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

Re:ATA-100 only ?

[pantherace]

You do realize that ATA-133 has essentially 0 advantage over ATA-100 don't you. A 7200 rpm drive might make 40-45 MB/sec tops, and doubling that for a 15k rpm (though the highest I have seen for IDE or SATA is 10k) still less than the 100MB provided by ATA-100 & honestly is anyone going to be using a 15k new drive and not be using scsi or sata?

According to the specs it is a 7200rpm which will not benefit from ATA-133 over ATA-100

Will we ever have enough storage

[91degrees]

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.

Re:Will we ever have enough storage

[technix4beos]

I know exactly what you mean.

I'm not that old (only 31), but I've been using computers since 1982, and on a serious, regular basis since 1990. Along the way I've noticed the "price factor" has always remained relatively the same, in regards to hard drives, and total system breakpoint sales prices.

Back in 1988 I was lucky to play with a laptop that had a whopping 20megs in it, and 4mb of ram. I thought I was in heaven. Then I got my own computer a few years later that had a 500mb drive.

I never thought I could fill that much space, considering that at the time the largest filesize I was playing with were zipfiles downloaded via bbs latenite that were half a meg or so. I remember one nite downloading a new version of Remote BBS, and knowing it would take only 45 minutes on dialup (2400 baud modem, fast! :) I went to the store, went for a walk, etc.

And I thought that was FAST. Did I mention speedy? 1K every 4 seconds... Couldn't believe it.

What does this have to do with hard drive spaces? Well... I'll get to that.

A few years pass. I'm finally playing with a pentium and upgrade to a whopping 3 gigs! This was -just- before the time when mp3 was hitting the scene on this "new" web thing... I wish I knew how powerful the concepts were then, as I know now, but I digress... hindsight is perfect, and all that.

So, before napster came out, it was the thing to search personal webpages for mp3, and whoa! download them straight from the website...

There wasn't any real traffic issues in the day. Everyone was using fast 14.4k or if you were lucky bleeding-edge 28.8k modems, but the webservers were on T1's, and could easily handle the hundred thousand or so people actively getting mp3. It was a strange time. Exhilirating and always full of "what should we look for today" events while combing this new territory.

The growth of the internet and the growth of hard disk capacity have been in lockstep since the early nineties, I'd dare say that they each are compelling the other, but that's a story for another time.

So Napster hits the scene. People go apeshit and download/upload like crazy. Time to upgrade that hard drive to a whopping 8 GIGS! Get two of em'. And I still didn't think I would ever fill that much space inside of a year. Oh, how naive we are... ;)

Now its about 1998 or so... Hard drive capacity is exceeding 10 gigs for the new drives, and steadily every month some new announcement comes out that pushes the standards. By this point I was ripping CD's from friends, from the library, from business associates, and having a great time all the while.

Divx movies? Not yet.. we'll get to that.

By the end of 1998 I had gone from perhaps 2 gigs of mp3 (when I first started seriously collecting via dialup) to over 50.

Again, the needs, requirements, passions, desires, consequences and usage of hard drives were changing upwards all the while. Hard drive manufacturers knew what was really pushing their sales, and they worked that much harder to fill the "need for space".

Divx movies. By this time I was downloading 2 movies a day, easily, via napster and my friends on BeShare. Getting a whopping 100k/sec in 1999 ROCKED, and I had amassed over 300 GIGS of just media (mp3 and movies only) within six months on disc.

No, I didn't store all of it on hard drive. I was a frequent purchaser of CDR at the local office supplies store, and got very good discounts. ;) People would ask/wonder what I was doing buying 50 CDR at a time, each and every week almost... I would just smile and say, "backups".

Its amazing. I don't see an immediate end to the cycle yet. As for violations of the MPAA/RIAA... Fuck 'em. They're a monopoly, they don't deserve any money for the next 1000 years, and should wake up to the open nature of the internet. I feel absolutely no shame for collecting, burning, sharing, distributing and using thousands of GIGS worth of data over my short c

power consumption SATA vs. PATA

[Anonymous Coward]

9.0 watt idle power (Parallel ATA)
9.6 watt idle power (Serial ATA)

Interesting that SATA power consumption is slightly higher than PATA. My naive assumption was that fewer wires would yield marginally lower power consumption. Might this hold back adoption in laptops and other battery-backed devices?

Re:What for?

[NanoGator]

"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.

Why some people actually prefer to use a laptop

[blorg]

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...

'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.

Re:5 platters

[MarcQuadra]

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.

Hard drive death

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Drives 137 gigs

[EnglishDude]

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.