1.8" Hard Drives: Small is Beautiful

Ultra-portable computers require smaller hard drives, which means that drives below 2.5" in size are in growing demand. The latest drive generation stores up to 80 GB, but can these small units live up to the big performance requirements of modern PC systems?

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The nice thing is however, these drives fit inside my iriver h340 DAP (with rockbox on it).

Too bad the 80GB is still not available! Hello Toshiba?

Reply to petur

The hard drive industry/manufacturers need to scrap hard drives all together. They should put all of their R&D into non-volitle solid state storage. If they would actually work together I would expect a 1TB chip the size of my thumbnail with in a year.

V

Reply to VacantLot

Ahh! Guys- PLEASE seperate the 2.5 inch from the 1.8 drives in the benchmarks- or label them as such.

Have you any idea how much of a pain in the ass it is to look at those benchmark charts and try to figure out which is 2.5 and which 1.8 inch? There's up to 22 different hard drives in those graphics. I don't know all the model numbers!

Thanks,

-mpjesse

Reply to mpjesse

Does anyone know where you can purchase the Toshiba MK4007GAL (40gig)? I've Goggled and can't find any sellers but plenty of info about the drive is out there.

Thanks y'all,
Larry

Reply to LarryB

Post a new thread....but look on newegg.com or tigerdirect.com first.

Reply to crizazykid2

Thank you for your suggestions but unfortunately neither merchant shows the product when searching their product line. That particular 1.8 inch drive (or its 80 gig breathen) for whatever reason does not seem to be currently stocked.

Thanks again,
Larry

Reply to LarryB

While smaller is sometimes better, the performance is not there yet.

Magnetic media also has quite a few limitations.

I would like to see the industry move away from magnetic media to better storage devices.

Reply to linux_0

Quote :

The latest drive generation stores up to 80 GB, but can these small units live up to the big performance requirements of modern PC systems?

Yes if you use linux I'm constantly amazed at how much of a pos the Windows memory manager is. My first 2.5" HD gave way in less than a year due to 24/7 of Windows XP using it as swap (why oh why?), my second 2.5" HD fared much better with Windows 2k, but is still the main bottleneck (and still had swap written to it 24/7, though much less intensively). Oh, and I have 512MB memory btw.

Then I switched to linux. To my infinite surprise my HD is (most of the time) no longer the bottleneck even during booting, though my HD isn't fast at all (average read speed around 23MB/s). Since then I always wondered how Micro$oft managed to get away with that pos of a memory manager.

I mean, Linux even caches frequently used HD data in free memory (which is like the reverse of swapping). That makes HD performance much less of a problem.

</rant>

Anyway, it depends on what OS you are using I guess

Reply to rln

Quote :

The latest drive generation stores up to 80 GB, but can these small units live up to the big performance requirements of modern PC systems?

Yes if you use linux I'm constantly amazed at how much of a pos the Windows memory manager is. My first 2.5" HD gave way in less than a year due to 24/7 of Windows XP using it as swap (why oh why?), my second 2.5" HD fared much better with Windows 2k, but is still the main bottleneck (and still had swap written to it 24/7, though much less intensively). Oh, and I have 512MB memory btw.

Then I switched to linux. To my infinite surprise my HD is (most of the time) no longer the bottleneck even during booting, though my HD isn't fast at all (average read speed around 23MB/s). Since then I always wondered how Micro$oft managed to get away with that pos of a memory manager.

I mean, Linux even caches frequently used HD data in free memory (which is like the reverse of swapping). That makes HD performance much less of a problem.

</rant>

Anyway, it depends on what OS you are using I guess

Exactly!

It's not a rant if you're right :-D

Reply to linux_0

VacantLot, a little lesson on the current state of SS devices. AMD uses a 90 nm process to make Athlons, Intel uses 65 nm to make Pentiums, and Samsung uses 50 nm to make 16-GBit NAND flash (4 Gbyte). Flash memmory is ahead of all other Si techs in sofar as device density. As for ultimate limits of storage density, the main problem is non-volatile solid state storage requires devices and devices take up alot more space than magnetic storage bits. The other problem is that the failure rate for NVSS is something like 100x greater than magnetic storage for read/write.

A point about hybrid drives, they'd only be used for parts of the memory which is commonly read because of previously mentioned failure rate. Not that this is new, embedded versions of Windows have been around forever.

Reply to stardude82

Interesting lesson.

However, if I am not mistaken Samsung stores 1bit per cell while Intel and Spansion(formerly AMD) store 2bits/cell.
Also Flash manufacturers are presumably working on storing 4 maybe more bits per cell to catch up to magnetic drives.
There are some more aspects than pure density such as initial access time where Flash memory outperforms the magnetics drive by 100x.
Runtime of a notebook is important too. Flash memory can be "shut down" and wakes up with no latency.
Finally some users have dropped their iPod destroying the magnetic harddrive immediately.

The notebook of my dream is in the Samsung Q40/Dell X1/SiemensFujitsu Q2010 league equipped with a Flash drive and an operating system supporting instant on and a lifetime of 15hrs....

O.K. it is a dream but then again in 2008 when 45nm technologies are widely available and Flash technology keeps evolving this dream may come true for me.

Sunzi

Reply to Sunzi

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