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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."
That was actually a very unique form of advertising. I'm curious how many people know about perpendicular because of that effort. The question is, what will the marketers come up with for future forms of storage?
I don't know if I believe the claims of an "accidentally leaked" spec sheet.
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.
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
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.
They're becoming IO-bound far faster than cache-bound. It takes literally hours to read an entire 500gb hard drive at this point. The cache, on the other hand, is staying roughly on par with the IO speed, which seems like a more natural combination.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Oddly enough, the reason it's good these fancy huge hard drives come out is not just to use them, but rather to drive the price of the reasonable drives down. $60 250 gigs here I come.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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
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..
The filesystem may reserve enough bits to address 16EiB, but that doesn't mean Windows can handle it yet.
Flash drives are already much faster at random I/O because they don't have to seek. And they can be made to provide much higher throughputs if there's enough demand. Those little thumb drives are slow because they're cheap and USB isn't very fast anyways. HDD speeds can only be increased by adding more heads, increasing rpm, increasing density, reducing head seek times, or making a RAID.
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.
Pound the table all you want, but it simply isn't "just the way it is". Keep in mind that the http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/large.html predate computers by decades or centuries (depending on your precise definition of "computer"). According to the metric system:
The only way you could say that 1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes is to make a special exception to the metric system's prefix rules, and the whole point of the metric system is to have a system of measurement without silly exceptions like that. If they had wanted a system where you had to memorize different rules for different units, they would have stuck with the imperial system.
So to sum up: some computer geeks thought it would be convenient for them to redefine the metric system to work using powers of two rather than powers of ten. 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. Since the traditional (powers of ten) definition has both seniority and wider usage, it is now winning out, and rightly so.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Its called SCSI. Quit buying shitty storage and then complaining that it's shitty.