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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.
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.
Note 1: this drive despite the antishock stuff uses a glass plate so dragging it around is very unwise.
Glass is very strong. Worry about the heads smashing pits in the surface media.
I work in the manufacturing industry where we use encoders of a high density glass disk to accurately measure the speed of large DC and AC motors up to 400 vibrating and earthshaking horsepower. These encoders are directly bolted to the motor's iron frame. The encoder's metal body often suffers from physical damage from hammers and other mechanic's tools. Yet the glass disk will not shatter unless the shaft is hammered to slide through the bearings.
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
Actually, it is *almost* more practical to back up to CD's and CD-RW's than to tapes. It is, of course, circumstantial, but high-volume CD-R purchases do have a very low overhead cost, they are fast to read/write, but aren't particularly big.
why get this one when the 90 gigabyte solid state hard drives are coming out Q2 this year. Check out the slashdot article.
The new glass platters allow for greater areal density, decreasing the error rate. Check out <A HREF="http://www.ibm.com/Press/prnews.nsf/jan/2EC<nobr>0<wbr></wbr></nobr> 1AB873630970852568A3004E28F6">the press release</A> for a litle more on the platters... I'll try to find a more technical article, but the gis of it is that the glass doesn't expand like the aluminun does with heat, so your data can be closer together on the drive. There's also less friciton with the air, so there isn't as much heat to start with.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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.
.sig: Now legally binding!
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.
Glass does not "flow".
Really, you could look it up if you wanted, but the usual citation against the slow flow of glass is old ground and polished lenses. Accuracy of these lenses is measured in fractions of a light wave front, so if a 500 year old window shows visually perceptable flow, certainly it would show up in a 100-200 year old lens?
It hasn't happened yet.
See the FAQ for more details.
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
Tape isn't dead. You still need tapes to store off site backups, and to have several backups from different dates. Backing up data to another disk is only good if you only care about getting "last nights" data back. What about three months ago?
The disk method is fine for home users with 10GB of mp3z and such, but if you have tons of important data you will still need tape or something like it.
support gun control: take guns from cops
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
Glass is far more stable than the aluminum is, in terms of size / distribution. Remember that aluminum, being a metal, is far more size sensitize to heat (and it does get hot in there) that glass is. The glass surface is smoother and doesn't create as much heat spinning through the air, either, so that's reduced even more. So, throughout the lifetime of the drive, the glass should be more reliable than the old aluminum platters.
When the drive is off, the R/W heads are parked away from the platters, and the spindle is shock-absorbed, as to offset the glass breakage factor. Normally the R/W heads are parked somewhere on the platter, and vibration/impact can cause contact between the heads and the platters. This is supposed to reduce those problems rather drastically. I've been told that the glass platters can be used in laptops, but I don't kow what kind of glass it is...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
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.