Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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.