Toshiba DTR vs PMR
Toshiba announced some breakthroughs in magnetic storage that could theoretically see the 1.8″ hard drives pushing 240GB using two platters. Using a new process which adds grooves to the disc surface, Toshiba have been able to get 120GB per platter. Apparently this process is best suited to small drives such as 1.8″ & 2.5″ drives. Although this would mean a nice fat drive in our iPod, this process is expected to reach the manufacturing process in 2009.
Anyone that has ever looked inside one of these “drives” will realise that they are only suitable for temporary storage capacity. There is nothing magical inside the enclosures, just a couple of standard hard drives and a small RAID 0 controller. What people (ie. general users) tend to do with a drive of this capacity is copy over all of the big data (pictures, movies and music) from their desktop or laptop computer and then delete it from the original location to save space. Not only is this not a backup but the chances of this drive failing are more than doubled due to the fact that the data is striped across two drives, either of which could fail at any time. In a RAID 0 only one drive needs to fail to take out all of the data.
One terabyte drive fails = 2TB of data gone!
Anyone thinking of using one of these should consider buying two and using software to mirror them. At least you would have some redundancy. There are of course much easier and not to mention cheaper ways to set up a redundant backup solution. We will post a more detailed guide of how to do this in the near future.
Playing a game of catch up, Samsung and Seagate have gone head to head with Hitachi’s big boy by each announcing their version of a terabyte drive. Both drives feature the SATA 3Gps interface. The Samsung offering has only 3 platters opposed to Hitachi’s 5 and Seagate’s 4 which would suggest that it is not only more reliable but may be the forerunner of a future 1.5TB drive (with all that extra space for platters!).
Engadget today posted news of the new solid state disks from PNY. In 1.8″ and 2.5″ flavours they feature 66MBps read and 55MBps write speeds with standard ZIF, Micro SATA, 44-pin IDE and SATA interfaces. These drives will be simple replacements for the likes of laptops and will eventually (by the end of the year) be shipping 1.8″ and 2.5″ drives up to 128GB capacity. Finally my whole music collection can follow me to the gym without fear of trashing the 1.8″ drive and it’s glass platters! It is now more important than ever that people start to put a decent backup routine in place because with solid state storage there is not much a data recovery company can do to resurrect them when they fail.
With drive capacity nearing the Terabyte mark, track density increases along with the gap between read / write heads and platters. Therefore are Hermetically sealed drives the the way forward for Manufacturers?
See link below to read more
http://www.touchbriefings.com/pdf/22/data031_t_MOUNTOP.PDF
(Link Now broken, Provided for reference)
