Slashdot Mirror
IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved
jeffroe writes "Infoworld has an article stating that IBM has enhanced it's 'Pixie Dust' technology yet again. The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops." IBM's also predicted hard drives to have 100gb per square inch by 2003. Storage space just keeps increasing.
Yeah, but what's the reliability? 330 hours uptime? :-P
Ample gigabytes that I can store up my nose.
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
IBM seems to have a good track record in hard drives. This is pretty amazing stuff. It is very refreshing to see a large company innovating.
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
Storage space just keeps increasing.
shut up
So, how much porn do you need to cary on a business trip anyway?
The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.
What we need is faster drives. I'm personally sick of how slow ATA drives are. Every other aspect of computers has made leaps and bounds in speed, with this one exception. Why? A fast hard drive makes all the difference in system speed.
1)pr0n
2)AIM
3)Anime
The score is now IBM: 1, Education: 0 (unless you're in a class about sending anime porn to your friends via IM)
FYI when they say an area of 70gb they mean 70gigabits per square inch not bytes...
I thought IBM sold their HD business to Hitachi?
Porn is pretty disgusting if you ask me. Though you're probably not too far off by saying porn does drive the hard disk industry. Where else can you find as many videos and pictures that take up a ton of space?
-> Sometimes, you just gotta break free from the shackles of proprietary code.
Isn't IBM leaving the Harddrive market? I'm glad they're working on this though. IBM has recently been on the cutting edge of personal computing devices with being the driving force beyond harddrive research and technoligies such as MRAM.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?
Movies. Why pay for pay-per-view when you're on a business trip when you can bring 50 with you.
Of course, some of them may be porn, so your argument is partially correct.
And now, a man with a hard drive up his nose!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
You crazy purist. Geek world would collapse without porn. Who would take care of all the technical stuff if there were millions of horny geeks just running around making suggestion to marketing babes and ending up in jail for sexual harrasement.
Cool! Wake me up when they come out with 100GB backup drives.
Looks like the only hard drive backup solution these days is another hard drive.
Sweeeeeeet...
;o)))
Now RIAA is gonna be even more pissed at me
The article mentions how they are cramming more space into existing form factors. I am guessing the 2.5" laptop HD standard. I would like to see them introduce new smaller form factors for ultra-portables.
Maybe they can finally cram an HD into a PDA? A 20 gig HD coupled with a Crusoe would make for a nifty phone/computer.
That is just wonderful. More IBM drives that can be RMAed. I'm not trying to flame IBM here, but I honestly RMAed one of their drives 5 times before I gave up and used it as a 30 gig paperweight. I thought they were out of the hard drive business?
Video editing, for one.
Or, in your terms, "making pr0n" .
There's a little difference there. Call me a troll but I have a point.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
70GB/sq in.?! Those IBM engineers must be smoking something..and it sure ain't pixie dust.
but 7,200 RPM's just doesn't do it for me, not since I had a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive 5 YEARS AGO!
I was going to say that myself, but this dude beat me to it. It's the truth.
Real hard-hitting commentary there, CowboyNeal. Way to go. You'll get that Pulitzer in no time.
Stupid me, I first though improved in the context of IBM drive tech referred to MTBF, not capacity.
Back to the usual mudslinging from SCSI-only-people.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
What to do with 10 times as much storage? I could start keeping home videos on there. Or store all the network traffic that comes on and off my computer indefinitely. Or keep track of the voltage waveform coming in off the power lines, and post processing it after a year to look for frequency shifts.
But this talk of "no-one but video pirates would need this" is silly. Just give it to me, I'll think of something.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
I'll finally have enough space to back up /dev/zero
Get a raid card or raid-supporting mobo. Run striped. I have a two way striped raid at work that is very, very fast, constructed from IDE drives. It benches favorably against single high-speed SCSI drives for a small fraction of the price. I am unsure of 4-way striping is available on IDE drives, but would improve things even more.
Stuck on the notebooks though. Solution there is to put as much ram as possible in them so you don't have to hit the disk much.
..don't panic
Unfortunately the departmental accountant knows you only need 160 GB total, so he cancels the other six "unneeded" drives, not realizing it's the eight heads you needed.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Those source trees can grow pretty big, you know!
Attually I have over 70 gigs of unlicenced anime thats fansubed. Seems like a pretty legitimate use to me. Some of the servers I get anime off of have over a terabyte of anime, but alot of that is licenced in america or dvd isos.
I do use SCSI for servers etc, thats just common sense. But consider ATA is still slower than SCSI was 5 years ago, or heck even 7 years ago. That's just pathetic. SCSI is just to expensive to be sensible for the average Joe.
" No, it's not. Apparently you don't follow the news."
Shhhhh....we need someone to jumpstart the economy.
Don't people learn English anymore, and why do we accept stories from illiterates?
Gigabyte is abbreviated GB (gb means nothing, but is closer to gigabit), and its has no apostrophe.Drive space is increasing at a rate that is directly proportional to the bloated size of Mircosoft Operating Systems.
1991 - DOS 6.22 about 5MB for the OS on a 40MB HDD
1996 - Win95 about 300MB for the OS on a 1.7GB HDD
2002 - WinXPPro about 2.5GB for the OS on a 40GB HDD.
2007 - LonghornSP4 about 20GIG!? for the OS on maybe 400GB drives?
How far out am I? Probably heaps but you get the idea.
make laptop physical drive size standard across the board (for desktop harddrives too). then increase harddrive speed and space and all will be well. in harddrive land.
Why don't them make the next enhancement to the name?
But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities, and a 10000 RPM drive would be very fast indeed.
LOL. You're about post #64 clown.
Some people are too stupid to fp.
Hard Drive Manufacturers pour alot of money into researching how much more life they can get out of their existing manufacturing equipment and processess. Too bad that money wasn't spent on doing things in an entirely different, better way.
Magnetic medium.. these guys are still using 8-track technology.. c'mon. Change is good.. let's see some of that lazeropticalneuro shit happenin..
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
It involves sandwiching a three-atom-thick layer of the precious metal ruthenium between two magnetic layers. That seemingly simple step allowed researchers to increase the areal storage density.
I'm pretty sure that making a 3 atom sandwich doesn't seem simple to me.
Karma: Not Particularly Funny.
Does this mean that they may make drives with the same capacity as current ones that are smaller or put out less heat? I don't know about the rest of you, but any less heat coming from my laptop would be a big plus. My lap feels like its been slow roasted after I use my laptop for an hour or so.
People seem much brighter once you light them on fire.
At work I constantly am burning work files up my 20GB HD on my 1-year old Inspiron 8100(in the South and Southwest US reffered to as the Inspiration, I swear).
Work files do not include illegal software, MP3s, or pr0n. I could use some more storage space--too many spreadsheets and databases.
?sp
Granted my laptop is about 2.5 years old, but it came with a 12 GB HD and well I really hope that they'll be 100 GB ones I can swap out for with with new technology, or at least something half decent if I buy a new system
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
G to the deathstar
Claim failed
The only problem is how reliable these things will be. Its one thing to be able to pack shit-loads of data onto a tiny little spot - but its another thing to pack that same data on a spot thats going to hold it reliably without going bad or corrupting it.
This new hard drive enhancement has a precedence of being faulty after launch.
gb = grambit
GB = gigabyte
One day when you grow pubes, you'll understand.
How reliable will these drives be ? since the spot is smaller a head-crash could crash your entire harddrive instead of loosing a "few" files.
Maybe such systems will be reliable (in laptops) by putting in 2 of such harddrives (RAID5?).
I would be worried with such small harddrives, sure in movable PC's and sure if it is coming from IBM which is known for having certain bad drives.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I've posted about it before.
I simply noticed how many CDs I had sitting around, and got sick of it -- so I plunked down around $1500 for 9 Western Digital 120GB hard drives a few months ago.
I have 140GB of OGGs and MP3s, 500GB of DivXs and VCDs (including porn), 100GB of installed games, 6 different OSes, and all kinds of other crap. I also have about 150GB free, still, that gets used for various tasks.
But if you don't need the memory, run Linux off of flash memory or one of those pocket USB drives, or some other form of solid state memory. However, the prices for it are still exorbitant.
Enough with storage space! I don't care about having a 480GB drive. I want a drive that doesn't have any moving parts. A 100% solid state harddrive for the cost of a regular IDE. I'd even pay twice or three times as much to have 40-60-80GB worth of solid state goodness.
My computer sits here beside me and the only mechanical part that will destroy it if it fails is the spinning disk inside the drive. Sure there are still fans but my computer will quickly notice that and shutdown. However if the drive fails, you're toast.
I know we still need storage but can't some of these cycles be put into getting us off the old pre-space age magnetic disc technology and get us into something that doesn't need moving parts!
Come on IBM, where's my Holographic or Memory Based solid state storage. I don't care if it's twice the size of my current drive either, I just don't want any more moving parts!
Syn Ack
How many of these laptops will fit inside of the Library of Congress? Maybe I asked the question backwards.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
but it's you're, as in "you are," not your.
what is disgusting abotu pr0n?
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
The funny thing is that as these drives become mainstream, users in my company will think they need 80 GB of space on their laptops. They can't fathom how many word documents would fit on it, but they're convinced anything less would be inadequate.
I'm still amazed when I set up servers that do a lot of logging (firewall, web, ids, etc...) and I give a big /var partition (10+ GB) how little is filled up after several months. I suppose it differs with traffic, but 10 GB alone is tons of space!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
MP3s and ordinary movies and TV. A season of Buffy is a 6 DVD (40+ GB compressed) boxed set. A porn film is half an hour (an hour if you're watching upmarket stuff with a lame attempt at a story line) and the consumers are probably only interested in half the footage, anyway.
Don't look at it then.
Mainstream movies and CDs. I have hundreds of music CDs, which equals far more porn pulled off the net than I'll ever likely have. Factor in mainstream movies, and there's no contest.
Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
... if it wasn't for IBM's -appalling- track record in this sector (haha, sector, get it?)
I wouldn't -touch- another IBM drive with a 50ft. pole, even if there were flaming naked ninja-women threatening to cut my head off if I didn't.
I try to lead my life as paper free as possible, all my personal info (bills, letters etc.) are scanned and stored on my home server that can be accessed from the internet anywhere, any time. You can imagine how much space this takes (27 g's - not including porn) the same box controls my home theatre and stores all types of media that regularly keep 150GB chocked full.
Of course.. I scan all the documents in 300dpi in case I need to.. 'adjust' them later...
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
nvedit /pci@f2000000/mac-io@17/ata-4@1f000/disc@0v store
devalias hd
^C
n
nvrun
setenv boot-device hd:,yaboot
boot
G to tha muthafuckin oatse
Claim failed, pigfuckers
I wouldn't fret too much about battery time, though. Fuel cells are just around the corner and will realize a 4-5x boost in battery power in the near term with the potential to go to 10x+ range. Near-instant recharge, half-weight in same volume.
That said, it's rant time:
<rant>
IMHO, IBM's track record with desktop drives sucks ass. I'm one of those unfortunate souls who got hit hard with failing GXP series drives. IBM dropped the ball big time and their behaviour during the whole debacle put them on my blacklist. Before I get hit with objections, let me say that it wasn't the fact that their drives failed (got them from different runs, different dates) that torqued me off. It happens; happened to Maxtor in '96-'97.
No, what gives me the red ass is their poor product replacement (after 4 replacements I still had bad drives; drives from Maxtor/WD worked fine - still working, in fact), shipping me DOA refurbs, and giving me the run around the whole time. That was the first (and last time) I've gotten bad customer service from IBM. I won't do business with a company that leaves me swinging in the breeze.
</rant>
why else would you need an 80GB drive in a laptop?
Two words: Desktop replacements.
There is a good niche industry of making laptops that are powerful enough to run the latest games ect.... An 80 gig drive would suit a laptop which had a fast 3d video card and a nice 15-inch screen. Of course you COULD use that 4 or 5 thousand dollar laptop for porn.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Last thing we need is for IBM to get the youth of America hooked on Pixie Dust.
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?
You -- scan -- your -- bills. Dude, you don't need to scan your bills, you need to get a date.
Raid is not a means of combatting unreliabillity.
P(A intersect B) = P(A | B) * P(B)
Where,
Event A = first drive failing
Event B = second drive failing
Heck with that! Memory has MBTF's as well....I want an interface to my brain, so I can keep all important data with me at all times....
:)
And if it ever fails, I won't care, since it'd probably be because I am dead...
Karnal
Hmm lets see after the last batch of Desk Stars who is going to trust thier data to these larger version.. Almost every tech sit that has reviewed an IBM has had to RMA a few of them.. Even I had one die.. IBM never issued a recall and luck me it was under warrenty and I had backup..
Once bitten twice shy.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
However if the drive fails, you're toast.
>>>>>>>>
Heh heh, all my data is stored 650 miles away in a nice safe server. I've been in my dorm room for 2 months now, and I've already got two spare HDDs sitting in my desk drawer. I figure that if my main HD dies, I'll be up and running again, with all my data, within an hour.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
And not having to power that DVD drive saves enough juice that you can actually watch that full-length movie!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
About $1000 per gigabyte
which would you rather pay:
$450 for 450 gb
or
$450,000 for 450gb
Mainstream movies and CDs. I have hundreds of music CDs, which equals far more porn pulled off the net than I'll ever likely have. Factor in mainstream movies, and there's no contest.
I'm guessing that those movies and songs are backup copies of media that you actually own, right? Not a troll/ flame, just a rhetorical question targeted at the audience in general. I'm all for making backups, as long as it's stuff that you own- I just know for a fact that that is not what is usually going on.
Besides the dude below who copies all his bills 'n stuff (which only took up 27 gigs, he said), is there any other legitimate reason for Joe User to have so much disk space? Or is the quest for more gigabytes just for us to feel more proud/macho/cool/sexy/etc? (in addition to being able to collect as many stolen movies/mp3s as possible)
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
Wow, I have new found respect for the marketing people at IBM. They should develop a new interface and call it "Freebase". That way you could Freebase your Pixie Dust, a powerful metaphor for getting the most out of your hard drive experience.
The SD slot on my Zaurus is about that size, and I've been refusing to pay 200$ for 256mb of memory, when I can see that technology be put to use to give me a 200$ 20GB drive for my Zaurus? What's that? Never? Fuck you.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Can you imagine a beowolf cluster (tm) running with these?
You'd need N+N just to keep up with the MTBF rates and down time to swap the HDD's.
Bwahahaha! I did it! my first Imagine-a-beowolf-cluster (tm) post!
Heh, I'd be playing DoD now, but my cable modem sucks!
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
IBM is not spending all their money on this, you know. They are making advancements in different fields (holographic memory, magnetic RAM), that will most likely replace HD's in the future. Memory that will enable you to have instant-on computers, and terrabytes of storage. But, to fund this new research, they need to make advancements that will pay off now. It is pretty dumb to spend all your time researching something that will take 20 years, and expect to do it without making money in any other way.
.. Just trying to stay in the market, to fund future technologies.
Hitachi bought out that sector, and rather than shifting things around, Hitachi and IBM are forming a child company (whose name I do not know).
Why don't they take the name "IBM," and just shift each letter one character to the right in the alphabet?
"I'm sorry, I don't think they can do that."
"And like that
I've got a DLT80 drive here. It stores around 40GB/tape of raw data (80GB with hardware compression) but unfortunately a lot of my data is already compressed in some shape or form.
It averaged around 5MB/sec across over 340MB of data I store on my ATA RAID array + a few other disks in the machine. It took up a total of ten tapes and took endless hours to do (plus I need to be around to switch tapes - audoloaders are hardly accessible to home users).
I find the ATA RAID1 solution more elegant. The only issue that bites is that you can't do historical backups or pull data off the drive you deleted two months ago but now decide you need (it's happened to me). But disk mirroring is realtime and provides an easy way to cut over to the other disk (as opposed to reformat, reinstall, restore with tapes)
Yes, in my new Dell Inspiron 8200, my 60GB 5400RPM IBM Travelstar 60GH died after a month, taking some of the data down with it. I had a Dell service tech come out and replace it the next day, but it's rather distressing that such a drive, brand new, dies within a month. 60GB is a LOT of data, especially on a notebook where the information changes a lot more frequently than on a desktop system and backups are a lot harder to perform compared to datacentre/home use.
Interestingly, the 80GB drive is 4200RPM, claiming 30% more data transfer rate than the 60GB 5400RPM disk (which is on par with the 60GB Toshiba drive).
Oh, and Apple's new Tibook no longer ships with the IBM 5400RPM disks - they ship them with the 4200RPM 60GB 2.5" notebook drives (and IBM don't make any 2.5" 4200RPM drives)
In short, IBM's recent track record for reliability isn't the best and reliability on a notebook drive is far more critical than a desktop drive because it's harder to back it up.
The way i see it this whole "HD space increasing faster than we can use it thing is great. It goes to show that we're getting to point where we don't even have to worry about HD space, the concept of files taking up space will cease to exist. I think the future's gonna be cool.
IBM does NOT have a good track record in hard drives. Remember the Deathstar (Deskstar) series?
Bill G is back! What's up Bill.
The size of current hard drives at the moment is big enough for me. I don't mind if IBM's technology remains as it is at the moment - literally "pixie dust".
;o)
They really should've thought of a better name - if they'd called it "geek dust" I'm sure they would've had lots more sales.
Video Game cheats, hints a
I'm getting really tired of people not using the correct prefixes, and even more on computer-savvy people not understanding the difference between bit and byte. Learn this list by heart or at least between 10^9 and 10^-9:
;)
b = bit
B = byte
E = exa = 10^18
P = peta = 10^15
T = tera = 10^12
G = giga = 10^9
M = mega = 10^6
k = kilo = 10^3
h = hekto = 10^2
D = deka = 10^1
d = deci = 10^-1
c = centi = 10^-2
m = milli = 10^-3
u = micro = 10^-6
n = nano = 10^-9
p = pico = 10^-12
f = femto = 10^-15
a = atto = 10^-18
Those writing "mb" for megabyte, are actually writing "milli-bit". How do I split a single bit into one thousand pieces? Is that what micro processors is all about?
To avoid any discussion between k=1000 and k=1024, please turn to www.iec.org and read about binary prefixes (kibi-, mebi- et.c.).
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
60 Gigs is not nearly enough. While faster drives would be nice for those of us doing real-time video mixing, larger drives would be helpful. (Really sucks constantly swapping out drives...)
I've been thinking that it is about time for RAID with faster I/O to make it into laptops... seems like you could get really nice performance from two IDEs (and two controllers) with moderate rpms.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Games nowadays take up about 500 to 1.5 gigabytes of harddisk space (Diablo 2; Sims; etc..) not to mention having the webpage backed up (those are hi-rez images, thank you) a music server (yes I own the CD's, no I do not want to get a 200 disk CD changer, but yes I do want them encoded at the highest kbps for my enjoyment) Also have tons of editing software with picture libraries on here and God forbid we have school software (Mathlab, Adobe Acrobat Office XP ) But thats just the stuff I can think of. Imagine all the people out there with motion picture software that are editing movies and adding graphics... Thats a harddrive hog if I ever saw one..
| - | - |
Finally, I can install emacs. Beautiful!
that's the point of the article, it is a (reasonably) reliable way to store the data on the drive.
;)
everybody's so impressed when the chip manufacturers drop the fab sizes down, but nobody really seems to appreciate how amazing hd tech is these days. chip people, even down at 90nm (nothing to sniff at!), are still dealing with bulk matter and (generally) free from worrying about quantum effects, while hd tech has runs smack into quantum-scale events - normal thermal energy kicking the magnetic states of the bits around (superparamagnetic effert). while it's not strictly a QM problem, eliminating it definitely involves quite a bit of heavy quantum work.
just looking quickly at the outershell configuration for ruthenium, and assuning they still use iron oxide as the magnetic media, it seems that the 3-layer thinck layer of atoms leaves some interesting unfilled oribitals exposed to the magnetic layer (the bonding to the middle layer of atoms will bump another electron down into the 5s orbital, filling it and leaving some vacancies in the 4d orbitals). i'd have to check the energy levels, but i'd guess that the empty orbitals on the Ru atoms can grab some of the electrons from the magnetic materials; not forming a true bond, but holding tightly enough to stabilize the induced magnetic state, increasing the energy requited to flip the polarity to well above normal thermal energy.
disclaimer: i am not a physical chemist, i just got my BS in may. did get three As in phys chem I&II and advanced inorganic, though.
further disclaimer: i have'n't had all my coffee yet so i may just be babbling, if there are any physical chemists who know better than i, feel free to tear me apart
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
If only access speeds were any faster than they were in 1997.
I'm sure there's quite a lot of people who download MP3s and other files without paying, but there are also many people who buy their CDs and will convert libraries to MP3, for ease of use.
Tim
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
The supposed speed there is mostly marketing hype. Show me an IDE drive with a sustained transfer rate that even comes close to maxing out UDMA/66? You can't, they don't exist.
SCSI will spin 8 disks at once on the same channel, and that's the only way you'll max out the transfer capacity of the channel. IDE only handles 2 drives per channel, so the difference between UDMA/66 and UDMA/100 amounts to nothing other than feeling 'l33t'. Yes, very rarely, when you have drives that are doing burst transfer from their own cache, you might actually use the difference. But the UDMA/66 will catch right up the next millisecond anyway, no one would actually notice it even then.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
For a start, generally you want to have plenty of free space around to limit fragmentation. Cut about 30% from usable capacity there: 75GB usable -> 52GB you'd want to use.
Now, let's install a few games:
UT2k3 is 2.4GB, more if you have some custom maps. Except UT2k3 also wants the CD; you don't want to constantly swap in originals, so you rip the play CD and mount in daemon tools. That's over 3GB for one game.
NOLF 2 is ~1.6GB, plus easily 50MB+ of savegames, so let's say 1.7GB, plus daemontooled CD, that's 2.4GB.
Ditto for Battlefield 1942, which also needs the CD: 0.9GB + 0.7GB.
That's 3 games, eating a grand total of 7.1GB, or nearly 15% of our available disk space Addons can easily push this higher pretty easily, and savegames soon pile up to sizes that make Word
Email: I recieve a tonne of it, and I keep all of it, too. This year I chalked up 1.3GB.
Windows: 1.8GB here. Oh, and another 1GB of swap.
Backups: I mirror my ~/ and various other dirs to my Windows machine, that's another 1-2GB of junk, easily.
Logs: I log a lot. IRC, SSH sessions, email, firewall hits, all sorts. If I want to keep a few years worth, I want to be able to, because, damnit, it might be useful! One day I *will* make a nice graph using rrdtool of [whatever I logged].
Music: I'll admit I don't own much, and the RIAA probably would be rather irriated at my collection, but what I do own, I rip; the CD's barely get taken out once, purely because my computer is my sound system, and OGG's are the most useful format for me. 50-100MB per CD, multiplied by however many CD's I might own. 100 CD's isn't uncommon; 5-10GB, assuming I use OGG and not FLAC or another lossless codec. 20GB+ if I go lossless.
Movies: Ditto for MP3's; although legitimate use is probably closer to "If I want to make my own edit of I want the space to do it in". 10-15GB, easy. Plus maybe I want to keep those 6GB VOB's on my HD so I don't have to hunt for the DVD's and risk damaging/exploding them
8 DVD's * 6GB = 48GB. Oops. A friend of mine owns over 150 DVD's, I'm sure he'd love a couple of TB to store them in rather than hunt around his shelf for them.
TV: Let's not forget TiVo and friends. Hands up who wants multi-TB HD's for their PVR?
Alternate OS's: When I want to try out RH 8 or FreeBSD-CURRENT, I want the disk space to try it out. 5GB (at least) for the spare partitions.
Cache: 3 browsers, each with 200MB+ cache dirs. 600MB of tiny files that probably bloat to 800MB easily. I might like to give squid half a gig or more.
Source code repositories: I have 1.2GB of tarballs and source direcories, most aren't even full CVS repositories.
Versioning: I dream of a time when my filesystem is one big version controled repository. I want to keep every modification I make to my HD, at least in certain directories. Multiply current requirements by about 100.
That's about 55GB there, and I've not even got onto applications or central storage for all my digital data, or filesystem version control, and my requirements are only going to get bigger while I'm allowed to purchase permanent licenses for data.
Conclusion: Relatively average users could quite happily make use of multiple TB's of quiet, reliable, backupable, rollbackable and relatively portable storage.
Now, which of these count for laptops might be questionable, but then, how many people have a laptop as their primary machine because their £2000 machine cost them their entire tech budget? How many laptops come with DVD's? Wouldn't you like to have all your data at your fingertips wherever you are?
If not, well, you're not geeky enough for SlashDot. Get out
Bigger laptop drives are wonderfull, but even my 5400 RPM drive seem horribly slow compared to my desktop.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Watch out for those short cicuits.
Paul
Until recently, IBM Deskstars were the best drives you could get.
Then the 75GXP came out... And Deskstars became Deathstars.
Conversely, Maxtor and WD used to SUCK. From what I've heard, both companies have really shaped up. (I hope so, my home machine's new drive is a Maxtor...)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
B.G.A.T. (Billy Goats Against Trolls)is proud to announce that SexyKellyOsbourne has made our most wanted list. Normally it is pretty hard for us to prove our case against such people. But Ms. Osbourne has taken special care to ensure that the world knows she is a troll. Example #1 Right from her own journal. As much as B.G.A.T. would like to take credit for this, it does all come right from the trolls mouth!That one wasn't enough to convince you. How about This one? And then there is this one. She has also taken a moment to tell her something about herself. A quick glance at her posting History tells it all. Here is one of my favorites. So please take this time to spend just one mod point to keep this genital wart on society out of sight. MOD HER DOWN AS A TROLL!!!! Not because I said so, but remeber she is a self confesed troll.
He sprinkles a little pixie dust, and he gets more harddrive!
-- IBM
He sprinkles a little fairy dust, and he gets more bandwidth!
-- SBC Internet ad from a while ago
Maxtor announced 80B platters ages ago, and didnt try to claim it was due to Pixie Dust either. And as its been pointed out before, IBM announced they were leaving the HD market, and most people said good riddance, so why are they pestering us again?
So basically, IBM is saying that Millipede is still going to be vaporware for another decade, and until then, they'll just keep cramming more space onto hard drives until either the oxide falls off or laptops start burning holes into your khakis.
Woo. Wake me when I can buy the breakthrough stuff at Best Buy.
Visit me on the web at Permanent4.com.
...or did you mean 80 GB?
How much more heat will those 7200 RPM drives generate?
Would love to put one of them in my Thinkpad, which really stinks with my 4200RPM drive (from factory)....
The drive runs constantly. A 7200 RPM drive would really make things much smoother.
But will it generate to much heat for current laptops? Is it something for only new laptops?
So, when will I be seeing my 70G IBM MicroDrive? ;)
If they can fit 70G of storage into a square inch, I would certainly think that they could fit 70G into a drive that has little more than a square inch of surface area. :)
Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)
You have a rather vague imagination. Care to explain why precision would make it take longer?
The hundreds of CDs I most certainly own, and rip to MP3 so I can pipe them around the house via the magic of ethernet. I don't bother with DVDs, but if I did, I'd start needing hundreds of gig, or even terabytes. So yeah, that's all legit.
I only have a low-end digital camera (a little Powershot A10), but I convert the JPEGs it produces into TIFFs so I can work with them without losing any more quality. Even with only low quality pics, it's very easy to rattle through significant amounts of storage. If I were a more avid photographer I'd be using gigabytes a month, between a better quality camera and more pics. If I were an artist a la Dave McKean I'd likewise go through gigs of storage for my digitally composited work.
In a similar vein, I have friends who like to make moves. Setting up your own non-linear editing suite is quite affordable these days, and editing hours of video, even if it's only consumer/prosumer quality, will chew though huge amounts of storage.
Likewise, I know a few musicians who'd be delighted to build their own edit suite (some have), which goes through the storage.
People are more creative than they're given credit for. A lot of the crap from big media companies is trying to keep people in their place as consumers, not creators, and make sure people can't do their own work, still less distribute it.
AIT-2 can store 130GB/tape. AIT-3 can store 250G+.
Some versions of DLT I *think* can store around 400GB per cartridge.
-----
i dont know, people who are cheap fucks such as yourself who think IDE drives are "good performance" care about companies getting into price wards to make things cheaper.
and you get shit warranties and no 10K or 15K drives.
and you fucking fools act like the king of the ide market is a king. more like a retarded drive that gay-merz such as yourself drool over. freak.
you cant afford real equipment. HAHAHAHAHA.
in my experience, the bigger and faster the drives are getting, the bigger the errors, and the faster they happen,, i have a RAID of 3 IBM 2gb SCSC drives, they run hot enough to cook eggs on (i've tried it... don't ask) and they've been running 24/6 pretty much since i've got them... i had a newer IBM drive for my desktop a couple years ago.. it's already dead, and the old 2gb ones are still heating my room,,,
Reece,
The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.
1) Who would want a personal computer?
2) 640 KB is enough for anyone
Someone always figures out a way to use the available resources and more. My point is that this will have an impact.
Anyone ever wonder what happened to holographic storage? It occurs to me that as long as the R&D powerhouse at IBM continues coming up with radical new ways to magnetically store data, we're not going to see the promise of holographic/crystal storage come to fruition anytime soon. And as long as there's no money in it, I've got to wonder, who's still working on this and have there been any real breakthroughs in the past year? I for one haven't heard a peep.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
SCSI is pointless these days in all but high end servers. IDE technology is currently catching up with SCSI and will soon pass it, once this happens you will see your precious 10K and 15K RPM drives on IDE.
SerialATA was the first big step towards making SCSI useless.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHA.
what a fucking idiot.
Poverty man. Hahahahaha.
what about the warranty? the sparing? the reliability?
oh, you dont care. you are a gamer, fat, sexless, and live at home with mom and dad.
Warrenty? There are high-priced IDE drives that cater to people who feel they need a longer warrenty. Most IDE manufacturers have "premier" or "professional" versions of their drives.
Sparing? What do you mean?
Reliability? Again, that's why the higher-priced drives are available. Still, I'd trust an expensive 5400RPM drive much more than a 15000RPM drive. Those high-speed drives pump out enormous heat, and I'd be surprised if their reliability was any better than an IDE drive.
- Sparing. It is a significant percentage of the disk that is there solely to remap bad sectors if the come to pass. on IDE it gets marked as bad and detracts from the useable space. On scsi, its remapped. The bad section becomes a pointer in the drive map to a spare location. Its sad you don't even know what reliability features exist and you cast disparaging remarks against SCSI.
- The MTBF is a reliability statement. MTBF for WD 8MB is 500,000 POH.
The MTBF for a 15K cheetah is 'Distinctions Extremely low power consumption allows easy integration for high performance. 1,200,000-hour MTBF
One fifth the warranty. Less than half the MTBF. 8.9ms seek vs 3.6ms. One half the spindle speed. And the 15K drives are actually quieter. (31db for the 15K vs 35db for the 7200)! And the disparity in wattage/power is less than 30% [7 watts vs 10 watts, but the spindle speed is TWICE as fast]! Oh man, you really don't know a good drive if it smashed you in the face.
Shows what you know about drive technology. This is the most retarded statements I have ever seen on Slashdot, and this festering quagmire of an online "communisty" has a veritable myriad - no - a plethora of retards,
You said. You are baseless, without knowledge, incorrect and spread FUD to justify the fact that either you are extremely poor and cannot afford good equipment or you are a direct descendant of Shylock and are the epitome of a cheap ass.
dont waste time on that stupid quake bitch. he is a fucking pseudointellectual troll asshole that pollutes this place with anti american xeonophobic crap while living on the dole. the day he dies is the day the atoms in his body can become useful again, even as worm food.
Oh, and this is another kernel in that great and venerable "BugFree(tm)"
series of kernels. So be not afraid of bugs, but go out in the streets
and deliver this message of joy to the masses.
-- Linus, in the announcement for 1.3.27
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...