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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?
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? ...
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 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 ?
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
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
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.
I'd rather have a 15,000rpm/200gig IDE drive then a 7200rpm/500gig one, seeing that hdds are the major bottleneck on performance.
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.
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.
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.
Just where to they squeeze these extra bits from on the same size platter?
It's actually a compression algorithm. You know that computers store information as a series of ones and zeroes, right? Well, they just added a driver that writes only the ones, not the zeroes, instantly doubling the storage space.
After that, it's been a matter of building the drives with smaller and smaller pencils to write those ones side-by-side. When hard disks were first introduced, they used a standard #2 pencil sharpened down to the eraser, but eventually they moved to mechanical pencils, then realized they could use the mechanical pencil lead without the pencil at all.
Today, special microscopic pencils can be built one molecule at a time. The "eraser threshold" (currently the smallest one is 0.00003 centimeters in diameter) is a key factor in manufacturing drives.
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.
I guess you've failed to notice the 400GB drives available for the past year?
This is done specifically for backwards compatibility. If the product was new and revolutionary and had no size bounds.... but it would only work with new hardware X, you'd be equally upset.
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
Why don't you try running linux, which will ignore the BIOS and do it's own HDD geometry homework.
Wow. Amazing how Linux can solve hardware problems in software.
As many things as it can do, even Linux won't access an entire drive if your IDE controller isn't capable of 48-bit addressing. Really. If the controller itself doesn't have the capability of addressing the entire drive, you're screwed from the start. Don't believe me? Get an old P2 motherboard, plop a 200-gig drive in, boot up Knoppix (or your favorite distro), and see.
Overall, I'm not even sure why you had to make it an OS issue, seeing as how sufficiently recent versions of Windows have 48-bit addressing capability, and can use all of a large drive as well. Maybe you just couldn't pass up the chance to flame someone, who knows.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
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.
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
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.
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?
So many people go buy the Maxtor junk and then wonder why the drive sounds like a jet engine a few months later.
Are you posting from 1995 or something?
LBA is what they SHOULD have done from the start, it abstracts the specific geometry from the amount of space on the drive. Anyone who remembers having to dial-in CHS values knows this, LBA is a godsend. The reason it wasn't implemented from the start was that it would shift processing (sector locating) to the drives themselves, which wasn't cheap to do in the eighties and early nineties. LBA has also been the standard for a LONG while now, and besides a minor bump in addressing size (which was painless as could be) it's an awesome and generous implementation.
As for SATA, they DID get it right, they serialized and simplified the data stream and implemented it as ATAPI or a subset of SCSI for OS compatability. It uses a 48-bit LBA which (IIRC) tops out at 131,072 gibibytes, that's 128 terabytes! The hardware platform is also quite well thought-out, with room to grow, in speed, size, and scalability.
I see LESS jumpers on drives than I used to, except for some brands that include options for backward compatability. Hell, you can just leave your new ATA drive on 'Cable Select' and it'll just work, you couldn't do that too long ago. SATA drives don't (IIRC again) have 'required' jumpers at all.
Here's an idea:
When YOU see a single drive that hits the lba48 limit of 128TB, gimme a call, I'll send you a crisp twenty dollar bill.
Outside the geek community, storage requirements are much more modest, my family has yet to go over the 6GB mark on any of their four machines, my little sister has 'tons of music' on her 30GB iBook (and it's not even half-full), I've got a bunch of music, movies, and run an automated development tinderbox for an entire Linux distribution, and it fits nicely in the 60GB drive it's on. I also do tech support during the day, for about 2,500 computers total, and have yet to meet a user with over 20GB of data (and this includes faculty and student personal machines). Storage requirements WILL continue to rise, but not NEARLY as quickly as they used to, unless we start needing to store holographic video or something.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
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!
32-bit operating systems can use 64-bit filesystems (e.g. XFS) which have no practical size limits.
Wait 10 years...
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...