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Terabyte Drive to Debut Later this Year
mytrip writes to mention the news that Hitachi will be releasing a terabyte storage drive this year. "These large drives also will get incorporated into televisions and personal video recorders. Hitachi, among others, already sells TVs with integrated hard drives in Japan and other markets. While large drives start out expensive, the price drops relatively quickly. Computer makers pay something in the 30-cent range for a gigabyte when buying hard drives, Healy said. The price at retail is around 50 cents or less."
What a waste of space. This is not about a product to be released, it's just a way to fill some space so that maybe someone will click on some ads.
The only thing of interest in the entire article is at the end, when it mentions that the hard drive is reaching its 50th birthday/anniversary/whatever you want to call it. More interesting might have been a brief timeline showing hard drive advances over that half-century.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
SCSI is basically dead. It's just a scam to get more money out of people that are stuck in 1992. Just ignore it and go with modern technology like SATA.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Regardless, I know as soon as I get one, I'll have it filled within 8 months.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I could've sworn that...oh, that's right: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/ 30/2124225
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
...but at not quite 0.91 TiB, I couldn't help feeling gypped if I bought one of these.
Are they referring to a terabyte as 1000 or 1024 gigabytes?
not true.. SCSI is still alive an working and will continue for along time..
SATA is just starting out and will have may years ahead of it - but it will have to prove it's self
there hasn't been a worth wile SATA disk on the market long enough to prove the reliability of them above scsi.
on top SATA lacks alot of the higher end functions that SCSI offers.. this is why for large amounts of storage via SATA to data centers you will see the SATA drives in a box that is then connected to the servers via iSCSI and fiber chanel.
sure for the desktop/workstation/small server market yes scsi is going away but when you use the true abilitys of what makes SCSI great SATA drives have a long way to go.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
We always hear about AMD and Intel giving out tons of information on roadmaps and what we're expected to see in the near future but hard drive development is a relatively silent business. Does anyone know what we can expect to see in tomorrow's hard drives? What's scheduled for the next two years?
Measuring the amount of TB in future disks is easy. The capacity doubles every x months and so and that's probably not going to change for some time, so I frankly don't care too much about hard drive space as it has never been an issue to me. What I do care about is the other technology inside of a hard drive. Seek times, write/read speed and throughput. How's that going? Are we eventually going to see some major difference between SATA150 and SATA300? If so, when?
I am not sure about you guys but I am growing increasingly dependent on fast hard drives rather than a shitload of space. My workstations are usually bundled with a fast Raptor disk combined with a Seagate at some 250 to 500 GB, so I put the big who-cares-about-speed files on the big one while my operating system, applications and games rest on my Raptor.
So once again, does anyone know what we're going to see in 2007 and 2008?
Full Tilt
Is anyone else tired of hearing about yet another x00Gb extra storage capacity while the the RPM remains the same as it has for the last 5/6 years, ie. 7200rpm. When are we going to see affordable 10,000rpm disks fer kreissake? The 150Gb WD Raptor at £175 is not what I call competitive pricing. We have more than enough storage. What we need is faster, energy-efficient disks.
We're starting to reach the point where hard drives are so large we're not sure what to put on it. Well, lots of people will; they're a boon for people doing video editing and they'll keep you in episodes of the Sopranos for months. But drop one into a regular desktop PC and your typical average user simply won't be able to fill it up; or if they do, they'll already have reached a point where they don't know what 80% of the data on the drive is.
As a sometime hardware tech, I'd really love to see the manufacturers using some of this capacity for redundancy, rather than sheer space. Run the drive as a RAID unit, with each surface being one "drive", and use two of the surfaces for parity. You'd lose up to 40% of the capacity of the drive but it would become much more reliable. Sealing off the platters from each other might take up so much space you'd lose one platter, and might mean more expense since you'd need multiple head units, but again, the reliability would improve enormously. While this still isn't quite as reliable as having multiple separate drives RAIDed together, it would be convenient and transparent to the user, and make dead drives (mostly) a thing of the past.
there hasn't been a worth wile SATA disk on the market long enough to prove the reliability of them above sc
What? I've got some pretty old SATA disks in some of our ACNC RAIDs. No failures out of 32 disks. Seagate 7200.7, Date code 04-167, 167th day of 2004 I guess. That's over 2 years old.
The great part about SATA is that since they aren't a complete rip-off like SCSI, you can replace them every 3-4 years instead of running them until they fail and are stupidly small compared to modern disks.
this is why for large amounts of storage via SATA to data centers you will see the SATA drives in a box that is then connected to the servers via iSCSI and fiber chanel.
Yes this is a fine idea. I have no problem using iSCSI or fiber channel or even old SCSI for RAID->Computer interfaces. SATA doesn't have any sort of standardized external cabling standard for that use.
But for the disks themselces, it's stupid to buy SCSI or SAS disks and pay 3 times more just for a name.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
> why is it hard to find SCSI drives in these high capacities?
SCSI/SAS/FC drives typically spin at 10k or 15k RPM, compared to 7.2k RPM for ATA drives. The higher rotational velocity means more work to keep the heads on track, so the data densities aren't quite as high. Higher rotational velocity also causes more aerodynamic turbulence at the platter edges, which can make the platters vibrate. Most enterprise 3.5" disks actually use 2.5" platters in order to keep the disk edges farther away from the case to minimize the turbulence.
The enterprise class drives also devote more of the platter area to error correction. If you look at the uncorrectable error rate for enterprise class vs. desktop class drives, you will see about a 10x higher uncorrectable error rate for desktop class drives.
So smaller platter, lower density, and more bits for error correction are the primary factors which cause enterprise drives to be lower capacity than desktop drives.
-- Chris Caudle
Not the ones that I have seen. There are basically two main failure modes on a hard disk. Either the bearings on the motor give out, or the reserved area for mapping out bad sectors fills up and you see bad sectors. Controller failer is *much* rarer than either of these two events. If you ask me controller failures are more likely to be down to people not taking proper ESD measures.
With hard drives getting this much capacity, which term would most accurately describe them - a truck or a series of pipes?
Prove it.
"That's over 2 years old"
2 years isn't that long of a time compared to SCSI drives - life span is important, sure SATA drives are cheep compared to SCSI and can be replaced more often but do you account for the man hours and/or loss of production do too having to replace drives at the end of their life cycle.
give SATA 5-6 years being stable in the market and i am sure that they will evolve and take over - i like the ideas that drive SATA but it has not yet proven it's self over SCSI yet, so when required to put something into production that needs max reliability people still use SCSI and they will.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
"Sure, it's probably not a real 1TB drive, but it's in an external box and plugs into a USB port, so what's the difference between it and a single-drive solution? For most people, probably none at all."
It's twice as likely to fail.
Will there ever be an upper limit to hard drives? I know we just started using perpendicular technology, but there must be some kind of physical limit to the platters. Another question is why is it hard to find SCSI drives in these high capacities? Or at least in newer SAS drives.
From what I've read over the past year, perpendicular recording supposedly will offer densities somewhere between 2x and 5x over existing longitudinal recording methods. That puts 3.5" SATA/IDE drive somewhere in the range of 1TB to 2.5TB before they hit the wall again. For 2.5" SCSI, 600MB up to 1.5TB. I suspect that things will top out around 3x-4x densities over existing drives. (GMR longitudinal recording was supposed to bring us greater gains then it did. You can look back at the original announcements of bit densities and then look at what finally made it to market at the high end.)
SCSI drives are a different form factor. They use smaller platters inside to allow for higher rotational velocities (10k/15k RPM) and faster seek times. That limits their capacity per platter.
(I did all the math about 3 months ago for another article, looking at existing bit densities vs what perpendicular recording bit densities were estimated to be at the upper end.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Correction: USB 2.0 has a theoretical peak higher than Firewire 400. The difference in real speed lies in the isochronous mode that USB lacks.
Basically, USB allows one device to talk on the wire at a time. So if you have a USB 2.0 HDD and a USB 1.1 mouse on the same bus, they get equal time, but the mouse wastes 99% of the bus for 50% of the time, for an overall loss of about 49%. So you only get half the speed you're supposed to get.
Firewire's isochronous mode allows devices that use more than their fair share (they max out the bus and beg for more) to "borrow" the unused bandwidth during the time slot belonging to a device that doesn't use the full bandwidth. So while a FW scanner might only use 50Mbps, a HDD on the same bus might be transferring a file and "borrow" the other 350Mbps, even during the scanner's time slot. This is why Firewire outshines USB in raw data transfer in all but the most scripted of Intel's tests (Intel invented USB).
So, the moral of the story: If the HDD is the ONLY thing connected to that USB bus (that port and probably the one next to it on the PC), then, yes, it might be a bit faster than FW400. If it's sharing a USB bus, it's going to be much slower, and may not be fast enough for video.