Laptop HDDs hit 5,400 RPM Now!

[Clocker]

Interesting info:

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-838981.html

I wonder if they have made tribological advancements to help compensate for the added power consumption that a faster spinning drive will have, or if they just reduced the size/mass of the platters via advances in aerial density? I'd bet on the latter...

Clocker

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

You mean, "9.5mm laptop HDDs hit 5,400 RPM Now!"

IBM has had 12.5mm 5400RPM laptop drives for a while. I've been using one since October 2000 or so.

 

[Tannin]

I'm loosing it. Once upon a time I would have noticed something like that in a flash. Getting old.

Guess I've been away from laptops for too long. Maybe the thing to bring me back will be the quasi-laptop a couple of Taiwanese companies have started making just now: near laptop form, but mains powered, with a full-size hard drive and a desktop CPU. Now that is something I've wanted for ages. Must lok into it when they arrive here.

PS: Barry: been flat out like a lizzard drinking at the office these last few days. This week I really, really will try out your SMART utility!

 

[Clocker]

What SMART utility? I'll try it too if it works on my SCSI drives.

C

 

[Tannin]

http://www.storageforum.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=138 You'll find all the details there Clocker.

 

[Barry K. Nathan]

(As an aside, I removed the uncompressed download from my web site (if it can even be called a site) -- there's only the compressed .zip download. I hope that's not a problem.)

What SMART utility? I'll try it too if it works on my SCSI drives.

My "utility" (which is really a minimal single-floppy bootable Linux distribution with the smartctl command from SmartSuite 2.1 on it) currently doesn't support SCSI drives (no SCSI drivers in it right now). I'm going to post a new version sometime this week, probably later today, with some sort of SCSI support (since I need that for myself). Currently I'm planning on support for Adaptec PCI SCSI cards and for up to two SCSI hard drives total on the system. It's pretty easy for me to add drivers for other brands of cards and it's trivial for me to support a higher number of SCSI drives, so if you need either, just ask and I'll do that in either the next version or the one after (either way, it'll be this week).

Note that, even with the SCSI support, the only really useful pieces of info that smartctl will show on SCSI drives are the SMART status (i.e., OK or failed) and, if the drive supports it, the drive's temperature. It's not going to show the error logs and thresholds/attributes like it does for IDE drives. I'm not sure if this is a SMART protocol, kernel, or smartctl limitation, but in any case, I won't be able to fix it anytime soon (assuming it's fixable at all; I'm guessing it is).

 

[Tannin]

What are the best notebook drives these days? I see so few that I don't have an opinion anymore. Are there brands to avoid? Brands that last better than others? Last time I saw enough notebook drives to matter, it was 1.08 and 2.1GB days. Guy asked me to recommend a drive in the 20 to 40GB class today, and I had no idea. IBM? Hitachi? Toshiba? Or are they all much the same?

 

[Mercutio]

Probably half of the IBM laptops I see - including both of the IBM laptops I own - have non-IBM disks in them. Does that tell you anything?

 

[Tannin]

OK, I take your hint. But then half the IBM desktops we see have non-IBM drives, and they did back in the days before the 75GXP when IBM was a byword for quality too. Tells me that IBM PC Co is a seperate business unit and they will buy from WD, Maxtor, Seagate, whoever.

But I take it you think the current breed of IBM notebook drives is sub-par?

 

[Mercutio]

I'm not completely sure what to extract from that, actually. I've heard claims of poor reliability in those disks, and I do believe that if IBM's notebook engineers specified IBM disks, they would be putting IBM disks in their laptops.

Perhaps the better thing to say is that IBM's notebook people don't see a compelling reason to use IBM disks.