News Seagate comes out with 160GB laptop drive

[WilHarris]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/01..._160gb_laptop/

[Hamish]

woot perpendicular
now wheres the 1tb perpendicular desktop drives

[Arkuden]

Sweet nice to see this technology moving along a little. Now i hope they can start showing some movements along the solid state storage

[Da Dego]

UPDATE:
Seagate just contacted me to give me some more information on the drive, which is called the "Momentus". It runs at 5400rpm, but thanks to perpendicular recording efficiency, it consumes battery like a slower 4600rpm drive. So, not only more storage, but less power drain. Also, perpendicular recording means a faster seek time than a standard drive, so the 5400rpm behaves closer (though not equal to) a 7200rpm.

w00t!!

[rupbert]

Is there any technical reason why these drives are not running at 7200rpm? Or is it a matter of cost?

[ajack]

Increased heat would be my guess...

[Buzzons]

will it be SATA2 etc? or just SATA?

[Arkuden]

heat and power consumption i would guess as well.

[The_Pope]

There is to be a 7200rpm version it seems:

http://www.seagate.com/products/notebook/momentus.html

[eek]

does this mean that the tracks are perpendicular to the centre circle? If so how does this increase the amount of storage? Surely as you move away from the centre you are going to start wasting more and more space as the tracks fan out?

Also, surely if the tracks are as I imagine them, then surely you wouldnt want the drive spinning while you're reading a track? That is unless of course it spins at the same speed as it takes to pass one track width ways and one track for the head to move 1 track out?

Still, however it works, large capacity laptop drives has been a long time coming and this can only be a good thing!!

[The_Pope]

Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording

[eek]

And what a great friend he is

Pretty clever stuff, I've even stopped to consider the polarity of each bit and which end forms the north/south pole. Lucky I'm not in HDD research or we'd never get anywhere

[thecrownles]

If this means that a 5k rpm laptop drive is about equal to a 7k rpm drive, when do they come out with the 10k rpm ones? I want SATA2 channeling me the equivalent of 15k rpm from my 1tb desktop drive.

[specofdust]

The fact that they brought out a lappy drive as the first perp storage drive annoys the hell outta me. 160GB is supurb for a lappy drive, and the power requirements and speed sound fantastic, but I wanna see how big, and how fast they can make a 7200RPM 3.5" disk, thats the really exciting thing in my mind.

[Firehed]

As I can buy over a terabyte for $500- (over four drives, but the 400/500GB drives are such a poor value right now), it's nice to see them boosting laptop storage capabilities. That said, laptops are, IMO, best left as more of thin clients - build yourself a fileserver and stream it over the network rather than try to pack a ton of stuff onto the laptop itself. Of course this isn't the case for gaming laptops, but you'd need quite a few games to fill up most gaming laptops.

Yeah, bring it to desktops. That's the one stupid thing with computers - hard drives are just too expensive. I can get a DVD burner and a 100-pk of DVD-Rs for about $70, giving me about 430GB of storage (write-once, but still...) Or I could either spend $300+ on that same ~400GB or buy myself an 80GB drive. Considering how much of a bottleneck they are, they're way too expensive. To start at the cheapest everything, you could spend $25 on RAM but still need to spend $60 or so on a hard drive - almost as much as a celeron/sempron or accompnaying motherboard.

[Boswell]

btw the 7k harddrive only comes in 80 - 100 gig

[Aankhen]

Originally Posted by Firehed

Yeah, bring it to desktops. That's the one stupid thing with computers - hard drives are just too expensive. I can get a DVD burner and a 100-pk of DVD-Rs for about $70, giving me about 430GB of storage (write-once, but still...) Or I could either spend $300+ on that same ~400GB or buy myself an 80GB drive.

Hard drives are indeed expensive, but they are also a lot faster than DVDs or CDs, if I'm not mistaken. And a lot more convenient in terms of not having to look through a mountain of 100 disks to find the one you want.

(notice that I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to shed some light )

[specofdust]

Well I think Fireheds comparison was a rather dumb one I'm afraid. Hard disks are totaly different to optical storage, an optical CD isn't expected to rotate at 7200RPM for 5 years now is it? Nor is it expected to do millions of I/O operations before kicking the actuator.

[LAGMonkey]

eep and here is me still with one 40gig HDD in my main rig and a 12gig in my laptop! Maybe its about time i got some more storage my laptop could use a 160gig HDD that performs like a 7200 and sucks power like a 4200

[GuardianStorm]

sounds pretty cool, but i still want a method of using mt CDROM bay in my laptop for a hard drive....i dont use a cd that often, and i need more space, but as i have an 80Gb in ther ethe upgrade is not really worth it for me.