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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.
More porn, yay!
Hard drives get bigger and bigger, we might reach the 1TB limit one day ! More at 10.
Sorry but I can't think of a single interesting thing to say about the launch of a new hard-drive whose only claim to fame is it being a bit bigger than the previous biggest.
So... anyone got anything interesting to say?
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?
Hello Usenet!
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
Am I the only one who likes 5400rmp drives because he thinks they will last 72/54 times as long as 7200 rpm drives? We use large drives for backup, and since the access is all sequential, the high rotation speed isn't that important to us.
Will it be big enough to install Longhorn on?
Now, when am I going to see this capacity in my iPod? ...
at the increasing capacity of spinning magnetic media when about 20 years ago (I guess when thin-film heads came about), many pundits said that the medium had reached it's physical limits.
Just where to they squeeze these extra bits from on the same size platter?
One day Hitachi invented a 500 gigabyte drive. The RIAA said "The public is evil, that's 100,000 5 MB MP3s!" Then the MPAA cried "The public is evil, that's over seven hundred 700 MB xvid movies!" So their lobbyists went to Washington to get these high capacity drives made illegal. And their shareholders lived happily ever after.
The End
Trolling is a art,
Seriously, as long as you get the kernel in the part of the disk that your motherboard supports, (or don't boot off that disk at all), Linux will work with it, no matter what motherboard you've got. No 128GB limit to worry about, even if you don't have ATA/100 (or is it ATA/133 that is supposedly required to support 128GB+ drives?)
I've even read those 200+ GB disks on a Pentium 120 Dell's onboard controllers on Linux. No problem -- Linux knew to ignore the BIOS settings on the drive and just made it work.
I wonder what everyone's doing with all these huge drives, other than indulging a compulsive collecting habit. How much music can one listen to, and how many movies can one possibly watch?
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 why they don't read hard drive platters in parralel? from what I understand they read them one at a time. If the read them in parralel, throughput would increase at a multiple of the number of platters in a drive.
"brxref
Screw that, keep those system designers off my power supply, I want more power not less!!
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 ?
We got the more room for porn post.
Good job.
We got the when will we see this kind of capacity on my iPod post.
Good job.
Now all the need is -- (drum roll please) --
But does linux support it yet?
ACK
Is why in the storage realm, everytime they hit some stupid short-sighted limitation, they implement some new addressing scheme or something as a band aid, (LBA, etc etc), which is suboptimal, but somewhat understandable, *BUT* the solution itself is very short sighted, providing for capacities of 25-30% more than the limitation hit, but will break beyond that, and do the same thing after a few months when their capacities hit the new limit. I figured at least with SATA they had a chance to mostly start from scratch with a new protocol and do it right for a long time, but no, they inherit some of the very same pathetic limitations and have already had at least one iteration of addressing change.
Why is it that we see more and more jumpers on drives, and have to update motherboards/bioses again and again and again as the capacities increase and addressing scheme of the day breaks?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I won't touch Hitachis. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the last DeathStar I owned. That's nothing compared to a friend of mine though, who had to turn in his 75GXP 4 times under warranty before he finally figured it wasn't worth the trouble and scrapped the drive. The magnets that came out of it are more useful than that drive ever was.
Yes, I know I was burned by IBM rather than Hitachi, but when I was asking some techs who still work in the tranches about it, saying that they were not big fans of Hitachi drives would be putting it lightly.
-R
Damm, where have I been? I thought we've already reached 500GB already. My bad. This is very interesting though; soon we'll be in the multiple terabytes of data on operating systems (in normal consumer use). Will operating systems be able to handle this? More specifically, will Windows hit the dirt or not work properly? I hope I'm not getting a whiff of the old Windows 98 problem with too much System ram.
;).
Hitatchi (spelling?) though? Aren't they on the "no-no" list for hard-drives as of late? Sorry, I don't keep up with the times, I'm not a big movie buff so I don't need *that* much space
I'm f#$king magic!
I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
Why don't you try running linux, which will ignore the BIOS and do it's own HDD geometry homework.
I know you need Windows because linux is hard for non-technical users, but all the drive makers have their own soft-bios utilities to support the larger drives on old hardware.
They have had these since the 2 gigabyte barrier.
There's also add-on controllers if you really need a new interface feature, like the next only-exists-on-paper UDMA speed.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Do you suppose it's some people's desire to pull down every piece of available information in the world onto their own hard disk?
Is this some kind of new obsession - just because it's becomming almost technically feasible?
There's an interesting (as far as "new drive is bigger than old ones!" is interesting) thread on Storagereview.com which includes some insights as to how this thing is built, and why it uses lower-capacity platters than even Seagate's 400GB drives.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Maybe instead they'll just ask for a tax to be added to the price of all large-sized hard disks, say anything above 137GB.
They can point to the tax we pay on blank VHS tapes as an example.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
So... my friends massive porn collection is illegal?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
"I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs."
:-)
I'm sure there will be a PCI card that you can tie into, these type of monster size drives aren't typically used because of their speed, they're used for storage of various things.
If it were about performance you're probably not going to use this style of drive anyways. When your storage needs aren't limited by size persay but by I/O, you'd be better off investing the money in a scsi solution. Especially if you were in an enterprise situation you'd go with a NAS device. There are some pretty kick ass models out there that offer a lot of storage, and massive I/O for around a 100k.
In a home environment you'd be better off running some dual or quad scsi drives in some sort of raid array.
I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
Sounds like the CmdrTaco Center for Pornography Storage is doing pretty well. At least we know the Slashdot subscription fees are going to a worthy cause.
Well great, right after I put 4 300GB drives in Raid5 on a sata, 8 drive card, this comes out. w/ 500GB drives the practical size of the array when full would be almost another TB. (the 4 300GB drives in raid 5 produce about 850GB now so I assume 8 drives would produce about 2TB).
I do security
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.
An alternative to buying a new motherboard is to just buy a PCI IDE controller. The only reason for the upgrade is so that enough bits are used to address all of the sectors on the disk; the interface otherwise doesn't change. In fact, new hard disks sometimes come with controller cards in a bundle if you're too cheap to pay the $20. I'm currently running a pair of 40 GB drives on a Pentium 90 system.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
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.
[500 GB] would be a reasonable size for a HDTV PVR unit.
But given the broadcast flag, how much of this DTV programming will actually be marked recordable?
At the risk of sounding like Mr. Gates fabled 640K comment back in the day, how in the world is a user supposed to make use of such a product?
.txt, .sxw, and .doc files to fill up 500 gigs? I better get typing.
1. My music collection? Nope, DRM prevents me from burning my CD's anymore...
2. Digital movies? Nope, again DRM requires me to buy a seperate copy of each work, even for backup purposes.
3. Software? Nope, that's all subscription based, I just get to pay my $37.50 a month and be happy with what they choose to offer.
So, I'm left with
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
According to Colossal Storage Corp., hard-drives will never exceed a capacity of 500Gb. http://www.colossalstorage.net/home_diskdrive.htm
Any truth to this?
Hard drives read from one platter at a time because the platters' read heads sit on moving arms, and the arms easily become misaligned.
I'd rather have a 15,000rpm/200gig IDE drive then a 7200rpm/500gig one, seeing that hdds are the major bottleneck on performance.
With 500GB of capacity, you could record about four hours of HDTV programming! Wow...
The power of the TeraByte, In the palm of my hand.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Scsi has had delayed power on for ever.
While that can apply to SCSI and IDE to a large extent, SATA has dedicated connections to each drive, therefore the sky is the limit as far as multi-drive performance goes (as far as SATA standard is concerned, of course system I/O capabilities and controller capabilities will still limit, but SATA as a standard doesn't impose performance limits in that regard). With SATA assuming a controller can saturate each of it's on board ports, no drive's data transfers would consume data transfer resources from other drives, as is the case with SCSI/IDE (IDE only for two devices of course).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Geez, what to do with all that hard drive space. I know! pr0n! eh Commander Taco?
Back in the day when hard-drives were measured in MB not GB, there were tape disks that can backup GBs at a time. So it was possible to backup an entire harddrive relatively cheaply and easily. How the hell am I suppose to backup 500GB?!? That's over 120 DVD-Rs, 20 Blue-Rays, 700 CD-Rs...you get the idea. I would imagine, I'd need some sort of special hardware just to do something simple like backing up. Jeez, do I need to buy another 500GB as a backup drive?
size doesn't matter.
I read that too fast and thought you said "whore-house" video solution :-)
When encoding with Dr. DivX, there is a High Definition preset which will shrink down a DVD, but still create a very beautiful video file.
I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
Yeah, I guess spending $25 and dropping in a Promise ATA controller is too much effort. Western Digital was even bundling them with the drives for a while.
Funny thing, those controllers perform significantly faster than many built-in IDEs. My nforce2 MBs have IDE defects that cause lockups that require power cycles to clear (reset won't do it). I don't even use the on-board IDE on those boxes.
I have been buying 250 GB Western Digital's from my local Sam's club for $130. Very convenient. I get 58-60 MB/sec on those drives.
just in case you had to switch HDDs wonder how long it'll take to back up 1TB
Not quite. Remember that 500 GB will not REALLY be 500 GB, being that drive manucaturers don't cound bytes correctly. Plus, 500 full GB plus 500 full GB does not equal 1 TB. 1 TB is still 1024 GB, so you'd need 24 more GB.
So..
Format your drive before you send it to IBM to be fixed. Or your data might become my data!
If I had to guess I would say that it has a lot to do with us simians fixating on "round" base-10 numbers.
His initial comment was correct...I doubt (m)any motherboards designed for a Pentium 1 133Mhz processor can handle a 500GB hard drive.
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.
I am going to be building a new PC soon.. but if they are going to be releasing this in the next month or so I might hold off to buy the hard drives hoping for a price drop on the 250GB.
Anyone else think it might cause a significant difference?
The Nomad
"Men of lofty genius when they are doing the least work are most active."-da Vinci
And I do tons of 3D modelling, graphics, DVD authoring, and lots of games. What do people do with all this space? I mean really, do people not uninstall old games they've won? Do they keep all their MP3s on their drive instead of dumping them onto DVDRs? I mean really .. I just dont understand it.
On Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) systems. Each controller can address 16,256 devices. SAS is backwards compatible with SATA in that SATA drives can plug into SAS controllers.
_ General_overview_public.pdf
There is actually a _great_ need to increase the communication speed between drives and controller.
For more information on SAS, see my Wikipedia article at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Attached_SCSI
Since wikipedia is down or slow right now, here is the non-wiki version of the article and a link:
Serial Attached SCSI (also known as SAS) is a new generation of SCSI designed to allow for much higher speed data transfers. SAS does this by serial communication instead of the parallel method found in traditional SCSI devices.
SAS supports up to 16,256 addressable devices per port and point to point data transfer speeds up to 3Gbps, but is expected to reach 10Gbps by the year 2010. The SAS connector is much smaller than traditional parallel SCSI connectors allowing for small 2.5 inch drives.
The physical SAS connector is form factor compatible with SATA, allowing for much cheaper SATA drives to connect to a SAS backpane. SAS drives are not compatible on a SATA bus and have their physical connector keyed to prevent any plugging into a SATA backpane.
Serial Attached SCSI supports three transport protocols:
* Serial SCSI Protocol (SSP) - Supporting SAS disk drives
* Serial ATA Tunneling Protocol (STP) - Supporting SATA disks
* Serial Management Protocol (SMP) - Supporting SAS Expanders
SAS General Overview - http://www.scsita.org/aboutscsi/sas/tutorials/SAS
With these sizes, how long 'till hard-drive backup becomes cheaper than tape in $/mb?
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I collect boxing videos. In the past VHS was the norm but there are well known quality issues about the format. The new way is to record fights in either mpeg or VCD etc. Fights generally go from 300-1000 in length. It's not too difficult to imagine how much space one need to have a large collection. Right now, i have 300gb in storage between my desktop, server, and external hardrives and i am full. I welcome hard drives this size. Of course, how do you back it up?
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.
Anyone else notice ever since IBM sold off its hard drive business, the rate of drive capacity increases for 3.5" and 2.5" drives has gone to heck? We've barely moved from 320GB to 400GB in roughly that time frame. Its just as bad for laptop drives only going from 60/80GB to 100GB in quite some time.
The only place where there has been some rapid increase is in the iPod 1.8" and 1" size drives. Perhaps it's because there will be much greater volume at these sizes, but one wonders why the slow down. The more conspiracy minded would say that there is not as much incentive to keep the increases going forward at the same pace as IBM once did.
I for one really need more space on my laptop. (No, not for pr0n, but between my MP3s and email alone I'm out over 60GBs).
I guess you've failed to notice the 400GB drives available for the past year?
Remember, RAID is your friende s/board-w-cards.jpg
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041006/imag
why use one drive when you can use 32...
I guess my measly 8x300gb machine just won't be as cool any more. : )
As an aside, replacing motherboards to support larger disks seems like a lot more work and expense than just buying a new controller card. The two controller cards for the machine I mentioned above totalled something like $50.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I have an 80(OS), 120(database) and 160GB(content) (all Seagate) drive in my home server and about half a million files that are being served up. The ringtone site alone is about 4GB with well over 100,000 files.
The 160GB drive took a massive beating (and promptly died) when the virus scan went nuts and was scanning 1 million files an hour. I was able to recover all the files from the drive using GetDataBack NTFS, format the drive and put it back into use.
Standard ATA drives are quite reliable for handling small (visitor count wise) sites. Having a single 500GB drive makes it real easy to do a complete backup of a large site spread out over smaller drives.
However, since Seagate drives have proven themselves the most resilient of all the drives I've used, I'll wait until a 500GB Seagate drive exists and is within my price range.
Work Safe Porn
Go to avsforums.com and check out the HTPC section. I built my movie server for right around $400, excluding storage space. Then it's an additional $5/movie using 250GB drives in external USB enclosures. Backup? If a drive goes bad, it would result in my having to DVD-Shrink around 45 movies, which would take me about a week (start 1 before work, 1 before bed, 1 before dinner, etc..). So, for a 2.5TB server (500 movies), it'll cost me a tad under $3000.
I also use Meedio (meedio.com) so I can access weather, music, RSS feeds, email on my TV. Zoomplayer with fddshow allows me to upconvert DVD's to 1080i HD. Finally, I also have game emulators installed, so I can play any NES, SNES, Genesis, or Atari game ever created.
Most of all, though, I consider it a hobby since it's a nice challenge for my brain. Keeps me busy .
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
older motherboards supported the 28-bit LBA addressing scheme, which tops out at 130GB. Newer motherboards support the new 48-bit LBA scheme, which tops out at 144 petabytes. (1 petabyte ~ 1000/1024 gigabytes) Don't worry, you'll be safe for a little while. =)
Then one day, the ??AA lost a court case against one of its customers because of the levy.
The Customer's lawyer said that the ??AA wanted it both ways:
-tax the people just in case they pirate but don't get caught
and
-Sue then when they are caught.
It's like reverse double-jeopardy!
The judge agreed and dismissed the case.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
It won't require a new motherboard, because hardware was upgraded to allow lba48 at the ATA-7 (lba28) level. There is definately old hardware that won't support big drives but it is old enough to uncommon.
It won't require a new OS, becuase lba48 finally has adequate headroom and most OS's have already crossed that hurdle. (Notable exception seems to be Solaris on Sparc).
Of course, this were a SCSI disk, the question wouldn't even come up. SCSI doesn't have this "upgrade every a couple of years just to use new disks" problem. Old harware and old operating systems work just fine with new big disks at full capacity. Limit seems to be 2TB (lba32), newer hardware does lba64.
They seem to work ok once you've sent them back for replacement.. but 500GB is abit much too loose :\ Seagate seems to be the best, anyone?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Most modern operating systems (inclding windows) don't trust the BIOS for this, and havent for quite a while.
What the poster is talking about is 48bit LBA which is required to break the 132gig limit.
Indeed a good way to fix this is to use an addon card, just make sure your operating system knows what to do with 48bit LBA. Windows has some issues last time I checked.
Only the 75GXP line was lemons. 120GXP and higher releases have been MUCH higher quality. (Don't argue with me about it as I have FOUR 7K250 drives, a DOZEN 120GXP drives and a DOZEN 180GXP drives in use 24x7 across a variety of desktop systems.)
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
When this thing crashes do you realize how much data is going to be lost? More money to the drive recovery companies!!! :~|
-Palal
anything like the infamous IBM deathstar.
3.5 inch hard drives get bigger capacities and are cheaper within a short period of time(6-8 months.) But why isn't this carried over to laptop hard drives(2.5inch?)
Anything over a 40GB still cost a pretty penny and 5400/7200rpm disks are still the exception rather than the norm in laptops.
And good luck finding laptop hard drives above 100GB.
You can get the Hitachi 400GB drives from http://www.zipzoomfly.com/ ZipZoomFly for $330.
This isn't an SAS drive. I can understand why you would want 300MB/s links between the SAS controller and the expanders, but between the expanders and the drives, 150MB/s is more than adequate.
It doesn't matter how 'good' DivX encoding is, Mpeg-2 is a lossy format. Since mpeg-2 is a lossy format, conversion to any other lossy format (including mpeg-2) will result in 'further' degredation of the video quality. in the case of DivX since DivX and mpeg-2 throw away different bits of data, the lossy conversion will be worse, than encoding from a lossless codec like HuffYUV. .OGG.
So to anwser your question, converting to DivX will result in both a generational loss, and some mpeg-4 specific loss of quality. Would DivX be smaller? in the same resolution the space saving is marginal*, you actually need to down scale resolution to achieve 'impressive' down scaling of files. Also, to make the 'best' mpeg-4s you'd need access to a lossless master of the video. Converting mpeg-2 to mpeg-4 is like taking an mp3 and 'converting' it into an ogg vorbis. And Granny Ogg Doesn't approve** of transcoding mp3's to
*= Properly compressed MPEG-2 streams are only 10% larger than comperable (read same resolution) MPEG-4 stream, however DVDs don't usually compress the audio at all, and generally don't compress the video as much as it 'could' be. Also, DivX 'scales' better than mpeg-2 making a 200% magnification mpeg-4 'appear' better than a 200% magnification mpeg-2...
**= If you wouldn't like being turned into a toad, you'd better listen to Granny Ogg.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
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
The current BigDrive standard is 48 bits. That's 144 petabytes. I think we're good for a while now.
I'm glad they stopped screwing around just doubling (or even quadrupling, or whatever) the standard. As long as you're having to redo a standard, might as well get all the pain over with at once.
this is not cool. if you need that much space I know that all of the programs that will fill it up are not all legal so I feel that every one of those harddrives should come with a GPS tacking device that is directly wired to the RIAA so they can come and investigate your programs.
As far as transfer performance, you can transfer the most data where the platter is spinning the fastest - on the outer edge. The 3.5" hard drives' edge spins that much faster than the edge of a 2.5" hard drive, so it's easier to get higher data rates.
Spinning the hard drives faster and faster also builds up much more heat, and consumes more energy than slower drives. Laptops have a harder time coping with heat (it's not like you can just keep adding fans to the chassis), and battery lives are already short enough.
There is also a lack of SATA interfaces for laptops. I don't know why this is, but you are faced with a chicken/egg situation - do you build SATA 2.5" drives if there is no connector for it? Do you build connectors for a hard drive that doesn't exist?
SATA 2.5" drives are supposed to come out sometime early this year. We'll see.
As I understand it, the reason is that you need n Analog to Digital converters to read n platters at the same time. If you are only reading one platter at a time, you can use one A-D converter and a switch to select the head connected to the A-D converter. Since these A-D converters are expensive, and the situations where you would benefit from them are limited, I don't think that we would notice much if they DID hook each head up to a A-D converter, with each converter going into a seperate buffer. Possibly on some enterprise level hard drives?
That is why RAID is so good- you do get platters being read in parallel, with each head going into it's own cache. It is just that the parallelism doesn't occur in each atomic hard drive, and instead occurs at the RAID controller level.
Googling doesn't turn up anything, but with what other people say about no noticable performance between drives of the same type with different numbers of platters, this would probably be the case.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
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?
Its time that harddrive manufacturers start agreeing with the rest of the world with their specs. I have no idea how big a 500GB drive is when I put it into my computer. I'm not even sure if I could figure it out with the math since most of the FAQs talk about "megabytes" and I don't know how to extrapolate that to a gigabyte (is it multiplied by 1000 or 1024, or 42?). It would not suprise me to end up with about 400 real GBs of space once this guy is formatted which is a 20% loss vs what I was expecting.
So harddrive people, is this a real 3.5" disk or a 3.7 or 3.3" one? Is it really 7200 RPM or do your revolutions not go all the way around? Is it a 500GB disk or a fraction there of?
These differences were not that significant back when disks were only 10 or 20 gigs, but now I'm starting to be very disapointed in the actual formatted capacity of drives today.
Now, when Apple sells me a 500GB iPod, it'll cost me $99,000.00 to fill it up. Oh, how I wish I could just fork over under $200.00 a year to have access to any piece of crap song that the RIAA is responsible for!
The CB App. What's your 20?
Assuming:
1) The average shmoe doesn't mind 128kb mp3 compression levels.
2) At such levels, the average classic rock album is about 50MB.
3) 500GB/50MB = 10,000 albums on a single drive.
4) The RIAA succeeds in making on-line trading difficult/risky/costly.
Stick one of these in a USB/FireWire portable enclosure.
Goodbye, Internet P2P. Hello, sneakernet.
Sure, you don't get new releases or updates this way, but you have over a year's worth of non-repeat music. Want a different genre? Buy a second drive.
And that's now. What is the RIAA going to do when storage prices reach a buck a TB?
Yes, I admit it. I have a compulsive collecting habit for huge drives. But when we moved it was too much work to bring the 8 inchers (in big empty cabinets the size of 20 inchers so people would take them seriously) along so now the biggest ones I have are 5-1/4 full heights. The 5 megger is in a box the size of an 8 inch drive so people would take it seriously.
I remember this issue with drives quite a long time ago. It was either Maxtor or WD (possibly both) and they shipped the drives with boot-loader software allowing one to access the full capacity of the drive.
So many people go buy the Maxtor junk and then wonder why the drive sounds like a jet engine a few months later.
"Every day our father would kill us, and dance about on our graves."
This has SATA II, its backwards compatible, but twice as fast as existing SATA. So yes, if you want to get all the speed out of it, you will need to upgrade your motherboard. So Sorry.
that was half Tuberculosis?
that's your real problem as I see it.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." Mark Twain.
I don't know much about DiVX so comments would be appreciated
According to doom9, you'd be looking at using XviD or NeroDigital (depending on your preferences). You could probably cut the average movie down to a gig of absurdly-good-(for-ripped-movies)-quality or so, if you so desired. You could even (if you so chose) keep the subtitles, separate audio tracks, etc. by using a container format like Matroska or Ogg if you so chose. I mean really, another 5.1 or 7.1 channel audio track won't take up THAT much space. For the content I store, anyway, I'd at least keep subtites and the Japanese and English language tracks.
If you wanted to get crazy with it, you could set up VideoLAN and then just make streaming requests over the network for whatever you want (VideoLAN primer article). After you had that set up, you could throw a (few) TV tuner card(s) with hardware MPEG encode and stream TV channels around the house as well. Throw in another TV card to act as your TiVo to record/encode/archive programmes and add them to the collection to be indexed, allowing them to be streamed on demand.
With 2.5 terabytes of space, you could do a LOT of archiving. Once you figure out how to get the system set up to do everything I discribed above, you'd be set until well after we start seeing 1GB drives for $200 or less, at which point you can upgrade to 5GB and onward.
That'd be pretty cool, actually.
Hi Multiplexo,
I was lucky before Christmas and got the Seagate 400gb (7200.8 UATA not SATA however) drive for $200 after rebates at CompUSA. Definitely some markup going on and would be a good idea to look for sales.
Personally, no. I haven't hardly filled up my 160GB drive in the year since I bought it.
Professionally, you bet your ass! And that's just the beginning.
And what I'm hoping is going to happen, professionally, is going to change what, how and how much hard disk capacity and RAM mapped to it I will need personally.
This is a good thing. We need cheap BIG, FAST drives with LOTS of cache.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
$5000 for a video server plus storage for 265 movies runs to $19 per movie. Is the convenience really worth it? A 300 DVD megachanger only costs $500.
$5000?? that seems like a pretty retarded idea, you could just buy 300-400 dvds and store them in a closet instead. "Use SMB over gigabit ethernet to mount these images to your clients and then play whatever you like." -umm doesnt let you play them on a tv tho, nice try tho, expect to spend another hundred or so on a nice htpc (well you'll need a decent tv out card and maybe a nice processor if you intend to upscale the dvd content to hd for your sweet hd tv, oh right you spent 5000 on a computer so have to watch on your monitor in your bedroom, too bad) Oh divx, ah ya that's a good idea, too bad you probably couldn't figure out how that works, nice try tho, but seriously, i'd use xvid, better all around codec and should work in most stand alone divx player :p
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/01/234920 2&from=rss
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/05/16/2252245.shtm l
I already modded myself down so don't bother =!
3 of these in RAID 5 = 1TB. 5 is 2TB. I'm still waiting for Seagate 500GB drives, they are more reliable in my experience.
I still remember from going from 330MB HDs to 520MB HDs, and then to 740MB and 1GB HDs. Hopefully we'll be up to 1TB disks at the end of 2006.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
It seems like the actual (not specced) MTBF is diminishing rapidly. If your MB doesn't have builtin RAID mirroring, get one. And don't use striping, that means you're twice as likely to suffer data loss.
And back up early and often. USB/Firewire drive boxes aren't that expensive.
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
and for 1/2 that I can buy a pair of pioneer Elite 300 disc DVD changers and the equipment to distribute the video AND control throughout the house AND buy doubles of all my existing DVD's.
you still can not beat doing it old-skool.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's for sale at Best Buy right next to the Maxtors and Seagates for just $9.99 after $1500.00 rebate.
we could of had this technology years ago if the hard drive manufacturers wanted to release it, i have been using hard drives now since day one (probably 20 meg on amiga was first) and i have always had to pay through the nose for the latest technology that comes out.
if everyone waited a few months the retailers would have to bring this stuff into the maket at less overblown prices.
who here hates to lose 50% of the money to unscrupulous manufacturers that know theres always some muppets out there willing to pay top whack for new tech.
why not learn to compress data so that the space we have is better used ?
microsoft and games suppliers will only make it so that it takes longer than a spectrum tape drive to install anyway.
What you mean like this one?
You will now need around 100 DVD-Rs & a day or more to back your drive up..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
With the actual link this time
h =23_512_624&products_id=3808
http://www.span.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPat
I would think that a bunch of nerds would realize that a Terabyte is 1024 gigabytes (2^40 bytes), half a TB would be 512 GB. Thus this drive is still a bit shy of being a full half-TB.
C'mon people get with it!
In addition, the 2.5" hard drive platters are (obviously) physically much smaller than the 3.5" hard drive platters.
Wait, you are saying 2.5" is smaller than 3.5"? I'd like to see your calculations on that.
come'on this has got to have seek time in the tenth's of seconds.
Wake me when the the terabyte drives come out and then I might be interested. Course I would be nice to have everything I have on 1 drive instead of 4 drives, but I'd still be out of space wouldn't I?
Or you could get up off your kilosized butt and insert the disk into your DVD player. ;)
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
32-bit operating systems can use 64-bit filesystems (e.g. XFS) which have no practical size limits.
Wait 10 years...
Noone would ever need more than 500GB of disk space! Impossible!
STFU about slashdot bias.
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...
No, he's referring to the stress, presumably at the outer edge of the platter, which is the tension trying to pull the platter apart. (Same reason spinning pizza dough in the air make it flatten out---same force.) And centripetal acceleration is v2/r, so it's proportional to v2.
It's still a poor way of describing it---I thought he was talking about acceleration in general at first, and was going to post some sort of high-handed nonsense about how long it had clearly been since he actually took high school physics.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I believe I just wet myself in excited surprise.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
And, indeed, as processor power improves, things are going to get even better. Recent tests of wavelet-based codecs like Snow have shown that watchable quality can be attained at under 300kbit/s (though it's got visible artifacts, it's a damn sight better than more traditional codecs at that speed) as well as incredible high quality at 800kbit/s. Of course, it's currently unoptimized, and you need ridiculous CPU power (a 1GHz Athlon displays the 800kbit/s as if it were a slideshow.)
I find a pleasantly symmetry in the fact that, even though it requires mad programmer juju, there's a correspondence between space and time requirements for the storage of video. I wonder how it would look if graphed.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Since when does a 35mm frame contain 54MB of data? A Canon 1Ds Mark II RAW file, which has higher dynamic range and can make prints comparable to medium-format equipment, is less than a third of that size.
Methinks whoever taught you to scan negatives was adept at mistaking film grain for detail.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Unfortunately, Hitachi still has the stigmata of having unreliable drives, especially after they bought what remained of IBM's DEATHSTAR division. Hence ppl still tend to shy away from Hitachi drives, fearing that they would rather have two or more reliable drives than one drive that may be massive...but also comes with a more massive fine print.
It's also the reason why I haven't bought an Ipod mini...though there are modders out there who've taken apart their mini's and replaced the 4GB hitachi microdrive with a 4GB compact flash. (if apple was smart, they would sell a compactflash version of the mini for those who are more active...[no spinning drives, good for sporting], but that's another issue).
I'm just waiting for the Seagate 400GB SATA (NCQ) to come down in price to 2GB/buck or better (4GB/buck would be best but it'll take time). At the moment, it's at around 1GB/buck.
like the MSI K8TNeo2 which has built-in SATA HD support and works fine in Linux 2.6.x with SATA enabled in the kernel config.
/dev/hd[a-z] to /dev/sd[a-z] which is mildly important to know when setting up a SATA boot device.
Just make sure you ask the linux kernel guys why they still can't be bothered to document the recent (2.6.7) change in the naming of SATA devices from
find linux-2.6.10/Documentation -type f -exec grep -iw sata '{}' \;
I really need three of these babies ASAP! I have 3 disks now (440 Gb total) and let me tell you, it really sucks not having free space. :( The only thing that saves me is that I regularly manage to fuck up one or two partitions accidentally - I lose some files, but at least I get more free space after I fix it. :)
Seriously, in the Internet Age a 200 Gb drive fills in what,3 months? And that's not even trying.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
"I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs." C'mon, you know you were just looking for an excuse to upgrade the whole thing!
$ make work
make: *** No rule to make target `work'. Stop.
Surely you are kidding, drive sizes have been steadily growing. Maxtor released their massive 80 gig drive during the fall of 2000. I bought one of the original ones and have just retired it from four years of constant duty. Go read the StorageReview review archives to see the increases in maximum consumer storage sizes.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I've been placing family home movies onto our networked drives. Even with compression, our new 160GB drive is already full, and I am not done archiving home movies. Bigger drives would be great to have.
Why do this?
Because now the family and I can view these movies with minimal effort at any time. Even the kids know how to click through the folders to find what they want. We hardly ever bothered to sift through tapes. It was too much trouble to find the tape, and then too boring/much work to FF and RW.
And the tapes?
The tapes are safely tucked away in a fireproof box. They are available as backups. That is what tapes are good for.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
i don't see why this was modded troll. I think the mods didn't understand what he was saying.
Get off my ass? That's crazy talk!
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Seagates work for me, I have a 40 gig one in my box now, it has 7382 hours on it, still works. I like the WD (Caviar, haven't had a chance to use a Raptor) drives, haven't had any problems with them either (currently have a 120GB WD, with 3545 hours).
And IIRC, it was only the 75GXP drives that were bad anyway, and the others were fine.
I had a 75GXP drive which failed and lost me nearly 75Gb of data. I joined the class action lawsuit but nothing really came of that.
I have had many many specifically IBM drives fail both at home and at work. At work we have many in RAID arrays and they drop like flies. We replace them with any other make but IBM. As I write I have an IBM 40Gb waiting for me to get around to returning it under warranty for a replacement.
My advice based on much personal and professional experience is to avoid IBM drives like the plague.
...You'll need all the disk capacity you can get.
Remember, with today's small digital still cameras with 5-8 megapixel sensors that create quite big files per picture (especially in RAW format), you'll be surprised at the large amount of disk space you'll use up editing your pictures with image editing programs when you store both the original and edited versions of the same image.
And if you edit video files downloaded from your MiniDV/MicroDV digital camcorder, the data your hard disk with the original video data and the subsequet edited version can use up disk space at an alarming rate.
In short, if you home-edit still pictures or home movies from your digital camcorder, you better have at least at 120 GB hard drive--a 200 GB (or even 250 GB) hard drive may be a more preferable solution. That new Hitachi 500 GB hard drive is likely aimed at serious users of multimedia editing programs.
Granted, evaporative chip cooling *can* be made to work, but wouldn't a good quality heat sink and fan be easier, and less time consuming? Plus, aren't you creating almost as much heat via friction? I mean, I've had non-ball bearing fans go out in less than a month...
why is it difficult to increase the speed of the drive? can more than one head be placed so the drive will perform like a raid0 subsystem? can an entire static head be placed throughout the radius of the platter and can read all tracks simultaneously?
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I saw dozens of dead IBM DeathStar drives and experienced several here at home. Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive business after that huge disaster. Along with it, they bought the bad name. I won't trust Hitachi drives for a long long time.
Performance is irrelevant against the validity of data in a permanent storage device such as a hard disk drive.
I love my nice small seven-conductor SATA cables. However only recently have power supply manufactures begun add SATA power. So here's a question. Why 15 conductors for the power cable? I know it's 3.3v 5v and 12v but add those up and you only get four. Please enlighten.
For those wondering I think it's
3.3 3.3 3.3 G G G 5 5 5 G G G 12 12 12
I do have to say though the power connector is much easier to attach/remove than molex.
Just when I thought that Slashdot News Posters couldn't interpret news more bizzarely this gem comes along.
"I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs. "
Really? Because I have never in my LIFE had to replace a motherboard to accomadate a new drive. I'm not even sure WHY you would need to buy a new MotherBoard for a larger drive unless you want a new bus, which could also be accomadated through an expansion card. I have bought a scsi card before for just such a purpose.
nuff said.
Or, you can get 4 250GB drives for 130$, a case with good 120mm cooling fans 70$, a normal power supply 40$, and a plain motherboard with all the fixins for 150$
:)
And you're at less than 800$. Sure, it's not 2.8 TB of storage, but 750GB is plenty, especially when you start compressing the video.
And because the RAID5 gives me some protection against hard drive failure, mine doubles as a file server.
So, for the price of a cheap emac, you can make one of these.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Can't you do that with MythTV? (Serious question, as I am considering putting together a MythTV / Video / MP3 server soon.)
Call me an old-fashioned fool..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"