The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Rich,

In all fairness, I believe she was giving me the "Reader's Digest" version of how it is. Very knowledgeable about the drives physically inside. I know when I was talking to Amber, Russell's daughter about hard drives, because she used to work for a company that made high precision drives for Cisco Communications which I sort of remember as being servers? I couldn't have a job like that, it would bore me to death! She built drives for them for 4 years, until they closed the factory.

Russ

 

To be fair in my case the PSU wasn't what caught fire, it was the floppy disk, and only nearly. I was able to pull the mains cord before the thing actually burst into flames, but it was billowing smoke - and my first reaction, holding the power button in, had no effect, presumably due to the components being toasted (though the board survived, barely).
I had no idea about the 4TB enterprise drives - hopefully they pave the way for a 4TB consumer drive from somneone other than Hitachi

Rich - hard disk warranties have 1) never been 10 years for any consumer product that I know of, 5 was the highest, and 2) will never cover the value of data. That is a data loss insurance policy, which would be a recurring cost, not something included with the sale of a physical product.

It should be noted that despite the poor 2 year warranty on WD Green drives, many of Seagate's consumer drives now only carry a 12 month warranty. Food for thought...

 

Thanks guys, good info.

Was just reading reviews about the 2Tb WD laptop drive. Apparently it's so big, it can't fit in the majority of laptops! I'm really wondering just how much larger a mechanical drive can get.

 

Well, I was just using the 10-year as a hypothetical example of meaninglessness - pardon that new word which I just made up (Oh, for crisake - google says it's a real word!)

Your description of your "fire" Sam, produced some amazing visual images in my mind, and pardon me for laughing, I know you were not amused at the time. Holy sh*t!

The part about "billowing smoke" from your floppy drive gave me the giggles. Hahahahaha.

 

It took a few days for the smell to finally clear from my room :/
Not a pleasant experience, and not something I'd ever want to repeat.

 

Not seen that but have heard tales. When I was very young I remember seeing someone else fall for a CD tray opening without the disc having spun down first. Needless to say the disc didn't remain in the tray once it had opened ;-)

 

I believe Russ has had that happen before DDP. Never had that happen before myself. I have accidentally inserted an SD card into a wii drive though :S Had to take it apart to get it out LOL!

Rich the information you linked to is interesting. However I don't find it that impressive. Seems like Necessary innovation to me. If hard drives didn't have this technology years ago, they're sorely lacking innovation LOL! I guess SSD's are gonna revolutionize. Or perhaps Isolinear chips eh? LOL!

 

Haha I know someone that's done that as well (the wii SD card). Can't remember who it was off the top of my head.

Nothing really new about the WD Red drives, they're just the halfway house between consumer grade and proper enterprise hard disks. The 'designed for 24 hour use' has little to no merit as normal hard disks don't really suffer ills from that. The higher vibration and temperature tolerance may well be true though, and that's certainly welcome. What will really please buyers is the proper RAID support, which current WD drives certainly do not have. (Was dropped after the colour naming scheme was adopted). I'm trying to decide if there's much reason for me to buy them. 24/7 usage in a high vibration environment is certainly an apt description of my server. Primarily I want large capacity disks that don't lose their GPT table at random :/

Might wait until the 4TB version arrives, if there's one for enterprise, a consumer grade version should hopefully follow before too long.

 

Oh, Kevin, you're so cavalier, lol.

(Go visit the game thread - I have a lot of good CS:GO for you.)

Do you know that they have 2 cpus embedded in every disk drive logic board, each of which is much more powerful than the earlier PCs? There is so much computation going on - which is why they say that the firmware is so important for maximum data throughput.

On your earlier question about capacity - look how blase we are all getting - "oh, 2 TB, oh 4 TB, that's nothing - when they get to 100 TB I'll be impressed" Lol.

My guess is we'll see 100 TB in a 2.5" laptop drive by the end of this decade. Miniaturization is phenomenally interesting.

 

And extremely difficult as well, which there is a limit too, just like clock cycles. Which is why we see more cores as for now the cycle rates have plateaued, at least for now.

 

Unless there's another breakthrough in SSDs I don't see this happening. The limit for mechanical storage has been placed below 100TB, I'd be surprised if we ever saw 100TB mechanical desktop drives by 2020, let alone laptop drives. If we do get to 100TB per disk, it'll be SSDs that get there.

 

Steve and Sam,

You guys are slaying me. It's my story, it happened to me. I've told that story a couple of hundred times, and never mentioned AOpen PSUs, or Asrock motherboards.

The PSU in Andrew's computer was a "DiabloTech" black Chrome 350w model, the motherboard was a Win 95 2m something, socket 754, and the CPU was an Athlon 64 4000+. That's what it says on the invoice! Oh, and the picture was not running on the monitor screen, as it had locked up! It's irrelevant anyway, because all of this happened before the Asrock MB was even Purchased!

Basically, I built him a new computer to replace the one that burned, with some better stuff that I had laying around. I thought about re-using the case but it would have cost too much to paint, let alone repair! Besides, what can you expect to cool with only 2 80mm fans these days?

The original build, was seriously under powered, and I doubt you could pull 200w out of one, at the wall, let alone 350!

Best Regards,
Russ

 

100Tb. 1/10th of a petabyte! I remember in 1995, my mothers Windows 95 machine (133mhz CPU) had a 1.19Gb hard drive. I shutter at such limited space now LOL! And now we have drives that dwarf that capacity I think a petabyte drive is looking more and more like a reality. Of course it'll only happen if doomsday doesn't ensue LOL!

It would take roughly 250 4Tb drives to reach 1Pb. :S

 

In the early 1980's a 5MB and 10MB drives were huge in size but also large literally at almost 2 feet in diameter but they were removable! Of course then card readers were the thing and vacuum tapes too. I don't think we will see a 100T 2.5in drive soon though as still size is limited for that capacity.

Russ you have changed your story and that's a fact!

 

Wow - who knew it could be physically dangerous to work around computer equipment, what with fires, billowing smoke, and explosions!

 

Televisions are worst, especially CRT types, old tube audio gear as well, new Direct Current cars (hybrids), and then we get into 5KVA+ transformers...

No matter what they say and what we do life is dangerous, and it will always be that way as long as there is life.