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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?
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.