Hitachi announces new 100gig 5400RPM travelstar..!

[BillMorrow]

They are now a reality..

when IBM announced the pixiedust technology some years ago, they said that capacities of 100gig on a 2.5 inch HDD would be possible..

now hitachi is announcing the drive..

http://www.hitachigst.com/portal/site/h ... ID=content

[Roland]

Any information when the drives will be available for consumers? Waiting for the 100gig drive so urgently...

By the way: Seagate has announced similar high performance 2.5" drives some with 7200rpm. The announcement sounds promising...

http://www.seagate.com/cda/newsinfo/new ... 69,00.html

[JHEM]

Roland,

The Fujitsu 100GB HDs are already widely available, including from my favorite source: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=100052 but they're only 4200RPM.

The Hitachi 100GB 5400RPM HD was originally promised for the 4Q of this year, but has been pushed back to 1Q of 2005 the last I heard.

As far as Seagate is concerned, although ZipZoom offers them: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=101587, it will be a LONG time before I can bring myself to ever get another Seagate laptop HD.

The 4200RPM 100GB Toshiba has had reports of good, quiet service: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=101713. But, for $100 less, I'd sooner get one of their 5400RPM 80GB HDs: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... ode=101678. I sincerely doubt that, between the increased rotational speed and the 16MB buffer of the 80GB HD, I'd miss the additional 20GB of storage offered by the slower, 8MB buffer 100GB HD. I tend to prefer the 80GB Toshiba over the 5K80 Hitachi due to the Toshiba's 16MB buffer as well.

I'll also go on record once more that ZipZoom Hitachi HDs carry the full Hitachi 3 year warranty, while those from Newegg.com are OEM HDs and carry little (if any) warranty, regardless of what Newegg says on their website!

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDe ... 209&depa=3

Regards,

James

[Roland]

James,

thank you for this nice comparison of possible hard drives.
Fujitsu and Toshiba drives were always a bit slow compared to Hitachi/IBM and Seagate drives. This is what I remember from my few experiences I have made with these drives and tests I have read about some of them.

Since I use notebooks (10 years now) altogether 3 hard drives from IBM have quit (unfortunately without any indication before it happend) their work forever without any external impact. Ask me if I think that Hitachi drives are more reliable compared to others...

However, I think I have had sometimes such problems because I always look for state-of-the-art harddisks...like now again.
Hitachi or Seagate I don't mind as long performance, power consumption and noise level are excellent.

The buffer memory is an interesting point I did not looked at so in detail.
Do you really think that this counts in some cases more than rotation speed? Have you more information (e.g. tests) about this?
Of course, if a drive gets older performance mainly decrease because of less accurate adjustments and more re-reads of the heads. So larger memory would not get "smaller" by aging...

Thank you and regards,

[dr.b]

In typical "read-ahead"-situations the buffer works well. In the new c´t is a nice chart with 2,5" drives...i think you should get one at your location hm, you don´t need to buy it, just take a look at page 179

[Roland]

Thanks for your comment.
I am located in Taiwan since one year and it will take until I can get back to Germany. Meanwhile I looked at C'ts homepage but did not found some more details about it...can you scan and send this page of the magazine to my e-mail address or tell me a bit more about the conclusion of this test?

TIA,