If anybody knows where I can get a 750GB IDE hard drive, please let me know. I did some looking around last night and just about everywhere I found was out of stock.
Also, while I am calling on your expertise, does anyone know if SATA drives draw more, less, or the same amount of power as their IDE equivalents?
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ATA-style hard drives bigger than 500 GB are somewhat rare; it was at that point that SATA technology came along and has virtually replaced them. I checked a few places and even Newegg was out of stock. Dunno what to tell you for that.
From what I understand, the actual drives don’t take any more power to run (voice coil tech is still voice coil, spindle motors are still spindle motors). The only difference in power draw can come from the fact that SATA drives tend to have a lot larger cache (which makes them not need to “spin up” as often if you make their sleep-mode timing very aggressive) and any architectural differences between a SATA and normal PATA controller. There’s also the inherent power difference between higher and lower-speed drives, though “just about” every 3.5″ SATA or IDE drive on the market these days is a 7200rpm drive.
Yeah, the IDEs got up to 750 and then quit. I had assumed that they would keep making the largest drive available, but they apparently stopped. I guess they figured anyone that needs that much space will probably get a SATA anyway.
Thanks for the info on power consumption.
From what I saw, the 750GB IDE’s were a very brief period – the problem is that higher-density platters aren’t that easy to make (though they can “fake” quite a bit, binning slightly-underperforming density platters down to lower capacity).
They’re pushing the various capacity of drives these days upwards and upwards, and SATA is being adopted almost entirely over IDE now (a number of the most recent motherboards lack even the single legacy IDE channel to be used for optical drives). Hard drive manufacturers like it because it lets them advertise higher data performance numbers, mobo manufacturers like it because just about every commodity SATA controller known has a built-in RAID mode (again, advertising)…
My system, as silly as it sounds currently, carries one 300GB SATA, one 1TB SATA, and two 1.5TB SATA drives. When I get the chance for a rebuild (probably in summer), I’m looking to let the 300 go and turn my remaining 500 into a boot-partition drive. My optical drives are still IDE, but I don’t know if that will hold true (again, much depends on the motherboard).
“Legacy” components, from experience in the industry, rarely stay top-of-the-line. Finding an AGP video board these days is equally difficult; you have to currently go back to early 2007 spec to even find an AGP “high end” graphics board, as they’ve all been phased out in favor of PCI-Express. I’ve been holding off on my next system upgrade for much longer than I ordinarily would on that basis – it’s not just a “minor” change, I have to change the motherboard, which means I have to change Motherboard, RAM, Processor, Heatsink/Fan (grand total ~$250) but I also have to plunk down at least another $100, if not $150, on a graphics board as well because my old AGP unit won’t work for the new motherboard.
I also wonder if super-large IDE drives less reliable. My failure rate with the 750’s I’ve had dwarfs that of any other size. The size with the next largest failure rate (less than 1/3 of the 750) is 500GB. The safest is also the smallest, 40GB.
Unfortunately, they were around in the brief period that I was expanding my HD capacity considerably. Switching everything else over to SATA is a risky proposition for me right now.
On the other hand… you have a 1.5TB? Getting my hands on one of those could dig me out of the hole I’m in.
Legacy is good enough for me in most respects. Since I don’t game, I don’t need a really good video card. My biggest expenses are power supplies and hard drives. The processor and mobo just have to be good enough to keep up.
II hate it when you have to wait on a purchase because of shifting technologies. I was caught without a computer when chips were becoming 64-bit, RAM was shifting to DDR2, and video cards were moving towards PCIE all at once. I could either save money on technology that was already dying or spend obscene amounts of money on newer technology than I was accustomed to buying. I went with the latter, mostly because reputable mobo companies weren’t releasing anything old-tech friendly.
I think that’s more a function of the 750GB IDE’s having been “bleeding edge” than the fact that they were IDE. “A drive is a drive is a drive”, functionally – open up the innards of any of them and you will see a set of platter(s) and a set of drive heads attached to a voice-coil motor to swing the heads out over the platters.
The number of platters matters for power consumption as far as inertia is concerned and wear/tear on the spindle motor. It matters for drive survivability, since a failure in ANY platter/head combination means a “whole drive” failure (most of the drives treat the set as a “striped array” of platters for fastest read/write times). It also matters for the drive’s production cost (and thus retail cost), since each platter/head combination has a not-inconsequential cost in terms of raw materials. Three platters is “tops” in most drives these days, and most of the H/D manufacturers’ profit actually comes from bulk OEM sales of the cheapo single-platter 80-250GB (or possibly even less) drives to outfits like Dell, Lenovo, and yes even Apple.
The 750GB IDE’s were, unfortunately, made during a time when there had been a “breakthrough” in the market (allowing for the first ~250GB platters, which meant room for a three-platter 750GB drive), but the process hadn’t really been perfected yet so survival yields were probably lower than they should have been.
As far as making the drive IDE vs SATA, that’s all the controller board you’ll see attached to the bottom of the drive. I think the switch to SATA and dropping of IDE was more that they didn’t want to make the IDE-based controller boards any more. IDE is a market that’s shrinking pretty fast, and my guess is that the H/D manufacturers are betting the “already in channel” stock of drives up to 500GB capacity will suffice to fill the remaining demand and that consumers like yourself will eventually bite the bullet and switch to SATA anyways.
For 1.5TB drives, I picked up a pair of these: http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Shop/Product/Detail.htm?sku=8868390
Newegg has them same price w/ free shipping today:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337
How big is the difference in power consumption between different types of drives? How would a 1.5TB drive stack up against a 1TB and 500GB drive?
The machine I’m working with let it be known that it would not work with the additional 500GB drive. Would I run into the same problem by swapping a 1.5 for 1TB HD? Or because the entirety of the space is in a single hard drive, would that be less an issue?
(This is assuming that power consumption was the main issue behind my needing to remove that last hard drive. I haven’t proven this to be the case, but these days it seems most of my HD-related problems – other than dead drives – relate to the power supply)
The 1.5TB might use a tad more power than the 1TB by itself, but far less than trying to combine the 1TB and 0.5TB drives.
Since you already had the tech talk I would just tell you that the biggest and cheapest I found was actually 400GB 7200 for 70 bucks.
http://microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0307722
check ebay for 750gb ide
some available