Notebook drives

[Fushigi]

Why can't I get more than 18 months from a notebook HD? The Hitachi 60GB 7200 RPM in my Dell had some bad sectors a couple of months ago. I ran CHKDSK -R to flag them as bad and started watching for signs.

Thursday evening, I notice the distinct chug-chug-chug of retries going on. I got the PC up and copied just about the entire HD to my 'server'. A couple more CHKDSK -Rs later and the machine won't do normal tasks like, say, open Control Panel or bring up Task Manager.

Friday, a vacation day for me, I'm on the phone with Dell's gold support. 15 minutes later, about 6 of which was spent running diagnostics, I got a confirmation number for a replacement drive to arrive at the office on Monday.

This prompted me to want something for official, regular backups. The file server at work would overload if too many people did that, so I wanted something standalone. I decided on a USB-powered 2.5" HD. One with enough capacity to back up my main + my spare laptop (60 + 40GB if both were full). I went hunting online and found an 80GB Samsung unit but no local retail outlets carried it (I wanted to pick it up Friday). At Fry's I found a 100GB Seagate but Fry's still doesn't take American Express so my expensing it at work would be a PitA. Went to MicroCenter and found a 120GB Western Digital for $230 (I, well, work, could have saved about $20 or so buying from a reputable online dealer but the immediate use outweighs the cost difference.). OK, yeah, it's a WD, but work's buying, it solves my immediate problem, and it won't be spending that many hours powered on so I picked it up. I'll tell my manager about it tomorrow when I'm back at the office.

The WD is quiet, practically silent. I certainly can't hear it over my regular PC. There's a blue power/activity light and a connector for an AC adapter in case your USB source lacks sufficient power. It's 5400RPM w/2MB cache. I haven't benchmarked the drive, and don't really plan to.

I like the formfactor. It gets just slightly warm; not that far above ambient room temp. The supplied USB cable is about 18" and uses a mini-USB connector on the drive side. Long enough without being too long. There's a cover over the USB & AC adapter connectors so they're protected from dust, etc. The only gripe I can make so far is really a preference: I'd prefer a built-in retractable USB cable vs. a separate one. That, and they didn't include a carrying pouch.

 

[LunarMist]

I did not know that WD had progressed to 120Gb notebook drives. It is unfortunate that the drive only has a 2MB buffer.

 

[Mercutio]

Why not buy a 3.5" drive in a USB enclosure? You'd have a better choice of manufacturers and more reliability if you went that route, and you wouldn't have to lower yourself to owning Western Digital-anything.

Are you carrying this extra drive around?

 

[Fushigi]

I explicitly wanted a USB-powered device. It's bad enough to carry a USB cable around; an extra power brick just adds weight and hassle I don't need.

A close second was better size & portability. The new drive can fit in the front pocket of my slacks. Mostly, so far, I'm carrying it in the backpack I carry the laptop in. I'm not sure yet what I'll do long-term. Probably shuffle it to & from the office at least weekly to back up my spare laptop.

Ultimately, I don't expect the drive to see >5 power-on hours a week. With that usage pattern, reliability is slightly less important since it's only used for backups.

 

[Mercutio]

OK...
Why not buy the drive and, I dunno, leave it in one place?

 

[ddrueding]

I have a few of these drives (smaller, but the same manufacturer and form factor. The design is really neat, and I haven't had one go bad yet. They seem to spin up fine, even from laptop USB connectors (usually lower-than-spec voltange). Only a non-powered USB hub can stop them.

 

[Fushigi]

OK...
Why not buy the drive and, I dunno, leave it in one place?

1. I believe in off-site backups.
2. Having the drive be portable is nice. For instance, when I noted my notebook's drive was dying I wasn't at the office and had no plans to be there for 3 days.
3. I also work from home one day a week and occasionally work from our downtown office. While I don't envision taking the drive downtown particularly often, having it at home is convenient so I can do my notebook's backup off-hours. That's handy since some files, like local PST files for Outlook, are flagged as busy and are skipped during a backup if other apps are open.
4. The drive is low power, very low heat, and basically silent. The 'environmental impact' of using the drive in the cubical farm at work is about as small as can be w/o going solid state/NVRAM.
5. In the end, the price of this drive is only $90 more than a 3.5" unit. Example at same store the WD was purchased. Compare that to the fees we pay for consultants and the cost delta is well under 1 hour of their time (under 2 hours of my time). It's simply too small a difference to care about. If we were a small shop and every dollar mattered, things might be different. But we're a >$1 billion firm and tomorrow we're announcing record revenue and a 60+% increase in profit for 2005.

 

[Mercutio]

Aw, I'm not really arguing about the cost. More the fact that some awful retailer wrangled you into buying WD.

 

[Fushigi]

Well, I would have bought the Seagate at Fry's if they accepted AmEx. I didn't want to spend all day, a vacation day at that, going from store to store. I was hoping MicroCenter would have the Samsung Pleomax drives but they didn't. They had some externals from non-drive-manufacturers and the WD units. I wanted 80+ GB; they had a 120.

My first preference was not WD, but then again I haven't had issues with their recent drives (I have a 180GB and a 320GB unit). I certainly wasn't going to buy a Hitachi notebook drive since they don't seem to last too long in my notebooks.

Speaking of large corporate buying, though, on Thursday I'm going to check out the bulk-order of 17" LCDs we picked up to replace the CRTs as we remodel our downtown office. 300 units on 6 pallets. Today I saw the still-under-contruction new DR data center. 30+ racks, each with a 48 port Gb Ethernet + multiple fibre drops to the SAN. Gonna be nice when we move in to that in a couple of months. Also heard a rumor we're going to up the speed of the connections between my branch office, the downtown HQ, and the main data center to Gb. Pretty nice for a WAN link.

 

[time]

It's amazing that those 2.5" drives work off USB power. Although WD doesn't quote peak spinup power, Hitachi lists 5W for their 2.5" drives.

USB ports are only rated at 2.5W (5V @ 500mA) ...

The WD pulls the full 2.5W when reading or writing, and 2W when idle. The Hitachi is clearly more efficient at 2W and 0.85W respectively. Samsung specs are similar.

It's a pity the capacity isn't there, because a Hitachi 1.8" drive would be a much safer proposition: 1.4W spinup, 1W read/write and 0.4W idle.