Slashdot Mirror
Not Much Happening in Hard Drives This Year
yahooooo writes "CoolTechZone.com has an article that talks about desktop hard drive developments in 2005. It looks this year is going to be a dud for the storage industry."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
No more technology is needed. How about reliability?
Is good news?
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I can't wait for the next two Slashdot stories: "The sky is still blue" and "There's nothing interesting to report."
It's a slow day today. Really!
For "news" that atually say "hey, nothing happened"
how long until
The calculated scores don't carry much weight.
Nothing particularly surprising here.
Did anything happen today that does matter?
sulli
RTFJ.
I'd like to see more speed, but capacity hardly matters to anybody these days, now that 200+ gig drives can be had for ridiculously cheap.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
What I would like to see is more and cheaper network attached storage devices like the Ximeta Netdisk. With networks being so popular in homes, it's amazing that they don't have one place to store their files without a actually having a specific computer turned on. And most people, including myself, don't see the need in devoting an entire computer to serving files.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Part of the reason why hard drives haven't kept up with other components is because consumers don't demand more features. Seems like people don't want their hard drives to do more - though I know that I'd like better performance when working with large video files.
I Want To Believe
When will I be able to buy one ?
This article is terrible. Looks like nothing more than a usenet rant to me. The author decries the terrible progress of the storage industry, obviously completely ignorant of the fact that the storage industry has consistently bested Moore's Law for at least a decade. If processors increased in speed at the pace that hard drives increase in size, we'd have processors in the tens of gigahertz today. Besides moaning about the slow pace of one of the fastest-paced areas in the industry, what is it the author thinks they should be focusing on? In his own words:
we would certainly like to see a set pattern where users can expect something significant in this industry
"Something." That's as specific as the author gets. Storage capacity is doubling every 12 months, but we need to see something significant. Nothing in particular, mind you. Just something. Go figure it out, come back to us when you're done. That's 5 mins of my life I'll never get back...
I somehow doubt that HD manufacturers have pre-announced all of their little secrets. That said, there comes a time with every technology when things mature - there are a limited number of bits you can fit into a finite space. My feeling is that solid state drives will be the next extremely big thing. 1GB flash memory is no longer a "big deal" and I suspect that with a few significant innovations, solid state might dominate. It would certainly reduce power and space requirements (I can just imagine Steve Jobs demoing the headless Mac Shuffle right now: Smaller than a stick of gum, except for the port adapter...)
I think that what the industry should focus on in this point in time should be the miniturization of such memory storage devices so as to fit them into smaller devices such as cell phones, PocketPCs (ugh), etc... most of the technology is already out there, it just hasn't been utilized to its full potential on a widespread commercial level. The most notable exception that comes to mind would be Apple, with their 40gb iPod.... if only we had as much storage on our Palms as well!
"...about desktop hard drive developments in 2005. It looks this year is going to be a dud for the storage industry."
"The storage industry" can hardly be categorized by desktop hard drive sales. I can assure you that high-end fibre-channel RAID controllers, FC fabric switches, and 15k rpm FC drives are the big profit makers.
Besides, in the personal desktop PC segment, current IDE and SATA technology provide way more than enough capacity to satisfy even the most MP3-hungry 14 year-old, and the most email-crazy grandmas. The vast majority of personal desktop PC buyers out there are not going to spend extra money to get a 600GB drive instead of the 400GB model - they just don't need it.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Most of the best news for most HD consumers is price drops, which will probably accelerate. Most of the HD price reflects recouping investment in R&D and retooling factories, not a per-unit cost. So HD companies aren't spending lots more money this year - that means they'll be charging even less, competing on price without other differentiators.
For consumers, that can mean qualitative improvements through passing quantitative thresholds. Buy 2 HDs instead of 1, make a RAID, and watch both uptime and fault recovery become minor bumps in the road, rather than a job-threatening days-long surprise nightmare. While filling the coffers of the vendors, who can reinvest in integrating that kind of redundancy in the HD unit itself. This year's nonevents might just give sysadmins the chance to become the most obviously important link in the IT chain, eclipsing the usually exaggerated developer rockstars.
FWIW, HD consumers probably aren't defined by "HDs", but rather storage in any medium, determined by usage. So the real news in "HD" is really Flash memory, which is seeing huge leaps in capacity, cheapness, perfomance and manageability. When will someone ship a $100 SDIO 1GB/WiFi card? With gumpack-sized, 8-SDIO-socketed battery for a pocket-PSAN (Personal Storage Area Network)? Or start sewing these things into hats and sweatjackets?
--
make install -not war
Ever since Maxtor announced (but didn't ship) a 320GB drive in August 2003, things have moved too slowly in the PC (3.5") drive market. Maxtor finally shipped 300G and that was king for a while before Hitachi (and now others) shipped 400G. The lack of motion is very unusual compared to the historical size increases we've seen over the last 20 years.
I think the article doesn't make it clear that manufacturers' focus has moved to several other areas:
- 2.5" drives for use in servers (density of machines, not data)
- 1.8" drives for iPods (now up to 80G)
- 1" drives for mini-iPods and CF cards
- sub-1" drives (Cornice...) for CF and cell phones
Even though some of us need TBs of storage, most of the CE world would be happy with 10G for their music/video-recording.
I realize you're trolling, but Indonesia also has a history of treating the Chinese living in Indonesia like shit, so it's not surprising if the Chinese didn't do as much. (Note, I'm not defending this reaction, but it's not surprising.)
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
"Yes, I shat in woods," admits bear
Just looking on the news channels but no one is confirming it....
This year we're expecting the max size on 7200RPM notebook (2.5") drives to jump from 60GB all the way to 100GB, a huge jump.
And I'd also expect to see a jump in 5400RPM storage capacity from the current 100GB.
My ideal notebook drive for 2005 would be a 100GB 7200RPM drive with a 16MB cache, SATA(2?), and NCQ. But who knows when that will happen. The best drive available today is a 60GB 7200RPM drive with 8MB of cache, though as I mentioned earlier that will jump to 100GB this year.
Everything worth inventing has been invented. We've hit the ceiling. No more unexpected advances. Have a nice day. Smoke if you've got em.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
Thats what I'm waiting for.
I have 3x200gb, 2x160gb, 2x120gb, 4x80gb (and more down the line).
The 200gbs are running at 83% full because... they all mirror each other.
Yup I know it's particularly anal, but I'll agree with the first post: We need more reliable drives. All of my photos are backed up 2x on DVD- one goes into a jukebox, the other goes onto a spindle, and all are stuffed into something called CDStorageMaster (fun proggy).
The HDs mirror each other but I've not yet had time to test a catastrophic failure of this. I had a manual raid before and, when my system crashed due to a bad PSU (note: Antec replaced it free of charge) I was eventually able to get all the drives back up and running, but I was left with a very nasty taste of bad-dynamic disks in my mouth.
So please... more storage at 35cents/gb and I'll be happy. Or 3.5 cents/gb would make me happier, but one can hope.
The reality is that the hard drive, in addition to the floppy drive, is reaching extinction. The density of flash memory is increasing so rapidly that, within 10 years, the hard drive will not be necessary. IBM saw this inevitable demise of the hard drive and sold its hard drive business to a competitor.
Flash memory has still a lot of improvements to do in the write cycles department (the number of times you can write to it before it fails), which basically hasn't changed a lot since it was introduced to these days. The exact number dpendens on the manufacturer, but it ranges between 10k and 100k. It's also still very slow.
But i agree, hard drives will be phased out in the short term, probably by new technlogies like MRAM memory, which doesn't have the limited write cycles problem and is as fast as DRAM.
Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead!
I used to have a good sig...
So the only way for them to move is lower prices.
Sounds like a good year for consumers. Who needs more than a couple hundred GB anyway ?
What about the-
109.5 GIG RAPTOR!!!
15K RPM drives have been around for a long time, does anyone know if this is the fastest they can spin them from a physics perspective, do the bits start to fly off? Seriously what is preventing them from ramping up the speed further? I would think in the server world where fast throughput could be used that they would at least be pushing 20K+ RPM drives by now...
obviously completely ignorant of the fact that the storage industry has consistently bested Moore's Law for at least a decade
Can you please tell me how you think that Moore's Law is supposed to relate to the capacity of persistent, non-volatile data media? Or could you please just stop suggesting that it applies?
[
is all i care about, until we see these i could care less about movable drives.
So you're basing the entire society on the actions of the current government in power.
Seeing as the current government doesn't apprise it's own people of disasters within it's territories, why would the people be any wiser about the situation following the tsunami, and how would they be able to donate.
Just what country do you happen to be from? Is it Utopia?
Go back under your bridge, stupid little troll.
50 percent funny? .000000001 million?
What's so funny about that?
and also, how much did you donate?
Flash memory has still a lot of improvements to do in the write cycles department (the number of times you can write to it before it fails), which basically hasn't changed a lot since it was introduced to these days.
I agree that the 10K figure for multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory is a bit low, but with modern wear leveling, sector remapping algorithms, and file systems, 100,000 writes per sector for single-level cell (SLC) flash isn't too bad. In practice, the only things you can't put on flash memory under a typical workstation work load are 1. a swap file (get more RAM instead) and 2. a database (but for this, you're already RAID 5ing your drives and, if you're serious, mirroring transactions off-site).
Hitachi and others will continue to push the limit and introduce a 500GB model to the market very soon.
I guess very soon means last week, since the MacMall catalog that hit my mailbox last week offers a 500GB drive.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
What happened to the Buffalo TeraStation? I would call 1TB of storage (though overpriced) an improvement. http://www.cnet.com/4520-10602_1-5618710-1.html?ta g=hot
Hmm, then I wonder why the largest compact flash cards are actually just containers for micro hard disks...
Flash memory density is increasing rapily, but so is the cost. Look at solid state drives from M-Systems
-- They are rediculously expensive. I have used them for storage in hostile environment experiments, as that is what they are made for, but they are wayyy to expensive for consumer use. Obviously, the prices will come down. However, the prices to make postage stamp size hard disks with many gigabytes of storage are very low. Lower cost will win in the end, no matter how dense flash memory is.size increases, but that doesn't count as an improvment..
I mean, if they would put neon on them, now THAT would be an improvement.
sheesh
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is a good point that you bring up. The author of this article leaves a lot of angles out. Such as the development in smaller hard drives such as 1.8" and less. The increase in speed for 9mm 2.5" drives. The fact that more corporations would like to remain on drives that don't impact images when changed. Compaq plans on offering their 15K 146.8 GB drives until mid-07 that's production. They'll be around for longer than that. Desktop side too - the bandwidth hasn't really increased - the new Intel chipsets are pushing for SATA drives which means higher capacity too.
Where did this author come from? He probably attended a roadmap for Hitachi and decided that there wasn't anything useless for the people who read is articles? Screw that.
A lot of the major drive makers are focusing on the next generation of the DVD media too.
UID 1000000 is just around the corner.
My first computer was a 14MHz 80286 in 1988. It had a 60 MB hard drive. I now have a AMD 2.1 GHz chip and 4 drive RAID of 75GB drives plus a couple of other drives. In other words, my speed has gone up less than a thousand times, while my storage capacity has gone up almost 10,000 times.
Sure, they aren't as exciting as CPUs, but hard drive tech seems to have a pretty good track record.
Stuff that doesn't matter.
I've had three drives in a row that fail to spin up after 12 months.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
well, in fact, the speed increase HAS slowed.
They guy is just spoiled because the introduction of GMR read-heads started a storage density explosion that now is slowing down to normal levels.
The biggest hd you can buy now is 400GB. 250GB hds have been availabe more than 2 years ago.
Thats A LOT slower than doubling every year...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
... since hard disks are still the worst performance bottleneck in just about any PC. Over the years as CPUs and RAM have become faster, this bottleneck has just become more pronounced. Along the way we've heard about all kinds of amazing, alternative mass-storage technologies entering the pipeline, but nothing ever comes out the end. What's the status of that non-volatile nanotech memory they were talking about a while back? If that stuff ever hits the market and performs even half as well as they were saying, my machines would be zillion times faster than with these ancient, unreliable, revolving magnetic disks, large as they may be.
That's a feature I'd get a new drive for. There's power, noise and reliability to work on as well but it's not really up to me is it?
You're so right, I must be both. Thanks for enlighting me. Screw Slashdot for the evening, back to pr0n surfing, much more fun than reading up on domain hijacks...
Yup, but then you've got half the population behind bars. So you need the other half to guard them. Who's gonna feed everybody in that scenario? Or do some nanotech-science or writing /. comments on the side?
Just saw "Revenge of the nerds" on TV (I kid you not). Damn, that movie sucks!!!
You can get an external Firewire drive that's faster than an internal.
Traditional HDDs make great workhorses, and they'll be around for a long time to come, but I doubt if we'll ever see any huge improvements over the current top-end drives. Their basis is fifty-year-old technology, and conceptually they do very little. There comes a point when you're pretty much tapped out of revolutionary improvements.
Prices will continue to improve, and I'm sure we'll see gradual space and speed improvements for a while, but the future lies elsewhere.
Yes, it would be more accurate to refer to it as The Law of Accelerating Returns, as it's more general, but unfortunately most people are only aware of the popularized Moore's Law as it applies to transistor count, so it'll continue to get used in its stead. It makes the same point (unless you're a pedant).
Power to the Peaceful
Sure we'll see one or 2 fantastic things but nothing like 1999 -> 2002 for hardware innovation.
Incase anyone here hasn't noticed the tech industry IS still slowing down in advancements, especially the desktop PC.
Anyone who put a tiny bit more effort into buying a PC within 18-36 months ago (should) still find their machine runs most things today perfectly well.
There's simply nothing to upgrade to worth the $ / performance ratio of 2 or 3 years ago.
Actually Hitrachi just announced a 500GB Unit to be on sale before too long....
We need to move away from mechanical drives, not seeing how much we can push rotational speeds.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I'm posting this after booting from a 10GB HD made by Western Digital. I got this HD back in 1999. As for shoddy stuff, I don't know what you've been buying.
The best bang/buck EIDE hard drive you can get today is ~40cents per GB for a 160GB drive; any smaller capacity and you'll be paying more for less. For a little less than 50cents/GB you can get a 250,200, or 180GB drive where the increased storage density might be worth the extra few pennies per GB. The 400GB and 300GB monsters are under $1/GB, but still aren't a very good value (unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket and value bragging rights).
So, IMO, the best bang/buck for your average guy is putting two to four 160GB or 250GB drives in RAID 1 or 5.
--
Power to the Peaceful
They've been focusing mainly of storage space and not performance. The hard drive is still the bottle neck on most machines. I can barely dent my 240 gig HD. I'd much rather have a 80 gig HD that was 4x as fast. Yes, there are pratical uses for a 400 Gig hd, file server, AV, etc. But for the majority (read: regular consumers, not slashdotters) of people it's just unneeded at this point in time.
go out of business for making TRASH..
I have a 120g I bough last year that sounds like a 767 is cranking up for takeoff. I've padded the case with felt pads to absorb some of the noise but it's still intolerable.
I've also had a LOT of problems with WD drives going into a power on/off cycle, 'clunking' on and off rapidly and of course trashing data..
I've owned about 20 WD drives over the past few years and now they sit in my drawer, trashed, because they were just cheaply made crap.
I'll NEVER buy another WD again, I won't even take one if it's offered to me free of charge.
I've installed several Maxtor's for people and they are damn near silent, the PS fan is usually louder than the drive. In most cases I have to pick the drive up and feel it gyro in my hand (during initial install) to be sure it's working!
Well, if this is going to be a slow year for them, they can lower prices to move inventory.
I would like to stock up on a few big Maxtor's this year. I also hope blank DVD prices come down too.. Gotta back those bad boys up ya know!
Think about it... storage is pretty fast already. The average consumer doesn't need any faster. Those who need speed are using Serial ATA, SCSI, RAID, and other acronyms.
What is really *necessary* (marketable)? Size? Do consumers care about the size of the HD in their computer? Nope. Accoustics? Modern drives are pretty quiet. Consumers are used to noisy fans anyway... most don't care.
What consumers want is cheap. That's why dell makes money. That's why Apple released the mac mini.
IMHO the thing HD companies need to figure out is how to get the fast large drives they have now, at a lower price.
*THAT* is the forecast for 2005. Cheaper drives.
I do think though we'll see marginal improvement in flash storage, and small HD's... for mp3 players, PDA's and other devices. But nothing groundbreaking.
This year's economy is about *price*. People want more for less...
the company that delivers it, will be rewarded with customers. The ones that fail: will not succeed.
A RAID5 terabyte with only three physical disks. Anyone else being blown away by this? Holy crap. }:)
-Z
My PC is just about 2 years old now, but an Athlon 2200, 1GB DDR266 ram, 7200RPM 8M cache drives, and a GF4600 really do just fine. Even Doom3 and HL2 didn't really beat the system as badly as I had figured -- if I can play those two OK, why the hell would I bother upgrading for anything else? :) I'd like a DX9-capable vid card, but it's hard to justify another couple hundred bucks, especially considering I put well under $1000 into it originally...
I figure in another year, my system will be showing its age, and I'll be able to put together an PCI-E + SLI system for decent money...rar!
1) Disk perforamnce gains have outpaced CPU performance gains for at least the last decade. 2) The author simply does not understand HD design constraints. For a given RPM, the data transfer speed increases as the density per platter increases. This is constrained by the Magical electronics that read and write the bits on the disk. So, twice the density also implies twice the bulk data transfer rate (not the burst rate.) 3) SATA. SATA is now being sold at (or very near) the price of EIDE. Last A year ago SATA sold at a premium of $20-$30/drive. By the end of 2005, SATA will be cheaper than EIDE for otherwise-equal drives. 4) Price. Price/gig went from $1.00 at the beginning of 2004 to $.50 at the beginning of 2005, at the "sweet spot." The current "sweet spot" is 250GB. There is not reason to doubt that the price/Gig will reach $.25 by the end of the year. 5) interest in 10K and 15K RPM is misplaced for most applications. Speed affects rotational delay and nothing else. Bulk transfer rate is more important in most applications (point 2 above.) If it spins twice as fast but has half the density, it has the same bulk transfer rate. 6) interest in SCSI is outdated. SATA with one (competent) controller per disk has better characeristics.
I have not calculated if Moore's law applies but I distinctly remember using 2 Mb Winchester drives that were horribly expensive and then a large department store in town announced they had 10 Mb 'Hard Cards' for sale...
It's probably 15, not 10 years ago but still.
The external 2.5" 60Gb USB2 drive I have in front of me is indeed a world away from those large 2 Mb HP drives.
What has not changed is the time it takes to fill 'em up :-)
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I have to say that's not really Insightful since that's hardly commmon. I have 6 drives in my house all over 24 months old and haven't had a single issue yet. Some of these, 30GB ones, are like 4 years old and run constantly except for when I go away for a weekend or week whatever. If these are from different vendors then there is Definitely something wrong with your setup, like your Power supply or mobo is killing them. Hard drives don't keep dying in less than a year unless something is wrong with their environment. Stop buying drives and replace your PSU and/or mobo.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
No offense meant, but perhaps you are doing something wrong? Maybe a cheap PSU?
Drives have been getting bigger and bigger for years, it's backup media which has lagged. How about some solution to that? Like portable and reliable backup media which doesn't cost an arm and a leg, is big enough that you don't get tendonitis from switching the media out, and is fast enough that you are actually willing to do the backups.
If you read that link you just posted, the reply explains how RAID0 is still faster than RAID1. You forgot that if command queueing is used along with caching, that RAID0 should read the data just as fast, on average. I haven't done a random seek benchmark yet, I should probably try that.
There is no reason why RAID0 should increase latency compared to a single drive though. For those who don't really care about redundancy (make regular backups onto other drives), RAID0 is nice because you have twice the space of RAID1.
What a bunch of cowners!
It's all about perspective, no? Hell, we've nearly got 80 gig disks in our pockets, cell phones will get hard drives this year, SATA and SCCI 2.5 inch drives...
Nope nothin's happening!
I want a drive with more features for notebooks...
Sure 4200rpm may save battery life, but they're so god aweful slow. Why don't they make a drive that has variable rpm? You could even have the OS control the speed: 4200 when on battery and 7200 when plugged into an outlet. Maybe even have an override so you can make it fast at the expense of battery life, should you want to.
How about some solution to that?
How about external FW/USB2 drives for ~$1/GB? It's perhaps not quite as economical as DVD-R, but as far I know, it's still quite a bit cheaper to do backups to external fixed disk than it would be to go tape/DLT or similar.
If you are doing long-term archiving (like saving one tape per week permanently, for example), then HD backup is probably not for you -- but if you just want to keep your stuff from going bye bye, grab a couple external drives and use them in rotation.
I wanted a bigger drive back in June, and the prices were really quite high. I finally bought one in September, by then the prices on a 160GB drive had dropped to a respectible $130 (with rebates). Now the same is on sale for $59 in the latest BestBuy flyer.
The point? Something is happening. Why are they selling off drives like this? Oversupply? Switch to SATA?
It's not really a problem. With intelligence caching and lots of RAM, for the majority of uses it won't be a problem.
Most of the files I use such as applications, movies and music are only ever wrote once or maybe 10 times in their lifetime.
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
Having worked with both scsi and IDe offerings, It is safe the say the Seagate cheeta is within 5% of the fastest scsi drives and much cheaper and ten times easier to configure. SCSI snobs are going the way of Amiga snobs, seriously Seagate cheata drives are just as good...and scsi is way to difficult to use for the average computer user (believe me I took the phone calls)
my harddrive's had lots of changes this year. I added more memory to my harddrive, I added a new video to it to play them new games. Now my computer, that hasn't been upgrade since I bought it from Viewsonic.....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Knowing many chinese, they told me that the Indonesians frequently kill or burn down the houses of chinese living in Indonesia, and that goes both ways...but Chinese are the usually the victimized minority in Indonesia (they migrated there as merchants and professionals) Would we be barbaric if we didnt donate money to people who want us dead?
What awful news. Instead of coming up with yet another new type of interface for hard drives that cost extra and most of us don't have systems that will support in either hardware or software, the drive makers will have to focus on improving reliability, capacity, and maybe even have to slash prices further. As users how will we survive this?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Do you know any chinese, well I do...and they say that the indonesians frequently target the chinese there for racial attacks because they are in general more wealthy professionals. Would you give aid to people who have killed your ethnic group for hundreds of years? So believe it or not you dont know everything about world politics.
Hmm... a hot-swappable IDE/SATA carrier would be nice. Sure, you can sort of do it with a few USB/1394 drives, too.
The cheapest high density backup for home/SOHO is more hard drives.
Yes. Actually, seeing that nothing interesting is happening, I decided to go out and I almost got lucky, if you know what I mean. I kid you not. So, ironically, no news can be good news, if you follow my drift.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Lets take a break for the quest to be first with a small
form factor terabyte drive. Instead lets concentrate on
two things:
a) faster. much faster
b) self mirroring (ie raid 1) drives in the same form
factor.
The first is obviously a desire everybody wants.
The second is similar I guess to dual core cpu's vs
dual cpu's. Take a drive and instead of making it 500GB
give me 2 200GB drives on seperate controllers and power
supplies with an internal interface that allows one to
mirror the other. Seemlessly.
While fault tolerance should never be confused with a
'backup', something like this would be very useful. With
giant capacities now prevalent, most consumers have given
up on backing up. But by offering a self contained
fault tolerance you allow the consumer to easily chose
between giant capacity or smaller size but some safety
built in.
For the performance crowd, many who now use raid 10 arrays,
you cut the drive clutter in half. Two bays, not 4 (or 4
not 8). Perhaps you could even get better thermal
peformance than 2 independent drives.
I, on the other hand, haven't seen a hard drive failure on my desktop since the single-digit 1GB drive I fried by changing jumpers while it was connected something like a dozen years ago. My secret is this: always buy the slowest spinning hard drives on the market. My main hard drive is a 40GB drive spinning at only 5krpm, but it has been spinning 24 hours a day and 7 days a week for at least five years with no single problem, outliving four power supplies and six keyboards. Also, it is still very quiet. Maybe I am just lucky but I haven't got any problem with slow disks yet. But I don't buy old models. I buy big, slow disks. And if the seek time is an issue than two 5krpm disks in an array have the same seek time and additionally twice the throughput of a single 10krpm unreliable noisy piece of junk.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
This is flat out wrong. Digital video, content you create yourself is incredibly demanding when it comes to storage. DVCAM video is 3 MB/sec, and let's not even talk about HD. If you're in the film/video industry, 160 GB is too little to even consider.
Let me tell you, when you start recoring video and storing your DVD's on disk for easy access, not even multiterabyte disks will seem enough.
Add to that storage for backups which doubles or triples your needed space
Pardon the naive question, but (setting aside self-recorded stuff for a moment) why do you need to make a backup copy of copies of video on your hard disk? Don't the original DVDs--or your hard disk copies, one or the other--already qualify as backups? If your hard disk fails you can always restore from the DVDs, and if the DVDs go bad you can always burn new ones from the hard disk.
I personally keep my video archive in DVD-R spindles; my hard disk only has self-recorded stuff (serving as a backup to the DVDs) and anything I may have cached there for watching. DVDs are far more likely than hard disks to last 10 or 15 years, at which point they'll have been replaced by a new media with even more storage space and you can shift everything over then.
Nothing happens. Again.
Are you serious? With new technologies making it easier and easier for any user to film and edit their own videos, space becomes extremely important. How much video is a mother capable of shooting? Anyone who has any video generally needs lots of space, not just those in the industry.
Four roommates. No microwave. You do the math.
I've had three drives in a row that fail to spin up after 12 months.
And what brand are you buying?
The biggest speed improvements seem to be related to the cache 2->8mb was a big change in performence. Maxtor DiamondMax-10 drives, 7200rpm with 16mb cache apparently offer similar performance to the 10k Raptors with 8mb (other than seek times), not to mention they have a better GB/$$.
have to be the biggest story in storage in 2004. We're talking a new product category that has been so successful, it is now multiplatform and multi-vendor and has spawned a related line of flash-based products (iShuffle).
1.8" drives, followed by flash ram eating into the hard drive market, there's progress in 2004.
Combined with PC virtualization (VMware, UML, Virtuozzo), it's just a matter of app integration before we start using widespread standby/resume that saves our virtual machines to iPod-scale media.
Compared to Internet Suspend/Resume, this would be more secure.
Eventually the limitations of magnetic storage will be reached, so I have been wondering, what other storage technologies are avialable that all greater density.
One technology i have heard of is storing data holographically in perhaps crystalline medium. This has several advantage, it is very reliable since there are few moving parts, the crystal does not tend to degrade much, and from what I have heard there are very fast access speeds. I even heard that due to something to with the holographic nature of the storage it would be very useful for search engines. This technology seems to address many of the issues with magnetic storage. I havent heard much about this technology being applied, unfortunately. I dont know what technical issues have to be resolved for it to be feasible.
See here.
I know people have made this claim before, but seriously - they've demonstrated completely working prototypes and have a product line set for release this year.
In addition to the other benefits, this will allow small, PC based drives to get into the TB range.
Does anybody really think technology goes by stops and starts, synchronized with the calendar year? And that an industry with a heavy R&D invetment is just going to let all that infrastructure just sit idle? It's more likely there's just a random lull in announcements. It takes years of research to develop each increase in drive capacity, then more time to develop th eindutrial processes to make all those drives reliably and cheaply. As for progress, my first computer at work was a 3MB disk drive, size of 4 PC cases, dimmed the lights when it started up. Almost $22K in today's dollars. I wouldnt say progress has been slow.
I don't think that's right. I've got one of those Ximeta thingies, and it just does some USB-over-ethernet trick (I assume) to be attached to any machine. I hear there is multi-write support (for windows only of course) now, perhaps that requires a machine to be the "master" host.
The biggest hd you can buy now is 400GB. 250GB hds have been availabe more than 2 years ago. Thats A LOT slower than doubling every year...
The time span between 32 MB and 30-40 GB being typical mainstream drives was almost exactly 10 years. That is a doubling every year.
But since then, the size increase has slowed considerably down.
What kind of massive R+D and capital investment effort could one mount with a price point of $1/GB? Unless you're a Google sized operation, even reducing the cost of DASD by 50% or increasing the price/performance by 50% is not going to matter that much.
What they should focus on is not more storage, since I can already but a Terabyte, nor network attached storage since that's pretty cheap and all the other hardware wrapped around the drives is the cost component. What they need to focus on is better backup and storage management, secondary and tertiary storage media and better more standardized removable storage.
This particular field in the computing industry simply doesn't move at the same pace as other system components
Given that statement, I'm not sure I'd trust what the article defines as 'newsworthy'. Hard disk performance, cost, and capacity have been advancing significantly faster than any other major system component over the last 10 years, with the possible exception of consumer-level video cards.
Sure, people blather on about "Moore's Law" and 18-month doubling times for computing power. Very few people realize that magnetic drive performance has been advancing faster than that.
1980: 5MB HDD in doublesize, extreme cost.
1987: 40MB HDD
1995: 1GB HDD
2005: 500GB HDD
Doubling times:
1980-1987: ~21 months
1987-1995: ~20.6 months
1995-2005: 13.38 months
That's right. Hard drive capacity over the last 10 years has been doubled over an average time of less than 14 months.
Now that is impressive.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
If you are running systems with very large block of memory allocated for very large objects, and I mean very large, then the Virtual memory system may indeed be thrashing your harddrive. How? Because the V-mem system will continuously swap out blocks of memory, back and forth, back and forth, from the swap area to the physical memory.
I have seen this when we had an amatuer engineer who stupidly made his data-structures 250 meg each. Pretty stupid, but there it was.
This could be the problem with someone who keeps needing to swap out harddrives. The drive might just be worked to death.
I think that for a very large capacity harddrive if you could get dram prices way down you could set up a screaming psuedo-drive in a dram space.
The noted problems with flash (sram) is that it has limited numbers of writes. But it retains the data when it is powered down.
And so if you design a drive that has a continuous source of power, then you could use cheeper dram for a solid state drive. That would mean that the device would have to have continuous power. And so it would need a very reliable batter power system on it.
All of this seems very doable. Anyone know of such a device?
I hope this year tape drives can catch up a bit in capacity and lower prices. Tape is essential no matter how reliable your disks are as businesses need off-site data storage as part of their backup strategy.
I've seen a few places backup to external hard drives instead of tape (mainly due to large capacity needed). That's not too bad, but you still have the transport factor, which tape can take much more of a beating then a hard drive.
Online backup to a trusted provider is a great idea as well, but can be limiting by your internet connection's speed. True, you can do incremental/diff backups, but a complete system restore would take way too long.
That's my wish for the new year!! We'll see how it goes.
-m
http://www.invisik.com
I thought SATA was going to get a large transfer rate boost this year. I don't recall exact numbers, but I remember that it was quite a bump.
Hardly. All else being equal, if you double the rotational speed, you double the bulk transfer rate. Also, rotational delay is the major factor in the drive's average seek times.
Bulk transfer rate is more important in most applications
I would contend that seek time is more important for most applications (transaction servers, database access, web servers, booting PCs etc) than transfer rate (used mostly by media-intensive industries).
If it spins twice as fast but has half the density, it has the same bulk transfer rate.
Why half the density? Why not the same density but 50% higher spin (and transfer) rate?
6) interest in SCSI is outdated. SATA with one (competent) controller per disk has better characeristics.
Not according to this article, and others. It's improving, SATA NCQ/TCQ is a big help, but its only advantage is price, still. 10K and 15K SCSI drives have real advantages in both transfer rate and seek times.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
What I want is a little box where you can dump up to 5-6 drives, and it'll do RAID-5, with wi-fi, ethernet and USB2/firewire interfaces.
That's your safe, easy, convenient, flexible home/office network storage device.
surprisingly enough users doesn't demand much from the manufacturers. Thus far, companies have delivered what the masses had requested, but much halt is due to customer dependency.
Someone call the grammar police?
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
Allow me to toot my own SAN horn. Before you think I'm a kook, realize that the top two lawfirms in the world use these solutions (along with many many others in the know):
FalconStor designs an appliance which will allow you to do many many things with your data in terms of reliability, speed, and disaster recovery. One of the best features available is -instantaneous- backup and recovery. That's right. Instant. In the blink of an eye your entire SAN drive can be backed up or restored using Timemarks.
In addition, using a Time'view', we can open up a transparent window to any timemark (timemarks are usually taken on some schedule - one every five minutes, for instance; they only take about 64k of overhead), and allow you to look at your data as it was an hour, six hours, or two minutes ago. This lets you easily mount up a drive and recover a file you accidentally deleted - or an email.
Our solutions tie into Exchange, SQL server, Oracle, Sybase, and more, to provide instant backup and recovery. We provide an inband solution (that means we get between your disks and your servers) - because of this, we can provide extreme services such as bare metal recovery (mirror your local drive to the SAN, then if your drive fails, just boot off the SAN! Either via IP or FC!)
We also provide solutions for disaster recovery (replicating your data to a remote location, then restoring it), redundancy (our applications have no single point of failure; on top of that, we use a redundant pair of applications so that if one fails, the other takes over), data migration (move your data from that fast EMC disk onto some slower JBOD disks, or take your local drive and put it on a fast SAN instead).
We've been doing this for a while! It's nothing new, but everyone is paying attention, especially to our Virtual Tape Library solutions, which allow you to backup your systems to disk, then export those backups to tape - still using your familiar NetBackup/etc infrastructure.
We provide NAS solutions, too, and much more than I could ever fit in one comment. FalconStor is widely recognized in the storage world as the leader of SAN management and disaster recovery. So don't tell me disk isn't going anywhere. There ARE still customer needs, from backup to virtualization. Take a look if your SAN needs an upgrade - www.falconstor.com. Oh yeah. And it's FAST TOO, with technologies like Hotzone, which will identify the most-used portions of your disk and cache reads and writes to a solid-state disk.
The advance that never seems to happen is parallel read drives. If you have a 200 GB drive, it probably has five or so platters with data on them, and so has five heads -- but it only uses one head at a time. If you could read all five heads together, you would get 5x the data rate. You'd get the performance of a five-disk RAID0 in one disk.
Why aren't companies doing this? There must be a good reason.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
On slow news days it's pretty much traditional to just run a fluff story on firemen rescuing kittens from trees.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but I'll have to concur with the other posters here and say that my 2.5-year-old 100GB Maxtor drive is doing just fine in my Dell. I think it's 5400RPM. You might want to check on your heat and/or power situation.
Y'know, paying over $100 on a hard drive isn't a sin or anything. Go ahead. You might like it.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
5 platters isnt stable in a 7200RPM drives. I expect a 500GB+ version from Seagate using 4 platters, but not 5.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I'd like a 200GB flash (or whatever it takes) RAM drive with an access rate measured in nano-seconds. THEN we're talkin' storage!
Only boring people are ever bored.
Nothing new in 2005 no, SATA arrived in 2004 (or was it even 2003) ? Going from 2MB cache to 8 MB cache was in 2002 or 2003. Now that SATA is here, there are no real changes expected for 2005, except small price drops and slightly larger drives.
In my experience harddrives do fail often when you hdparm -S xx them (auto-suspend after xx minutes). Of course I don't access these disks too often (mostly backup). All of the disks are guaranteed to crash after 1 yrs of timeout usage. The WD Caviar disks I purchased over 10 yrs ago still work without problems, IBM disks also. Also, laptop hard drives are very vulnerable in my experience.
If you need more than a few hundred gigs, then you are a theif or a pervert and belong behind bars.
I know you have already been ridiculed, but...
WTF!
I am a freelance video producer. I am currently working on a project that consists of over 200 Gigs. That's in addition to my applications, music, DVR recordings I make with the ATI card, etc.
The largest project I ever worked on required over a Terabyte. And that was just my end of the project.
I'm about to start editing a wedding for a friend. The raw MiniDV footage will occupy nearly 200 gigs itself.
I am also a pervert, and the last time I checked, this was not illegal. It may not be revered, but it is not illegal.
Further, do you agree that the cost of housing these "thieves or perverts" would be worth punishing them for their fairly victimless crimes? Nothing like paying $45,000 a year to house someone who download a few hundred dollars worth of CDs. And even though you may consider these folks the scum of the earth, they may, other than having a nasty BitTorrent habit, be upstanding members of society. You could be sending soccer moms and dads to jail. You'd be breaking up families which would seem to have a much greater detriment to society than a few lost MPAA profits. And we must send the evil little ones to jail for their after school downloading behavior, because that's where we should raise our downloading children, in jails where they can learn to commit real crimes.
It seems to me that any Slashdot post that is shorter than one line and doesn't make you laugh, is as dangerous as a George W. Bush dichotomy. (Of course, geopolitics is as simple as categorizing the individuals and nations of the world as good and evil.) IMHO, people who cannot spell the word thief, or avoid the logical fallacy of oversimplification, should be behind bars.
You said it man. Nobody f#%ks with the Jesus.
How many times can you watch the same DVD?
How many DVDs that you will watch no more than once you need to keep? Why?
I prefer to watch a DVD, if it is not memorable it finds its way to Ebay or Amazon. If it is worth watching a second time I keep it, but once I have 10 or 15 of them I know I have too many, most likely I will never watch them all again, so I get rid of 2 thirds of them, rinse and repeat.
In the unlikely case that you need a DVD again, you buy it 2nd hand.
So again, why do you need a collection of DVDs?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Yeah, insightful... "ATTENTION PLEASE!!! NOTHING IS HAPPENING!!!"
Caps, caps, caps. Sometimes all caps is necessary.
Comment removed based on user account deletion