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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."
to 1 TB since you can put 2.5" hard drives in there.
Finally: Done.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
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.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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.
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?!?!
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.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
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.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Some of us don't enjoy having our data spread out all over the place on multiple systems with multiple drives. I don't want to have to worry about if I'm going to want some file while I'm traveling, so why not just take everything? That's what these allow people to do.
Highest quality 1080p is said to consume 1GB/minute.
Is that right? I thought completely uncompressed 1080p was supposed to be something like 3Gbps. Looking at the wikipedia:
The movie industry has embraced 1080p24 as a digital mastering format in both native 24p form and in 24PsF form.... For live broadcast applications, a high-definition progressive scan format operating at 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second is currently being evaluated... as it has doubled the data rate of current 50 or 60 fields interlaced 1920 Ã-- 1080 from 1.485 Gbit/s to nominally 3 Gbit/s.
Ok, so it looks like that's a future standard. But 1920x1080 * 3 channels * 8 bits per channel * 24 frames per second = about 1.2Gbps, right? I don't know if the cameras have good compression built in, but 1GB/minute still sounds low to me. Is my math wrong?
Anyway, point taken. There's a use for compact large-capacity hard drives.
2 and a half inches doesn't get you into the porn business.
Believe me I've tried.
3 Gbps = uncompressed 1080p60 video, used for high-end interconnects and such. Recordings are almost always made compressed, even in professional cameras. AVCHD has a maximum of 24 Mbps = 180MB/minute, there's probably more exotic format for huge movie production cameras but even cameras in the 2000$-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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.