It is about time that they give this idea up and try to get SSD up to the same sort of storage.

How does a 5400rpm drive with 500GB compare in performance terms with a 7200rpm drive with 250GB (all other things being equal, like number of platters). Seems to me like it should outperform the smaller 'faster' drive : a bit slower to find stuff, but a fair bit quicker to read once its gets there ?.

Paris, because she doesn't know either.

That's a whole lot of information to put on such a little drive.

That's not really much these days is it? I've got more than that dedicated to recording TV shows I don't watch :)

That the government can lose when they misplace there laptop.

They're lagging months behind.

Paris, because her behind is proactive.

Where is Hitachi in the race? They seem to be concentrating on 7200RPM drives, but have a 320 out in volume, so a 500 can't be far off at least in announcement.

I finally got a 320GB 7200 into my laptop too.

So what about capacity if it's just going to crater and lose it in a few months - the first question is not How Big but How Robust.

And BTW what kind of heat will these tuppence-sized wonders generate? Miniaturisation is pretty moot if you can't stack them close.

Hitachi have a 5400rpm 500GB up on Dabs, noticed a couple of weeks ago. 78 squids.

It will be great to be able to stick 5 of these 2.5" 1TB disks into a small quiet file server box in a ZFS RAIDZ2 formation (like RAID 6 on steroids). That should give great fault tolerance, so that any 2 disks can fail without losing any data. As they're small, spin at only 5400 RPM, they should be quiet, relatively vibration-free and run cool.

The ZFS file system will give end-to-end data integrity to ensure no data is lost.

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/

We treat a byte on a laptop like a byte on a secure server in the enterprise. Maybe, to some, it is. But it should not be.

Data on a laptop are irrelevant, prone to loss (and not just the failure kind), risks to security (if they approach real data of any kind), and are as transitory as your shareholder's confidence during an economic downturn.

One TeraByte drive on a laptop? The only use I can see for it is thousands and thousands and thousands of vacation pics. Those should be sent to grandma, anyway.

If your data are worth saving, they are worth saving twice. When the drive array on your Dell laptop approaches 10 TB with RAID 47 (or whatever they're up to by then) and the satellite uplink constantly transmits the deltas to your secure underground bunker, the laptop will still get stolen. Or lost. Or left behind in the head of the AirBus 930 MaxiCruiser and mistaken for a terrorist attack and hit with a water canon and smashed to smithereens just before they find your identification tag and send you the bill for the emergency response.

Laptop data are transitory. And insecure. Get over it.

And don't depend on anyone to care when you lose your data. I won't. The 280TB drive manufacturers won't, either. Your former boss will.

I think Paris lost her secure data when she was 14. She didn't need a backup.

Ahh, so speaks the optimism of youth. Clearly someone didn't have their IBM server filled with RAID5 Ultrastars ;)

I had two hot spares in my lovely RAID5 array on Monday, but even before I had an RMA for the first another died. Followed by the third a day later. Bye bye array. Good job I had full backups. It was unfortunate that I didn't have a redundant server though; "Don't worry, I have all the data" isn't much use when no-one can access it... I was very glad I could prove I'd asked for a redundant server and it had been refused though ;)

In the same timespan I was lucky enough to have a RAID0 Deskstar 2x46.1GB array at home. Anyone care to guess how that one turned out? Let's just say I wasn't a happy bunny. Those things popped faster than popcorn. Oddly it wasn't the failures themselves that completely soured me to the idea of ever buying HGST again, it was their "customer service" that guaranteed I'll never touch one of their drives again. Shipping refurbished drives and making me pay to ship them back only *after* they'd received the original drives. Guess how the refurb drives fared. Yup. First failed at one day, the next was DOA, and the third failed at three days. Before anyone asks, yes, the drives were adequately cooled; I used to run a pair of mk1 Seagate Cheetahs just fine...

You're right -- I used Western Digitals.

I wouldn't dream of using Deathstars in a RAID system -- that would be certain suicide.

I had some IBM Deathstars / Hitachi drives go clickety-click and that was that. I refuse to buy HGST drives any more, after these previous bad experiences. I use Western Digitals now and so far they have run flawlessly.

http://breden.org.uk/2007/10/26/hard-drives-du-jour/

http://breden.org.uk/2007/10/28/life-on-a-hard-drive/

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/