The portable squeeze

As I was writing the headline above it struck me as being pretty funny because what I'm about to discuss seems preposterous. The subject matter here is internal drives for portables and how they're not growing quickly enough. Laugh it up, but I'm serious (sadly).

I have an 80G drive in my Powerbook, but I did a couple things wrong. I used partitions (three) and I didn't give enough room to the system partition (failing to understand last year how the system tree would grow and grow). 12G is not enough for a system partition, period. 20G would seem about right, but then I'd have to start dumping other stuff I keep around. It being time to start over again, I thought I'd look into getting a bigger drive and fix several issues at once.

Before diving into the issue of drives, let's examine how I use my "portable" and why it seems so full.

It has become my primary system for everything digital; development, communication (instant, less so and the more old fashioned document) and play. Outside of media (mostly music and pictures plus some shorts and shockwave media), the biggest loss of space on my system is source code. We've got a pretty big CVS based tree and I have a lot of it checked out. Add to that apache (big gobs of that), darwin, jboss, openldap and various smaller repositories. And then there's the Eclipse idea of how to use CVS... rather than fight it I also have a lot of java stuff checked out elsewhere to make the IDE happy. There's also all the fink stuff (just under 1G). It's not on the boot partition because it never would have fit.

There are also a whole bunch of work related applications that live under another top level directory (again symlink'd off to a non boot partition). The C based applications are pretty small but the group I work in also has apps that run under tomcat (big) and jboss (even bigger!) which also need to be installed. I need Oracle for a few things and that's a one stop shopping disk hog, especially after you have a few databases setup. Eight years of documents and other debris litters another 4G directory. Eudora is using almost 4G too.

Summed up? History has a price. Being able to pull up five year old decisions, the documentation and some source code fragments requires a lot of seemingly wasted resources. The cost is space, which seems to be dear right now...

I went looking for a 100G drive and was shocked by what I found (or didn't find). None of the normal Mac outlets (that I know about and checked) carry a 2.5" 100G drive. Expanding my search a bit, I found some 100G drives, but they were all 4200 RPM.

It's interesting (or something) that the first mention of 100G 2.5" drives was back in June. It sure took the manufacturers a long time go from 80G to 100G. I guess I'm spoiled. The growth in drive size over the previous five years had been phenomenal. The high end drive on a Powerbook in mid 1999 was 6G, and by late 2003 it was 80G. It seems like we're stuck there.

If you've followed the market for a while (I do so only occasionally, usually when I need a new drive), it was defined by IBM (now Hitachi) and then Toshiba. The Travelstar series was always first at a particular density and rotation speed and then came Toshiba, always with a quieter drive, sometimes with better caching or some other tiny improvement based on being six months late and a bit more expensive. At this point, all four of the major manufacturers (Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu and Toshiba) of 2.5" drives (honestly, I never thought I'd include Seagate in that mix) are shipping 100G drives at 4200 RPM in quantity sufficient that you find them somewhere. What's weird, and may have challenged the middle man vendors we all deal with are vendors making new inroads.

Amazingly, Seagate has somehow jumped into the lead on 2.5" 5200 RPM drives with the Momentus 5400.2 (ST9100823A for the ATA-5 version). It's the only drive in this class that I can find that's widely available to consumers. I don't recall them ever making a 2.5" drive before, although they may have. The only alternative is the Travelstar E5K100 (HTE541010G9AT00 for the ATA-6 version [I think]) which doesn't seem to be available anywhere for consumers.

After digging around, I think the reason for the delay is a conversion to Serial ATA (aka SATA or ATA-7). I'm not sure exactly what kind of devices are taking advantage of the slim drives, nor how the SATA conversion will affect future laptops (and other portable devices), but everyone is making changes to enable a SATA version of their drive.

The log jam will likely end soon, but it's problem for the portable toting data pigs (like me) right now. Seagate seems like the only solution available.

Posted by Dave at December 22, 2004 12:42 AM