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[DocLotus]

IDE hard drives just got a lot faster.

It totally amazes me every time I take a long, detailed look at hard drive technology.

Through the years I have observed the evolution of hard drives...

* Drive technologies has evolved from... MFM to SCSI to IDE.
* Size has increased from... 5 MB (yes MEGA not GIGA) to over 250 GB in size.
* Average access time has decreased from... 210 milliseconds to less then 9 milliseconds.
* Capacity per surface has increased form... 500 KB (that's Kilo, not Mega or Giga) per surface to 50 GB per surface.
* Disk speed has increased from... 1800 RPM to 10,000 RPM.
* DMA (data burst speed) has increased from... 8, to 16, to 33, to 66, to 100 & now (133 Maxtor only).
* Cost has shrunk from... $1000.00 per MB to less then $1.00 per GB.
* Width has shrunk from... 5 1/4 to 3 1/2 & now to 2 1/2 inch (if Seagate has their way).
* Height has shrunk from... 3 1/4 to 1 inch.
* The number of platters (or disks) has shrunk from... 10 platters to only 1 - 4 platters.
* Reliability has increased, noise & heat has decreased... a great combination for sure.
* Formatting a drive has gone from DOS's infamous FDisk to being built into most newer operating systems & is now so easy to do or change.
* On-board cache memory has gone from... None, to a few KB, to 1 Mb, to 2 MB, & now 8 MB.



Moore's LAW doesn't hold a candle to hard drive technology.  Just consider this...

My first Intel PC (1983) had a processor speed of 5 Mega Hz.  The first hard drives for that computer had a capacity of 5 Mega Byte.  Just remember the number 5.

Today's processors top out at 3.4 Gig.  Hard drives now top out at 250 Gig.  Hard drives have improved 73.5 times in capacity more then processors... WOW!!

The very first hard drive that was available for my computer back in 1983 was a whopping 5 MB & it cost $5000.000... that's 1000 bucks per MB. It was a large, heavy, 5 1/4 inch full height (3 1/4 inch high) monster with 8 platters. It was slow, very noisy, ran hot & was unreliable. No wonder I stuck with four floppy drives in my TI Pro 8088 computer for several years.

You can now install anywhere form 4 - 6 of today's drives in the same space as it took for one drive in 1983.

In the space that then would hold 5 MB of drive capacity you can now put 1 - 1.5 TB (that's Terabytes) of capacity.  A Terabyte is 1000 GB.

As I recall, it was not until 1990 that I finally broke down & bought my first "huge" hard drive... a 20 MB MiniScribe that ran at 4200 RPM & had something like 19 milliseconds access time. It cost me over $400 (OEM price) & I was in hog heaven with this "speed demon".



Now, lets advance the time frame to 2003 & what do we have?

Glad you asked.

A couple of weeks ago I bought two new Maxtor DiamonMax Plus 9 model 6Y120PO 7200 RPM IDE drives with 8 MB of on-board cache; that is 4 times the normal 2 MB cache that most drives come with.

Boy, are they fast, fast, fast.

I also have two Maxtor 80 GB 7200 IDE drives with the standard 2 MB of cache that I got about a year ago.

The new 120 Gig drives test out at over TWICE the throughput of the 80 Gig drives.  An example is a test using Fresh Devices Fresh Diagnose hard drive performance test...

Write speeds... 80 GB drive 15.2 MB per Sec.
Write speeds... 120 GB drive 33.5 MB per Sec.

Read speeds... 80 GB drive 12.6 MB per sec.
Read speeds... 120 GB drive 32.4 MB per sec.

The faster speeds are for real as all my programs now snap to & seem to jump from the hard drive.  This is a very real improvement for sure.

The last time I had such a noticeable improvement was back in 1989 when I changed my motherboard form a 5 MHz 8088 to a 12 MHz 286.  That let me change the hard drive interleaving from 6 to 1 to 1 to 1 interleave.  All drives today run at 1 to 1 interleaving.  That simply means that for every turn of the drive one track of data is loaded into memory.  Back in the early days the CPU & memory was so slow that hard drives had to be slowed down so they came up with the 6 to 1 interleaving that caused the drive to rotate 6 times for one track of data to be pulled into memory.

Man... have we advanced or what  

[Cmagic]

You're right Doc,

Magnetic storage technology has made tremendous progesses in the last ten years thanks also to new discoveries in physics such as GMR (Giant Magneto Resistance) that allows for the tremendous reduction in size of read/write heads.

But the future will look even brighter with the advent of MRAM technologie http://www.howstuffworks.com/mram.htm.

MRAM devices have the speed of SRAM (static RAM) - the type of memory that is used in cache memories - and it is completely non-volatile like flash memory. It will soon replace the flash memories with the same access time as the internal memory inside your computer. MRAM has also a very low power consumption.

But the best is to come since MRAM technology has the potential to have densities much larger than current HDD.
And it has no moving part !!

Can  you imagine a 10 TByte (yes Tera) storage device without any motor, a modest heat dissipation and an access time of about 10 nsecs ? MRAM will be able to perform this in, maybe 15 years ?

Currently the big players are IBM and Motorola.

We, at the lab, are starting to think about new computer architecture with MRAM registers and memories. Think about it :If all the registers and memories in the CPU are MRAM, you simply can switch off the computer. It will retain all its internal state. When you switch it on it will just resume operation where it left off,

C'est pas beau ça / Isn't it nice ?



Christian

"The Best way to predict the future is to invent it !" (A. Kay)

[jleerigby]

Wow.  How do you know so bloody much about hard drives?  

I'm just about to upgrade my 120's to 250GB.  maybe you can advise which model I should go for.  Currently I have 2 of the WD Caviar Special Edition 7200 8MB and they claim to be the fastest drive around.  But how can that be as they are ATA100?  Surely an ATA133 will be faster?

I'm happy with them though so I'm thinking of going for the same drive in the new 250GB model.

[DocLotus]

The Maxtor 120 GB drives I just got are ATA 133 but there is no serious difference between 100 & 133.  You motherboard has to support 133 for it to make any difference.

Just for the heck of it, I tried the Maxtor 133 drive adaptor cards that came with my 80 GB drives.  They plug into a PCI slot.  Test showed that I got better results (in MB per sec) when the drives were connected to the motherboard 133 connectors.  Think the PCI slot may have been slowing it down a bit.

IBM & others set the DMA 100 standard a few of years back but Maxtor thought they could get a little more out of it so they came up with the Maxtor 133 set which to this day is strictly a Maxtor speed.

That is one of the reasons I have stayed with Maxtor.

WD does not make 133 drives.

Both WD & Maxtor are good drives.  I got burned a few years ago with WD (both failed within 6 months of each other) but that was a long time ago.

Also WD found themselves in a technological gap with Maxtor in the late 90's but finally came out of it when they licensed technology from IBM.  In fact the WD 40, 60, & 80 Gig & IBM 40, 60, & 80 Gig drives were actually the same exact drive except for the name.

I'm sure now days that are making their own with improved technology.

[jleerigby]

Yeh - my mate had the maxtor 133 and was ****ed off when it scored lower than mine at PCmark2002.  He & I couldn't quite understand why.  I fancy the WD 250GB but it's a lot at £216 ($384).

[DocLotus]

One side note:

DMA 100 / 133 is the end of the line for IDE drives as we all know & love.  There is no more room left for improvement in throughput as far as DMA burst speed is concerned.

The problem, among other things, is the resistance of the 40 pin connector & cable running between the drive & the drive controller on the motherboard.  This problem was first encountered when the DMA 66 drives came out a few years ago.

A short term solution was found in a rather unique way... someone discovered that if they make the wires thinner but double up two of them to a connector pin that higher throughput could be achieved (up to DMA 100).  So today all drives of DMA 66 & higher MUST use the 80 wire / 40 pin connectors or you will be bottle necking you drives throughput.  These cables are often referred to as 66 drive cables.

As a result of IDE's DMA limitations, we are starting to see a new technology called Serial ATA (or SATA) drives.

SATA just hit the market a few months ago.  As usual, your motherboard (or an adaptor card) must support SATA.  IDE drives can be connected to a SATA connector with a special adaptor plug & cable but there is no advantage to doing that.

SATA uses a new 4 wire / 4 pin connector plus new electronics on both the motherboard & drive that currently has a DMA rating of 150.  But don't run out right this minute & buy a SATA drive as test buy almost everyone has shown that currently there is very little difference between SATA 150 & IDE 100 / 133.  SATA drives also cost more.

The interesting thing right now is that most SATA drives are really IDE drives with an IDE to SATA converter chip on the drive.  That may be why the current crop of SATA drives are not much faster then IDE.

The future of SATA does look very bright though as SATA currently does not have a roadblock in its way like IDE 100 / 133 does.

SATA was designed for very high speeds indeed.  The next SATA will most likely be 200, then 250, & 300.  From there it is anybodies guess.

We will finally see a real improvement when the drive industry finally comes out with drives designed for SATA from the ground up & not another IDE with a SATA chip.

Seagate just introduced such a drive... a true SATA running at 10,000 RPM.  Catch is, it is only 40 GB... was designed for the server market.

In the meantime, if you are stuck with IDE, don't despair yet... there is still some room in the old gal yet.  As aerial densities improve (the amount of capacity per sq inch or per disk surface... currently 50 GB per surface) more data comes off the disk for each revolution which translates into speed.

There is also some talk (lead by Seagate) in the industry about moving away from 3.5 inch drives in favor of 2.5 inch drives as they can be made to respond faster (smaller, lighter parts).

Where this is all going is anyone guess.  I would like to see the move to 2.5 inch drives as it just makes sense.  In the meantime you will be hearing & seeing more about SATA as the next best thing to sliced bread.

[DocLotus]

JLee...

Drive test can be deceptive

A drive with a lot of data on it will always test slower then an identical drive with little or no data on it.  The problem is the time it takes the heads to move around all the data to lay down the test data.  A new drive will lay the test data in mostly the outer tracks whereas a nearly full drive will lay the data on the inner & slower tracks where it can find some free space.

In order to make fair comparisons you must do the following...

* All test drives must be clean with no data.  A fresh format is good for this.
* Windows must not influence the test... all boot-up programs must be turned off (a clean boot).

Only under this method will you get a meaningful test under Windows.

When I tested my new 120 Gig Maxtor's under the above condition I got a MB per sec throughput test of 33.5 write & 32.4 read... double my old 80 Gig drives.

After installing Windows XP & all my data for a total of 35 GB of files, the throughputs dropped noticeably as would be expected but even with that, the new drives with all data loaded were still faster then the 80 Gig drives with no data.  Now that is performance!