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Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive
Lucas123 writes "Seagate's first drive, shipped in 1979 was the ST506, which had a capacity of 5MB and cost a cool $1,500 — or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate holds 1TB and cost just 1/5000th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte. Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs." Update: 04/23 14:56 GMT by CT : The quoted fraction is wrong. Someone complain to ComputerWorld. Update: 04/23 15:13 GMT by CT : TY. The site is corrected to say "just 1/50th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte." The universal equation is once again balanced.
$0.0002 is 1/50th of a cent, not 1/5000th. Still a good value, though.
My first hard drive was a 20MB Seagate that went into my 8Mhz 8088 Sanyo PC, which was originally bought with two 360KB floppies and no hard drive. I remember feeling very lucky at the time, because while I was saving up for the hard drive (which cost ~$400 in ~1985 as I recall) the 10MB model (which I was going to get) was replaced by the 20MB model at the same price.
... or one Microsoft OOXML spec doc
Does anyone need that much porno?
To which the answer is a resounding, YES!
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The article has a photo of a drive that's supposed to be the ST506. It looks more like an ST225, as the ST506 was full height. Jeez, you'd think Computer World would get the technical details right!
;) Get off my lawn!
Of course, maybe you have to be over forty to know the difference...
That's also roughly 4 million Libraries of Congress.
It's funny how it always seems as if the next drive we purchase offers virtually limitless and impossible to use storage space but is never really enough.
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
I'm guessing that they haven't sold 1 billion Seagate branded drives, but that they're including all the drives made by all the other drive companies they've bought in the past.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
ll those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs."
I remember the first time I put the whole Library of Congress on a hard drive. It brought tears to my eyes, as I felt so lucky. Of course, this was in 2007, so I still had a few hundred more gigs to fill up with wares and music. Still it was an important experience.
I got a catholic block.
Wait... is that their 1,000,000,000the hard drive, or their 1,073,741,824th?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
158 billion hours is a shade over 18 million years. If you had a camera fixed to record for the past 18 million years you'd only have started in the Miocene era ... it'd all look really quite modern. It'd have been a bit more grassy, but there'd be recognisable mammals like deer and wolves, birds like ducks and grouse.
It sounds a like long time, but it really isn't.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.
Everybody I know has some vendor they swear by, and some vendor they think is just terrible. I know people who think Western Digital is the best, and that Maxtor is crap. I know people who say the exact opposite. None of these people buy enough hard drives to have any real say in which one is better than the other. Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The problem is that bandwidth (and for that matter latency, only more so) hasn't kept pace with capacity. So yes, we have a lot more storage capacity, but getting the data onto and off the disk hasn't improved by nearly as much.
It's relatively not *too* bad if you're working with large files that can stream. A system I bought in 1994 had a 420 MB disk, which was state of the art at the time. Its bandwidth was on the order of 1 MB/sec. In contrast, the 500 MB disks I'm using now get about 60 MB/sec (internal SATA, at any rate -- USB disks are still limited to 20 MB/sec). That's about 1200x the storage with 60x the transfer rate, so the relative transfer performance (a word I just made up) is about 5% of what it was then.
Latency's another matter altogether. Both seek time and rotational latency are about half what they were then (rotational latency based on 7200 RPM today vs. 3600 RPM in the mid 1990's). So if you're latency-bound, you're really in tough shape. If you're streaming ogg files or what have you, you don't have this problem, but if you're paging to disk (or use applications that create a lot of small files, or scan directories containing lots o'files) you're really in a world of hurt.
Enterprise SAS disks tend to be a lot lower in capacity (74 and 150 GB are common sizes), but rotate at 15000 RPM. So you're spreading out your data over a lot more disks, improving your net throughput, and you're suffering much less from latency. If your application's multi-threaded, with plenty of threads performing queued I/O and plenty of workers, you can make progress even while you're waiting for other I/O ops to complete.
Library of Cong... no wait... was done
How about a beowulf clus.... no... no makes no sense.
Heh, I, for one, welcome our large-capacity-cheap-per-megabyte-storage.... argh
ok fine - no one wants to hear it!
DOES IT FUCKING RUN LINUX?
Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
They've also just celebrated receiving their half-billionth RMA hard drive.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Now they can change their logo to say "Over a Billion Platters Served."
Customer: "I want one of those congress library storing things for the computing machine I bought for my kid".
A: "What capacity? 1 Tb is the typical size. Less than that and you risk your kid turning gay overnight. And die."
Hell yes... got a 30 megabyte drive that way, which lasted about a month. (But I didn't even need it for that long; I just wanted it make a 30 megabyte text file containing nothing but spaces. This was ARCed twice and ended up at 50k or so, and reserved as a "poison pill" upload for to DOS an unfriendly BBS that had a script in place to convert all ARCs to ZIPs. I was a rascal. I have reformed.)
Karma: -2147483648 (Mostly affected by integer overflow)
... we called a 5.25 hard drive a "mini-winnie" since the established 8 inch hard drive at that time was called a Winchester .
Back then the two CP/M Z-80 "micro computers" at university lab where I did my class work used 8 inch floppies. Real floppy disk Users dismissed mini floppies not only because of it's paltry storage capacity but because some pinhead decided to reduce the disk rotation speed of the mini floppy by one half thus reducing its data transmission rate. At least that's how I remember it.
Some other graybeard is gonna have to take over for me now cuz I gotta go chase some kids off my lawn...
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
I was a rascal. I have reformed.
I think what you really mean is you ran out of clever ideas.