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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.
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....
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).