74GB and 150GB VelociRaptor on the way?

[Kobalt]

why not just use a normal 150GB platter and just use part of it? Like they do with smaller drives.

There's not much of a point in doing that because they wouldn't be able to offer the 74GB drive at much of a lower price point. Then they'd also have to worry about people unlocking the extra 74GB.

I bet 74gb and (God if only) 150gb will be slimmer and intended for notebooks to!
:woot

That's a good theory. The current VelociRaptor is too thick for notebooks, but perhaps the single platter 74GB and 150GB could be made into a notebook version?

[Frank M]

There's not much of a point in doing that because they wouldn't be able to offer the 74GB drive at much of a lower price point. Then they'd also have to worry about people unlocking the extra 74GB.

Unlocking? What are you smoking?

This is what hard drive manufacturers have always been doing, if the drive
capacity is smaller than the capacity of the plate(s), then they disable parts
of it. This is the general practice, they have been doing it for years, and
they were never unlockable. Did you really think they'd go ahead and design
a new, low-density platter for a single product?

[Starscream]

There's not much of a point in doing that because they wouldn't be able to offer the 74GB drive at much of a lower price point. Then they'd also have to worry about people unlocking the extra 74GB.


That's a good theory. The current VelociRaptor is too thick for notebooks, but perhaps the single platter 74GB and 150GB could be made into a notebook version?

them designing a special 74GB version would add costs and companys usualy dont want that.
If they actualy do make a special 74GB model you can bet that they will do it as cheap as possible.

And how would you want to unlock that extra 74GB? You cant do so on current HDDs either.

[One_Hertz]

And how would you want to unlock that extra 74GB? You cant do so on current HDDs either.

Well you can, but it requires some very expensive tools

What they do is not exactly "lock" a section of the platter but actually just change the number of sectors per track. This effectively makes the platter lower density. This gives a drive better reliability btw. With certain tools you can reformat the drive with a new number of sectors per track. This is dealing with vendor specific commands, which are the commands that manufacturers use when they first create the drives. These commands are different for every single family of drives and there are some folks that reverse engineer this for data recovery purposes (having extremely low level access is very beneficial and a good deal of failures are firmware related; firmware is accessed by vendor specific commands as well).

Just an FYI...

[tiro_uspsss]

but perhaps the single platter 74GB and 150GB could be made into a notebook version?

it would be funny if they could make the 74GB version, a 1.8"

"the worlds fastest ipod" MUAHAHAHA

(user beware: can produce uncontrollable gyroscopic &/or centrifugal forces during playback.)