Current harddisk design: biggest hunk of crap ever?

ARGH! They annoy me SOOO much. They are uber slow, the OBVIOUS bottleneck in ANY system, yet, the only mass storage solution without selling your mother or winning the lottery.

Id have a COMPLETELY SILENT system (12db papst fan the loudest thing in there, and i cant hear that in a normal quiet environment) if it wasnt for my bloody seagate (others would be worse mind) harddisk. I turn it on and for at least 3 seconds am so filled with glee with the not knowing if its actually on or not until my harddisk spins up.

25dB quiet? BS!

Somebody roll on solid state and FAST! PLEASE! cause current harddisk design SUCKS.

Now im gonna have to try and sleep with this ****er going "shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh*click*click*shhhh*click*"

 

funny... sorry.
yeah, I agree, 25Db isn't that quiet. My 27 Db fan is fairly noisy, but not compared to my 32 Db 80mm sunon fan.

Solid state would also be SOOOOOOOO much faster. I know you can get micro drives that are up to 2.2 r 5 gigs now.. and they the same size as the sd cards (about the size of a postage stamp) They should be fairly quiet. as long as you don't need win xp on it just hook a few up to those USB sd card readers and make sure your mobo can boot from a usb device, mine does anyways. That would be cool. also a cool mod for lan parties.
I think the transfer rate is only like 2.25Mbps or something

feel free to correct me on those figures though

 

what about "file system" on usb cards?
can FAT32 GO ON THAT USB CARD STUFF?

 

Not sure... but with my mobo, I was able to use a lexar media 128 mb jump drive in dos just like a normal hdd. I guess the bios managed the partition part of it... I needed to copy some win 98 files before installing windows and it worked fine. cd drive was fudged up and would not install the cd drivers under dos.

another option in my bios was to make the jump drive act like a floppy drive. Tht way I could mount/unmount it whenever I delt like it.

So, the answer ot that is.. no, I don't think it can. but the bios initialezes it as a normal drive w/ fat32. i think it was fat 32... not sure what fdisk said... too long ago.. only a month

 

i actually saw an ide compact flash card adapter here in NZ. That would be cool, and silent.

 

Problem is, the flash memory cards (compact flash etc) can only be written so many times (can't remember right off), so if you are using winblows, you are screwed, cuz the swap file would kill it super quick....

 

buy ear defenders if you can still hear it bindeh

 

I remember reading in some science mag about protein cubes and lasers. THey had found the proper wavelength of light to be used on these protein cubes to get the molecules to behave in a predictable manner. (Read that as the ability to write/save/erase data into a protein cube by using light as a transfer and retrieval mechanism).

They were touting GB's to TB's of data that would be accessable instantly (laser light access) in these little gelatenous cubes.

I'll have to go searching tonight and see if I can locate any new news on this procedure.

 

Infant stages:
http://lsb.syr.edu/projects/protein/process.html


Still... neat idea!

 

They arent SD stick, they are compact flash. SD only goes up to 512meg at current. I have a microdrive in my PDA, its not bad. But you are right though, transfer speeds at <10Mbit per sec and id rather sit there with a microscope and magnet and do the little 1s and 0s myself.
Also, yea, solid state when written to so many times becomes useless - so that's your pagefile out the window.

 

You can already get IDE solid state HD's (they even look like hard drives). The problem is cost memory modules arnt cheap and they have to stick quite a few fast ones in a solid state HD

 

You think your PC is loud Bindi, try having 2 of the older (non-FDB) Raptors and 2 Maxtor DM+9s (bloody loud when seeking) whirring all the time

I agree that current HDD designs aren't great, we have the problems associated with mechanical devices such as the noise, heat, and dodgy reliability, but also the S-ATA cables aren't particulary robust, at the drive end the connection is actually quite flimsy (a pet hate of mine, after breaking one of my Raptors )....

 

Argh! SATA plug design is rubbish whoever designed them needs to be slapped hard several times about the face

 

I would like to third that opinion.

As far as solid state goes, you could use t type flip flops.. Yes, it is a lot slower, but can be written to and read from a lot more times than compact flash.

Thanks for the correction Bindibadgi. Was gonna correct it, but you beat me to it..

 

Solid state comes in two flavours as far as I am aware. The first is Compact Flash based and the second is uses standard memory.

The first is not as quick as the second and has write issues, but it is cheaper and doesn't need its own power source. Bit Mirco is an example of this variety.

The second is quicker, but extremely expensive and does require constant power to ensure data integrity.

 

SATA mebbe fragile, but the space saving is worth it imo.


JADS: Yea, they STILL havent developed a solid state medium that can hold the data in stuff like memory chips youd have thought they would have developed something useful by now.

 

http://www.soliddata.com/products/3000/3000_specs.html

drool over this

thing of dreams

 

NICE... /me drools and fillis up office with drool and drowns to death

 

One of my best mates is doing her thesis work on nanoscale magnetic storage media in collaboration with HP.

Essentially solid state, non-volatile magnetic memory.

VERY fast, and silent (obviously).

I keep meaning to ask her what sort of time frame we're looking at, but we're probably talking a few years yet.

It is going to be big though.

8-ball

 

The specification for the BitMicro E-Disk 3S320D (normal HDD size, except the height which can go up to 1.985" [5.0419cm]) using the SCSI Ultra 320 interface are:

+ 33 microsecond access time
+ 4096-151552MB storage capacity
+ 320MB/s burst read/write
+ 230MB/s sustained read/write
+ Write Endurance of 123 years for a 4.6GB disk at 100GB/day erase/write cycles. 27 years for a 1GB disk. So goodness knows what the endurance is of the 151GB model!
+ Data integrity for 10 years
+ Entire media erase, <3 second per 8GB
+ 128MB cache
+ 1.9 million hours MTBF

Wouldn't mind having a couple of those in RAID 0