around will have might thin margins and heavy competition.

Re:Western Digital reliability

[Perdo]

Some people win the lottery.

Some people buy 6 substandard drives from the same manufacturer.

Some people use a 5400rpm CPU fan and 5400 rpm drives and expect they won't set up narrows bridge style resonate frequencies in their cases.

Some people do not properly cool their cases.

Some people bang their boxes around at once a month lan parties and wonder why their drives fail.

Some people overclock their machines but don't use western digital drives because they tend to behave badly.

Getting there

[Pope]

Still not enough space to rip my whole CD collection. Guess I'll just keep listening to them on my phat stereo, the way music should be! :)

Methinks it's time...

[Pollux]

...for Western Digital to rethink their webserver strategies.

Here's what filled my web window in my attempt to view the specs of this 200GB hard drive:

Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0113'

Script timed out /products/products.asp

The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.

I mean, I really didn't think that a company as big as Western Digital could actually be /.ed, but I guess they can!

(For those of you complaining about how 200GB hard drive is not any worthy news, there certainly was enough people interested to still bring the server to a standstill.)

But you need at least two.

[gerardrj]

Others have mentioned backup problems with these large drives and joked about the number of floppies the drive equates to. Assuming my math went okay, here's a list of popular backup media and their estimated time to backup such a beast.
What these large drives mean to users is that you can't just buy one drive, as there is no feasable way to back up the entire drive. You'll need to purchase two identical drives and mirror them for backup purposes. While 200BG seems like a lot, you'll need at least 400GB in reality. You can't let all that good prOn get lost in a head crash.

Drive type
(Native capacity) (native xfer rate)
(time to fill one media)
Time to complete a full 200GB backup* (approx media cost)**

DLT-8000
40GB 6MB/s
2hrs per tape
5 tapes 10 hrs $200

DVD-R
4.7G 2.6MB/s (2x write speed)
30 mins per disk
43 disks 21 hrs $43

CD-R
700MB 3.5MB/s (~20x write speed)
20mins per disk
286 disks 4 days $45

Floppy
1.44MB 25K/s
1.5Mins per disk
138889 disks 20 weeks $13,888

*These times assume 100% efficiency. IE: That the next media will be available immediately after the preceeding one is full. I did not allow any time for insert/eject, preperation/formatting or phyisical movement of the media. You would never be able to achieve these times. Perhaps * 1.5 would be more realistic.
*For media cost, I used pricewatch and took the lowest price I could find for bulk media. In the case of floppies that was 10/$1. These costs do not reflect the price of the device to write to the media.

Not an IT assistant are we..?

[Burning1]

The one thing most people fail to consider is the possibility of incramental backups.

Consider that on a 200gigabyte drive, it's improbable that there will be more than a couple gigs of new content in any given week (even if you're a major porn hound.)

2 gigabytes worth of data is plenty small to do incramental archives nightly on a tape drive.

With that said, you're right... A second hard disk is far more efficent for the needs of the average consumer.

Most IT industries use tape drives as well as RAID arrays simply because it creates a sort history of the data on the drive. Where RAID won't protect you from stupid user errors and 1e3+ /-/4xx04z where tapes will. Additionally, a proper backup procedure should also include a monthly backup to be taken off site in case of a fire, flood, act of god, or act of pissed off ex employee who is owed a lot of money by ex employer (you hear me, you bastards? [yes, I'm joking. Don't sue me.] ; )

People seem to forget that tapes are generally an enterprise solution... Not somthing intended for the desktop.

Actually it's a 195.31 GB drive

[Proudrooster]

In computer science 101 we learned:

1 byte = 8 bits

1 KB = 1024 bytes
1 MB = 1204 KB
1 GB = 1024 MB

However, drive manufacturers switched to the same math that the monitor manufacturers use for calculating viewable area e.g. (17" monitor = 15.9 " viewable).

Drive Manufacturer Math

1 byte = 8 bits

1 KB = 1000 bytes
1 MB = 1000 KB
1 GB = 1000 MB

As you can see, this reduces the unformatted capacity of the drive 2.4 % smaller.

Thus, this new 200GB drive is only 195.31 GB! Then whack another 10-20% for filesystem overhead and your down to a measley 180GB. I mean what can you possibly do with a 180GB harddrive? :)

Need an ATA133 controller

[SaDan]

You'll need an ATA133 controller, or a RAID controller that can address drives beyond the current limitation of most ATA100 controllers.

Promise makes one, I'm sure. Maxtor 160gig drives are sometimes bundled with a controller.

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[twilightzero]

The drive will be bundled with a Promise controller, says right on the site.

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[megabeck42]

You have two situations here. Most of the "RAID" cards are just a PCI-IDE interface, with special drivers. For example, the Promise FastTrack and the HighPoint chips. Software raid, and it sits on top of the block and IDED layers, that, at least in the linux kernel, already talks the > 160 gig addressing. There, you have no problem.

Note, even if your BIOS doesn't support the new addressing, that's not a problem. If the drive is not your boot drive, you don't need to worry at all. If the drive IS your boot drive, you can tell the chipset that your drive is however large you care (I usually say about 100 megs), and enable LBA. Then you make /boot within the first 100 megs, and keep your kernel there. Once the kernel has booted, you can use the complete drive.

You could use one of these new 200 gig drives on those old, ghetto ISA IDE interfaces, you remember them, they shipped with CDROMS, they had a few jumpers, two 74 hundred TTL chips, and a PAL or a GAL? Yeah, well, it's an IDE interface, the same as those PCI ones, just without the DMA and other functionality.

Anyways, next problem, The SuperTrak's, Escalade's, and Adaptec 2400's. They have custom processors and firmware that actually take all the RAID processing off of your chip effectively Hardware Raid, unlike the Win-Raid above (ala winmodem).

Those are probably fixable with a controller BIOS upgrade, pending, of course, vendor support. People have shown that, given a fast enough processor, your peak throughput from those software RAID cards can surpass the hardware raid solutions. I want to see how that falls, when the processor is stressed.

Anyways, poing being, unless you're using hardware raid, you've got no problems, buddy.

Re:Need an ATA133 controller

[AntiNorm]

Promise makes one, I'm sure

Yup, the Promise PDC20269 has been out for quite some time now. I got mine several months ago (came with my new 80 GB Maxtor drive).

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[ZxCv]

I bought a Maxtor 160GB drive that came bundled with an ATA/133 card. I ended up putting the drive into an ADS Firewire enclosure, which seems to be just as capable as addressing the whole drive as the bundled ATA/133 card.

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[Waffle Iron]

Hrm, my motherboards don't recognize drives over 120 gigs due to some weird LBA limit of 132 gigs.

For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits? I thought they had fixed things, but here's another one. For the last 20 years it's been an endless parade of hard drive capacity limits, one after the next. I can't remember the last time I installed more than 1 OS on a box without being nagged about dire warnings about hard drive geometry crap.

Why the hell do they need to be so stingy with the address bits? Don't they learn anything from experience? Is it a conspiracy to make a few people pay 3X for SCSI?

Here's a hint: Send 64-bits of address to the drive! Store 64-bits of address in the BIOS! Use 64 bits in the device drivers! Use linear addressing! NO EXCEPTIONS ANYWHERE! For once, they wouldn't run out of space in 6 months and cause new headaches for everyone.

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[PD]

Probably the same reason that the AIX box at work (1 gig of ram, 18 gigs of disk space, quad processor) chokes when you try to grep a file with lines longer than 2048 characters.

Keep ranting about stupid limits, maybe it'll do some good. At least I won't feel lonesome.

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[pjrc]

For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits?

The limit is due to having only 28 bits in the IDE registers to selecting the address. There are four 8-bit registers, and the "head" register uses 1 bit for master/slave selection, one bit to select CHS/LBA addressing, and two bits are "reserved" (originally used to select sector sizes, but in modern times sectors are always 512 bytes).

ATA-6 kludges this 28 bit LBA limit to 48 bits by specifying that the host is to write 20 bits twice!

But for the forseeable future, 32 bit computers will only really use 32 of those 48 bits, which turns out to be only 2 terabytes. If the operating system uses a signed integer (common practice, including the linux kernel until only recently), you only end up with 31 bits of sector addressing, or just one terabyte.

Of course, there are probably even more limits lurking. Doesn't linux ext2/ext3 use 32 bit numbers? FAT32 uses 28 bits for cluster numbers, but clusters can be as much as 32k in the standard (apparantly larger in some systems, though Microsoft doesn't document that in the FAT32 specification).

Re:How to make my mobo recognize it?

[bedessen]

For the love of God, when will the PC industry stop with these damned limits?

FYI, for anyone interested in reading a nice list of all such limits with a technical description for each one, I suggest this link. [pcguide.com]

Re:It's Western Digital

[Surak]

Now I hear people say this all the time. But in my nearly (oh wait, this is 2002...we can skip the 'nearly' part now :-P) 20 years of computing experience, I have only had 2 drives that ever died on me (like totally dead, not just developed a few bad sectors or whatever) and they were both Maxtor drives. And I have owned drives that were manufactured by Maxtor, Western Digital, IBM, Seagate, Kalok, Fuji, Quantum, Toshiba and another company that I can't remember the name of right now... :)

Re:It's Western Digital

[MaxVlast]

Conner?

I've had several Micropolis 4.3GB SCSI drives (the 3240AV, if I recall) and those are the most damned unreliable drives ever. They go into 'airplane mode' and sound like a prop plane about to take off.

Re:It's Western Digital

[duckbillplatypus]

I own a computer repair/retail store. I have given up on WD several times. We have mainly used Maxtor for the last several years. I have had 2 Maxtor drives die in 5 years. I have replaced more WD drives for several 3rd party warranty companies than I could count. If one of the warranty companies call and sends a computer through our doors, (especially if it is black with a blue logo silkscreened on the front) and it has a WD drive inside, it's a 90% bet that the drive has developed bad sectors. I have enough dead 4.3gb Caviar drives to build a wall across the front of our shop. We have recently been using the new Maxtor/Quantum drives (Qaxtor I guess) and have not had any returns. These new drives look like a Quantum, but have a Maxtor label. I was a little hesitant at first to use them. However, I wanted to test the new drives and I needed a new server, so I built myself a new box consisting of dual 1800 Athlon MP (Tyan Tiger MP), 1GB Mushkin PC2100 DDR, Promise Supertrak SX6000 and FastTrak100,and 8 Maxtor 80GB drives. 6 drives are in RAID 5 (data) and 2 are in RAID 1 (OS installation). So far I have had no problems, other than gasping over the speed of this beast, but only time will tell. Just my 2cents. =)

Re:It's Western Digital

[davmoo]

Folks, I hate to be the one to throw water on everyone, but here goes...

Debating which drive manufacturer is "most reliable" is like debating which God is "correct", or the existance of Santa.

You say in 20 years experience you've only lost two drives, both Maxtors.

Well, in my (let me count) um...23 years experience, Maxtor is one of the only two brands of drives that I've not had a failure (the other one is Fujitsu). And I've also "owned 'em all" too. I've got a pile of dead Western Digital drives a foot tall sitting out in my workshop (figured I'd make clocks out of 'em or something). I once had three Seagate drives fail in a 6 month period, and the second and third ones were warrenty replacements starting when the first one died.

So which one of us is right?! :-)

Re:Maxtor Or... Western Digital?

[twilightzero]

It's WD, I submitted the article with a different title and it got edited...to the wrong company LOL! I laughed so hard I almost wet myself when I read it...

Re:really old news

[twilightzero]

The press release is June 25, but the drives just SHIPPED today, THAT'S the news.

Re:how ironic ...

[twilightzero]

I have but one thing to say...

LMAO!!

That's nothing...

[scubacuda]

...compared to the new Ford Exorbitant [bbspot.com].

Cold hard disk drive = cold car engine analogy

[BigBlockMopar]

Does anyone know if fluid dynamic bearings would change the minimum temperature that a drive requires to spin up?

Well, assuming that these fluid bearings are smooth races with a "ball bearing" of oil molecules in between (ie. like bearings in any car engine since the 1930s), absolutely.

From the descriptions, from what I can tell, we're only talking about bringing automotive engine main bearing technology, on some scale, to hard disk drives.

Whatever the liquid lubricant, when it's cold, it's likely to be thicker. Which will mean that it will take more motor torque to get it spinning when it's cold. (Think of how much slower your starter motor turns your engine on a really cold day; not all of that is the reduced efficiency of the battery in cold weather!)

I think, in cold environments, these drives might take a while longer to spin up, but once they're spinning, the turbulence in the oil in the bearings will warm it up quickly enough. Also, when it's really cold, the bearing clearances will be smaller because they probably will have contracted more than the journals.

Compared to ball bearings which will have no fluid filling the bearing clearances as the temperature changes, I'd imagine these will be less prone to vibration and read/write errors as the bearing temperature changes. (Not that it matters much, all modern hard disk drives use a closed-loop servo system to detect the position of the heads relative to the platters.)

Early Nineties? Try 1982!

[BigBlockMopar]

So you think you are old? ....I'm not old (26) but HD didn't exists on the consumer market when I started. ....my first real personal computer was an Apple II. and then the macintosh. Anyway, just remember how much application you could put on a single 800k floppy.

TI-99/4A [99er.net]! :) I had a 5.25" single-sided single-density floppy disk drive, with a whopping 90k per diskette. The average application was about 20k, word processor, Editor/Assembler development package, etc. Sticking in another diskette was like adding a new hard disk drive to your machine today! :)

Then some nut in the TI User's Group realized that we could stick two of the new half-height double-sided drives then becoming popular in PC/XTs into the disk drive bay. 180k per drive, two drives at once! (TI Disk Controller cards wouldn't run double-density, so we didn't get the full 360k/disk.) Literally, you could go weeks or months using nothing but the two diskettes in the two drives.

I kinda miss that. But, then again, that was before the good porn came in large, high-resolution 1+ megabyte JPGs. (16 colors was enough back then, too...)

Re:This is going to be a hoot for personal securit

[puppetman]

Long and irrelevant? Nah. Kind of interesting. A little slice of life.

If someone had put a scene like that in a movie, it would have been called "over the top" and "cliche".

If you edit this down to the best 10 minutes every week, post it somewhere and then post the URL.