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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.
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.
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).
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!
I want more reliability. Over the last ten years of using hard drives, I have about a 50% failure rate.
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...
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?
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?
What's in this folder of yours "Cowboy Kneel"? Hmmmm ...
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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.
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 ]
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.
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?
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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!)
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