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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.
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.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
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?).
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.
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.
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.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
# yum -y update; shutdown -r now;
:D
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.
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.
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.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.