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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.
Cue the "Nobody needs more than []300GB []1TB []x because I don't have a reason for it" posters
I hope we won't be using hard drives in four years. Let's all pray for a breakthrough in solid-state storage.
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.
Care about privacy? Read this!
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
It'll get used up fast, with the introduction of Blu-Ray and HDTV movies/tv shows.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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....
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).
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.)
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.)
I know most people think they don't need that much, but still, thats a helluva lot of porn!
"4 terabytes ought to be enough for anybody,..."
I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
Hitachi's CPP-GMR head
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...
I think the data version of Parkinson's Law applies here: "Data expands to fill the space available for storage".
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.
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
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?
"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
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.
Care about privacy? Read this!
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
What's in this folder of yours "Cowboy Kneel"? Hmmmm ...
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
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.
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.
What would my kids do with my backup disks and all the data on them if I died today?
Would they have any idea?
I wonder how Steven and Mary Reiber are handling the news.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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.
Where "TB" and "GB" refer to the SI/marketing quantifiers, 4TB ~= 3.6TiB:
As we expect "1 terabyte" to mean exactly 1024**4 bytes, the disk manufacturers would be short-changing us by about 370.7GiB.
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 ]
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*...
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...
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 ]
To use a pedestrian Joe Sixpack example, people will be able to DVR everything they watch.
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.
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.
4TB = 4096GB
No it isn't. Four terabytes is 4,000,000,000,000 bytes.
...for Vista 2011 to use about 80% of it.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
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 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.
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 ]
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 ?
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.
Too bad you won't be able to import them in the US! :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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?
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.
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."
Now I can watch High Def. streams in boring powerpoint slides.
lol: You see no door there!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly how many Library's of Congress is that?
The game.
But we need 20TB at 2011!!
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
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
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
Sounds like voodoo engineering to me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You want speed..... You will have to pay but this will give you what you want TODAY!!
http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
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?
Uncompressed video? Where are you getting that? You probably mean MPEG-2.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
"Porn, glorious porn..."
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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).
My Babylon
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.
+4 Funny. You guys are so predictable.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
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.
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.
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.
:) but that approach will also fail at some point the more huge drives proliferate.
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
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.
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.
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.
This also means 40GB iPod minis... Seen how the hard drive market recentered to consumer electronics in the last few years?
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.
Get yourself a HD video camera and a hoarding instinct, won't take all that long.
Software patents delenda est.
...something for sure is that windows will take half of it.
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.
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!
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.