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Hard Drives Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte
Junky191 writes "I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available for $1 per gigabyte (according to pricewatch,). There are several stores now selling 120GB models for $120 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who once spent $500 for the fantastically large 10MB models. I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB." With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.
Disreputable dealers have had 120GB for $110 for months now. FP, btw.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
i remember when they were a $1 a mb
The prices for HD's have been down around 1$/gig for months, especially on surplus stores like comp-geeks.com (new, not used).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Leet, now I won't feel so bad knowning that my swap space is only worth a buck.
Trolling is a art,
and thank the good lord for that!!
1957, the first hard drive was introduced as a component of IBM's RAMAC 350. It required 50 24-inch disks to store five megabytes (million bytes, abbreviated MB) of data and cost roughly $35,000 a year to lease - or $7,000 per megabyte per year. For years, hard disk drives were confined to mainframe and minicomputer installations. Vast "disk farms" of giant 14- and 8-inch drives costing tens of thousands of dollars each whirred away in the air conditioned isolation of corporate data centers.
$120 for 120GB. That's lovely, but what about reliability? Where did that go?
Bah! You kids with your newfangled hard drives! Why, in my day, we worked with ferro-magnetic drives. Sure, the magnets were big, and they were powerful, and dammit if you didn't get a nice buzz while working around these things. That was the way it was, AND we liked it!
AND I had to walk uphill! Twice! In the snow! Buzzed out of my mind!
/.'s 10 Millionth
http://www.wookielove.net/
I doubt anyone else noticed this- but today is the first day where mass storage is available (according to pricewatch). There are several stores now selling 12GB hard drives models for only $250 shipped. This is truly an amazing milestone for those of us who ran out of space downloading Yanni mp3s. I just can't wait for the days when hard drives are replaced by women. Pretty women.
Producer: NEXT!!
Ralph Wiggum: Chicken necks
Processors are getting faster! Recent chips hit speeds of 1Ghz!
Microsoft still not releasing source code!
This isn't really new, nor is it news...
And at the same time, our storage needs are 2^10 times as large due to 10^3 more data, 10^3 more illicit mp3's, 10^3 more pr0n, 10^3 more overhead in a microsoft binary document format, etc., etc., etc.
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
Yea, its been this way for quite some time. Doubtful if you noticed tho.
I'd applaud this too, if only the reliability weren't going down faster than the price. Hell, I'll sell you a 5-inch-footprint hunk of metal that won't work for just $50. I'll even stamp 50TB on it.
So, in other words, I agree that it is a milestone, but I think they are already pushing the technology and cutting QA corners to get the price point. I will always either pay more for my drives, or by about 20% lower capacity than the biggest cheap drives (usually the latter, because I'm cheap, cheap, cheap!). That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual.
it seems as though this should've been expected, as in, not really news. disk space has been getting cheaper since its creation.
sorry if i'm trolling.
What is a good, cheap Sun server (preferable rackmount) that I could pick up used for a good price and put in my basement rac?
My dad who works in IT always likes to tell the story of the $25,000 his company spent in the 80's for a 400 meg hard drive the size of a dishwasher
I remember my first hard drive, an RLL ST238 30 megger from seagate. Anyone else remeber having to do this? The drive came with a list of bad sectors and then you had to load up dos debug in an effort to run the program which came on your drive controler which you could then use to enter the bad sector list and low-level format the drive. That was something like $230 in '88 or so.....
My new shiney 160gig maxtor was a measly $180 bucks and I'm sure I'm gonna feel really ripped off in about 10 years.....
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Bought an Atari SH204 20meg hard drive for my beloved 520ST, $985.
Inside was the circuitry to make the atari interface speak MFM/RLL, and a full height 5.25" Rodime 20meg hard drive. 65ms seek time.
If I've done my math right, that's $50,432 per gig.
Wow, this is amazing if you've been around for a while.
My first hard drive was 105MB (that's mega, not giga) and cost $600. Of course, that included the SCSI interface for the Atari ST I was hooking it to.
The big question is where the lower-capacity drives are going. It seems like a decent drive always costs about $100 - and the amount you get for your $100 keeps increasing - but where are all of the 40GB drives that should be floating around for $40 apiece?
It's Slashdot's evil twin... SlashNOT
Did anyone actually go look at the drive listed? It's a 5400 rpm drive. My grandma can remember information faster than that.
Producer: NEXT!!
Ralph Wiggum: Chicken necks
Well yes, the prices have dropped immensly indeed - however it might be worth considering that the basic concept of physical storage has not changed a bit. We are able to squeeze more bits into each square millimeter, but access speed has maybe changed by a factor of 50 or so (I'm guessing here, so please correct me). At the same time, processor speeds have aptly doubled in speed every 18 months or so.
I do appreciate cheap mass storage on my desktop, don't get me wrong, but I really long for things like static memory or holographic storage devices. And the use of spinning copper disks is not exactly power efficient either - so on the laptop front, new storage technologies could make a big difference.
at MicroCenter, for about a month already. Other than that - yes, it is an important milestone. I'm still waiting for another one: Solid State Memory, Compact Flash format (as the least expensive) - 1GB for $100. Any takes when it happens? So far the best price I've been seeing (also at MicroCenter) is 512MB CF card for about $160 (after rebates).
I'm pretty sure that this is the second time this has happened. The first time it was the 80G drives for under $80. However, that was back when Pricewatch didn't include shipping in the price.
What's even more interesting is when the best $/byte drive changes to a higher capacity. Currently you pay a big premium for your storage if you go with something larger than 120GB. With the recent addition of 250G drives, it might not be long before 160G drives take over the best price per byte spot.
And
1 TB = 1 GB * 1000
There's no math like slashdot math.
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
Attention: Please Stand Up, Power Computer Down and Walk Away. Thank You.
Even if you ripped DVD's into VOB's ... you'd still need to rip over 100 to justify even 1 TB, and who the hell rips to just vob, that's like ripping to wav with a CD, you just don't do it.
Even with 4.7 gig DVD Burners, the days of multi terrabyte storage systems for the home is a little further off. Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space (like a TiVO that can record 100 channels at the same time??)
Lets face it, the mp3 and other multimedia files has justified multi gig harddrives. Plus games that take up 600 megs a pop aren't exactly hurting the old cause. There's going to need to be justification for multi TB drives if they ever want to sell, well ... duh :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
More and more we are seeing that dependability, reliability, and faster access times are paramount to overall storage capacity of hard disk drives.
Is a 100GB hard drive even worth $100.00 if it suddently stops spinning or the disk access arm breaks off after two years of use?
I do appreciate the storage capacities going higher as time progresses, but I do not appreciate the craftsmanship decreasing at such a rapid rate that warranties are now down to a year for your typical drive rather than 10 years as it should be.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Now, what to do with all my 120K to 60 gig hd's?
Personal Strap-On Aircraft for Auction on eBay Strap on?
Four months ago I bought a 80GB 7200 RPM UDMA Western Digital drive at Best Buy. It was $109 purchase price, but came with a $10 instant rebate and a $25 mail in rebate. I received the rebate check about a month later, bringing the purchase price to $74 plus tax. I have seen similar deals (though not quite as good) since then.
Has anybody out there strapped 10 together for home pc use? A $1000 terabyte isn't too bad. I'm just curious about performance, feasibility, etc.
New Scientist just ran an article talking about how bacterial cells can carry a message encoded in DNA, and how this message can survive multiple generations without being changed.
Apply this technique to human cells
The first hard drive I bought cost me $500.
It was a 10 MByte (yes, that's mega) Seagate. Full height 5 1/4 (hint, a CD drive is half height).
I partitioned it into 4 drives:
C: 1M - DOS (V 2.0 !)
D: 4M - Applications
E: 4M - Data
F: 1M - Testing
Mind you after struggling with two 5 1/4 floppy drives, this was heaven.
I still have it, after all, where could I possibly sell it?
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
Now if you include the ratio of hard-drive failures into the equasion, wouldn't the cost be about $1.15 per gigabyte?
With fatwallet I was able to get a 40x lite-on cdrw and a maxtor 80 gig hard drive for $41 after all my rebates came back.
Retail stores are a very good place for HD's. You will often find BestBuy/CompUSA/Staples/CircuitCity/OfficeMax etc will have lower prices on HD's then what is at pricewatch, local computer stores, and even regional computer expos. More then likely you get a retail drive in a box with full warranty (mainly 1 year now) and maybe even a UDMA cable and 5.25 adapters. Most mail ordered I've seen are OEM and 30 days at best. CDRW's are the same way.
Sometimes you may have to deal with a rebate to get the good deal but at least one of the above retailers has one good deal a week. Not sure if SalesCircular covers all areas of the US but it is a good place to scope out retailers sale prices for a week.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
In 1986 I bought an "HD 20 SC" for my Mac Plus for $1,195.
God you young kids don't know how lucky you are to avoid the dark ages! :)
every man and woman can travel.........by horseless carriage!!
Bzzzt.
You're right that TB is TereByte. However, a TB is the next step up from GB, not the other way around.
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
TB=2^40 or 10^12
PB=2^50 or 10^15
EB=2^60 or 10^18
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yeah, but by then, Super Windows XP Pro Ultimate Championship Edition will be out, will have backwards compatibility to all prior 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, and 128-bit architectures, take 8 solar days to load, require 800 terabytes to install, and the neuro-holographic interface will crash regularly, wiping out more data than a human being can process in a lifetime, and throwing people into neural shock. You'll die, but it will be illegal to have any negative feelings towards the occasion, because of the Digital Oblivion Mind-Control Act.
Linux, of course, will still be around and install fine, but no one will care, because they get an extra 7 updates per second playing the Windows version of Quake 82, so it will still be considered a 'toy' OS.
Sometimes I scare myself...
--Dan
... Intel and AMD have finally smashed through that 1GHz barrier. Film at 11.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
That's great and all that they have disk space down to $1/GB, but what about some performance?
... but what are you going to get for that money ... probably a four banger ...
... but lets get real. If you have THAT much data, you're going to use the REAL thing.
...
This is like saying you can buy a new car for less than $10k
Now when they get SCSI drives into that lower price range, that will be something to celebrate!
Besides, who is really going to run a database that requires that much disk space (120 GB) on an IDE drive??? yes, I know you could use IDE RAID
Sorry to be the party pooper, but I think the "celebration" is a bit premature
Just my $0.02
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
I was cleaning out some storage boxes over the holidays and found a Micropolis 1.6 GB drive that I paid $1600 for back in 1989 or so. About all it's good for now is a doorstop. :[ Is there anything that depreciates in "value" ($-wise, that is) more than computer hardware?
I was just going to comment on your $500.00 price tag for a 10 Meg hard drive of the days of old... but someone else beat me to it but on a Big Hardware platform. When you actually talk about the PC business..when I started back in the Osbourne and Kaypro PC days when the first 10 Meg hard drive came out it was $5995. I still have the old magazines with these old ads. And us DSDD Floppy people thought that there was no way we could ever use 10 Megs.. Now look at us!!
I would rather spend my money in
$30 dollar increment. $120 is too
hard for me to come up with and I don't
really need the 120 GB. 10 GB would
be fine.
Now that's the way to go! Get rid of the rapidly spinning disk of alluminum. Get rid of the microscopic magnetic domains on some ferric material that softens with old age. Solid state memory worries me a bit. Now you are at the point that a sub-atomic particle can make a 0 into a 1. Think of storage on silicon like the QC steps in the manufacturing of LCD displays. A few bad bits don't make a bad chip. Just map them out as unusable and move along. A memory storage device the size of a wafer would have gigabytes of capacity (be a little pricey at first). You could embed the controller on the wafer, cover the thing over with some buckeyball carbon to make it harder than snot.
Tisha Hayes
Attached was a note from the person who built the computer for them, saying something to the effect of "This is more storage space than you will ever need."
I imagine that at the time, 40 MB of storage was friggin' huge.
That's why the two 120GB drives in my server are mirrored. Nothing sucks more than having your main data drive fail.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I now have 10x the HD capacity that I can afford to back up (DLTs are still insanely expensive) and the access and transfer speeds haven't changed in years.
How about an 80 Gig drive that lasts 5 years and can transfer at about 1 Gig per second that costs $200. THAT I would buy.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I was looking at 80gig hard drives a couple of months ago, and I noticed that they were around 80$.
http://phreakinb.com
If I've done my math right, M$ stands to gain $103,079,215,104USD in royalties every time someone buys one... according to this.
Yes, it's great, isn't it? Even a cheapskate like me can afford a huge drive now. I vividly recall back when I was able to find a Miniscribe 3650, 40mb, for $400. Wow! Nowadays, anything less than 40gb isn't worth looking at.
:) Goddess, the fun of shopping for a controller card that could support a 1:1 interleave, and fine-tuning the system's skew factor to really max out performance. Even better, grab an RLL controller, and turn the 40mb into 60! Way cool :)
:)
We stuffed that 3650 in Igloo, running Microport Unix., and went to town
Ahh, the fun times back then
Lemon curry?
Who needs storage?
Somebody wake me up when Memory is $1/Gig. now there's something to cause a hooplah over.
**rolls over and falls asleep again**
Rebates are obnoxious. You have to process extra paperwork. You have to wait to get your money back. You have to pay sales tax on the full price.
On the other hand, you can use rebates along with price matching policies to get some great deals. I keep hearing of stories of people who see a drive advertised by, say, Microcenter with no rebate, and get Best Buy to match the price while still being able to claim the store rebate.
I used to own a computer store in downtown L.A. (1986) and we were selling 20mb Seagates with controller for 349.00 and I think we were making about 50.00 or so in profit. Debug was the tool that we used. g=c800:5 I think that was the code that was used on the old Western Digital controllers actually.
And just for people who don't know, PB = petabyte, and eb = exabyte.
This would be even better news if it related to the smaller hard drives. I would love to be able to spend $10 for a 10 gig drive, or $40 for a 40 gig drive.
I have no use for super huge drives, but super cheap drives would always come in handy.
So when do the CPUs come out at a $1/GHz? :)
Guess we can be glad they are not $1/Mhz. But I remember working on 8MHz machines too so maybe then it would have been ok.
1 terabyte = 1024 megabyte
Did you know?
bit - nibble - byte - kilobit - kilobyte - megabit - megabyte - gigabyte - terabyte - petabyte - exabyte - zettabyte - yottabyte
(I googled this up)
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Wait a couple years. Do you really want a huge drive with only 5400 RPMs?
Hacking the Network
Since everyone else is giving away their age by telling how big their first drive was and how much it cost, so will I. I'll never forget it...
10MB Techmar with a serial interface - $2000. This was ~1984 and I was damn glad to have it!
..is that you just bought it last year.
there are no cheap 120GB backup systems yet. I asked our IT guy at work what he said, "well, just buy another hard drive and back it up with that."
I dunno, I feel much better with tape. So, this begs a bigger issue: with the cost and corner cutting going into todays hard drives, how safe are your gobs of music and video files? And what do u do to keep that info safe?
Why the hell does the subject change from "re: yeah great" to April Fools right before my eyes?!?
Anyway.....Recent hard drives have had a few bad runs. The IBM DeskStars, the Fujitsu recall. In one 24 month period, I went through 6 drives myself. I think 3 or 4 were IBM, one was a Seagate. I got bit by the Deskstar bug ferociously.
On black Friday I bought a 30GB Maxtor for $29 (!) after rebate.
It wasn't all that long ago (early 90's) that hard drives were a still a dollar a megabyte.
MOD PARENT UP +1 MORE WORTH READING THAN THE CRAPPY ARTICLE.
lameness filter encountered, please append random crap to the bottem of your post.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Drives I own made from 1992-1997: 6
Number of those that went bad: 2
Drives I own made from 1998-2002: 4 Number of those that went bad: 2*
* - a 3rd developed a chunk of bad sectors but still works fine
My dick is older than your dick. I remember the days before I had pubic hair!
The day after thanksgiving, A buncha friends and I stood in line for 3 hours at 4AM to each get an 80 Gigger for $50 (and they threw in an extra 256MB stick).
Best Buy Rules.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
They came back up but the point is, the event
long since came and went.
I have to say that single hdd for cheap is cool, but not as impressive in the price drop on arrays, etc. :) ]
I recently got a 10KRPM [10 drives] 40GB Rack mount ultra wide scsi 2 array with hot swap and a 32mb cache for $40. I thought this was an insane deal, this thing cost thousands new, but then I looked at ebay and it is more or less in the same price range as other similar systems - that, imho is the most impressive [except perhaps for the 0 frames dropped while recording video
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I ordered a huge 80MB hard drive back in 1988 with SCSI interface and 4MB RAM. It plugged into my Amiga 500's expansion slot and was a mere $1000 US. I could not fill that puppy up no matter how much stuff I downloaded with my 9600bps modem. Ah, those were the days.
The system would make a great doorstop today!
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
Well at a user group that I frequent the running joke is about $175-200.00 for a internal HD. Doesnt matter when in time or size of drives get it always $175-200.00, starting from the mid-1990's.
As prices of everything else falls one thing is certain is HD prices will remain constant.
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
and how do you propose backing up reliably 1 terrabyte of data ?, hard drives fail all the time, could you even contemplate losing your entire life's music collection or entire video collection cos the drive failed ? what about in years to come when you might have generations of your families data on disk
plus with all this reliance on magnetic based media is just an accident waiting to happen, you do realise that if one EMR pulse from the sun (or even a EMP weapon) ever reaches Earth were back to square 1, sure us as humans can survive the magnetic dose of energy but all our data/research is gone forever all cos we chose to store our knowledge on a magnet.
the saying "never put all your eggs in one basket" comes to mind
we really need to focus on developing a cheap non-magnetic based reliable storage medium instead of storing such massive amounts of data/work on such a fragile medium as a block of mechanically controlled magnetic iron.
paper at times has a lot going for it even today , do you think your hard drive or data will still be usable or around in 1000 years or even 50 for that matter ?
At $1/Gig, you can have 240 GB of speedy (45 MB/sec), death-resistant (mirrored) storage for $500. That should make any pr0n user, scientist, or geek happy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Computer Renaissance.
They offered an 8GB drive for $60 while Best Buy offered an 80GB drive for $79.95.
Renaissance my ass. More like the dark ages!
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I just recently bought myself a 6 120GB drive array, for $123 apiece. That's two months of divx :)
sic transit gloria mundi
Ferro-magnetic and paper? You all had it easy. We did our data storage with sticks and stones. Laid one after the other. Error checking was a pain, and heaven help you if you had to defrag the whole mess.
I don't see how people can say that performance hasn't increased with larger capacities. Sequential transfer rate inherently increases with increased areal density, and access times haven't increased. All this adds up to a faster drive.
That said, I'll be passing up on this great value for a 73gig Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 for a whopping $700. I've had enough of the crashes and waiting with IDE that I have decided to go SCSI, even though it does cost about 10x as much.
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB
/. article now so you can claim FIRST!
Moore's law: Doubles every 18 months.
MB to TB = 1024 times = 2^10
10x18 months = 15 years.
Of course you've got inflation to factor in... What's $100 today will probably be closer to $200-$300 then (though it will still feel like $100 does now). So that probably adds another 18 months or so.
So, $1/TB - should be on shelves just before 2020. Time to file that
Yes, I know Moore's law is technically about silicon. Yes, I know the predictions of doom. Equally, it seems to hold largely true for most aspects of computing and, for all a given tech hits its limits, a replacement tech always seems to turn up.
Actually, scan all of em. say at 50 megs each (thats what I do. That's 20 photos per gig, or 200 per 10 gig, or 2000 per 100 gig.....
Oh, btw, I took 3600 photographs in 1 month while working.
Thats Why. And thats not even talking redundant storage.
"...Make love to her, and then insert the FireWire cable to watch your movies!"
Not when that "time of the month" comes, you wont!
It is simple
1) Get 120 people together (I'd say 120 friends
2) Cut the drive platters into one gig portions
3) Take home 1 gig for a buck
(I'm being silly too)
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Flash memory will be much much better when it gets down to ~$100 for 1gb.
So for ~$200 you have enough space for 1 full length SVCD format movie on a matchbox sized card.
With discounts, the price has been that low for a little while.
:)
Best Buy had 7200 RPM 120 gig Maxtor drives for ~$100 just last month. Of course it was mis-priced, but I still got one while they were out there.
..and of course by then the warranty will be one month too.
Probably less tongue in cheek than I'd like that prediction to be.
My first hard drive was a 20MB drive for my Amiga. It came with a controller. I picked it up at an auction for around $160.
Then in my PC days I remember going ohh and ahh when prices hit $1/MB.
The thing that gets me is all the $$ I forked out for this stuff back in the day. If I had just used that money to buy shares in Microsoft I could be buying terabyte hard drives by now.
if you could pick up a 40GB drive for $40, or a 20GB for $20, without having to fool with rebates. As it is, the cost of hard drives seems to be staying at around $100, almost regardless of capacity, limiting you in just how cheap a system you can build. Right now the most expensive item in a bottom feeder system is the HD. On Newegg you can build a minimal Duron system for:
20GB HD: $69
All-in-one mobo: $51
CPU: $31
Case: $28
128MB SDRAM: $22
CD-ROM: $19
Floppy: $8
Total: $228
If that 20GB drive were $20 instead, that would be only $179. Of course, there are reasons why the drive isn't $20, I'm just lamenting.
Working there is its own punishment. :P
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
Which also costs $1/TB.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
In this paper, dates were predicted for a megabyte per buck, a gigabyte per buck, and a terabyte per buck. I recall that this 1980 paper predicted a gigabyte per buck in 1999; pretty close!
Jonathan V. Post, "Quintillabit: Parameters of a Hyperlarge Database", Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Very Large Databases,
Montreal, Canada, 1-3 October 1980
By the way, Post named in this article the "Shannon" = 1 mole of bits = 6.02 x 10^23 bits.
Now THAT's a big memory!
Before that it was floppies, before that I used a reliable old tape drive carefully marking the counters where each program started.
Lots of DVDRs!!!!!!
If your data means that much to you, BURN IT onto disk!!!!
My $0.02 cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Many venders with lowest prices on PriceWatch, provide either bad or fraudulent service. Choose a reputable site with credentials (newegg.com) or your local retailer to get your prices and merchandise. The best place to check out a online business is various consumer review sites by typing in the company's name into Google (sample link to review of vender w/the $120 price on the HD). Pay particular attention to the most recent comments when reviewing a company.
Unless someone comes out with more justification for that much space (like a TiVO that can record 100 channels at the same time??)
What if you could go online and look up every TV show ever broadcast?
Yup, I try to use nothing but Maxtor hard drives. Everone I've seen running Seagate and other high end drives have all had great problems with them. But I've never had a Maxtor hard drive die. I still have my old 100mb Maxtor from ooooh, years back, and it works fine. Fair enough it's not in my machine but it works all the same! I currently have a Western Digital 30gb in along with my Maxtor 20gb, and the WD seems to have survived so far, but it's not actually my drive, i'm just using it til i go out and buy a Maxtor 120gb. So as far as personal experience goes, i do recommend Maxtor.
... happened not too long ago. I sold some old gear to my inlaws, who had been using my wife's computer from college (from just 2 years earlier). I had to swap out the hard drive from their old computer, a computer that was built in '97, so they could keep their old data. The strangest thing about it was that it had a 5 1/4"-wide hard drive! I thought the industry had standardized on 3 1/2" drives by that point (all the ones I bought during that time frame were 3 1/2".
To this day, that 5 1/4", 10 gig hard drive is still churning away, happily running Windows 98.
Seriously, I have a 30GB drive now, and I have NEVER gone over 10GB with WinXP and all the greatest and latest games installed. What need do I have for a 120GB drive? I dont, I would love to buy another drive for a simple Linux install, but no way am I going to use 120GB.. 10GB is far more than enough for it.. Where can I get a 10GB drive for 5 bux?
Does anybody know of anyone that actually needs these abr.'s???
If so, please post the link to their FTP site
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
I can remember $1/MB drives...I feel old...
I remember when mass storaging dipping below $1 per megabyte was a Big Deal
You can get 120G drive 5400 RPM for under $80
OK. Buck a gig. I only need 4-6 GB for my clunker no-X web/mail server. Woo has a HDD for $5? The best I can get on ebay is 10GB for $30.
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
...to, oh lessay 1994-95...
"Who would ever need storage at $1/GB? Heck, even if you copy Wolfenstein 3d and DOOM, you've STILL got space to spare. And with CD burners on the horizon, well that's over half/gig of space right there. You can already fit the whole flipping World Book onto just _one_!"
History doth repeat itself...
Not tyrin to mock ya or anything. Just pointing out, in 10 years (prolly less) you'll look back on the question and laaaaaugh....
~~~
"The slave thinks he is released from bondage, only to find a stronger set of chains" - NIN
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
It wasn't long ago that blank CDs cost that much, and many alternate backup mediums still cost a lot more than that. If you have a lot of data to backup, get yourself a swappable drive bay and a stack of drives. You've got a dirt cheap (and space-efficient!) terabyte of backups.
Neat.
Josh Woodward
...that's great - until you need to backup!
Why is it that storage seems to be so outpacing backup technology at the moment? Why, it seems that the cheapest reliable, efficiant backup at the momen is simply to duplicate the drive - buy two (or more!) of them..
...we only 'ad one register. And that were t'program counter.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Anyone have a guess when we will see high-transfer-rate solid state drives in the $1000/GB range?
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
All drives eventually fail.
Cheap drives crash suddenly and cant be recovered.
I want a drive that will keep trying even when developing read errors.
IBM's are great. The media and heads last even with damage. The firmware doesn't give-up if it can't come-ready on the first try. Last week I sector copied a 46gb IBM... it was clicking and retrying for a solid week. But it kept going and I got 90% of the customers data.
You can put a new set of heads in an IBM and usually it will come ready. The others - forget it.
Those IBM's take a lick'n and keep on tick'n
Wow, Maxtor make 300GB drives, when did that happen.
What is the end size projection of hard disks for the end of the year?
You're a bit late, unless you're soley going by mail-order drives / only on pricewatch.
Three months ago I purchased a 100GB drive for $95 at Fry's. (It's happily installed in my SPARC Blade at the moment.)
But you WILL be dealing with a mail-in rebate; in fact its quite likely that it will be a multiple mail-in rebate.
Also, you won't get as much buffering space for the ones that are on super sale.
But if you are diligent in sending out those rebate offers CompUsa can be a great place!
(and a thousand times better than those crappy OEM resellers like a-z computers! BLECH!)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I remember buying a 10MB 2 bay high MFM hard drive which cost $10 [Canadian], exactly 10 years ago. I got it to replace a 170MB drive that had just died, but my Dad later repaired.
I wonder if I can get 20 one GB drives for $20US. I'd buy those now. One drive that large though, just doesn't make sense to me. Why not just buy a DVD burner?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
There's a bit of a price difference, as well :-) In about 1984, we'd paid about $35000 for four RM05 drives, which gave us 1GB of total drive capacity, and removable 250MB disk packs were about $1100. So that was $4/MB for the media, and $35/MB for the drives. I forget what tape drives cost, but 6250bpi 9-track tapes cost about $25 and held about 160MB of data, so they were the obvious backup medium.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I sometimes wonder if there's a correlation between p2p and hard drive technology.
Corn-fed middle-agers pretending they're old!!! Back in my day, we used mercury delay lines, and we LIKED it. Sure, the younger engineers and their tension-coiled torsional-wave nickel-wire delay lines, and their kids with their fancy ferro-magnetic cores and whirly, multiheaded drum memories stored more, but give me a long, vibrating trough full of toxic liquid metal any day.
Not to say it isn't a great leap for the /. crowd, I have about 90% utilization with 500 GB of storage at home. SHN and DIVX take up the bulk of my storage capacity. I know it sounds like "640k is enough for anybody," but the average desktop user does not need a 100 GB hard drive, even the casual P2P and multimedia user will not fill that up. Obviously 100GB will become a necessity with the 50GB minimum install of windows 2007.
I remember when 10 megs was $ 25,000 and
the future using holographic storage will
be $.20 (20 cents) a gigabyte !
GB=2^30 or 10^9 if you're a lying drive manufacturer
You know, it's been quite a while since I actually thought about this difference. Drives were much smaller then, so it wasn't so much. But now with the size drives we have today it really adds up. The difference between 2^30 and 10^9 is slightly more than 70MB. On a 200GB drive, you are talking about a 14GB difference. Thats as much space as I have in my current system (go ahead, laugh at me).
If manufacturers continue with this scheme, by the time we get to TB drives you will be getting almost 10% less than the stated capacity.
Good enough for digital audio workstations. mind you, your cache isn't going to be 8 megs like on the nicer drives.
But I'm talking about the CompUsa double mail-in rebate special. I know, cuz I got one and its serving on my home lan quite nicely. (actually, mine was 100gig, but it beat the $1 gig ratio)
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
..but remember, even RAID isn't a replacement for backups. RAID or no RAID, a virus or a misplaced rm command can still wipe your valuable data.
I am getting a kick out of all these..
Back in my day i pay $1,000 for a 100MB hard drive
Oh yeah that's nothing my company paid $15,000 for two 20MB hard drives the size of a dishwasher.
That's nothing, I paid....
I guess it the next generations version of:
I walked 10 miles in the snow to school, both ways. And I was happy dang it!
I still can't buy a 20gb for $20 or a 40gb for $40.
The only reason the 120gb is so cheap per gig right now is because it's the sweet spot. That's the size of hard-drive most enthusiasts/geeks are looking to get right now.
The 80gb drives are bottoming out in price, and the 20 - 60gb's are almost the exact same in price, having changed very little in the past half a year or so.
fakelag.networks
CD-RW's and CD-R's have been below a dollar per gigabyte for several years. Also, I've seen DVD-R's and DVD-RW's under a dollar a gigabyte.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
What percentage of personal computer users use more than 10GB of hard drive space? Seriously.
If a person isn't determined to use their computer for a PVR, a digital video workstation, or an international citizen tracking database, it might be better to spend the money for a top-notch SCSI hard drive of about 30 to 40 GB.
$250 buys a 36GB 10,000RPM Ultra 320 hard drive with a 1,200,000 hour MTBF and a five-year warranty. The extra price buys: faster seek times, less latency, higher bandwidth, longer drive life, a manufacturer that stands behind their product...and better peace of mind.
Why should a person jump through technically-complex hoops, such as IDE RAID, just to be comfortable with cheap and unreliable hard drives? A single high-performance hard drive coupled with a recovery plan in the slight chance it breaks could be a better plan. My idea of a recovery plan is: a known configuration that can be remade from OEM CD-ROMs plus personal data backups (e.g., CD-RW).
Computer components are so damn cheap anymore, that the money we would have spent on just the basics years ago can now go towards quality and reliability.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
According to techbargains.com, this weekend:
CompUSA - WD 100 GB 7200 RPM $79.99AR
-jc
Back when I had a DecMate II, I spent a fortune ($1120) for a whopping 4MB hard disk!!! I was convinced that that was all I WOULD EVERY NEED. 4 MILLION BYTES?!? That's like 32 MILLION ones and zeros! Who would every fill up THAT MUCH SPACE? It's INCONCIEVABLE!
Two years earlier, I was using a DecMate, which only had two 8" floppy drives (RX02, for you DECies out there). I remember being completely amazed that the operating system required the use of both drives. Then I sprung for an analog coupler to call into the mainframe. At 180 bps, I was travelling faster than God himself could go.
God am I old or what? Does anyone but me remember playing Moria on a VAX?
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
Three separate mail-in rebates on a pack of CD-Rs??!?! WTF?
What these companies are doing is requiring you to give them 2-3 month loans, interest free, in return for a good price on their merchandise.
What I wouldn't give for a time machine. Just the idea of packing a couple of crates of today's hardware off to the past nakes me yearn for a way to leverage it. But then again, I would just go all the way back to Newton and show him Einstein's equations and try to bootstrap this century even further.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
big deal I sold 10mb Micropolis and CDC drives for real profit! 1500.00+ and 5mb fixed with 5mb cartridge drives for even more!!!
Heck, I just found out the 2 Ampex (?) 50mb washing machines I turned into welding carts are worth a couple of grand a piece.
Waaaaaaaa.....
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
This is a great deal of storage, so much that it is hard to comprehend. To put it into perspective, let's say that somebody wanted to keep a 1K byte file on every US citizen. You could store that online for under $500 at these rates.
But by then, the operating system will take 100 TB.
How about meta moderating properly and fixing the moderator problem?
I used to think it was lying to say a GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, but then I realized that Giga was 10^9 long before digital computers existed. The computer industry (incorrectly) used the prefix Giga to mean 2^30. Giga properly and historically does mean 10^9 though. When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.
-*-*--*-*--*-*--*-*-
On sale now. Maxtor 60 GB 7200 rpm at CompUsa for 69.99
-*-*--*-*--*-*--*-*-
I placed an order and they required me to fax a photocopy of my driver's license and credit card over because I was shipping to my work address with my personal credit card.
Two days later, they informed me that they lost that and asked me to fax again, then acknowledged that they had the fax.
A week and a half later, when I inquired about the order, they said that they suspected me of fraud for shipping to an address other than the billing one. After getting that all straightened out yet again, nothing happened for a week. I checked in again, and the order had been cancelled.
Since the order was closed according to their Yahoo shopping record, I purchased elsewhere, only to have the newegg.com order show up a week later. When I turned it around for a refund, they then tried to charge me a restocking fee!
It has certainly occurred to me. The problem is, where do I find drives (or parts in general) which cost twice as much, but last three times longer? Or 50% more, but last 75% longer?
The manufacturers seem compete ONLY on price, until you get into the unix workstation price range. It seems we have the choice of kmart specials or gold-plated and priced to match.
Since I can still back up each single project on a single CD (actually, all of my projects, and /etc, and my ~/.files on a single CD), is it really worth my while to spend anything extra to increase the odds of that HD lasting that long from 90% to 99.9%? Maybe not. Maybe that's why the manufacturers compete only on price: quality suffices for most use, and RAID covers the few folks who need better quality on a PC.
A another thought is that I'll be wanting to replace my 30GB hard drive in another two years or so. It will have lasted about 4 to 5 years when it's replaced, and odds are that it will last that long.
My data and what-have-you seems to expand fast enough that I don't really need hard drives or computer hardware in general to last a full decade. I do still have a 10 year old laptop, but it's a toy today. It doesn't have an ethernet port, nor a modern modem, and no way to add either, so I can't even use it as a cheap router or xterm.
I suspect that if there was money to be made by making PC hardware that was significantly more reliable than the current standard, we'd see soemone filling that niche. The fact that none of the intensely competitive hard drive manufacturers are trying to fill that niche by selling specially inspected versions of their drives with extra warrenties suggests to me that we just don't want extra reliability enough to pay for it.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that the hard drive manufacturers ARE making those specially inspected, high-reliability, long warrenty versions. They put SCSI interfaces on them to mark them as better than consumer grade, and sell them for the 50% to 100% extra that the extra quality control costs. That matches up pretty well with the stories I hear about the relative quality and price of SCSI versus IDE.
See what I've been reading.
I've met a guy on IRC who did this about a year and a half ago with SCSI RAID. An interesting side note: he recorded the noise it makes it on startup and just those disks spinning up makes it sound like a jet engine.
I'm not as old as many of you (19) but I remember my first computer was an 80386 with a 250MB HDD. I have no clue what it cost (I was 7) but I never thought I would ever fill that thing up. Then, when I was about 12, I bought my first hard drive on my own. A 2.1GB Seagate (when 30GB drives were $20,000) for $220. That was heaven. Now, I have a 30GB internal and 45GB external on my laptop and I backup stuff on DVD's.
And what is all this, "How am I going to back up a TB?" Didn't you all read the post (I think it was on slashdot) about the 1.5TB DVDs coming out in 2010? Man, you have to pay attention more!
-SaNo
I bought a new 100 gig harddrive for $80 retail. Not a bad price at all.
There was a 120 gig hd for sale a few weeks ago at bestbuy for $60 after rebate.
The drives have been $1/gig with mail-in-rebates for some time now. (big stores, BestBuy / Frys ..etc).
But I loath MIRs!
May it is just me, but I could never get any rebates. It is some sort of 'missing proof of purchase'. Even though I stuffed every thing from the store receipt to those damn stickers in one envelope and mailed it.
So I felt like I was ripped-off and never tried mail-in-rebates since then. I always thought they were some sort of scam. They rely on you
- not mailing in the rebates (how many geeks do?)
- or able to refuse rebate because a sticker is slightly damaged!
Finally it is good news, that you can get a $1/gig without those MIRs..
nice.
LinuxLover
Does anyone out there actually run a RAID array as their main drive? I've only recently become aware of the software RAID capabilities in OS X, and wondered what kind of a speed boost you could get by simply buying 2-3 cheap (price-wise) drives and striping them. Or is this path fraught with peril?
Last time I striped anything RAID was back in 97, with big-assed AVID setups.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
The doc in Back to the Future was a pretty famous Emmitt, but not Emmitt Smith. Different guy entirely :)
Dr. Emmitt Brown is the name you're looking for.
Wait, the OS that *can't* play Quake 82 will be considered the "toy OS"? Huh?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
*Risks the wrath of the moderators by going off topic to release a bee from a bonnet*
:)
Finally! Someone else notices the problem!
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I'm sure floppy disks aren't as reliable as they used to be. I can remember carting 3.5" disks around the place for *ages* before they died out... now it seems that if you drop one of the things then it will become unusable.
So, who is behind it? Is it the manufacturers of the floppy drives, or the manufacturers of the floppy disks? Have Iomega secretly bought out every single one of the floppy disk manufacturers?
Oh well, it gives an opportunity for even young people to state 'They don't make them like they used to'
' Ore stabit fortis a fine placet ore stat '
- found on a park bench
I assume you're talking about software RAID since you're building RAIDs from cheap IDE drives. Software RAID is a cheap and easy way to protect your data, but if you're looking for availability, pricier SCSI RAID cards and such are the only way to go.
I use Linux Software RAID on my web server, and had a hard drive crash just last week. All the data was protected on the good drive; however, when the IDE drive failed, the entire system crashed with it. And since the BIOS was set to boot from the bad disk, simply rebooting it didn't fix the problem. I had to manually go into the BIOS to get it to boot from the good disk.
I still plan to use IDE RAID, because it's a great way to cheaply back up my data. However, if you're looking for uptime and reliability, stay away from cheap IDE drives.
When I was a kid, one day my father took me by the office on Saturday because he had to do something. I don't know how much data was in the hard drive, but it was the size of a refrigerator. You had to wait a few minutes after turning it on so the disk could "spin up" and you were supposed to watch it after you turned it off to make sure it "spun down" properly. Either there was a lot of angular momentim in there, or the motor was really weak. All the computer equipment was Wang. They used to joke about "playing with the Wang". Ahhh... the days before sexual harassment suits.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
When Doc Smith was gaping about 1.21 Gigawatts, he wasn't talking 1.21 * 2^30, he meant 1,210,000,000 watts.
Actually he said "Jiggawatts", quite funny now that we use giga all the time, but back in the mid 80's I guess giga- was used as much as exa- is now.
Hmm, cable connecter was about 1 foot long. At 88mph, total maximum contact time (Assuming the car didnt vanish half way through the connection - if it did less power was needed) was less then 1/100th of a second. Total power used by the car was therefore 1.21*10^9/10^2 - 12.1MJ. (1 watt is a measure of power, not energy - 1 joule per second)
With a massive capacitor you could charge the delorian off five ten-millionths of a gram of antimatter (combined with an equal ammount of matter). More importantly you could charge the delorian in a UK power socket (13A, 240V, or just over 3.1KJ/s) in less then 7 minutes.
The delorian must have needed the power all at once (understandable), and didnt have any way of storing that much charge (doubtful).
BTW 1.21GW is a lot of power to continuosly put out.
Marty was back in 1955 for a week. Even a trickle charge of 60W (1 light bulb) for the entire week would have provided 36MJ, enought to power the delorian for 1/30th of a second - 3 times longer than needed.
Incidently, in 1999, the U.S.A produced over 13 million TerraJoules in electricty - enough to power the delorian for over 300 years.
Moreover, there's only one drive (a Samsung 120G) that's at this $1/G price point. Every drive with a larger or smaller capacity is more than $1/G.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
When Radio Shack first released the Model 16 (one of the first 'mass-market' Unix (Zenix) boxes), their 8MB hard disk (with a 10" platter) cost something like $6000. That's why I got hired by one person who wanted to know if I could get a usable system to boot with two 1M (8") floppy disks instead of a hard disk.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Falling prices is always a nice thing for consumers, but look out - quality is suffering, and companies like Maxtor have been accused of "stuffing the channel" to move more product.
These low prices are a result of cut-throat competition akin to that in the "0% financing" car industry -- the manufacturers aren't profiting, so there won't be very good support down the line. Look at IBM - they sold their (previously crappy) hard drive line to Hitachi. Additionally, virtually all of the IDE/ATA drive manufacturers have cut their warranties to 1 year OR LESS!
I personally had an 80 GB IBM deskstar die in December (3 months after manufacture). It cost just over $3,000 to get the thing recovered by a data recovery shop (the thing wouldn't power up, so no, Norton Utilities was not an option).
HOWEVER - now that big drives are so cheap, look for (and implement if you can afford it) IDE RAID-1 configurations (mirroring) to save money and increase reliability.
Yet tape drives are still around $30/GB! Who cares about big monster drives if you can't backup the data.
Hard drives still fail, you know.
-ted
Well, one of my passions is to remove the earth magnets from old SCSI disks, they have soo many uses! :-)
Pricewatch is nice, but next to useless without or similar methods of checking out resellers.
Always remember to check out anyone offering the "best" prices, especially their history with returns.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah, I think I was thinking of Lost in Space, which is about where I am today.
The pain, the pain!
You know that sorting algorithms won't get better than O(NlgN) and searching algorithms won't get any better than O(lgN).
And access times of HDs haven't improved much in the last 10 years (bulk transfer has, though).
I know CPU's are now much faster... but also software developers became sloppier (think of the first C compiler running in a 4Kbyte RAM machine).
So... what all this means?
Probably we'll just have to wait longer...
I know... maybe I'm worring too much...
We agonized over whether to go for a 40 or 80 MB disk for about a week, then finally went with the 80 in case we ordered lots of Fred Fish disks. We didn't, so in the 10 years that Amiga 500 was in service, we managed to fill about 30 MB of it, with DeluxePaintIII animations, hundreds of assembly programs, Unicalc spreadsheets, and even a few BASIC programs. We had the disk in a Dataflyer IDE controller, which also held our huge upgrade of 2 MB of fast RAM, on 80-pin 1x8 SIMMs.
We modified an Amdek Color-I monitor and built a custom cable to drive it with the digital RGB output of the Amiga. The computer is gone, but the monitor lives on, with a PSOne[1] connected to its analog input. We still play games with mono sound.
[1] Who would name a product something that looks like it should be pronounced "piss on"?
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
You're right that things other than raw capacity affect hard drive prices, but my experiences so far with Computer Rennaisance have always left me amazed at how high their prices are, and closer to the 10X price difference the parent post to yours mentioned.
Once in a while, there's been something I wanted, and I let convenience win (I'm there in the store, and CompUSA doesn't seem to carry laptop-sized hard drives, and I need it RIGHT NOW TODAY), but usually, I've been disgusted by the prices and politely left. Prices on their used stuff, (sometimes quite beat-up seeming) are often no better (especially counting discounts) than the new, much-better counterpart products you might get at any large computer retailer or office store of the CompUSA / Best Buy / OfficeMax etc variety. In addition, I've found the sales guys there, while some of them are nice enough, are often ignorant of the stuff they're selling, and will happily deny that their prices are in any way odd. Also, the CR stores (three in total) where I've ever been for any reason have been badly organized; two of them could not tell me over the phone whether they had what I needed, and said I'd have to come in; it turns out that the first of them *did* have what I wanted (a laptop drive), but "misspoke" when telling me the price; after driving 1/2 hour, the price had jumped $50. Did I buy it? Yes (had to replace a crashed drive), but not happily.
(Note that I've only been in a few of these places, in Maryland and Tennesee -- maybe some CR locations are much better. I hope so -- it seems like they brand the *name*, and individual stores are themselves responsible for how good / mediocre they actually are. It *should* surprise everyone that the individual store's websites are so spotty.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Now that beowulf clusters are commonplace, heck even my 8-year old kid sister has a sweet little 50000-noder in her bedroom, isn't this just too little and too late?
For instance, a billion XTs sporting a 720kB floppy each can roundly trounce these 120GB hard disks and can be had for a lot less than $120!!
It's a little know fact that the average American household throws away over a thousand PC XTs every week! This resource can surely be leveraged for the good of our fine country. God bless America!
I know IDE RAID doesn't work all that well, but will serial ATA RAID be a viable alternative to SCSI RAID?
When I started high school, they got the first student-usable computer in Texas. It was three feet tall, two feet wide and deep, had 256 BYTES of volatile memory, and had a paper-tape storage device.
Yes, paper. Inch-wide paper tape, in folds, with a punch write head and an optical reader. You programmed the machine with eight switches and a push button (up, down, up, up, down, down, up, up, ENTER).
Just six years later, a friend of mine had an Apple II with 64K of RAM (the "language card"), color display, and *two* 5 1/4 floppy drives. Other Comp Sci students used to come over just to see this monster machine, which was being used to write some silly little computer game called "Ultima."
Seriously though, the reliability of these cheap high capacity drives suck.
The recent reduction in warranty length should have proven that to most anyone.
Where are the smaller, and more reliable ones, being sold for these costs?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So if I'm not entirely wrong, this should make full data retention of the communications data of everyone possible -- except, perhaps, the storage room problem.
--
How much output did you produce today?
Operating systems and applications seem to scale to the size of the hard drives, so does it really matter....
WD1200JB or if you reall need space WD2000JBzs p?DriveID=3 8
http://www.wdc.com/products/products.a
Besides the obvious - video/pictures/music
Surely this should open up some new opportunities for someone who can figure out what to do with all that space.
Any ideas?
I don't need a 120G drive, 20G is plenty-- so when can I buy one for $20?... -- Kazoo
Got a Micro-Center near you? Check here
http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~jrm21/images/platter- lowres.jpg
I put a US one dollar bill on the display case for size comparison ;)
There is also a clipping from a newspaper of the time saying how Stanford was suing over warranty issues (such has high unavailability) but it doesn't say what the outcome was...
we didn't have none of those fancy shmancy disk drives, we were issued a slab of granite and a chisel each day and we damn well liked it!
If we made a mistake, we had our trusty all-weather c-ment and a Mark14-Delta GI Putty Knife to cover it up before the beatings and lashing and tears and the screaming!
how do you setup logs to tell you if a hard-disk is about to fail?
ATA and SCSI hard disk drives use error correction coding to estimate how long each sector has to live; once it reaches a threshold, it will automatically remap the dying sector somewhere on a nearby track reserved for remapped sectors. Once the mechanism begins to remap an increasing number of bad sectors, you know your drive's going downhill. Good drives should let you query this statistic.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I've actually had very good luck with Maxtor and very bad luck with Western Digital. I had a 80MB Maxtor hard drive that lasted 10 years and I've had a 12GB one for about 3 years now thats still going strong. On the other hand, every hard drive I've ever had crash (be it mine or a friends') has been a western digital. I think they have gotten better in recent years though. It seemed that a particular 1GB WD model was especially notorious for crashing.
While a DVD may only be on the order of gigabytes, the raw video used to make that DVD is going to be on the order of hundreds of gigabytes, and what with Apple's push for iLife (iMovie3, iDVD3), I don't think there's any problems at all with sucking up 200gb in making a home movie masterpiece.
Now imagine when Apple releases the home consumer version of Shake (for compositing and SFX) or Logic Audio (for home music composing), and it's easy to imagine the need for more storage. The movies you make, the raw footage, the intermediate files, etc.
GPL Deconstructed
And no, I'm not going to regale you with tales of having to walk to school 22 miles in the snow, uphill both ways. I only had to walk about 1.5 miles, and it was fairly flat, though there was in fact snow.
"MiB" is a trademark for a film, toys based on the film, and video game programs based on the film.
"GiB" is what comes out after you've FrAgGeD somebody.
Will I retire or break 10K?
He's got a great point. Not about backing up 1TB (just double your cost and buy another disk for RAID mirroring), but about the possible widespread loss of information from EMP sources. We'd literally be in the stone age.
The only reason nobody is addressing the problem is that if you make sure that you personally have non-magnetic versions of your data, it won't matter unless the rest of the fricking world doesn't lose theirs and grind to a halt/panic/start looting the planet.
We'll get the Bureau of Printing and Engraving to print a 10**100 dollar bill and give it to Bill Gates. Except he won't be able to spend it because the rest of the money supply won't be large enough to make change for it.
Really
Expensive
Array of
Disks
This was a joke, right?
Are you sure that isn't the back plane to H. G. Well's time machine? The edges look pretty in that picture somehow.
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
the parity disk's content can be reconstructed from the content of all other drives.
OK, there's some debate as to when this point actually was, but whatever- close enough. I submitted this story because I just wanted it acknowledged that it has actually happened- I don't think it matters much if its off by a few weeks.
$1/GB. Wow.
Yeah....hard disks are really cheap now...but is the quality still up to par?
Watching warranties for disks is depressing as a lot of companies drop their previous 3 year warranties and replace them with 1 year and even 90 day warranties for hard disks.
For example, I have a Maxtor 80GB drive that has been replaced 3 times in the past 2 years. The only thing saving me is that, at least up until now, they have been resetting my 1 year warranty on that drive with each replacement. But I don't expect that to continue either.
And I have heard a lot of bad stories concerning 120 GB drives failing often also. I've talked to people that won't buy one without a good backup solution.
Also, hasn't the physical limits of space on the platters coming close to their theoretical maximum? There is going to come a time when reliability and actual physical space come crashing down...and they'll need to move to a new technology.
I don't give a fuck about space. I have an 80GB HD and it holds my entire music and photo collection as well as 2 full dev environments, MS Office, and every program I would conceivably use. And I still have 60GB free.
Could these HD makers start concentrating on SPEED please? How about upping that cache to 64MB, reducing seek times to 1ms avg, and throughput rates of 1GB/s? How much would it suck if all video card makers did was increase the amount of video memory year after year without improving performance?
Give us a 20GB HD that can boot XP in 5 seconds, not a 2TB HD that still takes 5 minutes to boot.
How giving metamoderation privileges to latecomers? :) at least the ones with non-negative carma??
It seems that it is going to be a long while till I am eligible... it's been more than a few months since I opened my account.
I have > 200GB of home DV. DV takes 12 - 17 GB per hour.
;) Now I just need the time to use FinalCutExpress to make the award winning 15 minutes of home video...
With a 2 year old, and all family living out of the area - we use lots of video.
And the sad thing is in the 200GB there is probably about 15 minutes of *good* footage.
In Germany, we've been very near 1 / GB last spring.. now drives are more expensive again with 60 GB drives going for around 100 .
I hope they come down in price again eventually, including the big drives (200+ GB)...
Slashdot. Yesterday's news...today! The ONLY reason I still come here is because the trolls and 'In Soviet Russia'. Gold. Solid gold that Soviet Russia joke is.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell, 1984
The edges look pretty in that picture somehow.
That's just where they had to color with the magic marker so as to bust the digital rights management.
I recall the first 10mb hard disk for the Mac, it was 1985 and the drive was a Paradise 10mb. If it was $500 i would have bought 10. However, it was $5,000 dollars - not $500.
You kids these days don't understand how easy you have it. Why, back in MY days...
I remember my first computer job at a Radio Shack computer center. Some guy had been begging his wife for months to let him buy a hard drive, and she finally let him. I think it was Christmas or something. It was $2,800 (US) and was the size of a mini-tower case laid down flat. I can't remember whether it was a 5 MB or a 10 MB drive.
This would have been... let me think... must 'a been the winter of '84/85... yep, them were the good old days, when floppies were 5 1/4 inches and women were grateful, or something like that.
And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth gets you modded -1 Troll
No more swapping floppies when you want to run a program *and* save something, or when you want to copy a file from one floppy to another.
Remember the BSA: "Don't copy that floppy"
That had to be the worst motto ever.
God is real unless declared integer.
I'm waiting until I see some storage device under 50 or so. We're getting larger and larger drives, but it's basically the same price, around 100 bucks. What I want is a 20GB drive for 20 USD, so that I can put a web kiosk for a decent price (or a jukebox). And I say it again: flash wont do....it's too expensive now.
You mean the folks with camcorders and kids and scrapbooks and home movies and DVD players?
:)
The ones who will film the baby's first step, or the violin recitals, or the choir performance on Christmas?
Who will make videos out of trips to the Bahamas, when they go skiing in Colorado, and visit the temples of Japan?
Who will then make 10 DVD-Rs of each of these events and spread them, like spam, to their next of kin?
And then put up accompanying photo albums online, with short writeups, and then send them via email, like spam, to their co-workers, best friends, and family?
Apple is betting on this market, at least
GPL Deconstructed
Cool. That is it. The big black band is the drive crash.
Lasers Controlled Games!
TB does not stand for Terrabyte, it stands
for Taco Bell!
I once used KDE1 on a 32MB system, and it run quite smoothly. One day I did some configuration and forgot to turn on swap. After typing startx, the system nearly thrashed to death, and it took me three minutes to exit KDE normally.
Yes, this is the headline of the year of course. The rapid advance of technology also leads to rapid commoditization of slightly older equipment. This means that as long as Moore's Law holds true, or at least holds up with slight modifications (already ammended once remember). Everything (at least everything technology related) will get cheaper forever.
By the, plasma TV's are down to $150, look here:
http://www.ezexpo.com/index.htm
I really will have to change my thinking soon. When i see '06, i think .30-06, which was designed in 1906. Now i have to deal with '06 being 3 years in the future... damn.
mechanicos ergo cogito
And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!
Was that before or after you clipped it onto the phone and manually dialed the number?
I'll be impressed when NZ gets $1/gb.. our 120gb drives cost $NZ353.. So NZ $120 would be a nice decrease (NZ$120~US$50)
Hmm, cable connecter was about 1 foot long. At 88mph, total maximum contact time (Assuming the car didnt vanish half way through the connection - if it did less power was needed) was less then 1/100th of a second. Total power used by the car was therefore 1.21*10^9/10^2 - 12.1MJ. (1 watt is a measure of power, not energy - 1 joule per second)
Don't forget about arcing, which would effectively have made the "contact" time longer. There was definitely a small but visible arc, so the total energy needs might have been somewhat higher, though probably within the same order of magnitude.
But I suspect the total energy angle on this whole thing is inaccurate. Doc Emmitt L. Brown, ever the perfectionist, only claimed that there was a power requirement, not a total energy requirement. It may be that the total amount of time over which the power is applied (and therefore the total energy necessary) is irrelevant, so long as the flux capacitor's apparently-very-short time constant is covered. There may be only a localized power threshold relevant to the flux dispersal process, beyond which space-time warping and attendant temporal displacement are initiated instantaneously.
Thus, one could supply a tiny amount of energy in an incredibly short amount of time to achieve temporal displacement, allowing Marty to return home to 1985 using a fairly small capacitor cleverly engineered by Doc to discharge in one ten-billionth of a second. This would have made for a somewhat less interesting movie.
"One point twenty-one gigawatts!?! It can't be done! Can it? Oh, wait, gimme the battery from your digital watch. Okay, we're all set. You'll be home by lunch. Oh, and, uh, I'll take care of your parents."
Can't wait 'till things are a buck for a terabyte, eh? When that day comes to pass, inflation will have made a dollar worth three cents, so a reasonably priced hard drive will run you about $40,000 dollars, the average weekly wage, and will be the size of a dime. We'll all be using the Itanium 6 and 512 GB of RAM, and our monitor's resolution will be 65536x49152, with 64 bit color. Windows will take up a mere 75 terabytes of hard disk space and will take about 45 minutes to start up, and will crash no less than once every six hours (that's over 518,400,000,000,000 instructions executed, a record for Windows!)...
This made me thing of when I went to my dad's office :) but it was the mid 80-late 80s, so stuff was different then. By this time the drive was about 1/2 the size of a refrigerator. But they had these blue cylinders (~1 1/2 ft diameter, ~1/2 high) that you would put in to the drive (I guess it was removable media). He would have to put in some new blue thing in and then my brother and I could play games on the Wang terminals.
Under their "Worst Models Ever" I found a list of drives, almost all of which are old and long out of production. So, while drive failures still plague us, it doesn not appear to me that today's drives are less failure-prone than older drives.
I am the statistic.
Sorry for being blunt, but I don't think you really understand statistics.
I used to work in a data center doing sys admin work and we had about 30 IMB hard drives ranging from 30-60 GBs.{snip} but in the end about 75% failed.
(I assume that you mean IBM.) So you had 30 drives from one manufacturer with a high failure rate and you feel that this is evidence that hard drives throughout the industry are less reliable than they used to be? Both IBM and Fujitsu have produced drive lines with defective components that have caused high failure rates. It's a product defect, not an industry trend. That's like citing Firestone tires on Ford Explorers as proof that tires are less reliable than they were back in the sixties.
That's two-channel audio. You are going to get many more channels (in fact, DVD audio already does, I believe).
Video isn't going to get a heck of a lot bigger than DVD-Video sizes.
Sure it is: DVD resolution is really low. You are first going to see HDTV-resolution DVDs, and later probably 3-6 MPixel video. Beyond that, there will be many simultaneous video streams: half a dozen camera angles from a live event, etc.
I used to work in my father's law office, writing docs and stuff... (keep in mind this was about 1999-2000) ON AN OLD COMPUTER!! (when I say "old, I mean an amberchrome screen, no mouse, 5.25 floppy, Wordperfect 4.2..) Yeah, that sucker had a 20 meg HD in it and it still works.. we use it to retrieve old docs... However, we have a few steps of tech in the office.. we have to write the files to 5.25, then put the 5.25 in a machine that takes both 5.25 and 3.5 (pentium 1 133 with '95) and then take the 3.5 and toss it in the '98 machine and get the files. And I thought I was l33t when I was doing that.. now I'm a EE major.
Now watch this drive.
me remembers spending that much on a stack of punch cards...
"And when we connected with a modem, we had to flip a switch on the modem with our bare hands! 300 bits per second, BOTH WAYS, by thunder!"
Luxury! pure luxury! you younguns had it easy!
Back in my day there were no modems! you had to dial up on your phone, and use your voice to do the outgoing data (took me years to learn whalesong that well, it did), and your ears for incoming
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
should be "RAM Down To A Dollar A Gigabyte"
Wish the $1/GB was true of SCSI drives. I'm in the market for new SCSI drives and am looking at Ultra320 that cost between $7.27 and $8.08 per GB.
--ralphieboy
"That way I seem to avoid the semi-annual crash/replace/rebuild ritual." Back in the days when disk drives cost $1 a kilobyte, drives were less reliable, but expectation was that data be more protected. So the systems were designed so that data could be protected by the design of the hardware, software, and operating procedures. That you have to deal with a drive failure by doing a rebuild is merely an indication that you don't use software that allows for easy backup and recovery of ALL the data on your system. I figure that if you can't recover in an hour from the building, containing your system that has all the data, burning down completely, then you view the data as disposable. And the cost should be no higher than the cost of an identical disk drive. But I'm an industry dinasaur who kept dozens of "hard drives" in his office and at home.
I just can't wait for the days when things are $1/TB.
Yes, but will I be able to purchase a hard drive for $1? What ticks me off about hearing that hard drives are "down to" 1$/GB is that I can't just go to the store and spend $20 + tax to get a 20GB hard drive. Right now I'm running on 6GB and just about any hard drive over that amount is out of my price range.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
no text
Sound files are not getting much bigger per minute. Totally uncompressed audio is no more than 5MB/min tops in a format like shn.
What about multitrack audio- and not just for surround sound like another poster mention, but for every track of audio prior to being mixed together into the finished song. Plus a makefile that will explain to the music compiler how to generate the finished song from the multitrack source. That'll take a little more space, especially for the very complex and multi-layered music some people like.
I'm sure the many eyeballs effect would keep backwards devil messages out of the music distributed in this fashion, in addition to benefiting the musical types who would want to remix music and so on.
I sold Data General MicroNova and Nova 3 computers that year. A 10MB rack-mountable hard drive contained a drawer of two 5MB 15-inch platters, one fixed and one removable. Two people were required to lift the 70-pound subsystems into the racks. At just $9,995.00 for that drive, we were able to offer a "breakthrough price" of "only" $1,000 per megabyte.
3 "new" disks dead in 4 years at my home. IN spite of having backups it is an absolute pain. Yes, I know, RAID. But Raid in multiOS machines is not yet perfected (unfortunately Linux does not support the cheap IDE hardware RAID cards out there in the wild).
Older disks (a 5 year old 1 GB disk in an old Pentium 166 used as firewall, 2 GB one in a Toshiba Libretto) keep working fine.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Make it painful.
If your data is not valuable or completely forgettable, then yes, get some more reliance mirroring or copying to another disk.
Otherwise you'll have to pay for backups (which should be duplicated, stored in different physical locations and tested regularly with a "dont use after..." label attached to each tape).
For the home users the only alternative is to buy the most inexpensive medium (CDRs, or a cheap tape technology) and be extremely selective. Backup your important, irreplaceable data with incremental schemes (i.e. don't backup the same file you need but never change too often) to ensure you don't back up more then what is needed.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.