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Hitachi Promises 4-TB Hard Drives By 2011

zhang1983 writes "Hitachi says its researchers have successfully shrunken read heads in hard drives to the range of 30-50 nanometers. This will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011." Update: 10/15 10:39 GMT by KD : News.com has put up a writeup and a diagram of Hitachi's CPP-GMR head.

372 comments

  1. Waiting for... by Steffan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Cue the "Nobody needs more than []300GB []1TB []x because I don't have a reason for it" posters

    1. Re:Waiting for... by TheBOfN · · Score: 3, Funny

      Don't forget the "finally something to hold all my pr0n" posts...

    2. Re:Waiting for... by El_Muerte_TDS · · Score: 0, Redundant

      Nobody needs more than []300GB []1TB [X]x because I don't have a reason for it

      (where x > 0)

    3. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If I could afford petabyts I'd use petabytes. There is no real limit to the amount of hdd space I can go through. No matter how much I add I always feel like I'm running out of space. I'm always shuffling around a couple hundred gigs here and a couple hundred gigs there to try to fit stuff in. This weekend I downloaded over 100GB of files from the web, several gigs of files using Bit Torrent, and had several gigs of mail.

      Even my none geek friends and family are starting to feel the pain as working with video and Bit Torrent becomes more common. Multiple TB usage won't be that uncommon I think. What we really need now though is RAID-5 for the average Joe.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    4. Re:Waiting for... by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      actually, no, we're going to change to "look at the colossal amount of largely useless unimportant data those schmucks will lose; look at the colossal amount of data they'll have no means to back up within the budget of the home user, hahahaha!" I trust this will make you feel much better.

    5. Re:Waiting for... by TrevorB · · Score: 1

      I built a 4x320GB RAID5 array last November for my MythTV Backend.

      It has confirmed my belief that all new large harddrives will fill up in 4 months.

      Sad part is 900GB seems kinda small by today's standards.

    6. Re:Waiting for... by mcrbids · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Cue the "Nobody needs more than []300GB []1TB []x because I don't have a reason for it" posters

      Actually, my sickened mind went a completely different direction... remember when we were going to have 8 Ghz Pentium 4s with 6 GB of RAM to run Windows Vista?

      Heck, it's still common to see computers sold with 256 MB of RAM, which wasn't a particularly large amount 5 years ago... that it's even salable today speaks volumes. I have an "end of life" Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz that I picked up this w/e for like $50. 20 GB HDD, 512 DDR RAM, CD, Sound, etc.

      Other than the small-ish HD and the CD instead of the DVD, this system is not significantly different than a low-end new system. And, when it was first sold 3-4 years ago, its specs weren't particularly exciting.

      Point being, there's a "we don't talk about it" stagnation going on in the Computer industry. I honestly think that most of the new purchases are based on the expectation of EOL and the spread of viruses. It's gotten to where it's actually cheaper to buy a new computer than it is to reload your old one. Part of that is the fact that it takes a full business day of rebooting the computer to update Windows from whatever came on the CD.

      This part just floors me. I have the original install disk for the aforementioned $50 Dell 2.4 Ghz system, and am reloading from scratch so it's all clean. It takes ALL FREAKIN DAY simply to update Windows to the latest release, with a 1.5 Mb Internet connection. (not high end, but still no particular slouch)

      Yet it takes about an hour and just ONE short line to update CentOS (RHEL) to current:

      # yum -y update; shutdown -r now; I'm getting spoiled by the "ready to go in 10 minutes, fully updated in under an hour with no oversight" way of getting things loaded. Windows is just a serious pain in the neck, IMHO.

      My point to all this?

      The computer industry has (finally) reached a stable point. Performance increases are flat-lining to incremental, rather than exponential, and there's little incentive to change this, since a 4-year-old computer still does most anything anybody needs a computer to do. There will always be a high-performance niche, but it's a niche. The money has moved from computing power to connectivity.

      People no longer pay for processing power, they pay for connections. Thus the Intarweb...
      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    7. Re:Waiting for... by Solra+Bizna · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Well, some of us are still using storage with a reasonable level of efficiency. My hard disk was 60GB and that was more than plenty.

      BTW, just got this ultra-modern 500MHz G3 iBook. It's sweet!

      -:sigma.SB

      --
      WARN
      THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
    8. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hard drives are just getting to the point where a few of them in a RAID configured NAS can hold a decent sized DVD collection in uncompressed form. If HD-DVD/BluRay catch on, we'll need new drives like these in order to accomplish the same thing with the newer formats.

      As someone with close to 300 DVDs (yeah, yeah...I know, MPAA evil...but I try to buy as many of them used as I can), I'm going to wait until HD technology starts catching up with disc technology before upgrading to HD. So any breakthroughs that make this possible are welcome in my book.

    9. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Cue the attempts to look like a smartarse by preempting commonly used memes.

      Err. Damn.

    10. Re:Waiting for... by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      You use another hard drive for backup: that's not difficult. For off-site or storage backup, you use another hard drive.

      I use this approach at work, rather than spending colossal amounts of money on expensive tape libraries and backup software. It seems quite effective, although it does require a bit of thought to use effectively. (Don't back up live MySQL databases, write them to a backup file!)

    11. Re:Waiting for... by cheater512 · · Score: 1

      Yeah I've got a identical setup.

      Hard drives cannot keep up with space demands these days.
      RAID 5 is the only way to go if you want a lot of cheap redundant space.

    12. Re:Waiting for... by gaspyy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree with the stagnation part. At work some of our laptops are more than 4 years old (May 2003) and they are still perfectly capable and working (P4 @ 2.8 GHz, 512Mb RAM, 60GB HDD). We even have two T30 Thinkpads that are just enough when traveling to browse, check email and write a doc.

      Regarding the second part (reinstalling XP) - you should really look at Acronis True Image - it's what we use.
      Basically, you install WinXP+patches and whatever programs you need once, make an image and store it on a DVD, network or on a hidden partition on HDD. At boot, you can press F11 to start Acronis instead of Windows from the hidden partition (it's a lightweight Linus distro) and you can restore your image in 5-10 minutes. Even if the image is 6 months old, you still need to download just a few patches and software updates (e.g. update from FF 2.0.0.0 to 2.0.0.7).

    13. Re:Waiting for... by ThirdPrize · · Score: 1

      With tech these days things are more likely to be replaced as they are a couple of gens old rather than because they have stopped working. I would love a nice LCD tv but as my old 28inch CRT is still going i feel loathed to replace it. Same with my iPod. 160Gb would be good but I only just got my 80Gb one.

      --
      I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
    14. Re:Waiting for... by HYHA · · Score: 1

      I think Hitachi have invented this for me. I don't know how I manage it (actually I do I'm a document / webpage / image hoarder) but however much memory I have I still use it all up. Sigh...

    15. Re:Waiting for... by bestinshow · · Score: 1

      This weekend I downloaded over 100GB of files from the web, several gigs of files using Bit Torrent, and had several gigs of mail.


      Crikey, how much pr0n are you getting through?! I hope you don't digitally horde the media after "using" it, it's never quite worth watching for a second time I find.

      However once you decide to rip your (not small) CD collection to FLAC, then generate AAC files for the iPod from that, and MP3 files for another device, you suddenly realise that 500GB is small. And that's just for music...

      4TB hard drives will be filled rapidly with HD rips - it's only a couple of hundred movies (at ~20GB a movie).
    16. Re:Waiting for... by ivoras · · Score: 2, Funny

      In other words: Where's my flying car?!

      --
      -- Sig down
    17. Re:Waiting for... by poetmatt · · Score: 1

      Performance increases are flatlining? Since when? That would imply innovation is decreasing, and that would be incorrect. Do you even know what you're talking about? I seem to recall an individual from IBM that has a method to completely re-engineer storage as we know it and increase it 100 fold. Not Linear. Nvidia (and previously ATI) in their high competition moments have doubled the speeds of their graphics cards every 6-12 months. Video game systems increase exceedingly more than double their processing capacity per 2-4 year generations. The PS3 can handle 55.3 billion operations , where the Ps2 could only handle 6.5 billion operations.

      People do indeed pay for processing power, thats what money is. Things are getting better, and faster, and cheaper, as they always have in the first place. You still have to spend on average 400-700$ for a decent up to date PC, and 700-1000 for a medium gaming rig, and 1500 for a real gaming rig, and 3 grand for an insane gaming rig. That hasn't changed one bit in probably 8 years now. Paying less than those amounts is similar to comparing buying a new but inexpensive car (like a civic) versus buying a 10-20 year old thing to just "get around town"(like an 87 or 97 buick/cadillac).

      Windows will be gone in 10 to 15 years hopefully, things will continue get better at that point.

    18. Re:Waiting for... by tomstdenis · · Score: 2, Informative

      Good lord, either you're encoding at a like 10mbit/sec, or you're not throwing away old shows. My Myth setup ran at like 3.2Mbit/sec ish on a single 80GB drive and I was able to keep at least 2-3 episodes of each show in backlog. 900GB? I'd probably be able to keep a week or two...

      It's not the size of your RAID mate, it's how you use it.

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    19. Re:Waiting for... by dave420 · · Score: 1

      If you did yum -y update; shutdown -r now; on a distro released a few years back it might take a bit longer than an hour, surely :)

    20. Re:Waiting for... by Jarik_Tentsu · · Score: 1

      I was thinking the opposite. If you just look at the competition between ATI vs nVidia and AMD vs Intel...I may be wrong, but I don't think it's been this heated for ages.

      In the past for instance, games dictated new graphics cards. Doom 3 came out - and out came a huge bunch of graphics cards that could *just* run it. But now, it seems that the quality of graphics cards has extended far beyond the capabilities of the games, and now games are struggling to make use of all this power.

      Granted, Vista chews up shit like a bitch...But even pre-Vista, I think the competition has been really hot.

      ~Jarik

    21. Re:Waiting for... by budgenator · · Score: 1

      What we really need now though is RAID-5 for the average Joe.
      That would be Linux, does RAID 5 i software so you don't have a proprietary controller board toasting your data and you can even make a beowolf cluster of these things if you want google-class storage.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    22. Re:Waiting for... by jamiethehutt · · Score: 3, Informative

      # yum -y update; shutdown -r now;

      Next time do "# yum -y update && shutdown -r now" the && means that it will only run shutdown if yum reports successful completion, so if yum breaks you can see the errors. :D

    23. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It takes ALL FREAKIN DAY simply to update Windows to the latest release, with a 1.5 Mb Internet connection
      Dude, you're either way over-exaggerating, or just really, truly suck at admining. 3 hours tops, is all that would take.

    24. Re:Waiting for... by aplusjimages · · Score: 1, Flamebait

      With all that content are you actually using it all? If it's all video, are you watching it all? I know people who are addicted to downloading. One friend downloads music that he never has a chance to listen to because he's downloaded so much.

      --
      Can I bum a sig?
    25. Re:Waiting for... by FelixGordon · · Score: 1

      Or, save a tiny fraction of your electricity bill with: # yum -y update > yum_log; shutdown -r now (Yeah I know, redundant. Anyone who can't keep their machine busy 24/7 doesn't deserve one, right? ;))

    26. Re:Waiting for... by Nextraztus · · Score: 1

      I was thinking more along the lines of, 'watch out for ceramic tips' so the US can get these big drives :)

    27. Re:Waiting for... by jollyreaper · · Score: 1

      Cue the "Nobody needs more than []300GB []1TB []x because I don't have a reason for it" posters HD porn. It won't hold as many minutes of video as you'd think compared with SD porn. Er, did I say porn? I meant home movies. Er, home movies of kids and birthdays! No, wait, this is all coming out wrong. Pets! No, er... stupid extreme sports accidents. Yes, that's the ticket. Stupid, painful accidents, for your amusement.
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    28. Re:Waiting for... by karnal · · Score: 1

      In the past for instance, games dictated new graphics cards. Doom 3 came out - and out came a huge bunch of graphics cards that could *just* run it. But now, it seems that the quality of graphics cards has extended far beyond the capabilities of the games, and now games are struggling to make use of all this power. I take it you haven't played UT3 yet... That thing brings my gaming rig to it's knees (3ghz core2duo, 7950gt, 1680x1050 res) - I'm contemplating an 8800gtx, but they've not seemed to drop in price one bit since I built my machine. LAST YEAR.
      --
      Karnal
    29. Re:Waiting for... by encoderer · · Score: 1

      Software Raid Sucks.

      Next Question?

    30. Re:Waiting for... by GooberToo · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Software Raid Sucks.

      Bzzzz. Next contestant!

      Linux's software RAID solution is often faster or on par with high-end hard RAID solutions, plus, it doesn't tie you to a specific hardware vendor. Linux's software RAID solution is generally far, far, far better than the low-end, commodity RAID solutions which comes with various MB/chipsets these days. The down side of software RAID is it takes more CPU. In a day where multi-core CPUs are common and CPUs are faster than ever, almost everyone can spare the CPU. The combination of the two means software RAID is actually one of the best solutions available for many classes of casual RAID users.

    31. Re:Waiting for... by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      This is my view point. We could fill up that much space. But how many people could actually find a good use for that much space? I record a lot of stuff on SageTV, and I only have a 160 GB drive. That's on my main computer. I could probably use a bigger drive, but I find that I have enough space to tape a weeks worth of shows easy. If I start taping more stuff than I have space for, than I never get around to watching it anyway. Most of the time when it gets close to full, is because I've taped a bunch of movies, which I intend to burn to DVD. I've burnt a lot of movies to DVD that I haven't ended up watching yet. Sure it's possible to fill up such a large drive, but when would a person find the time to actually watch or listen to all that media.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    32. Re:Waiting for... by CastrTroy · · Score: 1

      I'm running my SageTV setup off a 60 GB partition. THat provides me with more than enough space. Just convert to MPEG 4 after you're done watching the show. You lose a bit of quality, but I'm recording from analog cable, so there isn't much quality to begin with. With 900 GB, I could probably keep all the TV I watch for a year. With MPEG4, I can get a 1 hour show into about 500 MB. So 900 GB would be 1800 hours of TV. That's 75 days worth of 24 hour TV, or about 5 hours a day.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    33. Re:Waiting for... by obergfellja · · Score: 0

      OOhh... but how can 4 tB be enough for my porn or reasons why to hate RIAA/MPAA?

    34. Re:Waiting for... by Zeinfeld · · Score: 1
      Heck, it's still common to see computers sold with 256 MB of RAM, which wasn't a particularly large amount 5 years ago... that it's even salable today speaks volumes. I have an "end of life" Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz that I picked up this w/e for like $50. 20 GB HDD, 512 DDR RAM, CD, Sound, etc.

      In like vein I just pensioned off a machine I built in 2002: 512Mb RAM, twin CPU (forget how many MHz), 64Mb 3D Graphics, 4 32Gb disks. Apart from the CPU speed and the disk storage the machine is pretty much the same as today's low end Dell. Apart from the size and amount of noise made, that is. Price has dropped from $5,000 to $500 in the five years but thats nothing like the rate prices were droping ten years back, the machine was built to the spec of a $50K workstation I had used at MIT.

      The reason I can justify spending as much as I do on machines is that if a machine lasts me five years instead of three I save the inevitable downtime when bringing a new machine up.

      The machine that replaced it is faster and better of course, (quadcore 3GHz, 4Mb RAM, 1.5Gb Video RAM) but the forcing function on making the replacement was finding a machine that could drive a couple of 30" displays. I don't think I will be replacing that in the very near future.

      I am currently trying to decide what to do with the old one, one path would be to stick some large drives on it and turn it into a file server. Thats the path I would take if I didn't want to find out what is going on with Microsoft Home Server and the like.

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
    35. Re:Waiting for... by failedlogic · · Score: 1

      There's always a need for more storage space and I don't think the computer industry has been able to keep up with consumer and corporate demand. There is a rapid growth on the consumer side because people are storing photo albums, home-made videos etc. all on the PC. It also brings up the important idea of backups. Increasingly larger hard drives are really the only quick, practical way to back up home movies. DVDs are too inconvenient often requiring too much compression and Blu-Ray/HD-DVD are too expensive per GB.

      The other equation, computer speed. I have a PIII 800 w. 512 MB of RAM. If I run an *older* version of MS Office and do run-of the mill tasks it still runs Windows XP fairly well.

      Demand of faster comptuers at least in the comsumer market, IMO, is directly related to the efficiency of code and speed of an application. I own an iMac G5 1.8 Ghz w/ 1 GB RAM not the speediest thing by today's standard. I have lots of pictures from my Digital camera. As an example, if I try to bring up a catalog of several hundred pictures up in several 'thumbnail' shareware programs and iPhoto, I can look at the screen for a while. A freeware program I found can display those images at blistering speed - close to what an Athlon 3800+ with 2 GB RAM was able to do in the fastest program I could find in Windows. I'm not trying to pit OS X vs Windows or program A vs program B. Its just to say, had that OS X app not existed or had I not many other options .... my first thought would have been: "So when do I buy a new computer?"

      I think the need for faster computing is dwindling and although I would like to get a quad-core system with 8 GB of RAM it is, I believe, there isn't a need.

    36. Re:Waiting for... by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      oh, you want to talk seriously about my wise-ass joking. In that case there can be the classic replication danger, that there's newly corrupted data that gets copied to the other disk. Sure, can have multiple incremental backup sets on that other disk so there's hope of going back to good version just as with stack of tapes, but that's getting hairy for the average home user. If storage gets cheap enough, maybe ISPs could just offer encrypted backup storage and async replication with point in time recoveries.

    37. Re:Waiting for... by itlurksbeneath · · Score: 2, Informative

      It may suck, but somebody's got benchmarks saying that it's faster...

      Link from 2004, but still relevant, I'd think.

      --
      Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
    38. Re:Waiting for... by PitaBred · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's 20GB for pretty much uncompressed video. Full HD 1080i compressed with H.264 is like, 7Mbps. For a 120 minute move, that works out to what, 50400Mbits, or 6.3GB? That triples the number of movies in your estimate to 600 some movies. I know that's way more than I have on DVD, or would even think about keeping around on HD, and I think it's the same for everyone except serious digital packrats.

    39. Re:Waiting for... by zsouthboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Have fun with your Hardware RAID when the controller card dies and you lose all your data.

      In the meantime, I'll take the small performance hit of software RAID for the robustness it provides.

    40. Re:Waiting for... by PitaBred · · Score: 1

      But how much better is it than Doom3, qualitatively? It'll bring your rig to it's knees, but so will running SETI at high priority. The problem is that the actual graphics have more or less plateaued. I don't see a huge difference between Doom3 style graphics and the newest cream of the crop. I mean, they have to post screenshots and point out the differences between DX10 and DX9 versions of the same game... and the framerates with the "upgraded" effects are often just crap relatively. I think we're reaching a point of diminishing returns on massive hardware investments.

    41. Re:Waiting for... by QuantumRiff · · Score: 1

      Even better than imaging, imagine if MS would release some big rollups. IE, load up XP, download SP2, download one or two rollups, and your done! I do imaging at my work, but there are times, when I need to load from scratch for one reason or another (like a new model of computer, with different drivers) I think last time I counted, it took 97 patches (after SP2) and about 5 reboots to get my PC working. And thank god I have a WSUS server on premise, so I didn't have to waste bandwith..

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    42. Re:Waiting for... by Vellmont · · Score: 1


      People no longer pay for processing power, they pay for connections. Thus the Intarweb...

      I completely agree, and I'm glad to hear someone talk about it. I'm not sure a lot of people really realize this yet. I know of at least once instance where a boss wanted to upgrade an employees computer because they thought the computer was "slow". The machine in question was maybe 4 years old, and did everything it needed to. The "slowness" was because the machine was still on dialup, and the boss sent him a large attachment. The employee in question was out in the boonies, and DSL is only recently available.

      I've come to the same conclusion myself recently. I really wait more for downloads to finish than the processor to do something. After trying to install Centos 5 and DLing 5 freaking CDs on a 1.5 megabit DSL line, I broke down and upgraded my DSL connection to 7 megabits. Large downloads are obviously much snappier now. My machine is 6 years old or so, and I rarely wait for the processor, it's always the internet.

      --
      AccountKiller
    43. Re:Waiting for... by Pojut · · Score: 1

      Check out the particle differences and some of the texture differences in Bioshock DX9 compared to DX10...the particle effects are the primary difference, but DX10 in Bioshock overall definately looks more refined.
      That being said, unless you have a rig that has AA and AF maxed out, the differences between the 360 version of Bioshock on an HDTV and at high resolution on a widescreen PC monitor are negligable...

    44. Re:Waiting for... by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 1

      I won't be one of those people. There is A LOT of pr0n out there to download.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
    45. Re:Waiting for... by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 1

      I just want to know how the hell you'd back it up (and industrial grade backup systems are not an option).

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
    46. Re:Waiting for... by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 1

      Do you only keep an image of a clean install or do you update it to reflect new app installs, patches, etc? If you lost the latest registry you'd have to install your apps too. Sounds very interesting though.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
    47. Re:Waiting for... by gravis777 · · Score: 1

      So, several things to point out:
      1) are you using an XP SP2 disc, or a regular XP disc? If you have to install Service Pack 2, expect this to take all day. A freash install of XP SP2 on Dell machines that have reached the end of their life takes me roughly 30 minutes to install the OS and another hour to do updates.

      2) Of course, if you complain to Microsoft, they will probably say something about Vista. Vista takes me roughly 25 minutes to install (surprisingly less time than XP, I am not sure why), and roughly 5-10 minutes to install updates (not including drivers)

      3) I completely agree with you that the normal desktop user is probably not going to need that much storage space or horsepower. I work in IT at a fortune 500 company, and it seems to vary from job to job. Our accounting girls are on machines, many 3-4 years old, and the replacement of these machines tend to happen because hardware is giving out, and the cost of servicing the machine is higher than getting a new machine. Our image is roughly 6 gig, and the girls in accounting rarely have more than a gig of personal information on their computer, usually MUCH less.

      However, this starts to vary greatly depending on who you are dealing with and what they are doing. Most of our execs will have 20-30 gig of just e-mail archives (I try to warn them to clean out archives and backup, but they just will not listen, that is until their harddrive fails). The average size of an iTunes directory for most users is around 5 gig. Still most of our users are not pushing their harddrives to the limit. What seems to be killing us is not enough ram and fragmented harddrives. Our PCs now come with a gig of RAM, although I am starting to push this to 2 gig for some of our users, and the newer macs come with anywhere from 2gig-8gig depending on which department its going to. There have been talks about getting some of our Macs dual terrabyte drives when they become more popular in the market (2 seperate SATA drives in RAID).

      My point is, yes, not everyone needs this much storage. Many may never fill up the 40 gig drives they have in their machines now, probably will never need a machine with more than 512 meg of ram. Shoot, as many of them still log into mainframes using a terminal program, I do not understand why we just do not give them dumb terminals, as then you do not have to mess with Windows or Linux. Instant on. However, that does not mean there are not people who need it, and that niche is growing. Our Vista image (which we have yet to role out to users, we only have a few test machines up here in IT running it) is roughly about 18 gig (compared to 6 and a half for XP). People are downloading more iTunes. Digital cameras are getting higher resolution, and many will film in TV quality mode now, ever increasing the need for space (my recent trip to Colorado resulted in almost 7 gig of pictures and videos, and I have taken 16 gig of pictures and videos this year just with my Nikon L12 camera). More and more Jo Blow users are doing video editing on their computers. And have you seen the installs of some of these games? I am thinking BioShock was around six and a half gig. Many demos are between 1-1.5 gig. I at home am running 2TB on my desktop, and am having space problems, then again, I tend to keep more data around than the average user.

      No, my first response when I read this was, What's taking them so long? If they have discovered how to do this, why 2011? Why not mid2008-early 2009? We have terrabyte drives now, they have discovered a way to fit 4 times as much data, why 2011? No, I don't think the drives can get here fast enough with our ever growing demand for storage space

    48. Re:Waiting for... by the_lesser_gatsby · · Score: 1

      Surely that should be "shutdown -h" if you're looking to save some leccy. (Can't say I do that very often!)

    49. Re:Waiting for... by somasynth · · Score: 1

      He's right you know. High performance computing is just a trillion dollar niche market.

    50. Re:Waiting for... by Frozen+Void · · Score: 1

      Its more "can I afford to download this and that without running out of space"
      even with modest broadband you can get 20-30 Gigabytes daily,with disk space being the only limit.Movies,music,games and miscellaneous userdata which tends to grow unbounded with each new program(e.g. photoshop drafts) .

    51. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is a Good Thing(tm). It means computers have gotten to the point where running crap like Web Browser/Word Processor is no longer system limited.

    52. Re:Waiting for... by blahplusplus · · Score: 1

      "No matter how much I add I always feel like I'm running out of space. I'm always shuffling around a couple hundred gigs here and a couple hundred gigs there to try to fit stuff in"

      I think it's time for someone out there to make the next killer application! Auto-sorting program, with editable Wiki sorting templates one can download, so that everyone can pitch in on identifying files, labelling them (tags, etc), and then sorting them. The fact is we're dealing with enormous amounts of data that need to be sorted intelligently. I've had significant problems and I only have a terabyte or two of hard disk space (combined).

      I've often wished there was an auto-sorting program in which you can mark or flag directories or files and it will automatically sort them intelligently without your intervention.

    53. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I use a custom file system, that I wrote myself (woot FUSE), that hides duplicates, so that only one real copy exists but the file system behaves as if multiple copies can exist, and compresses files that will have 10% or greater reduction in size. Not that it matters to this discussion, but in case anyone is going to comment, it caches read files in memory so it doesn't have to constantly have to decompress files. It caches file writes on disc and only compresses the files once there have been no further writes for a given amount of time. It also does versioning. I'm working on making it flag rapidly changing files, such as bit torrent downloads, so that they won't be processed to save space or keep versions, until they've finished downloading.

      I still need terabytes of disk space. :)

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    54. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Most of it I never look at myself. Some of it might be porn but that isn't my objective. I collect media files of all types and run them through my own AI code to train my toys in processing visual/audio information. So not only do I download 100's of gigs at a time but then I process it and save the resulting data.

      I process DVDs, CDs, and my own collected images too so again that takes up a lot of hdd space also.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    55. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Hmmm, maybe its me but ...

      The article talks about read heads but is strangely silent on the subject on write heads.

      For the regular joe (such as me-self), it seems patently clear that if you can't write at that density, the tech is pretty much worthless at this time.

    56. Re:Waiting for... by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      You don't record a lot of stuff.

      I used to have a drive as big as that on my Series 1 Tivo.

      My current such drive is 750G and my recordings are recompressed using divx.

      No, I don't watch all of it. That's not the point. The idea is to
      never miss something and to have a good selection of stuff onhand
      for when you have the time to watch.

      A 4TB drive would be great to put into an HD PVR. Transcoding to h264
      takes too long to be practical for PVR use.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    57. Re:Waiting for... by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      If you're not a pirate, you already bought your backup. It's sitting on the shelf in it's original package.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    58. Re:Waiting for... by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      "A week or two" is the whole idea.

      You can leave the thing for a few days and you
      don't have to worry about missing something.

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    59. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Finally something to hold all my pr0n.

    60. Re:Waiting for... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      A dead controller can be just as fatal in a software RAID configuration, depending on the type of "dead". If "dead" means "corrupts data on write", you're still screwed.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    61. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Interesting

      No, I mean they need to figure out how to fit multiple disks and a RAID-5 controller in the size of a single disk so that it can be installed as a single disk and only worried about if something goes wrong. It needs to be extremely easy to use. Maybe make each mini-disk from the RAID so that it can be ejected and replaced without opening the case and with a little light on the front of the case for each mini-disk so if it turns from green to red you'll know it's broken.

      They've squeezed enough space into that size for now - now I'd rather they work on reliability. For most people reliability is more important than hdd size or speed. I'm actually surprised Dell or one of those big name sellers hasn't started pushing the reliability angle as it seems such an easy upsell. "You wouldn't want to lose your family photos or important documents would you?"

      Us geeks already know enough to use RAID, and a lot of us do use Linux's RAID 5 support, but they need to make it the default option, and really easy, so that everyone uses it. Even if they could make a multi-hdd unit with built-in RAID 5 that would fit in a 5.25" external bay it'd be useful.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    62. Re:Waiting for... by axjdo · · Score: 1


      Yeah. That's me backup in a backup in a backup >>>

      Seriously I had my full music library nested 3 times over. When I backed up, I left the main folder on the other drive and absorbed it into the next backup as so on. Very sloppy management on my part.

      Now that I have a new laptop and am retiring the 5yr old desktop I plan to manage data much better.

      Not that I have a choice on a 120gb main drive and a 160 external versus a 300gb+80gb + 160 external.

      Too many drives just make for a mess of data.

    63. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Actually I do use it all although I don't view most of it. I use it for training AI-ish programs I write. I enjoy writing AI type stuff and trying to make it as good at identifying images, video, and audio content as possible so I keep training my programs with bigger data sets and tweaking my code and then re-training, and so on. It's just a hobby I have with no real purpose other than to waste time coding stuff.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    64. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Besides, what if I wanted to record every channel at the same time 24/7? Then I could go back and re-watch episodes of shows I didn't know I wanted to watch until I saw a random episode months later. I often will get into a show a couple seasons into the show. It'd be great to be able to go back to episode 1 and just watch from there until I catch up with the current episode.

      Or one thing I've actually experimented with is recording my video surveillance cameras 24/7 and keeping a record for my own protection. With a personal video camera that records what I'm doing all the time I can always defend myself against any claim that I was committing a crime. I have very good evidence that I wasn't out robbing, raping, or murdering. I'd like to have a drive small enough and with enough space that I could easily carry it around and record a whole day at a time before needing to upload it to my main hdd which I'd like to be big enough to keep my record forever. I'd also like it to be big enough to record all my other security cameras forever.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    65. Re:Waiting for... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      I prefer the "Great. Now, by the time BD-R media becomes affordable, it will be hopelessly too small to be useful, just like DVD-R were when they came out" comments

      Could somebody please nudge the optical storage folks repeatedly until they come up with something that is at least marginally useful as a backup medium? I mean, really, what good is a 4 TB hard drive if it would cost $2000 worth of Blu-Ray recordable media (80 discs at 50 gigs apiece) just to back it up once? Why can't we take some of this incredible engineering that the industry is putting into hard drive R&D and use it to create stable backup storage at a price that is actually affordable to consumers instead of just to large businesses?

      And before you suggest hard drives, there's a problem with that. Most people buy the biggest drive they can get when they buy their computer so that it will last them as long as possible, or at best, buy it at the sweet spot, which is usually one size behind the largest drive available. That makes it really hard to make a usable backup on another hard drive, as a single backup of the entire drive will completely fill any backup drive you can buy. It's fine if you never fill the drive (which I know many people don't), but for those of us who do, it just isn't practical.

      *sigh*.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    66. Re:Waiting for... by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      Assuming you aren't just being a wisenhiemer....

      You do realize don't you that you can have security cameras
      setup to take an image only every so many frames. You can also
      setup the display (and thus I am sure the recording) to show a
      the output for a number of your cameras all at once?

      It's not like you have to worry about things getting all blocky
      once the chase scene starts...

      Although you probably want to recognize yourself...

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    67. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I write auto-sorting programs as a hobby which is part of why I download so much. I used to have the image portion tied into the system so users could browse images, rate them, keyword them, etc but it became sort of pointless once Flickr came out so I stopped pushing my own image indexing and search tool.

      I have a toy, which I keep considering turning into a business, that would make it easy for users to backup their files to a central server farm that'd keep redundant copies in different locations, make files easy to restore, share, index, search, etc. It's meant to work with files of all types and is built on top of a file-system I wrote that makes storing files space efficient by removing duplicates and using compression. I personally think it's sort of a killer app since it combines network backup, file sharing (with built-in BT), file tagging, powerful search, live previews, forums, an open API so other web apps can use it's functionality, etc all into one but I don't think it's the kind of thing most financiers would grok. I wish I had a buddy that was into business. For fellow geeks, or people that have at least read Cryptonomicon, an Avi. :)

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    68. Re:Waiting for... by budgenator · · Score: 1

      The advantage of RAID 5 is if one drive gets toasted, the RAID just slows down until a new drive is installed and the data moved over to it, the software can compute what the missing data should be, the increased size is just an added bonus. If all the drives were in the same enclosure that had "no user serviceable parts inside" you would not be able to replace the bad drive, losing the primary advantage of RAID 5.

      --
      Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
    69. Re:Waiting for... by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 1

      I'm not looking forward to re-ripping 500+ cds.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
    70. Re:Waiting for... by Poltras · · Score: 1

      Nobody needs, officially, more than (1Mb/s * 60 sec/min * 60 min/hr * 24 hr/day * 365 day/yr * 80 yr life expectancy) worth of personnal storage, at least not before we invent a medium that cannot be reasonably compressed to 1Mbit/s. Be it porn, readable documents or just music, you cannot possibly need more, or else you're using more space than you can consume. BTW, that's 2.34 peta bytes. :)

    71. Re:Waiting for... by 8ball629 · · Score: 1

      Petabyte? Is that like a tofu snack or something?

    72. Re:Waiting for... by getnate · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think the parent was refering to HD-DVD and Blu-ray rips. A full 2 hour movie on HD-DVD or Blu-Ray is 20GB to 30GB. Those are 1080P, higher bitrate and better quality than Apple's.

    73. Re:Waiting for... by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      CD's are easy. They're small and fit 40 to a single layer DVD when they're compressed.

      If something is small, it can be easily duplicated even onto another harddrive somewhere.
      If it's not small to begin with then backups as such won't be as easy. They either won't
      reduce to a small number of 'alternate' backup media or they will be prohibitively expensive.

      Ripping 500 CD's over still beats losing 500 CD's entirely. ...although that does bring up an interesting question?

      Re-rip video and use the extra space to allow for all of your DVD's to
      sit on the media server in the raw or use the extra space to have extra
      copies of your entire collection?

      Not even RAID... just two distinct copies. Possibly with one being completely external.

      Wonder if anyone in Hollywood is losing sleep over this... '-)

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    74. Re:Waiting for... by Eivind · · Score: 1

      That's not far away. You can store very reasonable video-quality at 0.5GB/hour, much MUCH better than the typical "one low-res picture every second" of security-cams. So, a terabyte will be enough for ~2000 hours, 100 days. In practice you'll be able to get away with a picture every minute while asleep, and various other optimisations. Which means a complete video-log of everything you do for a year should fit on a single TB-drive.

      A TB-drive is only $250 or so. $250/year isn't an outrageous cost at all, and besides, that price is falling like a rock. In a decade or so a single standard hard-disc will be able to store a reasonably complete video of your entire life.

    75. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Ever really tried looking at your average security tape? Usually the bad thing you want to see is in one of the frames skipped or is so blurry you can't see what the heck went on. Better to keep at least several frames per second and to use high enough resolution that everything is clear. No point in doing it if you're not going to do it right. Or maybe I'm just paranoid after having several bad things happen in places that are supposed to have video surveillance only to find out they didn't get a clear enough image to do anything useful with. :)

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    76. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Which is why I suggest using user serviceable parts, miniature hdds, inside an enclosure the size of a typical hdd or at least the size of a 5.25" bay. It's just your typical RAID 5 system but made miniture enough that it won't scare your average user away when they look at the front of their computer and see it there. Somehow I think the massive grid of removable drive bays that I have, each with a sucking maw of fans and indicator lights, would turn off your average user. So make it fit into a single normal bay and make the lights clearly indicate drive failure and it'd be easy to sell to your average Joe. We have hdds small enough to do this with now - those used by things such as an iPod being an example. So why not do it?

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    77. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      It's what happens when a petaphile attacks you.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    78. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      It's definitely becoming easier than when I started messing around with the concept. Those 200MB disks just didn't go very far. ;)

      Think we'll be able to buy a petabyte for $100 in ten years? Much cheaper than the ~$200,000 price tag now. Of course then I'll be working on setting up my exabyte system.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    79. Re:Waiting for... by Eivind · · Score: 1

      Nah. Not a petabyte for $100. Progress is quick, but not -that- quick.

      Current best capacity/dollar is about 4GB/dollar, no ? I'm thinking doubling that every 18 months or so may be realistic, that gives you 6 doublings in 10 years, so 256GB/dollar, or $4000 for a petabyte. But even that assumes buying the best price/capacity drives, and using them with no redundancy. The best price/capacity is currently at about the $200 mark, and I don't expect that to change much, so you'd be buying 20 50GB-drives and striping them.

      Which ain't such a good idea.

      Give it 25 years though, and if current progress continues, you may get your $100 PB-disk. That's long enough that there's a large risk that current trends -wont- continue though. So all bets are off. You don't need a PB anyway for this project, unless you imagine storing your entire life in HDTV-quality, including the boring parts like sleep, which seems overkill to me.

    80. Re:Waiting for... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The two states of HDs are: "New", and "Full".

    81. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      It seems we were at around 20GB for $250 in 1997 (going from memory - may not have been the best deal). I can currently buy 1TB for around $200. I could live with it if the next 10 years has a similar jump in hdd progress.

      I don't really believe that CPU speeds, hdd space, etc are going to stop skyrocketing. There is no reason they would until consumers lose interest in buying bigger and better. When on avenue of improvement runs out there will always be another waiting to be investigated so long as there is money to pay for the research. For the most part so long as new apps are being written to take advantage of the more power and storage our computers have people will keep demanding more and more will keep being offered.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    82. Re:Waiting for... by Eivind · · Score: 1

      There's physical limits. Related to the quantumness of matter. One can't cause a lasting change with less than a certain amount of energy, dependent on temperature. (colder makes it possible to use less energy)

      That limit is aproximately 15 doublings away from current CPUs, it is physically possible to get 2^15 more operations out of the same energy, at the same temperature. (cooling actively doesn't help, because that consumes energy too)

      So yeah, there -is- a reason we can't go on growing like currently forever. If you want more details and numbers, google rec.arts.sf.science for "computronium"

    83. Re:Waiting for... by kaizokuace · · Score: 1

      Even my none geek friends and family are starting to feel the pain as working with video and Bit Torrent becomes more common

      The video editing becoming commonplace is a real killer on space! Especially when your family doesn't understand that raw video from the camera takes like gigs upon gigs of space! Crazy family! Stop filling my drives! I need space to download pr0n and anime!
      --
      Balderdash!
    84. Re:Waiting for... by Wolfrider · · Score: 1

      [[
      Most people buy the biggest drive they can get when they buy their computer so that it will last them as long as possible, or at best, buy it at the sweet spot, which is usually one size behind the largest drive available. That makes it really hard to make a usable backup on another hard drive, as a single backup of the entire drive will completely fill any backup drive you can buy. It's fine if you never fill the drive (which I know many people don't), but for those of us who do, it just isn't practical.
      ]]

      --What, you never heard of COMPRESSED BACKUPS? Compressed FOLDERS? RAR??? :b ;-)

      o Buy (2) 500GB HDs
      o Use as JBOD (non-RAID)
      o Backup ENTIRE HD **ONCE** with Compression to 2nd HD

      o Backup ESSENTIAL files that you don't want to lose after that, to 4-8GB DVD+R discs AND the 500GB spare drive, COMPRESSED. Use RAR to split archives into multiple files with Recovery data (5% is what I use.)

      --
      .
      == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
    85. Re:Waiting for... by Wolfrider · · Score: 2, Interesting

      --D00D, I like your idea! Make it a self-contained ZFS + Samba system with 3-5 removable "platters" in the form factor of ~2 5.25" HDs stacked on top of each other, and sell it as an eSATA device for Backups! :)

      --2-port PCI SATA cards can be had for like $19 these days, and they DO make eSATA -> Sata cables for ~$7.

      --
      .
      == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
    86. Re:Waiting for... by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Three problems:

      • Most of what fills my hard drives are either DV captured content or audio recordings, neither of which will compress easily.
      • Most files qualify as essential once you ignore the junk on my desktop.
      • It's generally a good idea to back up periodically, not wait until you've filled the entire 500 GB drive. :-) That means that you now have multiple backups of many of these files, and you have to keep track of which ones are most recent and throw the old ones out. That's a pain, and borders on impossible if the files are stored in a compressed archive.
      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    87. Re:Waiting for... by mattack2 · · Score: 1

      It's not *sorting* them, but at least *finding* things is the purpose of Spotlight in OS X. Seems like you don't really need to sort it, if you can easily find it wherever it is.

    88. Re:Waiting for... by caldodge · · Score: 1

      That doesn't sound right. The best deal I found in early '97 was $300 or so for a 3 gig drive.

    89. Re:Waiting for... by EvanED · · Score: 1

      Linux's software RAID solution is often faster or on par with high-end hard RAID solutions, plus, it doesn't tie you to a specific hardware vendor.

      No, but AFAIK it does tie you to a specific OS.

      Can I mount a software RAID set made in Linux in Windows? Or vice versa?

    90. Re:Waiting for... by EvanED · · Score: 1

      (quadcore 3GHz, 4Mb RAM, 1.5Gb Video RAM)

      You might want to look into an upgrade for that... my parent's first computer was a 386 with more than that. ;-)

    91. Re:Waiting for... by EvanED · · Score: 1

      That did strike me as an exaggeration, but it's not completely unreasonable.

      For instance, imagine installing off of a first-generation (i.e. pre-SP2) medium. I don't know how many restarts are in there, but there are several. If he was off doing something else while the computer was sitting there asking to restart, that could very easily be an entire day from start to end time.

      Whether it's fair to count that time is a different question.

    92. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Could have been '98 or maybe even '99. I just remember it was sometime in the late 90's and was 20GB and I know my price range would have been around $250. It's a foggy memory. Regardless, we've jumped from a gigabyte to a terabyte for around the same price in around a decade.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    93. Re:Waiting for... by Wolfrider · · Score: 1

      --BTW, Example Linkies: (Std Disclaimer, I have no affiliation blah blah)

      o PCI Card: ** (Silicon Image Sil3112ACT144 chipset) -- Should also work in Linux
      http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?InvtId=VP-9601&cm_mmc=googleproducts-_-Controllers/Adapters-_-SATAControllers-_-VP-9601&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=VP-9601

      o eSATA -> SATA Cable
      http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/10satsaexca3.html

      --
      .
      == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
    94. Re:Waiting for... by GooberToo · · Score: 1

      No, but AFAIK it does tie you to a specific OS.

      Yes, it does. But then again, most people don't need to mount their reiserfs, xfs, ext2*, ext3, so on and so on from Windows. With the exception of ext2, it's not likely to happen anyways. So I fail to see the problem. It's not like the entire device, as would be the case with RAID hardware, is tied to a specific RAID implementation. Besides, using RAID hardware means you're tied to a specific hardware vendor.

      Can I mount a software RAID set made in Linux in Windows? Or vice versa?

      Not really sure why you mention this because it is not something which is normally done. If this is an issue for you, then I would guess you fall into a less than one percent of one percent of Linux users. It's simply not a factor in the real world unless you have very obscure requirements. Frankly, I'm drawing a blank.

    95. Re:Waiting for... by blahplusplus · · Score: 1

      "It's not *sorting* them, but at least *finding* things is the purpose of Spotlight in OS X. Seems like you don't really need to sort it, if you can easily find it wherever it is."

      You obviously have never had a lot of stuff you need to archive and backup... sorting is absolutely necessary.

    96. Re:Waiting for... by tehcyder · · Score: 1

      Most of it I never look at myself. Some of it might be porn but that isn't my objective. I collect media files of all types and run them through my own AI code to train my toys in processing visual/audio information.
      I'm going to try that one out on the missus the next time she has a moan...
      --
      To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
    97. Re:Waiting for... by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      There are already 4 disk external USB/eSATA/Firewire units that can be used for portable storage and setup in RAID5 (if your OS supports it). The downside is that enclosures like that are $250-$500.

      The rest of us use hot-swap SATA bays that pack multiple 3.5" drives into 5.25" bays in various configurations. Such as 3:2 (3 3.5" drives in 2 5.25" bays) or 4:3 or 5:3. Combine that with Linux Software RAID and things get easy-peasy.

      (Our server boxes are mostly using the 3:2 setup with a triple-active RAID1 array. So even if a single drive fails, we're still running in mirrored mode. Plop the replacement drive in, and we're back up in tripled mode. Pull the wrong drive by accident, and it's still fixable. But the disk activity lights make it easy to know which bay to pull.)

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    98. Re:Waiting for... by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      In general, you should have at least 3 images.

      1) The base install, after product activation, when things were known to be working fine. It may be 2-3 years old, but it still saves you a lot of time if you ever have to re-install that particular image. These images are also great for when you need to switch the computer over to a new user. They're typically kept on DVD-R and stored in two locations.

      2) A weekly snapshot, written to a USB/Firewire/eSATA drive or a central server. And if you have the space, write to alterate directories each week so you can go back further. Use these images for the times when the Windows Restore feature fails.

      3) Annual or bi-annual snapshots that never get overwritten. These can be stored along side of the base install disks.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    99. Re:Waiting for... by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      I agree with the stagnation part. At work some of our laptops are more than 4 years old (May 2003) and they are still perfectly capable and working (P4 @ 2.8 GHz, 512Mb RAM, 60GB HDD). We even have two T30 Thinkpads that are just enough when traveling to browse, check email and write a doc.

      I just retired a Toshiba Tecra 9100 from Feb 2002. It was a P4 @ 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, and the hard drive had been bumped to 120GB. I used it as my primary machine for 5.5 years. So I understand your point. But I *really* like my new Thinkpad T61 (dual-core, 3GB RAM, two 160GB hard drives, and a 15.4" widescreen 1680x1050 display).

      Still, the useful lifespan of a machine has gone from 3 years in the mid-late 90s up to 4-5 years at the turn of the century, and dual-core machines will probably have useful lifespans of 6-9 years. The second core should help them remain responsive to the user, even as they age. Hopefully the capacitors on the motherboards will last that long...

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
    100. Re:Waiting for... by cthulhu11 · · Score: 1

      can pitch in on identifying files, labelling them (tags, etc) Look at what's available on any p2p net. People routinely botch file extensions, butcher track names, spell things incorrectly etc. I've often wished there was an auto-sorting program in which you can mark or flag directories or files and it will automatically sort them intelligently without your intervention. *cough* *cough* OSX *cough*

    101. Re:Waiting for... by blahplusplus · · Score: 1

      "Look at what's available on any p2p net. People routinely botch file extensions, butcher track names, spell things incorrectly etc"

      That's why you'd have configs on Wiki with moderation, and have a support forum, anyone who would f-ck with it would get banned.

    102. Re:Waiting for... by Zeinfeld · · Score: 1
      You might want to look into an upgrade for that... my parent's first computer was a 386 with more than that. ;-)

      Yes, 4Gb RAM.

      The first computer I owned/built had 1Kb RAM. The big machine at school had a whacking 32Kb.

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
    103. Re:Waiting for... by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      An example of what I usually see:

      60471 done.
      60482 done.
      60470 done.
      60494 done.
      60483 done.
      60476 done.
      60488 done.

      It'd be overwhelming to actually look at it all. If I was going to look tho I'd be looking for the amateur stuff people didn't realize a third party, such as myself, would be able to find. ;)

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
  2. So? by Mr_eX9 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I hope we won't be using hard drives in four years. Let's all pray for a breakthrough in solid-state storage.

    1. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      I hope we won't be using hard drives in four years. Let's all pray for a breakthrough in solid-state storage.

      arrrr yes

      The mythical breakthrough that hasen't happend in the last 10 years!

      please be quiet and resume your waiting!

    2. Re:So? by jmv · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, flash storage has been growing faster than HD for the past few years. About 6-7 years ago, a big HD would 80 GB, while a big flash card would be 32 MB, i.e. a ratio of about 2500. Now, a big HD is 500 GB and a big flash card is 16 GB, which means the ratio is more around 30. Basically, flash has been growing nearly 100 times faster. If it keeps doing that (I've no idea whether it will), flash storage will be bigger then HD in about 5 years.

    3. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1992 called, they want their meme back.

    4. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's still way more expensive per MB though, and the write speeds aren't so good. Hard drives aren't going away anytime soon.

    5. Re:So? by l0b0 · · Score: 1

      How about working for it instead of praying for it?

      Sincerely, an atheist.

    6. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You will probably find that the ratio of the price differences has changed along with the ratio of capacity differences explained above. I don't have any pricing hard facts on this one though, someone do it please.

      Speed? They are doing some serious catch up on speed too.

    7. Re:So? by tomee · · Score: 2, Informative

      Last I heard the rate at which flash memory prices are falling is 70% a year. You can find 32GB 2,5 inch solid state disks for about $320 at the moment, so $10 per GB, and $40000 for 4TB. So:

      2007: $40000
      2008: $12000
      2009: $3600
      2010: $1080
      2011: $324

      If this works out, 2011 might be about the time solid state disks overtake hard disks.

    8. Re:So? by quazee · · Score: 1

      > and the write speeds aren't so good
      This is so not true.

      The read/write speed of a mechanical hard drive has well-defined physical limits (at most, it is rotational speed * bytes per track * number of heads).
      And even then, modern hard drives do not use more than 1 head at a time because it makes the drive significantly more complicated with little benefits compared to a RAID array.
      The read/write speed of a large solid state disk is mostly limited by the controller design, not by the Flash chips.

      Let's say we build a 256GB hard drive using 32GBit Flash chips, 20MByte/sec speed (which is quite slow by todays standard).
      Using just 64 of such chips, we can design a device which does 1280MB/sec.

      --
      throw new SuccessException("Sig read successfully");
    9. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If your data is correct and the relative change continues, the two will equalize in 5 years, or by 2012.

    10. Re:So? by jmv · · Score: 1

      My data is approximate (from memory), but it definitely shows a trend. I'm hoping that trend will continue.

    11. Re:So? by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 1

      flash storage has been growing faster than HD for the past few years. About 6-7 years ago, a big HD would 80 GB, while a big flash card would be 32 MB, i.e. a ratio of about 2500. Now, a big HD is 500 GB and a big flash card is 16 GB, which means the ratio is more around 30. Basically, flash has been growing nearly 100 times faster. If it keeps doing that (I've no idea whether it will), flash storage will be bigger then HD in about 5 years. Nice historical observation, however the flash price curve has now about settled down to something more resembling Moore's law, as opposed to the nigh-on miraculous rate of the previous few years. Hitachi's prediction is also in line with Moore's law. If nothing dramatic happens to change those relative rates then the current factor of 25-50 price difference will remain for quite a few years yet. Put it another way, I won't be putting my rotating media optimization skillz out to pasture just yet.
      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    12. Re:So? by maxume · · Score: 1

      Uh, good luck with that.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
    13. Re:So? by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

      I've been having solid state discussions since I was a nerd / dork at high school, talking with other nerds about how much hard disks suck and how we hate the performance and wow those holographic disks will rock.

      This was quite literally 13 or so years ago, magnetic always seems to beat the competition to the big space punch.
      On top of this the disk manufacturers will be shooting themselves in the foot if they ever do release a decent sized, high speed solid state disk unless it's insanely expensive (and if it is, it won't take off)

      It's a catch 22 - 4 years we'll be using magnetic, abso-freaking-loutely, now 14 years? Maybe......

    14. Re:So? by jmv · · Score: 1

      While the gap may not be closing in just 5 years, I still think it keeps shrinking. Flash may be growing "only" as fast as Moore's law, but recently HD growth seems to have been slower than Moore's law. In any case, I'm pretty sure solid-state drives will become quite common on laptops within about 2 years.

    15. Re:So? by zsouthboy · · Score: 1

      Screw that, I'm doing whichever option is easier.

    16. Re:So? by ILuvRamen · · Score: 1

      real companies shouldn't be using them NOW! InPhase made holographic storage disks that already beat Hitachi in storage and speed. Right now, at this very moment you can pick up the phone and order an InPhase drive and disks that have 1.6TB each. I believe the disks are under $100 each too. Yeah they're write once but for backups and video recording, which are the main things anyone would ever use a drive that big for, they're the best by far. Plus they write at 120 MB/sec. If Hitachi has 4TB magnetic hard drives in 2011, they'll be out of business cuz that's pathetic.

      --
      Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
  3. 4 Terabytes? by crowbarsarefornerdyg · · Score: 0
    Who the hell is going to use all that space? Honestly, it seems incomprehensible right now. I know, I know, we all said the same thing when the 8.4 GB drive was introduced, and the same thing when the 100GB barrier was broken. I know I said it when I saw a 1TB drive on the market.

    At any rate, wouldn't the data be more susceptible to corruption being that densely packed on the platters? I'm not a hardware engineer by any means. I really want to know.

    --
    "Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
    1. Re:4 Terabytes? by JoshJ · · Score: 1

      Home users won't fill it up (except for the few lunatics who pirate stuff all the time, log 50 IRC channels at once, etc), but business users will certainly utilize multi-terabyte disks.

    2. Re:4 Terabytes? by d12v10 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It'll get used up fast, with the introduction of Blu-Ray and HDTV movies/tv shows.

    3. Re:4 Terabytes? by QMalcolm · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not really that weird at all. If you have a modest HD movie collection (say, 50), it could easily chew up a big part of the drive. Add a 100gb music collection, maybe half a dozen game installs, OS install, and your 4TB drive suddenly doesn't seem that big.

    4. Re:4 Terabytes? by crowbarsarefornerdyg · · Score: 1

      LMAO. I wasn't thinking about business users; I fully expected that. It was more rhetorical than anything, but you're right. I doubt there are many original artists who would need that much to seed their own creations, but you never know, right?

      --
      "Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
    5. Re:4 Terabytes? by crowbarsarefornerdyg · · Score: 1

      I haven't gotten into the whole HD movie thing yet. Just doesn't appeal to me, but I see your point. I have a 320 GB drive in my system, and between my Linux ISOs, Alcohol ripped game discs, installed games, and other miscellaneous software I've purchased/downloaded (OSS, dammit! lol), I'm using, according to Windows XP, 161 GB. Of course, 10GB are taken by the bloody restore partition.

      --
      "Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
    6. Re:4 Terabytes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Actually, my first reaction was, "That's all?"

      They're talking about having this capacity available in another four years, and yet, 4 TB isn't even that much now. I have four drives in my computer totaling a little over 1 TB, and since the start of the year, it's mostly gone. A few uncompressed videos, a decent music collection, and a handful of the latest games... suddenly you're trying to decide what you need to delete before grabbing the camera and starting a new project.

      (My work and hobbies all revolve around video, but I know plenty of people who could already fill that drive with just games, movies and porn.)

    7. Re:4 Terabytes? by cashman73 · · Score: 1, Funny

      "4 terabytes ought to be enough for anybody,..."

    8. Re:4 Terabytes? by BrainInAJar · · Score: 1

      "business users will certainly utilize multi-terabyte disks"

      Eventually, sure, but at the moment the largest 2.5" SAS drive anyone'll sell you is 150GB

    9. Re:4 Terabytes? by JoshJ · · Score: 1

      How many do they put together? I'm sure Google has terabytes upon terabytes of data set up in some extremely reliable, extremely fast way. "Results 1 - 10 of about 79,800,000 for slashdot. (0.09 seconds)" I'm sure that most businesses use over 150 gigs, they just RAID them somehow (I don't know much about RAID so I don't know the details) for better performance and reliability.

    10. Re:4 Terabytes? by BrainInAJar · · Score: 1

      absolutely they shove them together with some sort of striping/spanning/whatever; the point is that we're talking individual spindles here.

      notice the use of the words "multi-terabyte disks" and not "multi-terabyte logical volumes"

    11. Re:4 Terabytes? by Wildclaw · · Score: 1

      As a "hardcore" pirate (mostly anime), I can say that a 4TB doesn't really cover my needs today, so I doubt it will cover my needs in five years.

      Let's say that you download 25GB a month, which is not that much compared to a hardcore pirate like me, and probably quite common among young people. 25*12=300. 4000/300 = 13. That 4TB disk will be able to contain 13 years of your downloads. Sounds like a lot? Well, humans in general love to keep things, and 13 years isn't that long compared to the human life span.

      And that isn't even taking into consideration the increasing size of data, especially HD video, but also uncompressed music and high quality images.

    12. Re:4 Terabytes? by smash · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Google runs its index from RAM.

      Sound nuts? Yes... but they do. Large clusters of many inexpensive machines set up in a redundant manner...

      --
      I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
    13. Re:4 Terabytes? by supersat · · Score: 1

      At any rate, wouldn't the data be more susceptible to corruption being that densely packed on the platters?
      From what I understand, the answer is yes, but there are ways to mitigate the problem (like perpendicular recording).
    14. Re:4 Terabytes? by SpectreBlofeld · · Score: 1

      To use a pedestrian Joe Sixpack example, people will be able to DVR everything they watch.

    15. Re:4 Terabytes? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      True. But why use SAS? Given the recent reliability, larger size, and vastly lower expense, of 3.5" SATA drives, a decent 2 Terabyte server using 6x600 Gig drives in RAID5 with one hotswap drive fits easily in 2U and costs less than $3000. A similar capacity of SAS drives takes 4U, has 10% less disk space available, draws a lot more power, and typically costs at least $6000.

      I know where I'd spend my money: I'd buy two of the SATA units and have a much more flexible system with redundancy.

    16. Re:4 Terabytes? by Belial6 · · Score: 1

      I have over 10,000 photos on my hard disk, weighing in at a little over 15GB. I didn't really start taking a lot of photos until I went digital, because it is a pain in the ass to deal with storing paper photos. Today, I don't use my camcorder much, because storing all of those tapes is a pain, and hard drives are just not nearly big enough to realistically put all of the video on the hard drive.

      Not only is 4TB not that big, but there are uses that I'm not even bothering to consider because disk storage isn't big enough. How about security cameras. At ~3GB an hour, that is 72Gb a day for each camera. If you had 7 cameras around your home (or business), that would be ~500GB a day. A 4TB drive would only last 8 days.

      Of course, depending on the application, you might want to have a second copy of your data as a backup. This means that you could easily go through a 4 TB drive every 4 days. So, maybe drives will be big enough when we hit the 1PB size. Of course this is under the premise that video doesn't get dramatically higher resolution, and that we don't come up with a new data type that requires even more space.

      Oh, and I am going to want this data replicated between my server, laptop, and car, so we need to triple all of those number.

      That's my personal storage needs. I'm sure there are others that would want more, and businesses that would have well over 100 cameras.

    17. Re:4 Terabytes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Security cameras can be very optimised in what they record however.

      Motion triggered, low frame rates, etc. You could average 100MB/hour on average (over a 24 hour period) in some configurations and locations with decent compression.

    18. Re:4 Terabytes? by jcr · · Score: 1

      Who the hell is going to use all that space?

      Anyone who has a couple of HD security cameras and feels like keeping several months' worth of recordings. Or, anyone who feels like ripping DVDs and doesn't want to recompress them and give up one generation of data loss.

      When there's that much space available, people will use it. Probably for things that we consider absurd today.

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    19. Re:4 Terabytes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Large clusters of many inexpensive machines set up in a redundant manner...

      with no end in sight!
    20. Re:4 Terabytes? by suv4x4 · · Score: 1

      Google runs its index from RAM.

      Sound nuts? Yes... but they do. Large clusters of many inexpensive machines set up in a redundant manner...


      It doesn't sound nuts since most databases also run their index from RAM. The index is far smaller than the actual data, and if you put it down on a disk, some of the advantage of having index in the first place is killed.

      AFAIK Google doesn't use off-the-shelf database, but same logic and laws of physics apply to making indexes.

    21. Re:4 Terabytes? by Lumpy · · Score: 1

      your comcast on demand runs from RAM. They have racks of servers with no hard drives, just terabytes upon terabytes of ram. The drive array that stores ther video long term is drives, but it sends it out to the streaming machines in your local headend to be held in a crapload of ram.

      Advantage? when they crash a reboot fixes them. or simply swap it out with a new one and turn it on.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    22. Re:4 Terabytes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Do you have any references for this? Other than people basically saying they are fast, and RAM is fast, so they must run the index from RAM.

      They are not *that* fast. I think google has smart enough people to get that performance without placing the index in RAM. They might have some of the index in RAM though, because some parts might be much more used than others. They almost certainly have this because of disk caching, but there might very well be smarter ways in play.

    23. Re:4 Terabytes? by Stray7Xi · · Score: 1

      3GB an hour is way overboard. You can get decent quality with 500MB an hour on moving scenes. Scenes like a security camera I bet can be encoded to under 50MB an hour (possibly lower if no traffic) just based on having a still background and periods of no movement. It's more an issue of having the correct encoding scheme for what you're doing, and having enough processor power to handle it.

      But your premise is still correct, video archiving is out of the reach of most.

    24. Re:4 Terabytes? by jollyreaper · · Score: 3, Funny

      --
      i very rarely use the preview button; there's a good chance i know about my typos, don't bother pointing them out. Hey, ee cummings, you forgot to capitalize your "i".

      (I couldn't help it, the Devnul made me do it!)
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    25. Re:4 Terabytes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you're paranoid and you cover more than just the access points to your home (so you can not only identify thieves but also record what they actually steal) you won't have anything like the storage space you need for even just a week's worth a video on a modest-sized home, unless you're using low-quality footage running at a horrible frame rate. And if you're going to do that there's hardly any point in having a security system in the first place.

    26. Re:4 Terabytes? by begbiezen · · Score: 1

      Uncompressed video? Where are you getting that? You probably mean MPEG-2.

    27. Re:4 Terabytes? by ericrost · · Score: 1

      Two Word: Media Server

      Completely medialess DVD collection. On demand TV that I never need to worry about clearing up space on. That's what I'll use it for, I was looking at building a RAID to get this amount of space, now I just need 2 drives (mirrored).

    28. Re:4 Terabytes? by jedidiah · · Score: 1

      Once home users realize that they can have their
      entire media collection at their fingertips, those
      4TB drives will seem positively puny.

      Data is big and it's not getting any smaller.

      You don't even have to "steal" it to end up with
      a lot of it. Just a few of your favorite shows
      will fill up a drive like that (if you don't
      transcode).

      --
      A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
    29. Re:4 Terabytes? by Anomolous+Cowturd · · Score: 1

      Get yourself a HD video camera and a hoarding instinct, won't take all that long.

      --
      Software patents delenda est.
  4. Full circle... by rts008 · · Score: 1

    FTFA:
    "But GMR-based heads maxed out, and the industry replaced the technology in recent years with an entirely different kind of head. Yet researchers are predicting that technology will soon run into capacity problems, and now GMR is making a comeback as the next-generation successor."

    *Scotty sets down mouse- looks at keyboard and replies:"How quaint."*

    Having seen all of the referenced articles and links on my own, this just ties it all together nicely.

    On the downside, if you haven't been subjected or hunted out the background info, TFA is kind of sparse.

    --
    Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
  5. Base 2 or Base 10? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    30-50 metric nanometers is not as small as 30-to-50 *2^-30* meters, so you purchase one of these drives and they rip you off with a head bigger than the size you expect.

  6. Yeah, okay. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    UT2004. ~8 GB, and that's with very few mods/etc. installed.

    UT.

    Two thousand and..

    FOUR.

    Notice, it's 2007 now, and shortly it's going to be 2008. Notice that video cards keep getting better and better, and are using larger and larger textures.

    Hi, Bill Gates called, he wants his laughable predictions on "X ought to be enough for anybody!" back.

    1. Re:Yeah, okay. by crowbarsarefornerdyg · · Score: 1

      I wasn't being serious. Lighten up. I know how stupid it sounded to say that. Didn't you read the rest of my comment?

      --
      "Slapping lipstick on a pig does NOT make it Natalie Portman. Paris Hilton, maybe, but not Portman." - UncleTogie
  7. I have a need right now... by jkrise · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Trying to build an open source PACS system at a hospital I consult with. The need is basically for lots and lots of storage, without needing to access a DVD or tape. A typical MRI / CT scan can generate 1 GB of data; so with dozens of scans a day; and the need to store and access patient data pertaining to say, 10 years; these drives will be really useful.

    A simple SATA RAID controller interfaced with 4 such drives can give me 12TB of cheap, fast, storage. At 1TB per year, should be good enough for my needs. H/w vendors currently recommend expensive SAN boxes; which I don't like... no useful value for the application at hand.

    --
    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
    1. Re:I have a need right now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Are you replacing a certain data centre that burnt down recently? I:m far too lazy to fetch the link.

    2. Re:I have a need right now... by chuckymonkey · · Score: 1

      I will say this, don't use a commodity RAID controller for something like that. They're pretty good for home use, but I would really recommend you spend a little and get a real RAID card. Unless you do a lot of tape backups if that RAID unbinds you'll so many flavors of screwed Baskin Robbins will sue you for trademark infringement.

      --
      "Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
    3. Re:I have a need right now... by grasshoppa · · Score: 1

      That's terrifying; You would trust that kind of data to a simple raid5 commodity card? A SAN is a must, with a disk juke box backing it up.

      Sure, you can recover from 1 disk loss, but what about 2? Murphy is a cruel bastard who enjoys eating fools like you for breakfast.

      --
      Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
    4. Re:I have a need right now... by SamP2 · · Score: 1

      Sure, you can recover from 1 disk loss, but what about 2?

      RAID 6 is your friend.

    5. Re:I have a need right now... by grasshoppa · · Score: 1

      Except that's not what the OP had in mind. 4TB drives, 4 disks with a total overall capacity of 12TB. That's raid5.

      Even raid6 in this configuration is scary. I'd want a SAN, if for no other reason than the backend management. On top of the fact that you slam 16 drives in the bloody thing ( minimum for this kind of data ), and have half as hot spares to a raid6 array. On top of this, you have a support contract with the vendor, so if a drive dies you have an exact replacement in under 24 hours. You dump the array to tape once a day ( and you'll need many drives, probably ultrium 3 ). Given the shear amount of data, you'd need a tape juke box, robotics and all.

      Sure, you *might* get away with a consumer level raid5/6 solution. But when things come crashing down, and they very likely would, you want something a bit more serious on the back end.

      --
      Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
    6. Re:I have a need right now... by jkrise · · Score: 1

      Except that's not what the OP had in mind. 4TB drives, 4 disks with a total overall capacity of 12TB. That's raid5.

      Actually, the setup includes an off-site Disaster recovery setup that will have identical storage size, in an external drive cage, attached to vanilla hardware. So in the event of a major crash, I just need to transport the DR box and rebuild the RAID.

      --
      If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
    7. Re:I have a need right now... by drsmithy · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Being in (roughly) the same industry and situation, I can sympathise. Our setup for study archiving is a front end "head" unit that receives data to a local 4-disk RAID10 (via a hardware - for transparency - 3ware card). It is connected to a number of back end "disk servers"[0] via GbE and iSCSI to present their disk space to the front end as block devices which are then stiched together using LVM.

      Studies are archived daily, with an automated script simply carving an appropriately-sized LV out of the VG, formatting it, copying the data to it, indexing the study metadata, etc. We have about 15TB online (12.5TB allocated) and archive ca. 5000-6000 studies/140-160GB every day (compressed with JPEG lossless).

      HOWEVER, our requirements are probably quite different - we keep archived images more for our own convenience, than because of any legal requirements, and only aim for about a 90 day rolling window (ie: the last 90 days worth of studies). Further, the front end unit has enough local disk to go for a solid 3-4 days without needing to archive off (and there is a backup machine if it fails), so while we've never had significant downtime on that particular aspect of our workflow, theoretically most of the physical machines could die for a couple of days with little more than a minor inconvenience.

      While I think this is a sound (and dirt cheap - for what the whole thing is worth you couldn't even buy a single 16*500G drive array for our DS4800) solution, if your requirements are more strict - especially from a legal perspective - I would be extremely careful about recommending what is effectively a DIY solution. In particular, if your client ends up on court, they'll be a lot happier if they can go "we have a legally compliant storage system for our data, as certified by $LARGE_VENDOR" rather than "$CONSULTANT designed and built a storage system for us with COTS parts, but it hasn't been certified as compliant for storing patient data". There's also the greater uptime and redundancy of enterprise storage solutions (the part you're actually paying the 10x as much for)[1].

      A simple SATA RAID controller interfaced with 4 such drives can give me 12TB of cheap, fast, storage. At 1TB per year, should be good enough for my needs. H/w vendors currently recommend expensive SAN boxes; which I don't like... no useful value for the application at hand.

      Using RAID5 with 4TB drives would be insanity. Heck, using RAID5 *at all* with SATA ~160GB+ drives is crazy, IMHO, even for just my home server (16*250G RAID6) - let alone anything business-critical. Maybe if you restrict yourself to small drive counts (6-7), have a hot spare and do regular disk scrubs, it's worth taking a chance on - but I personally wouldn't do it.

      [0] DIY jobbies, since no major vendor sells a box that holds so many SATA drives. We stuff 16 drives into a box, RAID6 them all together with Linux's software RAID, then export the RAID arrays with iSCSI Enterprise target. Each disk server has a pair of GbE links for bandwidth and redundancy and cat saturate both of them simultaneously from the RAID array. There used to be 5 servers, but 3 old IDE-based ones were recently replace with a single machine (holding triple the space). We also keep no less than two spare drives for each machine on-site and enough other spare parts (motherboard, CPU, etc) to completely rebuild one from scratch if necessary.

      [1] This particular system is one of the few times I have chosen to go DIY over off-the-shelf, simply because the cost savings were so massive and the uptime/reliability requirements were relatively low (only 99% uptime). One thing I did discover researching this, however, was the dearth of low-end storage solutions in the Australian market (hence my decision to DIY).

    8. Re:I have a need right now... by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Which CT scanner are we not going to get, in order to pay for all this? Or which MRI will we fail to pay for the last 25% of to pay for all this?

      Because, you see, you've just spent your budget on hardware that will never likely be used that gets you no visible day-to-day advantage, except leaving you vulnerable to multiple simultaneous drive failures. (This is surprisingly likely: go read the Google paper on drive failure rates.)

      Instead,, you use a second system with snapshot backups, possibly using a system like rsnapshot that supports hard-linked backups. This gives you on-line backup, fast bare-metal restoration, and easy access to yesterday's or last week's data. It also offloads the tape backups. And the mirrored drives can be used for off-loaded backup or mirroring, for creating off-site backup media of actual hard drives, not tapes.

    9. Re:I have a need right now... by Paul_Hindt · · Score: 1

      That is true. I am sure that a lot of /. readers might not consider the other uses for massive data storage besides pr0n, WaReZ, and IT stuff. I didn't realize that a CAT/MRI scan required so much space for its imagine. Of course filmmakers probably use loads of space to work on next summer's blockbuster, as do all the effects specialists and post-production artists as well.

      I work in audio engineering, and with the increasing fidelity of digital audio, it is easy to start burning through space when you are recording raw audio at 96kHz in 24-bit. Recording an album could conceivably take up many gigs of uncompressed audio data to store all the multiple tracks, versions of the tracks with effects, old takes, compressed versions to demo on the iPod, etc.

      In short, there are many many uses for increased hard drive capacity besides just the casual home user, or intarweb pirate.

    10. Re:I have a need right now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, I suppose it depends on what you mean by expensive, but I can buy a 20 TB box (24 1TB disks total, RAID 6 plus 2 hot spares) for about $16k, or 10 TB for about $9.5k, and to me that seems fairly cheap. That includes 3yr warranty, OS (Open-E Enterprise, supports iSCSI or NAS), disks, raid controller and a big 5U box to hold everything. I actually like the 3U 16 disk versions better, but if you want max storage, that's the 5U box. I usually use a place called ICC USA (basically a supermicro reseller, see google for address) when I need that sort of thing.

    11. Re:I have a need right now... by norton_I · · Score: 1

      Where on there did he say he didn't have backups?

      Just because you can't be bothered to make a reliable system that actually meets the requirements at hand does not mean everyone needs to spend an order of magnitude more for features that provide no value for the problem.

    12. Re:I have a need right now... by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      On top of the fact that you slam 16 drives in the bloody thing ( minimum for this kind of data ), and have half as hot spares to a raid6 array.

      Holy shit, dude. There's responsible redundancy, then there's paranoia, then there's overkill, then, far off in the distance, there's having half a shelf dedicated to hot spares.

      One hot spare per shelf is heaps. Consider a 7*750G RAID6 that suffers a disk failure. An array rebuild will take ca. 20 hours (assuming it's not offlined during the rebuild). Even a cheap SAN is going to come with a 24x7, 4hr response support contract (or, at worst, next day). That is to say, your failed drive will be replaced ca. 16 hours before your array has even finished recovering from the failure (or, worst case, around the same time as it is finishing). Just what is more than a single hot spare going to buy you ? Heck, if you've got staff on-site 24/7 (or equivalent), you don't even need a hot spare - just a cold spare and decent system monitoring.

      If you're going to throw away half your raw space, the best way is to use RAID10 or RAID60 and at least get some performance benefits as well.

      Sure, you *might* get away with a consumer level raid5/6 solution. But when things come crashing down, and they very likely would, you want something a bit more serious on the back end.

      It's not especially hard to build a centralised storage solution with COTS parts that get up to about 90% of the features and performance of enterprise kit at well under half the cost - and despite what EMC and co. will try to tell you, that covers the requirements of the vast majority of environments. *Especially* when you start moving into archival/backup/second-tier systems with much lower reliability and uptime requirements (eg: can get away with single controllers), the cost difference becomes an order of magnitude or more.

    13. Re:I have a need right now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      SATA RAID controller
      Make sure to buy some spares of that controller and make sure they work with the current RAID. Firmware incompatabilities will fuck you an your RAID over. Say you have 60 scans a day = 60 gigs a day. That's 60 * 365 = 21900 gigs or 21 terabytes a year, maybe 18 if you ignore the weekends. If you really care about long-time storage (> 5 yrs.) use a robotic tape storage mechanism (like archive.org, the internet archive, uses). Otherwise, buy a couple of spare hard-drives up front and keep a contingency and replacement plan. You're better to use a 'expensive' solution for this, because the one thing a homebrewn solution won't provide to you is: C.Y.A.: Cover Your Ass. And in the context of the health industry, you better cover your ass properly. :-)

      gotcha: storage (duh!)
    14. Re:I have a need right now... by FireFury03 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      ...get a real RAID card. Unless you do a lot of tape backups...

      I sincerely hope you do backups anyway. RAID is simply there to allow you to continue running a service under some specific failure conditions that would otherwise cause the service to be down whilst hardware is replaced and backups restored - it is not a substitute for backups, RAID and backups accomplish different jobs.

      Some examples of failure conditions where RAID won't save you but backups will:

      - Some monkey does rm -rf / (or some rogue bit of software buggers the file system).
      - The power supply blows up and sends a power spike to all the hard drives in your array (I've personally seen this happen to a business who didn't take backups because they believed RAID did the same job - they lost everything since all the drives in the array blew up).
      - The building bursts into flames and guts your server room.

      In all these conditions, having a regular off-site backup would save you whereas just using a RAID will not.

    15. Re:I have a need right now... by akro42 · · Score: 1

      HP FSE is perfect for this.

      Check it out

    16. Re:I have a need right now... by slyn · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't 4 X 4Tb drives be more like 9TB?

      It makes me mad that all the hard drive makers failed 3rd grade math.

    17. Re:I have a need right now... by ckhorne · · Score: 1
      You may want to check your numbers...

      I'm in the same boat (consultant for a company that generates approximately 1million studies per year). We had developed our own PACS system from the ground up, although that was scrapped by the CEO after two years, and now we're going with an off-the-shelf system, and we're currently scoping out our internal archive solution. In either case, we've got a pretty good idea of how much storage we need.

      A "typical" MR / CT scan is far less than 1 Gb of data. On some scans of our own data of 30,000 studies, I show an average of 52Mb per study. The catch here is that, due to the sheer number of machines (>300), we have a lot of older 1 and 2-slice CT's. If you're dealing with the latest and greatest 40 or 64-slice CT's, then you can approach 1Gb per study. We expect to eat up around 20-30Tb per year (with the current rate of ~2000 studies per day). A CT image is always 512x512 (unless you're on some really old equipment), and either 8 or 16 bit. The DICOM header is almost negligible compared to the image data. It takes a LOT of images to reach a 1Gb CT study, and the only way you'll see that is with the 64+ slice CT's.

      My only point is to verify your numbers. IME, people don't always understand that medical imaging data can be relatively small.

    18. Re:I have a need right now... by fbriere · · Score: 1

      I sincerely hope you do backups anyway.
      I'm curious: what backup method are you guys currently using to store those hundreds of GB? DVDs just don't cut it anymore, and tape drives beyond DDS-4 (20 GB) are quite expensive. What's left? USB hard drives?
    19. Re:I have a need right now... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      I'm curious: what backup method are you guys currently using to store those hundreds of GB? DVDs just don't cut it anymore, and tape drives beyond DDS-4 (20 GB) are quite expensive. What's left? USB hard drives?

      Personally, I don't back up hundreds of GB. My important data fits on 2 single layer DVDs and I do a regular(ish) backup of that, the rest of the contents of my hard drives is stuff that can be downloaded, and stuff like my music library (a reasonably large amount of Vorbis data) which, whilst it would be a PITA it can be re-ripped from the original CDs.

      It boggles the mind that "normal" users would have hundreds of GB of stuff they need to backup. Maybe with home video editing becoming popular some people might need to backup this much data. Of course businesses have much greater backup needs, but one hopes that such businesses see the sense in spending money to back up the important data (sadly, having supported a number of businesses I can tell you that this is often not the case and losing the contents of the file server certainly can put the business in peril).

    20. Re:I have a need right now... by naapo · · Score: 1

      Maybe with home video editing becoming popular some people might need to backup this much data. Indeed. I use DVDs for my home videos and pictures, but it's a pain in the ass and I think it's not a particularly reliable backup method anyway. I try to burn two backups of each video, though.
    21. Re:I have a need right now... by Prof.Phreak · · Score: 1

      just some cool suggestions, we recently got one LSI 8480E, and hooked up 32 1T drives to it. from what I understand, we can chain as many as we want (upto 255 drives?). our previous solution (which is actually still hooked upto the same server) involved two 3ware 12 port controllers, and 24 750gig drives.

      price wise, it's not expensive [1T drives are cheap] (not something for home, but for corp, prices are certainly cheaper than what they were a few years ago).

      --

      "If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy

    22. Re:I have a need right now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Raid five It's N-1 * HD size in TB /1024^4 * 1000^4
      So 3 * 4 * 0.91 = 10.91 Terabytes - whatever the file system takes up.

      My guess is you get a little over 10 Terabytes but YMMV.

    23. Re:I have a need right now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Paying for the amount of disk space you are going to need in 4 years today is a bad idea.

      Don't use a disk for more than 3.5 years and your risks are a lot lower.

    24. Re:I have a need right now... by tuffy · · Score: 1

      Personally, I don't back up hundreds of GB. My important data fits on 2 single layer DVDs and I do a regular(ish) backup of that, the rest of the contents of my hard drives is stuff that can be downloaded, and stuff like my music library (a reasonably large amount of Vorbis data) which, whilst it would be a PITA it can be re-ripped from the original CDs.

      How much is your time worth, though? A lot of data can be recreated if given enough time to work on it. However, I'd rather buy an external drive as a mirror for all that audio so that I won't have to re-rip it should my internal drive fail. Given that hard drive capacities are growing faster than my music collection, it's really not very expensive to do.

      --

      Ita erat quando hic adveni.

    25. Re:I have a need right now... by mnmn · · Score: 1

      Get a Clariion AX150. It takes SATA drives and can do RAID rather well...
      (I work for VMware/EMC).

      I just happen to know this product, I'm sure other SAN vendors have cheap SATA arrays too.
      Check them out on eBay... I'm waiting for one to be cheap enough for me to buy. That will make for a truly quiet PC (with the array in the basement).

      --
      "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
    26. Re:I have a need right now... by Jhan · · Score: 1
      I'm curious: what backup method are you guys currently using to store those hundreds of GB? DVDs just don't cut it anymore, and tape drives beyond DDS-4 (20 GB) are quite expensive. What's left? USB hard drives?

      What!? You're only having this problem just now? For me, at home, optical storage has always been to tiny, and tape always to expensive. Here's what I do:

      At home: Another HD. For some years now, I've always bought twice the storage I need, an backup my data from one drive (cluster) to the other.

      At work: Tape. Like we always did, since 1950. Quote: "Capacities up to 1400TB native".

      --

      I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.

    27. Re:I have a need right now... by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      I incrementally dump(8) my important few hundred GB to a rotated pair of 500G drives. I could do with an extra hot-swap caddy and something to store a drive + caddy in when it's not online, but it seems to work pretty well.

      My home server lives in one of these, but standalone and 5.25" bay hot-swap SATA racks are pretty common.

    28. Re:I have a need right now... by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      Get a Clariion AX150. It takes SATA drives and can do RAID rather well...

      We looked at the AX150i, but it's still ~3x as much as DIY. That's a big difference when all you really want is a huge slab of disk without high uptime requirements (99% availability is fine for us - and most people, IMHO). Also, I don't think the AX150 does RAID6 yet ?

      I just happen to know this product, I'm sure other SAN vendors have cheap SATA arrays too.

      Relative to its contemporaries, it's cheap - but compared to DIY it's just not in the same league. I do have to wonder why you'd be looking to to buy one for home when you could build something just as good (better, if anything) for a *lot* less money (at least, I'm assuming you don't need dual, redundant controllers for your home server :). Also, don't forget you won't be able to put off-the-shelf drives into it, and will be stuck buying drives from EMC (or off Ebay) at a ~500% markup.

      There'd certainly be a bit of "cool" factor, but personally I'd rather have the extra disk space (or several thousand $$$$s worth of something else).

    29. Re:I have a need right now... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Except that when your simple SATA raid card goes west, and you can't get back some of that ten years worth of data, it won't be your problem because you, being a consultant will be long gone.

      The idea behind the expensive SAN gear, is that it is reliable and fault tolerant.

      When a disk dies on your cheap set up, how long will it take to rebuild? What will performance be like while the rebuild is happening? How often will disks fail in this setup? It may be worth paying a bit more for disks that last longer. You'll certainly need to have some on the shelf for replacement.

      Your maths a bit off also, with dozens of scans per day, and 1GB per scan, you need more than 1TB a year. 365*12 = 4380 scans a year, which is 4.3TB a year.

      So you would be looking at buying a RAID set every one-three years (as you said dozens of scans). Are you going to add them all onto the same fileserver? Or build extra fileservers as you go. It will all quickly become an immense mess.

      Good luck, you're going to need it!

    30. Re:I have a need right now... by EvanED · · Score: 1

      It boggles the mind that "normal" users would have hundreds of GB of stuff they need to backup.

      There are a few points.

      1) It can be a PITA to figure out what to back up. Do I really want to go through my hard drives and figure out what I should back up and what I shouldn't? Reasonable file organization helps with this, but doesn't solve the issue.

      2) Even things that are "replaceable", like downloads, program installations, and rips still are a PITA to recover from. Installing and updating Windows takes a couple hours, installing Office takes 30 min, installing Visual Studio takes 30 min, yadda yadda yadda. It'll be a day or to before you're back up and running. And God help you if you're using Gentoo. ;-) () And now where did I get those videos from? And do I really want to sit there re-ripping 150 CDs?

      3) Even if you do go through and pick out what you want to save, and are willing to put up with the PITA nature of #2, it's still very possible that there is more data than can be "reasonably" done. I filled two DVDs with photos from one "vacation". (Granted, I shoot RAW and this "vacation" was three weeks long, but still.) Add in the other photos I've taken, we're probably at 5 DVDs for those. Add in another disc for some videos. I don't trust optical media to last very long, so that means burning those 6 discs maybe once a year. Manageable, but still annoying. I've also got about 250 GB of stuff I've recorded from cable TV. That's not really replaceable if it dies: I'd have to get cable again at $50/mo then wait for them to come around.

      My point is that it depends on your definition of "need". Sure, I don't "need" to back up hundreds of GB of stuff, but at the same time, it's clearly (to me) worth it to do so because of the aggravation it will save the next time something dies. And as the victim of two very close calls with data lossage, I'm not willing to chance it again.

    31. Re:I have a need right now... by FireFury03 · · Score: 1

      It can be a PITA to figure out what to back up. Do I really want to go through my hard drives and figure out what I should back up and what I shouldn't? Reasonable file organization helps with this, but doesn't solve the issue.

      If your data is that disorganised that you can't relatively quickly identify what stuff needs to be backed up then you probably also have big problems finding data when you need it too.

      Even things that are "replaceable", like downloads, program installations, and rips still are a PITA to recover from. Installing and updating Windows takes a couple hours, installing Office takes 30 min, installing Visual Studio takes 30 min, yadda yadda yadda. It'll be a day or to before you're back up and running.

      Yeah, but I wouldn't usually want to reinstall those things from backup because unless you only just took the backup the system is going to be massively out of date anyway - far better to do a clean reinstall from scratch. For my workstations I can go from a blank hard drive to a fully functional workstation (with all the development tools I need) in the space of less than an hour with the latest Fedora CD and my backup up a few key configuration files (and most of that time is just waiting for Anaconda to do its thing, so I don't need to even be present). Admittedly servers are some more effort, but I still wouldn't recover the _software_ from backup, only the config.

      And now where did I get those videos from?

      Presumably they would've been ripped from your DVD collection?

      And do I really want to sit there re-ripping 150 CDs?

      You don't have to sit there doing it - just return to your computer every so often to swap the CD. You'll have the lot done in a couple of weeks of no effort... The effort of maintaining a backup of them would be more for me than the effort required to re-rip them (also, the chances of me losing the Vorbis files is relatively small since I have them stored on both my server and my notebook).

      I filled two DVDs with photos from one "vacation". (Granted, I shoot RAW and this "vacation" was three weeks long, but still.)

      If you spend 3 weeks shooting 9 gig of photos in RAW format then you are not a "normal user" so my comments do not apply to you. Normal users shoot in JPEG format which comes to maybe 2-4MB a photo.

      I've also got about 250 GB of stuff I've recorded from cable TV. That's not really replaceable if it dies: I'd have to get cable again at $50/mo then wait for them to come around.

      Since you're breaking the law anyway by doing long-term storage of videos from cable TV, you may as well go the whole hog and just download them if you need to replace them. They are no doubt available over bit torrent - most broadcast videos are.

    32. Re:I have a need right now... by CKW · · Score: 1

      > Using RAID5 with 4TB drives would be insanity. ... taking a chance on - but I personally wouldn't do it.

      May I ask why? Are you saying any large drives in 4 or 5 disk raid-5 arrays somehow present a larger risk of failure than 4 or 5 10GB drives from years ago?

      Or is it just the perceived "increased risk" of the amount of data that's at risk?

      Or are you just trying to say "raid is not backup" - which everyone *should* know... and you're saying you'd rather have one JBOD with a second JBOD backup, as opposed to one raid 5 array? I'd agree with that - but a pair of raid-5 arrays (one backup of the other) ... isn't that more cost effective? Or is the rebuild time just not worth it - instead just managed the data across individual disks with scripts and have backups, less work and risk due to the reduced rebuild time?

    33. Re:I have a need right now... by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      May I ask why? Are you saying any large drives in 4 or 5 disk raid-5 arrays somehow present a larger risk of failure than 4 or 5 10GB drives from years ago?

      Because raw read error rates suggest that once drive sizes get over 1TB or so, the risk of a double-disk failure increases dramatically. There is also the factor of the sheer amount of time rebuilding an array like that takes and the significant performance and reliability impact that is suffered while the rebuild is occurring.

      Even being generous and saying a RAID5 will rebuild at a constant 100MB/sec you're still looking at ca. *40 hours* to rebuild the array if a disk fails. During that rebuild, even a single sector read error on one of the other drives will likely hose the entire thing. Further, current raw read error rates pretty much guarantee (statistically) an unrecoverable read error about every 12TB or so worth of read data. In the context of rebuilding an array of 4TB drives, that's a risk factor _way_ above my comfort level.

      Personally, I don't trust RAID5 _now_ and haven't for a couple of years. IMHO the probability of a second drive failure during a rebuild is already too high. That's why I only use RAID6 or RAID10 (and even RAID10 will start getting iffy soon, unless the expected error rates improve dramatically).

  8. Will we even use magnetic HDs in laptops in 2011? by webplay · · Score: 4, Interesting

    With the current market trends, the flash memory-based HDs should be cheap enough to replace magnetic hard drives in laptops by 2011 in most applications. They are already superior in access time, drive life, power use, and transfer speeds (see the FusionIO demo or MTRON drives).

  9. That is tiny by tonan · · Score: 1

    That read head is about the size of 3 big protein molecules side-by-side! (That's what she said. Sorry, I've been watching The Office reruns.)

  10. Thats a lot of porn! by Zantetsuken · · Score: 4, Funny

    I know most people think they don't need that much, but still, thats a helluva lot of porn!

    1. Re:Thats a lot of porn! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One can never have too much porn.

      To all people who are saying that this is too much: 150 HD movies would take more than 4TB....

      I'm sure there are many people who have more than 150 movies on their HDDs...

    2. Re:Thats a lot of porn! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Helluva lot of porn!" ????????

      Not really, thats only about 1000 DVDs worth!

    3. Re:Thats a lot of porn! by R2.0 · · Score: 1

      1000 porn dvd's @ 2 hrs/dvd=2000hrs porn

      2000 hrs porn*80%sex/filler ratio=1600hrs (derating for dialog, etc)

      1600 hrs video sex/.25hrs/"session"=6400 "sessions" (gotta be efficient)

      6400 sessions/2 sessions/day=3200 days

      3200 days/365 days/year=8.77 years.

      over 8 years worth of porn per HD. That's quality.

      (I can't believe I bothered to do the math for this)

      --
      "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  11. I don't want more space... by TwoBit · · Score: 4, Informative

    I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.

    1. Re:I don't want more space... by pla · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.

      I see comments like this all the time, and really don't understand them.

      I have personally bought an average of one HDD per six months over the past decade, and, except for ones outright DOA, I have only had one fail, ever (and that after it had served for a good many years). And I include both DiamondMaxes and the legendary DeathStars in that list, both considered some of the most prone-to-failure out there.

      Considering my work environment, I can expand that sample to most like 100+ HDDs; Of those, only two have failed, both laptop drives.

      I have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool them (I put ALL my HDDs loosely-packed in 5.25 bays with a front-mounted 120mm low-RPM fan cooling them) or somehow subject them to mechanical stresses not intended (car PC? portable gaming rig? screws tight agains the drive's board?).

    2. Re:I don't want more space... by Wildclaw · · Score: 1

      Hard drives will always crash eventually.

      What you really want is a hard drive that is big enough that it contain all your data, while cheap enough that you can buy a few without going over budget. That way it is easier to make backups, as well as implementing a redundant RAID.

    3. Re:I don't want more space... by G+Fab · · Score: 1

      Look man, you did the right thing. Fans for each HDD probably saved you a lot of money. But the typical consumer wants a hard drive that is durable enough that it can be abused a bit more. That's all the parent means.

      I don't have time to cool all my hard drives. In fact, I'm sure the one in this computer is covered in dust. It's a deskstar, and it's been making odd rattles for a while, so I know this system is headed south. Could I have babied it to where that wasn't going to happen? Yeah, but I don't want to. I could live with a ten gig drive that was robust.

      We can have one 500 gig media server, even software servers to some extent. Those can have fans and stuff. Your huge hard drives probably have a lot of content overlap (if they are personally your drives). You probably only need one if you could access it wherever you were.

    4. Re:I don't want more space... by smileylich · · Score: 1

      I've also had several hard drive failures, and it's annoying. I thought I was immune until I started getting failures 2 years ago. Yes I keep them cool, etc. External (USB) hard drives seem to be really vulnerable; writing more than 20-30G to a drive without a break seems to make them rather hot. One drive (a WD MyBook) failed within a month of purchase. Makes we want to RAID or use Syncback to mirror each of my drives, which is unfortunate. It effectively halves my space. An unreliable 4TB HD is really only 2TB in my mind, since I'll need another drive to backup the info to.

    5. Re:I don't want more space... by pla · · Score: 1

      But the typical consumer wants a hard drive that is durable enough that it can be abused a bit more.

      Fair enough - I can accept that interpretation... But ignoring the reality that HDDs have rapidly moving parts that must never touch mere nanometers apart, combined with a high sensitivity to heat, well, that just asks for trouble. Ideally, we'd have better. Practically, we have what we have.



      I don't have time to cool all my hard drives.

      I didn't mean to imply that I have some complicated setup... Just a $3 DC fan, in its simplest form. For cases that have 4+ 5.25 bays, ThermalTake makes a great little kit for about $12 that holds 3 HDDs with a 120mm fan (you can get 4HDD-in-3bay as well, but they pack the drives a bit tighter than I'd like); For those with too few external bays, zip-ties work wonders for connecting fans to anything at odd angles.



      I could live with a ten gig drive that was robust.

      As you point out, iff I could always access my home file server, a 10GB flash drive would indeed work fine in any other machine I own. But again, this comes down to what-we'd-like vs what-we-have.

    6. Re:I don't want more space... by Slorv · · Score: 1

      Heat is one common factor that kills harddrives.

      We buy lots of drives (university).
      We've never - yeah, really - had a hardware failure on individual storage drives. Raidchassis has failed but never drives.
      However, we replace the drives approx. each 36 months simply beacuse that's when the warranty expires = we would live on borrowed time if we would continue to use them. Also we have properly fan-cooled enclosures to reduce heat.

      --
      Bikers.....The only people that understand why a dog hangs his head out a car window.
    7. Re:I don't want more space... by Grismar · · Score: 1

      If you want more reliability:

      - Mount the hard drive as specified in the manual, in a bay that's intended for it, with adequate cooling, depending on the other hardware.

      - Make sure the other hardware has proper specs. A crappy controller or shoddy PSU can ruin your harddrive.

      - Get decent surge protection, put your case on a solid base, out of reach of children, pets and your own feet.

      - Keep the case relatively free of dust and don't smoke in the room that has the system with the hard drive in it.

      - Install 2 smaller drives in a RAID mirror array and configure the relevant software to notify you when one of the drives still fails.

      If you follow these instructions, you won't have any trouble at all. This problem is not for the HDD manufacturers to solve per se. Ofcourse they can contribute, but nobody else can make the drives larger, whereas all of the above helps to make them more reliable. I think they have their priorities straight, considering that hard drives hardly ever fail if you treat them properly.

    8. Re:I don't want more space... by fractoid · · Score: 2, Funny

      ...as well as implementing a redundant RAID. Is that like an ATM Machine? Or a PIN Number? ;)
      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    9. Re:I don't want more space... by TwoBit · · Score: 1

      At my office, the IT guys told me a few months ago that pretty much every DeathStar the company got died eventually. We run our drives very hard and they are constantly working because we are building huge applications with huge data. My drive death rate at the office is something like 60%, maybe more. And these are stock Dell machines.

    10. Re:I don't want more space... by Wildclaw · · Score: 1

      My bad. I was specifically trying to not include RAID 0 which doesn't provide any fault tolerance.

    11. Re:I don't want more space... by fractoid · · Score: 1

      I thought of that just as I clicked the submit button... but even if I'd been quicker, you don't expect me to pass up a chance to be pedantic, do you? :) RAID0 is evil anyway.

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
    12. Re:I don't want more space... by Aladrin · · Score: 1

      It depends on how you use the drive. I've killed a few drives in my time. 1 was from kicking the computer while it was on (I was young and stupid.) The other 2 died from excessive use. They were being read and written constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for about a year. I know it was constant because it was stuff I was grabbing from the net, and a lot of it ended up deleted before it was ever fully looked through. (I had my reasons.)

      This kind of constant use is apparently too hard on consumer hard drives. After I killed the second one like this, I reworked how I was doing things and haven't lost a drive since. The manufacturer replaced both of those hard drives and they've been fine since as well.

      The computer shop I used to work for had a 'server' machine with SCSI hard drives. Cheetahs, I think they were. The other day I was looking at it to try to fix it for him and 1 drive was totally dead, 1 was flaky (half speed) and the other 3 seemed to be fine. He's lost other drives just like them before in that machine. This 'server' hosts his webpage that nobody ever goes to and a couple email accounts in Windows Server. It sees basically no use, and yet the drives died.

      The moral? Just because you don't see hard drives die doesn't mean they don't.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    13. Re:I don't want more space... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.

      What a vandal

      Seriously dude, you are doing something really wrong to get that sort of failure rate! You might want to make sure you keep them cool and don't bash them around while they are running.

    14. Re:I don't want more space... by dotgain · · Score: 1

      Actually RAID0 is kinda sweet when you consider drives don't exactly fail every day and the type of data you work with is transient and can be recovered relatively easily, such as in video editing. Anyway, it's not as if the trenches are full of stories about people using RAID0 and not realising what it meant.

    15. Re:I don't want more space... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My bad. I was specifically trying to not include RAID 0 which doesn't provide any fault tolerance.

      Agreed, the actually negative fault tolerance of RAID 0 pretty much makes it redundant, in my opinion!

      Now what?

    16. Re:I don't want more space... by dotgain · · Score: 1
      They were being read and written constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for about a year. I know it was constant because it was stuff I was grabbing from the net, and a lot of it ended up deleted before it was ever fully looked through. (I had my reasons.)

      Mom found it?

    17. Re:I don't want more space... by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

      Score 5 Informative from such a subjective post? Cmon mods please,.......

      Moving parts suck, yes, they do break down, yes but 50%? Does anyone moderating this actually have a personal computer or had one for long sheesh!

      How about you give me a +5 for my subjective opinion too?
      I've been using PC's since I was 13 y/o (16 years, argh) I do not exaggerate when I say I've owned at least 80 hard disks.
      In that time I have had less than 6 fail on me and 3 of them were my own fault.

      For a mechanical device, working within the limits that it has to to function, the reliability on hard disks is frankly astounding.

      I guess the guy could've just been solely buying Maxtors though...

    18. Re:I don't want more space... by jollyreaper · · Score: 1

      I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate. Are you chewing on the drives or just opening them up and spinning the platters manually?

      I've been playing with computers since the early 90's and to date I have had one hard drive failure, only one power supply failure for that matter. As far as workplace drives go, I've only seen two dead laptop drives and two dead server drives, the server drives being on separate machines so the array never went down. And my personal history includes lots of tech support for friends, family, different businesses, etc.

      I'm just curious, is my experience what should be expected or are 50% failure rates more the norm? Cuz that seems awfully high but who knows, I've been wrong before.
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    19. Re:I don't want more space... by plisskin · · Score: 1

      At my work, we have maybe 70-100 hard drives 'in the field' in always on systems and we see maybe a few of those fail per year. Usually after 3-5 years of use. The machines are well cooled but live in extrememly dusty environments. I don't know if the dust affects the hard drives but it will impede cooling. We see more problems with Maxtors than any other brand. In house, our server raid drives also seem to fit this 3-5 years of always on service. At home, I don't leave my computers on all the time and have never had a hard drive fail.

    20. Re:I don't want more space... by stewbacca · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure what the term is, but your lack of hard drive failures have given you a false view of hard drive reliability. Hard drives are easily documented as having higher than acceptable failure rates, anecdotaly and through technology reviews/research. Just because YOU haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't a problem. More importantly, when it does happen to YOU, you seem to take notice of the problem. Some other guy on slashdot has it in his sig...something about denying what you've never seen doesn't make it true...I suck at paraphrasing, but I'm sure he'll pop in here and clear it up.

    21. Re:I don't want more space... by vertinox · · Score: 1

      have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool them

      I've still had HDDs fail with adequate cooling, but you're right. On average its usually the laptops that go belly up. In the best scenario a product should be designed with the worst case scenario in mind which is why SSD sounds so promising since it is less volatile especially in laptops.

      --
      "I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
      -Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
    22. Re:I don't want more space... by jollyreaper · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure what the term is, but your lack of hard drive failures have given you a false view of hard drive reliability. Hard drives are easily documented as having higher than acceptable failure rates, anecdotaly and through technology reviews/research. Just because YOU haven't seen it doesn't mean it isn't a problem. More importantly, when it does happen to YOU, you seem to take notice of the problem. Some other guy on slashdot has it in his sig...something about denying what you've never seen doesn't make it true...I suck at paraphrasing, but I'm sure he'll pop in here and clear it up. Right, this is why I was asking. Whenever you're talking about high failure rates, you have to ask yourself "is this a problem with manufacturing, end user, or just a buggered design right from the start?" Sometimes you know it's a manufacturing problem like when you see a big batch of failed hard drives from one vendor. Sometimes it's a mix of all three like the Xbox 360. Bad design, it runs too damn hot; bad manufacturing, they used the wrong solder; bad end users, they stick a super-hot unit on carpet or in an enclosed entertainment center and just make the problem worse.

      When my personal experience differs from what conventional wisdom says to be the norm, I like to find out why.
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    23. Re:I don't want more space... by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      Sage advice. Out of a few dozen hard drives I've used in my own computers during the last ~decade, the only one I've had fail outright was a Travelstar notebook drive. I don't smoke, I clean my hardware semi-regularly, I keep the drives reasonably cool, and I always use battery backups and good PSUs. I also replace drives after four years or so, though not specifically for reliability - old drives are too slow for my desktops and too small to be useful in my network storage pool. On the other hand, I know people who regularly go through drives; these are the people who usually shut their computers in cabinets with no ventilation whatsoever, would never think of cleaning the system, had their computer assembled by some relative who used the power supply bundled with the cheapass case, and "protect" their hardware with a no-name, decade old power strip. And a lot of them smoke. And while I've never had a bad controller ruin an IDE or SATA drive, I've ran into quite a few drives that I thought had failed until I tested them independently of the controller. I learned years ago to avoid the cheap RAID controllers tacked on by motherboard manufacturers; in my experience they have an astonishing failure/data corruption rate.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    24. Re:I don't want more space... by pushing-robot · · Score: 1

      Sorry about the run-on paragraph; I finally decided to check all the preference pages and, sure enough, found that I could set "Plain Old Text" to the default.

      Why it wasn't the default to begin with, I have no idea.

      --
      How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
    25. Re:I don't want more space... by greenbird · · Score: 1

      And these are stock Dell machines.

      As the Mythbusters would say "Well, there's your problem". Those never have anywhere near enough cooling and usually have cables obstructing the air flow of what little cooling they have. You keep buying those crappy computers and that kinda thing is going to happen. I build my own for cheaper than Dell and have had 1 drive fail in the last 7 or 8 years and that was my fault because it was mounted where there was no air flow. I've dealt with 100's of computers over the last 10 years and in pretty much every case (including many Dells) I've encountered drive failures it's been attributable to insufficient cooling.

      The short answer is if you're having those kind of drive failure rates you're doing it wrong. (also addressing sibling who said they didn't have time to cool their drives) Adding 2 or 3 80mm fans to a case is a lot cheaper in both money (I buy them by the 6 pack at $1.50 per fan) and time than a drive failure even under the best circumstances, meaning good easily recoverable backups, which we all know is pretty rare.

      --
      Who is John Galt?
    26. Re:I don't want more space... by Baumi · · Score: 1

      ...as well as implementing a redundant RAID. Is that like an ATM Machine? Or a PIN Number? ;) No - it's just redundant. :)
    27. Re:I don't want more space... by Dirtside · · Score: 1

      Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.

      This is a meaningless statistic without more information. We don't know how many drives this is (for all we know, you could have bought a drive ten years ago, it failed after two days, and then you bought another drive that's still going strong).

      Also, what does "50% failure rate" mean to you? That 50% of the drives you've purchased within the last ten years have, so far, failed? After how long? The following pattern would be a "50% failure rate" but would also be considered totally acceptable by, you know, normal people:

      Year 1: Buy a 10 GB drive (drive A).
      Year 2: Buy a 20 GB drive (drive B).
      Later in year 2: Drive A fails.
      Year 4: Buy a 40 GB drive (drive C).
      Year 6: Buy an 80 GB drive (drive D).
      Year 8: Drive B fails.
      End of year 10: Drives C and D are still going strong. Drive A only lasted 1.5 years but drive B lasted 6 years. You bought four drives and two eventually failed. That's a "50% failure rate" but I don't really see how it's a problem.

      Maybe "failure rate" means "immediately"? Like, of all the drives you bought in the last ten years, half of them failed out of the box? Gosh, maybe that info would have been useful in your post? :)
      --
      "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
    28. Re:I don't want more space... by Dirtside · · Score: 1

      I see comments like this all the time, and really don't understand them.

      The grandparent's paucity of information notwithstanding (see my other reply for details), what you really don't understand is the Law of Large Numbers. :)

      Assuming he's talking about out-of-the-box drive failure (like, within a week of installation), then think about this: Imagine there's a 1 in 100 chance of such failure per drive. Imagine that the average person buys a new drive only every two years, for ten years. That's five drives. At 0.01 chance of failure, there's a 95% (0.99 ^ 5) chance that the average person, after ten years, will have had no out-of-the-box failures. Pretty good.

      However, there's a 0.96% chance that someone will have exactly one failure. That's 1 in 104 people who will have one drive failure during that ten years. And there's a 0.0097% chance (1 in 10,306) that someone will have exactly two drive failures. And there's a 0.000098% chance (1 in 1,020,304) that someone will have exactly 3 drive failures (a 60% "failure rate").

      Well, now imagine that ten million people have followed this pattern. That means you've got about 10 people who've had a 60% failure rate.

      Well, one of them decided to post on Slashdot about how unreliable hard drives are. :) But just as his experience is not anything like indicative of the average, neither is your experience of buying a drive every six months and having only one failure in ten years. What I don't understand is how people can think that because something hasn't happened to them, it can't happen at all.
      --
      "Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
  12. Pictures of the new CPP-GMR head by fractalVisionz · · Score: 1
  13. Re:Will we even use magnetic HDs in laptops in 201 by Zantetsuken · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But that fits a different need - the need for fast access times, low power, etc. This fits its own need - people that need extremely large amounts of storage space, no matter the access time or power usage tradeoffs. Also, while this'll be pretty expensive, keep in mind that SSD drives are still gonna be expensive as hell, and even assuming the price of SSD drives comes down, 500Gb is still gonna cost a pretty penny, while normal mechanical HDD's at that size will probably be no more than $50 dollars (since I can run down to local retail and pick up a 400Gb for about 120 right now).

    While its pretty incomprehensible to use even a fraction of the mentioned 4Tb right now, I can see that with high-def video becoming more and more common, at the very least all the people pirating movies and tv shows will use these drives. Also, think about how more and more computers are being sold with TV tuners in them (granted most people will never use them). A few years from now, I can see that instead of regular TV tuners, HDTV capture devices will be much more common - thus people will actually use that space...

  14. Math time! by Cprossu · · Score: 0, Redundant

    4TB = 4096GB = 4,194,304MB
    however,
    in the 'hard drive' world, and everywhere else these days, we've been told that 1000MB=1GB and 1000GB=1TB, so 4TB = 4,000GB = 4,000,000MB.

    So what are we really getting?! if 1TB = 1,048,576MB, then 4TB = 4,194,304MB, so we are missing 194,304MB - which is the better part of 190GB right?

    Isn't the mixing of the 'new' SI units and good old binary values confusing? now someone needs to do the calculation for certain filesystems and not just arbitrary values.

    feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I wrote this before going to sleep.

    1. Re:Math time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      eh, the SI units are not new. M is mega and it's 1,000,000 and K is kilo and it's 1,000. At the beginning, "1KB" doesn't mean 1024 bytes. If it's 1024 bytes, it will state as 1024 bytes (you can check out some of the old computer manuals). But after a while some people got lazy.

    2. Re:Math time! by prionic6 · · Score: 1

      Even more...

      First in 1024 "base":

      1 TB = 1024 GB = 1048576 MB = 1073741824 kB = 1099511627776 B

      So 1 Terabyte "base 1024" is almost exactly 1,1 Terabyte in "base 1000". It would be nice if operating systems would start to give disk and file sizes in base 1000 to avoid this confusion.

    3. Re:Math time! by piranha(jpl) · · Score: 1

      Where "TB" and "GB" refer to the SI/marketing quantifiers, 4TB ~= 3.6TiB:

      4 * 1000**4 / 1024**4 = 3.63797880709171295166015625

      As we expect "1 terabyte" to mean exactly 1024**4 bytes, the disk manufacturers would be short-changing us by about 370.7GiB.

    4. Re:Math time! by Swampash · · Score: 1

      4TB = 4096GB

      No it isn't. Four terabytes is 4,000,000,000,000 bytes.

    5. Re:Math time! by Dunbal · · Score: 1

      No it isn't. Four terabytes is 4,000,000,000,000 bytes.

      Only in the hard drive marketing world. The rest of the computing world uses the nearest power of 2.

      --
      Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
    6. Re:Math time! by Swampash · · Score: 1

      Only in the hard drive marketing world. The rest of the computing world uses the nearest power of 2.

      Riiiiight. So how many calculations are there in a teraflop again? How many watts in a terawatt?

    7. Re:Math time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      4T = 4000GB or 4096GB... are u fighting over 96GB? thats peanuts :D!!!

    8. Re:Math time! by Dutchy+Wutchy · · Score: 0
      If this perpetuates to 1024^25 or 26, then we will only be getting 50%. When do we make our stand?

      Why don't the hard drive manufacturers take a hint from graphics cards and processors.
      Be the first to own the xXx4450KT Triple-layer-Cake Extreme GT Type-R Performance Edition

      It might sell more units to the average consumer and allow for actual storage figures to be printed on the package.

    9. Re:Math time! by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

      I wanna know what's wrong with the SI binary unit prefixes - Ki, Mi, Gi, Ti (Kibi, Mebi, Gibi and Tebi).

      1KB = 1000 bytes, 1KiB = 1024 bytes.

      Makes life so much easier. HDD manufacturers are perfectly accurate, they claim 1TB and deliver 1,000,000,000,000 bytes(ish). It's the OS manufacturers who tend to state disk sizes as "GB" when they really mean "GiB".

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    10. Re:Math time! by Saffaya · · Score: 1

      And what do we give a shit for base 10 units in computing, tell me ?

      In the same line, what use is having our UPS power output sold as VA (Volt*Amp) instead of watts (W) ?

      Industrials are simply trying to screw us with inflated, bigger numbers different than reality, numbers that are deceitful to not technic-savvy customers.

      And btw, there is no need for those fancy i-added units.

      1 KB = 1024 B
      1 kB = 1000 B

      k is the SI prefix for 1000, not K. There was never any ambiguity in the computing field.

    11. Re:Math time! by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 1

      1: That's more than the size of some peoples' entire hard disk.
      2: Different definitions of GB, as said it works out like this:
      4TB (hdd) = 4,000GB = 4,000,000,000,000 Bytes.
      4TB (pc) = 4,096GB = 4,398,046,511,104 Bytes.
      Which is a 398GB (hdd) or 371GB (pc) difference.

    12. Re:Math time! by jacksonj04 · · Score: 1

      The IEC document on the subject (IEC 60027) makes Ki the 2^10 unit. BIPM (The SI people) have stated that you should *never* use SI units in relation to binary numbers. The k/K issue is moot, since according to SI k is kilo and K is Kelvin (My bad in my original post, I knew what I meant to type :-/).

      Also, I was wrong in stating they were SI units, typo there. They're IEEE units, stated in IEEE 1541. It's also, interestingly enough, been ratified as a European standard making use of binary prefixes where necessary legally binding in the EU.

      --
      How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
    13. Re:Math time! by tchuladdiass · · Score: 1

      Then how much space does a 1.44 MB floppy disk hold? Hint, the stated capacity combines both binary and si units.
      The actual capacity is 1440 KiB (1024 * 1440). Using binary units (1 MiB = 1048576 bytes), it works out to 1.40 MiB, using SI units (1MB = 1000000 bytes) it is 1.47 MB.

    14. Re:Math time! by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 1

      Some hard-disks are the same. I've had 2 identically branded Maxtors (but different firmware / revision), one 160 GB = 160,000,000 kiB = 151 GiB, one 160GB = 160,000,000,000 Bytes = 149 GiB.

      If they're going to lie to us, they could at least be consistent about it.

    15. Re:Math time! by Dahan · · Score: 0

      In the same line, what use is having our UPS power output sold as VA (Volt*Amp) instead of watts (W) ? Because power generation equipment (either the electric company, a generator, a UPS, or whatever) needs to deliver apparent power, which is measured in VA. If your computer uses 200W of real power, but 300VA of apparent power, a UPS that can deliver 250VA isn't sufficient. Look up power factor for more details.
    16. Re:Math time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Saffaya explains:

      k is the SI prefix for 1000, not K. There was never any ambiguity in the computing field.


      Oh great one, how does one distinguish between these two never ambiguous prefix sets for the 2^20 and 10^6 case ("M"), the 2^30 case and the 10^9 case ("G"), the 2^40 and the 10^12 case and so forth?

      I really do not know!
  15. Parkinson's Law by The+Real+Nem · · Score: 1
    1. Re:Parkinson's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The my phallus symbol is greater then your phallus symbol crowd will keep that forever true unfortunately. Thus bloat in software often comes close to or exceeds the Moore's Law driven hardware. Vista in relationship to the current hardware they are often installing it on is a prime example. OSS isn't free of bloat either, some of it seems to serve for nothing more then something to point and say "look at this, mine is greater then yours". Perhaps nowhere is this more demonstrative in the computer world then it is in the gaming community, new games always seem to push or exceed current hardware and many gamers tend to brag on their hardware, MMORPGs tend to lean more to graphics excess then they do to gameplay and then of course there are the raiders and their bravado.

      Call the above a rant if you like, but it was only intended as a realistic look at things based on years of observation. Not everyone or anywhere near every piece of software falls into the above descriptions, but as a general rule such people and things end up in control of where related things go in the fields.

  16. What happened to PMR? by pla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011.

    Prior to the rise of perpendicular recording, we had cheap and plentiful 200-400GB HDDs using plain ol' longitudinal recording. Suddenly PMR hits the market, promising 10x the storage density at up to 1Tb/in^2 (which Seagate claims they actually achieve), and two years later we have only two real models (with a few variations for SATA/PATA) of 1TB drives available.

    Call me crazy, but a few really trivial calculations show that at 6.25in^2 *of usable area) per platter surface, times two surfaces per platter, times three platters, we should have, using today's technology, 4.5TB (note the change in case of the "B", no confusing units here) 3.5" HDDs.

    So forgive me for not wetting my pants in excitement about an "announcement" that something realistically available today, we won't have for another half of a decade.

    1. Re:What happened to PMR? by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

      I'm sure some posters are about to bitch you out for this one, I for one couldn't agree with you more though.

      I recall the claims, we were apparently meant to get exactly what you said, insane amounts more storage, easily and quickly - any minute now!
      Instead, it trickled along just as it always has.

    2. Re:What happened to PMR? by BenEnglishAtHome · · Score: 1
      ...we should have, using today's technology, 4.5TB ... 3.5" HDDs.

      I've always wondered why someone doesn't market drives with maxed out capacity, even if the performance is poor. A double-height drive with lots of platters, even if it had slow rotational speed and lousy seek times, would be a good secondary (non-boot) drive for someone who needed to store lots of large files.

      Am I missing something about drive performance that would negate the usefulness of such a beast?

    3. Re:What happened to PMR? by technoviper · · Score: 1

      Your calculations are way off (unless youre thinking of very large, very square hard drives) Assuming that the diameter of the disk is the same size as the width of the drive (3.5 In), best case : The numbers should be Pi x (3.5/2)^2 - Pi x (Radius of the motor spindle)^2 Your numbers are an order of magnitude off.

    4. Re:What happened to PMR? by pla · · Score: 1

      The numbers should be Pi x (3.5/2)^2 - Pi x (Radius of the motor spindle)^2 Your numbers are an order of magnitude off.

      Okay, I have a platter sitting on my desk at this very moment:

      OD = 3.75in; Pi*(3.50/2)^2 =11.04 (a "3.5in" HDD actually measures almost 4in).
      ID = 1.25in; Pi*(1.25/2)^2 = 1.23 (actually the OD of the little aluminum disks separating the platters).
      11.04 - 1.23 = 9.81in^2

      This discrepancy (on the high side, I would point out) allows a good bit of space between the absolute physical edges and the data-containing region. So I'd have to say 6.5in^2 sounds like a reasonable number, per side per platter. 6.5 times two sides times three platters gives 39in^2; At 1Tb/in^2, dividing by 8 for bits-to-bytes, we get 4.875TB.

      Incidentally, I actually found that number in an old Seagate tech-oriented PR, rather than calculating it for my prevous post. So I thank you for keeping me honest, but the numbers do indeed work out.

    5. Re:What happened to PMR? by asparagus · · Score: 1

      A) As the number of platters goes up, so to the chance of failure. IBM had a bad shipment of five platter drives that after the inevitable lawsuits was one of the factors in them deciding to sell their hard drive division.
      B) The money in hard drives is mostly on the low end. The purpose of making three and four platter monster drives is that you can then ship a single or dual-platter small drive cheaper than the competition.

      So yes, it's technically possible, but having the biggest hard drive is more for press-release spin than anything else, much like the latest and greatest graphic card that comes out every few months.

    6. Re:What happened to PMR? by Yvan256 · · Score: 1

      PMR got almost nowhere because all the R&D funds got through PR first and all we got was this funny cartoon.

    7. Re:What happened to PMR? by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      Just because you can achieve it in a lab doesn't mean you can achieve it in a cheap, reliable, mass-produced device right this second. 1Tb/in^2 with a few million dollars of lab equipment != 1Tb/in^2 in a $40 consumer drive. I expect they've had variations on this sort of head for a few years, at $10 million a pop, and are now announcing that they're actually ready to start mass producting a version you might be able to actually buy.

  17. The bigger problem by SamP2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The real problem is not the lack of space but the systematic chronical unability of the industry and users alike (but especially the industry) to properly manage their files.

    Yes, there are some cases where 4TB truly isn't enough without the problem being poor data management (large datacenter, huge DVD-quality media collection, etc). But far too often we see the reason for more space being poorly managed mail servers, tons of WIP that has not been properly archived or disposed of, huge amounts of unhandled spam, work-related casual conversations that really don't need to be stored after the work they relate to has been completed, outdated and obsolete software not being uninstalled, inflated registry (or any other overhead data) that keeps being backed up and restored without any cleanup involved...

    A lot of people, when challenged with the problem of this vast array of useless junk data will just respond "well we have space, and if we run out we can always buy more, and the purchase price is way cheaper than the manhours needed to clean up this mess, so why bother". Another common excuse is "it doesn't bother me, so why not keep it just in the potential case I'll ever need it again, even if the chance is extremely small".

    It does not occur to these people that proper data management is extremely important procedure, and must be ingrained in the business process. Much the same way you clean up physical garbage, remove obsolete physical equipment, empty the contents of that blue recycle bin under your desk, and do it all on a regular basis to keep the garbage from getting out of hand. Trash not worth keeping in real life does not become valuable when stored online, even if it can be stored for free or cheaper than the disposal price.

    Properly disposing data as a business process will take time, but this time will be saved many times over when people don't have to dig up through junk to find what they need, when important things are not buried in crap, when all data worth storing is clean and polished and free of rust, when your OS is not clobbered up by crap processes or temporary files, when your DBE doesn't have to go through zillions of crap stored in the database to find a single row, when you do the cleanup as-you-go, rather than waiting for things to be completely out of hand and then doing a half-assed job because by that point it is really hard to tell apart the good from the junk.

    The problem is spiraling - the longer people don't properly clean up data, the harder it is to clean it, especially as files grow larger and more complex as hardware and applications evolve. In turn, it motivates people to just invest in extra drive space, processing power, memory, etc, because by that time it's cheaper than the cleanup. And of course, once the resources have been invested into, they are filled with even more crap until they are full too.

    But the biggest problem of poor data management is actually not technical, it's business-related. As we are faced with an increasing information overload, it is very easy to make poor decisions based on data that is not necessarily wrong, but is outdated, matched with incompatible other data, or just not put in the right perspective. The whole "data warehousing" principle absolutely REQUIRES proper and timely maintenance and cleanup of data. This is so important that (and this has been proven over and over again) large corporations with proper data management gain a substantial strategic advantage over those who don't.

    It's not just about a little slower response time, or some more work to find what you need on the server. It's about right business decisions vs. wrong business decisions. And it's also about not being taken advantage of - contractors and business partners can easily manipulate data to present it in the light favorable to them, and if you are a private business, this kind of crap can make you bankrupt. Of course, it happens day after day in the government with the taxpayers footing the bill, but that's another story altog

    1. Re:The bigger problem by svunt · · Score: 4, Interesting
      You seem to be approaching the need for big disks from a purely sysadmin point of view. In my case, and the case of a lot of friends/family, massive media collections aren't the exception, they're the rule. Between backups, downloads and plain old piracy, a lot of individuals need enormous data storage, as do film makers, musicians, artists etc. The sort of issues *you* face make it clear where your priorities lie, but don't assume that your experience is definitive.

      I for one am getting sick of having to navigate between endless stacks of DVD-spindles every time I'm in a house!

    2. Re:The bigger problem by James_G · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Well, I've read this post now. How do I go about deleting it?

    3. Re:The bigger problem by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Properly disposing data as a business process will take time, but this time will be saved many times over when people don't have to dig up through junk to find what they need, when important things are not buried in crap, when all data worth storing is clean and polished and free of rust,

      I'm sorry, but this is just fantasy world 101. I almost never have to look through old mail, but when I do it's because some clients are trying to dredge up something that just not how it happened. Often when I do, it's important that I have all the "useless" mails as well, so you can say with confidence that "No, you just brougth this up two months before the project deadline and it wasn't in any of the workshop summaries [which are in project directories, not mail] before that either."

      When I do, it's far more efficient to search up what I need rather than going over old junk - what you're saying is something which would imply that the Internet is useless since it's full of so much redundant, unorganized information. It's quite simply not true, and even though you should extract vital bits to organized systems, keeping the primary source around is very useful.

      Extracting experience from current communication to improve business systems (or for that matter, technical routines) should be an ongoing process - it's vital going forward. Going back to old junk to try to figure out what's deletable just to run a "clean ship" is just a big timesink and waste of money. Maybe you'd have an argument if there was a good system not being used because it's all kept as unorganized mailboxes. In my expererience, usually the prolem is there's no such system and doing a clean-up would do nothing to change that.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    4. Re:The bigger problem by l0b0 · · Score: 1

      Very good points. Also, this is one place where open standards are great: Even if the file format is long obsolete, there's a good chance there are modern tools available to read them, and you can create your own scripts to extract data automatically for review.

    5. Re:The bigger problem by SnprBoB86 · · Score: 1

      I think Google has DEFINITIVELY PROVEN that you can find a needle in a haystack and software is getting better at it all the time. Every few months or so, I select everything on my desktop, move it into a folder labeled with the current date, and stash that folder into the "Desktop Junk" parent folder of my "Archive" directory. I've got a couple GB of junk over the last few years and I can not count the number of times a 2 second, indexed search located something super useful in that directory.

      Proper data organization is certainly valuable for decision making and other business reasons, but there is absolutely no reason you can not create smarter software to organize existing information and to add improved structure to new information. The solution to this problem you see is not better deletion of old data, but superior classification and visualization of all data.

      Thanks to people like you, Google added a "Delete" button to Gmail which is just cluttering up the UI. Has anyone got a greesemonkey script to get rid of that for me? :-)

      --
      http://brandonbloom.name
    6. Re:The bigger problem by Phurge · · Score: 1

      sorry but I don't buy this argument. I would much rather spend my limited time being productive and making money for my business rather than being an email filing clerk. Cost of storage these days makes this a non issue. In terms of "business intelligence" - the types of data needed for these tasks are held in structured databases which facilitate data-mining, number crunching, whatever you want to call it. (and even then because the data is held in a database, you can hold the dta on your server indefinately and be able to retrieve it in a systematic way)

      --
      I'll see your hokum and raise you a boondoggle.
    7. Re:The bigger problem by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 1

      Even without piracy, this occurs. I've probably got 100 commercial DVD's in my house, scattered in various boxes and shelves of particular collectible sets. Add the open source CD and DVD's to that, and it's another 100DVD's worth of such media collected over the years. It would be nice to have the antique RedHat 6.2 installation media online for historical refernce, since I still work with tools that haven't evolved much since then, and it's become a real problem to find online.

      So with 200 DVD's, at roughly 5 Gig each, that's easily a Terabyte. Add another set of drives for mirrored backup, and that's 2 Terabytes right there, without a single bit of piracy.

    8. Re:The bigger problem by Shivetya · · Score: 1

      Sounds more like a problem of over extending a platform than what is stored on there.

      Once your storage needs get beyond a certain point PC based storage systems and their attendant OSes don't cut it.

      On the retention side, SOX has killed us in disk space. The auditors and such are basically so damn scared or put the fear of jail into executive's heads that we have three plus year retention at moments notice. Then we have it on tape as well.

      In this day of oppresive government regulation your just going to have to deal with ridiculous amounts of e-mail and stop worrying about if its all valid. It is not for you to decide, its up to the corporate lawyers and such what has to retained. If your pubically owned your just going to have to buy the storage - and get real systems to manage it with.

      --
      * Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
    9. Re:The bigger problem by jollyreaper · · Score: 1

      A lot of people, when challenged with the problem of this vast array of useless junk data will just respond "well we have space, and if we run out we can always buy more, and the purchase price is way cheaper than the manhours needed to clean up this mess, so why bother". Another common excuse is "it doesn't bother me, so why not keep it just in the potential case I'll ever need it again, even if the chance is extremely small". The thing that management doesn't realize is the data requirements are NOT the size of the file collection. If the company has 150gb of data, that does NOT mean you buy a 200gb drive and you're covered. I'm not just talking about RAID which should (but isn't always) a given, I'm talking about backups. I like using shadow copy to do the "restore previous version" but that eats up a ton of space on the drive in question. There's also the matter of archiving "stuff" online. We get a ton of marketing and engineering files on CD and DVD. Everybody loves squirreling this shit away in their offices. NO! It goes on the file server so we can keep track of it and find it when necessary. I put that in a separate archival volume from the shadow copy stuff, the archived pst's of former employees, etc. Trying to keep all this stuff straight on a robotic tape drive was nuts since tape sucks and BackupExec is the Devil's bollocks. I dump everything to the overly large external USB drives and keep them in rotation. That seems to work out well.

      There's also the matter of preserving point in time copies of all this data. Oh, you don't want last night's emergency catastrofuck backup, you want it from six months back? Well, good thing I still have that backup. Oh, you want to keep a backup of every message that ever passed through Exchange, the end user does not have the right to permanently delete it? Ca-ching, more money.

      We're a small shop but I can imagine how horrendous data retention requirements and security standards would be for big shops. And yet I'm sure management will still anticipate a gig of corporate storage should be as cheap as what they can get from a cheapie external drive at CompUSELESS.
      --
      Kwisatz Haderach
      Sell the spice to CHOAM
      This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
    10. Re:The bigger problem by zrq · · Score: 1

      this is one place where open standards are great

      I agree, but there is one place where the 'standard convention' no longer works, users home directories. At the moment, desktop applications store the users data in an ungodly mess of randomly named application specific directories in a subdirectory of their home directory. which include vitally important settings mixed with useless cache data.

      If I take a look at my own home directory, the biggest users of space are hidden directories for Nautilus (desktop thumbnails), GoogleEarth (cache), Beagle (indexes), FireFox (cache and passwords) and Thunderbird (cache, emails and passwords). All of these have large directories of cached data mixed in with the application settings (including website passwords, email addresses etc).

      To create a backup of the users home directories, I can either backup the whole lot, and waste backup space on storing the cache data, or I need to spend time writing a custom backup script that will distinguish between important and transient data. Yes, I know it is fairly easy to do with something like rsync, but I have to guess which directories to include and which to ignore. We need some way to distinguish between 'vital and private' configuration and security settings, and 'private but not critical' cache data.

      The ideal would be two separate directories for each user, /home/fred and /tmp/fred, both are private to the user, but the temp directory would mean that applications could store transient cache data in somewhere other than the users home directory. But to start with, just a standard config file that the application supplies listing which subdirectories need to be backed up and which don't ... unless of course, this already exists and I just haven't heard about it.

    11. Re:The bigger problem by stewbacca · · Score: 1

      You seem to be approaching the need for big disks from a purely sysadmin point of view.
      You must be new here. (YES!!! Finally I get to use it!)

      Wow, you must have a big nerdy family ;-) I think we solve our family data issue by just having multiple computers, which is a pain in the ass. My primary computer has a 500gb hard drive, though, which I'm sure could hold everything thing for all four of us. The laptop, however, barely holds just my wife's iTunes collection :-( It doesn't help that we are a family of "creatives" and I am a musician.

      I'm with you on the whole "what about the home user" deal though. Nerds are one of the most egocentric (if not THE most) group of friends I have. And I thought guitar players were bad...

    12. Re:The bigger problem by Immerial · · Score: 1

      Amen brother! I remember working with designers at my old job that would scan things at overkill resolutions and this was mostly FPO (for placement only) work where the print shop was going to do the final scans. They would always complain about how long it took to print, copy, open files. Would they do anything about it ... nope. People get lazy. Print resolution requirements hasn't changed much over the years (200lpi/400ppi tops!) and yet the designers keep making bigger and bigger files. Yes, yes... I know designers have more freedom to make variations and you can have things that are layered but it shouldn't be that much, especially for FPO. Files used to fit on a single Syquest/Bernoulli/Zip disk (44-250Mb), now they need a full CD or sometime a DVD (15-16x increase). When I upgraded the network from 10 to 100... nobody noticed. The server storage mushroomed 18GB to 500GB. Most of the advancements in tech have been eaten up by their laziness (business process). Grumble... grumble... "Get off my lawn!"

    13. Re:The bigger problem by MeBot · · Score: 1

      You want to fill a large hard drive without piracy? Set your DVR to record a bit of high-def programming. You'll fill up a TB before you know it. Especially if you're one of those people who like to record the whole series instead of deleting along the way. And believe me, the wife gets pissed when some of her episodes of "Private Practice" are missing.

    14. Re:The bigger problem by James_G · · Score: 1

      Way to go, moderators. Did you read the parent post?

    15. Re:The bigger problem by CKW · · Score: 1

      I completely agree.

      You know what everyone needs? A data cop. Our main fileserver has a job that indexes it every night and produces a diff, and it also shows the change in size day by day.

        - When usage jumps by >1GB, the data cop investigates. Usless temporary data on the ultra-highly available highly backed up array? Move it Buster. 4GB of 2 year old useless temporary crap (like unzipped oracle distributions, etc etc) in your "tmp" directory - delete it Sir.

        - Once a quarter, run a disk usage scan. Peer into what directories are using the most data, and ensure they need to be there.

        - Regular public admonishments to clean up after ones-selves and to put certain types of data where it belongs - on non-backed-up partitions.

        - Readme's in all new directories of crap.

      Done consistently, vastly reduced bloat, vastly easier to determine if that 8 year old big directory needs to be archived or can be deleted.

      The biggest problem isn't raw disk capacity, it's backup capacity and historical "what's important" intelligence. It's so much easier to find important-project-A's files from 4 years ago when it isn't in amongst 50 huge confusingly named directories of crap.

      Hmmm, excuse me, time to empty my deleted items in Outlook and go purge the client side spam filter. Make sysadmin's exchange server happier :)

    16. Re:The bigger problem by the_olo · · Score: 1

      You seem to be approaching the need for big disks from a purely sysadmin point of view. In my case, and the case of a lot of friends/family, massive media collections aren't the exception, they're the rule.

      As a happy father of an eight months old toddler, I can confirm that. I've discovered to my terror that only 2 minutes of raw DV video data stream occupy 400MB of storage space! And that's for non HD content! Indeed, a home drive has only two natural states: new and full.

  18. So where is the speed? by ryanisflyboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. I'm having a hard time trying to get RAID 6 working well with my 1TB drives (think rebuild times, RAID 5 will be on its way out). How do I manage a RAID array of 4TB disks that still only give me about 60MB/s real-world write performance. So I put 12 in a RAID 6 and end up with 40TB. How many days will it take to rebuild a failed drive in real-world work loads? Capacity is great - but at some point we are all going to wake up and start begging for faster speeds as well. I think hybrid drives might have a shot, 1TB of flash with 3TB disk might be the right match - but you're still waiting forever on rebuilds (and a policy to manage it).

    I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.

    Is anyone thinking optical? Or how about just straight flash? I have a whole stack of 2GB USB flash drives - should I put them in a RAID array? ;-)

    1. Re:So where is the speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Let me get this straight - you're complaining about write times and you recommend we use flash? Flash has access times several orders of magnitude better than HD. However, write and read performance is about half from what I can remember.

      Also, if Hitachi manages to get 4 TB onto a single or 2 platter arrangement, data density will be much higher now which should mean quite a bump in read/write speed (about 4 times, no?).

    2. Re:So where is the speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you have a decent RAID card you should know exactly how many hard drives you need to keep your data safe within an acceptable level of risk. Especially if you're the one buying the RAID, you better well find out whether it does parity checks and how it handles recovery. It's not the RAID card's problem if you configured it wrong.

      Of course, if your server rack catches fire then RAID isn't going to help you, but you better have other plans to deal with that.

    3. Re:So where is the speed? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2, Informative

      You don't. You build 4 or 8 sets of smaller RAID arrays, and use the others for snapshotted backup. This makes doing a straight rebuild/reformat/restore vastly faster and keeps the recovery times down to a quarter of the time of using a single array. It also lets you re-allocate the smaller arrays, or upgrade them, over time.

    4. Re:So where is the speed? by slashflood · · Score: 2, Informative

      I have a whole stack of 2GB USB flash drives - should I put them in a RAID array?
      Why not?
    5. Re:So where is the speed? by Daniel+Phillips · · Score: 2, Informative

      Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. Not true. Media transfer speed increases as the data capacity increases (though less than linearly) and seek "rate" improves in terms of number of tracks the head passes over in the same time. What doesn't increase much at all is rotation speed, which means that average seek time gets worse and worse over time in relation to transfer speed. It's still very fast though, currently about 6-7 ms for commodity drives. If you're unhappy with the overall performance of your disk system, it isn't the fault of the drives, it's how the OS and applications use them. For the most part, pretty horribly inefficiently.
      --
      Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
    6. Re:So where is the speed? by noidentity · · Score: 1

      All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe?

      You do realize that the bits the OS stores on the hard drive are not physical bits, right? The hard drive presents logical bits to the PC which are physically spread out on the disk so that localized damage to the platter's magnetic configuration won't damage individual bits. So you don't get "bit flips" as you would with non-ECC DRAM for example.

    7. Re:So where is the speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      they flip in transit -- parts of the pathway from ECC ram to physical disk sector are unprotected even on "enterprise" servers. there was a paper on this just the other week?month on ./

    8. Re:So where is the speed? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster.


      They are getting faster, or else with capacity increase the lag would be too apparent. However, IMHO and IANAHDDD(eveloper), there is an unexploited possibility for making it much faster. When disc head can be made smaller, it also means they can make multitude of them, perhaps even a still "R/W platter" covering complete disc surface, thus allowing for almost instant random-access to any sector, virtually no "seek" movements. This RW platter could be made from single silicon wafer (which is, well, conveniently disc-shaped).

      It only depends on possibility of producing heads on a silicon wafer by usual lithographic process (with subsequent additional deposition of ferromagnetic materials). However, orientation of "artwork" on stencils must be done in polar instead of rectangular coordinate system, there is need for some method of isolation of "failed" heads from the array, and, last but not least, hovering of disc upon disc instead of hovering of light little head above rotating surface would perhaps need some fancy fluid dynamics magic like, I don't know, separate constant air pressure source for a start, or perhaps hovering bellow - "head" platter being "sucked" up (and/or against elastic spring) toward media platter by dynamic underpressure, thus when power goes out, no crash(or screech) occurs.
    9. Re:So where is the speed? by mritunjai · · Score: 1

      You're actually exactly right on data integrity issue. RAID controllers are iffy and will not protect you in most of the scenarios you listed above.

      What you're looking for is ZFS that guarantees to cover those scenarios and can protect from faulty cables, controllers, bit rot and more. Linus isn't excited about ZFS for nothing!

      Read about ZFS more here

      --
      - mritunjai
    10. Re:So where is the speed? by Mr.Fork · · Score: 1

      SOLID STATE HARD DRIVES BABY! I think the era of 'disks' for storing data is about to be smacked hard with solid date hard drives. The speed alone is one reason to go this way.

      --
      Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. - Peter F. Drucker
    11. Re:So where is the speed? by DamnStupidElf · · Score: 1

      Okay, that's great. Hard drives will get bigger. The problem is they aren't getting any faster. I'm having a hard time trying to get RAID 6 working well with my 1TB drives (think rebuild times, RAID 5 will be on its way out). How do I manage a RAID array of 4TB disks that still only give me about 60MB/s real-world write performance. So I put 12 in a RAID 6 and end up with 40TB. How many days will it take to rebuild a failed drive in real-world work loads? Capacity is great - but at some point we are all going to wake up and start begging for faster speeds as well. I think hybrid drives might have a shot, 1TB of flash with 3TB disk might be the right match - but you're still waiting forever on rebuilds (and a policy to manage it).

      First of all I assume you mean a 10TB array, given 12 1TB disks of which 2 are parity. Dividing it out, you should expect 4.6 hours to completely write 1TB of data to a disk. Whether or not you can read 10TB of data off your other disks in the same time is up to your SATA controller. Hardware RAID would have no problem, I assume, but unless you have PCI Express SATA controllers and lots of processor speed it will be pretty difficult to make a sustained 600MB/s read and 60MB/s write.

      I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.

      RAID6 takes care of that for you, if it's implemented right. RAID6 is just a Reed Solomon (n,n-2) code over n disks which means that a single corrupted disk can be completely recovered without having to guess which disk has gone bad. This is sufficient for all single bit errors, and most multi-bit errors unless you have a noisy bus, since they'll probably be confined to a single disk, or at least a single stripe. Obviously if you know which disks are defective, RAID6 can recover from two failed disks. Whether or not your RAID drivers read every stripe from disk and check the parity on every read is another matter. Do you want performance, or do you want reliability? If you just want reliability, go hack that into the OS of your choice. I haven't heard of any full integrity checking mode for software RAID6 (but I haven't looked), and I know even less about RAID6 hardware. It would be relatively simple to write, because it's essentially just running the parity generation on every read and comparing it to what's stored on the parity. For very large arrays where n is quite a bit bigger than 2, and where you're reading large blocks of data a lot (say, movies or backup files), the performance hit will probably not be too great.

      Now I'm going to have to go look at the Linux RAID6 code and see if any of that is implemented...

    12. Re:So where is the speed? by DamnStupidElf · · Score: 1

      What you're looking for is ZFS that guarantees to cover those scenarios and can protect from faulty cables, controllers, bit rot and more. Linus isn't excited about ZFS for nothing!

      Problem: If you suffer random corruption on a disk, ZFS won't know anything about it. The RAID subsystem will have to try to guess which disk has actually failed, and if the RAID gets it right ZFS is happy. If not, ZFS fails a checksum and is stuck because the RAID layer already decided wrong, and probably overwrote the good data with the incorrectly recovered stripe.

      What's needed is either RAID6 which can unambiguously recover from single disk failures or to have some thunk layer between the file system and the RAID to decide which blocks in the stripe are valid.

    13. Re:So where is the speed? by MauriceV · · Score: 1

      Of course, the bits are physical. Where do you think the data is stored? And the physical bits CAN and DO flip. And non-enterprise drives don't have serious error correction and therefore they are essentially the equivalent of the non-ECC DRAM chips.

    14. Re:So where is the speed? by drsmithy · · Score: 1

      Problem: If you suffer random corruption on a disk, ZFS won't know anything about it. The RAID subsystem will have to try to guess which disk has actually failed, and if the RAID gets it right ZFS is happy. If not, ZFS fails a checksum and is stuck because the RAID layer already decided wrong, and probably overwrote the good data with the incorrectly recovered stripe.

      You're not supposed to run ZFS on top of a hardware RAID array. That defeats most of the reasons for using ZFS in the first place.

    15. Re:So where is the speed? by MauriceV · · Score: 1

      That (e.g, PCI bus) is separate from bit flipping on the drive itself.

    16. Re:So where is the speed? by MauriceV · · Score: 1

      It's a major reason, but I'm not sure it's most of them. Another big reason for using ZFS is the builtin LVM capability, so each filesystem has access to all the available storage at all times.

    17. Re:So where is the speed? by RogerWilco · · Score: 1

      True reading/writing Terabytes/day is a pain using current harddrives, even in some nice raid setup.

      I really like the bigger drives that are coming, but I haven't figured out how to write/read the fastest, Flash disks, Huge disk buffers in RAM, machines with big stiping disk arrays, or lot's of small systems. I'm currently writing/reading about 100 GB/hour, but this needs to scale to about 5-10 TB/hour in 1-2 years. While this is easily possible, figuring out the cheapest way to do it is not.

      --
      RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
  19. Relax... by therufus · · Score: 1

    Hitachi are making them. You'll lose 4Tb of data before you know it!

    Really, reliability is what we need these days. Now if Hitachi made reliable drives, I'd be listening. Instead the sacrifice stability with size.

    Shame!

    --
    You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
  20. BFD by headhot · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Its 2007 and we have 1TB drives now... If you apply Moore's law to storage, size should be doubling every 18 months.. that puts 4TB some where around 2.5 years out.

    I think 2011 is a pretty conservative estimate.

    1. Re:BFD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I must have missed something? At what point did we start using transistors to store data on harddrives?

    2. Re:BFD by mgblst · · Score: 1

      Moores law doesn't apply to storage. It doesn't even apply to the speed of CPUs. It applies to the number of transistors on a CPU.

      You might as well apply the law of gravity to storage, it makes much more sense.

    3. Re:BFD by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

      So...the complexity of the chips on the logic board of harddrives will double in complexity every 18 months.

      That's a useful law. :)

  21. Ugh, no. by JewGold · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Whenever I read about advancements in storage space, what comes to mind for me is now there will be NO incentive for companies to ever throw away information they have about you. In years past, physical storage limits--and later data storage limits--has caused companies (and the government) to routinely purge data. With hard drives getting bigger at a rate faster than they can fill them, why expend the effort to get rid of old data? Why would they spend the manhours to delete old data, when it's cheaper just to keep adding larger drives?

    The possibly negative consequences here can be very damaging. Imagine the security breach when a company "loses a laptop" that contains 30 years of your transaction history. Or, say you're 20 years old right now, imagine what would happen if in 2040 you decide to run for congress and your opponent pulls out dirt from your Google searches and GMail chats of your youth? Imagine the blackmail material that could be uncovered.

    The possibilities are endless, but without a real revolution in the way corporations and government operate, they all seem to lead to the absolute end of privacy.

    --
    Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
    1. Re:Ugh, no. by Fizzl · · Score: 1

      Yes, but consider the amount of porn you can store!
      I think we can all agree that the benefits clearly outweigh the disadvantages.

    2. Re:Ugh, no. by iknowcss · · Score: 1

      Well is the problem here the hard drive capacities or the companies that abuse them? And if it's the hard drives, do you propose we stop making bigger drives? Because there's no OTHER way to have more capacity than simply to have SINGLE drives that hold more storage space. *COUGH* DRIVE ARRAY *COUGH*

      What?

      --
      Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
  22. Re:Will we even use magnetic HDs in laptops in 201 by webplay · · Score: 1

    I don't disagree that regular HDDs will still have their uses by then. I was talking about laptops, though - where power usage is more important (even when it's an extra 20 minutes), video storage is less important, and the current 2.5'' HDDs are comparatively even slower. There is one more thing that I expect will jump start their acceptance, even if they are way more expensive - the "cool factor." Flash-based HDDs will be visibly faster to end users than magnetic HDDs, giving laptop-makers a good reason to use them as a selling point. Laptop buyers will see them in expensive laptops owned by their friends and they will see that they are better. When that happens, magnetic HDDs will be seen as old technology, kind of like CRT monitors were seen for a couple years, even though they were cheaper and had better specs. I can see external eSATA magnetic HDDs becoming more popular when a lot of cheap storage is needed because they have the big plus of portability.

  23. Re:Man by ThirdPrize · · Score: 5, Funny

    What's in this folder of yours "Cowboy Kneel"? Hmmmm ...

    --
    I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
  24. I was just thinking yesterday, by Joseph_Daniel_Zukige · · Score: 1

    What would my kids do with my backup disks and all the data on them if I died today?

    Would they have any idea?

    1. Re:I was just thinking yesterday, by fractoid · · Score: 1

      Depends on whether they're old enough to appreciate porn.

      I keed, I keed! ;) But most likely no, if your hard drive is anything like mine, it'll be a bunch of random media that I found useful or amusing, plus a bunch of install and system files, plus a metric shiteload of stuff that I just haven't gotten around to deleting (my windows app download folder is now completely redundant, for instance). So your point stands - it's kind of like asking whether they'd have any use for the fluff down the back of the sofa. Of course sometimes the TV remote is down there too, so you can't guarantee they won't. :P

      --
      Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
  25. No dissipative ceramic bonding tips? by dotancohen · · Score: 1

    I wonder how Steven and Mary Reiber are handling the news.

    --
    It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  26. Easy : Porn ! by DrYak · · Score: 1

    What would my kids do with my backup disks and all the data on them if I died today?


    They would erase the data and use the free space to store porn.
    The fact that there was already porn before hand won't even cross their mind.
    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  27. This is a shock by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 0

    I'm glad Slashdot decided to post this story. I know we've become accustom to harddrive capacities tripling every 5 years, but like most of us, I was certain harddrive capacities were as large as they could possibly get. Now we can rest assured that hardrives will in fact continue to get bigger over time. Amazing, absolutely amazing.

    --
    "Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
  28. The small thing yaou neglected by DrYak · · Score: 5, Insightful
    There's a small thing you failed to take account for.

    Yes, indeed, we've reached the point where any computer, even if 4 years old, is good enough to do most day-to-day activities (hanging around on the web, wrting some stuff in a word processor, e-mails, and ROFL/LMAOing on AIM/MSN/GMail/Facebook or whatever is the social norm du jour).
    Case in point, my current home PC is still Intel Tualatin / 440BX based.

    *BUT*...

    . I honestly think that most of the new purchases are based on [ ... ] the spread of viruses. It's gotten to where it's actually cheaper to buy a new computer than it is to reload your old one.

    As you said (and that's something I can confirm here around too), Joe 6 pack buy a new computer every other year, just because his current machine is crawling under viruses and is running too slow (and spitting pop-ups by the dozen). He either pay wads of cash to some repair service that may or may not fix his problems, may or may not lose his data in the process, and he'll have to wait without a machine for a couple of days. Or he gets a new machine. And...

    remember when we were going to have 8 Ghz Pentium 4s with 6 GB of RAM to run Windows Vista?

    Those outrageous configuration never showed up. Never the less, it seems like Vista was still designed with those in mind.

    So in the end the new machine Joe Six pack *WILL* have to be better/faster/stronger, simply because the latest Windows-du-jour has tripled its hardware requirement for no apparant reason.

    OS maker will continue to make new versions on a regular basis, mostly because that's their business and they have to keep the cash flow in. Also, there are security issues to fix (by adding additionnal layers of garbage over something that was initially broken by design), legal stuff (add whatever new DRM / Trusted Computing stupidy is latest requirement voted the **AA lobby), add a lot of dubious feature that still 0.1% of the user base will need (built-in tools to sort / upload photos, built-in tool to edit home-made movies, or whatever. Modern OS tend to get confused with distributions and go the Emacs-way of bloat).
    All this will result in newer OS that take twice the horsepower to perform the exact same task as older.

    And thus, each time Joe 6 pack changes his computer, he gets a newer one, which will obviously have the latest OS on it, and thus will *need* to have 4x the computing power. Just to continue hanging on some IM, sending e-mail, writing things, and browsing porn

    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
    1. Re:The small thing yaou neglected by Hoi+Polloi · · Score: 1

      But Joe 6-pack won't be too happy to find out that he needs to transfer his big mp3 library, his games, etc to the new machine. If he can't be bothered to protect his system or surf safely I doubt he'd be up to reinstalling everything or moving gigs of mp3s.

      --
      It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
  29. Increase in capacity will be just in time by maroberts · · Score: 1

    ...for Vista 2011 to use about 80% of it.

    --

    Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
    Karma: Chameleon

    1. Re:Increase in capacity will be just in time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      for Vista 2011

      It's called Vienna.

    2. Re:Increase in capacity will be just in time by pandrijeczko · · Score: 1
      Ah, Vienna.

      [Cue the melodic sync refrain & synth drumming]

      --
      Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
  30. Emacs is no longer bloated by today's standards. by McDutchie · · Score: 1

    Modern OS tend to get confused with distributions and go the Emacs-way of bloat).

    Actually, the complete Emacs "operating system" takes up less than 75 MB, uncompressed and including all documentation and LISP source code. The main emacs package is just 25 MB uncompressed. By today's standards, that's positively tiny. Damn Small Linux claims to fit a complete OS in only 50 MB, but like many Live CDs, it "cheats" by storing everything in compressed form and decompressing it on the fly.

  31. Moore's Law and storage by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

    Moore's law won't apply to harddrives, true, but the poster said 'storage,' and SSDs are already here, and while they're not cheap, they are approaching somewhat-affordable, depending on your use. Doubling the complexity of flash RAM every 18 months pretty much means doubling the capacity, and I think it might be going a bit faster than that currently. The jump from 32GB to 64GB was pretty quick. I'm much more interested in faster and unlimited writes for such chips at the moment, than I am in capacity. Didn't someone last year announce 10x speed improvements with unlimited writes, 'coming soon'?

    1. Re:Moore's Law and storage by stewbacca · · Score: 1
      I've read about the limited writes limitation of flash RAM, but to me it seems that the lifespan of flash RAM will still be better than your average hard drive that manages to break every 5 years or so (at least for me). Or perhaps this is the quintessential YMMV situation?

      Also, I've never seen any benchmarks, but flash memory seems to be several times faster than hard drives in typical use. At least in waking up from sleep. I'd like to try an OS mounted on flash memory on my computer to see if seek, access and read/write times are perceivable different. Anyone have any links with benchmarks?

  32. More About 2TMR head by vivekg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1 CPP-GMR: As an alternative to existing TMR heads, CPP-GMR head technology has a lower electrical resistance level, due to its reliance on metallic rather than tunneling conductance, and is thus suited to high-speed operation and scaling to small dimensions.

    2TMR head: Tunnel Magneto-Resistance head A tunnel magneto-resistance device is composed of a three layer structure of an insulating film sandwiched between ferromagnetic films. The change in current resistance which occurs when the magnetization direction of the upper and lower ferromagnetic layers change (parallel or anti parallel) is known as the TMR effect, and ratio of electrical resistance between the two states is known as the magneto-resistance ratio.

    Source: Official Press Release

    --
    The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
    1. Re:More About 2TMR head by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why are there no American scientists and engineers doing this work?

      We just had a Frenchman and a German win the Nobel Physics prize for new magnetic heads, and now the Japanese...! It looks like the rest of the world is inventing things and then selling them to us.

      What are we paying with?

    2. Re:More About 2TMR head by fowley · · Score: 1

      actually TMR read heads offer a much larger change in resistance than GMR readheads, generally all read heads are TMR based, if you check the pictures put up on http://www.news.com/2300-1041_3-6213399-2.html?tag=ne.gall.pg then you can see that it is infact TMR based read head. i guess someone got it wrong with GMR somewhere along the line. that sad however it is more difficult to scale the TMR head when compared the the GMR head. im still sure its TMR based though.

      the real problem with storage density though is the disk itself and not really the read head, since the information is stored on the disk as magnetic information, there is a limit to how small the a space the data can physically occupy on the disk (imagine it like two magnets being squeezed closer and closer together, eventually they will interfere with each other) since the advent of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) the density has increased.

      also the write head is still quite large, and some companies try to use lasers to heat up the area below the write head, this has the effect of making the magnetisation on the disk easier to switch. research on this is particularly active in the university of nijmegen in the netherlands.

      maybe solid state will get better than hardrives, but until the price is comparable the magnetic recording industry wont really stop, so we can look forward to increasing HDD density. which leaves lots of storage for us end users :) maybe we dont need 4TB per disk, but it doesnt hurt to have it eh?

    3. Re:More About 2TMR head by fowley · · Score: 1

      actually i stand corrected, i just read the actual article. it is GMR, wow. ill look before i post next time. sorry about that. still i think people need to work on the disc itself in terms of storage in order for theer to be 'no end' to the HDD density increase.

  33. Emacs in term of functionnality by DrYak · · Score: 1

    The main emacs package is just 25 MB uncompressed. By today's standards, that's positively tiny.


    I meant Emacs from the point of view of functionnality. Initially, Emacs was supposed to be an editor with some extension capability.

    This extension capability has been abused over time, and now Emacs can be used as an e-mail client, a browser, features interactive chatbots, and has pretty much everything else including probably a kitchen sink (indeed: There's a Nethack extension for Emacs, and Nethack does feature a kitchen sink).
    It has gone beyond anything it was supposed to do, in a completely unstructured way.

    In the case of Emacs, it is based on old technology, and the software follows the corresponding speed of inflate. 75MB is just fucking crazy for a simple text editor. On the other hand, as you point out, it is dwarfed by most modern graphical software, where the smallest new feature is going to take several hundreds of MB.

    But the fact is, Windows gets regularily added a lot of new dubious functionnality (regularily playing me-too with whatever is a popular download at the time), witch is beyond the initiall intent of windows, and in the end gets added to the power requirement bill.
    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  34. No 1.5 TiB units in the meantime ? by OdinOdin_ · · Score: 1

    Since we can get 750 GiB right now does this mean we are stuck at that level of capacity for the next 4 years ?

    In 4 years time how much will a 1 TiB unit cost ?

    Surely solid state have taken over by then for desktop and frontend server needs ?

    Leaving magnetic/optical based storage to the extremely huge volume market sector ?

    1. Re:No 1.5 TiB units in the meantime ? by stewbacca · · Score: 1

      Excellent point! I'm not an engineer, but I fail to understand why these guys are looking to newer, solid-state solutions. Frankly, I'm tired of the shitty spinning-disks that always break, make a lot of noise, and generally suck. Instead of trying to come up with 4x the amount of storage in 4 years with existing technology, why not explore something new? I'd rather have 250gb worth of flash memory than a TB of delicate platters anyday.

    2. Re:No 1.5 TiB units in the meantime ? by stewbacca · · Score: 1

      are = aren't....my bad...

  35. Shame by Dunbal · · Score: 1

    Too bad you won't be able to import them in the US! :)

    --
    Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
  36. Actually, that's the scary part by Moraelin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually, the scary part is that I can easily see how someone will take it as an invitation to install more bloat on your hard drive, do things even less efficiently, etc.

    I started my programming experience almost directly with assembly. Well, I had about a year of BASIC on my parents' ZX-81 first. But that was a damn slow machine (80% or so of the CPU was busy just doing the screen refresh) and Sinclair BASIC was one of the slowest BASICS too. So with that and 1K RAM (you read that right: one kilobyte), you just couldn't do much, you know. So my dad took the Sink-Or-Swim approach and gave me a stack of Intel and Zilog manuals. Anyway, you had to be particularly thrifty on that machine, because your budget of CPU cycles and bytes makes your average wristwatch or fridge nowadays look like a supercomputer.

    I say that only to contrast it to the first time I saw a stacktrace (Java, obviously) of an exception in a particularly bloated Cocoon application running in WebSphere. If you printed it, it would run over more than two pages. There were layers upon layers upon layers that the flow had to go through, just to call a method which, here's the best part, didn't even do much. That nested call and all the extra code for reusability sake, and checks, and some reflection thrown in for good measure, obviously took more time than the method code itself needed.

    It hurt. Looking at that stacktrace was enough to cause physical pain.

    Now I'm not necessarily saying you should throw Cocoon and J2EE away, obviously there are better ways to do that even with them. Like, for a start, make sure your EJB calls are coarse granularity so you don't go back and forth over RMI/IIOP just to check 1 flag.

    But how many people do?

    The second instance when it caused me pain is when I was testing a particularly bloated XML-based framework, and it took 1.1 seconds on a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 just for a call to a method that did nothing at all. It just logged the call and returned. That's it. That's 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles wasted just for a method call. That's more than 30 years worth of Moore's law. Worse yet, someone had used it between methods in the same program, because apparently going through XML layers is so much cooler than plain old method calls. A whole 30 years worth of Moore's Law wasted for the sake of a buzzword. The realization hurt. Literally.

    Again, I'm not saying throw XML away generally, though I would say: "bloody use it for what it was meant, not as a buzzword, and not internally between classes in the same program and indeed the same module." It just isn't a replacement for data objects (what Java calls "beans"), nor for a database, nor as just a buzzword to have on the resume.

    Each iteration of Moore's Law is taken as yet another invitation to write crappier code, with less skilled monkeys, and don't bother optimizing... or even designing it well in the first place. Why bother? The next generation of CPUs will run it anyway.

    And the same applies to RAM and HDD, more or less. I've seen more than one web application which had ballooned to several tens of megabytes (zipped!) by linking every framework in sight. One had 3 different versions of Xerces inside, and some classloader magic, just because it beat sorting out which module needs which version. Better yet, they were mostly just the GUI to an EJB-based application. They didn't actually _do_ more than display the results and accept the input in some forms. Tens of MB just for that.

    So now look on your hard drive, especially if you have Vista, and take a wild guess whether those huge executables and DLLs were absolutely needed, or are there mostly because RAM and HDD space are cheap?

    At this rate and given 4TB HDDs, how long until you'll install a word processor or spreadsheet off a full HD DVD?

    --
    A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
    1. Re:Actually, that's the scary part by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here, here! I saw one of those Java stack traces, and couldn't believe that one person could actually even understand all 100 levels of control flow.

      Vista doesn't necessarily suffer from all of the same problems, though. Compared to XP it has grown a lot wider, but not much deeper. For example, my XP machine has about 500K worth of small BMPs for wallpaper, while Vista has a portfolio of high-res professional photographs.

      You can't buy a desktop machine with less than 40GB of disk space anymore and installation media holds 5+GB, so why not waste some space for a bunch of wallpaper? It's not like you can't go and delete them if you want the bits for something else.

      dom

    2. Re:Actually, that's the scary part by owlstead · · Score: 1

      Oh, come on. Those stacktraces are a godsend (if only someone would make the messages in them more informative). They are terribly easy to use in developments environments, and they are ton's better than any assembly code error messages (if any). Anyone that has seen a memory protection fault in a C++ windows application will know what I mean.

      Of course there are applications out there that do it wrong; they use XML for their inner modules to communicate and yes, with Java and many other applications, all libraries are provided with the application. Both Java and .NET are more and more focusing on modularization to make this problem go away. But currently we are stuck with relatively high memory and CPU use for these modules. Most of the time I don't care - I'll rather use an application that is well build and reliable than that is over optimized.

      But on the other hand: how many people have you heard complaining that they've run out of disk space because of application code lately? How many of them were using a web-application framework? And last of all, I don't have a feeling at all that overall code quality gets worse. Due to the internet, to better language and IDE support, better project management tools and static analysis, yes even due to XML use within projects I can see code standards rise slowly but steadily.

      I've always seen so called bloated applications. Hell, when I was using the Z80 of my MSX there were games on tape that loaded a splash screen of several KB before loading the actual game. You're just getting old, granpa, and you are remembering just the good things. Bring on the HD-DVD wordprocessor, it's about time that MS puts some clip-art on the CD-ROM that is worth taking a look at.

    3. Re:Actually, that's the scary part by Moraelin · · Score: 1

      I'm not against stacktraces, of course. I'm against the fact that it was 100 levels deep, just to check a freakin' flag.

      --
      A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
    4. Re:Actually, that's the scary part by I'll+Provide+The+War · · Score: 1

      The simple fact is that you can buy 20GB of server RAM for less than two days of salary+benefits for a quality programmer or enable two more (virtual)cpus on the mainframe for less than a weeks compensation. It is hard to make a business case.

  37. sweet by g0dsp33d · · Score: 1

    Now I can watch High Def. streams in boring powerpoint slides.

    --
    lol: You see no door there!
  38. Re:Will we even use magnetic HDs in laptops in 201 by Eivind · · Score: 1

    True, there's /currently/ a large price-differential.

    But did you notice that flash-based storage has a capacity/dollar curve that is falling significantly more rapidly than the same curve for mechanical disks ? At the current rate, flash and mechanical will be equal storage-pro-dollar in aproximately 12 years.

    In practice, mechanical is dead before that. Nobody would pay $100 for a 30TB mechanical disk if the equivalent price for a flash-based disc is $200. If you can only afford $100, you'll settly for the 10TB flash. It's just that much better: Silent, small, low-power, reliable.

    Makes sense really, mechanical discs have moving parts. Moving parts are bad.

  39. 4TB? by thatskinnyguy · · Score: 1

    Exactly how many Library's of Congress is that?

    --
    The game.
  40. 20TB by crf00 · · Score: 1

    But we need 20TB at 2011!!

  41. Re:Am I the only one... by AbRASiON · · Score: 0, Troll

    "who likes hearing harddrives do their work? Solid-state storage is too quiet, "

    Die, in a fire please or at least seek help.

  42. I don't want a terabyte of storage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's just more evidence against me (whether I've committed a crime or not).

  43. Sounds like Ed Felten's iPod ... by Kiaser+Zohsay · · Score: 1
    Ed blogged about a related phenomenon last week.

    The panel's title referred to an interesting fact: sometime in the next decade, we'll see a $100 device that fits in your pocket and holds all of the music ever recorded by humanity. It sounds like the industry is right on schedule.
    --
    I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
  44. I had 5 drives fail ... then fixed them by Skapare · · Score: 1

    I had 5 drives fail over the course of a couple months. That seemed so out of normal that I checked them out better. They died with the "clickety-click-of-death". Today I am still using 3 of them going strong (the other 2 were smaller and I replaced their spots with bigger ones). The cause of the failure was actually two bad power supplies (140 watt units in micro-ATX boxen). I squeezed in fresh new 250 watt units (were a bit larger, but I made them fit) and those "dead" drives came back to life. Two of the machines with these PSUs had the problems, but I just went ahead and did the PSU replacement in all 4 to prevent the problem in the others.

    That's not to say your problem has this cause. Hard drives die for other reasons, too. But it's worth checking. The power supply was not so bad that it prevented the CPU and mainboard from working. There might have been some corrupt bits (no ECC on all those machines), but not enough to crash anything. In any case, if you have a 50% failure rate, you have some kind of common cause that you should look into.

    --
    now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
    1. Re:I had 5 drives fail ... then fixed them by crocodill · · Score: 1

      Yeah I recently had 2 portable USB drives (different brands) doing the clicking thing, lost the filesystem index on one (managed to restore my data).

      I think the problem was a dodgy power outlet they were plugged into. Both drives are working fine now after being formatted.

  45. "shrunken read heads in hard drives" by hey! · · Score: 1

    Sounds like voodoo engineering to me.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  46. Re:Am I the only one... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Electric hybrids are too quiet, we need to install loud speakers on them as well.

  47. HERE IS THE SPEED!! by windmill007 · · Score: 1

    You want speed..... You will have to pay but this will give you what you want TODAY!!

    http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/

  48. No. they dont get it by Ep0xi · · Score: 0

    When i say i want TWO equal hard drives, fast, cheap and strong. I am not telling that i want hundreds of Gigabytes on my drive.
    I only want FASTER DRIVES. FAST AS ASYNC RAM. Who cares about gigabytes when we cant deal with the entire computing experience, right now in terms of "RESPONSE". Competition is used to bring a good image of your favorite company, and not better technical advance.

    --
    ?
  49. Re:Will we even use magnetic HDs in laptops in 201 by dintech · · Score: 1

    Moving parts are bad.

    My bet is on Liquid Metal. However things get difficult when you open the chassis and find your hard drive is pretending to be your graphics card.

  50. Re:Am I the only one... by AbRASiON · · Score: 0, Troll

    LOL Flamebait, ok so someone is PRO noise in a computer and it's not marked troll?
    Come the fuck on people, think about this, advocating a noisy computer? Something some of us older users have been striving to avoid ever since we sold our Amiga's and C64's

    Noisy disks indeed, mark the original authors post as either, retarded, over-rated, troll or just plain lunacy, I'm outright insulted such a post would even make it to text on a website.

    WHILE WE'RE AT IT, LET'S BRING BACK FLOPPY DRIVES!

  51. Re:Data Management by fast+turtle · · Score: 1
    I recently had someone decided to sue upon the eve of the statues limitation for cases and I was able to show the court both the current and evolutioniary trail of my written document retention policy. That's been in effect for 10 years. Now I'm a small, home based business and I've had a written retention policy since I started on the advice of my business law instructor; which turned out to be the best damn $100 ever spent (class and textbook) because I got to pick a lawyers brain once a week for an entire semester. How many can say they got over 20 hours of legal advice for free?

    Because of my written retention policy, I was able to show the court that

    1) didn't have the documents in question any longer and why I didn't

    2) a retention policy for complaints/support tickets life of statues limitations/contract terms

    3) that I did have a retention policy in place for trouble tickets/complaints covering Period of Statues of Limitations

    and these written policies helped cover my ass in the courtroom because I had no record of complaints or support tickets and that the contractual obligation had been satisfied at time of purchase since the sale was without warranty (except required by law) or recourse (except allowed by law).

    Made me look damn good to the judge and if it had gone to a jury (would insist on it) to them that I wasn't some idiot who might have broken the law through ignorance.

    --
    Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
  52. Only Terabytes ? That not very good. by fedrive · · Score: 1

    Sir, I invented the concept back in 1983. No one back then would believe it would work. I talked
    to all the companies in storage at that time.

    http://www.colossalstorage.net/colossal4a.htm

    My nanotechnology will blow this technology out of the water ! With >>>>Petabytes !

    The will still have the same s/r problems at the densities and won't prevent super paramagnetic limit.

    Just another bandaid to prevent the death of magnetics.

  53. 4000 hours of p0rn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mor ei can watch in a year

  54. 4TB Paperweights ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    My 1TB Hitachi Drive didn't last 6 months.

    It's great they increase the capacity, it would be even better if they continued to work.

  55. Everybody get your motherfsckin' roll-up by tepples · · Score: 1

    imagine if MS would release some big rollups. IE, load up XP, download SP2, download one or two rollups, and your done! A roll-up for Windows XP is expected by June 2008.
  56. Except... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...more space doesn't just buy you more time. It buys you more flexibility. I record lots of video I never get around to watching. I do that because when I have time to watch something, I want to make sure there is something available that I want to watch. I want several options.

  57. Repeat after me... by R2.0 · · Score: 1

    "Porn, glorious porn..."

    --
    "As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
  58. What frame rate? by tepples · · Score: 1

    Anyone who has a couple of HD security cameras Even if your security cameras are running at 1920x1080 pixels, what frame rate are you using to store the video? And because a whole feed from a security camera consists of one shot, you won't need to have a keyframe as often as you would on, say, network television, and your codec will be able to compress the video more efficiently.
  59. Re:Man by ThirdPrize · · Score: 1

    +4 Funny. You guys are so predictable.

    --
    I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
  60. Re:The small thing you neglected by IdeaMan · · Score: 1

    You're forgetting that Vista has failed like Windows ME failed.
    Only thing that will rescue MS from the Vista failure at this point is a new release of Windows.
    What I see driving requirements for new machines now is gaming, which is pushing the video card system.
    http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/
    That guy got hired by Intel. Translation: Intel is going to be making some rather staggeringly powerful video systems for the segment of the market that spends the most on computing hardware: Gamers. When Billy Gamer plays the new fully ray-traced Duke Nukem Forever, all of his Joe Sixpack cousins will want one too.
    Now if that first system would only run Linux we'd have The Killer App...

    --
    They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
  61. Forensics people won't welcome this by mav[LAG] · · Score: 1

    I've done some takedowns and it's getting tricky these days just from a time point of view. 80Gb drives are no longer the standard, it's now 160Gb and 250Gb. That means longer to do the pre-checksum, copy the image, and then the post-checksum. The adoption of SATA as a standard is helping but there will come a time when there aren't enough hours in the day to perform a bit-for-bit copy of a defendant's infrastructure.

    To just copy 4 terabytes - no sha256 or anything like that - at 4 Gb/min (which seems to be the fastest possible speed offered by specialised forensic disk duplicators) will take over 4 hours. Add the time for the two checksums and we're talking eight hours minimum. What if the suspect has two 4 terabyte drives? You get two disk duplicators obviously :) but that approach will also fail at some point the more huge drives proliferate.

    I really worry that forensics guys will get left behind because of the best practice requirements of taking a complete image.

    Anyway, I'm off to add a much-needed patch to md5sum which displays the current progress as an optional switch. I hope.

    --
    --- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
  62. premeditated conclusion by epine · · Score: 1

    I once posted a comment that what Slashdot needs is a way to pre-moderate the foregone contribution. OTOF, I suppose it was a lot more fun for everyone involved to race off to Mordor to destroy the ring *after* the ring woke up.

  63. Re:Waiting for... (question) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So uh, it sounds like the amount of data you're bringing in could exeed the rate that you can humanly be able to order, process and consume it?

  64. Higher capacity means higher performance by glacote02 · · Score: 1
    Higher areal density means transfer speed increase. Even if you don't care about using 4TB - just only format the first 1TB and you got yourself a 75% transfer boost and, much more importantly, a 33% latency decrease (seek latency being divided by four, rotational latency unchanged).

    This also means 40GB iPod minis... Seen how the hard drive market recentered to consumer electronics in the last few years?

  65. Re:Waiting for... (question) by MikeFM · · Score: 1

    Not at all. Processing the data is the fun part if you're a geek. As for consuming it - that is something I'll leave to others. I'm just enjoying myself indexing the data and making it searchable.

    --
    At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
  66. Well no matter how big it is... by garompeta · · Score: 1

    ...something for sure is that windows will take half of it.

  67. Yes but let's see some product by obeythefist · · Score: 1

    I've been keeping an eye on the local HDD market and the only development I've seen since the first 1TB HDD's (well over a year ago now..) has been a price drop in 500GB disks, making them more attractively priced per gig than the 320's now.

    But that's it! For over a year... where's the 1.5GB drives? All we get is some extremely expensive 64Gb flash drives with a Sata interface.

    --
    I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
  68. I propose... by okmijnuhb · · Score: 1

    I propose read/write heads that are stationary, and the width of the radius of the disk, and that are read/write switchable electronically, rather than mechanically.
    This would enable faster seek times, simultaneous read/write of multiple non-contiguous sectors, etc.
    I give this idea away for the benefit of humanity, in the spirit of the GPL, and freeware.
    Enjoy!

  69. HDD mfgrs corrupting us... by Chili-71 · · Score: 1

    Let's see. HDD manufacturers are creating larger and larger hard drives for the desktop and laptop [notebook] for what purpose? So we can store more and more movies and music CDs? Which means they want us to COPY the DVDs and CDs that we purchase. Isn't that tantamount to piracy?

    I guess the RIAA will be suing Hitachi next.

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