marvel-media.com

marvel-media.com



Among the vendors, there has been some consolidation among drive makers, with the market for the smallest hard drives. Only Toshiba and Samsung make 1.8-inch drives, with Toshiba seemingly most committed and now shipping a 160GB drive. (It's no surprise that Apple's largest-capacity iPod is also 160GB.) But in part because 1.8-inch drives have been slower than traditional 2.5-inch drives, they haven't seen as much use in notebooks. Instead, the vendors seem more focused on 2.5-inch drives, with Seagate introducing a 500GB 2.5-in drive that's only 7mm thick. In the consumer segment, external drives, mostly connected via USB 2.0, have grown tremendously in recent years. Prices have come down, and the drives have gotten easier to use, with better included backup software and most 2.5-inch drives being powered from the port. Now we can start to play around with test parameters. Access time and I/O performance depend on agility, positioning speed, and head precision. But they also depend on rotation speed, as waiting times for required data (referred to as rotational latency) are shorter at higher spindle speeds. Faster speeds also mean faster sequential throughput, but they require a more precise and robust drive design. Additionally, higher performance comes at the expense of recording density, and hence, capacity. Power consumption has become an additional key metric, as performance typically has a direct relation to power consumption. More power translates into greater heat dissipation, and more components at high speeds typically turns into higher noise levels. We’ve written about hard drive performance several times: o Directron The iPod is currently the world's best-selling digital audio player, and its worldwide mainstream adoption makes it one of the most popular consumer brands.Users typically only hear about advances in the hard drive space when there are capacity breakthroughs or fresh flagship drives: hitting a new terabyte level, higher RPMs, lower-power models--stuff like that. But each hard drive generation and the generation that follows it usually isn’t large enough to justify a replacement. However, there are more aspects to consider. We took a three year old Core 2 Duo desktop PC and installed a similarly-aged Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 drive. We then took Hitachi’s latest desktop drive, the Deskstar 7K2000, and used it as a drop-in replacement for the older 500GB disk. o $189.00 Accelerate Your Hard Drive by Short Stroking: A performance analysis of short stroking, which reduces the head’s activity radius and capacity for the sake of improving I/O performance Solid-state drives (SSDs) have gotten a lot of sense to always get the newest hard drive models possible. These will provide the highest recording density and consequently store data on the fewest possible platters. This reduction in complexity generally yields lower power consumption, as well. The interfaces that connect drives are evolving as well. For enterprise drives, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is moving to a new 6-Gbps standard this year. And for external drives, while I expect USB 2.0 to still be dominant along some eSata and FireWire drives. USB 3.0 seems poised to replace it,