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Hitachi Announces 400GB Hard Drive

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the never-delete-a-file-again dept.

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."

15 of 476 comments (clear)

  1. Good for RAIDs by farnz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Good for RAIDs by fake_name · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...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!

    2. Re:Good for RAIDs by Xoro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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    3. Re:Good for RAIDs by NNKK · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Good for RAIDs by cdrudge · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Trickle down by slycer9 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

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    1. Re:Trickle down by jez9999 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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  3. Size doesn't matter by Killjoy_NL · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)

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  4. They should sell them in pairs by frs_rbl · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    1. Re:They should sell them in pairs by Endareth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

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  5. Fabulous! by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. ;-)

  6. 7200rpm is not worth the mention? by lingqi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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)

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  7. Specs out of whack by adrian_hon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  8. Re:deskstar by phrasebook · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. MTBF by rf0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

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