Talk:Hard disk drive/Archive 3

message: Is the link at the botton of the page titled "Manage Disk Space" really needed?  It seems a little commercial and irrelevant to me.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Inklein (talk • contribs) 17:28, August 7, 2006
:Good call.  I deleted the link.  --ElKevbo 22:52, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Manage Disk Space Link? 

message: Around paragraph 11 or 13 under "Mechanics and magnetics" reads:
"In CSS drives the sliders carrying the head sensors (often also just called heads) are designed to reliably survive a number of landings and takeoffs from the disk surface, though wear and tear on these microscopic components eventually takes its toll. Most manufacturers design the sliders to survive 50,000 contact cycles before the chance of damage on startup rises above 50%. However, the decay rate is not linear—when a drive is younger and has fewer start-stop cycles, it has a better chance of surviving the next startup than an older, higher-mileage drive (as the head literally drags along the drive's surface until the air bearing is established). For example, the Maxtor DiamondMax series of desktop hard drives are rated to 50,000 start-stop cycles. This means that no failures attributed to the head-disk interface were seen before at least 50,000 start-stop cycles during testing." [bold italics added]
It seems to me that while it may well be true that the increase is not linear, the explanation given does not show it to be - only that it increases. Anybody know? Or am I misreading?
--Fitzhugh 04:15, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-linear increase in chance of damage? 

message: Does the capacity of a hard disk coincide with Moore's law?   71.213.27.179 17:05, 11 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moore's Law 

message: Lacie has a hard drive they claim is 1 tb, 
:I've seen the 500 GB model of this drive; it's actually two 250GB drives in a case, running in either JBOD or RAID-0 mode (I'm not sure which, since the RAID controller in the case obscures that). I would imagine this "1 GB" drive is the same sort of setup, only with two 500GB drives. -lee 17:23, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  possible 1 TB drive 

message: I've just heavily reshuffled this article. An awful lot of redundancy has been exposed, which now needs to be reduced. The technology section was folded in from two or three separate parts of the article, one of which was almost impossibly technical. This needs to be addressed somehow. I've also moved the history section out mostly to its own article; that article could do with some choice pictures from here. Chris Cunningham 19:15, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I noticed the POV tag on the Manufacturers section; what all would you suggest changing? (The "deathstar" bit about the 75GXP can certainly go, but the rst I'm not so sure of.) -lee 17:28, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  It's mostly gone now anyway. What remains still doesn't seem to be particularly important to the article; lots of hardware sections are dominated by a handful of manufacturers, and corporate scandal is hardly unique to hard disk companies. In an article which is already rather too long, this can probably be excised. Chris Cunningham 15:14, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I re-wrote the technology section. Is it OK? I admit I was the one who wrote much of the original so maybe I was biased to my stuff (I suspect I wrote the parts you say were 'impossibly technical' :) about dipoles and grains etc). I removed a lot, because I think it should go in the Disk read-and-write head and Hard disk platter articles, or even more general ones. I put the part about grains in the platter article. I kept what I thought was an overview of the technology: Platters, r/w heads, magnetic surface, binary encoding, & advantages of HDD. Other articles can go more in depth. And is it still too technical/convoluted? BlankAxolotl 01:16, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Your work is excellent. I was about to comment on how much better the technology section reads now. You shoudl certainly add the more esoteric information to the sub-articles, it's all good work if a little too in-depth to be presented here. Chris Cunningham 10:50, 26 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heavy reorganisation 

message: I have to say that I don't think the technology section is as readable as it was two days ago. The sub-headings are too short, it goes to some unnecessary lengths to clarify things and it contains an unneeded "advantages" header which should either be implicit in the text or explicitly balanced with a counter-header to read properly. Would there be objections to reverting the section structure and incorporating the better edits made? Chris Cunningham 10:08, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: change it to whatever you think is good! I'm no english major... :) BlankAxolotl 22:46, 29 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thanks. I've reordered it in much the same way as it was previously while using the new version's text. It may be that the part about exactly how data is recorded is a little technical; I'm going to work on trying to reduce the length of the article again, so I might try to move things which relate to ferromagnetic data recording in general to a more appropriate article. Chris Cunningham 10:23, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Just some random comments on my cursory read of the article (sorry if this is the wrong place for my comments). (a) The article states that "Modern disks can perform around 50 random access or 100 Sequential access operations per second.". This is innacurate. In the case of random I/O. the number of IOPS is mostly limited by seek and rotational latency combined. For example, on some disks you can have 250 random reads per sec with a 4 ms seek + random latency on average. On sequential I/O - ordered sequential writes are actually batched & optimized by the controller (or other elements in the storage stack) as larger operations, so the number of seq. operations is not really meaningful. (b) The article states that FC-AL is the cornerstone of storage area networks. FC-AL is actually obsolete and replaced with switched fabric (FC-SW). (That said, you can still see FC-AL in the internal implementation of some storage arrays.) --AdiOltean 08:44, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems with the recent re-organisation 

message: The recent reorg seems to have introduced a rather large and detailed section on the differences between the 1000/1024 bases for disk size prefixes. This is important to note, I suppose, but not in such heavy and fervent detail. It should be seriously cut back. I don't think it needs its own subsection.
The article now also has a large number or large images. They're interfering with the section edit links. They should be moved, shrunk or removed. Chris Cunningham 18:05, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Capacity section, images