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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."
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An average seek time of 8.5 ms....for 400GB...just seems to good to be true...
oh what this is hitachi the new owners of what was once proudly refered to as the IBM 'deathstar' series of hdd...
hopefully these are better than the old ibm 60gxp i had that broke in 6 months
from what I heard hitachi/ibm fixed there death stars by getting rid of the glass platters. I had two of these fail and have had one replaced with the newer style that is ok, and a older on which, is making dieing noises every once and awhile... would be nice to buy 12 of these, setup a raid 5 to give you a nice 4GB! with one hot swap spare.. nice!
Unless this drive comes at a cheaper per gigabyte cost, I don't see why I would even get this as opposed to separate smaller drives (which would have lower seek times individually).
Furthermore, note that they are measuring a gigabyte on the powers-of-ten method instead of powers-of-two, so you are being gipped by quite a bit (just like the Lacie terabyte drive).
And furthermore, is SATA much use today?
The specs says it's an ATA-100, I'm far from being a hardware expert but that looks weird to me, isn't a supposedely top-notch drive supposed to support ATA-133 ?
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
Do you always get so upset when other people have a need for a product you would never use?
Personally I like to keep all my favourite DVD's on hdd. Easy access, the DVD itself can stay safe and sound in its cover. 400GB is going to fit easily over 50 uncompressed DVD's, and I doubt I'll ever have 50 movies that I watch often enough that I benifit from copying them to hdd.
:P
Of course I own all the DVD's so if the drive breaks its merely a pain to copy them back on. However, for the majority of users, 400GB of kazza'ed movies and music is a lot of time and bandwidth wasted.
People who do lots of video editing, and with 400 GB thats going to be A LOT of video, will love this I'm sure. Just as long as its not the only place the video is stored.
East Coast Brewers
Interesting to see in the specs the capacity in terms of media content, 40,000 books...10,000 mp3's etc. That is a lot of space to fill when you get your new drive. How nice if they were supplied with a preloaded partition (100 gigs say) that contained a lot of goodies. Better still, pre-load with several partions, for example: a) Free windows software and documents b) Free Linux software and documents c) Platform independent documentation and referenc d) Non computer related stuff (Guthenburg project,for example), free graphics and sound clip libraries. When you partition the disk you decide which, if any you want to keep for later installation, and eventually, when you have copied what you need, you format to a native partition.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
I use a RAID-1 array of Maxtor 300 GB to archive and listen to my CDs, all encoded in flac. Hundred of CDs can take a lot of place, but when they're all on hard drive, it's so much easy to use them via a Squeezebox... And you could always rebuild them if the originals becomes unreadable.
I avoid IBM/Hitachi drives like hell. Every 2.5" IBM drive I have seen sounds like it's dying all the time, what is really disturbing, with a click sound every once a while acompanied with a one second pause in data stream.
IBM drives are also known for developping bad sectors if powered down with unwritten data in buffers (or something like that), IBM knew it and simply stated it's not a bug, but a feature.
I value my data too high to risk a disk from a company with a reputation like that, thank you very much.
(If you do not believe me, just use Google, you will see for yourself...)
Yeah, capacity king... for about five seconds. I'd imagine that this title will be rather short lived, as is the nature of such devices.
In all seriousness, though, I'd imagine that losing one of these beasts would be, to say the least, horrific. For some reason I imagine a return to the days of home users swapping hundreds of floppy disks out over several hours to do a backup on their hard drive, except in this case it will be (much more expensive) DVD-R's instead of floppies.
Ah, the good old days...
My first hard drive was 270 Megs. When it was new, I thought I'd never fill it up. When I inevitably did fill it, I upgraded to a "huge" 3GB drive. I figured that would be more than enough to last me for a while. It was. Then I discovered mp3s. Right now, I've got a total of about 50GB of space, and spend half my time working out what data I no longer need in order to make space for what I'm doing.
Noe, 400GB seems vast. More than enough to be going on with, but I know this would fill up as well. So will the 4TB drive I'll eventually have. I wonder if we'll ever have "enough" space. I also wonder what I'll actually fill all this space with.
"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. "
Well I imagine I'm in the minority here, but I'm a 3D artist rendering animations on my machine. My 120 gig drive's starting to get full of lightly compressed (.png) images and mesh files etc. I can work within the 120 gig by doing backups etc, but a 400gb drive is definitely tempting.
So what about average Joes? DV video anybody? $500 buys you a DV camcorder. Just plug it into your firewire port and you've got 13 gigs an hour chugging along into it. Somebody who takes lots of vids of their kids would want lots and lots of gigs so they don't have to recompress. Etc.
I should point out, though, that there is a huge difference between needing the storage and being able to use it.
"Derp de derp."
'I don't know why anyone uses a laptop' appears to be a very common opinion on Slashdot. So, as a laptop user for over seven years, let me fill you in with why I prefer a laptop:
I much prefer the digitally-connected LCD monitor, which is a lot sharper and less tiring than any CRT I've used. I have an external monitor also (LCD, naturally) and find the added desktop space invaluable for serious work. Cleartype on a digital LCD is very nice, too. I know you can do all this on a desktop now, but laptops had digitally-connected LCDs and second monitor ports long before DVI and dual-head graphics cards were a common option. I love the fact that I can carry it around and from room to room easily, and still be internet-connected through WiFi. I love that my stuff and environment is always there whether at work, home, or away on business. I love that it is completely silent - this was in fact why I started with a laptop in the first place; I simply could not stand desktop noise when researching/writing. I like being able to put it away in a drawer when I'm not using it.
The laptop percentage of the market relative to desktops has been steadily increasing over the last few years, so it appears that many people agree with me. I personally could never use a desktop as my primary machine, although I recognise that people have different priorities and that for many a desktop is a better choice (cost & power being the key issues.) I did recently get a Shuttle home server solely for storage (670gb) and PVR purposes. Apart from the TV connection for watching programmes, it is accessed through terminal services over WiFi - from my laptop.
I suppose if you were really paranoid you could worry about the boot sector for the partition going bad. Although I think there are usually measures built into the bootloader/MBR to deal with this. Could be wrong though. Would be pointless though anyway, come to think of it, because you could still repair the partition from its brother. No, you're right. You'd just be losing half your storage space without any speed or safety gain. Boo that.
True. That's my 'trick' to reliability. I usually purchase the lowest-model of the newest family of drives. I recently had to replace a laptop drive, so I hit the spec sheets and found the Hitachi Travelstar 5k80, a 5400RPM 80GB drive, but the 80GB model has 2 platters, they have a 40GB model with one. It works like a dream, and I have half the number of heads to crash.
Another trick I use is to buy from a manufacturer that had problems the year BEFORE. I'm buying IBM/Hitachi exclusively, because the bad PR from years ago is still pushing their QA to high levels. The Deskstar 180GXP is an awesome drive, I've installed over ten of them for people and not one failure yet.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I'll tell you what! I just shot my first days footage of a super hi def stop motion animation today. we shot 3 seconds of video at 2274X1704 resoltion, uncompressed 16bpp tiff files. how big was that 3 SECONDS of video, you may ask? 2.5 GIGABYTES. thats right, for a college project we were shoooting video at almost 1 GIG a second of uncompressed video. the video is 3:54 seconds long, or 234 seconds, or roughly 150 GIGABYTES for just the source footage, nevermind the editing, which can easily jump to three times the source. not to mention that these tiffs are going to be converted to B&W, so at least one point were going to need well over 400 GIGS free. to make a long story short, I'm buying 2 of these for a raid array when they hit the streets, and I'm just a student, imagine what the pro's need...
e ne600087.jpg
oh, and if your curious what the source looks like, heres a frame: http://home.csumb.edu/h/hayesaaron/world/sheep/sc
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
In the past 3 years, I've had 3 of my hard drives die.
Meanwhile, the 340 megger in my 486 firewall chugs away, having turned ~11 years old this year.
I remain skeptical that "bigger is better" in the hard drive world. Before they advertise size and speed, give me a hard drive with vastly improved quality and longevity, and *then* I'll become interested.
Is the size of the drive starting to be like the megahertz myth? I mean, aren't two 200GB drives faster/better than one 400GB in any application where the physicial size is not a limitation (laptop/blade)? Lets say you were editing digital video and then saving the stream in real time. Seems simultaneous read/write ability would be huge. Large drives become even less significant in non physician size limited applications when you can view two devices as one partition.
For desktop use, there are so many open drive bays in a PC that I think I prefer two drives to one monster.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
SmartRipper has an option under settings for file splitting. Set it to max file size and then make sure the max file size is larger than that movie. This will get you a single VOB file. Any DVD playing software should be able to read these (I use powerDVD and it can play ripped VOB's perfectly)
East Coast Brewers
No, that's ~370 GiB, or 400 GB :-)
Remember, Giga meant 10^9 a long, long time before computers came along and tried to redefine it as 2^30. Giga was just a handy phrase, it's only through misuse that it came to be thought of as 2^30.
I waffled on this a lot myself, but now I think the SI people are right.
Also apparently you need an ATA133 controller to see more than 137 GB - I had that problem when I put in a 200GB drive into a co-worker's computer, the BIOS would only see the first 137GB, so I had to get him to buy an ATA133 controller to see the rest of the 200GB. Just as well, he wanted those upgrades as he's a filmmaker, and ATA133 would help a little over ATA66 the computer has.