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Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive
MojoKid writes "Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the 'industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives.' The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that is capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed."
When you start ripping your Blue-Ray HD Movies to store on a disk-less HDD share (at about 25GB to 50GB a pop) and then you conveniently convert them into mountable ISO images, you will then know why you bought that 1.5TB HDD.
I have a buddy that does this and he uses a 1TB HDD to store the ripped & converted ISO HD movie images. He then mounts them over his wireless N network on his Multimedia PC attached to his living room's 60" HDTV or he mounts the images on his HD laptop anywhere he feels like round his home. Very cool, and he NEVER scratches or loses one of his Blue-Ray disks... (Thank You SlySoft and Elby)
This could be a factor of my faulty memory, but a quick bit of googling didn't turn up anything useful. Is it just me, or has the rate at which storage capacity increases been slowing in recent years? It seems like we had a very rapid run-up to the 300gig mark (in a 3.5inch drive) then a much slower crawl to a terabyte and beyond.
When you start ripping your Blue-Ray HD Movies to store on a disk-less HDD share (at about 25GB to 50GB a pop) and then you conveniently convert them into mountable ISO images, you will then know why you bought that 1.5TB HDD.
What a waste. If he spent a little more time and remuxed them down to just the movies he could easily shave off half of that space. For example, the "I am Legend" blu-ray contains two complete copies of the movie, one of the theatrical cut and one of the director's cut - no seamless branching, two full copies that are 99% identical. Toss the theatrical cut, and all of the other junk and that disc which was nearly the full 50GB is down to ~18GB.
Another common space-wasting practice on blu-ray is to include multiple uncompressed (lpcm, not even truehd or dts master audio) soundtracks, good for 5-6GB each, all of which can be tossed except the native track and then you can losslessly compress that down to 1-2GB. And then, of course, there is all the supplements which you watch, maybe once, if that. Throw those out the window, if you ever really want to watch them you can still pull the original disk out of storage.
Another benefit to remuxing is that you can easily play the movie in any variety of free and semi-free players. Sometimes that can be extremely difficult with the original iso -- like animated movies where they actually render the scenes differently depending on the language track in order to localize things like signs and to keep the mouth movements in sync, typically seamless branching is used for these things, but the net effect is 30-40 different snippet files for each specific language that are not necessarily in any obvious order.
And what backup solutions exist for 1.5TBs today? Anything affordable, or just more RAID solutions (again, hard drives)?
You can talk about backups all day long, but you know that when HP pushes out their latest consumer desktop with this drive, a home user is essentially buying a ticking time bomb.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."