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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.
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.
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)
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.
"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.
.. 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.
"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!
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?
Nothing to see here
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.
Well, if every clown represented one GB, it would roughly take one hour for all the clowns to get out of the volkswagon (9 sec per clown).
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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!"
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.).