Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
There's quite a lot of information at http://www.urbanlegends.com/science /glass .flow/ that suggests glass flow is indeed a myth.
Interesting. Having actually stood looking at one of the examples of 'glass flow' in a Cathedral (which one escapes me) where there was a thin piece of glass surrounding a hole and much thicker glass at the bottom, the above information makes interesting reading. To summarize the findings of the urbanlegends site, pure glass has next to no chance of flowing at room temperature. Glass carefully laced with particular additives, such as lead crystal or borosilicate glasses, can have further altered properties. Several interesting things do spring to notice though. Firstly, the presence of imperfections in the glass can have a macro effect on the properties of the glass, changing it's maximum tensile strength and possibly the conditions for plastic deformation (which is after all what we are talking about) so with ancient glass the distinctly impure nature of the glass may have an impact. The other point which caught my interest was the part about temperature-dependant plastic flow - the quoted critical figure (for infinite time) here is 270'C. Now I would be worried about my hard drive if it got to that temperature ... :-) Still, a platter spinning at 7200rpm with a diameter of 10cm would experience an acceleration of 2800 g at the edge if I've done my sums correctly (w^2 r for those who are interested, where w is the angular velocity and r is the radius). Of course, its a while since I did my physics degree so I may have got the equation wrong... :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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.