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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."
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.
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.
"A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later."
I'm sorry, but I really think you're mistaken. I and those in my field are caught in a seemingly unending storage excalation war. We provide 500 megabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 50 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 500 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. Sure, they're wasting A LOT of space, and we could slow down the rate of growth by running scripts to delete MP3s or whatever every night, but that's a stopgap measure, and in the end is probably more expensive in terms of costly technician time than the cost of just slapping more drives in our Promise array. Currently we're backing up all of our servers to a 6.5 TB array via rsync -- and it's getting full. Give me a petabyte disk, please!
I am not left-handed, either!
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.
2006:
A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
1996:
A gibabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
1986:
20 megabytes is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
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..
Yes there's a limit to how big one movie will be.
:)
Actually, I don't think there is. A quick Googlin' turned up this site which informs us that uncompressed 1920x1080 video at 24 frames/second takes up space at around 400 GB/hour. So, one of these new 750GB drives maps to about one uncompressed high-definition movie, and it can't even be two hours in length (the site also tells us that this drive wouldn't even be capable of playing back such a movie - not enough bandwidth). Now, yes, we may not "need" to see uncompressed movies, but it could easily be argued that we don't "need" quality better than good old NTSC, either.
In 20 years, we'll be watching all our movies in digital form with no compression applied and/or the resolution/frame rate will be so high that we really won't be able to tell the difference between looking at the screen and looking out the window.
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.