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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
I can't wait to try out ReiserFS on it.
Hard drives are getting bigger? Wow.. what news.. that hardly ever happens.
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..."
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.
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.
Copy the following into your URL bar and press Enter. The code will allow you to compute the real amount.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
No such thing exists. However, you can hose your browser nicely if you run the following script:
WARNING! Do not run the following script!
(*ahem* I told you not to run it! :-P)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
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.
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?
As the bits are more densly packed on the platters, the thoughput is increasing too. Current drives easily doo 100MB/s and I would be surprised if this drive can do 120-140MB/s. You're point still stands of course, HD space increases faster than throughputs increase.
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.
Got a source for that? I've just installed two Seagate SATA 750G drives with 16 MB of cache each in a mirrored config, and I get sustained read performance in the neighborhood of 60-65 MB/s. And mirroring should speed up read performance relative to a single drive. Write performance is about 25 MB/s (tested using bonnie++). These numbers are a significant improvement over the PATA 200G and 120G drives that they replaced, but not matching the relative increase in capacity (nearly 4x).
This article is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Good Source is Storage Review
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php
The top 34 drives all do at least 54mb/sec MINIMUM and at least ~80MB/sec maximum. The top 15kRPM cheetah doing 82.7-135MB/sec.
If i were to pull a number out of my ass I would say 78-135MB/sec (min/max) on the new 1.5TB drives.
I would say if you have 750gig seagates and you are only getting 25MB/sec you have a bottleneck. Those drives should do a MINIMUM of at least 40MB/sec...
Sounds a lot like your SATA/RAID controller may suck. I'd set up a pair of Seagate 7200.11 500GB 32MB cache drives last week with a fairly cheap Promise TX4 controller (heard about issues with the RAID supporting models available at my local computer stores). Used software mirroring (RAID 1) in Windows 2003, and did a quick HDTach test to see how they fared against the old 10K RPM 73GB SCSI U320 drives they replaced.
Turns out that aside from a poorer average seek time (12ms vs 7ms), they beat the hell out of the SCSIs (which topped at around 60MB/s). Read throughputs for the Seagates topped at around 115MB/s for the first 100GB, and were poorest at 60MB/s (and only really dropped low in the last 100GB). The system felt quite a bit more responsive (especially upon enabling NCQ). And I'd even forgotten to pull out the jumper that disables SATA2 mode.
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.