120+GB Laptop drives available when?

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Any idea when laptop drives will exceed 100GB?

Toshiba already had a 120gb notebook drive, model #MHV2120AT.
 
BR549 said:
Any idea when laptop drives will exceed 100GB?

Toshiba already had a 120gb notebook drive, model #MHV2120AT.
Click to expand...

1) It's a Fujitsu, not a Toshiba.

2) Not released yet as a 120GB, it's still vapourware.

3) At 4200RPM, who the heck would want one?

Seagate, Hitachi and (BION) Western Digital all allegedly have 5400RPM 120GB
laptop HDs waiting in the wings.

Seagate is already shipping their 5400RPM 100GB laptop HD.

Hitachi has a 7200RPM 80/100/120GB laptop HD to be released "soon".

Regards,

James
 
JHEM said:
1) It's a Fujitsu, not a Toshiba.
Click to expand...

Something wrong with Fujitsu?
2) Not released yet as a 120GB, it's still vapourware.
Click to expand...

Hmm, ok.
3) At 4200RPM, who the heck would want one?
Click to expand...

This doesn't bother me and I've so far been buying 4200 rpm drives in
preference to 5400 rpm. 4200mm drives are quieter and use less power
and perhaps are more reliable (less heat). The seek latency is about
the same as 5400 rpm drives even if the rotational latency is a little
longer. Most laptop applications should not be seek intensive; if
they are, your software is badly designed or you don't have enough ram.
Hitachi has a 7200RPM 80/100/120GB laptop HD to be released "soon".
Click to expand...

This kind of scares me. I still associate Hitachi with IBM Travelstars
which had bad reliability problems even at 4200 rpm. Lately I've been
buying only Toshiba drives.

I notice the Hitachi 7200 rpm 60gb drives come in both a 7K60 version
and an E7K60 (Enterprise?) version. The E version claims to be built
for continuous operation and is the same price (zipzoomfly.com). I
wonder what the differences really are and whether the E version is
mainly intended for blade servers and is somehow unsuitable for laptops.

The 7200 rpm Hitachis do have 2x the track to track seek speed of the
Toshiba 4200 and 5400 rpm drives, so are likely to make lots of programs
run noticably faster.
 
Paul said:
Something wrong with Fujitsu?
Click to expand...

Well, if Fujitsu makes the drive and you go to Toshiba looking to buy it
you're going to have a pretty long wait.
Hmm, ok.


This doesn't bother me and I've so far been buying 4200 rpm drives in
preference to 5400 rpm. 4200mm drives are quieter and use less power
and perhaps are more reliable (less heat). The seek latency is about
the same as 5400 rpm drives even if the rotational latency is a little
longer. Most laptop applications should not be seek intensive; if
they are, your software is badly designed or you don't have enough ram.


This kind of scares me. I still associate Hitachi with IBM Travelstars
which had bad reliability problems even at 4200 rpm. Lately I've been
buying only Toshiba drives.

I notice the Hitachi 7200 rpm 60gb drives come in both a 7K60 version
and an E7K60 (Enterprise?) version. The E version claims to be built
for continuous operation and is the same price (zipzoomfly.com). I
wonder what the differences really are and whether the E version is
mainly intended for blade servers and is somehow unsuitable for laptops.
Click to expand...

Reading the specs, it seems that rather than being built differently, the
E7K60 simply requires more cooling--its rated for a maximum ambient of 40C
vs 55 for the regular 7K60. The E7K60 is also available as a 40 GB drive
for some reason.

There may be differences in the firmware.
 
J. Clarke said:
Reading the specs, it seems that rather than being built differently, the
E7K60 simply requires more cooling--its rated for a maximum ambient of 40C
vs 55 for the regular 7K60. The E7K60 is also available as a 40 GB drive
for some reason.
Click to expand...

Thanks, good point. The 40GB version may be historical or it may
reflect the preference for smaller drives by some enterprise RAID
users. They like to spread their data across as many drives as they
can, to get more speed through increased parallelism. So for a given
total amount of data, more drives => smaller amount of data per drive.
 
Paul said:
Something wrong with Fujitsu?
Click to expand...

Nope, just pointing out that the drive is made by Fujitsu, not Toshiba.
This kind of scares me. I still associate Hitachi with IBM
Travelstars which had bad reliability problems even at 4200 rpm.
Lately I've been buying only Toshiba drives.
Click to expand...

Too many folks associate the Travelstars with their infamous "Deathstars"
cousins. But every HD manufacturer has had their clunkers, starting way back
when with Seagate MFM and RLL drives.
I notice the Hitachi 7200 rpm 60gb drives come in both a 7K60 version
and an E7K60 (Enterprise?) version. The E version claims to be built
for continuous operation and is the same price (zipzoomfly.com). I
wonder what the differences really are and whether the E version is
mainly intended for blade servers and is somehow unsuitable for
laptops.
Click to expand...

The E version is intended for Blade service, correct. Not really for laptop
use, although many do.
The 7200 rpm Hitachis do have 2x the track to track seek speed of the
Toshiba 4200 and 5400 rpm drives, so are likely to make lots of
programs run noticably faster.
Click to expand...

I've been a proponent of them for the Road Warriors and Power Users among us
for quite a while.

As someone said on our Forums, the 7K60 is like a shot of Viagra for your
laptop.

Regards,

James
 
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