Western Digital Announces 1TB Mobile HD

Western Digital has announced a couple of new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives weighing in at 750GB and 1TB. The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate and Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" tech along with specialized shock tolerance and head parking to ensure durability. "Both models are shipping now through various channels; the 1TB model is currently available in My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB model has a suggested sticker price of $190 while the Scorpio Blue 1TB is a mere $250. The My Passport Essential SE 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 USD and the 750 GB model is $199.99 USD."

Comments

More Mobile Porn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone needs more porn that is mobile.

Now I can upgrade my PS3

[the_humeister]

to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

Economy not burdening you eh? :P

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[TuaAmin13]

Except this is a 12.5mm height drive. The PS3 uses a thinner drive.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

You've always been able to upgrade your PS3 to 1TB. 3.5" drive + USB enclosure.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[masshuu]

a Dremel will fix that

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't you use various sata cables to allow the drive to be outside of the PS3 case?

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[falconwolf]

to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.

Maybe not. According to an article on eWeek it's height is 12.5mm. The PS3 probably has more clearance than most if not all laptops so it may fit in. I was hoping it'd fit in my MacBook Pro but I doubt it. And the thing is is I replaced the 160 GB HDD my MBP came with with the biggest drive I could find for it a 320 GB drive a few months ago.

About all the drives are good for is USB or Firewire, however I already have a 1.5 TB external drive.

Falcon

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[Tycho]

Or to 2TB and potentially beyond. Hack a SATA cable to an eSATA port on a PS3, fail at making the port look pretty. Then, connect a 2TB drive in an external case with an eSATA port to your PS3. Then explain why you did this at all. More drives could be added if the SATA port on PS3 systems support SATA multipliers, stir in more fail for fun and enjoy.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

How many libraries of congress is 1TB?

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[TheJamesM]

Then why not go for a 3.5" drive? I presume they're cheaper. Of course, people have been doing that for a while.

Re:Now I can upgrade my PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

No, some of us work rather than bitch about the economy and sleep till noon.

Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

The plan: Get one of these TB drives and stuff it full of FLAC rips from my massive CD collection. Then USB it to a WD TV box and my cheapy $80 15in flat panel monitor, routing the audio to my insane audio system.

Finally: Done.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[ODiV]

If it's just sitting there, why use a more expensive 2.5" drive?

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Ralph Spoilsport]

elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Tynin]

With a 2.5" drive via USB you don't need to provide it power, it gets it from the USB port. With a 3.5" drive you need an external power source and a wall wart.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Facegarden]

elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive. Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives. I don't really know what they mean by that, but I guess it is safe to consider it a good thing.

Really? Really....? You really think they say it works best with THEIR drives for any reason other than to make you think you should buy their drives? It's just marketing fluff, like when Kraft Mac and Cheese says it tastes great with Kraft Parmesan cheese on top, as if any other Parmesan cheese isn't going to provide the same taste sensation.
-Taylor

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[karnal]

Four words: Specially Activated Flavour Crystals (tm)

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[teg]

... Kraft Parmesan cheese ...

There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Facegarden]

... Kraft Parmesan cheese ...

There is no "Kraft Parmesan". There is a product called something like it - even containing cellulose if I recall correctly - but it is not Parmesan cheese. Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

Actually that's exactly what they call it. They don't call it Parmigiano-Reggiano, but they do call it Parmesan.

http://www.indojin.com/shop-online/catalog/images/kraft-parmesan.gif

Of course it's almost nothing like good Parmigiano-Reggiano, but if we're being pedantic, you are wrong in saying there is no "Kraft Parmesan", even if they are wrong in calling it that.

-Taylor

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

Which means exactly what if you just want to get buzzed?

As a related question, what if a chemist made an exact chemical copy of a "real" champagne? Would you still claim that the location mattered?

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Penguinshit]

Mac-N-Cheese is made with cheddar. Using parmesan would result in a bowl of pasta vomit. Every cheese has a proper usage.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Kaboom13]

Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too, instead of where they were made! Indeed the other day I saw a man in the deli order a sandwich! How absurd, as if you could get a layered meat and bread product assembled in Sandwich, in the Kent region of England, in a deli in the United States. I politely tried to correct him, but he persisted in his error, and after my repeated attempts, told me to "Shut-up and fuck off".

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kraft's abomination is an attempt to identify a crappy, industrialized low quality item as a high quality, hand made product of specific origin. In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

That all depends on where the product is sold. The U.S. has recently been playing a bit more kindly with DOC/Appelation type names, but that doesn't mean it's a legal requirement, nor does it mean that every item plays by the rules. As a matter of fact, Joe Sixpack probably doesn't even have a clue, and probably thinks that a Budweiser is a fine American beer. Whether you like it or not, companies will still continue to produce "Parmesan" made in American factories (or worse yet, Chinese factories?), and so on so forth.

And finally, not trying to be nit-picky, but just because a bubbly wine isn't made in Champagne region of France doesn't mean it's automatically "Sparkling Wine" either. In any other region of France it's Cremant if it follows a specific method. (Differentiated by region such as Cremant d'Alsace etc.) In Spain it would be Cava. In Italy it would be Spumante. Method Traditionale would suggest that it is made in the Champagne method, and so on so forth.

Those that care, know. Those that don't care, don't know, and couldn't care more. While I agree that the pre-grated "Parmesan Cheese" in a can is absolutely disgusting, if not simply lacking in any flavor whatsoever, I have a hard time believing that Joe S. would throw a fit and run out to buy a decent block of Parmigiano Reggiano if he found out that it's not REALLY Parmesan cheese. He'd probably say "eh, whatever, gimme that powdered cheese stuff." And that's not being snobbish, the French have an equal share of apathy towards most things not French anyways. We're all guilty to a degree.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Hal_Porter]

I think the GP is French. GET HIM!

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[digitalchinky]

I've run up against more than a few USB ports that don't appear to provide enough power to spin up 2.5" drives properly. It could also be crappy USB enclosures causing the problem. Annoying really.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Minimalist360]

http://brands.kraftfoods.com/kraftparm/parmproducts.htm oops

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Minimalist360]

It's pretty similar, except in Europe they can't call it Parmesan. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601100&sid=aEWqRRUcXz88&refer=germany I'm glad someone is doing this important work.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[ColdWetDog]

Four words: Specially Activated Flavour Crystals (tm)

In a hard drive?

Really?

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[teg]

You misunderstand. I know there is a product trading under a false disguise. I'm just disputing it has anything to do with actual Parmesan. I bought that miserable product once when I lived in the US. It tasted like sawdust, nothing like the real product. Then I looked closer on it, and realized it was just a fake... like Ralph Laurem, Barbi, S0ny, Appie - but allowed to use the real name. It seems that the US cares very much about trademarks and copyrights otherwise - but not about protected names from Europe, identifying specific products.

And the sawdust taste? Not so surprised anymore when I looked at the list of contents. There are things there that has nothing to do in Parmesan... like cellulose. In a cheese. Somehow, I doubt the rest of the method has been used either... including the aging.

It's sad that a lot of Americans don't know what the real product should be, and identify it with substandard products using fake names.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Minimalist360]

Parmesan cheese in, say, Argentina - do they care about this? From the wiki article you cite above:

Outside Europe, the name "Parmesan" is treated as generic. The European Union campaigns against the use of protected European food labels by producers outside the designated region of origin, which might eventually lead to dropping the word "Parmesan" from cheese products originating outside the designated production region of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

It appears that Argentina also produces something called Parmesan Cheese:

http://www.alibaba.com/product-tp/11688233/Parmesan_Cheese.html

I know it's cool to hate the US, but from what I gather, people in the US don't like cheese as flavorful as other places, on average. It's also kind of regional. Maybe that's why this "award winning" Parmesan from Wisconsin is aged 10 months instead of 12?

http://www.widmerscheese.com/products/Parmesan_Cheese_12oz-76-24.html

I'm just kind of rambling here, but is Argentinian Parmesan like Ralph Laurem?

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Minimalist360]

Also I'm going to say that if you got he stuff pre-grated in a can... isn't any cheese sold pre-grated lacking majorly compared to doing it yourself? I mean I could see that make it taste like sawdust. Or nothing.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[igb]

Sandwiches are reputedly named after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, not the place in Kent. I don't think there's much relationship between the him and the town in Kent (a county, not a region), any more than there is much relationship between the Duke of Devonshire and Devon (note to tourists: Chatsworth is a long way from Devon, in every way). The 1st Earl, Edward Montagu, received his title for navel derring-do, so presumably received the Earldom of one of the cinque ports as an appropriate name. The Earls of Sandwich are, on the other hand, who the Sandwich Islands are named for.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[__aaxwdb6741]

What, you thought iPods being 'lickable' was just a homosexual persons way of saying that it looks pretty?

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[SlashWombat]

It's the bloody french whining again ... (Pun intentional).

A rose by any other name ... Who cares about the naming conventions of wine? ... Perhaps it should be mandated that all wines be called Alcoholic Plonk or Rotten Grape Juice. (Especially that crap from France!)

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[u38cg]

Sometimes a fair point, sometimes not. Some foods can be manufactured anywhere, and can reasonably be called the same thing. Some specialist foods, however, can't. Wines depend for their taste upon the particular combination of soil and climate; you can make sparkling wine anywhere in the world but champagne can only come from Champagne. Similarly for things like Parma ham or the Spanish Pata Negra. If you don't think there's a difference, try them side by side. You might be surprised ;)

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[syousef]

In other news: It is only champagne if you make it from special grapes from a special region in a special way. If it isn't, it is sparkling wine.

Unless there is something physically different about it, who gives a shit? If you do I have some fucking magic beans to sell ya Jack. Hand over the cow.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[KURAAKU Deibiddo]

I hate to be pedantic, but the idea of "navel derring-do" is rather amusing in a no-doubt perverse manner. Hopefully his aim was not so sorely lacking that he was invading someone's navel. ;)

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in the EU at least, there does exist such a thing as protected designations of origin. In the USA, you can probably call any concoction "parmesan", and as long as people will buy it, you'll get away with it, too.

Of course, that said, I think what the GP was getting at is not the fact that Kraft parmesan is not actually from Parma, Italy but rather the fact that Kraft parmesan is - well - inferior in quality and not actually "manufactured in identical processes". Rather like the German "Reinheitsgebt" for beer, perhaps; IIRC, that one stipulates you can't add things like sugar etc. that brewers in the USA do like to add. And someone who favors German beer and its purity law might well complain about American beer then - not because it's not from Germany but because it, well, adds things that he thinks shouldn't be in a beer.

I hope you can see the difference.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[styrotech]

It's both the ports and the drives, but more likely to be the drives these days. There are low powered ports out there (G4 Powerbooks were really bad), but as these 2.5" drives get bigger they also seem to be sucking more power.

These days it seems most (certainly all the ones I've used) disks above say 160GB now need extra power - eg a USB Y cable or separate power cable. Even on ports that previously ran 80GB disks just fine. Maybe the move from IDE to SATA might also have something to do with increased power requirements.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[tcr]

If you just want to get buzzed, there are cheaper ways of doing it than with champagne... :-)

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if I have misunderstood your post, but it's not just about location. Champagne and Cava are made from completely different grapes, for example.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[the_other_chewey]

Exactly, I hate when the Plebians call things based on what they look like, taste like, and are manufactured in identical processes too,

Kraft "Parmesan" "Cheese" (quotes are there for a reason) does neither look like, taste like, nor is it manufactured like real Parmigiano.
It's a lousy imitation you'll never touch again if you've tasted the real one.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[TheRaven64]

In France, they have a set of rules called appellation d'origine controlee[1] (AOC), which are like trademarks. Unlike trademarks, they are tied to a region and a method, rather than to a company. Anyone can produce something like Champagne or Roquefort, as long as they do it in the correct region, using the correct process and (usually) pass certain quality tests. If they don't, they have to call it something else.

A number of European countries have similar rules, and all enforce each others' version. You can't, for example, sell a German wine in the UK as Champagne. The USA, however, follows its traditional strategy of complaining loudly to the WTO and demanding stronger treaties when countries don't accept their IP, while ignoring everyone else's.

[1] Accents removed because Slashcode eats them.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[mdwh2]

Is it absurd when a random company can't sell their cola as "Pepsi", even if it looks and tastes the same?

Sandwich doesn't have a regional trademark, btw.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[KeNickety]

What amazingly brave feat did his belly button perform? I thought he was merely famous for some Naval battle or other!

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

elegance - don't have to deal with the freakin' wall wart from a larger drive.

Even standard sized hard drives are small. Cut a panel into your wall, build a platform between the studs - you can include a fan that way as well, and have room for many standard hard drives. Even a micro-atx... in-wall SAN! Anyway, I digress. Close it up - camouflage it to look like a normal wall; or gussy it up as suits you.

Also, WD says the WD TV is optimised to work with WD passport drives.

Now that's just silly...

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're basically just brand names with their own associations and quality controls. You wouldn't call every wine a Bordeaux and you wouldn't call every cola a "Coke", so why should every sparkling wine be a Champagne ?

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[lewiscr]

It takes more power to spin those extra bytes. Duh.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a bunch of 320 to 500GB 2.5" drives. I don't need to use the y connector on any of my machines. I'd say it's your usb ports.

Re:Cool. Now my music will change again.

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Insightful, really?

Strong branding is useful for consumers to make an informed decision.

cf. http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/quality/

If another brand of directly substitutable food or drink is as good as the PDO brand but cheaper, the PDO brand will surely wither out of the market or at least lower prices.

The problem is that the CAP is used to subsidize PDO brands directly through marketing and price supports, so even if there is a brand crisis (like the occasional listeriosis scares affecting PDO soft cheeses like gorgonzola) there are barriers for substitute brands (like safe, pasteurized Kraft blue cheese) to compete effectively.

Strong branding without the state insurance against brand self-destruction and without barriers to actually selling comparable products under different names (i.e., the case today in the European Economic Area) seems like a better approach than aggressive deregulation and non-regulation of food claims including implicit ones associated with well-known traditional ingredients and methods.

Glad I waited...

[shadowmage36]

I am now exceedingly glad I waited to purchase a new HDD for my laptop. While this is just slightly ridiculous, now I can give windows i nice happy 250 GB to play with and give linux 500 GB.
And then all shall be right with the universe.

Re:Glad I waited...

[teg]

I am now exceedingly glad I waited to purchase a new HDD for my laptop.

The drive is 2.5 inches, but it is 12.5 mm rather than the standard 9.5 mm thick - so it is unlikely to fit in a laptop. On a side note, I wish they started using metric proper instead of this mix of metric and legacy measurements.

Re:Glad I waited...

[shadowmage36]

Well, shit.
Back to the drawing board, I guess...

Re:Glad I waited...

[Hatta]

What's the other 250GB for?

Re:Glad I waited...

[Chabo]

I think he means that he'll buy the 750GB drive.

Re:Glad I waited...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's for porn.

Re:Glad I waited...

[falconwolf]

to purchase a new HDD for my laptop.

You may be waiting longer. It's height is 12.5mm so it doesn't fit in most laptops.

While this is just slightly ridiculous, now I can give windows i nice happy 250 GB to play with and give linux 500 GB.

I gave OS X Leopard and Linux 30 GB each on the 320 GB drive in my MacBook Pro with the rest setup for the home folder, both OSes will use the same home folder when I install Ubuntu. I'd like to get a bigger drive though, to give both OSes and the home folder more space. Why would you give Linux and Windows so much space? With a 1 TB drive I'd give each OS 50 and use the rest for user documents. That or I could setup more boot partitions to try out difference OSes and configurations.

Falcon

Re:Glad I waited...

[sayfawa]

No reason to make that much space exclusive to either OS, IMO. The actual OSs don't take up nearly that much space. Why not give Windows a more reasonable 50 to 75 GB, 25 GB for Linux, and make the rest readable/writeable by both?

Re:Glad I waited...

[kcitren]

What filesystem do you plan on using for your shared /home? Not trying to be difficult, I want to do the same thing but couldn't find a filesystem that both supported well enough to hold my docs. Also, do you put your OS X /Applications on the primary partition?

Re:Glad I waited...

[Corporate Troll]

While I agree with the premise... Making read/writeable by both systems implies using either FAT (bad idea on such large drives) or NTFS. You can't use open source file systems. (There are Windows drivers for ext2, but they suck hard.... )

Re:Glad I waited...

[LiquidFire_HK]

What's the point then? Why release a 2.5" drive when it won't fit in 90% of devices that take 2.5" drives?

Re:Glad I waited...

[teg]

What's the point then? Why release a 2.5" drive when it won't fit in 90% of devices that take 2.5" drives?

• Demonstrating technical leadership... first to 1 GB. Hoping this will promote sales of other drives.
• It can be (and is) offered as a small, portable USB drive.
• Some laptops can support it (or be designed that way, for future products).
• Other products, like media players or other appliances, could also be a target market
• The development was made anyway... I doubt the number of platters is the most significant part of development costs. They can release a standard form factor 650 GB drive too.

Re:Glad I waited...

[falconwolf]

What filesystem do you plan on using for your shared /home?

My OS X partition uses HFS+ Journaled, the home partition is HFS+, and when I install Ubuntu Studio I'll format it's partition then. I'd use HFS+ Journaled for the home partition but Ubuntu doesn't support it.

do you put your OS X /Applications on the primary partition?

With Disk Utilities I created three partitions on my HDD, the first 30GB, the last 30 GB as well, and the rest of the space taken by the partition in the middle. I installed Leopard on the first, then setup the second as the home partition. When I install it I'll install Ubuntu Studio on the third. For the OS X apps I installed them in the OS X Applications folder.

I want to do the same thing but couldn't find a filesystem that both supported well enough to hold my docs.

If you're going to install Linux on a Mac may I suggest you do your research and create a roadmap or strategy for installing Linux first? I spent months doing my research, however I had specific things I wanted to do. If you're using Ubuntu check out the Ubuntu on Macs page. Also check out the Ububtu forums. Be aware that how it's installed depends on the Mac model. As for your question about file systems check out how to create a shared home partition between Linux and OS X.

One thing about that page though is that there is an easier way to tell OS X, Leopard, where to put the home folder. In System Preferences open Accounts. If you have to click on the padlock in the lower left corner of the window and type in an admin name and password to unlock it. Once you are able to make changes [ctrl] click on your account and elect "Advanced Options". Where the window says "Home Directory" clink on "Choose" and navigate to where you want the home directory. Now you'll have to be logged into each account to make the changes for each user, I don't know why logging in as an admin can't do it but when I just tried it didn't allow me to make changes to other users. You may also have to manually move all of the user files from the old place to the new one.

And if you want to dual or multi-boot you can use the same browser and email profiles in each OS, if you're using Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin you can use a single data store. When I said above that I took months of research because I wanted to do specific things, it was stuff like these. Now I still need to find out how I can run OS X as a guest in Ubuntu, it's no problem running Ubuntu as a guest in Leopard, there are a number of guest or virtual OS options.

Falcon

Re:Glad I waited...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why avoid using NTFS to share stuff between Linux and Windows just because it isn't open source? If not being open source is that big a deal don't use Windows at all.

Re:Glad I waited...

[Corporate Troll]

Because I use more than only Windows and Linux.... Not every operating system supports NTFS.

Record my life, I guess

[religious freak]

I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???

I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Killer Orca]

You're forgetting about BluRay, up to 50 GB per movie, granted not everyone needs all the extra audio and whatnot so you can probably trim a few GBs here and there.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Facegarden]

I've loved IT for decades, and this level of data storage still boggles my mind. At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???

I guess I'll just record my life so I don't forget where I put my keys? I'm sure I'm suffering from lack of creativity in my old age, but that's all I think can think of anymore!

Yeah, I was just thinking of that last week. If you read the Wikipedia Entries on Petabytes and Exabytes, and Zettabytes it really starts to make you wonder what we will be using all that space for. On 50 meg drives it was more space for documents, then a couple of gigs and you had just enough space for all your music. On Terabyte drives you can store lots and lots of BluRay rips, something we didn't even think about ten years ago. A good movie collection might still be a few TB though. Beyond that though, what kind of media will we come up with? We always seem to come up with something. Fully Immersive 3D environments a la holodeck? Full copies of human memories?

Wikipedia mentions some research that says "all words ever spoken by human beings could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data" if stored in text format. That's freaking amazing. ALL WORDS EVER SPOKEN is an insane concept and thinking that we have technology capable of storing something like that just blows my mind.
-Taylor

Re:Record my life, I guess

[bemymonkey]

Hmmm... let's see. I've got about a terabyte of stuff that I've accumulated over the years. Every CD/DVD/Video cassette I've ever bought or borrowed from a friend has been digitized, reencoded and written to a hard drive. That's 100-300 MB per CD and somewhere between 700 and 8000MB per movie. Over the years, I'm up to a 120GB music collection and 800+GB of video... _without_ downloading a single one. If you're a pack rat, you'll fill a terabyte pretty easily, even with legal means :)

If I'd downloaded and kept everything that would remotely interest me, I'm sure I'd be sitting on dozens of terabytes of data by now...

Re:Record my life, I guess

[vertinox]

At every step, I could think of applications for greater storage - "oh, more OS space is needed", "wow, music would be nice", "movies... obviously", "make an incremental restore point at any point in time"... ok, now what???

And you know what... The Exchange Administrators still only give 50mb for your mailbox 10 years later. ;)

Seriously, what is up with that... My home computer has more hard drive space than many business servers combined.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[maxume]

Well, I'm sure it would make for an interesting chair.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

server space also cost a LOT more money. You know tape drive, tapes, robotic library, offsite storage aint cheap...

Re:Record my life, I guess

[sirsnork]

Whilst data density has kept increasing, data transfer rates have not. Even doing an offline defrag or repair on a 10GB Exchange store is going to piss of a lot of people for a good few hours at least. What happens when your exchange store is 500GB and hosts 1000 users mailboxes and something goes wrong?

Also backup systems haven't kept up either, backing all that data up is another problem entirely

Re:Record my life, I guess

[YrWrstNtmr]

And you know what... The Exchange Administrators still only give 50mb for your mailbox 10 years later. ;)

Seriously, what is up with that... My home computer has more hard drive space than many business servers combined.

Your home PC has to store 1 persons stuff, and you personally can sport the money for you. Should the company provide a terabyte per person? Why? You're not storing dozens and dozens of movies on the office server. 1 movie = several thousand emails/spreadsheets/text documents.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[karnal]

Borrowing a DVD from a friend and ripping it is the same as pirating it.

*note - I'm not attempting to throw stones here, just stating a point that just because you haven't downloaded a single one, doesn't mean you are better than everyone else who has.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Compuser]

First, we will see purists who say they want to store movies uncompressed. That's about a terabyte per movie. So your typical movie collection (including your kids' movies and movies of your kids and movies of your friends' kids and a bunch of stuff listed on IMDB - that's easily a petabyte. Then you figure we'll need 16-bit color, and 10Kx10K resolution and you are easily in the exabyte range. Then you add third dimension and you add another four zeros. Etc.

I have said this before and I will say this again: even today, it is easy to envision a use for up to a mol (~10^24) of bytes provided they can be accessed fast enough to be useful.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[contrapunctus]

I won't be able to win if I argue with you :)

If I say: well if 6 people send me each a 10MB file then I'll be over quota

you will probably say: email is not for sending big files, you should use "blah"

I will counter that it's the most convenient way for off-network or off-company people to send me the files

But you will say this is abuse of email and if you were my sys admin, you would hurt me.

Then I will say technology is here to serve me not so I conform to it and if everything was used for its original purpose, there would never be technological progress

But you won't listen because your in power of the said technology it's your way or the highway.

Then I would forward everything to Gmail bypassing/compromising all the security that you set up b/c I'm just a user and I want my way...

Re:Record my life, I guess

[YrWrstNtmr]

I won't be able to win if I argue with you :)

If I say: well if 6 people send me each a 10MB file then I'll be over quota

Trust me...I hate this crap too. Managing not only my space, but also managing what other people send me. But no matter how much space on the mail server is granted, someone will bitch about it.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[TClevenger]

Exchange Server Standard is limited to 75GB for the message store. When the size of the entire mailbox store exceeds 75GB, you have to upgrade to Exchange Server Enteprise, which means more money and (if I'm not mistaken) rebuying your per-seat licensing as well. Large customers can save money by cramming more users into that 75GB.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap... I'd hate to be the one that has to type all that in!

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

50GB 1080p Blu-Ray films can be compressed down to 8GB with very little visual degradation.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[quadrox]

By that logic you could limit storage quotas to 1 kb. After all, people are going to complain anyway, right?

Re:Record my life, I guess

[religious freak]

HOLY SHIT, I AGREE!! This drives me abso-f'in-lutely NUTS! Ugh, forgive my emotion, but seriously - I've had the same storage space for 10 freggin' years. I can get more from Google for free! You'd figure someone would sit down and do the math x number of workers making an average of y taking z average amount of time to deal with exchange issues = justification for more storage.

Drives me batty...

Re:Record my life, I guess

[shervinemami]

Somehow I doubt anyone has complained to Gmail that the 7+ GB of free mail storage is too limiting! Maybe people will in 5-10yrs but who can predict that far into the future of the technology?! (Obviously not Bill Gates, and his never-ending "replacement of the keyboard & mouse with speech recognition in 5yrs")

Re:Record my life, I guess

[ajlisows]

Well, a lot of smaller business' still run on some older hardware like a Compaq DL380 G4 or something and yeah, no SAN backend or anything. A DL380 has space for 6 U320 SCSI Drives....they probably have mirrored two drives for the OS so they are left with four, which are probably a RAID-5 configuration. U320 Maxes out at 300 GB or something. Realistically, the largest I have seen in production are the 148 GB variety. So....450 GB of usable storage.

Obviously if you only get 50 MB for your mailbox that is a little absurd, but I can see the need for mailbox limits using servers like that.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[wvmarle]

How are you storing all that now? Only a few years ago TB storage was mighty expensive. And it sounds like you have been taking many years to gather all this data.

And how do you manage backups? Assuming you do that in the first place.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[wvmarle]

Euhm... you mean Exchange stores everything in a single file or so?? Ugh that may take a while if something goes wrong (and this being MS it will go wrong now and then). And that would immediately explain the 50MB limit on mail boxes.

Over the last five years I have collected about 15 GB or e-mail. Yes I receive many photo attachments, so it adds up fast. I wouldn't be able to do with such a small mailbox.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[giorgiofr]

I won't be able to win if I argue with you :)

If I say: well if 6 people send me each a 10MB file then I'll be over quota

you will probably say: email is not for sending big files, you should use "blah"

I will counter that it's the most convenient way for off-network or off-company people to send me the files

But you will say this is abuse of email and if you were my sys admin, you would hurt me.

But surely you agree that there are sensible and less sensible ways to use a tool, in this case e-mail. You don't ask people to send you movies by e-mail because the tool just doesn't work that way: there are different, better tools you can use for that. SO it boils down to what is reasonable: 10MB attachments are close to the limit.

Then I will say technology is here to serve me not so I conform to it and if everything was used for its original purpose, there would never be technological progress

A car is also there to serve you but still you must conform to the way it works. You might build a joystick-controlled car for example, if you dislike steering wheels, but you'd never simply complain that a common car is forcing you to use the wheel, even though actually, it is. You just accept it because the tool is built in a certain way and you need to use it in a certain way to exploit and enjoy it. Most limits are not arbitrary; cars need a steering device and you *will* cope with that or build something new altogether. Technology has limits and best practices too: and it would be best to cope with that too, while we keep innovating, little by little. Remember IT in the 90's?

But you won't listen because your in power of the said technology it's your way or the highway.

I like to explain to my users why systems and procedures are the way they are. Surely they will understand, appreciate and cooperate... maybe even give insightful input... Guess what? They are not interested. So while "my way or the highway" is too rude to be used for real in a workplace, sometimes it does boil down to that. If your kid insists that he wants to drink poison, you will stop him somehow, won't you? And it becomes "your way or the highway".

Then I would forward everything to Gmail bypassing/compromising all the security that you set up b/c I'm just a user and I want my way...

That's tragically irresponsible. It should be ground for termination and be made impossible technically. Unfortunately it's not, where I work. Our CEO worries that people might steal our valuable data on a USB stick and wants us to monitor or block USB usage... When people can simply mail themselves our whole file server contents (ok it's going to take forever but you get the point).

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

First, we will see purists who say they want to store movies uncompressed.

Even if you're a purist there's no point in storing uncompressed as opposed to *losslessly* compressed. I've got the storage to store my CDs uncompressed but I store them as FLAC. Not only does it take half as much space, it also means they're quicker to move/copy/backup etc.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Rockoon]

Mom and dad don't need 1TB. Junior might waste a few TB on movies, but most juniors in general don't actualy need 1TB.

The need for these large volumes is actualy quite specialized. Professionals and serious hacks in multimedia, ripped-movie pack-rats, and businesses/institutions with large databases.

As far as newer multimedia uses (3D, holographic, and so on) there is still a limit as to how much data a person can reasonably consume per second of time. That goes for porn too.

With these latest high capacity drives (2TB), a person can read/write 1KB/sec for the entirety of the average lifespan of 70 years and only at the end of their life be worried about space. In a few years that will be 4KB/sec, then 16KB/sec, then 64KB/sec

.. within two decades we will easily be able to record and store BlueRay quality video for an entire 70 year lifetime onto a single drive.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[muckracer]

> I've got the storage to store my CDs uncompressed but I store them as FLAC.

Am doing the same as a direct result of cheap and abundant storage. Why bother with mp3's and other lossy codecs when you got plenty of space to do it all in FLAC's?

The only issue I have is this: via K3B I rip an album to a single file flac with cue sheet. However, extracting a single song out of that has been tricky. Any suggestions?

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Corporate Troll]

Just a question: why do you rip to a single file? I've started ripping my CDs in FLAC just recently, and I want them in individual files. Rhythmbox does exactly that, in an iTunes like directory structure (which is customizable, so if you don't like it you can change it)

Re:Record my life, I guess

[muckracer]

Well, atm I do both: single big file and individual files (all flac) as long as I don't run out of space. The single-file album FLAC mostly on reasons of having no artificial breaks between songs (such as live recordings or songs that blend into each other). Only do that until I can figure out how to:

1. Have a Flac 1:1 copy of an album, (incl. no breaks where there are none), with perfect 1:1 album burn-back ability
2. Still have the ability to pick out individual songs for further processing or making custom compilations

Any suggestions?

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Corporate Troll]

Well, as a big fan of Pink Floyd, where artificial breaks are deal killers, I just set my players to "no-breaks"[1]. The problem for you is probably that at that point you are missing breaks where there were some. Personally, that has bothered me much less than artificial breaks where there were none.

I can't really help. For me the system works with only one file. [2]

[1] When I burnt "Operation Mindcrime" by Queensryche album with iTunes (before my FLAC days), I forgot to disable the artificial break resulting in an awful CD. Yech!

[2] "Hooray for Boobies" by Bloodhound Gang was a problem though.... Tracks 19 through 46 are all 4 or 5 seconds of silence. I removed those, which of course changes the layout of the album.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

"or borrowed from a friend"

That is pretty illegal my friend...

Re:Record my life, I guess

[theanorak]

Is it?

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2007/evaluation/editions.mspx

Re:Record my life, I guess

[bemymonkey]

Fair use. And anyway, I'm OK with it... I buy enough media :)

Re:Record my life, I guess

[TheRaven64]

Dirac has a lossless mode which can get movies down to a lot less than 1TB. There's no reason to store uncompressed in preference to lossless. No one stores their music in wav files, they use something like FLAC. And even then, I suspect large movie collections are not going to be something that the majority will bother with for much longer. I have quite a large collection of DVDs, but I haven't bought any new ones for ages. I realised that I rarely watch a film more than once, and given the choice between watching something new or something I've seen before, I'd rather watch something new. I pay a small fee per month to rent DVDs through the post, and the company I use has just started including a streaming service. The quality is not great (about VHS, maybe a bit better), but it's perfectly watchable, and lets me pick something I want to watch from a much larger collection than I could comfortably store. With the bandwidth I have at home, you could stream something better than DVD quality, and I'm on a cheap consumer connection. I suspect the amount of storage you want to own is not limited by the amount you can consume, but by the amount you can produce. There's no point in storing a copy of every film I might want to watch, because I can just stream it from somewhere else. There is, however, a point in storing things I've written or filmed, but this doesn't increase at anything like the rate you might expect.

Re:Record my life, I guess

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one who figures if you don't need to compress, why compress? I store my music in wave format. I could use lossy compression, but I sometimes delude myself into imagining that I can hear the difference, storage is cheap, and for a few years now the advantages of compression of any sort have evaporated in the light of cheap hard-drives. I could use FLAC, but that would mean that any bitrot in the files would have the potential to make a track unreadable... whereas a bit here/byte there in a wave file is just a click which can be identified and made inaudible. So... why *not* wave?

Re:Record my life, I guess

[TClevenger]

Interesting. That changed in 2007.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/822440

Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there, but I only listened to a small subset of it, nothing that a cell phone with a 4 GB couldn't handle.

so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?

then, at home just load and unload what you need, and that's it.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Yeah, you can get that if you want it. Why not?

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Hadlock]

Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[nine-times]

so, wouldn't it be better to have a smaller, but more energy efficient and thougher disk better ?

But making smaller, more energy efficient disks also mean that it's easier to fit bigger, higher capacity disks into the same packaging. It's part of the same deal.

I mean, yes, I agree with what you're saying. Putting this drive in my laptop would be overkill. My laptop is currently only using 25 GB. But the nice thing about having lots of different options is everyone can get what they want. With the new flash-based notebook drives, I can get a small, fast, energy-efficient drive, and with this release the guy who actually has use for a 1TB drive in his laptop will be able to get it. We all win.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think a desktop drive is more energy efficient? Tougher maybe, but certainly not as energy efficient...

That being said, what about users whose primary computer *is* their laptop. I have a big honkin' fileserver at home, but I'm not always there. It's nice to have a selection of stuff (games take a rediculous amount of space nowadays) on the go, especially when you're going away for a few weeks.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[R2.0]

"Imagine being a photographer on the Paris-Dakar race where you're shooting hundreds (thousands?) of photos on a high-res DSLR for three weeks (a week before hand, the race, the aftermath) out in the field. There are a ton of week long sailing races that any one photographer might blow through 1000 photos a day. Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute. How many hours of video could national geographic tape with just three of these in the field with a MacBook Pro? Lots of options for pros. Consumers will buy these but rarely use them to their potential."

And then he drops something the size of a cigarette pack into the drink or into the sand and it's all gone. They need to make sure they buy 2.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[anthony.vo]

For some people, a laptop is their only computer. Laptops have been outselling desktops for years, if you haven't noticed.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[PitaBred]

Conversely, he can carry 15 somethings the size of a cigarrette pack with him exceedingly easily where that would be untenable before, especially given power requirements.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[corychristison]

I have the same thought.

When I bought my MSI Wind, I decided to upgrade the HDD to a 320GB merely because I wanted the faster 7200rpm and because it was fairly cheap. I then put the old drive in my PS3 so it didn't go to waste. The old drive from the PS3 is now my OS drive for my Media Center.

I think with all of my utilities and OS it's taking up maybe 6GB? There's probably some music on there, too.

I keep all of my media on my Media Center and that is because its in my living room. Music, TV Shows, Movies, etc are all on there. That's where I enjoy my media.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[orev]

Some of us don't enjoy having our data spread out all over the place on multiple systems with multiple drives. I don't want to have to worry about if I'm going to want some file while I'm traveling, so why not just take everything? That's what these allow people to do.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[tepples]

I have a big honkin' fileserver at home, but I'm not always there.

Then plug in your 3G modem, MiFi router, or phone with a tether plan, and mount it remotely. Of course, it's not for everybody; some people don't find it worth $60/mo, and others find it too expensive for the 5 GB/mo cap that all the carriers enforce.

games take a rediculous amount of space nowadays

DS games aren't more than 128 MB. Or is that more "greeniculous"?

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[d4nowar]

Yes, and here's why - many people (students) use laptops as their main and only computer.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[nine-times]

Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute.

Is that right? I thought completely uncompressed 1080p was supposed to be something like 3Gbps. Looking at the wikipedia:

The movie industry has embraced 1080p24 as a digital mastering format in both native 24p form and in 24PsF form.... For live broadcast applications, a high-definition progressive scan format operating at 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second is currently being evaluated... as it has doubled the data rate of current 50 or 60 fields interlaced 1920 Ã-- 1080 from 1.485 Gbit/s to nominally 3 Gbit/s.

Ok, so it looks like that's a future standard. But 1920x1080 * 3 channels * 8 bits per channel * 24 frames per second = about 1.2Gbps, right? I don't know if the cameras have good compression built in, but 1GB/minute still sounds low to me. Is my math wrong?

Anyway, point taken. There's a use for compact large-capacity hard drives.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[FleaPlus]

I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

I actually use my MSI Wind netbook as more-or-less my primary machine nowadays. The main problem I had with the netbook is the lack of a DVD drive, so my solution was to just spend $100 for a 500GB 2.5" hard drive and copy images of every DVD I own to it. I take my netbook almost everywhere since it's so light, and it's quite handy to be able to show any movie from my collection whenever I'm at a friend's place. It's also been handy for offloading several gigabytes worth of photos/videos from my digital camera while on-the-go. The convenience is well worth $100.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Hadlock]

I googled h.264 gb per second storage and 1gb/sec was the 8th result or so. I make no claims to it's accuracy. Its a good, round ballpark number though.
 
fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital". The only plus right now of getting rid of film is financial and economical reasons (savings the consumer will never see). Oh and less projector shake and cheaper bulbs (also cost savings that won't be passed on to the consumer). Actually as it turns out they fixed the shake long, long ago, but most people have never seen a movie on a high end projector (IMAX excluded) so they don't know what they're missing. A first run print (I.e. Movie critic's edition) on a good projector in a properly set up auditorium with a good projectionist is an amazing production. Crappy projectors in a cheaply built megaplex run by teenagers produces a crap experience. Which is why so many people prefer a blu-ray on hdtv - its really hard for the average consumer to fuck it up using name brand hardware.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Kjella]

3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-5000$ range use AVCHD since it takes a helluva camera to capture more detail than that. The rest is basicly to avoid generational loss so a pipeline looks like:

Camera -> (lossy) -> RAW -> (lossless editing, filtering, special effects etc.) -> Movie -> (lossy) -> final encode for consumer.

You may think it sounds a lot but video compresses very, very well along in the x, y and time axis. In fact, the better the camera the better it usually compresses because everything is clean while noisy, grainy and flickery video eats bandwidth like crazy. I guess if you're shooting staged movie shots with tons of explosions you'll hook up the camera via one of these 3 Gbps interconnects to a real storage kit and save it uncompressed directly, but then you'll need something much faster than this disk anyway.

On a related note, a lot of the videos today are basicly just "filling out the disk" of a BluRay, they don't have that amount of detail. You can tell when there's 1080p reencodes that you need a magnifying class to tell is a reencode. At BluRay sizes we should have had 2160p video instead, you'd get much more detail for 50GB - not that many can tell anyway. So you don't really need all that much space except when you're working with uncompressed intermediaries, but that's what the huge workstations with attached SANs are for.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I go to the bathroom with the laptop for a little "alone time", I like to have all my pr0n at the ready.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see:

- your music collection in wave format: it's not like we *need* compression for such tiny files anymore, and wave is intrinsically bit-rot tolerant.
- your dvd collection in ISO format: no loss from format conversion, all the menus and special features as the maker intended... well except for those with previews and anti-piracy warnings, obviously, as ripping these significantly improves the viewing experience.
- your blu-ray collection in ISO format... assuming there will be such a format eventually (or perhaps there already is. I don't know: I've been ignoring the format and plan on continuing to do so until the associated DRM is properly and consistently broken).
- long home movies, high-res photos in TIFF format, e-books, storage for security camera video (depending on where you live)...

Point is: the right amount of storage is whatever makes storage a non-issue. That might mean 10GB, 700GB or 10TB, but 1TB is pretty easy to fill from the above list.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[sixsixtysix]

is 1080p still a movie industry mastering format? don't they master at 2k and 4k nowadays?

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Joce640k]

3Gb/sec is the SATA interface speed. There's no way in hell the spinning disk will give you 3Gb/sec.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[westlake]

And then he drops something the size of a cigarette pack into the drink or into the sand and it's all gone. They need to make sure they buy 2.

Not a problem.

This is a business where a Nikon lens can set you back $5-$10,000, easy - and the $30,000 lens isn't unknown. Sigma Ultra-Telephoto Lens

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

OK, I'm convinced. where can i get one of these here in brasil ???

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Kjella]

fun fact about movie standards (and I know this because I used to be an art house movie theater projectionist) is that most digital transfers (to "film") are 4096x2048 already. 1080p as a standard is a huge step back in quality to what you're already seeing as "digital".

I don't have the sources now but it was a study on resolution in theaters. Basically a good master negative of a film can have 1500-2000 lines of resolution, but even the best analog cinema prints had only 800-1000 lines of resolution. So digital 1080p movies on digital screens are no worse than before. However, analog film directly scanned to digital is very impressive and probably needs a 4096x2048 (4K) camera to match. Fortunately things are progressing fast and the RED Scarlet coming this year should bring 3K to the 3000$ mark and 4K below 10000$. Compared to all the other costs, that's not much. Hell, even 9K IMAX should drop below 50000$ this year. Personally I'm most impressed with the prosonsumer cams though, it's amazing what they pack in a small HD camera and it gets better every year.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Paracelcus]

I like spreading my data out, keeping it in different places, redundantly. And the My Passport form factor fits in a bank safe deposit drawer with lots of room to spare.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[mihalis]

is 1080p still a movie industry mastering format? don't they master at 2k and 4k nowadays?

or 8K. For example Baraka on Blu-Ray was transferred at 8K. I just watched it last week after receiving my copy on Blu-Ray from Amazon. I am very happy with this mode of consumption and don't want to even think about the hassle time and expense of trying to download something like that.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you're in Brasil? Just pick up one of your mind-blowingly super hot sexy trannies! Shit, from what I've seen, they're hotter than 98% of the women in North America!

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Kjella]

The comment I replied to said HD was 3 Gbps, he said that because HD-SDI/3G-SDI is 3 Gbps and that was the interface I was talking about throughout my post. High-end equipment will have those to handle raw HD in realtime. I probably should have spelled that out in a post where it could be confused with the SATA 3Gbps interface.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[falconwolf]

I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

Yes, on the go. I don't have one now but when I finally get a digital camera I will want to have as big an external drive as I can get. Actually two, one I can keep on-site and the other for off-site storage.

it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there

Some photographers use iPods to store photos.

Falcon

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[muckracer]

> But making smaller, more energy efficient disks also mean that
> it's easier to fit bigger, higher capacity disks into the same packaging.

I have my (tower) desktop running on a setup like that:

my main OS drive and /home is on a 2.5" laptop drive. Music, movies and other big things are on regular 3.5" drives with lots of space. I geared this setup specifically towards energy-savings and noise-reduction. The 2.5" drive you can't hear at all through the case and it runs with ca. 4 Watts or so max. By comparison a 3.5 drive runs at ca. 10W give or take. Granted...not much of a saving but it adds up 24/7. The larger drives give me a much better GB/$ ratio and fit all the big things easily. Since I separated them from my regular home, I have them shut down automatically via hdparm after 10 minutes of non-use.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[u38cg]

Most movies these days are being mastered well in excess of Blu-Ray standards so that they don't have to do anything when the successor format comes out. That's also the reason Blu-Ray was crippled - they will be able to introduce Blu-Ray 2 without having to redo most of the installed hardware base. However, they will be able to sell you the same damned film *again*.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[klaue]

it's the same thing with iPods. the 30 GB model I had was enough to put all my music there, but I only listened to a small subset of it, nothing that a cell phone with a 4 GB couldn't handle.

I never know what I want to listen to. Having all my music with me would be much more comfortable than synching everytime I use my MP3 player.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Malc]

You might find this article interesting: The Truth About 2K, 4K and The Future of Pixels

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[WuphonsReach]

I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

Smaller backups, less space used for offsite storage (such as bank boxes or media safes).

On my primary laptop, I have about 250GB of files at the moment. None of that is movies or music. More storage means that I can keep more things around in case I need to reference things. There's already things that I don't carry on my laptop that I wish I could.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[pebs]

I can understand having this much space at home, for movies, TV series, pictures and the like, but on the go ?

Why wouldn't you want it on the go? Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to decide before-hand what you want on your small laptop hard drive?

Personally the only reason I have a desktop machine is because I can load it up with hard drives (have 4TB in internal drives at the moment) and not have to fiddle around plugging in external drives like I would if I was using my laptop as a main machine. Of course I do some video editing, which takes up a ton of space. I would love it if my laptop could have that kind of storage space, then I'd only have one computer.

But I don't think they will catch up any time soon unless there is some huge breakthrough in storage technology. But it seems that the amount of space video takes up will continue to grow along with growing storage capacities.

As it stands, my desktop machine is my "media machine" - containing all my video and audio files (both of which may be original content as I do both video editing and audio recordings). My laptop I use for everything else (coding, web browsing, work). Storage space is the only thing that is forcing this division.

Re:Seriously, is that much space neccessary ?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true. Some people do need more than 540K. :D

Parity with desktops now

[Guspaz]

Roughly two 2.5" drives fit in the space of a 3.5" drive (using common adapters). So with a standard two-drive 2.5" to 3.5" adapter (such as a Bay Rafter), you can now have 2TB with 2.5" or 3.5" drives as your choice.

What might this be useful for? It would reduce the space needed for a RAID-5 array. For example, you could have four drives in two 3.5" slots, running in RAID-5, 3TB usable. With desktop drives, you could at best do RAID-1 with 2TB usable.

It also potentially could have performance benefits. It's not clear if this is a 7200RPM drive, but the performance of two drives in RAID-0 might be better than a desktop 2TB drive. Of course, the cost would be $600, nearly four times what you'd pay for 2TB of storage in desktop drives.

Re:Parity with desktops now

[ameline]

It actually is clear -- it is 5200rpm, 12ms seek, 8MB buffer.

(at least it is clear if you download the spec sheets from WD)

Re:Parity with desktops now

[Barny]

Which is why I will stick to my seagate 7200RPM 500G drive :)

WD pulled the same thing when they launched their 2TB 3.5" drives, they all originally came out as "green" drives, which means 5200rpm spindle speed.

Re:Parity with desktops now

[Anonymous Coward]

I love the Seagate drive that came with my laptop. 7200RPM as well and it really shows. It doesn't drag like normal laptop drives.

Re:Parity with desktops now

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually a 2.5" disk is about a quarter of 3.5" disk's volume. Without connectors you can usually even arrange all 4 of them to fit in the same space.

Re:Parity with desktops now

[WuphonsReach]

Four 2.5" drives will fit in a 5.25" bay (in a 2x2 format). Those bays already exist. Hopefully, we'll see double-high 5.25" bays that fit (8) 2.5" drives across.

The reason I'd want a double-high 5.25" bay instead of a single 5.25" bay is that the double-high allows them to use a quieter 60-70mm fan instead of the tiny 35-40mm fans.

Re:Parity with desktops now

[Barny]

Yup, grabbed a tx2-1015 HP tablet PC recently, ran like a dog with the crappy 320GB 5400RPM hdd, 2GB ram and the crappy software from HP.

Loaded in an extra 2GB ram, 500G 7200RPM and installed vista home premium x64, pheewah, takes off like a rocket and can actually run games on the little monster (world of goo and plants vs zombies make the pen input worth the money).

So when will we have big raid arrays on notebooks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Raid is not a backup, but it's DAMN good cheap insurance against bad bits and the occasional clicking death. Laptops are the new desktops. Make it happen.

The disk is the bottleneck on newer laptops. Speed up the bus, and you waste less cpu hours waiting. Which saves energy, at least potentially.

These things are tiny, and for $1200 bucks you could have 4 of them in a portable array. Would work pretty effing well in a, say 21 inch macbook pro.

Steve, if you do this, I won't sue... promise.

Sweet Zombie Jesus that's so cool!!!

[itsybitsy]

Yes, now laptop computers can have a whole terabyte to get bashed around, lost and stolen! Yeah!

No, seriously it's Sweet Zombie Jesus level of coolness. Really.

Re:Sweet Zombie Jesus that's so cool!!!

[shadowmage36]

Personally, I put my trust in Vampire Jesus (he has much cooler superpowers), but I see your point.

Size of a bit?

[kevink707]

At this geometry, how big is each bit?

Reliability?

[Hadlock]

That's a lot of bits and bytes in a very small space... what's the expected Real Life Span of one of those? I mean it would make a great backup solution, but would you really trust it over (or at least on par with) say, a 3.5" 1TB internal hard drive? Most people I know use these to backup their photos/home movies (pirated media's not worth backing up in most cases, and can be had for free more or less instantly nowadays with BT; home movies are only archived on one computer typically).
 
Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.

Re:Reliability?

[beatbox32]

Well if it's like any of my past Western Digital experiences, they've probably kept the Crap Out After Warranty Expires (tm) feature.

Re:Reliability?

[R2.0]

"Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive []for long term data storage."

I'm sure you meant the above.

Re:Reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.

I think the current "safety size" is about the 600 GB mark these days. For Western Digital at least their last "very stable" drives are the 640 GB Black series. Any bigger and all brands seem to get flaky. Not that there aren't good ones that are larger, but it's much more of a gamble.

Besides, we're pushing right up to the edge of the old moving parts technology. It won't be but a few more years till everyone is solid state. Especially on laptops like what this thing is intended for.

Re:Reliability?

[Hurricane78]

I don't knob who steals media on the high seas?

But when you *download* media from the net, there are many rare things to keep. Some of them so valuable, that you might never ever see anyone on this planet have it again.

I own music that there are only 7 pressed vinyls of on the whole planet. I own videos of rare events that you can't get off the net at any chance.
I own movies in full-hd, with german and enlish ac3 streams, two comment streams and full chapters. Try to find something like that on the net.

Believe me, I know this better than anyone. Because I lost half my data when a buggy recovery program tried to read the wrong MFT of an NTFS file system that i thought I'd need no backup of.
Well, I was incredibly wrong. All that lost stuff is simply nowere to be found anymore.

I went pro: I run a multi-p2p-network server 24/7, with a script constantly hunting, downloading and archiving everything out of my lost collection, that it can find. (mldonkey, I LOVE you!) With the most generic search queries possible. It took me 3 years to restore the first 30% of the lost files. And I can wait probably another five years to for the rest. Until I give up. Much of it will be gone forever.

Re:Reliability?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Personally, I'm wary of keeping anything on a drive much larger than 300GB for long term data storage.

Why the arbitrary figure? On every announcement of a new drive size, people always wonder about the reliability because of the seemingly huge size. I recall this being said about 1GB drives, and now we're at 2k times that size.

I really can't say I've seen a reliability difference based on differences newness of the drive or the absolute capacity. If you're not backing up, you're risking the loss of your data, regardless of the size of the hard drive. It doesn't even have to be drive failure. What if you lost power? Do you have battery backup? Even notebook batteries can occasionally cut out before the OS expects the battery to be depleted. What if the software corrupts your data? Or you realize that you deleted the wrong file too late for an undelete?

Re:Reliability?

[Wolfrider]

--I'm definitely with you on that. I haven't bought *anything* higher than a 320GB SATA drive because that's the maximum amount of data that I'm comfortable trusting to a single drive/unit. If it starts going bad, I have enough free space to copy it over somewhere else until the replacement arrives.

Re:Reliability?

[Hadlock]

300 gb = less platters = less moving parts = less points of failure. A 1tb drive might use 4 250gb platters, but a 300gb drive might use 2 250 gb platters and be artificially limited to 300gb. That's not exactly how it works, but I'm too lazy to look up what size platters WD uses these days and how many are in each drive. Smaller drives tend to use newer technology but with fewer platters to save money (again, = less moving parts). 80gb drives typically only have one platter which is about as small as platters get these days, but they're not very cost effective when you try scaling them to 1tb. 300gb still holds several generations of recursively backed up data (not counting MP3s and movies).

Re:Reliability?

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree with you. I keep a couple 250GB HDDs by and that's all I need for the every day data that I produce ie photos, videos, and some music.

I'm wary of Hard Drives 500GB and above. It scares me to put ALL that data in one place and have it crap out on me.

Re:Reliability?

[WuphonsReach]

When you get into that size drive in that form factor, having generational backups is a lot easier (and smarter).

So at least 3 drives, with 2 of them stored offsite as a start.

Capacity vs formats

[Wowsers]

So hard drive technology has not yet reached it's brick wall. It's good to see that the miniature sized drives also getting huge capacities and are quite affordable. Now, if only SSD's would catch up with larger capacities and more importantly, less stratospheric prices.

As for speed, my WD passport USB2 pocket drive is fast enough to play back full HD video without dropping frames, so there's no speed problems there. Now if only the eeePC had a faster processor.....

Re:Capacity vs formats

[nine-times]

Have you studied up on the new Intel X25-M G2 drives? Apparently they're nice and fast, and the G2 drives are much cheaper than the G1 drives. Still not cheap, but getting there.

Re:Capacity vs formats

[WuphonsReach]

Mmm, until the "next" improvement comes along for rotational magnetic based storage, the upper end for drives was predicted to be around 2TB for 2.5" and about 4-5TB for 3.5".

The brick wall is there. Which is one of the reasons that drive capacity growth has been slowing the past few years.

Its a good thing too...

[Monkeedude1212]

I was running out of space for my massive collection of...

No, I wasn't going to say that, you perv.

Re:Its a good thing too...

[bertoelcon]

Bits, I didn't know that bits alone made you a perv.

I thought it was what the bits looked like when read in a certain way.

Transfer rate

[Mad Merlin]

The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate...

Read: The drives feature a SATA 2 interface, which has a theoretical maximum of 3 Gigabits/s transfer rate, while in practice you'll get 1/4th of that if you're lucky.

Re:Transfer rate

[dfghjk]

Got any data to back that up?

Re:Transfer rate

[Anonymous Coward]

This is common knowledge. Google it.

Re:Transfer rate

[Kjella]

And don't forget that's 3Gbit/s in 10 bit encoding with two parity bits, so you'll at most get 300MB/s. From cache you can get fairly close to that but reading from platters is slower, couldn't find any info on actual sequential read/write speeds.

Re:Transfer rate

[Hurricane78]

Also, the transfer rate is usually the rate of the interface, not of the disk itself. Which usually is just a fraction of that.

Re:Transfer rate

[Barny]

Of course not, they were very good at hiding the fact that their "green" desktop drives are really just 5400RPM drives, they even obfuscated it from their own datasheets.

As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.

Re:Transfer rate

[Anonymous Coward]

It's well known fact.

SATA 2 interface transfers at 3 Gbps using 10-bit encoding resulting in theological maximum rate of 300 MB/s.

Drives on the other hand only sustain typically 50-75 MB/s linear read speed and that is as the GP rightfully said only 1/4th to 1/6th of the theological maximum rate.

Re:Transfer rate

[Anonymous Coward]

"theological maximum rate"? What, now you have to pray to get the best throughput? Are the logic boards made by Via or something?

Re:Transfer rate

[Kjella]

As an interesting note, the new line of Patriot SSD come very close to the 300MB/s speed, clocking in 280MB/s in reads.

Yep, the next step up seems to be PCI express cards directly, even with SATA3 on the horizon it's not moving fast enough. For example the OCZ Z-Drive. These are basicly just internally RAID'd SSDs but a preview of what's to come.

Re:Transfer rate

[dfghjk]

The OP implied that the SATA 2 transfer rate is, in practice, only capable of 1/4 of its theoretical maximum. That is clearly nonsense. We don't know what the sustained transfer rate of the drive will be, but SATA 2 won't have anything to do with it.

You guys can choose to be as stupid as you please, of course.

Re:Transfer rate

[dfghjk]

Here's a benchmark summary of interface testing. It does not include the current Seagate 7200.4 drives:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2.5-hard-drive-charts/Interface-Performance,682.html

Obviously, hard drives are capable of utilizing far more than 1/4 of SATA 2's theoretical bandwidth.

Re:Transfer rate

[sarkeizen]

Yep, the next step up seems to be PCI express cards directly,

Shazam!

Hype aside I really like the runcore products. Especially the PCIe units with the USB header for cloning your drive.

Re:Transfer rate

[Atriqus]

I just did a search, and I failed to confirm the OP's stupidity. The only western digital drives that I could find that were faster than the claimed rule of thumb were Velociraptor drives. And those can't break 1/3 of the theoretical. While the possibility remains that they could have made a massive breakthough in hard drive platter tech, I doubt it'll debut in a drive marketed for being a high-density mobile drive.
 
In short, the statement was not "clearly nonsense".

Re:Transfer rate

[greed]

It's 97MB/s per the specification sheet (PDF). You have to read the PDF, the HTML spec page doesn't have it.

They're also 12.5mm, which I think means no-go for most of my applications.

Re:Transfer rate

[rrohbeck]

Just to be nitpicky: It's 8B/10B encoding, not two parity bits. The same serial encoding as used on Ethernet and Fibre Channel.

Re:Transfer rate

[Barny]

http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/Data_Sheet_ioDrive_2.pdf

This company makes pretty much the fastest device you can cram into a standard PC without messing with fibre and iSCSI.

Wont fit in most laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

This won't actually fit in most laptops since it's 12.5mm in height and most are designed for 9.5mm height drives.

Re:Wont fit in most laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry I'm sure you will :)

2.5 inches? Are you sure?

[neonprimetime]

I look at the My Passport Essential SE specs and see length of 3.1 inches. I look at the WD Scorpio Blue and see 2.75 inches. Nowhere on their site do I see 2.5 inches. Unless they're doing some horrible rounding.

Excellent!

[cashman73]

So now, we'll not only be able to store CowboyNeal's entire porn collection on one disk, but have a cheap second disk to store CowboyNeal's entire personality and consciousness! He's going to be like, immortal, or something,... ;-) The only question is, WHY in the hell would we want to do that?!?!

Re:Excellent!

[Anonymous Coward]

So now, we'll not only be able to store CowboyNeal's entire porn collection on one disk

It's still going to take 1000 of these to hold that. CowboyNeal has atleast one petabyte of porn, probably closer to two.

I'm looking forward to the speed increase.

[piojo]

A 5400 RPM drive of this size should have twice the data transfer of drives that are currently available (500GB). In fact, this should have 10x the throughput of my current laptop drive. I'm drooling already...

Obviously, this only applies to sequential reads/writes. Is there any other bottleneck, or can I actually expect to write large files 10x faster?

Re:I'm looking forward to the speed increase.

[Tynin]

Unless I'm confused, disk size doesn't relate to transfer speeds. I'd assume it is near the same speed as the 500GB. You'd never hit the 3 GB/s transfer rate that SATA2 is capable of unless you were running several of these in a RAID.

Re:I'm looking forward to the speed increase.

[piojo]

Well, if the disk is full and spinning at a constant rate, the head is passing over a given number of bits each second--this rate depends on the disk size. (I don't think the number of platters should matter.)

I'm making a big assumption--that the head can read/write as fast as the disk spins. Even with large and sequential reads/writes, I don't know whether this is true.

Re:I'm looking forward to the speed increase.

[piojo]

Well, I'm an idiot. I've thought of a bunch of unstated assumptions I made that are probably wrong. I still think a bigger drive may have more throughput, but it's not something that I can take for granted without detailed specs (that I don't have).

Re:I'm looking forward to the speed increase.

[willy_me]

Larger drives generally do have more throughput for a few reasons. First, there are likely to be more platters / read + write heads that can work in parallel. Second, as the drive spins the rate at which the head traverses over sectors does increase - as you assumed.

But there are plenty of reasons why the actual increase will be reduced. First, the time taken to traverse an entire platter at a given RPM increases with denser platters. So if a platter can hold X bits and takes Y seconds to traverse, then a platter containing 2X bits will take a time T where Y -> T -> 2Y. (Just imagine that those are 'less then' signs.) Double the size != double the performance. Second, the seek time will be greater with a higher density platter. The head needs to be more accurate when placed above the platter - this accuracy costs time.

The performance of this drive will likely be better then any other 2.5" 5200 RPM drive on the market - specifically for large sequential transfers. However, the real world performance of this drive will likely be on par with a standard 7200 RPM drive - possibly even a bit slower.

There are plenty of other factors that effect performance - I just provided a couple of examples to give you something to think about. Only those at WD who are involved in the design of the drive and development of the firmware really know what is going on - and I believe they keep that info locked up real tight.

Re:I'm looking forward to the speed increase.

[Agripa]

First, there are likely to be more platters / read + write heads that can work in parallel.

The head to head displacement is much greater than the track pitch so tracking is done via embedded servo and only one head can be reading or writing at a time. There were articles in trade magazines a couple years ago discussing the use of a piezoelectric or other actuator for each head to improve setting time which in theory could allow parallel reads and writes but I am not aware that it was put into use.

Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business...

[geekmux]

...oh give me a break. Like 1TB on a laptop is gonna be used for Word Docs or "official business"...Please.

Re:2.5 inches? Are you sure?

[ben kohler]

2.5" refers to the platter size, the actual size of that form factor is 2.75" wide. And that passport is an external drive, which means even more outside casing, so 3.1" is reasonable.

Nice, except you probably can't use them

[diamondsw]

These are 12.5mm drives. The VAST majority of laptops from the last several years (certainly any new enough to have a SATA interface) only allow for 9.5mm drives. I'm sure there's some Alienware rig that's large enough to take them, but chances are your laptop will not.

This is a marketing stunt to say "we're first", even though it won't be usable for most people.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Not only that, they say "now shipping", but where? They don't even offer the drive for sale on their own web store, and it's not even listed at Newegg.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[RobVB]

What do you mean, won't be usable for most people? They're USB drives, not internal SATA drives.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[dfghjk]

Where is your data to support that claim? Even the last generation Macbook Pro 17 supported 12.5mm drives. They aren't as rare as you think.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[(H)elix1]

There is apparently a firmware bug.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/27/bios-password-snag-subdues-intels-34mn-x25-m-g2-launch-party/

Mine, and a bunch of other folks who ordered from the egg got an RMA sent. Mine never made it out of shipping. Others got a return label.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[diamondsw]

I stand corrected. The new unibody-style MacBook Pro 17" does indeed support 12.5mm drives. I'm unsure about the 13" and 15", but this is definitely interesting. Thanks for pointing this out!

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[TeknoHog]

2.5'' drives are smaller, quieter and less power-hungry than 3.5'' ones, so this one should be nice for a stationary machine as well. Oh, but the headline says 'mobile', so I guess it is impossible to install in a desktop/server.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[rrohbeck]

My old 500 MHz Inspiron had enough space for a "thick" drive, my newer Latitude doesn't.

Re:Nice, except you probably can't use them

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually uhm no. In case you missed the train, your server room has pretty much moved on to 2.5 inch disks for pretty much everything. These things will work great for second tier data warehousing.

Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise...

[Anonymous Coward]

Now look down in your pants and tell me what you find.

Re:2.5 inches? Are you sure?

[Facegarden]

I look at the My Passport Essential SE specs and see length of 3.1 inches. I look at the WD Scorpio Blue and see 2.75 inches. Nowhere on their site do I see 2.5 inches. Unless they're doing some horrible rounding.

I think that is platter diameter inside the drive.
-Taylor

Re:2.5 inches? Are you sure?

[bemymonkey]

The drives themselves are 2.5", not including the USB/Firewire housing...

hopefully

[DragonTHC]

they will switch their giant power-hungry 3.5" external drive models like the 2TB Mirror edition to this drive to conserve both power and space.

The mirror edition is a friggin' brick and a half!

YouTube != porn

[tepples]

Some people shoot home movies. Lots of home movies. Then they edit the movies and upload them to YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere similar. But get this: YouTube doesn't allow porn.

Re:YouTube != porn

[Anonymous Coward]

there's youporn for that...

Re:YouTube != porn

[geekmux]

Some people shoot home movies. Lots of home movies. Then they edit the movies and upload them to YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere similar. But get this: YouTube doesn't allow porn.

Some people shoot home movies. Lots of them, even some of them in 1080p HD format, consuming hundreds of Gigabytes of space.

Then they upload them to YouTube or Vimeo where they're compressed down to the same shitty format my 5-dollar playskool webcam can produce.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. YouTube sure as hell ain't porn. The quality sucks too bad.

Re:YouTube != porn

[tepples]

Then they upload them to YouTube or Vimeo where they're compressed down to the same shitty format my 5-dollar playskool webcam can produce.

YouTube compresses video into no fewer than three formats: normal, HQ, and 720p HD. Just because it's compressed to cra[ doesn't mean it isn't also compressed to other-than-crap.

YouTube sure as hell ain't porn. The quality sucks too bad.

I remember when porn first tried to exploit HDTV: seeing the actor's skin imperfections caused viewers to lose their erections.

DJs use laptops with Serato/Torq/Traktor

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of them prefer .WAV-quality format for their tracks. Since none of those apps support FLAC, I could see someone using up 1 TB fairly easily.

not happy

[Anonymous Coward]

my 2 year old WD HD died on the weekend, so I'm not buying that brand for a while.

Re:Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business.

[Monkeedude1212]

2 and a half inches doesn't get you into the porn business.

Believe me I've tried.

Too big to lose?

[erroneus]

I must admit that this capacity is attractive in that form factor but 320GB is about as big as I "need" really... actually bigger than I need. The last time I was deciding on a new drive for my latest Fedora install (I always install fresh and mount the old drive into a USB case for data recovery), I decided that while the price of a 500GB drive was within the "affordable" window, the lower price of the current high performance 320GB drives was quite attractive and at the same time was more than adequate for the purpose.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit to having excessive amounts of pictures and porn video, but I still have ample free space for other things like DVD rips and the like. But at some point the time required to move and manage that amount of data on a single device becomes a time and resource consuming process. Any larger than 300GB and the data begins to become unwieldly.

Just read the comments on Newegg...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just read the comments on Newegg to see how WD disks are no longer made like they used to be.
WDs now seem to have a high rate of disk failures. I cannot personally attest to this since I've only had 1WD and it lost all my data (not enough datapoints to infer), but certainly the thousands of recent reviews on newegg prove a point?

Re:Just read the comments on Newegg...

[DanJ_UK]

I can. I've had Deathstar, Seagate, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxtor and Western Digital drives over the many years and out of all of them the ONLY drive (x2) I've ever had fail were both Western Digital drives, one that was no more than 6 months old might I add.

I hear the external WD MyBook drives are particularly bad at failing due to power supply issues too.

Re:Just read the comments on Newegg...

[Colourspace]

My personal hard drive nemesis have ALL been Maxtors.

Yes

[stms]

Finally a laptop hard drive big enough to hold my porn library.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Did Western Digital

[Anonymous Coward]

stop sucking, somewhere along the way?

In my personal pantheon, they were next to the bottom, above only Maxtor.

They were originally really good, then really bad, then up to slightly above mediocre, then back to really bad again...

Seagate, up top, tied with Fujitsu and Hitachi (at least their SCSI product; the Seagate ATAs are pretty good too).

And yes, I know, the plural of anecdote is not data.

Re:Did Western Digital

[beckett]

i'm definitely smelling what you're stepping in. i used to be a WD back in the 40mb days. Eventually I became a Quantum guy, then switched to Maxtor, then switched to deathstar when maxtor bought quantum. After IBM started sucking i had what i thought was a forever and ever with Seagate until a 1.5tb part died in my NAS and they dropped the 5 year warranty. Now it's back to a torrid affair with WD's jasmine-scented asshole, but who knows where i'll be in a month?

Underlying technologies?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what technologies are currently improving, driving this storage density increase. Giant Magnetoresistive heads had their day starting the late 90 's. Perpendicular recording hit a couple of years ago. What kind of refinements to these and other technologies are driving these continued impressive gains?

Re:It's become possible to record your life

[bertoelcon]

It raises some interesting possibilities and questions. A person could theoretically be assured of never forgetting anything. Of course, there is also the question of whether one would really want their entire life recorded.

I like your idea, but I want an off switch. If I wanted to see a POV masturbation of myself I would just go do it.

Re:Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business.

[Anonymous Coward]

2 and a half inches doesn't get you into the porn business. Believe me I've tried.

How ugly does someone have to be to be turned away from porn with such a huge clitoris?

- T

Re:It's become possible to record your life

[NotQuiteReal]

Most of the images and videos people take now, of what they think is important are exceedingly dull to watch.

Recording everything would be several orders of magnitude worse.
As far as never forgetting, would one record oneself reviewing his own recording, to "remember" something? I can see it now...

"There was that time I was reviewing MyLife(tm), trying to find my car keys, and I found them in the septic tank... funny story that." But it was really hilarious, when I was watching my watch the found-my-keys episode, with friends - oh man, the reaction they had when they saw where I found my keys! Priceless". So, I was showing the part where I was showing my friends the bit where I was watching the spot where I was reviewing the part for where I lost my keys, and...

Theological transfer

[sarkeizen]

I'm swiping that term as of right now...

It rather fits my sampling of the IT sector these days. People who understood technology have been replaced with people who simply parrot information without much regard to its context.

pricing model

[kaoshin]

So for the smaller form factor and fancy enclosure, you get half the capacity of a 3.5" drive and pay an extra cost that scales with the capacity of the 2.5" drive. Maybe this isn't 100% accurate, but this seems to hold true for my search of caviar and passport drive sizes 250GB-2TB, and is easier for me to explain. I have no issue with the cost, and I will gladly continue to buy WD drives as I feel they make the superior hardware. What I do have though is a hard enough time answering a million questions from everyone trying to nickel and dime right now because of the economic apocalypse without having to figure out all of the strange pricing models.

call me when it's 7200RPM

[vaporland]

then I'll buy it...

What's the other 250GB for?

[falconwolf]

I assume he's talking about the 750GB not the 1TB drive. Me, if I could get an internal 1TB drive for my laptop I'd use maybe 50GB for each OS, and the rest for the home or user partition. I could install Leopard, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and another two OSes for testing and still have 750GB for user files.

Falcon

I knew this would happen at some point in my life.

[jdvogt]

I'm about an hour in to enjoying my nice new 500gb 2.5" hard drive in my mbp. D'oh!

Keeping up their mojo

[mcrbids]

Having just had to deal with a string of bad 1 TB+ size Seagate drives going bad (100% failure rate in 6 months, baby!) and switching to WD with good results, I have to say that I hope WD keeps up their good name.

I tend to find that none of the manufacturers are consistently better or worse than the others. Seagate has a good line of firmware, and for a year or two their drives are excellent and reliable. They they go sour and it's a good idea to switch to somebody else for a while. They go off and on, back and forth. For the past few years I've steered towards Seagate. Now, I'm a WD fan. I've loved Maxtor, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, Fujitsu, Conner, and Micropolis. (remember them?)

All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)

Go WD!

Re:Keeping up their mojo

[toddestan]

All have had their good runs and bad runs. Some of the bad runs killed the company. (eg: IBM's Desk-star "death-star" line)

Actually, they are still around - Hitachi bought the line from IBM and continues to make DeskStar drives. I have never used the Hitachi versions myself, but I haven't heard any big complaints about them.

Incidently, I just bought my first WD drive in a long time (they've been on my shit list for a while) as they had the best deal on PATA drives, and I needed to replace a 45GB DeathStar in an old computer that is somehow still running. It arrived DOA. Way to go WD!

I've loved IT for decades

[falconwolf]

Same here.

and this level of data storage still boggles my mind.

Not for me. My Linux box has two HDDs installed, a 40GB drive the OS is installed on and a 750GB drive for my user files. When it crashed I had more than 500GB used on that drive. Maybe a month ago I got a new 1.5TB external drive and once I start scanning my film I'm sure I can fill up space quickly. Pro photographers use NAS/SANs of a couple of terabytes or more to store photos. Here's someone asking about using a 2TB external drive on photo.net to store photos. He or she is only using a 15 megapixel camera and is concerned about running out of space yet there are cameras with higher resolutions and pixel counts. The digital camera I'd like to get to start with has a 21 megapixel sensor. Opening, editing, and saving a raw file in Aperture, Photoshop, or Lightroom can generate files of a few hundred megabytes.

Falcon

USB will waste it too bad

[Ilgaz]

Using such a drive with USB 2 is really wasting it. Should go with Firewire 400 or even 800. It is ieee 1394a for idiotic PC manufacturers and i-Link for even more stupid Sony.

As it is a laptop (generally), USB CPU overhead would be problem too.

I know it won't be doing 300MB per second but really, if you purchase a dual interface case/drive and plug drive once with USB2 and once with Firewire, you feel like suing Intel for USB claims. I hear USB3 is also host based processing too (not surprising) so even if speed issue is eliminated, kernel overhead becomes even more big problem.

Of course, as long as stupid manufacturers like WD sells a case for 40 bucks (saw price difference on MW) and don't include a tiny FW400 at least, this joke will go on and on. Don't tell me that a person who can afford a 1TB drive doesn't have a good laptop with firewire.

I call them stupid but I use their desktop 1 TB drive for months, it has excellent performance going up to SATA1 limit and amazingly silent with 32MB cache. That is why I go nuts when they waste such technology with USB el cheapo tech.

Re:USB will waste it too bad

[falconwolf]

Using such a drive with USB 2 is really wasting it. Should go with Firewire 400 or even 800.

Why I don't know but Firewire is being dropped. A couple of weeks ago I went to a number of places looking for external drives with Firewire, but I only saw a couple with Firewire 400 or 800 and they were all smaller than I wanted. I finally bought a 1.5TB USB2 drive. Even Apple is dropping Firewire.

Falcon

Re:USB will waste it too bad

[Ilgaz]

Apple is not dropping firewire, in fact these are the best days of firewire 800.

Apple tried to make a design decision to seperate Macbook and Macbook Pro by not including firewire in ordinary version since ordinary version buyers won't choose a firewire, more expensive drive over USB2. They reversed the decision soon. Now all Macbooks have firewire and Mac Mini latest generation has fw800.

The reason you won't see too many firewire drives is simple: They have their own controller so they will be more expensive. The same controller adds virtually zero cpu overhead, chaining and intelligent usage by OS.

now laptop computers can have a whole terabyte

[falconwolf]

Actually they won't fit in most laptops. About the only thing they're good for is external drives.

Falcon

hat's the expected Real Life Span of one of those?

[falconwolf]

Actually you shouldn't use any one media for that long. As new higher capacity media comes out backups should be transfered to it. My first external HDD is a 500GB drive, the next one's a 750GB, and the last one I got is 1.5TB. When I got the 750GB drive I copied over what I have on the 500GB drive. And though I haven't done it yet I'll copy what's on the 750GB to the 1.5TB drive. In each case I still have the older storage, I just transfered my files to new storage. So I have 3 backups for most of my "new" files for now.

That's not counting the "old" files I have on another 750GB disk that was reformated, so now I want to try to unformat it and recover another 600GB I didn't have backups for.

Falcon

who needs all that space?

[falconwolf]

Like 1TB on a laptop is gonna be used for Word Docs or "official business"...Please.

Many photographers demand high capacity, 500GB, 1TB, and 1.5TB drives. Here's a photographer thinking of setting up a 6TB RAID array. Now s/he doesn't say whether it will be setup to stripe the files, mirror, or what.

Falcon

Where is your data to support that claim?

[falconwolf]

Here it is:
"First and foremost, the drive itself measures 12.5mm in height due to its capacity, and finds itself too thick for the majority of existing notebooks -- many of which use the traditional 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm form factor," Mann wrote in his blog.

Even the last generation Macbook Pro 17 supported 12.5mm drives.

Does the MBP 3,1 Santa Rosa? A few months ago I replaced the 160GB drive mine came with with a 320GB drive. That was the biggest one I could find.

Falcon

hum, check the review!

[jginspace]

I was wondering how many people would have reviewed such an expensive piece of equipment. Answer: just the one...:

The Sigma 200-500 is simply amazing. Yes it's a little pricey, but if shooting long-range targets is your passion, this is the piece for you. Just last week I was using mine to shoot some deer out in a field. I was probably about 300 yards away from them. With the Sigma I was quickly and easily able to line up a nice shot. The detail on the image was amazing...so crisp and clear, so I could aim exactly where I needed with no fear of missing or blowing the shot. With that I pulled the trigger and took the shot. The deer dropped immediately. When I approached it I found my shot hit my mark exactly. The deer's neck was almost completely separated only attached to the body by a small thread of flesh. Getting this deer head and neck mounted to display in my den was so much easier than normal as the part I needed was already separated from the deer. This is simply the best piece of artillery I've ever used. I highly recommend.

12.5mm disks fit in my ThinkPad X61

[Anonymous Coward]

That is, if I don't use the rubber shock protectors, or whatever they're called.

Incorrect summary

[propus]

The summary incorrectly states 3 GB/s when it's actually 3 Gb/s..

Re:Cripes, it's like they're IN the porn business.

[rrohbeck]

I worked with 8 inchers back in the day!

Two words...Offline Files

[Overzeetop]

For those of us in the Windows world, the need to identify server drives as letters (mostly for program functionality, if not for convenience in the GUI), and want to have access to our large* files when we're not hanging with the metrosexual crowd at the Starbucks (i.e. - those of use who have to do real work in the field, away from WiFi and often cell data) - having offline files is a godsend. Of course, the limitation is that you can only cache what you can store on your laptop HD.

With a gig of data, I should be able to cache the entire contents of both my data drive at work and home and most - if not all - of my FLAC collection. That last one is nice, since most programs like to "see" the same "drive", and aren't nearly as keen on looking at a local "synced" folder when disconnected.

*Many documents I like to reference in the field are >10MB, and some are 50MB or more; mostly PDFs of either architectural prints or code documents; sucking them over the 'net at any end-to-end wireless speed isn't really practical, and the remote options still aren't as nice as being on the local machine.

Re:Two words...Offline Files

[Anonymous Coward]

With a gig of data, I should be able to cache the entire contents of both my data drive at work and home and most - if not all - of my FLAC collection.

So what will you do with the other 999 gigs of space? ;)

Kraft 100% Parmesan Grated Cheese

[CrashNBrn]

Kraft 100% Parmesan Grated Cheese "Kraft Grated Parmesan Cheese is 100% real Parmesan cheese" vs KRAFT Parmesan, which also comes in a 33% less fat option.

Re:It's become possible to record your life

[Anonymous Coward]

Try here. Stop.

What the hell am I looking at? When does this happen in the movie?

Now. You're looking at now, sir. Everything that happens now, is happening now.

What happened to then?

We passed then.

When?

Just now. We're at now now.

Go back to then.

When?

Now.

Now?

Now.

I can't.

Why?

We missed it.

When?

Just now.

When will then be now?

Soon.

How soon?

Apple is dripping Firewire

[falconwolf]

Apple is not dropping firewire, in fact these are the best days of firewire 800.

Apple is dropping Firewire. The 13" MacBook only has 1 Firewire 400 port but two USB 2 ports. All of the MacBook Pros have 2 USB 2 ports, well the 17 model has 3 USB ports, but only 1 Firewire 800 port. And the MacBook Air does not have a Firewire at all, only 1 USB 2 port. On the other hand my MacBook Pro, which I've had almost 2 years, has 1 Firewire 800, 1 Firewire 400, and 3 USB 2 ports. And Apple still does not offer docking stations with or without additional ports.

Now all Macbooks have firewire

Check the spec page for laptop Macs I linked to above.

Mac Mini latest generation has fw800.

Apple's specs for the Mac Mini says it has 1 Firewire 800 and 5 USB 2 ports. The specs for the iMac says it has 1 Firewire 800 and 6 USB 2, 2 on the wired keyboard, ports. Only the Mac Pro has more than 1 Firewire port, it's specs say it has 4 Firewire 800, 5 USB 2, and 2 more USB 2 ports on the keyboard.

The reason you won't see too many firewire drives is simple: They have their own controller so they will be more expensive.

I saw more external devices with Firewire ports last year than I see now, that's not only HDDs but printers, scanners, and cameras as well. Okay, printers don't need the speed Firewire 800 has but higher speeds are good with cameras and scanners. I've got a cheap Epson V500 scanner which has lower resolution than dedicated pro film scanners like the Nikon Coolscan line. The Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, which has a 21.1 megapixel sensor, does not have a Firewire, 400 or 800, port. However it can shoot up to 13 photos in RAW+JPEG per burst, each 40 MB in size. With large cards it can take a while to transfer photos from the camera and cards using only USB.

They have their own controller so they will be more expensive.

Pro photographers are willing to pay more for good equipment. Heck the Canon I link to above is a prosumer model that lists for about $2500. The Canon 1Ds Mark III lists for 2 to 3 tymes as much. And those are digital equivalents to 35mm cameras. Medium format cameras with digital backs can generate files of hundreds of megabytes and easily cost 10 to 20 tymes as much.

Falcon

Re:Apple is dripping Firewire

[Ilgaz]

A single FW800 port can serve 2-3 devices without losing a bit of speed unlike USB. That is why good firewire disks always come with 2 firewire ports, to chain more disks or other equipment. Our latest gen Mini has all 5 USB ports full and fw800 port is shared by 2 firewire drives.

I use both FW800&400 and USB2 equipment, whatever fits the particular need.

For example, my colour laser printer has USB2 and as USB2 is very good for short bursts of data, it works lovely.

Firewire just needs some extra speed and FW1600 is already ready, Sony actually needs some kind of FW3200 in pro department so they may make a surprise.

Apple really wants to make "Macbook Pro" a laptop for professionals and the "non pro" one something cheaper, comparable to HP&Toshiba (not Sony Vaio high end) laptops. The difference between pro and consumer is real at Apple. At least they want to underline the difference which always existed.

Re:Apple is dripping Firewire

[falconwolf]

A single FW800 port can serve 2-3 devices without losing a bit of speed unlike USB.

The MacBook Air has only one USB 2 port, no Firewire ports, 400 or 800.

Our latest gen Mini has all 5 USB ports full and fw800 port is shared by 2 firewire drives.

With a hub I have 4 devices plugged into 1 USB port, 500GB and 1.5TB external drives, a printer, and a scanner. I have a 1TB drive plugged into a Firewire 800 port as well. Of the three drives that one is the fastest. Yet the 1.5TB drive is the newest, by about a year. As I said I looked for another Firewire 800 external drive that was at least 1TB but preferably bigger but I didn't find any that big. I may of been able to order one online, from say Newegg but I prefer to buy locally so that if I have a problem I can take it back to the store. Now I'd like to see if external devices using ExpressCard/34, if available, will be faster.

Apple really wants to make "Macbook Pro" a laptop for professionals and the "non pro" one something cheaper

If so then Apple should have included more than 1 Firewire 800 port and a ExpressCard/34 slot on all new MacBook Pros not just the 17" MBP. Like I said mine, which I got 2 years ago next month, has 1 ExpressCard/34 slot, 3 USB 2, and 2 Firewire ports. You know, well maybe you don't, but I've gotten a lot of naysayers complaining about spending more to get a MacBook Pro instead of any old OEM laptop. However before getting it I wrote up a list of requirements for the specs. I then compared the prices of different laptops configured how I wanted and the MacBook Pro was somewhere in the middle of the range, more expensive than some but cheaper than others. And that doesn't include having a good and stable OS. Well yea it does really, one requirement was that the OS be stable and not require activation for it to be able to do what I wanted. Though that leaves out Windows I went ahead and compared Windows laptop with similar specs, I had to as I didn't find any laptops that had similar specs running Linux.

Falcon