Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
Will it be big enough to install Longhorn on?
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,
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?
On drive cache.
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 ?
One potential non-infringing widespread use: this would be a reasonable size for a HDTV PVR unit.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
So... anyone got anything interesting to say?
Seriously... isn't this a wonderful industry?
If you answered "no" to the above question, please exit stage left. Thanks for playing.
I don't consider myself "old", but my first PC was an XT with *dual* 5.25" floppy drives (that required a soldering iron for overclocking when there was no such word as "overclocking"). My second PC was a 386SX with an 80 megabyte hard drive.
As much as I knew it would happen (just looking at the graphs in Byte Magazine was enough to see that), it is still amazing to me. I'm just happy to be working in such a dynamic industry.
Enough nostalgia for now...
More
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.
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.)
Of course, operating system limits have nothing to do with motherboard limits. SATA uses 48-bit sector numbers IIRC, so that's a limit of 2^57 bytes. And 32-bit operating systems can use 64-bit filesystems (e.g. XFS) which have no practical size limits.