Any New Drives Soon?

[LunarMist]

Apparently the maximum capacity for 3.5" drives is still 500GB and 2.5" drives are 160GB. Are any larger units expected to be available in the next four months?

 

[sechs]

I figure that everyone is going to make the move to perpendicular before making any furthur major improvements.

I suppose that they could make 600GB on current technology, but there just doesn't seem to be a call for it.

 

[LunarMist]

That sucks. The 2.5 inchers are too small. I could really use a bigger unit.

 

[Pradeep]

Fujitsu has announced that it has developed a new 200GB 2.5" Serial ATA hard drive for mobile applications. The MHV2200BT is the world's first 200GB mobile drive and features a 4200RPM spindle speed, best-in-class power consumption, whisper quiet operation and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1485

Looks like 3rd quarter release.

 

[sechs]

Fujitsu stated during CES that it expected to use perpendicular recording to reach 200GB by the end of 2006 and it looks as though they have hit that mark.

 

[LunarMist]

Oh man, I need PATA.

 

[Tannin]

That would be bloody right. The very same day that I buy a 120GB drive (because that is the largest available short of slumming it in the Seagate world) there is a 200 announced. Well, no matter. My laptop drive is the most important one of them all (backed up but most inconvenient to restore, especially if I'm thousands of kilometres from home) and I doubt that I'd actually ever take the plunge and trust a non-Samsung unit in it anyway. And Samsung Storage being Samsung Storage, it might be quite a while before their conservative engineers get around to relasing a 200GB unit.

 

[freeborn]

That looks to be an interesting product. Checking the specs it is 12.5mm high. I would guess that makes it a 3 disk drive. Make sure your notebook can handle a 2.5" 12.5mm high drive. Most notebooks ship with 9.5mm high drives.

Free

 

[LunarMist]

The specs make no sense. Notebooks don't use 12.5mm drives anymore. Perhaps the drive it is used for some embedded application or maybe there is a typo.

 

[LunarMist]

Well f*ck me. I received the 160GB drive, but the notebook only sees 128 GB. One would think that LBA-48 would have been supported by the time of Pentium M, but no.

 

[Mercutio]

It is. You need to enable large disk support in the registry or work from a Windows install disc that has XPSP2 or 2000SP4 already integrated.

 

[LunarMist]

Yes, of course that was the first thing I checked.

 

[Will Rickards]

Does the bios only see that much but windows sees all of it?
Try installing the intel application accelerator drivers, supposedly they work around the 127GB limitation for some chipsets.

 

[LunarMist]

No, the BIOS only sees "137GB" of the drive. But there is no BIOS of any kind available to download.

 

[LunarMist]

...and there is no IAA for the 855GM chipset. Computers suck.

 

[freeborn]

The notebook manufacturers often lag way behind desktop in implementation of features. 48 bit lba is still hit and miss. Some notebook manufacturers still require drives configured to not support 48 bit addressing. Hopefully with > 128G drives finally available they will update their BIOSes, but who knows.

Free

 

[Mercutio]

Computers suck.

You're only just finding that out?
The best you can really hope for is to find that certain computers suck less.

 

[LunarMist]

No. I found that out in '77.

 

[LunarMist]

Apparently Hitachi has 500GB in a 3-platter design now. One hopes the T7K500 is cooler and quieter than the current 500GB drive. I'd rather have 4x150GB if some manufacturer could manage that.