Neat article on IBM's new larger capacity hard drives

[drdoug99]

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...kpt=zdnnp1tp02

[YARDofSTUF]

cool, but will they be ata133?

[drdoug99]

Damn, apparently not.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS:
Deskstar 120GXP
120/80/40 GB
25.4 mm in height
7,200 rpm
29.7 billion bits per square inch maximum areal density
3/2/1 glass platter(s)
6/4/2 GMR recording head(s)
400 Gs (2ms) nonoperating shock (2 platter)
4.17 ms average latency
6.7 watt idle power
8.5 ms average seek time
Standard ATA-100 interface
3.0 Bels typical idle acoustics (2 platter)

straight from IBM
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/press/20011107.htm

[YARDofSTUF]

looks like maxtor is still my HDD love then :P

[YeOldeStonecat]

I think the ATA interface has gotten as rediculous as SCSI arguements. SCSI is what, ultra 160, 320 is coming out? Unless you have a high end server motherboard, the PCI bus can only take up to 133 Mb/s, and that is shared across the board. On top of that, the drives can only sustain into the high 30's....low 40's....it's like riding a moped down the autobahn!

Plus with serial ATA coming out...regardless, what's the fastest hard drive have for sustained throughput.....the low 40's? What about if you pair them into RAID-0....you might see into the upper 60's...low 70's? You're barely even taxing an ATA-66! Again, like riding a moped down the autobahn!

[YARDofSTUF]

at 33mhz its 133mb/sec right, so its a bit more at like 42?

[YeOldeStonecat]

You talking about the PCI bus?

[YARDofSTUF]

Originally posted by YeOldeStonecat
You talking about the PCI bus?

ya like if i run a pci bus at 42mhz would that increase the 133mb/sec thing?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Yeah, marginally, probably add a couple of Mb/s....but my point was, even the fastest hard drives can barely pass the capacity of an ATA-33, only RAID-0 can barely pass the capacity of ATA-66...and nothing can even approach the ATA-100....yet these days people will scoff that you don't get something with ATA-133 on your new motherboard...it will be years before drives can approach that, and todays motherboards will be long gone by then. In a few weeks, when everyone learns of ATA-133...people will be posting "Why are you getting ///THAT/// motherboard, it doesn't have ATA-133...so it sucks!"

[YARDofSTUF]

Originally posted by YeOldeStonecat
Yeah, marginally, probably add a couple of Mb/s....but my point was, even the fastest hard drives can barely pass the capacity of an ATA-33, only RAID-0 can barely pass the capacity of ATA-66...and nothing can even approach the ATA-100....yet these days people will scoff that you don't get something with ATA-133 on your new motherboard...it will be years before drives can approach that, and todays motherboards will be long gone by then. In a few weeks, when everyone learns of ATA-133...people will be posting "Why are you getting ///THAT/// motherboard, it doesn't have ATA-133...so it sucks!"

i agree with u but also from ata66 to ata100 i have noticed differences at ata66 my burst is like 50 and average maintained is like 32 at ata100 burst is 70ish and average is about 40

i believe with raid 0 u can reach teh max burst speed or close to it

[Easto]

My burst speeds with HD Tach are 81 - 84 mb/s

[Qwijib0]

Originally posted by Easto
My burst speeds with HD Tach are 81 - 84 mb/s

"burst" is reading from the onboard cache of the drive, solid state memory, as opposed to magnetic storage. YeOldeStonecat is right, magnetic storage is the limiting factor on ATA, but in a SCSI bus, it is not when you have multiple drives. Whereas ATA can only have one transfer at a time (using about 33% of the bandwidth), SCSI can have multiple transfers at once, so you could have 5 15, 000 rpm drives in raid, transferring at a total throughput of about 350 MB/sec This, however is an advantage if you had spent the money on a 360 Raid controller, and the 5 drives.... VERY expensive.....

[BaLa]

Originally posted by Qwijib0


"burst" is reading from the onboard cache of the drive, solid state memory, as opposed to magnetic storage. YeOldeStonecat is right, magnetic storage is the limiting factor on ATA, but in a SCSI bus, it is not when you have multiple drives. Whereas ATA can only have one transfer at a time (using about 33% of the bandwidth), SCSI can have multiple transfers at once, so you could have 5 15, 000 rpm drives in raid, transferring at a total throughput of about 350 MB/sec This, however is an advantage if you had spent the money on a 360 Raid controller, and the 5 drives.... VERY expensive.....

NO DOUBT LOL
SCSI RAID Controllers depending on what type of SCSI go from $150- 500+
didn't check out all the pages in pricewatch so the ceiling is prolly higher..
SCSI hard drives go from around $120 (crappy ones) to - $1750
ok lol but the one for $1750 is

NEW 180.0GB SEAGATE INTERNAL FOR SGI OCTANE/ORIGIN HOT PLUGGABLE COMPATIBLE DISK 7200RPM DISK ON SGI SLED FOR OCTANE/ORIGIN/ONYX II, 5

don't forget the cables and the terminator either

[YeOldeStonecat]

Ya should have seen the honkin RAID controller on the Dell PowerEdge server I was working on late last night....had twin PIII Xeon 1.0 gigers, RAID 5 setup with the Perc 3/Di RAID controller that had 128 megs of cache on it. Was performing a memory upgrade (cuz it runs SQL and was already hitting 1 gig of RAM usage), and had to upgrade the firmware on the RAID controller (a real nailbiting nite) so we could condition the batteries on the controller.

Oh how I love RAID. Wanna do RAID 5 ATA at home....snag that new Adaptec IDE RAID controller for my upcoming Palo rig.

Yes, SCSI bus can deal with concurrent drive transfers...where ATA cannot...one at a time with ATA.

Also "burst" transfer is a useless benchmark...notice serious people focus on "sustained" transfers...that's the one that counts.