Hitachi Announces 400GB Hard Drive

jkcity writes "Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced their new 400GB 3.5-inch ATA hard drive, which they claim makes them the new capacity king. Specs on the drive are also available."

Comments

Good for RAIDs

[farnz]

It looks like a nice drive for putting in a big RAID, but I'm not sure I'd like to put that much data in one place; the MTBF is about right for a modern drive, and I've had the 2 of my last 8 drives fail.

Re:Good for RAIDs

[fake_name]

...except that the disks aren't independent. The whole point of RAID is that the disks are closly dependednt on each other.

Hooray for marketing!

Re:Good for RAIDs

[DigitumDei]

Right now I guess I too have no reason to keep em uncompressed. A 1.5 gig xvid has no noticable quality loss with my current run of the mill system (not that its a bad system, but its just not absolutly great).

But the point is more that once one spends some extra cash on an expensive TV and 5.1 sound system (okay, a lot of extra cash), then you can start noticing the difference between uncompressed and compressed.

Also, compressing movies you own is just that extra bit of effort. Once these new huge drives become cheaper, one won't have to compress since it just won't be worth the effort.

Re:Good for RAIDs

[Xoro]

Actually, it's a much better name.

Relative cost (Inexpensive) has nothing to do with RAID, while Independent spindles has everything to do with it -- nobody would use any kind of RAID on different partitions on the same spindle for any reason I can think of. If it's a marketing name, they got it right this time.

Re:Good for RAIDs

[NNKK]

No, "Independant" is just plain wrong, as is FOLDOC, and I'm sick of having to point it out just because some people can't stand to be corrected.

First of all, "Inexpensive" still applies and then some. It's much, much cheaper to assemble an array of disks adding up to more than a few hundred GB than to try building a single drive.

Secondly, there is nothing "independant" about the disks in a RAID. The closest you come is in straight mirroring configurations (which are highly unusual for an array of any significant size), and they still don't operate independantly.

Re:Good for RAIDs

[cdrudge]

You are correct that it may not be inexpensive compaired to that 80 GB drive you bought last week at OfficeDepot for 19.99 A/R, it's still cheaper to put a couple these in an array and have 2TB then to go out and find a single 2TB drive. Inexpensive is a relative term to what you are compairing it to.

Re:Good for RAIDs

[Geccoman]

I like to think of RAID-0 as the drive setup that describes how much data you'll have left after a single failure. A big fat ZERO.

And yes, if you have 4 drives instead of one, you basically have only INCREASED your chances of data loss.

Trickle down

[slycer9]

I'm just anxious for more and more of this technology to trickle down to laptops.

Yah, I know, it's a different environment. But have you noticed how more and more people aren't even using their desktops anymore?

We've got SATA for desktops. Still stuck with really old tech for laptops. MASSIVE disk sizes for desktops, relatively small for laptops.

C'mon. If we can get 2GB CF working properly, where in the hell is my 200GB laptop HD??

Seriously, HD capacity is the ONLY reason I fire my desktop up at ALL these days.

Well...'till HL2 ships of course...but that's another rant entirely.

Re:Trickle down

[jez9999]

Hum. What do you use your laptop for, exactly?

Personally I couldn't stand using a laptop all the time. I find a desktop is better ergonomically (hate laptop keyboards, nasty LCD monitors, nasty tinny speakers) and financially (all that miniturization isn't free). Yeah I know you can plug larger peripherals into a laptop to alleviate some of these problems but you're getting closer and closer to turning it into a desktop then.

What for?

[Jacek Poplawski]

What guys are you doing with so huge hard drivers? My first HD had 40MB, I know it was small number... it was less than 40 diskiettes. Today I have 120GB, and I am never out of space. 120GB is more than 120CDs. On one CD I can put whole movie or half of movie, few mp3 albums, or lots, lots of text/sources. I just have no idea what I could put on bigger drive, except movies I don't watch, music I don't listen and software I don't use.

Size doesn't matter

[Killjoy_NL]

Really, it doesn't matter that much anymore.
What they really should be concentrating on is reliability.

I mean, the Hitachi HDD division(sp?) is the old IBM HDD division. And they haven't that good of a track record (even though I owned a few IBM's and had 0 problems)

370GB!

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's really 370 or so GB. Wow 30GB missing to salesman math.

They should sell them in pairs

[frs_rbl]

At these sizes, a HD is becoming the only way of backing up another HD

Re:They should sell them in pairs

[Endareth]

This is very true... Just been through the backup/reinstall process on my home pc, and had to backup my 120 GB drive. Considered borrowing a 40 GB DLT tape drive from a friend, but the time and cost of tapes was too steep. Ended up storing it all on smaller drives and across the network. Took way too long either way. Next time I do this I'm just going to buy another HDD of equal size...

Fabulous!

[pla]

This aught to push the 320GB drives into the sub-$200 category within a few weeks. About time, too, the prices have lingered between $250 and $300 for months now.

Nothing like a bigger-better-faster-harder product to make the rest nice and cheap. ;-)

7200rpm is not worth the mention?

[lingqi]

I thought that the news about this drive was that it's 7200rpm - the former "biggest" was maxtor at 5400rpm only. (IIRC)

(i say only, because I hope nobody is using those terrible 4200rpm bigfoot drives these days)

Specs out of whack

[adrian_hon]

The person writing the specs is either incompetent or insane. For 400GB of storage, they quote:

"45 hours of HDTV broadcast, or
4,000 high-resolution x-rays, or
40,000 typical library books, or
10,000 high-quality, 4 minute MP3 recordings"

Wow... I never knew that a typical library book took up 10MB (more like 100k). What are they doing, scanning all the pages in? And what kind of bitrate are they using for a 4 minute MP3 recording to take up 40MB?

Re:deskstar

[phrasebook]

Oh boo hoo. I got hit by a bad IBM drive (75GXP) 'deathstar' but I don't think I'd mind getting a new Hitatchi, even if it is still an IBM design. Got a 'travelstar' in my laptop that's been going fine for ages. So there was a bad lot a while back, get over it.

Re:ATA-100 only ?

[pe1chl]

But of course you will put two of these on each controller, so you need more than 100MB.

The low-end server that arrived at work yesterday has two 10kRPM drives that each read 66 MB/s sustained. Datarates are improving all the time.

MTBF

[rf0]

One thing that worries me is that in the release it says "The Deskstar 7K400 is ideally suited for nearline storage and other low I/O applications" i.e. don't use it much. Also I can't find the MTBF which is worrying

Rus

Re:What I'd like.

[RandBlade]

No it isn't! On /., home of the nerds, we should know that a terabyte is 1024 GB or 2 to the power 40 bytes.

Except of course we're talking about HDD's and not real space. Like it or not the term KB, MB and GB when used in conjunction with HDD specs refers to 10^3, 10^6 and 10^9 respectively. A terrabyte hard drive would mean 10^12 unfortunately, or a thousand of what they call a 'Gigabyte' even if it is just 931 real Gigabytes.

buy one big drive to back up you household LAN

[jarich]

I was having some disk issues on a machine or two so I went out and bought a 160 gig drive for $80 (after rebate), got an IDE controller card to be sure it would work in the older machine I use as a server (~400 mhz) and put shares on it.

Now every machine in the house (including my 5 year old's box) backs itself up completely every night

If I ever get really paranoid, I'll buy a second drive and have them mirrorred... but that's another day. :)

Seriously, these single huge drives make great backup solutions... just be sure to get two if the data really matters.

REALLY interesting - for backup

[Animedude]

I guess these large drives will - when they become a little bit cheaper - be the perfect backup solution for home users who care about their data. For years now I have been searching for a relatively cheap way of backing up the incredible amount of data on the hard disks of my home PCs. My primary home PC has a only 36GB Raptor for the OS and an 80GB for data, but my little file server here has a 40GB, a 60GB, a 120GB and a 250GB disk. That's 470GB of space, filled with about 350GB of data (fansubs, video editing stuff, all of my CDs and LPs in mp3 form, all my savegames, various hard disk images of my Notebook with various OS installed to swap around, etc.). For a home user, there just IS no way of backing up this amount of data. Tape backup? Yeah, sure. You would need a DLT or Ultrium streamer - at the price of a small car. Burning CDs or DVDs? Yup, the data could be burned - on about 80 DVDs or 500 CDs. And that at least once a week, to keep the backup current. The only way is to install an additional hard disk and then simply copy all the data over or to use a backup software and write everything into one backup file on that disk.

I already had considered something like this, but the problem was that one single additional hard disk would not have been enough. One of these 400GB monsters might be enough, with a bit of compression used.

Is there any reason (apart from maybe lack of sales - but that's probably due to the price) why tape backup is not cheaper? I mean, one 40/80 DLT tape has about the same price as an 80GB hard disk. And it's simply a roll of magnetic tape. And the tape drives are simply so expensive that it's ridiculous.