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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."
of pr0n!
more storage for nerds to steal and archive the work I produced. Damn them.
1.5TB... Who will ever need more than that?
The game.
For some reason, I can't stop thinking of this Flash cartoon I saw once about perpendicular hard drive recording, with cartoon dudes singing, "Get perpendicular! (Get perpendicular!)".
...I need a life.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
In true slashdot fashion I have not read the article.
This technology was first introduced commercially in 2005. All new drives use PMR.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular_recording
I can't wait to try out ReiserFS on it.
Isn't their current 1TB drive only 3 platters? So this isn't really a big increase in density, just adding a platter with a slight density increase. Regardless, I'm disappointed. I was hoping they would be coming out with 2TB drives this year. At least it's coming out in August, in time for the new TV shows in the fall (I need to upgrade my MythTV). Even if I don't buy one, it will help push down the prices on the 1TB drives.
Terabytes are the new gigabyte...
That burns up just outside of 90 days..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
One hard drive in your case takes up less space than 166 dual layer DVDs. Realistically, you can probably fit 300-400 DVDs of data on, since so many don't use all of a single layer, let alone all a dual. Or you can pare down your 2000 CD collection.
Hard drives are getting bigger? Wow.. what news.. that hardly ever happens.
wow, first time I read that I read 1.5TB notebook drive....guess you read what you want to :)
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I'm trying to recover email out of an .edb file and the file is 76 gigabytes. I need to run the recovery on a desktop and I'll need to save the .pst files to that desktop hd as well. I REALLY could use one of these RIGHT NOW!
How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Now although this will be welcome news to a lot of people looking to pack more into less, for me it doesn't do any good. If you fill one of these drives with data (eg. photos) it is going to take a long time to do anything with it. Unless more is done to increase the rotational speed and thus increasing seek times it is not going to deliver a whole lot more.
Just a minor correction, but you want to increase rotational speed to *decrease* seek times. Small, but important :)
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)
Wow, I'm braindead today. I didn't even think of high-definition content. What a disappointing nerd I am...
There are mountains to cross for those that are willing.
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.
Seek time and rotational speed are mostly independent.
Seek time is the time that it takes to move the head to the desired track (including time for the vibrations from the movement to settle down). This is mostly independent of how fast the disk is spinning.
Rotational speed determines how long you have to wait, on average, for the data you want to read to show up under the head.
So a random read will take one seek, plus half a rotation, before the drive can read the data.
Seriously though, how much is one of these things going to cost?
Probably a couple hundred dollars, like high end hard drives usually do.
And what benefit does it have for someone like me who is not an avid PC gamer (more of a console guy), but more of a multimedia buff? I have tons of multimedia, but not 1.5 TB worth.
Well if you have xvids encoded at around 350mb/hr, that's around 4285 hours of media. Sure that seems like a lot, but I already have about 4000 hours of music on my computer and I still hear repeats when I put it on shuffle.
This is going to be a much bigger deal if you're into HD media, or if you ever work with uncompressed video.
I can't imagine even losing that much data if there's some kind of mechanical failure... I would rather have 500 gig disks with redundancy, myself.
I'd rather have 1.5TB disks with redundancy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Unfortunately, as TFA notes, Seagate is not the first one on the market with a 500Gb laptop drive:
Apparently, slashdot isn't the only site that can use some help in the proof-reading department.
Seagate's new Momentus drives are lean on power consumption, allowing notebook users to work longer between battery charges, and are virtually inaudible thanks to Seagate's innovative SoftSonic fluid-dynamic bearing motors and QuietStep ramp load technology."
Despite Seagate's claims, the new 500GB Momentus are not the first "half-terabyte notebook hard drives." Not only have Hitachi and Fujistu already announced their 500GB, 2.5-inch hard drives earlier this year, but Samsung's 500GB, 2.5-inch, Sprintpoint M6 (model HM500LI) has been shipping since March. Oh well, you can't blame Samsung(??) for trying. Both of Samsung's(?!?) 2.5-inch, Momentus drives are expected to start shipping sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, and pricing has not be set yet.
More on topic, 1.5TB drives are awesome. Can't wait to pick one up. My current 600 gigs of space is constantly filling up. :-(
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
It will come in at just above the current retail pricing on TB drives, but below the ridiculous level. A TB drive will cost $200 (nominally, $150-175 on sale) and to get the 1.5 will set you back an extra 20% or so per gig. They'll be $225-$250 for Black Friday, limit 1, 3 per store.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Actually, Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on their hard drives. It's a major reason why I usually buy from Seagate instead of going to Western Digital or Samsung, which usually only a offer 3-year warranty. Still, it's always best to keep backups. How nice the company is about replacements says nothing about how likely the drive is to fail.
It's usually a good time to upgrade your hard drive when their size increases (500MB in this case) are way bigger than your current hard drive's entire capacity (250MB).
RAID-5/6. Or good old-fashioned backups.
as
??
then I looked at the porn tag and realized that I wasnt the only one.
I don't think HD movies and the like are the main reason. A ripped Blueray movie for instance is really huge, but you just need enough work space to rip and compress it down to something usable.
Home movies is a legit use. I recently converted all of my home movies to digital, from Hi-8 through a capture card. The raw, uncompressed data is really huge. My once "massive" 500GB drive is about full.
Plus you need more disk space to edit the movies, and a way to back it up (compressed), but it's much easier to work on uncompressed video.
I'm still recording on mini-dv. Now imagine the space you need for HD home movies.
Power goes up with the square of rpm. That's why 15k drives have 3" platters - otherwise they'd burn too much power.
Also, it's pretty hard to accelerate the heads any faster than they do now - it would required stronger actuator magnets which would be too costly. Also you'd have to devote more surface area to servo bursts so the heads know where they are during those very short seeks. That would cost capacity.
There's a tendency towards 2.5" drives for high performance. 3.5" is becoming the new 5.25".
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Well, in real-world units...
It's like the number of pinheads in a football field, stacked two packs of cigarettes high.
Or it's like the text in the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica when stacked as high as the walnuts filling a swimming pool, laid end-to-end.
I hope that clears THAT up.
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.
Whats really starting to become apparent is that these drives are very slow compared to the size of them. If we assume a 1500GB drive (actually smaller due to marketing) and 60 megabyte/sec transfer time (which I think may be generous), the drive takes 426 hours to copy all 1500GB. That's over a week. What will happen in another 5 years when drives are 3-4 times as large but transfer rates are only increased slightly?
I think the way things are going, hard drives have moved and are moving into a market that used to belong to tape. Slow, but huge capacity. We need a fast general purpose storage device, and I'm not yet convinced that flash can fill that role completely.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
My math is crummy today. Its 426 minutes which is over 7 hours. But still quite a long time considering.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Do you have a favorite piece(s) of software for doing all this?
Isn't perpendicular recording already being commonly used? I thought I recalled seeing articles and even ads about it years ago.
Just doesn't sound as good as the 1.5TB drive now does it...
When do we start the push to force drive manufactures to advertise in real capacity, not the misleading, never attainable capacities...
Unless you can write partial blocks, you can never get 1,500,000,000,000 bytes onto a 1.5TB drive, due to rounding, CHS, TPS, BpB and others.
I won't even go into the AS/400 use of 520byte blocks vs factor of 512byte blocks for most systems.
---- grumbles off into a corner
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
In kind of a weird corollary to Moore's law, the storage capacity of "affordable" consumer hard drives has doubled about every 14 months since at least 1991.
In the summer 1991 a 40 MB drive was "good", and in the summer of 2008 a 1 TB drive is "good". That's a doubling period of almost exactly 14 months. I don't have the data to back up the dates in between, but I remember doing this calculation several years ago and getting the same number.
If Moore's law continues to hold true, and processing power doubles every 18 months, yet storage capacity doubles every 14 months, at some point we will have so much storage that our processors will not have the capacity to ever utilize it all.
I'm reading what I want to as well, looks like.
from the they-had-to-count-them-all- dept.
So now they know how many bits it takes to fill the Albert Hall?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Hitach has released a 500GB laptop HD that uses 3 platters, many months ago! Recently Hitachi has released a 9.5mm thickness 500GB notebook HD that uses 2 platters! I don't think its out to market yet, but tomshardware has already reviewed it! http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/500gb-notebook-hdd,1960.html Seagate is late to the game!
When are we going to start seeing this type of improvements in Solid State Drive technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive -It will not just be the storage that increases. Once the swap file if placed on one of these suckers, the speed increases will be amazing. "Solid-state drives are especially useful on computers that already have the maximum amount of supported RAM. For example, some computer systems built on the x86-32 architecture can effectively be extended beyond the 4 GB limit by putting the paging file or swap file on an SSD. Owing to the bandwidth bottleneck of the bus they connect to, SSDs cannot read and write data as fast as main RAM can, but they are far faster than any mechanical hard drive. Placing the swap file on an SSD, as opposed to a traditional hard drive, can therefore provide a significant performance increase."
The problem with this drive is how to reliably and affordably back it up.
Of course for a non-critical application like my DVR it would be excellent!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Well if you have xvids encoded at around 350mb/hr"
350mb/hr is low quality. I've got anime that's ~350mb/30min. Has 5.1 surround and full DVD resolution. Looks sweet, but still gets some pixelation with crazy explosions. Anime compresses EXTREMELY well due to cell shading, so a regular movie is gonna be about 1gb/hour for regular dvds.
Do you have a favorite piece(s) of software for doing all this?
eac3to + various filters (some commercial, it comes with the Free ones) to take it apart and
mkvmerge to put it together as a matroska file (mkvmerge is part of mkvtoolnix)
one caveat is that mkvmerge can not handle dts files more complex than the regular DTS format on dvds, but it can do truehd. I always recompress to flac anyway, tends to be more efficient than either truehd or dts master audio and eac3to can do the recompression automatically.
If you want to keep it in m2ts format than TsRemuxer is pretty good it will allow you to remux to either a single m2ts file or to a bare-bones blu-ray directory format.
All above mentioned tools are easy to find in google.
Imagine a Beowu...wait.
True, but upgrading is tough...
I use 4x250GB drives in a RAID-5 configuration.
[fred@jupiter fred]$ df -h /dev/hda2 73G 23G 47G 33% / /dev/hda1 101M 15M 81M 16% /boot /dev/shm /home/fred /imports/mail
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
none 62M 0 62M 0%
ganymede:/raid/home/fred
676G 556G 93G 86%
ganymede:/raid/mail 676G 556G 93G 86%
[fred@jupiter fred]$
So its 676GB of usable storage. As you can see, I am running low... and want to upgrade.
But, like a full backup, it takes a LOT of time to back this up. It's 100mb ethernet, 10Mb/s (best case). 2 minutes per gigabyte, 22 hours at full tilt. Adding reasonable "slush", we are talking 30 or more hours to load the data into a new array.
Which is a problem that (in theory) should be faced by any user of 250GB or greater drives. Puts your drives out of commission for too long. My solution? Vital (not replaceable) data gets backed up, the rest just relies on RAID. I USE my array, and cannot afford that sort of downtime. (also, I haven't seen a USB link that is reliable enough for this task :( And, I want to run MD5 hashes on the files to ensure that they are copied without corruption, adding 30% to the total time). When I deploy my new array, it will be in a brand new system, and I have a script that creates links for all media files (movies, ISOs, tv shows, audio files) back to the original storage. This takes under an hour (simply iterating the directory of the RAID is fast)
[root@ganymede raid]# time find . | wc -l
115961
real 1m19.454s
user 0m1.310s
sys 0m3.480s
[root@ganymede raid]#
After the deployment of the new array (scheduled for a few hours every night), links are replaced by the actual files. This process takes several weeks, after which the old array can be "retired". Since it isn't much good, it gets to be the "primary" backup for important files (those that are locally synchronized every night).
I have to run through this process (or similar) every two years. I know that not many computer users do this; so I suspect that drive capacity has become a bit of a numbers game (oh look, mine is bigger than yours!) in the last couple of years. Either that, or a lot of people are REALLY going to have problems in a couple of years.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I wouldn't mind a couple of 5.25" drives in my computer.
I've got like 4 5.25" drive bays, with only 1 in use in my "mid tower" cases.
At the same areal density, you'd have over double the capacity. I don't care if it's slow.
Maybe you can find a few Bigfoot on eBay :)
That was too much of a niche market and the access times were truly horrible.
Today nobody even makes 5.25" platters any more.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Sux.
I'm sorry, the units given are meaningless to me... how many Libraries of Congress does it hold?
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
And it cuts through pr0n like butta!
About two years ago, I built my PC with two (maximum capacity) 300GB drives. Nowadays they're just about full. If I went the same way again I'd still have far beyond two terabytes of storage and could keep everything I downloaded the past years. Crazy.
Does anybody clean up their drives anymore to make space? I haven't in ages, and it seems I won't have to make any decisions about what to save in the future, either.
Nuke it from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
Make SELinux enforcing again!
Anime compresses EXTREMELY well due to cell shading, so a regular movie is gonna be about 1gb/hour for regular dvds.
Anime looks like shit when it compresses due to what you call cell shading, and what the rest of the world calls cel painting (aside from computer-generated animation, where it is called "cel shading") unless you use an encoder specifically designed for the purpose. I do believe that both DivX and XviD have options for this however, as do other encoders.
I have consumed plenty of MPEG4-encoded fansubbed anime, though, and lots of it was high-bitrate and still looked like dookie.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As the amount of data stored grows and gets cheaper per GB, the amount of marginal data increases to fill it. It's a form of long-tail economics - you keep more and more data worth less and less as the price of storage drops.
When a large drive was 80 MB, I didn't keep music in my computer, and I kept a few low-rez, carefully trimmed/cropped/scaled down personal pics in the computer. When a large drive was 800 MB, I kept a few of my favorite songs as MP3s, and dozens of pictures. When a large drive was 8 GB, I had a modest collection of music and a few hundred pics, at 80 GB, I had all my CDs saved as MP3s along with thousands of pics, at 800 GB (now) I have thousands of MP3s, pics from every source I can imagine, as well as many videos from my digital camera.
As the value of each bit goes down, the total value of the machine goes up, even as the value of each bit goes down. What's funny (for me) is that the same P3 that started with 8 GB now has almost a TB of space, and still serves all my files. Storage/bandwidth has value, processing power is not so much.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This is the drive I have been waiting for. 16MB-cache Sata III, 10RPM. $300. 300GB. The next time I need the combination of speed and space I will be looking at this one. It would be good to put four of these in the 2008 Mac Pro as the highest performance solution available.
All this sounds like it might be quite time consuming.
What's the actual cost of the disk space you are saving, and was it worth spending the time doing all this?
Unless your time is free, I'm wondering if it might be cheaper just to buy another drive or two. I haven't done the maths, though.
All this sounds like it might be quite time consuming.
Only if you babysit it. Kick it off and go time is usually less than 5 minutes for each step.
All this sounds like it might be quite time consuming.
Only if you babysit it. Kick it off and go time is usually less than 5 minutes for each step.
...once you've actually set it all up in the first place.
...once you've actually set it all up in the first place.
Huh? You mean install the software ONCE?
I guess you just have to do it to know what you are talking about.
I spend less than 10 minutes per movie on average in addition to whatever it takes to rip the movie itself which is the same whether you keep the entire rip or reduce it.
Then if you decide you want the theatrical cut again you can download the 1080p version already compressed to 8GB.
A RAID6 array of 6 TB is *eight* 1 TB drives.
Six drives minus two for parity equals four. The Article announced drives that hold 1.5 TB each; multiply this by four to give 6 TB.
And if a drive fails, then it must read 1 TB of data back to the replacement drive.
On a 6-drive RAID6 array, disk blocks are organized into sets of four, one from each drive. Because the parity of a set of blocks is a function of the data in all blocks in that set, you have to read all the blocks to calculate the parity.
But for home use, I guess I agree with Doctor Faustus (above) that RAID1 and backups in some other format are enough.