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IBM 75G Hard Drive Ready
Thomas Holme writes, "The Deskstar 75GXP sets a new standard in disk drive performance with a maximum media data rate of 444 megabits per second (Mb/s) and 8.5 milliseconds (ms) average seek time, delivering optimal multimedia performance and video playback." You can read more about it at IBM's
hard drive page. I can't believe I bought a 40g just two weeks ago! Bah. Course 75 gigs is like 1500 hours worth of MP3s, but for some reason going two months without listening to the same song twice seems like an admirable goal.
Post
Please
I usually record @ 192 variable rate. I think that this is the best tradeoff between size and quality. Just my opinion, though.
Enough about what Gates said many years ago. I don't care, and I am sick of listening to people quote this.
and who cares about mp3's? 75 gigs of porn is much more impressive.
In my experience, there is an upper limit to the storage needed for porn. Once I start looking at the porn, I can only look at so many pictures, before I suddenly no longer have a need to look at any more.
At least with music, I can listen to it around the clock, and its usefulness never..uh..wears out. With porn, there is a beginning and an end.
mp3's are not MPEG3 format, they are MPEG1 Layer 3.
In the days when we would precalculate sin and cos tables and instead of saving them on files, make these tables in memory while showing a nice simple scroller ..........to the days where a stupid browser takes up 100 megs.......Welcome to Windows. Where do you want to go today?... Don't come my way please... I prefer small and quick code... very optimized, only then will software trully be BETTER...
"Maybe Bill Gates is even right when he says 640k OUGHT to be enough" - bL
"Glass is a viscous liquid after all - 400 year old glass windows are measurably thicker at the bottom than at the top because of this flow."
400 year old panes are thicker at the bottom because that's the way they were cast. It would take much, much longer for glass to actually flow. And I think the technical term is amorphous solid.
What about when movies get cinepack compressed down to 700 MB? Lets say Joe College Student gets mom and dad to buy him a nice new Pentium 3 800 with a 75 gig HD. Lets say he uses 1 gig for os, and 10 gig for his warez. He can then beg them for $160 to buy 8 DVDs, or pirate 90 or so for free. Yes, free (ain't dorms great!!!).
Yes, there are people who live off campus. They go through withdrawl until they break down and get ADSL or a Cable Modem. Yes, this is the reality of the situation. All those who claim it is not are the same ones who called the Personal Computer a dead end 15 years ago. We either have to deal with this problem or agree to ignore it. Pretending it's not there will not accomplish anything.
There has to be an option to install the OS without those damned ads being displayed throughout the installation.
/? at look at the different options.
/iv Skips the display of billboards during setup.
There is. Next time you install windows, type setup
well sadly, I just bought a maxtor 40 gig 7500 a few days ago, I think i will hold out on the second one until the IBM 75 ships in volume the ibm has better seek time and transfer rate
Ah, but the microwave emmitter inside the case (GHz CPU) could pose a problem. Meanwhile, my 20MB 5.25" full height hard drive is still chugging along with no bad sectors on the XT.
More porn!
It was announced in oct 99 and I still can't find the dang things...
I just attended a linux event sponsored by SGI... they are opening up xfs and a pile of other stuff!
I don'tknow if this was covered but Win2k can only create fat32 partitions up to 32GB large due to performance issues. Does that sound retarded or what. I mean one month after release they need workarounds to fit the latest hardware
Tru 'dat. I have a huge CD collection (well over 500), and I couldn't rip 75 gigs worth of MP3s.
They have done computer tests and it would take the time of the universe to make glass flow as much as it had on those windows. The reason the bottom was bigger is because that is how they used to make them stronger.
I have been tracking hardware trends for several years. Hard drive storage-per-dollar has not only been increasing exponentially (a la Moore's Law), but the exponent has also been increasing over time. Up until about 1996, storage-per-dollar was increasing at a rate of 1.6x per year. From then to 1998, it increased by 2.0x per year, and since then it has been increasing by 2.5x per year.
-- Guges --
http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/prod/ ds75gxp40gv.htm closest i could find, for now.
NT
I bet you're one of those people that go nuts when someone referrs to 2000 as the beginning of the new millennium
And remember, too, Gates' Law: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
I have no use for a $1650 hard drive, SCSI or not. If IBM can put out an /66 drive for under $500, I'll snap one up in a second.
heh, take the drive out and put it in a safe ;)
My porn site's gonna kick ass!!!!!!
Unfortunately, it will be filled to overflowing with 3 or 4 MP3s! :-)
Excercise 75
a) If you had five hard drives (75 gigabytes a piece), how many prime numbers could you store there assuming you used a variable bitlength presentation?
b) And if you used some simple data compressing scheme, with say, 4/5 compression ratio?
My home machine currently has 22GB of storage, which would take 34 discs to backup. I am about to add an additional 40GB, thus increasing that figure to 97 discs. However, with, for example, a VXA-1 drive (33GB native) I could back up to 1 tape at current capacity or two tapes later. For larger capacity setups, look at DLT, SuperDLT, or DDS4. Conclusion: For storage and unattended backups, tape is the winner, hands-down. Looking at cost, using CDRs, the cost per backup at current capacity would be ~ $20, at future capacity, it jumps to ~ $60. Cheap, but you have to consider that is a write-once solution. Using CD-RW, the cost jumps to ~ $60 now, or $275 later. Using VXA-1, it would be ~ $20 now, ~ $40 later. Conclusion : backup to CD or CDR is not a viable solution. Archiving yes, backup no. On to speed. A CDR will commonly write at 8x, which translates to an abysmal 1.2MB transfer rate. A CDRW rates even worse, at speeds around 4x, say 600K/sec. Something like VXA can do native 3MB/sec, and DLT can push as high as 8MB/sec. Add to this the amount of time wasted swapping discs. Conslusion: There is no way to perform backup in a reasonable backup window using CDR or CDRW. And it should be obvious that for storage considerations, that many discs becomes a signifigant problem. Likewise, it should be obvious that restore off CDR or CDRW will be a horrific task.
Correct. It flows over years or tens of years. Considering the high Gs generated by the rotation it will actually flow pretty fast.
This means that these disks have a well defined life-span. No more leave it until it breaks. I guess we will hear about this soon. Someone will calculate it ;-)
I remember the old days where we had 720k disks. Man times have changed. Better change my diaper and take my geritol...
Fortunately this is an urban legend; the glass used in those churches wasn't flat when it was made, so the fact that it's not flat anymore tells us nothing about how it's changed in the last few centuries!
Nope. I'll be buying one of these drives, but I'll be buying the IDE version because although I have a SCSI system I won't pay twice as much for SCSI hard drives.
Hint: digital video editing requires about thirteen gigabytes an hour for storage; seventy-five gigabytes goes pretty damn fast at that rate.
Maybe I'm just warped. But when is ext3 going to come out of alpha so I don't have to wait a week for this HD to fsck after an unexpected power down?
As I recently discovered when my 37GB Maxtor drive full of my 400+ CD collection in MP3 format failed, these gonzo drives are only as useful as the user's ability to back them up. An el-cheapo monster drive is not useful if it costs mondo $$$ to have backup/restore capability in place.
paridoy
Microsoft announces the release of Windows 2002. "This is a revolution in computing software" says Bill, noting that all the advances will require 40 GB hard disk, 4GB RAM, a 72" monitor, and fifty eight hours to install on a 40GHz system.
Users complain of a dancing paper clip that appears any time a key is pressed. The paper clip says "HI! I think you are trying to use a computer. Don't you think it's nice that Microsoft thinks you are an idiot that needs help anytime you press a key?".
Slash Dot users report finding the following code buried in Windows 2002:
Global Weather forcasting, predicting cold, wintery weather all over the globe, with a note say that says: "Stay inside and read MSN pages!"
A flight simulator for a trip to outter space
An orbit calculator for Irridium sattelites
A SETTI spectrum analyzer with a buried background connetion to radio telescopes requiring an OC13 to allow the user to browse the internet with the leftover 0.1K of bandwidth.
A word processor buried in a flight simulator
a program designed to ferret out all of your personal information and send it to all the spammers on the net
scans your system every ten seconds and reports what software you have installed on your computer to Microsoft.
Sales of the software are reported to be brisk.
---
Can you say lemmings?
1)Why not define say a max size of 999TB or something. 2)but why the arbitrary limitations? Anyone else find this amusing? :)
I could go for a couple gigabytes of avi movies showing Billy taking it up the ass from the Federal Gov't.
No, goats blow bill gates. For money.
I could go for a couple gigabytes of avi movies showing Billy taking it up the ass from the Federal Gov't.
I know that the government is stupid but I don't think they would touch bill's ass for the world.
A bigger hard drive will make it easier for me to save /. posts about Natalie Portman and hot grits.
/. readers develop over time.)
Hopefully, Mattel will not compare the IP I used to download the Utility to Better Understand CyberPatrol with the IP I used to post this NPHG message (the same address). Otherwise, my jail sentence will be that much longer. (I have yet to meet a judge who has cultivated that special appreciation for cute NPHG messages that most
What's the point? Can't you stupid loser types try to do something funny. Of course right now you're just going to be laughing at me for finding the sublime humour in your post, but you need to come up with a new theme that can be made always on topic, and then try that. If you are incapable of writing anything new, (this would be indicated by barely passing English, I got As and I can write some funny stuff, insightful stuff, whatever I need for my karam whoring delight) then please read other things to find something different and copy it.
75,000MB / 5MB is about 150,000 hours of music.
As they've indicated, changing the platter material allows an increase in areal density which increases data transfer rates and seek times by itself. 10000 rpm drives aren't necessarily faster than 7200 rpm drives--but they are much more expensive to make run equally quietly, with the same power consumption (and dissipation) and lifespan. But you're right about SCSI. It seems to me huge drives and *sustained* transfer rates go together. Also... the article states, "enough to store 18 DVDs in MPEG 3 format". Huh? Don't all DVDs use MPEG II video, and MPEG I or II audio?
About the only thing you can back up 75GB with is another 75GB drive, which seems a waste for just archiving. Backup tech is severely lagging behind hard drive tech. 18 DAT tapes? 20 DVD-Rs? 110 CDROMS? 750 Zip disks? 54000 Floppies? Where is the leaps and bounds advancements in off-line storage?
Hi....so, I hear that IBM has their lates and greates 75Ghd already out in the market, this is all fine and dandy, but, what they are failing to inform the public is, if they do go out and purchase a large capacity hard drive will their Bios be able to support it??? I do know about certain programs out on the market that will just fool the Bios so the larger hard drive would work with customers unit...however, the full capacity of the drive will not be operational.....so, what's the sense of the larger hard drive? when the Bios doesn't support it... I think it is very cretical that consumers should be made aware of this, before they go out and purchase a larger capacity hard drive. then again this is just my opinion. A concern consumer.
it's safe to say that it will not get bigger than that.
HAHAHA! ROTFL!
Has it occurred to you that that's the same argument the BIOS designers made, way back when?
And remember, too, Gates' Law: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
--synaptik
If you want to flame me, do so here.
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Count in hours of film, then.
DVDs are max 10Mb/s, usually arounf 6Mb/s. So these 75GB, that's ~28H of film. Not _that_ much if you think computerized VCR.
OG.
I'm getting 580 g -- if I'm remembering the dimensional stuff correctly -- gotta convert w to radians and r to meters, right?:
Silly me. Shows why I'm not an engineer...I guess I'll go away, now! ;)
Lets make it a combination box and put whichever intel/amd chip is currently on top of the pissing war.
Hm. I figure it would take over 4 days to back it up on a 100Mbit link (which was actually going 100Mbit). Even gigabit links would only do that 3 or 4 times faster probably. I'd say a network back-up isn't very practical.
I'm on glue. It would only take like 2 hours.
They may have meant MPEG I Layer 3.
Check out this link for a very good "yes and no" debunking of the glass-is-liquid myth:
http://www.discover.com/oct_99/physics.html
The quick answer is that glass isn't a liquid, or even a solid, it's a distinct type of matter in it's own right. If you want to find out why then follow the link...
Rob
Just send the second disk to a friend across the
country who has DSL or a cable modem.
You don't want one of *those* solid state drives...
I ran into this problem a year ago, and it was cheaper to mirror the hard drive on a second hard drive (second 10GB last year was about $200) then a DAT drive($1000) that could store close to 10GB. Of course you could burn CDs, but who wants a stack of 20cds as static backup of your machine?
-P
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
"999TB should be enough for everybody"? ;-P
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I have some jazz cd's that I had to do at 190 ... the piano would sound like shit at 128kbs.
Most all of my rock cds sound just fine at 128 .
support gun control: take guns from cops
I agree. :)
Jordan
Good point, I had read this before but couldn't remember the link. I hate listening to popular but wrong scientific refrenences like that.
Thanks,
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
>75 gigs is like 1500 hours worth of MP3s
Yeah, and how many hours of downloading and ripping to get the content onto the disk? It's one thing to have the content available on a preloaded media (like a CD/DVD) but it's totally another to spend the amount of time needed to load all that music (and verify it) so you can not hear the same song for 10 weeks. Not to mention the backup and single failure issues.
Note to parents with young children - can you imagine how many childrens movies you could dump into a TiVo/Replay box and never have to worry about getting a peanut butter sandwich inside the VCR!?
Ken
Glass will indeed flow. For typical window glass held in a vertical position, it will gain a 5% increase in width at the bottom after 10 million years. This is a *very* slow flow.
The reason that old glass looks funky has to do with the manufacturing process. Old glass used to be made by hand. The glass blower would blow a ball of glass into a cylindrical mold. After the glass was cold, it would be removed from the mold, and scored lengthwise. After another heating, the cylinder of glass would be broken along the score line and unrolled to form a flat sheet. That flat sheet would be "ironed" smooth, and you could get an acceptable window pane that way.
New glass is made by floating a layer of glass on top of molten tin. The glass solidifies on top of the tin and is very very flat.
There are companies that still make glass the old way, because some people like the flawed appearance. They expect to have windows like that on their old victorian houses. The White House made a large order recently to one of those companies. They replaced a large number of their old windows with glass that looks antique.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Not only is Windows bloated but it also doesn't manage the space very well.
:(
I edit digial videos at home ( I need this hard drive now !) and a real pain for me is that Win98 has a 4 Gig file size limit that doesn't let me record more than 18 minutes of DV !!!
I wish Linux had good DV + firewire support
- sigs are for wimps.
Buy another disk.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Why would anyone put glass in something that is supposed to be resistant to damage?
Because it's resistant to damage -- compared to aluminum, the alternative.
I will never buy something like this with the potential to store massive ammounts of my previous data when the next passing small earthquake,large truck, or thunder storm could destory it.
Check the shock rating: 6000g. Then put all of your most important data on the drive and destroy the original copies. Then mount this drive in a decently strong aluminum box -- without shock protection. Then smash the aluminum box for 60 seconds straight as hard as you can with a large sledgehammer. Remove the drive and check to see that your data is all right. It will be.
The surfaces of the glass disks are not actually flat, but faintly speckled to prevent striction
Wrong. They are smooth. Prevention of striction was necessary in very old designs that required the head to land on the disk. The new smooth disks alowed by non-head-landing designs allow higher data densities.
i'm not a numbers fanatic, but are there any benchmarks on this drive? i want to see how it racks up compared to the new maxtor 40 gig.
....
75 gigs.... {drool}
Because it's still not enough! I estimate that I need approximately 72 Gigabytes to store my CD collection as 256kbps MP3, and that figure increases by approximately one Gig per month. I would need about 400 Gig (increasing at 5 Gig per month) to store 'em uncompressed.
Of course, by the time I finish ripping all my CDs and fill a pair of 40 Gig drives, I'll be able to buy a 500 Gig drive for $200. So maybe MP3 really is gonna die after all...
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Eventually, but not quite yet. 8 DVDs = $80-$160. This hard disk will cost more, so it just wouldn't make sense to use it that way.
But the capacity for a given price just keeps falling. When it hits .5 Gig per dollar, then they'll have something to be concerned about. Right now, we're at about .15 Gig per dollar.
But that's ok. As long as they deal with their customers in good faith, don't go around picking fights and being assholes, and don't try to pervert the law to prevent competition, then they will have nothing to fear, because no one will want to steal from them.
Oh wait, have there been some "incidents" up to now? Well, I'm sure that was just an innocent misunderstanding, which will all be explained (and forgiven) at the worldwide press conference tonight when the MPAA publicly apologizes, disbands the DVD CCA, gives a few million dollars to Jon Johansen and his family for the inconvenience that they caused him, and changes all their DVD masters so that all new DVDs will play in any DVD player, regardless of region codes. The last thing they would want is for the public to get the mistaken impression that they've been dealing in bad faith -- isn't that right, Mr. Valenti?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I suspect they will be priced (at least for now) so that Joe User won't be able to afford to buy one just for his pirate DVDs. IBM knows whose really going to buy these things for now. Maybe when this isn't spankin' new tech, and the price comes down a bit, they'll market these towards consumers. Frankly, right now the only people who would *want* a 75gig drive for personal use are probably reading slashdot.
Actually with these prices you can buy a second drive and dump the entire disk to raw device at night. At least under *nix.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
If you managed to fill up even half this space, considering you used FAT or NTFS, it would take a good day or two for MS Defrag to fix the thing....a couple hours for Norton Speed Disk
wonder what other filesystems might suffer.
The 75GPX may set a new standard in areal density.
The other features (ATA-interface, only 2MB of cache) appear rather low-end to me.
The 72ZX, beeing only slightly lower in capacity, and larger in physical dimension (1.6'' height), seems superior.
The reason windows in old, old, buildings are thicker at the bottom is because of primitive glass making techniques that would result in glass of inconsistent thickness. If you were puting a pane of glass in a window, would you put the thick edge at the top or the bottom?
If it were flowing, it wouldn't just be thicker at the bottom, it would also seperate from the top, was there a space along the top edge of this window pane?
I've encoded a bunch of queen numbers at 320kbps, because anything less doesn't do justice to freddies voice (I'm talking about things like 'prophets song' and 'exercises in free love').
I would hit you with my moderation stick if I had one. Interesting and informed unlike 99% of /. these days.
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
Great, :-)
I'm going to try to build a super Dual Athlon 1GHz PC in the summer vaction so several of these will go nicely
By the way, IBM said:
"A single drive can now store the equivalent of up to 18 DVD movies in MPEG3 format"
That's funny since MPEG3 doesn't exist.
Jonathan.
http://www.jonmasters.org/
Perhaps a Napster-like variation could perform such a service (or even Napster itself, you tell me :) Clients offer space, and in turn, they get their data backed up. Encryption could be built in, etc.
PS. Get back to studying for CS255, David!
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
Well, in working for a large corporation, there are ways to back up insane amounts of data in little time -- but I assume you're commenting on more of a home user experience rather than someone with an IBM tape robot....
:) and download more!
I perform backups on our home stuff about once a month (more if need be, but let's face it, mp3's and warez and the general amount of crap you'd pile on a 75 gig drive is NOT necessary to live from day to day) and it seems to be fine. We haven't had any disk problems other than when we only had some old SCSI HDD's that kept failing. Now that disk space is so low priced, backups are going to be more and more of a concern, but if I didn't have the backups, I'd just have to get on with my life
Karnal
if lightning hit my computer, I'd be more worried about the whole thing being fried, not just the hard disk. :)
Karnal
I use blade encoder (no high frequency cut offs in this one) at 256 typically.. 192 is okay for certain things, but since it doesn't have the roll-off like some other encoders, it can sound like crap even then. I've found that at 256 I have a really hard time discerning that there are problems with the mp3's.
I guess if I wanted to be a purist, I could go 320, but hey, space isn't that cheap for me yet.
Karnal
mirror?
...
a hardware mirror has its writes pretty much at the same time. A data corruption will be perfectly mirrored to the second drive.
Anyone else use cold-swap trays for IDE drives for backups? I use 'em for switching OSes without using VMWare or multiple boots. Just swap out the primary IDE drive.
Of course, the ability to change the boot ID in SCSI is still the best way to go
Paul
.
Just add a second HD and mirror it. Oops, I forgot, this isn't SCSI... never mind.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I wish Linux had good DV + firewire support :(
Um, linux has a 2gb filesize limit on 32bit hardware (such as intel, ppc). you'd need to use Alpha linux if you wanted bigger files.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
) you comment on sound cards introducing too much noise into a system; score +1 for a Mac: built in 4 channel 44.1KHz/16 bit audio since the 68040 days. Nowadays, you can mix even more channels; it is only dependant on how much memory is free for the System.
:P), and lots of other goodies.
Typical of a Mac user... Stupid. The guy was talking about the noise on the line, the number of mixing channels has nothing to do with the amount of line noise. At least my PC has a digital SP-DIFF output; can your Mac do that? BTW, with an SBLive I still get almost no analog interference that I can hear. The line noise actually goes DOWN When I turn on the computer. I don't know how the hell it works, but it does.
Oh, and it has 32 wave mixing channels, something like 500 midi ones, actual Hardware Midi inputs, SP-DIFF inputs, 4-speaker Dolby-digital output (and yes, I've got the hardware to play it, my amp is probably worth as much as my computer right now
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
75,000MB / 5MB is about 150,000 hours of music.
If that were true, you would have 2 hours of music per meagabyte. Maybe midi music, but not much else...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
too late, win2k already came out. Bill was up to the challenge... are you?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
And followup discussion about Slashdot features should go in the Slashdot discussion.
The surfaces of the glass disks are not actually flat, but faintly speckled to prevent striction (where if the heads were to touch they would be both be so flat that they would actually stick together)
These bumps are very small, just enough to pop the heads back into a floating mode if they did happen to touch the disk surface.
--
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
The best thing about the 40Gb drive are the moves to make it quieter.
The whine in my ear from my wife would reduce if the whine from the computers reduced.
--
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
If you're running a recent linux kernel or other production-quality OS then all the bios does is restrict where you can boot from.
Once you've got your OS up and running you can happily partition and use the rest of your disk.
I've got some big drives on a dell which can only see 8Gb of a disk, all it has done is cramp (!!) the size of my root filesystem.
--
-- Don't believe everything you read, hear or think
I don't see a real availability date or a price. If one of the previous posters is correct, the 75G drives are going straight to big manufacturers.
Well, maybe that's not so bad. Right now nobody can get even the 34G IBM drives (or the 40G Maxtors) so 75G drives may take some pressure off the smaller drives.
Glass does *not* flow over such short periods of time.
Go to www.snopes.com, www.straightdope.com, or www.urbanlegends.com for debunkings of that old hoax.
dave
I bought a computer with an 80 MegaByte hard drive. Today I can buy an 80 Gigabyte drive. 3 (or is it 4) orders of magnatude larger. If we were to have 3 (or 4?) orders of magnatude of hard drive progress in the next decade, I'll have 80 TeraBytes on my desk in 2010!
Oh yeah - forgot about he 72ZX and the 36LZX... 10k, Ultra 160 and 160+ SCSI, FC.... mmmm
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
hmmm, another nice job by extrans... used to work...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
yeah, I posted it yesterday morning with IBM, ZDNet and SJMercury links, along with more about the glass platters (which is hte cool part, after all)... oh well...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
> But did all this extra capacity really made the software better then > it was before? I doubt it. Therefor I think it will be really > interesting to see when the datacapacity-expansion is coming to an No, but it just simply allows us to use the software for something. I'v just had a very hard time with (semi-professional) video editing. The end result was less than 15min, and it required more than 30Gb to store the videofiles. I even had to temporarely give my /home to windows-devil... (Sadly, as far as I know, there is no good offline video-editing software for linux...) This is good news, even if the software grows. Today windown (with videoediting software) uses less than 800Mb, which is less than 5% of my hard disk space. I would not be sad, if software also uses same 5% of 75Gb hard disk. In that case I would have 71.25Gb for data - much better than 28.5Gb today!
--Saval
There isn't any excuse for these drive size issues. Pre LBA bios were limited to the 512Meg AT interface. That was back
pre pentium though. Any motherboard that supports >512megs should go all the way to 134gigs (LBA max if I remember
right). I know there were some issues but those were mostly 'bugs' rather than limitations. As proof of concept I have an
old 486 (MR BIOS) that supports 134G drives. In fact I have a 16.7G drive hooked up to it and I plan on putting a pair
of large drives in it next time it crashes. Damn linux though just won't crash its been running for >1 year.
On the other hand there will be issues when the 134G limit is reached. I was looking in the linux kernel a couple months
ago and there were issues there as well. I guess we will just have to convert to SCSI then..
Great, the white house is spending money to replace perfectly good glass with purposely deformed glass. Just what I want my tax money spent on :(
Ender
Nothing to see here
What are you doing using Windows 98 for any serious work? Win98 is for games and not much else (maybe DOS apps!). Use NT4 (or Win2K now) for serious work. It's a lot more stable and like 30% faster! NTFS is built to last from the ground up, FATxx is old shit from the DOS days.
FAT32 was only included in NT5 for compatibility (and I'm thankful for that). But NT has always been centered around NTFS which is built to last. It has per file security and transaction logging and file compression among other things. Plus it can go up to like 2TB in size. I highly doubt Linux can overcome any FAT32 limitations that NT can't, so I don't see what you're spouting off about.
Glass is not a liquid. It's a solid with the low molecular-level coherency of liquid (which is to say that it doesn't form crystalline structures at any scale larger than a few [dozen? hundred?] molecules across.) Now, if you've hung out in arcades as much as I did in my misspent youth, you've seen tempered pinball glass take horrendous abuse by the players, yet it doesn't shatter. [I've been told that if you drop one of these glass plates on edge, though, they make a horrible mess of tiny little fragments. I've never had the opportunity to verify this claim :-)] I think it's foolish to assume that IBM made hard drive platter glass using the same process as your bathroom mirror. Of course, the article doesn't list the process used. I'd suggest checking the patent archives :-)
"There is a diminishing return on caution."
How do you backup that beast ? 75 GB to backup is huge - even with tapes (which are sloooowwwww) it is going to be a real pain.
Well i think it is great that ibm finally got us to the 75 gb level. However i wonder when hard drives will reach their maximum capacity. I start to wonder how reliable things will be. On the MP3 side of things, This device would be an excellent opportunity for raid systems and servers, just think scsi. I record my music at 128 kbps and it is...well mp3, but does anyone else record at a higher speed and get surprisingly better results?
"If a man watches 3 football games in a row he should be declared leagaly dead" - A
Of course, with the AMD/Intel clock speed war, all we've been hearing about is how useless these ridiculously stretched CPU cores are, and how disk I/O is the bottleneck in most PC usage. I'm trying to put together the components I'd like to buy to upgrade/replace my box, and I'd like to focus on disk access/throughput... perhaps a duallie with only one CPU to start with, then I can add one later when I get more cash. ANYHOW - What is the best I/O system to get for PC usage? Is SCSI worth it? Any way that aging IDE can get anywhere close to the rated transfer speed (444 Mb/s) of this IBM drive?
Wah!
I honestly would not worry about IDE limits on modern hardware. Any such limits in new hardware are bugs, and should be rectifiable via a BIOS flash. PC hardware had trouble really at 500meg and 2gig, and a little at 8 gig, but that has all been basically rectified.
matt
Hmmm, I am looking at 5 1/4 bays on the desktop on this table, and I bet you could get 4 hot swapped 2.5inch cartidge/bays in a dual 5 1/4 bay unit. Raid 5 and a hot spare, or a 4 drive raid 5, or yet, RAID 10. hmmmmmm.....
matt
No, then you would be Salvador Dali. :)
Later...
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
Actually, one of the main advantages of glass is that high quality glass flows much more slowly than aluminum, which as a relatively soft metal deforms quite a bit under 7500 RPM.
We are currently using a MLR 16 GB tape for our backups, it takes about 2 hours per Tape, so if you include compression, you have abt. 10gb/hr.
... we thought of another sollution, as IDE hd is dirt cheap, get 4x40 gb, put then into a BP6 with 4 IDE controllers, use SW raid, and use rsync to mirror our server ...
.. you get a perfect backup sollution for about 2000 us$ .. :)
Now. We have to backup 60 gb of data -> takes about 6 hours ! (That means, if server fails, it takes >> 6 hours to get it working again)
So
When server goes down, we got instant backup, if 1 hd fails, it can be replaced without major fuss (backup server downtime is not THAT critical)
So
regards,
Michael
At power down, the drive "strobes" the head stepper (almost all drives use a "voice coil" instead of an actual stepper motor these days) which pushes the head assembly into it's parking position. This can be powered via a capacitor or via "free energy" from the inductive feedback from de-energizing the voice coil. The assembly is locked into the parked position by a selonoid spring latch (or in the case of some shitty Quantum drives, by a plastic arm that "floats" over the surface of the platters.)
:-) Laptop drives are designed to take this form of use.
The force necessary to move the voice coil head assembly is much more than your laptop case (or you for that matter) could withstand. (something like >150G shock, but I don't remember where I read that.)
This is not damaging per se. However, you can cause a head slap if you do it just right
Actually, there is a bug in the Sparc PROMs prior to v3 that limits the boot loader to the first 1G of the drive. But yes, PC BIOSes are very severly limiting.
Note 1: this drive despite the antishock stuff uses a glass plate so dragging it around is very unwise.
Then you would be very surprised to find out most laptop drives have glass platers. They are much stronger than their aluminium cousins at the microscopic sizes of laptop drives. Plus, head slaps (the ferrite R/W head touching the surface of the platter) are far less damaging to a glass platter -- it might knock the oxide off the platter but it won't pit (the head is too soft.)
Laptop drives have done this for a long time just to protect the heads from damage -- screw the parking area of the platter.
However, with the ever dropping power usage of components, removing the heads from the platters at shutdown is becoming a requirement. 90% of the "stiction" problems with modern drives are simply that the drive cannot provide enough power to the spindle stepper motor to start the drive spinning. Adding bearing wear with the heads clamped over the platter, and you have a drive that won't spin up -- you can hear it trying.
I have a Quantum drive that works perfectly once it's spinning; I have to gently "help" it at power up by "shaking" the drive. (The heads are mounted to the case. If you spin the case quickly from side to side, the platter's interia will keep it relatively stationary while the heads move over the surface. That's usually enough to get the drive spinning.)
IBM's documentation mentions that this drive is ATA-100 compatible. Is anyone aware of any controller hardware that supports this standard, if indeed it is yet a standard? I have heard rumors of VIA's KX133 chipset for the Athlon supporting it, but nothing official on VIA's website.
Or fluorescent discs. /. ran this article a little over a month ago. A quote: "The 12mm (CD-ROM/DVD-ROM) disc version of this memory will store up to 140GB"
So with 75 gigs of space available to you, why even bother with MP3? Why not just store the raw WAV files? No need to take the quality loss of compression with that much space available.
:)
I mean WAV audio only takes a up a MEASELY 10 megs per minute.
The ads you can turn off :P /? /? (windows)
exit your little bootable cdrom crap to a msdos prompt and do setup
gee look at that you can skip the registry checks, the disk checks, the ads, and all kinds of things.
Never woulda guessed it but,
(linux) --help =
Bob Not Bob,
if you aint confused yet, then you're doing something wrong
Janet Reno should be so lucky! That is one ugly she-beast. On the upside, she has cahones bigger than most men and a vindictive nature that makes her just right to be the one going after Bill's ass, both in court and on video..
.sig: Now legally binding!
75 GB is enough to hold 8 DVD movies, more or less. This drive has got to be the MPAA's and DVD-CCA's worst nightmare to date.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
If your house gets hit by lightning, or you have a fire, or you get hit by the police\\\\\\\\\\thieves, redundancy inside your box doesn't help you much. The real problem is that this technology is inherently inapplicable to removable media, because it needs extreme cleanliness. The requirement for high dimensional stability rules out tape. This may not be solved any time soon, because the economic pressures for hard-drive expansion just don't apply to backup devices. (If only people insisted on backups, because then they would.)
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yes, this is the same technology used to make car windows.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
glass does *NOT* flow.
if it did, goblets dating from way before the cathedrals would all be little glomps of glass, not goblets...
but I posted this story yesterday morning... and guess what? It was rejected.
2000-03-15 14:49:09 bigger, wider, harder... (articles,ibm) (declined)
a boring story a day too late. it was already covered by excite's news service for god's sake.
and who cares about mp3's? 75 gigs of porn is much more impressive.
1)Why not define say a max size of 999TB or something. 2)but why the arbitrary limitations? Anyone else find this amusing? :)
It's as big a number that dosn't exceede what I know of and it's safe to say that it will not get bigger than that. I also am not sure what the suffix for anything bigger would be Petabytes? PB?
I guess maybe 9,999,999,999,999,999PB would be better.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
The 7,200 rpm Deskstar 75GXP for desktop computers holds a whopping 75-gigabytes (GB) of data, more than 10 times the capacity of drives found in the average home PC. Looks to me like they are pushing this as a DeskTop hard drive. Especially with a name like Deskstar forge
A single drive can now store the equivalent of up to 18 DVD movies in MPEG3 format
Ten, twelve years ago, the average individual couldnt have afforded an HD that stored 2 Audio CD's. Okay DVD blanks are far more expensive than DVD's, but it looks as though in the next coupla years its going to be more than feasible to have a 30-50 DVD collection on your PC. And its rentals they're worried about...
Just a thought.
free experimental electronic music netlabel at www.viablehybrid.com
> Why not define say a max size of 999TB or something. Maybe I am an idiot but why the arbitrary limitations?
If they limit the size, don't you need to buy a new mainboard so you get a new BIOS? Unless you are smart enough to know about Dyanmic Driver Overlay by Seagate. I just put a 28.5Gb Barracuda into a Gateway that could only support 8Gb. For a small processing overhead, you get to put whatever size drive you want, wherever you can fit it.
What would setting it vertically do? You are talking about centifugal forces here. Forces acting away from the centre of the spinning mass. set it on a 45deg angle if you like, it is still going to go away from centre.
Everyone should read the Pysics FAQ
From the conclusion of the "Liquid Glass" Section:
<sigh>
So if a power failure cuts off the power to your computer what happens to the hard drive? Does it sense this and move the heads to a safe area or are they stuck over data?
How about when you flip your case sideways. Does that move the heads? What about if you combine the previous two?
How damaging is this to the hard drive?
Accroding the the Materials science classes I took. Glass does have a cold flow property and it can be scientifically proven by watching the shifting of raidoactive tracers of oxygen in glass. There are also other materials that have cold flow charachertistics, such as many carbon-flourine polymers (teflon derivatives--there was one that stuck out in my mind but I can't remember it's name--it ws used it ethylene oxide production as a filler/sealer for gaskets until pressure from the pipe cause it to flow out of the gasketing, which allowed the EO to leak, which cause a bit of a "boom")
:)
Tempering the glass makes the glass harder (as is discussed in this thread) but also creates a much more tightly packed lattice structure which hinders cold flow. Tempering was unknown or not practiced 400 years ago, so the glasses we have from that time period (and before) exhibit more cold-flow than the (non el-cheapo) glass we have now.
Just what I remember from MatSci, let me know if I goofed
- Sig
For years, Big Blue has been a powerhouse in technology. They stumbled to the likes of Microsoft years ago, but seem to be on a comeback. Two stories alone today in slashdot tell this reader that perhaps it is time to look in the old powerhouses for our power. Little scrappers like AMD rush out their big new technology, such as thier 1ghtz, and then race to get out their next bit to stay competitive.
Perhaps we should start looking back to some of the old powerhouses. While it seems like Microsoft is turning into IBM, HP and Big Blue seek to re-invent themselves. HP is going back to their "Garage workshop" roots.
So are we looking at the right place? The new kids are falling back into old corporate ways, and fresh blood under old names seems to be producing a lot. Even companies that pride themselves on innovation (Apple) are playing catch-up to whats out there.
Are we looking in the right place. Who is holding the next big killer tech secret?
--jay
One of the benefits of RAID is that failed drives can be pulled out of the array and replaced with good media.
If you eliminate that, all you have is a drive with a longer MTBF. (Not quite as much as you'd expect, though, since now there are more drives which can fail). In your case, you'd only be protected from one failure. Basically, that's what IBM drives do now, with the SMART failure detection technology telling you when the drive's about to flake.
The idea is sound, though. Use small drive bays, but multiple disks. It sounds like you could have a modular drive bay kind of idea, only with multiple slots instead of just one. You'd have to put the array electronics in the drive bay, though. I wonder how feasible that is?
All of the arrays that can do this are much much bigger than what you're talking about. But hey, that's what the miniaturization magicians are for!
I'd still feel bad about paying for 150GB and only getting 75MB of storage, though. Every RAID I've ever run has had at least 5 disks, keeping 80% of total drive capacity.
OT best palindrome i have ever seen. I palindrome I - TMBG
Pair up in threes. - Yogi Berra
The real problem (as I see it) is having the sound card running on the same power supply as the rest of the system - not always the sound card introducing noise itself.
Use a sound card with digital outputs and you don't have to worry about all the emfs inside your case. hoontech soundtrack makes good ones. See the high-quality linux audio HOWTO at http://audio.netpedia.net/aqht.html for more info.
Sumner
-- rage, rage against the dying of the light
Glass is a liquid and so acts like one over long periods of time. If you look at the windows on an old Cathedral (i.e ~500 years old) you see the glass is thicker at the bottom - it moves very very slowly.
I doubt any drive would last long enough for this to be a problem though.
A Very Long Time(tm).
Yes! Good idea!
Just like the "Linux kernel version" box.
Why not make a "Guinness Books of records" box
like:
Biggest Hard drive:
Fastest Processor:
Linux Kernel Version:
Win 2k Bugs
...
BTW Tomorrow is St Patrick day!!!
Ceci n'est pas une sig
About glass flowing: .02...
Don't forget that you're thinking of windows. Large panes of glass that are sitting still for many many years. These are small little spinning disks. The only real possible problem would be that it would bend or that the glass would be thicker at the outside of the drive than at the inside (the disks are SPINNING, not sitting still). But, if this was possible, maybe it could be prevented by setting up the drive vertically. Anyway, my
Welcome to Slashdot. Please do not feed the trolls.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
They can make the glass stronger by introducing impurities into the glass - not just any impurities, though. They introduce molecules that are larger, thereby increasing the strength of the glass. I remember watching some show on the Discovery channel a long time ago on this and they showed how they can drop a large metal weight from a couple dozen feet up and the glass will not break. They make bulletproof glass this way. I forget the elements they used, I think it was like Phosphorus and other elements that were heavier than the elements you usually find in glass (silicon and oxygen are light, after all).
Why dont you simply use hard drives in these drawer things? (you know what I mean silly) Why would hard drives be inapropriate to back up hard drives?
I had heard glass was a supercooled liquid, and that is also how this article describes it, more or less. Now that we've (perhaps) stopped worrying over the difference between liquid and solid, can we start arguing about plasma? That's far more interesting, I think. Or we could go backwards in time a few hundred years and argue over the other "elements": air, water, fire, and earth, as I recall!
As I understood it, it was actually the case that the panes were generally thicker at the bottom, but for a different reason. If you have an uneven pane of glass, which end do you put at the bottom? The thicker one, of course...
I'm going to live forever or die trying.
they're an awesome band, and could really use the publicity. they're first ablum went platinum. but because geffen didn't promote their second, it didn't. and because it didn't, geffen dropped them from the label. and that's why they haven't released a 3rd album for the last 4 years. now, they're finally going to start recording again (because they can afford to, now), and i look forward to their new material.
btw, you can keep updated on weezer at www.weezer.net
Whoops...looks like someone beat me too it... here's what I was looking for.
But on-topic, does anyone know how much this HDD costs? And more importantly, is it IDE (gasp!), SCSI (please!), or better yet, BOTH ??
"It's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
I thought Gates' Law was the reaction of Microsoft software to Moore's Law.
"Every six months the speed of software halves"
Q: Where do you want to go today?
Lars -
Lose is the opposite of win
I'm sure you mean lose when you type loose.
Picture yourself somewhere important, maybe a job interview, and you speak out "loose" when you mean to say "lose".
Boy wouldn't you feel like an idiot.
Q: Where do you want to go today?
Lars -
Actually, the article I read was talking about susceptibility to background radiation. If information density is low, then radiation doesn't pose much of a threat, but as the physical size of 'one bit' gets smaller, it becomes easier for stray radiation to do enough damage to erase that single bit of data. I assume, however, that this could be fixed with adequate shielding.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
This is going to sound crazy, but it was background cosmic radiation that it was talking about. It would pretty much go through any shielding except thick lead. It was also talking about densities of memory (i.e. DRAM) since radiation *could* actually slightly charge, or cause to discharge the capacitor holding the bit value. It's a one in _whatever_ chance, but since Moore's Law seems to be holding, we keep getting closer and closer to that _whatever_ value.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Glass does deform slowly, but as you said this is more on a geological scale. The drive will be obsolete in a few decades, the glass will be flat for centuries.
Glass has been used before for disk platters. There is long existing technologies for making very flat glass plates, much better than most metals. Glass is fairly light and stiff, attributes desirable in disk platters.
StorageReview.com is a good source of this information (though it would be better if it had Linux benchmarks.) It's very frustrating though - as soon as the fastest disks are available here in Oz, a newer, faster disk beats it on the leaderboard... (Trying to find a store that sells disks by brand and model, not just capacity, is also a challenge.)
There is a difference with this and Gate's law since in this case the disk limit is tied directly to a particular machine. The limit isn't intented as a be-all, end-all "no one will ever". It's only "no one on THIS MACHINE (ie, your average PIII) will ever". Think your still be using your same machine once you get that 999TB disk? I hope I'm not. --BxT--
go ahead and create a single-unit RAID? Seems it would be easy to stick a RAID controller, 3 to 5 smaller disks in the same space as a 3.5" double-height drive, (or a 5.25" single), give it two power-inputs for redundancy, and you're good to go. Ofc, you wouldn't be able to swap disks, but you'd be protected in case of failure, and at a low-enough price, you could replace it as easily as you do a blown drive but without losing any data.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
What's the excitement all about? Seagate has a 73.4 GB SCSI drive that has better specs than the IBM drive: 10000 rpm and 5.6 ms average seek time, vs. 7800 rpm and 8.5 ms seek time for the IBM. And you can actually buy the Seagate drive for about $1,650! So what if the IBM drive uses glass instead of aluminum!
Yawn. Wake me when they have some real drives.
If you look at the windows on an old Cathedral (i.e ~500 years old) you see the glass is thicker at the bottom - it moves very very slowly.
OK, glass may move very very slowly on windows (just as everything else does), but it may run pretty fast on Linux. :)
Plexiglas isn't a "reinforced" glass, but is, rather, a trademark for acrylic plastic. The glass is probably a borosilicate or Pyrex(tm), the same stuff lab equipment is made of. You can think of it as a glass "alloy." It is stronger, stiffer, and dimensionally more stable than any light metal over centuries of time.
Glass does not need to be reinforced for strength or rigidity. Glass is so strong and rigid it is the material used to reinforce other weaker materials! The strength of "fiberglass" composites comes almost entirely from the glass content. The more glass in your composite, the stronger the end product. The epoxy or polyester genererally used in making fiberglass serves two purposes; one, it glues the glass fibers together. Two; it *reduces* the the rigidity of the glass! When you drop a piece of metal on the floor, even a piece of chrome-moly steel, it deforms, perhaps both plasticly and elastically, and absords the energy of the impact. Glass, on the other hand is so rigid that it cannot deform enough to absorb the impact and thus shatters. If anything glass needs to be "deinforced" to be useful as a structural material.
Ahh BUT if IBM makes a BIOS in one of its machines that takes it, then they can support it. Just dont be looking for one of these things in your Dell or Sun server...
- Love all computers...
Check this out www.phys.unsw.edu.au/physoc/physics_faq/glass.html www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/florin.html www.ualberta.ca/~bderksen/windowpane.html
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. --Phillip K. Dick (remove SPAM to email)
Glass does not act like a liquid. It does not have a uniform crystal structure like most other solids, but it does not deform. Old windows are thicker on one side because they were made by pouring molten glass onto a slowly rotating disk. The glass on the outside of the disk was a little thicker due to the acceleration. The people who installed the glass knew this, and usually put the fat side down, but ocassionally you will find one upside down.
I need about five of these now ! Any one have any ideas on what the pricing structure looks like
You might be thinking of common misconception people have about glass. You've probablt been told that windows in Medieval buildings are significantly wider at the bottom than the top. Yes the are, 50% of the time. The deformations are caused by inadequate glass manufacture techniques in the middle ages. For a standard sheet of glass, 1m X 1m, 5mm thick, the deformation over the a 1,000 year period is about 200 microns. Good enough for a hard drive.
ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,ø`ø
Check out some of the patents that IBM hold for holographic data storage in birefringent crystals. In a few years we could be looking at datacrystals the like of which would make Mr. Spock proud. The capacity? About 400-600Tb is the figure that IBM quoted. (See New Scientist passim)
ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,,ø`ø,ø`ø
In addition, the new products are the first IBM desktop drives to use load/unload technology. This feature parks the recording heads off the disk surface when not in use, dramatically increasing the amount of shock the drive can handle when not in use.
This is kind of a minor issue, but on my old 286, there is a command that does the same thing
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
What's kinda funny is that IBM is pushing this as equipment for servers. Meanwhile we're sitting here raving about running DVDs off the harddrive and holding 6 months worth of MP3s. Looks like IBMs marketing department needs to loosen up
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Yeah, get two disks, it's probably cheaper anyway.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
Very nice, however, long ago I went the SCSI route for my machine, and have never looked back. I hope they plan on making SCSI versions of this drive soon. They would be very nice in a raid 5 setup...
next step? Windows on dual-sided, dual-layered DVD
You partition your disk in this manner:
- /boot - 15MB
- / - 4GB (or whatever)
- /home - whatever looks good
- etc...
Now your kernel will be bootable and you don't need a small root partition.Maybe you already new that, but I thought I would pass along the tip to anyone who didn't.
(In addition to what the AC said about the quality of old glass) When they made those old cathedrals they put the widest edge down.
So, yes glass flows (I think anouther person estimated it at 200 microns for some large quanity of time), but the quality of glass back then was not that great therefore any measurments made to old glass are inconclusive.
How many serious companies do you know claim that their base technologies came from aliens?
They also claim that the fabrication plants are refusing to manufacture their chips or couch for their technology because it would make their other clients obsolete! Smells a bit fishy to me, really...
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
All the same, it would be nice if they actually said when and where we could buy these and how much they will cost. I mean, if it's going to be $1000 for a 75Gb HDD, and they're going to be on sale in Korea in five months, then it's not such an exciting announcment, neh? On the other hand if they're on sale later today at Fry's, Egghead, and Buy.com for $150 each, this is one of the most kickass revolutions in storage history. I'm guessing that the truth is somewhere inbetween those two extremes; I'd just like to know where.
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
Doctor: "Don't bend your arm that way."
------
Consumer: "Whenever I drop my hard drive, the glass platter breaks."
Corporation: "Don't drop the hard drive."
Seriously, I've never dropped a hard drive (save the one that I threw across the driveway), so what kind of conditions do you have that this would actually be a problem? Are you actually that clumsy that you have to buy ruggedized equipment just to make sure it survives?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Hmm... Don't know about system noise per se. If I do listen with headphones for sound editing and such, it's a pair of Denon D750s. I've never noticed anything, except for glaring skips and wooshy encodes.
;)
But then again, I'm not expecting quality in an MP3, so I don't mind hearing them through my cheap $15 speakers.
Plus, I don't listen to CD's on the computer, because I have a stereo and Mission 701s sitting in the same room: why eat bread when you can have steak?
I think a lot of the problems stems from over-expectations of a generation that grew up listening only to tapes and CDs. You wouldn't have believed the bitching on alt.fan.bjork when her "Post" album came out: one of the tracks had added vinyl surface noise and "skipped" at the end, and people were angry that their CD wasn't 100% noise-free and perfect! Some people...
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
a) I WANT SCSI! Give me this drive in Ultra2 Wide SCSI, and then we'll talk :)
:)
b) you comment on sound cards introducing too much noise into a system; score +1 for a Mac: built in 4 channel 44.1KHz/16 bit audio since the 68040 days. Nowadays, you can mix even more channels, it is only dependant on how much memory is free for the System.
I've often heard PC folk complain that one reason against getting a Mac is that "you can't upgrade the soundcard." "Upgrade" to what?
As for MP3, come join the bitrate discussions/flame wars in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.d on Mondays. You wouldn't believe the crap that gets posted in the name of "Quality," the most amusing I can recall was Nine Inch Nails albums encoded in 320kbs in Joint Stereo! Jeez, talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
If you're after quality, don't use MP3. But if you do it *correctly* 128 VBR/HQ or 160 VBR/HQ will do for 99% of the music out there. Anything higher is a waste of drive/NNTP server space.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
But if you take your fingers and snap the very tip of the tail off, the entire structure will instantly POP and disentigrate into a pile of sand!
Have you seen this done/done it yourself, or merely read about it? I've read about this phenomenon (National Geographic had an article on glass a while back), and I understood that it would actually shatter. Based on that, I don't think that holding it in your hand would be a good idea...
And that, my son, is why you would never want to live in a world without glass.
Glass is SiO2. Life without SiO2 means a shortage of either Si or O2. Shortage of O2 => death. Shortage of Si => no computers. That horible decision is why I would never want to live in a world without glass.
I'm no material scientist, but I believe that you can make glass very strong, especially if you don't need it to be transparent. The article claims that the glass platters are quieter and are more stable at high speeds. If that's the case, then why is IBM only making 5400 and 7200 RPM drives with them? Seagate just showed off a 15k RPM drive that aparently used aluminum. Also, why are they bringing this new technology right to the desktop market? Wouldn't a higher capacity, more stable hard drive be ideal for a server? Even worse than that, I only saw an IDE version of these drives. The hard core home user that would want this kind of insane capacity would almost certainly have a SCSI setup. Anyway, it probably pisses off the MPAA to see "The number of DVDs you can store" as a de facto measure of hard drive capactiy...and that makes me happy.
-B
There's quite a lot of information at http://www.urbanlegends.com/science /glass .flow/ that suggests glass flow is indeed a myth.
My guess would be that it is sufficiently reinforced, probably a plexiglass of some sort, but I honestly couldn't say for sure. But over the period of time in which such structural failure would happen it is likely that you could back up the 75 GB on a disk the size of a pin head.
The spec includes a four-wire interface, meaning we can finally say goodbye to filling our cases with cables, lower voltages (= less power drain since ATA requires 5V while SerialATA doesn't.) Plus, of course, plenty of transfer oomph. The first version is 1.5Gbps, scaling up to 6Gbps. Of course, it still doesn't try to replace SCSI. It never will.
(This has been discussed on slashdot before.)
I mean come on, this is getting about as cliche as saying, "Let's see them make a Beowulf cluster out of them!"
Can we not just admire the wonderful size of the drive without resorting to the same ol', same ol' cheese factor of X hours of MP3s. You know what? I don't honestly think I could find 1500 hours of MP3s that I all like. Hell, I'm surprised when the 15k RPM drives came out there wasn't a post about how fast you could copy your MP3s. Let's get a more useful benchmark.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I seem to remember an article in Sci-Am a few years ago about the strength of glass. Glass is in itslef extremely strong and durable, but tiny quatities of water make it vulerable to fracture. This is why when you use a glass cuttter to cut a window pane, you score it, rub a bit of spit into the scoring and tap.
Even a single molecule of water sitting in a microfracture can sit in the leading edge of the crack and help "catalyze" the development of a macroscopic crack. Work is going on to develop self-healing coatings that will flow into nicks and scrapes and displace water, which will eventually allow the use of glass in applications requiring high structural strength.
Since the inside of the hard disk is probably pretty dry, the glass platters probably highly polished (few places for cracks to start) and coated, I suppose that glass is plenty strong enough.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
400-600TB?
We would need some type of distributed computing client to do the defrag. It would take the time of the universes existence to defrag that thing with a 7th generation x86 CISC CPU.
Ah, I wasn't considering the radiation angle... I'd hope that the metal casing around the drive and the system case would be sufficient for most of this... most background radiation should be defeated by these, especially if you consider the additional metal surrounding it for mounting... three layers of metal. Not too bad.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Note the debunking of the glass flow issue below, and on many urban myth pages. It may be a liquid, but the flow rate isn't visible within a lifetime. Old windows are thicker at the bottom than at the top because they made them that way (poorer methods) and installed them with the thicker ends down (for support). Considering the drive will probably have a 5 year warantee and a 7-10 lifespan, I wouldn'd worry about it too much.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
True, but off-site backups are the real issue, with father->grandfather rotations. If your office goes up in smoke, both hard drives are melted... not good. Unless of course, you intend to get three or four drives, and ship them offsite every night/week, like with tapes...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Mmm, lets just send all of the company's vital data across the internet from "a friend". I'll keep mine with a data vault, who has all sorts of legally binding contracts. That and a few hundred gigs is going to take far too long over DSL/cable. The point was that in most cases, you aren't going to remove the drive you are backing up to, so it isn't an adequate solution. I suppose you could use a hot swap bay, but then you would probably rather use a DLT or DAT autoloader (24GB dat * 6 isn't too bad), and the transfer rates *far* exceed that of a WAN link, assuming you want to grind your entire network to a halt to restore one server (robbing Peter to pay Paul sorta thing).
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
IBM's new drive doesn't let the heads ever touch the surface (if it's working properly). This should help it's shock resistance since nothing should ever be bumping into the platters. This is new, and should be posted under the 'why didn't they think of that earlier' topic. :)
Oh. You mean hard links.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Could we give up on the symlinks issue please? The original Slashdot mention of that was a knee-jerk reaction. Microsoft is talking about something beyond that (i.e. automatically determining when files are copies of each other and replacing one with a link to the other; think reference counting for files).
Thinking back on the storage I've had over the years...
:)
Back in the mid 80's I had a 40mb SCSI hard drive (it still works too, believe it or not)
A couple of years later I had an 50mb drive, then a 120mb drive, then a 340mb drive. That was on my old atari =).
At some point I bought a PC with a 4.3gb drive, added a 6.4gb drive, and now I've got a 27gb drive.
It's kind of funny looking at the curve there...it seems.....exponential.
(Right now, I'm using about 32gb of the 37gb available...)
What about a 'Vaporware Du Jour' Slashbox? Naw, most of the stuff would reflect badly on MS, and everyone knows Slashdot is a huge Microsoft evangelist!
Back to your idea: What about a 'dicksize war' Slashbox containing not only the tops in hard drives, but processors, ram technology, and video cards? It would make for an interesting perspective on the escalation of aggression going on in commodity hardware these days..
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Actually SiO2 is just one type of glass. And probably the most common.
I read about the shattering-teardrop effect. But "they" said that holding it in your hand is harmless, because it doesn't break into shards, it turns into very fine sand. It doesn't really explode... just "poof" it's sand! Obviously it's better to try it in somebody else's hand, and not your own.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
...such as plate tectonics or unexpected mountain ranges.
I wonder how long it would take for the glass to flow towards the outside of the disc.
Probably a few hundred thousand years. Old windows are "warped" due to the manufacturing method... let me see if I can remember this correctly, but back in those days, the molten glass sheet was wrapped around a wooden cylinder, then cut on one side and rolled out flat. The sheet was usually thicker in the middle (I think) and then cut down the middle again, so that you'd have panes with one end of greater thickness. The panes were installed with the thicker, heavier end down for stability reasons.
Glass is an amorphous solid with a strange viscosity/temperature curve. In fact, the shape of the curve depends on the rate of cooling.
At room temperature (or hard drive temperature), glass still technically will flow since it's not crystalline, but it flows on a geological time scale. Before the platters on a hard drive warp, you'd probably have to worry about protecting your data center against pesky occasional ice ages.
As a slight off-topic aside, glass is some really Amazing Stuff. You can drop a teardrop-shaped blob of glass into some water to cool. If it hardens without cracking, you'll have this solid blob of glass with a very long, thin tail. It has enormous amounts of internal stress due to the fast cooling.
You can hit the big blob end hard with a hammer and it won't break. But if you take your fingers and snap the very tip of the tail off, the entire structure will instantly POP and disentigrate into a pile of sand! And that, my son, is why you would never want to live in a world without glass.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
At home I use my old HDs as backup devices. What I like best about this is the random-access nature of old-file retrieval and viewing one gets from using a disk as a backup.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs had an interesting backup system that I've never seen elsewhere. They backed up to a CDRW-farm every night that had storage capacity for 3 years of nightly backups. It didn't use as much space as one would think since they employed a custom backup filesystem that reused storage when a file hadn't changed from one night to the next. The beauty of this system was its ease of perusual and restoration of files. The nightly backup was an exact image that one could cd into, just like for a normal disk based filesystem. Everything, of course, was read-only, even if the write-permission bit was set.
With that much space, why in the world would you need to defrag anything? Just use a journaling file system & be able to recover versions of any given file 10,000 versions back...
Also, isn't glass fairly unstable on a geological time scale? I realize that it would make very little difference in a device that isn't designed to last forever, but doesn't glass deform (albeit very very slowly)?
I wish they had said what kind of glass they were using.
Yes, but you all missed the press release this morning from MS...
Redmond, WA MicroSoft announced today the formation of the Windows 2003 team. Bill Gates said "Windows 2003 will be the best release of Windows ever." He also claimed that "Windows 2003 will use 40 gigabytes of Hard Disk space in order to give the users more of what they want, which as we all know, are pictures of all those Babe-Watch chicks!" As a concession to the Linux community, Mr Gates also stated "We will also be including a selection of Natalie Portman Pictures as well, ".
CSG_SurferDude
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
I'm getting 580 g -- if I'm remembering the dimensional stuff correctly -- gotta convert w to radians and r to meters, right?:
I had the disc diameter as 10cm, so radius r = 0.05m, not 0.01m as you have in your calculation. So I get 580 * 5 = 2900 g (I just let g = 10 m/s^2 for simplicity, hence the rounding error). Of course, I don't know the actual diameter of the disc - I just took an order of magnitude guess :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
I seem to remember reading an article in a magazine saying that data error rates depend more upon physical disk size than anything else, and that as information density increases, the mean time between errors decreases drastically. Thus, bigger hard drives = more hard drive crashes.
Does anyone else have information on this, or remember where the article was?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Yup, you're right. I meant to include that in the 1 GB limit of Screen Savers/Sounds/Desktop themes/AVI's :)
kwsNI
Remember when CD-roms started becoming popular?
:)
Normal HD's had a maximum capacity of a few hunderd megs and cd's could store such huge amounts of data.
Those 6 gigs of dvd space is getting really old really quick now. Wonder how long it will take for someone to release a new media with capacity that really makes a difference (like HDTV)?
If this continues it will start making sense storing movies on hd's. When that day comes we can kiss DVD goodbye
IBM's 75G UltraStar can do 2G/sec tranfers using optical datapath, 4.9ms seek times, and 10,000 RPM.. check out the page here.
The IBM Ultrastar 72ZX and Ultrastar 36LZX drives offer high capacity and superior performance for demanding server environments. As the fourth generation of the IBM Ultrastar 10,000 RPM disk drive family, these drives offer storage capacities up to 73.4 GB, average seek times of 4.9 ms, giant magnetorisistive (GMR) advanced head technology, and the latest technological advances, such as more powerful actuator motors, active damping, and leading-edge interfaces. The new Ultra160+ SCSI interface with packetization and quick arbitration select (QAS), as well as 2 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel speeds (data transfer rate), provides the fastest interface technology.
There are, of course, a number of issues that would need to be worked out. A lot of people might try and cheat the system, for instance, so we'd have to figure out a way to implement some sort of trust/verification network. But all-in-all I think that this would make for a fabulously useful product for all of mankind. Most people end up losing their data because frankly off-site backups are quite difficult and/or expensive. We should make the process easy for folks.
There might exist the possibility of combining this technology with a project like Freenet...distributed storage and distributed serving of information aren't that far off from each other in the grand scheme of things...
David E. Weekly
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
Is there a Moore's law for harddrives space? Could we continue doubling space every 18 days! At that rate, by the end of the year, a harddrive could actually hold every bit of data ever produced!
_______
2B1ASK1
why get this one when the 90 gigabyte solid state hard drives are coming out Q2 this year. Check out the slashdot article.
It shouldn't be long until the Ultrastar line show the 10k U2W versions of these, I would think (I have no real information). But with that 444Mb/s media transfer rate, two of these drives could saturate a U2W link... especially with the 2MB cache on it.
One issue is that for the larger servers (read: psycho RAID setups), the advantages are gained by having the most arms (physical drives), so all of the seek times are lowered, and transfer rates can be maxed out. Many people reluctantly started moving to 9GB and 18GB arms for their RAID systems - more capacity, but for heavy database usage, you want more arm for the same capacity point - the gain in performance is more important than the rise in price in many cases. You could trow together a pretty massive tower with 40s or 75s, and the transfer rates are really good, but again, the performance of the system as a whole is important. If you are building a 2TB db, would you rather have your data spread across ~60 drives (40GB) or ~265 (9GB). Data safety and performace both call for smaller individual arms here.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I thought that 'glass flow' was a myth and that the reason that old windows are thicker at the base is a result of imprecise manufacturing processes ~400 years ago. If you made a sheet of glass that was thicker on one side, which side would you put at the bottom of the window?
Anyone know about glass flow that can confirm/deny this?
It's not a COMPLETE myth, but Glass won't flow at room temperature. My father used to do construction and demolition and renovations and such. I was helping him out at the site of a fire in an older house, and the windows were visibly melted, they LOOKED as if they were flowing liquid. So I imagine that's where some of the myths about glass being a liquid comes from. People see older burned out houses with melted glass and don't think about the fire having melted it.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I thought that 'glass flow' was a myth and that the reason that old windows are thicker at the base is a result of imprecise manufacturing processes ~400 years ago. If you made a sheet of glass that was thicker on one side, which side would you put at the bottom of the window?
Anyone know about glass flow that can confirm/deny this?
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
Bad idea.. Remember Win95 OSR2? The OS ate 80 megs of CD space, the demos ate another 100.. What did they do with the rest of the space??
Weezer video.
Watch; Billy boy will call down to R+D and ask them for a statically compiled version of Windows2000 / IIS5 / Office 2000. That ought to kill 60G. What will they do with the rest of the space??
Weezer video.
'Buddy Holly' at 1600x1200x32 30fps sounds about right.
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Take a look at Windows; back in the old days it was big (I crammed 1.0 onto 2 5.25" disks which made it a 'smaller' (not needed) menu) but when storage capacity increased so did the Windows environment as did other software.
20Mb should be more then enough. Heck; if you want to use a NT workstation with some developing environments & graphical applications 1Gb can be a very small space.
But did all this extra capacity really made the software better then it was before? I doubt it. Therefor I think it will be really interesting to see when the datacapacity-expansion is coming to an end.
The IDE interface has only enough wires for 256GB. This disk is interesting in that at 75GB we are getting within shouting distance of this hard limit. Perhaps in the future all disks will be SCSI. Or perhaps we will go to a block size larger than 512bytes. Or maybe we will even add more wires to the IDE interface, or multiplex the existing wires more efficiently.
How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar?
It doesn't need strengthening - glass has a greater tensile strength than aluminium. What glas s does suffer though is brittle fracture, so I suspect that there is some interesting method for checking the surface for minor cracks which might later propagate through the platter.
What I wonder about is what happens to the platters after a long period of use. Glass is a viscous liquid after all - 400 year old glass windows are measurably thicker at the bottom than at the top because of this flow. If you consider that the centripetal force required to keep the disc together is much higher than gravity, I wonder how long it would take for the glass to flow towards the outside of the disc.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Like it or lump it, this can't be a bad thing. IBM aren't known solely for their production of storage media, but as long as they keep stretching the limits of current technology then we will all benefit. What have the other storage media manufactures got to do now? Compete or fail.
As a small side issue, compare the image of IBM against Microsoft in say 1992.
Compare the images of the two today. Both large corporations, one has developed with the times, the other is Microsoft.
Bill Goats blows gates or something like that.
You can lead milk to a rolling horse, but too many cooks break glass houses.
The storage potential here is amazing. No longer do I have to save every penny to purchase an expensive RAID array just to get the storage I need to pirate illegal .mp3s. I'm almost embarrased to say how much I've spent trying to get something for nothing. It would have been cheaper had I just bought the relevant cds.
.mp3s, and I wasn't about to go through that again. I still have bruises, and I think the cut over my left eye might scar. Anyway, I'm on the bus, credit card in my pocket, and this guy approaches me. I don't really know what his deal is, but he decides to dance at me. Not FOR me, mind you, but AT me. It was a very spiteful and angry dance. He starts humming louder and louder, to the tune of "Pop Goes the World" by Men Without Hats (and the ultra-rare Pet Shop Boys remix that I downloaded last week, so it was still fresh in my mind). As you can imagine, I was quite terrified and didn't know what to do. I thought I'd just give him a quarter, but all I had in my pocket was some lint and a beer bottle cap. So I gave him that. He tittered gleefully and skipped to the back of the bus. I'm not sure which of us was more relieved that it was over. The bus stopped, and I got off.
Take, for example, the other day. Drives 4, 7 and 18 were corrupted (I always thought tang was good for computers. Sigh. If that's what it does to a hard drive, I wonder what it's doing to ME?!?!), so I needed to hop a bus down to the local CompUSA (the finest in computer supplies) and replace them. Fortunately, no data was lost, god bless redundancy. It took me three months to find all of those Menudo
However, as that I was distracted, I missed my intended stop. Rather than wait for another bus, I decided to walk (it was really only about six blocks away). It was a nice enough day, but I wasn't too excited about the walk; I knew I'd have to cross the bridge. The last time I tried to cross the bridge, I was molested by seven punk trolls. Let me tell you, THAT was an experience I'd prefer to just forget. But I was wasting time that I could be downloading with, so I couldn't wait for the next bus. I swallowed my pride and started walking.
The bridge shone in the afternoon sun, the water below twinkling in a very pleasing manner. Broad daylight, of course! Trolls can't come out in the day, for they'd be turned to stone!!! I proceeded with confidence to walk across the bridge, when I was approached by a man in a trenchcoat whistling ("Earth Died Screaming" by Tom Waits, but don't quote me on that. The batteries on my Rio had died, so I couldn't check). I tried to keep walking, but he kept blocking my path (with tires, and toaster ovens, and I can't remember what else).
"excuse me" I said, trying to be polite, but holding back my rage. I was missing a file trade appointment. "oh," he said, "were you trying to get by?" and suddenly he whips out this wheel of cheese and starts beating me over the head with it! Goddamn trolls!!! "shouldn't you be stone" I cried inbetween strikes (it was a particularly mild cheddar, and didn't hurt much, other than my pride).
"no" he grinned "since our true saviour Natalie Portman has been petrified, the Nostrils have been appeased, and no troll needs to be turned to stone ever again" He couldn't mask his unadultered glee. everything a troll could ever want was his. He laughed and ran away, ending his assault just as randomly as it had begun.
All of this because I didn't have enough storage space. Thank you IBM that I may never have to endure this again. thankyoutheend
Maybe it would be easier to give the "Biggest and Fastest Disk Drives" their own Topic and Slashbox. Then we can just look to the side and see what this week's record is.
One thing that distinguishes these drives is that they have glass rather than aluminum platters.
/huge/ just a few months & years ago.
Since these are soon-to-be available (right now, limited quant. / OEM only) in sizes of a more normal variety* the next hard drive you buy may have glass instead of aluminum holding the data.
That raises a question I hope someone knows the answer to: How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar? That seems logical, but at the thinness of hard drive platters, wouldn't that make them impractically thick? I'd just hate to drop the box with a new IBM drive in it and hear "CRASH! tinkle, tinkle"
timothy
*Though still
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The Physics of ... Glass
Since I gave up hope, I feel much better.
From: kwsNI
Dear Bill,
I wanted to officially challenge you to make and operating system large enough to fill this HDD up. Here are my official rules:
So, if you're up to the challenge, let's fill this bad boy up.
Sincerely,
kwsNI
When is someone going to come out with an affordable backup system so that we can ensure the reliability of these large data stores?
/GB to use their drives/media compared to $2.20 /GB to use DLT. Both of these prices are insanely high.
Contemporary Cybernetics is actually proud that it costs $1.63 USD
Backup costs have barely come down in price in the last 7-10 years (only about 40%). While disk space has become about a thousand times more affordable.
Can someone please come up with a more affordable solution?
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.