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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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that's a big deathstar
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.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Here's the secret scoop on how they did it.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Finally enough place for my linux every-distribution iso collection...
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
Yes, yes, it's 400GB... but how big is it in units that *I* can understand, pachyderms and volkswagons?
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
this is the first media where i can store my full archive of low quality pr0n! i am happy now.
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.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
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.
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!
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)
This is the sig that says NI (again)
So that's really 370 or so GB. Wow 30GB missing to salesman math.
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 !"
At these sizes, a HD is becoming the only way of backing up another HD
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
Excellent...(insert wiggling of fingers here)... now when the feds come knocking on my door, I only have to demagnitise one drive instead of 2... Time well spent...
I do imagine that this is more for the server market or for, as they put it, applications where tape back up would be used... I can't think of any reason to have that much information in one place, until the next version of windows comes out and youneed two of these things.
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 ;-)
"What guys are you doing with so huge hard drivers?"
Plan on running Longhorn.
There are 5 80gb platters in this harddisk. They're just putting more of what makes a normal harddisk into it. I don't think that's a good idea: The result is probably heavier and more mechanically fragile than most harddisks. In my experience, disks with more platters fail sooner than disks with only one or two platters.
I can't but smile at the irony of modding the above "redundant", I could explkain why but I guess the beauty of it resides in its subtility :)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
.. why the rumours are MS aren't going to put an HD in X-Box 2 - we now have an HD that can hold the entire X-Box 1 game catalogue.
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.
400GB = 0.04 Libraries of Congress
If you're religishitty, KILL YOURSELF!
"The Deskstar 7K400 provides enough capacity to store the following:
....
400 hours of standard TV programming
45 hours of HDTV programming
More than 6,500 hours of high quality digital music"
"or, after you install Windows and Office XP...:
13 minutes of standard TV programming
4 minutes of HDTV programming
More than 6,500 seconds of high quality digital music"
Well, if you buy one of these, dont forget to double the space and increase the speed!
Well, the 300GB and 250GB are measured in GB, bot GiB, too, so that point isnt valid.
And i can centainly see the usefullness, for example in large storage raids. If you have 9 Slot raid array, now you can do a 2.8TB Raid 5 with hot spare.
With the Maxtors 300GB (that are only 5400rpm) it would be only 2.1, with the normal 250Gbs even less.
Sure, not everyone needs the biggest available HD in desktop right now, but its good that if you need them, you could buy them.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
.. sixty seasons of Red Vs Blue.
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...
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)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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?
LaCie is selling an external unit where 1TB of storage capacity is fitted in 5.25"
It's probably not one disk that's in there, or is it a 5.25"? Well, eihterway the laptop HD's still win when it comes to cap./vol., be it at slightly lower transfer rates.
-- Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Who cares what manufacturer can deliver the largest disk. In a month the rest will follow. That does not give them the label" capacity king" in my book. On the other hand, what Hitachi has done for the microdrive after they acquired it from IBM should give them a few points. After they got in control, microdrives has increased in capacity and decreased in price. Now all they need is durability, and microdrives are set to conquer the laptop market.
Underholdning.info
Six of these can probably hold the entire iTunes music store collection.
Err, no.
I still find that no matter how much I buy, I always need more
;)
As everyone knows, hard disks are similar to women hand bags: the bigger they are, the more cluttered they are
blah
Nothing to see here
Get your credit card ready for the $1200 expense.
:)
He said "in [his] pocket", not backpack
blah
right....
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.
But 400G is only a fraction of the pr0n on the net. :(
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
I would much rather spend $300-$400 on CDs to burn whatever I would stick onto 400GB of space than shell out the cash for this beast, only for it to die on me unexpectedly. Yeah, it'll be great for those of you out there who are downloading fiends(though that is unlikely what Hitachi had in mind as to the uses of the new HDD) and for other specialty tasks. You might still want to backup though...
~LD "My destiny was to be a karma whore. Then, I forgot my user name."
I recently built a network fileserver running Slackware 9.1 and samba, it has 4 x 250GB HDDs (1TB total) and I thought that would be enough for a very long time.
Then I discovered BitTorrent and SuprNova
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
Cheap UK and US VPS
..after the spectacular failure of the smaller IBM Deathstar, the new 400GB Hitachi Imperial Deathstar will be protected against failure by a forcefield projected around it from the nearby motherboard that it orbits.
Is a terrabyte hard drive. (Thats 1000 GB if you didn't know)
/., home of the nerds, we should know that a terabyte is 1024 GB or 2 to the power 40 bytes.
No it isn't! On
I was looking forward to squeezing 1TB out of this baby using the exact same technique. Is it perhaps possible to apply it twice?
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
I've had three of them go bad or crash. One of them I was stupid enough to actually buy, and two that came with new laptops. I'll never buy another. They are all Crashstars as far as I'm concerned.
I first got into programming on a Apple Lisa, with a "huge" 5MB Harddrive - (Thats 5 Megabytes, just over 3 floppies worth today), And we thought ourselves lucky, despite having to wait 2 mins after turning on the drive for it to count its cylinders, and been everso carfull not to rock the desk too hard, otherwise the heads would impact themselves into the spining platter. All connected through what appeared to be a parellel printer port, to give awesome data transfer rates.
We're talking hard drives here, not RAM. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes. It's sad, but true.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
The size of data we store (audio, video, documents) won't grow dramatically, so it's the amount of important information on a single disk that grows.
So, the bigger physical HD's we get, the more headaches we are actually subjected to - when 400GB hard drive decides to fail, it's a hell of a lot of data to lose.
80 gb's is somewhat my personal limit.. I prefer multiple 40-80 gb disks over 120gb+ single disks for the aforementioned reason.. and I guess I'll stick to this preference, no matter how big single disks will grow. They are just getting too risky with these several hundred GB capabilities.
Point: Manufacturers are constantly researching and developing their technology to make disks bigger, but I want to see them also make the news with new, working technologies that make disks more RELIABLE as well. Until then, I will most likely not buy these huge single HD's.
-el
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.
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.
Agile Artisans
Ahh. I have solutions for the parent AND grandparent posters.
I'm a minimalist of sorts. I'm running all linux/OSX at home, and all the files I use are on the file server, so my hard drive requirements are quite minimal. Right now on my fully loaded-out workstation I'm using 1.5GB out of the 60 available. The file server has 2 120GB drives, but only about 30GB is used.
So what do I do with all that free space? I do automated network backups!
Every night at 4:00am the workstation mounts the second partition (primary/root is 5GB, sec is 55GB) and makes a full copy of that 30GB of data from the file server. It also makes a full copy of the file server's root drive and sends a compressed image of the workstation root drive to the file server.
That's what I do with the extra space, I'm going on six years without any data loss.
The extra CPU power? I've got plenty. I've got all my systems totaly loaded out with RAM, so the bottlenecking is minimal. I'd rather not heat the house with my CPUs though. I run my AthlonXP at 1.4GHz instead of the native 1.9GHz, and my file server at 300MHz instead of 450MHz. I honestly don't even notice the difference. When you run a system that's 1.5GB and you've got over 1GB of RAM, your 'disk cache hit ratio' is incredible, at any given moment I've got EVERYTHING I use cached, CPU speed is of little consequence to me.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
'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.
Have you got a link for that? Google isn't helping.
No children yet myself, but I do have 670gb on a Shuttle in my living room - this is used primarily as a PVR and mp3 server. Video really does take up a ton of space, and even limiting myself to LAME-APS the mp3s take up a lot of room also. If I had more space, I'd use FLAC. The result? This system is currently completely full (only a couple of gigs free); I'm looking at adding or replacing a hard drive to get some more room.
Long term, I think removable media is on the way out, and we will store all of our music/video on hard disk based libraries, like we do today with software. (This was not always typical - I remember using software on floppies, and having to swap disks to do a Wordperfect spellcheck.) Hard disk prices are already nearing CD/DVD on a per-gigabyte basis, and backup can be easily done onto an external hard drive - much easier than swapping CD or DVDs.
Can I ask how you do that? I mean, copy the DVDs to your hard drive? I've tried several things but can't get it to work.
Thanks.
--RJ
The whole point of RAID is that the disks are closly dependednt on each other
Really? What about RAID 1? Mirrored disks are in no way dependent on each other. You can do a little learnin' here.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
I think there was a message somewhere in your comment. Maybe it's annother language
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.
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.
You'll have trouble getting a self-powered firewire drive bigger than around 40GB, anything larger than that has to be plugged in, which utterly defies the point of a laptop. Even if the drive is self powered, it combined with an internal drive sucks a lot more power than a single internal drive would.
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.
He's talking about Maxtor's 300 GB drive, which is a 5400 RPM model. While there have been 7200 RPM IDE drives for years, the largest Maxtor makes is 250 GB. Maybe Seagate, Western-Digital, or Hitachi make a 300 GB 7200 RPM drive, I don't know.
I got stuck with five of them - and was perfectly willing to shrug and go "okay, stuff happens - lets RMA." However, after multiple RMAs I was still stuck with 3 bad drives. I'd send a bad one back, get one that failed in a matter of days. Heat wasn't the problem (multiple fans, ion storm fan in front of drive, PC Power & Cooling power supply, conditioning UPS).
Anyway, IBM/Hitachi screwed me out of hundreds of dollars and many wasted hours on the phone and at the keyboard. The crappy replacements and crappier customer service means they've earned a place on my blacklist.
Even so, I'm glad to see the announcement. That can only mean that Western Digital, Maxtor, and the rest aren't going to be far behind with their own zillion gigabyte drives.
There can be some issues with the bigger drives. I just got a 200 Gig hard drive and it turns out that the default Debian installer won't work on it. Apparently kernels before 2.4.19 can't recognize drives bigger than 137 gigs. (Not this drive anyway). I had to install Debian through Knoppix. Even Windows XP won't recognize it unless you've got SP1.
My God, it's full of pr0n.
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
I've got a Shuttle PVR with 420gb internal and 250gb external for backup. I backup my mp3s and data I actually care about (mainly digital photos). Even with the mp3s, I'm only backing them up because I have the space - if I did lose them, they could be re-ripped, it would just be an almighty PITA.
Of the newest mega-drives, which are the quitest?
I'm chugging away with Seagate Barracuda 120gb drives with Super Whiz Bang Quiet Technology(TM), and am not very interested in adding high-pitch tones to my aural environment again.
One of the main reasons for ATA-133 was to add support for hard drives over 128 GB to the standard, in the form of LBA-48.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
... to unlock the hidden partitions!!
The first HDD maker to be outed by Slashdot for intentionally hiding vast swaths of storage!
(Manufacturers Warning: Actually using more than 200GB on this product may result in complete data loss)
I'd like to see someone come out with a Firewire or USB2 raid controller; basically I'm just thinking of a box that looks like a hub but would contain a hadrware RAID controller in it and allow you to plug 2+ drives into it and build external RAID arrays simply. The RAID array controller should look like a standard FW/USB2 disk to the host system for maximum portability.
The internal IDE cards work, but it can be a real PITA to build a RAID5 setup without getting into some of the really big mid/full size towers.
I'm not talking about "data center" grade RAID systems, but something that could be used with home media libraries or other storage environments where the priorities are cost, flexibility, size and performance (in that order).
Nope, they're all seagate, I'm pretty sure. But they're specific ones. 20GB (low areal density), single platter (I'd never buy anything else; if you want more platters, get them in separate drives, so one failing doesn't kill them all; you get improved performance as a side benefit), fluid bearings (quiet, plus essentially immortal), low power (less heat)... good stuff all around.
I've had this sig for three days.
Let's say I'm tired of trying to locate DVDs, or they being scratched or whatnot. An average one is 5-7gb, so ~20 DVDs on your 120gb HDD. Practical? No. I got more DVDs (legally, bought) than that. 400gb, ~70 DVDs? Now you're talking. Economical? Perhaps not. But I'd still like to have it.
Nevermind what else I might think to use it for. Of course, I could use DivX reencodes. Or whatever. But if the space is available, I'd like it. And I know people that own literally hundreds of CDs and DVDs. Lots of people could use a TB-size cluster if they'd want a digital media collection. And some of them do.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can read here to find out about RAID levels 2 thru 4 (they aren't used much because RAID 5 is superior). RAID 10 is a combination of striping (RAID 0) and mirroring (RAID 1). Because of the mirroring, RAID 10 can lose a disk without losing data. You'll also find mentions of RAID 50, 51, and 15. These are combinations of RAID 5 with striping or mirroring. It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine disk independence.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
Subtantially less? Exactly how fast do you think ATA drives transfer at? 66MB? 133MB? Tell you what. You find me an ata/66 drive that can do 50MB per sec sustained across the entire platter and I'll eat my laptop. Only in the last year have ATA drives consitantly been able to break 50MB/sec and that's only at the outer edge. As is gets towards the center its not uncommon to have it drop into the 30's.
Your right that gigabit switches are unheard for home use but if they weren't, the average user's hard drive would be the bottleneck not the network.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
...that in the future bandwidth speeds will be high enough, that we can have the "joint" harddisk space of the Internet. Imagine you and some of your friends would dedicate some hdd space, and enough of your ample bandwidth that you would all simply stream to eachother.
Not like p2p, not like mutual leech ftps. Like streaming it off your local network disk, that kind of speeds, that kind of availability. I've already seen it on campus. You don't bother to download anything, you merely stream it. A pathetic little xDSL upload doesn't cut it. And you don't want to stand in line. 10Mbit to the wall, minimum. Then you'll see it happen.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
HDs are cheap enough now that raid1 isn't all that expensive. I'm building a computer now (slowly) and i'm buying the HDs last because they drop in price so quickly. If i can get the drives cheap enough i'm getting 4 250GB SATA drives, and doing raid 10. It seems like a waste, but its the simplest backup solution, if a little pricey. I'd rather spend an extra $300 initially and never worry about my data than burn dvds of my important files (and have to decide whats important) every week. One of the drives goes bad, i pop in another one and it rebuilds. Makes me less nevous about running raid 0. Although personally i've never had a drive fail (killed a few, all my fault, but nothing important), but all the horror stories here on /. have made me paranoid. :p
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Computer with big screen, surround sound, a tv tuner and not even owning a tv... I'm not buying a tv and a dvd player for college next year, and even though the dorms dont alow hotplates i should be able to cook over my athlon....
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Maxtor always releases the biggest drives first, but only at 5400 RPM, then a few months later they release a drive of the same capacity but at 7200. 7200 has been around for a couple of years, the 80gb WD i got 3 years ago was 7200 RPM.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
the deathstar may be no more, but here comes the "meows"
Hitachi Deskstar drive "meows" during drive check
i have storage tower that all meow in unison! damn you hitachi! fix this shit!
I find it gets repetitive after a few hours - why store a whole month of it? I mean, you can only see a commercial for "The Tongue" so many times before you want to rip out your actual tongue...
Freedom: "I won't!"
My friends and I like to use dead bodies as a measurement for trunk/cargo space on vehicles. You should see some of the looks we've gotten from salesmen when we start to talk about how many dead bodies would fit in the trunk of this car he's showing us.
Would that make you a fellow Chopping Block fan?
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
to its integrated LCD. Also, all notebook LCDs are 'hampered' by an 18-bit color limitation. Tech tricks and better manufacturing help mask the noticability of the panel's reduced color output, but it is a well-known 'secret' of the industry.
Dell's new XPS notebook offers a DVI output, and methinks Apple has offered DVI out on their powerbooks for a while now. However, neither uses a digital connection, internally, to the notebook's display.
Como? Cuando? Que?
You can find it here...http://www.dvddecrypter.com/. This has to be one of the easiest ways to get your DVD's to hdd. You can also use DVDShrink...http://www.dvdshrink.org/ to burn them back so you can make backups. The really cool thing is that you can remove files you don't need such as foreign language subtitles, etc. to save some space.
Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.
... Bill Gates's prediction from waaaay back in 1981. Wow, he really is a visionary. Erm ... wait ... what's the difference between kb and gb again? It's not much, is it?
One of the most interesting feature of the disk, is the Auto-Spin disabler jumper. When using proper IDE RAID controllers (namely 3ware), the Auto-Spin disabler can be used to slowly spin up a large array of disks without blowing up your PSU.
just remember, Hitachi bought IBM's failed hard drive division, and subsequentially, new Hitachi drives are based on the designs and technologies acquired from IBM. Unfortunately, I'm not crazy or have the guts to play russian roulette with 6 live rounds in a sixshooter (as oppose to the customary single bullet) with my data. I've lost alot already. All 9 IBM 75GXP's I've purchased have died and several 120GXP's that my friends got, against my strongest opposition, have dead also.
What ticks me off the most was that IBM's tech support denied and denied and I got stuck with dead drives that were at the time under warranty.
Although, I would like to see some hardware review site put the Hitachi drives under MASSIVE long-term stress tests (not just one drive but several 10s of 'em or so).
For Hitachi, it's a major uphill battle. They'll have to somehow prove their worthiness again. For one, maybe they shouldn't use the name "Deskstar" as it is synonymous to "Deathstar." Distancing themselves from IBM's flaws would be best for them. It's like how auto-makers make a sub-brand of themselves to distant themselves from the typical stereotypes and so they can sell for more and look classy too (Lexus, Acura, Infiniti, etc.).
Considering Lysol is a brand of household cleaner, I think such a product does not exist.
400GB will store over 33 hours of DV quality footage. This is a good thing. Time spent on managing and planning disk space is time not spent on editing or various time wasters.
However on hte low end, my home, this won't happen for awhile. What I want to know is when and if these drives will force the price of 200GB drives down? I mroe space, dangit! Truly high end systems won't touch this drive, but a lot of work gets done on less than first line equipment. This could be useful in a few years to uss low class FCP flunkies.
The thing is, old RAID cards will be useless with these monsters. The cheapest card, for a G4 anyway, that will handle simple RAID for these large disks costs about $100. Not a small cost to be neglected.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Looking at what's on my Palm Pilot, I see "novels" ranging from 163k (Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe") to two megabytes (Stephen King's "The Waste Lands".) "War and Peace" is 1.7 megabytes.
The cake is a pie
As of now, you can have your own TB of storage for the low price of $616 (pricewatch: 7x160GB drives @ $88 each). As a bonus, it'll actually add up to a real tebibyte - 1 x 1024^4.
Last time (two months ago) the price was around $660. When this drive shows up we should easily find drives for under 50 cents a GB.
-Adam
the lacie "drive" is actually a striped array in an external box. note that there's no redunancy in this array, so if either of the 2 250gb drives in their 500gb box goes out, the whole volume is lost. basically, you double your chances of catastrophic data loss with one of these units.
if you don't have a backup solution capable of handling 500gb, i wouldn't touch one of these things.
What good is 400Gb if you can't read/write the data quick enough. You need an interface and a buss structure that supports this size effectively.
Try Fibre Channel interface and PCI-X buss.
Geeeez
I can increase the speed of my ram, the speed of my cpu, and the size of my hard drive. When is the big speed break through for hard drives going to come?
Sure, make a hard drive that will hold a Yottobyte of pr0n, but when it takes 2 mins just to find the file and open it, what good is it?
My drive has 540gb after the new ghost trick! I am glad to see they are finally using all that unused space!
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
shit bricks sideways. I was thinking about building a video on demand system that I would store my DVDs on. Assuming that I didn't want to apply further compression to my DVDs, and that each DVD is about 8Gb in size this gives me 50 DVDs per 400 Gb disk. Put a few of these 400Gb drives into a RAID-5 array (which should be ideal since you're going to spend most of your time reading data) for redundancy and pretty soon you get up to being able to build a system for a couple of grand that will allow you to archive a few hundred DVDs and have them at your fingertips. Combine this with some HTPC clients with gigabit ethernet and you've got a whole house video on demand system. You can buy a system like this now but it costs about $30,000, but hey, that's a system for people who don't read /., At the moment this would probably cost you 5 or 6k to set up but costs just keep on dropping. Right now I have 66 Gb of high bit rate MP3s on my server at home, six years ago when I started getting into MP3s I wouldn't have been able to afford this much storage, now building a RAID 1+0 to store these cost me about $500 (plus the system to put it in). I love technology, I can't wait until they break the 1Tb barrier at a cost of 10 cents per Gb and Jack Valenti's head explodes like a rotten melon in the sun.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Haha. Actually, we started talking about DB units before I ever read Chopping Block. That said, I am a bit of a fan of the comic, but I haven't really read it in about a year and a half for lack of time.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
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.
Can I have 931 real ones for one fake? If only that was true. Anyway, the real numbers:
1 Gb base 10 = 931 Mb base 2
1 Tb base 10 = 909 Gb base 2
I still remember seeing an ad for IBMs storage clusters as a adolescent though (my dad used to work there). The biggest fucking enterprise cluster they had at the time was a 6Tb array. One day, I intend to have more than that at my disposal, just for the hell of it. 6000/400 = 15 such disks is a bit much tho. Maybe when I can do it in 8, 4 here & 4 in the server
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It doesn't say in the article or specs what the disk cache is. For a drive so large I'd like to assume it's 8mb, does anyone know? Would they have a 2mb cache on a drive that big? Could it be that there isn't any cache?
Some of my old 45GB 75GXPs died. They were still under the 3 year warranty until the start of 2004, so I sent them in. Hitachi sent me back a 60GB 180GXP for each of them. Can't really argue with that trade. Cost me about $8/drive to pack and ship them.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
AFAIK - the TMDS is only used for DVI output; As of right now, no notebook uses the TMDS/DVI to output the signal to the notebook's display. And very few models sport external DVI connections.
I have brought this topic up with half a dozen notebook manufacturers and all admitted it was true. I have no doubt that a pure digital pathway to integrated panel will happen, but it isn't at the top of their "to do" list.
Perhaps the switch to DVI (internally) will also eliminate the 18-bit "choke" of the current analog pathway to notebooks' displays.
Como? Cuando? Que?
Here's one with 500 Gigs:
Of course it's not completely silent in a literal sense. *Nothing* that does *anything* is. The amount of noise my laptop makes is however less than the ambient noise in the environment in which it is used, which leads to complete silence in practice. 2.5" hard drives do tend to be quieter than 3.5" ones, and don't actually tend to be used too much during, for example, word processing. Laptop fans adjust their low speed according to necessity (you can actually ramp down the processor speed specifically to address this.) I can only hear the fan (it's on the bottom) if I actually pick the notebook up, turn it over, and hold it to my ear - which isn't a typical working position.