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Seagate Announces 750GB Hard Drives
Hack Jandy writes "Seagate documents have leaked out the two 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda hard drives. The drives are the first desktop hard drives to use perpendicular recording, feature a 16MB cache and 7200RPM spindle."
Get perpendicular!!!
Check out the Seagate Barracuda for more info.
We can finally Get Perpendicular!"
DYWYPI?
...oh, I see. Never mind.
I suppose that why it has perpendicular recording.
We all know 16k of storage is more than enough for anyone.
Now I have to go to Costco and buy 3 250GB drives!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I don't know if I believe the claims of an "accidentally leaked" spec sheet.
that will hold almost half of my porn!
I am not left-handed, either!
omgz!! more space for my pr0n
Each time the capacity of hard drives goes up a few gigs, I think back to the day in the mid 90's when I got my first "gig" hard drive for $500. Wow, it was the most incredible thing to be one of the first people in my neighborhood to have so much storage... I didn't think I'd ever run out of that much space. And today, the OS won't even fit into such a thing.
But let's put this huge capacity into perspective: Having once had to reverse engineer an obsolete 3.5" floppy drive to repair an obsolete piece of industrial machinery that was down (the customer couldn't afford to replace the whole machine because of a failed floppy drive, and the OS loads from floppy of all things), I learned that this contraption, which was on the market in the 80's, was really incredible, if you take a step back and think about it for a minute. Then, all it takes is a moment to realize that hard disk drives are several orders of magnitude more complex. First, the density of a floppy drive is nothing compared to that of a hard disk even from a decade ago, and secondly, the linear motion of the reading head on a floppy is controlled by a simple stepper motor, whereas the round motion of the reading heads on a hard drive is controlled by servo. I mean, just stop to think about it for a moment. All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
Get a life or buy a hard drive and shut up.
Everyones using USB disks for backups now rather than tapes. So many benefits there. Thats why Lacie and Maxtor are making a killing on selling drive + MCU + USB + casing packages. How many small and medium sized companies have total data exceeding 750GB?
Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter. A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later. Sure I understand Moores law and how 10MB was huge back then. But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it. Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there. Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that. Our humans senses will cease to notice any further difference. Games might require 2 blue-ray DVDs but will not require say 32 blue-ray DVDs in the next 10 years. What will you PUT on it?
Maybe this will mean I'll finally have as much space in hotmail as I have in gmail.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
For someone who knows all the answers:
Are hard drives becoming cache-starved? 16MB of cache doesn't seem like alot against 750GB on 7200 rpm platters.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I see what you did there ;)
Because I've experienced data loss before. That's a lot of valuable stuff (at least in my case) in a very small space with little to back it up with except for more of the same. It scares the bejesus out of me.
But I remember saying that about them huge 9GB drives when they came out when I was 12 (or so.)
750 (hard drive manufacturer GB) = 698.49 (real GB or GiB, depending on how anal you are).
As these sizes keep getting bigger the need to settle on one method of calculating GB, for both OSes and hard drive manufacturers, keeps getting painfully clearer.
Come on, there is no way that a 7,200RPM drive will have an average latency of 4.16ms, that's the pure physical latency of the platter! The transfer rate is similarly bogus, it's the burst transfer rate of the interface, not even the outer track transfer speed. Guess we have to wait for someone like storagereview to throw iometer at this beast and get some real info.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I want speed not giggaquads of data storage. why can't they sell 20-40G drives with the latest speed stuff so I could afford 5 or 10 of them for RAID arrays? it's recockulas.
... terrabyte hard drives, here we come!
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
Randy?
Well, part of the reason for the speed is the increased density of the bits. Plus, more platters and heads gets you more speed. Together, more density and more heads and more speed means more capacity.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that
Right. Tell that to any gamer running @ 1280x1024. Higher resolutions will always be in demand. Games will continue to have better and better textures, more units, bigger and more maps. I wouldn't be supprised to see 1TB games in the next 10 years.
You make a good point, but just don't put finite limits on things which are likely to change quickly.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
It's getting to the point where you want to keep your OS and core applications in Flash memory and things that are less important on hard drives. I just bought a 512 MB usb key for $25. Scaling up, you could get a multi-GB flash drive for a couple hundred bucks.
Some companies have multi-tiered storage solutions (e.g. fast SCSI RAID, cheap EIDE RAID, optical, etc.). Some of those ideas may make their way into desktop devices. You'd boot off of flash memory nearly instantly (it would cache your OS and core applications), then you'd play your MP3s, surf the web, or whatever on your relatively slow hard drive.
Harddrive space required == Harddrive Space Available + 5 Gigabytes.
What will you put on [a TB disk]?
After installing Windows and Office, you'll only have room for a few hours of virtual reality porn.
Seriously though, HD video is "already" 1080x1920. Up the bit-depth and frame rate, and an uncompressed video stream is pretty huge. 10 years ago who would have thought of 60GB of (compressed) music in your pocket?
I have no doubt that we'll find a way to fill a TB disk. The more serious question: will one be in control of one's own data, or will the MPAA/RIAA/MSoft charge you $0.02 every time you do a directory listing or open a file?
Since Red Hat in their ultimate wisdom has chosen ext3 and decided not to fully support XFS their Enterprise OS can't format this whole drive - you will have to chop it into a couple of pieces.
Go Suse!
I don't see why not. They can handle entire racks filled with drives almost that big now.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
I know people say the same thing when faster CPUs come out, "who's going to need all that speed?", but I think it can be said of hard drive space. I can't even fill up my 250GB HD, and that includes my OS, development database, latest games, and my, um... "collection." Video games are the largest media out there (unless you are pirating DVDs, but that doesn't count). Oblivion takes 4.5GB on my HD. Valve's Steam w/ HL1, HL2, etc. takes 7GB. What else is there? Unless you are doing high-res graphics work or editting a home-movie, will this hard drive ever make it into the mainstream? Or is it just a niche item?
I would rather than 2 x 350GB in RAID 1 in case of a HD failure instead of 1 700GB HD.
Mmm...Barracuda!
So will we ever reach the point that vector graphics will define what we want to see better than bitmaps ever will. Right now the hard part seems to be adding enough vectors to describe the detail of a bitmap, but it seems to me the more detail in the bitmap the easier we can find an equation to fit it. What is holding back vector graphics currently?
Will Linux support it... hehehe that's cute.
...
I have friends who have multi-TB raids at their homes using a mix of IDE/Sata/USB in one RAID
While hardware RAID support in Linux is a bit hit or miss the software kernel support works properly and is fairly quick. Certainly the bottleneck for most setups will always be the drives themselves.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Yes, it should considering that according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS [wikipedia.org] states that the maximum volume size for an NTFS volume is 16EiB. One exibyte is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, so 16 exibytes = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes. Since a 750GB hard drive should hold approximately 750,170,112,000 bytes, an NTFS volume should be able to handle 24,590,081 of those 750GB hard drives in a RAID array. Now assuming a RAID array can handle that many of these drives, and that this new 750GB hard drive merely takes the price spot of Seagate's current finest offering of a 500GB hard drive (priced on newegg as $295 each) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16822148108 [newegg.com] rather than debuting at a higher price point, which it probably will, that many hard drives would cost about $6,147,520,250 before tax, and not including any of the massive discounts one might expect to recieve for such a massive purchase. On top of that, at a sales tax rate of 7.75%, the tax on those drives would cost you $476,432,819.38. So I don't know about you, but I doubt this is going to be a problem for either XP or Vista for a long, long time (assuming you use NTFS partitions).
However, a thought intrudes -- why are we still using movable heads at all? Considering the track-to-track density and small radius disk formats we're using, isn't it about time to shift back to head-per-track? Couldn't we make a fixed-position monolithic RW head to cover all tracks of a disk at once? Can we make multiple RW coils small enough to pack at the same density as tracks on a platter? Come to think of it, we could stagger them a bit; they wouldn't have to be all in a single line...
It just seems like such a waste of kinetic to constantly throw the heads back and forth across the platter.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
I have a 3 x 320Gb RAID5 array in my home server, When i upgraded from my 3 x 200Gb drives it took a very long time to copy the data from the old array to the new (I left it overnight)
We need a way of getting the data on and off the drives quicker.
Its not like I need to access all the 640Gb all the time, but it shouldnt take hours if I need to.
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
Dunno why parent is modded funny. The basic approach is entirely plausible, and it may well be both cheaper and more efficient in the future to ship humongous pre-recorded libraries rather than depend on the constant availability of superwide network pipes.
*insert joke about storing a large amount of internet porn on the new 750 GB hard drives here*
can i have funny points now?
I do not accept czechs.
Something to hold all my porn...
Complete dvd rips of my dvd collection: 800GB.
My music, ripped to FLAC: 100GB
2 OSs (Debian and WinXP Pro) + Software for them (incl games): 45-50GB
Yeah, I could use this drive.... And in all seriousness, so could a lot of ppl. With dvd ripping coming standard in Vista and people's growing digital multimedia collections incl. TV and Music (from itms and others), the space is definately needed.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
I will juss repartition this drive into smaller ones and use them as backups. :D
Well now it will be too easy to get to 1 terrabyte. Now if only OS makers/fs developers would make there stuff accept a drive this size in its eniterty...strip a bunch of these, and video editing won't be as pain full..."Oh were is that drive with such in such...hmmm this one, no..." (now) "Sweet all my video in one place, loaded an ready to edite yeah!!! (act enthused)" On another note, maybe this will help in development of nural nets, or other AI stuff where storage and speed are needed to mimic actual human thought...hmmmm.
That ain't happening for a while, even with perpendicular recording.
If you check out the datasheet for the 7200.10 series Barracudas (PDF), on page 2 you'll see a row with the heading "Heads/discs".
I'm going to take a wild guess and say that "discs" refers to the number of platters in the drive. Also, Seagate has the option of writing to one or both sides of the platter, which helps explain how the 200 & 250GB models have 3 Heads and only 2 discs.
So: The 750GB model will have 8 read/write heads and 4 platters, meaning they're cramming roughly 190GB per platter. IIRC, the IBM 75GB Deathstars had 5 platters instead of 4, which contributed greatly to their failure rate, so Seagate is doing the smart thing and trying to increase the GB/platter instead of the GB/drive. They're awfully close to a terabyte drive... if they used 5 platters.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
the 750 GB hd is really only about 700 GB due to the manufacturers counting 1,000 instead of 1,024..
Anyway, lets look at how much space that really is, and how easy it is to fill up.
DVD Movies range from 4gb to 9gb depending on film length and extras, lets settle on an easy middle number, 7GB average.
That is around 100 DVD's you could store on your hard drive (My room mate owns over 150 DVDs, so while it might be a large number to some, it is not so large to others)
That is not including TV series, if someone were to store 1 season of the show 24 on their media center pc it would take 45GB of space.
Also concider that HD movies are going to be around 30GB each
Video games are getting increasingly large, Recent games like
The Godfather (4.5gb installed)
LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II (5gb installed)
TES: Oblivion (6.3gb installed)
World of Warcraft (5.3gb installed)
Tomg Raider: Legends ( 7.3gb installed)
Games are only going to get larger too.
This is not even counting people who dabble with video editing or anything like that, work-wise that consumes monsterous ammounts of HD space..
What's the useable space left after formatting that drive? 450G ? :)
You know, for when I don't need it.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
Between digital images, audio recording, and occasional video editing (yes all legit), I managed to rack up about 4 gigs per week of new data, and my parents about 2 gigs/week.
What I really don't understand is this: between 2 backups I did 3 hours apart, I somehow amassed 160 megs of new data - without using the computer. All I can think of is that something somewhere is downloading updates or logging or SOMETHING. Sheesh.
Anyway, at 4 gigs/week, my 400gig drive will fill up in about 100 weeks or 2 years. This is pretty much on par with past drive usage - filling up the largest available drive in 2 years.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
Lossless audio compression is just that -- lossless. There's no information thrown away, hearable or not.
Because "GiB" is stupid. GB means 2^30 bytes, and that's just the way it is.
CAD engineers can expect to work on so-called Dual Link (NOT to be confused with Dual Head) monitors, which work at up to 3,840 x 2,400. Well, that was last year - there may be better by now.
Then, there's always the ultra-high-resolution camera at 4 gigapixels. (Yes, that's giga, not mega.)
Present any of these storage problems to the Seagate engineers and they're either going to run screaming into the night or confess that really their drive would be good for a few minutes use, for these sorts of applications.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Get yourself an ATSC card and start recording 720p, or 1080i shows; the latter will consume almost 8GiB per hour.
...64 Kb is more than enough for everybody. 750 GB sounds like an overdone hard drive.
i am getting partly sick of people increasing HD capacities and processor speeds all the time. instead i want development in other fields like finer pixels on LCD, faster buses on HW side. a lot more people writing multithreaded programs on SW side.
While your post remind people that different definitions of GB are used, you are actually adding to the existing confusion. Because what you call a "real GB" is not real at all. You should rather call it "conventional GB", as in "conventional Giga prefix used in computing, ie 2**30". The real Giga is the Giga prefix as defined by SI, ie 10**9. Disk manufacturers are just using the standard Giga SI prefix instead of the "conventional Giga prefix". Other people are doing it in the computing industry. Bandwidth and throughput are also typically referred to using standard SI prefixes (e.g. an MP3 file at 128 Kbit/s is 128000 bit/s NOT 128*1024 bit/s).
...available in Akihabara on the 21st of this month at a price of 66,150 yen.
Next month, the 1 TB drive?
Did you guys notice that it claims in that article to withstand 68Gs of shock force and still operate? Isn't that an unusually high amount of force? I mean, I've dropped a hard drive a foot or so and it became completely useless. 68Gs is a lot of force. I'd be interested to know if this is some kind of new shock absorption technology.
-Vendal Thornheart
These are definitely not too big to be practical, and I don't just mean movies and such.
The data storage requirements for even small sized businesses can easily extend into the multi terabyte range. I last worked at a pretty small company (20 employees) which did financial modeling/forecasting. I think we had about 5 TB of data laying around (although they wanted to move the data format to XML, it's probably 18TB by now).
4096R/EF7BAFA6 79E1 DF98 D09D 898F 9A11 F6F0 DDDC 23FA EF7B AFA6
Standards do not appear overnight just because a bunch of guys decide that things should be done in exactly the opposite way from what everyone else was doing for ages.
The filesystem may reserve enough bits to address 16EiB, but that doesn't mean Windows can handle it yet.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As usual, the specs are misleading (but everybody should expect that anyway - it's nothing new, certainly not for hard drive manufacturers).
From the Spec Sheet:
"One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity."
That said, I'm a Seagate fan when it comes to hard drives. Lovely and quiet, and I've never had one fail yet (touch wood).
--
onedotzero
thedigitalfeed.co.uk
That was da bomb. Really speeded up my XT clone with the ultra-cool Amber screen back in '86.
:[
And, you could back it up with just a hand-full of floppys!
Now I can't even use a floppy on my notebook.
I think, therefore I thought.
>"The drives are the first desktop hard drives to use perpendicular recording, feature a 16MB cache and 7200RPM spindle."
Okay... but we're talking about 7200RPM over perpendicular bits... doesn't that equal something like 7200RPM x 8 if it were a conventionnal drive?
Just like a 7200RPM laptop drive will never reach the throughput of even (probably) a 5400RPM desktop drive.
I remember figures like this claimed before.
If you now wonder how humans can survive tripping and falling to the ground. Well A they often don't and the ones that do do because we are both bouncy and don't free fall to the ground.
But it is the reason a fall the the second floor is so fucking dangerous.
G forces are a lot higher then you expect.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
new ones, filled ones, and finally, broken ones.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
An important point seems to be missed by everyone in all the "1Tb won't run out in a few years", "yes it will", "no it won't" discussions. Given more space, engineers will think of new applications for all that space.
It's not like you were filling up that 20Mb harddrive with text files.
It's not like you were filling up that 1Gb harddrive with black and white bitmaps and low fidelity samples.
And you're not going to fill that 1Tb harddrive with JPGs, movies and MP3.
3D environments (for games or other purposes) will take more and more space, as objects and their textures get more detailed. And that's just an application that's already here. Think of what you can do with all that space and think of something new.
How about CGI-movies with dozens of selectable camera angles? How about we send you all the feeds of a sports event with a direction script and let you mess with it? I'm sure you can do better than I am, just saying there -will- be new ideas. Wilder and more storage hungry than what I'm proposing here and we -will- be needing Pb drives in 10 years.
bah! it's perpendicular!
Actually I regularly use ~10 Gb for storing simple ascii text files.
And roughly 8 Tb for storing images (although granted, not in jpg format).
Anyway, your point is well taken. And frankly, 750 Gb already is a pittance from my point of view.
My room mate owns over 150 DVDs
I am just curious. Unlike CDs, DVDs you have to watch with a high amount of attention. That is, besides stuffing your face or working out (that's both ends of the fatness spectrum), you cannot do anything else during the DVD play. CDs you can listen to during almost anything you do (work, sports etc...).
Where does your room mate find the 150 to 300 hours to watch the DVDs?
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I'm running 3x 400GB SATA's in a software RAID5 on a linux server no problem. The key problem you may be thinking of was the LBA48 support. Older IDE drive controllers only supported LBA32, so they would only see 137GB of larger drives. Often a BIOS upgrade fixes that, and ups support to LBA48. Newer SATA spec doesn't require LBA48, but I'm not aware of one that doesn't, though there's probably the odd one. There'd very likely be a BIOS or flash upgrade for the controller to add 48-bit addressing. LBA48 tops out at about 2000GB per drive on 32-bit processors IIRC.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Too bad you're going to need a bigger drive if you want to store more then 670 Gig on it.
I admit it. My brain went immediately to "Get Perpendicular!" ... AND THE HITACHI BRANDING ... as soon as I saw the reference to perpendicular in the story. It's been months since I saw that animated short -- if not more than a year.
Someone needs to give the guys who thought that up, a bonus.
Actually I regularly use ~10 Gb for storing simple ascii text files.
Wow, every hear of gzip?
The author of the article mis-interpreted Seagate's latency figure. Seagate means: "Average rotational latency". This can be calculated from: 60 seconds/minute / 7200 RPM / 2 = 0.00416 s = 4.16ms.
Oficially you should add in the controller overhead, and most likely the time to read a sector (it's unlikely they pass-through the sector: in theory you can start to send the sector to the host before you've read it completely, but this complicates things as when the CRC doesn't match, you have to cancel the data sent to the host!), but if you do the math, these are negligable compared to the 4.16 ms.
I don't expect anything "special" to happen in the "seek times" area. They will be within 10% from the slightly older drives. Either up to 10% better because they did find a way to improve seek times a bit. Or up to 10% worse because the higher density requires a longer settling time, but this is less likely than a small improvement.
I see absolutely no reason to stop at 10 megapixels. That must be an arbitrary number you just picked out of the air.
Again, complete nonsense. HDTV is already 1920x1080, so you were proven wrong 5+ years ago already. Never mind about film, which has about a century on your theory.
Pictures need to be zoomed, and anyone with even the slightest bit of logic can see how very wrong you are about video.
It's not so much of how stupid your claims are that bothers me, it's that several moderators have absolutely no sense, and are unable to see through your nonsense claims.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hmm, thinking about it, if it's a true hardware RAID array, it might hit the 2TB limit if it addresses the entire array as a single drive. Using 4 of these in a hardware RAID5 array, or 3 in a RAID0, you may well need LBA64 support in both the controller and the OS (which goes up to 512TB). AFAIK, only windows 2003 SP1 and linux 2.6.x (and presumably windows x64) support LBA64 at the moment, so you wouldn't run into problems with Vista or linux with a 2TB+ hardware raid array, assuming you had one of the SATA controllers that does LBA64 atm. There's also hacks for 2TB+ using 4k sector sizes, which goes up to 16TB.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
They sell the same piece of music both encoded onto a regular DVD and as a CD.
Listen to them both.
You hear that difference?
I do. Even on a pretty crappy stereo, the difference is pretty big. 16bits/44khz is not optimal - but it was the best thing possible back when the cd format was made in the late 70s. Now that we can get sound - why not? The CD's we have will still work - it's not like when the CD's replaced the LPs and tape.
Stop the brainwash
Just crack open the drives and swop the platters over :)
The capacity gap between affordable harddisk storage and affordable backup solutions is ever increasing :-(
By now, the only practical way to backup a harddisk is to another harddisk.
Of course, one can use an external (USB, Firewire or SATA) disk and store it offsite, but it would be nice if some high-capacity optical or tape solution appeared.
HD-DVD and blueray do not cut it. Who wants to backup his disk to 25 DVDs?
What we need is something that stores at least 250GB, preferably 1TB or more.
Only the highest-end SDLT drives come close, and those are not really within the average user's budget.
Sounds like some MS engineer is going to be in trouble when Mr. Gates starts wondering why NTFS can't handle his $10 billion worth of drives...
Assuming a standard 19-inch rack which holds 96 drives, you'd need 256147 racks to hold the drives. Given a floor size of 0.16 square metres per rack, you'd end up with 3.779 football fields worth of racks.
I leave it to someone else to calculate the heat dissipation from this array.
Heck, 6 megapixels is fine for most print use if you don't crop. But I think photographers will be asking for more resolution well up into the tens of megapixels because it gives you the freedom to throw away half the frame and keep something sharp. If you have tremendous resolution, a wide-angle lens gives zoom-like detail, and an f/1.8 50mm lens is $70 whereas an f/4 500mm is $5,800. For most photographers, the ones whose systems cost less than houses, it's cheaper to get a denser sensor than a longer lens and it will probably stay that way for a while. Also, bit depth is almost certainly going way up.
So yeah, "Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there" is nuts. Heaps of people will find ways to use, and slowly come to rely on, a doubling of megapixels just as easily as they do a doubling of core clock speeds.
Where am I going to find enough p0rn to fill that ?
... linux will support it.
The question is, will linux support it without you having to code the drivers yourself?
Before the English Language Police come after me, I want to say I meant "about", not "aboutr"
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004
feature a 16MB cache? I have a Maxtor drive (Maxtor 6L250R0 Diamondmax 10 250GB) right in front of me with that, which I'm about to install. Goodness. but 750GB? unless you have alot of music, or quite a bit of video, filling that is going to be a task.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
As the "owner" of 1.85 TiB of MP3s, let me state for the record that this collection does not include "Classic Rock", Rap, Hip-Hop, Electronica, Prog, Krautrock, Pop, (Much) Classical, Country, Gospel, or Audiobooks.
I must believe that the 192k whole of recorded music would total in the hundreds of TiB.
A lot of folk are saying that we're running out of stuff to put on a hardrive. Rubbish. We run out of stuff we can fit on a harddrive, then A disk of a different magnitude comes along, and we simply use it for storying thing of a different magnitude. I already use a PC to run my Video and music collections from. But I don't (dispite having a respectable 500mb) record from TV, as it uses too much space. Poor compression from my TV card means I get about 1.5gig per hr of TV. If I record all the episodes of my favourite shows, my harddrive just vanishes (it got plenty other crap on it too). If TV card compression doesn't improve it would prob take more than a Tb to make me forget about space, and just record away from TV. But when that happens, thats what I'll be doing. And I won't be the only one. After that...?
Because you can - or because you should?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I think I can pack my suitcase and take a tour through Europe before it gets done...
According the to the Comparison of file systems article on Wikipedia, the 16EiB "..is the limit of the on-disc structures. The NTFS driver for Windows NT limits the volume size that it can handle to 256TiB and the file size to 16TiB respectively."
So it looks like Microsoft may have put in place some sensible software constraints on what they think Windows can handle.
Or is it? Generally drive manufacturers stick with 1 gig = 1000 megs, not 1024.
Personally, if the Justice Dept does put their requirements though, the indexing method I'd use is sequential access
3D environments don't take significantly more storage at all, unless you intend to store a "scene" as a 3d bitmap. In fact, I'd wager that if software could extract objects from a movie, make models of them, then just render them in the position desired, that it would actually take significantly less space.
...for me anyway. I'm currently using a Shuttle with 2x internal and 4x external drives, total capacity 1.45tb (started out at 2x 120gb, after an initial internal upgrade have just been adding externals at whatever the gb/euro 'sweet spot' was at the time.)
Well at this stage I'd be quite happy to get rid of all the external drives with their space/wires/noise/electricity requirements for 1.5tb over just two internal drives. This rationale also goes for datacenters, space and power consumption are two very important variables there that you may not consider immediately when thinking about drive size.
The fact that NewEgg has good prices isn't that good of a deal. You have to run a format check on the drive and if you do find a problem, convince Seagate to honor a warranty on a OEM package drive, ship it to them and then get a replacement. I think I'll go somewhere else a pay a few more bucks for a more UPS proof packaging set up.
I consider Data Compressing algorithms a "hack" made by Computer Scientist in order to bypass the storage limitation problems.
However by using any kind of data compression algorithm you are exchanging storage by time. How much would it take to compress those 10 GB? Compressing 200 MB takes about 1 minute which will yield to about 50 mintues for compressing 10GB.
In a lot of places the data must be available (I have been in those places, have worked with IKONOS images with a multispectral resolution of 1 meter) and they are quite big.
Even though they are not textfiles, a lot of information generated by geospatial manipulation comes in text.
Bigger disks (more storage space) will always be good as it will help in decreasing processing time for the tasks. Just visualize a triangle whose 3 vertex are Speed, Time (at the top) and Space. To minimize the time spent in a task you may increase cpu speed or increase storage space.
Of course that would be applied only to certain tasks.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Sorry, I can't get overly excited about a hard drive maker increasing storage space. That is all they have been doing for the last 10 years, certainly hard drive performance hasn't been driving the industry.
Hard drives are the single biggest bottleneck on today's systems. With multi-core technology and cheap gigabytes of ram all with gigabyte transfer rates, a hard drive plodding along with a 100 - 200mb/s transfer just doesn't cut it. Why should my system seem to hang with only 10% CPU utilization because of intense hard drive activity. I can't even bring up another task that doesn't use the hard drive because the system is too busy with hard drive transfers.
Either a new I/O standard needs to be invented, something that doesn't tax your system when excessive hard drive transfers are made, or the frigging hard drives just need to start getting up to gigabyte transfer rates.
In any case, I could care less about hard drives doubling or tripling in size, until they show significant improvements in performance, or move to solid state, then I am apathetic about the whole industry.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Outstanding.
Doesn't have anything really to do with latency, but I've seen several comments from folks who worship at the altar of rotational speed when the true factors that determine a hard drive's speed are aa combination of rotational speed, track-to-track latency and data density. You can spin an old 10mb drive at 200,000 rpm and it still won't transfer data faster than a modern hard drive.
As sector density increases so does data throughput for a given rotational speed. If all other things are equal when you double the sector per track density you *almost* double the drive's throughput. I say almost because in order to double throughput you'd have to cut seek times in half as well.
But - fast drives have dense platters, not just fast spindles.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
Some people think that the 10-based counting in harddrives is weird, that's nothing compared to floppys.
Floppys are generally accepted as 1.44 MB, but how large are those megs? 1024000 bytes. How is that for a definition of MB? There are 1,474,560 bytes on a floppy disk. (2 sides with 80 tracks with 18 sectors with 512 bytes.)
I get 750,000,000,000 / 1,474,560 =~ 508,626
This story coincides nicely with an adventure I had last night, where my Seagate Cuda 120GB drive, which lasted a less-than-stellar *2 months* died and is now completely useless. Sectors went bad like milk sitting out in the sun; each reboot brought on another handful of bad sectors until it was no longer bootable. 2 months, $100. Nice, real nice.
I had purchased this drive to replace an IBM Deskstar which lasted about 3 years.
So I had to rebuild the machine with an 8 year old 10GB hard drive, as that's all I had left. Sad that the slow "POS" 8 year old monster that went through heavy use has proved more reliable.
Interesting trend here in my case, and I suspect I am not alone. What good is 750GB if it's not reliable?
Get started in stead of whining about it.
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I'll do power consumption, then someone else can build off that to do hear dissipation.
:)
Published consumption for the ST3500641AS (500GB) is 7.4W idle, 12.6W seek. Let's assume that at any given time, only 0.1% of the drives (24,590) are seeking. That should be enough throughput for your application.
The seeking drives are using 309.8kW, the remaining drives are using 181.7MW. Assuming an electric rate of $0.09/kWh, I'm coming up with a monthly electric bill of $11,799,721.49.
As a useful side-effect of this calculation, I can tell you that adding this drive to your computer will add about $0.65/month to your power bill at a 50% duty cycle.
Keep in mind that none of these figures are taking power supply inefficieny into consideration!
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Says the "linuxfanatic"
Guess this shows that Microsoft were right about the Vista specs for 2008 they released ages ago, seems we may very well have 1TB storage in just-below-top-spec PC's. Just depends how soon it will be till consumers feel the urge to upgrade to that amount of space.
Slashdot probably has the highest concentration of geeks on the net. What better place to settle this matter.
I believe we should have a REAL poll of this 1GB=1024MB vs. 1GB=1000MB issue. A real poll where you *must* be a logged-in member of Slashdot in order to vote and keep the poll running until 70-80% of registed Slashdot users have voted, and only voted once.
BTW for those Metric nazies out there:
In the 70s, when my government forced metric in schools, they NEVER mentioned Bytes. Later on, when computers came into play, it was 1KB=1024 bytes. Metric was still fresh in most people's minds but they still used 1KB=1024 bytes.
I only heard of 1KB=1000 bytes until the mid 90's. That's when the drive manufacturers started to used it to dupe the non-geeks to sell the drives. It pissed off a lot of geeks because they knew that they were being cheated. Only non-geeks, idiots and marketing types use 1KB=1000 bytes (Marketing types being the dumbest of the three...)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Seriously. I have a little, ordinary TV and I thought all my netflix DVDs were normal 4- or 5-GB ones?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
3TB Buffalo Terrastation here I come (Well, 2.25TB with Raid 5 should work fine.)
2000 EMC Symmetrix = $500/GB? 2006 Buffalo Terrastation = $1.00/GB. Sure there's a performance difference, but 500x?
Something here does not make sense. 2^32 = 4G, I'm not sure where the factor 128GiB/4G = 32 bytes comes from.
LBA48 should no matter how you could it be at least 2^48 = 262144 GiB. If it has the same magic 32 factor, 8388608 GiB.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That's pretty harsh coming from a guy with your sig.
...Something Crissy, right?
Hip...
Hyp...
Los Alamos National Labs uses 3Com SATA raid cards in their scientific compute clusters. The 9500 series is excellent, and very well supported in Linux. I've built several multi-terrabyte cluster heads for them. Sixteen 250GB drives in one 3U case, on two 8 channel SATA raid cards doing raid 5.
Yes, I did wear ear protection while configuring and testing the things.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
420: the new number of the beast
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
No, but I could see back then that putting music on a computer would be cool.
It's not like you were filling up that 1Gb harddrive with black and white bitmaps and low fidelity samples.
No, but I could see back then that putting video on a computer would be cool.
And you're not going to fill that 1Tb harddrive with JPGs, movies and MP3.
I think I will. Because seriously, there's no obvious next step, which there was before. I don't want 3D environments until I have a 3D display and input device. I don't want to pick from hundreds of camera angles. Once I can fit my DVD collection comfortably on a drive (which I can't yet, but it's not that far away) I really don't think there's anywhere else to go.
I am trolling
Yes, it is. I didn't just throw a 1.0737GB memory stick in a server.
This was fine as long as they were only interacting with other computer geeks. When computers spilled over into the world at large, however, this little shortcut conflicted with the way the terms were/are used by everyone else.
When the day comes that I need to convert between grams and bytes, then I'll agree with you. Until then, computer units are only used when discussing computer units. It makes absolutely no sense to force a base-10 numbering system onto a base-2 world.
Since the traditional (powers of ten) definition has both seniority and wider usage, it is now winning out, and rightly so.
Oh, please. The only place where it's "winning" is among drive manufacturers who noticed that they can claim an extra 7% capacity without technically lying.
If you feel strongly about the issue, though, then please invent a new unit of measure that doesn't sound completely idiotic, as though the speaker has a speech impediment. I will not say gibibytes - it ain't gonna happen - but I might be convinced to use tenbytes (2^10), twenbytes (2^20), thirbytes (2^30), or some other wholly distinct system.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Its called SCSI. Quit buying shitty storage and then complaining that it's shitty.
The drive manaufacturers should be forced to use a distinctive and cross-referenced suffixing to prevent their distortions. Similar to many grocery products, where measurements are give in english and metric. Drive manufacturers should be required provide capacity in GB (GiB in the contrived and unacceptible parlence) and DeGB (Decimal (Deceptive? Degraded? So many choices) Gigabytes), let's put the onus of contrivence where it belongs) so that the actual commonly accepted practice of a power of 2 is seen first and their subsequent market speak attempts to twist the facts can be discreetly ignored.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
> a price of 66,150 yen
How much is that in KiBucks (2^10 US$)?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Yes, it's a bit more complicated than just the number of bits in the address-range when calculating disk-mapping capacity.
... This is called LBA addressing.
"A disk has sectors numbered 0, 1, 2,
In ancient times, before the advent of IDE disks, disks had a geometry described by three constants C, H, S: the number of cylinders, the number of heads, the number of sectors per track. The address of a sector was given by three numbers: c, h, s:
No disk manufactured less than ten years ago has a geometry, but this ancient 3D sector addressing is still used by the INT13 BIOS interface (with fantasy numbers C, H, S unrelated to any physical reality).
The old INT13 BIOS interface to disk I/O uses 24 bits to address a sector: 10 bits for the cylinder, 8 bits for the head, and 6 bits for the sector number within the track (counting from 1). This means that this interface cannot address more than 1024*256*63 sectors, which is 8.5 GB (with 512-byte sectors). And if the (fantasy) geometry specified for the disk has fewer than 1024 cylinders, or 256 heads, or 63 sectors per track, then this limit will be less.
The old ATA standard describes how to address a sector on an IDE disk using 28 bits (8 bits for the sector, 4 for the head, 16 for the cylinder). This means that an IDE disk can have at most 2^28 addressable sectors - With 512-byte sectors this is 2^37 bytes, that is, 137.4 GB.
The ATA-6 standard includes a specification how to address past this 2^28 sector boundary. The new standard allows addressing of 2^48 sectors. "
Basically bit-size of the address range, because of this legacy BIOS fantasy translation to CHS, is not linearly related to the addressable capacity of the disk. Note, linux isn't affected by this problem post-boot, as it addresses the disk directly. It does however cause lots of problem if the boot partition is on a drive with two different geometries depending on when you look at it from the BIOS, and when you look at it in the OS.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
The Freshmeat record for it has been stale for years, though - I do wish people would keep these updated for exciting technologies, I can't expect to discover everything by sheer chance (via Google) or by superb follow-ups (such as the post I'm replying to). I've submitted an update for it, though, to make it current.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
http://www.brunozzitransfer.com/
if that PNG in the middle is compressed, then I am scared of PNG
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Seagate documents have leaked out the two 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda hard drives. The drives are the first desktop hard drives to use perpendicular recording
So that's what you can't do in horizontal mode!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I'm not an expert, but from my rudamentary knowledge of HDD, unless the interface gets faster or the seek times increase, there shouldn't be any more need for cache to achieve the same results.
I'm seroius about not being an expert, so if you see a reason that larger drives need more cache, please explain it or provide a link.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
You said:
" Certainly the bottleneck for most setups will always be the drives themselves."
The correction:
" Certainly the bottleneck for most setups will always be the user."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I have come to known Seagate hard disks as the most silent ones in the sector. As a matter of fact im in the process of acquiring an 200 Gb one to replace my existent samsung which makes pretty much harmful 'szziiii' noise with the engine/spinde. Its good to hear companies that deliver quality products are making innovations to keep themselves on the edge.
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