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Hitachi to Release Half TB Drive Soon
samdu writes "Hitachi has announced plans to release a 7200 RPM 3.5 inch 500 GB hard drive in the first quarter of this year." Maybe this one won't require a new motherboard to use. I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
The specs for te 7K500 (500GB) include 817 Mb/s max. media data rate, 8.5 ms average seek time, 7,200 RPM, 4.17 ms average latency, ATA-100/Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s.
While it's nice to something as fast as possible, is there a point to have a 3.0Gb/s interface to a product that can only handle 817Mb/s?
In the eighties, our raised floor had a TB of storage - 48 six-foot by 4-foot cabinets with the power, cooling, and connectivity that implies, as well as thousands of dollars in maintenance fees.
Now I can hold a TB in one hand...
I like this decade better.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
What I want to see is an array of HDs made for the consumer. Slap a couple of iPod-style drives together in some sort of RAID configuration, give it a controller, and we'd see a drive with excellent throughput and reliability! .. Just wishing! ...
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
Does anyone know the reason why the speeds of these drives are rarely upgraded? I mean, IDE is just 7200, which it has been for years, S-ATA is 10.000 sometimes, but not really very much faster still.
Is it technically difficult? Is it unnessecary?
And now that I think about it, what is taking those solid state disks so long ?
Yes, I'm quite suprised a Slashdot story included the motherboard comment. My file server is an old P200 running samba on a 160GB drive, and even with a rather old Red Hat installation (7.3) no extra configuration is required.
All it can support under DOS/Windows is 8GB. It's so ancient the MB doesn't even support IDE CD-ROM booting.
But last night I was looking at the price for Hitachi's 400Gb IDE drive ($368 on at newegg.com) and figured that I could throw a pretty decent video server together for about five kilobux. I was thinking of getting a big case and power supply, eight of these drives and an Adaptec eight port SATA raid controller. Set up a Linux system, set up the drives and RAID controller as RAID-5 and you could get about 2,500Gb of storage, which works out to about 265 DVD images (assuming that each image was a from a dual layer disc and 9.4 Gb in size. Use SMB over gigabit ethernet to mount these images to your clients and then play whatever you like. Eight 500 Gb drives would give you about 3,200Gb of storage which works out to 340 images (making the same assumptions about the size of each DVD). I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, this is just what I came up with off of the top of my head.
Note that this assumes that you're not doing any processing on the DVDs. With a tool such as DVD-Shrink you could increase the amount of images you were able to store by stripping out alternate soundtracks, extra features and even the menus. And with DiVX re-encoding you might be able to (I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated) reprocess the video streams so that they used less space but were not visibly reduced in quality. If I had a spare 5 kilobux to blow right now I'd build one of these as a mighty heigh-ho and fuck you to Bill Gates, Jack Valenti and all of the other assholes in Hollywood and have the pleasure of having a whole-house video solution.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Digital video editing eats hard drive space like a fat kid eats ice cream. I've done some tinkering with home movies, and I had to go out and buy an 80 gig HDD just for that. Raw video captured off of my camcorder takes up about a gigabyte for every four minutes. A 90 minute tape, which is convienently about the amount I can burn to a single DVD, takes a little over ten gigs of hard drive space. Now factor in the additional space required to edit and work with that video, as well as slice it into smaller clips, and it gets up to about 20 gigs for a single project. A full length project would be even more space. Now imagine you were doing several projects, or that you wanted to back up the projects original parts. You don't delete your PSDs when you're done with a photoshop project, why should I have to delete my clips when I'm done with a video project? Only storage space is the issue.
I'd rather have a 15,000rpm/200gig IDE drive then a 7200rpm/500gig one, seeing that hdds are the major bottleneck on performance.
it will drive the cost down, more, of the drives we are most likely to use.
so we got that goin' for us. which is good.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
With your scaling of drives, you missed something important. Right now, let's say that once every 4 years one of these drives will fail. That's a pretty good record, I think, for consumer hardware. When you've got four of these running, you are pretty much guaranteed that one will fail every year. With eight, you now have a good chance that one will fail every 6 months.
I'm not saying they'll fail once every six months. I'm saying that on average they will. More than likely, three will fail in a single month, but you'll have a couple of years without failure before then.
Now that you want to put several drives together, you are inclined to look at redundancy and fault-tolerance. This is what RAID is for.
I run only a single hard drive in each of my home computers, exactly because of this reason. The number of components I actually manage is minimized, so that my home network works, and I don't have keep replacing stuff. At work, I have two hard drives in my machines. One, because I don't manage the backup servers, and two, because I can get a new one in less than an hour, installed, because our tech staff keeps a box full of brand new ones around because it is cost-efficient.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
This is how technology generally evolves, isn't it? Small steps that have a tremendous impact in the long-term.
I guess it's not that exciting in day-to-day news, but it's important to realize that the evolution from the first computer to the one you're reading this article on wasn't made in a giant leap -- it took years and many many many small improvements.
call me when they can make them reliable.
I have replaced more drives that are only 2-3 years old in the past 4 years than in my 15 year career.
Drives below the 20 gig mark are much more reliable, and drives over the 120 gig mark seem to be the most unreliable.
to hell with more space, give me a drive that will actually last the life of the pc.
It's so bad that I only buy Segate server class IDE drives for the workstations here. Dell will give you funny questions if you order Pc's without os or hard drives.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just a suggestion but if you are looking for a good SATA RAID controller take a look at what 3ware has to offer. Their 8000 series controllers are very nice. 3ware has always done it's best to work closely with the FOSS community, Adaptec, not so much.
just in case you had to switch HDDs wonder how long it'll take to back up 1TB
I have a 1TB RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array. Using ntbackup with write-verify it takes 2 days for the backup, and 1 day for the verify.
XXCopy is quicker - takes around 1 day for write+verify.
These times would be cut to around a fifth if the data travelled over a faster bus than regular PCI and FW.
Da Blog
I don't know much about DiVX
I have a 1TB media server RAID-5 NTFS array (vintage 2002 so it's not a speed demon but still respectable - maxes out the PCI!). I back it up using FW400 (also not the fastest these days) onto an external 1TB RAID-1 array.
Anyway, one advantage I have noticed about DIVX over DVD is reduced bandwidth. You can get very respectable video quality from 1.5Mbps DIVX, versus ~4-5 times that DVD. Either of these is acceptable over wired connections, but 802.11a barely allows acceptable DIVX, and even 802.11g struggles to support more than a few DVD streams. But it manages several DIVX streams handily. There's also the issue of multiple seeks and STR rates on the RAID-array. So if you are in a family/group situation and you anticipate multiple simultaneous wireless access, recompressing to DIVX/XVID is a good option to reduce contention.
Also, if you're setting up a media server, then Media Center is a good choice. Its ability to do on-the-fly codec transcoding and bandwidth downsampling based on client profiles is a godsend, as is its ability to control Tivo and uPNP media hardware devices on the network. Technical info here.
Da Blog
Most motherboards currently in use don't have SATA support built-in, and even the news ones that do may come with chipsets that haven't got complete Linux support yet.
Since my next motherboard and drives may well be all SATA, it would make sense to start adding SATA drives to my current setup using an add-on controller card.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Your original quotes were far too logical - and mathematically accurate - to ever originate from the RIAA.
Even worse, AT&T could claim that the drive could store 897 copies of an old telephone manual and sue Neal Stephenson for $13.5 billions dollars (the total cost of all equipment and labor ever used to produce the equipment that one of them was written on, times 897) in losses. The EFF would have to save the day by pointing out that AT&T sold the exact same manual for a buck fifty on eBay last month.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The first computer I used with any regularity was a Mac Plus, with one 3.5", 400K disk drive, and no hard drive. It had SCSI, so you could add one pretty easily, but it didn't have one.
My next was a Mac SE, with a 20 megabyte hard drive and an 800K disk drive. After that was the 386SX with the 80MB hard drive.
I remember the first time I ever heard the word gigabyte. My uncle had a Giga-ROM CD for Mac - 650 megs of archives, over a gigabyte of software on one disc! It took me forever to look through a tenth of what was on the disc. As if CDs weren't big enough already! I'd never even filled up the 20 MB drive the Mac had (until then).
One Christmas morning, I opened one of my presents to discover - joy of joys! - a 1.7GB hard drive! along with my wavetable sound card, my 56k modem, and my ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, and the P75 chip and 16 megs of ram I'd upgraded to, my system was now complete! Finally, I could play games, listen to MP3s, it was on baby!
So for anyone who says 'so what?', that's what. This is a major milestone. Just the other day, I was looking at 200G drives, wondering when I fell so far out of the loop that I hadn't heard about them when they came out. The last I'd heard was 120G, and now that I've gotten over the shock of 200G and am working on 300G, we have half-terabyte drives.
I grew up in the computer age, and I still can't keep up with the pace of technological innovation and advancement. Any time I think I have a grasp on what we can do, I find out we can do something twice as fast, with more storage, and more lickable widgets. Once I get over that, I'm awestruck with ideas of the things that we'll be seeing on slashdot within a few years, if that. Carbon nanotubes? Two years ago, I didn't know they could make those (never heard of the idea), but now they're talking about making monitors out of them? I'm still waiting for OLEDs, and we've already got something that might well be better.
This is why I come to Slashdot: the latest and greatest, the bleeding, hemophiliac edge. If the pace of today's rapid technological innovation doesn't excite you, you're on the wrong website.
I recall reading (in a maths exam, actually) about how incredible the precision in a hard drive is.
The analogy was flying a jumbo jet at 20,000MPH approximately 2 inches above the ground and reading a line of coins (heads or tails) out of the window.
What's even more incredible is that my Western Digital 250GB drive works fine after it fell out of my computer on to a stone floor - a 6 foot drop. Apart from a huge dent in one corner, it works just fine.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
But as someone who does Video and Graphics work for a living and as a hobby. I've got a 200Gb Project that I worked on last year spanning 2 drives and I have no feasible way of backing it up w/out dropping another grand and change for a tape backup and even then I doubt the reliability of tapes.
how do you back this stuff up. Perhaps I'm excited for a 500GB disk just so I can back up my current 360GB of material.. hmmm...
My first compnuter, a casio PB-700 had 4Kb of ram, expandable to 16Kb (I went to 12Kb). with plastic modules the size of cigarette lighters for each 4kb.
It had BASIC, and I COULD NOT save programs on any media. It was battery operated (4 AA iirc), and I lost all memory when changing.
it had 160*32 pixels display, and I got good at writing games for it, and drawing out quadratic equations. I carried it in my jacket pocket.(That was 1984).
link: http://pocket.free.fr/html/casio/pb-700_e.html
My friend had a Z-80 with 24Kb... Man, he was hot. It plugged in to the tv... The games used the ascii extended tileset for display...
Anyways. My parents didn't want to buy me the Texas Instrument 99/4i (i think that's the right name), so I became a programmer. Now, I have too many computers, from the ones I own, work with, and manage.
What happened to the PB 700? I busted the lcd when I dropped it. I still remember what it looked like, the crystals liquit all smeared in there... boo hoo...
"Piter, too, is dead."