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High Density Storage
Charlie Engasser wrote
in to tell us about 216 gigabytes
hard drives over at Seagate. Uses "Optically Assisted
Winchester" (OAW), which "augments traditional magnetic read/write
techniques with a laser to allow positioning so precise that
it can store over 100,000 tracks across one inch of drive
surface". I guess it just means in a few years we'll be
able to do with video what we do today with sound.
From this page.
The fact that the disk the data is crammed so tightly may actually improve the seek rate.. if the drives defragged of course ;p
less distance for the head to travel.
:)
VR, Artificial Life, and ultimately,
Mind Uploads. These things can expand
indefinitely to fill any amount of space,
power and bandwidth. They will change
our species beyond recognition. Coming?
Crap idea, putting the FAT in h/w as the above poster said. My idea would be along the lines of automatic backup of data... instead of a file being overwritten when saved, the file system would just create a new version of the file, save to that, mark the old one as the backup, mark the old backup as the grandfather backup, delete the old grandfather backup. So one file requires 3 times as much storage space. If the backups were kept on different platters in the HD, than when one platter gets munged, you hopefully could recover from the backup platters. On the other hand.... putting all your eggs into one backet is a bad thing. Forget I wrote the above really...
Wouldn't that be what a good journaling disk format would be good for?
Why bother MP3 encoding a song when you have that much space? So you'll probably store your favorite episodes of your favorite TV show and dozens of CD's and still have room left over.
:-)
Pretty soon we'll have terabyte drives and will be storing full sensory data
I expect that within 2 years, we will have computers more powerful than we know what to do
with -- most of our current programs simply do not use the available CPU resources already, and
the same will happen with the storage and bandwidth. At that point, some totally new paragidm
will spring up -- for nature abhors a vacuum. We will foigure out a Totally New Thing to do with
our computers.
Yes, Microsoft is working on it as we speak.. Windows2000. Should be ready by 2002.
"and a patterned polycarbonate plastic disc"
based on how hot my drives get now, I am not so
sure I want a plastic disc in my drives.
i remember that rom extension board, it had 5 programs including a word processor burnt into ron
everything id need
The point was that "normal" users don't have a need for that much space. Personally the thought of all those boring/annoying home videos being edited on a home computer scares me. Desktop publishing on home machines has resulted in some of the worst looking documents ever; Home video editing could bring the same to video *shudders*.
Professionals will always need more, home users won't.
Personally, I think we've long since surpassed the amount of computing power that we would know what to do with. Why else would we have screen savers? :-)
Why, to save screens, of course. :) Besides, display hacks date back to the age of line printers; they aren't a new invention.
Seriously, the reason we think "no one would need a computer that beefy" is because the interesting applications today are all networked apps, and it's bandwidth rather than computrons that is the limiting factor. A Xeon won't let you surf the Web any faster than a 486, much to Intel's dismay.
However, expect the bottleneck to shift back to the client in the next few years, as broadband stops being hype and starts becoming reality, and as applications like natural-language processing and speech recognition start landing on desktops in a big way. Then you'll start hearing complaints about how wimpy and utterly insufficient for any real work that gigahertz Alpha is.
(I suffered a boggle a couple of months back. I saw a demonstration of IBM's ViaVoice, and saw just how much of a resource pig it was. I also realized that this is an application that belongs on the clients (anyone who has seen my aunt type will know why), and it requires more horsepower than all but the biggest servers could ever need. Fat clients and thin servers -- who'da thunk?)
That is actually an LSL drive. They didn't work, now they do (after a lot more development). And LSLs are pretty cool:)
I would really love DLT and the new IBM square tape (Ultrium?) to come down in drive price. I cannot see backing up to unreliable media (CD-Rs) and my favorite long-term storage (MO) is not a) cheap enough or b)high density enough for my budget. I cannot see not backing up at all -- I have been doing this too damned long professionally. Christ -- I want ADSM for Linux and would pay for it. But backing up 200GB ...
.sig should be "Tape: 3D storage today!"
LVD DLTs are about $3800 if you can get a deal, normally $1000+ more if you can't. That is out of my price range for now. The tapes aren't too pricey, so I wouldn't even mind the tapes needed to back up multiple drives (Oh -- you didn't think that I would run an important drive unmirrored, did you?). But the drive price is an impediment.
I am still using (and am quite happy with) my IDE TR4. Last IDE device, always can do 2.5GB in a little over an hour, normally will do just over 8GB per tape. It cost me $140. I would love a $600 100GB (raw) backup solution. I don't see how you can have one (big disk) without the other (big tape). Unless you are a kiddie or a pr0n luser or something similar.
Perhaps my
And since the DVD-R burners have already dropped from USD$16K to USD$5K, I expect them to be affordable to the masses within a 5 years. There's still a Philips CDD521 2X CDR burner (size of a large VCR) at out company that cost USD$10K back in 1991.
Assuming you don't want to partition the drive into 27 8GB partitions and want one vastly huge drive, what filesystem can do this? Certainly not ext2, or FAT16 or even FAT32. UDF maybe (used by DVDs), but that's not really suited to heavy read-write use. We need ext3 now and it should be able to handle 10e15 byte drives to allow for future expansion.
I think I can now travel.
'nuff said.
Cool, but I'm not running IRIX. Linux needs a successor to ext2.
Sounds vaguely like VMS . . .
42? Hah! Try 216 . . .
1. Dont use a Microsoft OS, there are plenty of good OS's out there that have a decent File System like Solaris's UFS.
2. I'am not sure about seek time, but they say they use a laser instead, so maybe its pretty quick.
3. Again Defrag'in seems to be a Microsoft problem
Solaris UFS runs FSFLUSH every 30 seconds to keep the drive unfragmented.
4. Seems to be a Microsoft and Linux problem, a good journaling file system like on Solaris and AIX, can recover from a crash very very quickly.
5. Formats only have to be done once, and usually not much afterwards. I formatted a 9.1 gig Ultra2 LVD harddrive a few days ago, only took about 20 mins.
Professionals will always need more, home users will always need more guidance.
What are the performance specs on this drive?
Well, In 1975 I got to play with one of the "new" Altair computers, with a front panel. Built a cassette interface for it so we could load Altair BASIC. Ah, the memories.
In Liberty,
Rene S. Hollan
(Posting anon. with IE (Oh, the Horror, the HORROR!))
36 gigabytes on a two-sided disc, eh? Think M$ will make these a requirement to install Windows 2000?
The article mentioned a "two stage" head positioning process where the head is aligned with the regular moter mechanism, then precisely algined with a combination of strands of fiber and mirrors. This all sounds like it adds a lot of complexity to the seek process, and possibly a few milliseconds to the seek time. Does anybody have the real specs on this yet? Is it even a real product yet (the article was a little vague)?
I read the internet for the articles.
Unfortunatly size is not the problem on those terabyte servers, seek time is. I know of one company that buys 18GB drives and only uses 2GB of those just to keep the number of spindles high. They constantly complain that no drive manufacturer is using these high density technologies to build smaller faster cheaper drives, but rather to build big expensive drives.
EIDE is not going to be able to handle 100MB of access a second in random 4k blocks across all of the drives.
I read the internet for the articles.
Well, I know several people today who have over 15 GB of 128kbps mp3s. If they were to switch from mp3 to a full-Cd-quality lossless compression (usually compresses around 50%), that same mp3 collection would now take over 75 GB. Leave the remaining 150+ GB for digital video editing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I wonder how long it will take to fsck this things after a system crash. Probably have time to get a coffee, go to the movies (marathon) and then take a 2 week vacation before its done....
Posted by TikTac:
If you did that you couldn't have nifty optimizations of file structure, including the nifty ext2 or hpfs file systems. There's also a new file-system out there that looked pretty cool (you can undo changes to files... nifty!) that would be broken too.
Posted by d106ene5:
The price of storage for most of us is rapidly declining. The typical 6-9 GB that most users need is soon going to be going for next to nothing.
Of course, then we'll need more!
Posted by mathman100@geocities.com:
if you're running linux, you wouldn't have a defrag problem, and since it rarely crashes, you wouldn't have to go through all that junk that most OSs go through to scan the drives for errors. The only case i can think of would be the power going out, and if you have a backup power supply you should have a sufficent amout of time to restart.
>This is cool. I wonder if they will make this in a removeable drive?
Any non-laptop drive can be removable. Just get a removable hard drive bay from any of the myriad sources, for example computergate.com. I do that with my Linux drive -- it makes sure my Windows partition doesn't mess with it!
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Well, no, I don't really think M$ alone will do that. We can al count on The Open Group to come up with X11R7, Motif 3.0, and CDE 3.0 to eat up availale hard disk space. And just so that the Open Source movement isn't left behind in the features race, GNOME 2.0 and KDE 3 to complement our selection. :op
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
As someone commented below, having more HDs increases performance. So instead of having one mumbo jumbo HD, have two, or three, or whatever you want. Then run fsck/badblocks/defrag in parallel (fsck can do this on its own, ;Windoze loses on this count :).
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
I remember the day I heard about something called a CD that would have 650 Megabytes on it! Ha Ha I thought you could never use that much. Never thought you would be able to write to one. Now I'm pissed because it takes so many to back my drive up to.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
This reminds me that the first hard-drive had a whopping 5 MB of storage and was the size of two large refrigerators...
Yup, right here.. TRS-80 Model I with 16k and Level II Basic. I've still got the beast in a public storage facility.. all of the cassette tapes for it have long since turned to dust, but you can find large archives of TRS-80 software on the net that you can use in an emulator.. some of the emulators even have the ability to write out the programs to tape using a SoundBlaster.
Gotta love that 500 baud tape squeal. ;-)
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture, this object was over here, that thing was blue, etc. It's lossy compression with the quality cranked way down. Our memory is more about concept mapping (assembling a 'picture' of a party by remembering who was there and what they wore and what was talked about) than about digitizing every detail. 2.5GB? I believe it.
I've heard that people who take "memory booster" courses eventually have to learn how to intentionally forget things, or else they have difficulty remembering new things.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
You need to upgrade your imagination. Don't think about textual information or programs. That stuff may grow, but not so much. Think about *video*, recordings of your videophonecalls, recordings of your favorite tv shows and movies. What do you think comes after collecting mp3's? Collecting music videos, of course.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
I've got it. The next big space eating improvement:
video for everything.
Your desktop background suddenly becomes a nice five minute long video loop of some waterfall, buttons sparkle prettily, nothing on your screen will EVER HOLD STILL! Thankfully, there will always be a command line.
Huge amounts of data, and it'll suck up all that "extra" CPU power too.
It'll be an Attention Deficiet Disorder nightmare.
--Mark
Put it this way: whatever sort of lossy compression is going on, you have to be storing enough visual information to do some pretty amazing pattern recognition. You can recognize objects based on very small visual clues: you can distinguish similar-looking people's faces by small differences in their eyebrows, cheekbones, noses, etc., including people that you've just met and ones that you haven't seen in years. There are a lot of gold-colored 1997 Toyota Corollas on the road (look around), yet, even, when one is parked right next to me, I can usually tell at a glance which one is mine, probably by almost-subliminally noting differences in trim, scratches on the fender, seat covers, etc. This process has got to involve a lot more than 100 bits per second.
The thing about counting yes/no questions probably means that they were trying to determine hoe many bits it takes to identify a concept, and hence how big the "address space" of concepts is, but this seems pretty ridiculous. The "space" of things that someone might pick in a game of "20 Questions" is surely a tiny portion of that of all human thought. The 100-baud figure has got to be based on the rate of speech, which is far from being our fastest, let alone our only, "I/O device". That said, I do believe in the concept of "mind uploads", and it might even be possible in our lifetime, but not with Jaz disks.
Back to how to fill a 200GB drive: a (probably almost) TV-quality music video in MPEG 1 format is about 40MB, or about 10 MB/minute, or about the same size as uncompressed CD audio. DV format would be even better. Passing those around on the net like mp3s would be kind of prohibitive, but they could be distributed on CDs or DVDs. I could definitely see having a big collection, which would slurp up the disk space pretty fast.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Print that comment out and save it. Read it again in 3 years and see how silly it seems. I'm not being rude here, but if there is disk space, it will be used. It'll probably mean that people just won't ever delete files. More than likely it will be a sys-admins nightmare ;)
but what about when computing power and electronic devices are so good that ... 3D goggles are at a resolution higher than normal vision (and at a refresh high enough), artificial sound can simulate any normal sound and CPUs can run QuakeXX at so many frames per second that it's not funny? it's Malthus' problem, in another sense. one progression is geometric, the other arithmetic (or stagnant).
Once the computers that reside on most people's desktops are fast enough, and have enough/fast enough storage, the speach recognition that you will be able to do will be amazing. Products like NaturallySpeaking aren't using all of the technology/techniques that they could be just because the computers that would be required, wouldn't be practical. Here at CMU they've been doing speech recognition since the 70's, and there are currently projects in the works that blow away everything currently on the market... But they probably won't run on your computer.
Would you do it for some scoobie crack?
Get in to digital video editing. it's not all that new, and it will use up your 11G drive very, very quickly.
200Gig is a heck of a lot of MP3 or Word files, but it's really not all that much video.
MiniDV is 9 minutes per 2GB, so it takes even more space. So if you're determined to use up all the space, start by getting a new digital video camera ...
D
----
216 GB would store 365 hours of UNCOMPRESSED CD quality audio and make MP3 obsolete as a storage format.
... obsolete!
Combine that with a backbone built around the new 1.6TB network technology, and MP3 becomes obsolete as a transmission format.
Which makes MP3
ugh... can you imagine good old fsck saying
..
.. you'd scream :D
.. that's AWFUL..
:)
'/dev/hda1 has reached maxmimal mount count'
just when you want to use ya computer quickly?
and don't mention windows sodding scan-shit
Lovely to have the storage though.. and I don't believe the 'you could never use it all' lines.. you ALWAYS do
Delphis
That's where it's all going to go, same as always. Already games are being shipped on multiple CDs or on DVD. This technology ensures you can go on installing them to your hard drive and enjoying the benefits of low seek rates and high retrieval speeds for all those MBs of data modern games throw about.
:)
Anyway, even if the common user doesn't have a use for 216GB, it'll put downward pressure on the price of 108GB drives, and that has to be a good thing
--
Don't imitate. Enervate.
That new Micros~1 help system.
You know, the one with 30fps, truecolor video clips and CD quality SurroundSound renderings of a Gerraud (sp) shaded, texture mapped digital assistant.
Remember back in the days when a harddisk was a commodity/expensive option? My XT had two 20MB drives - I was hot sh!t. I ran WP off of a floppy and was quite content.
What's the size of a full install of MS-Word2k?? 100MB? Giv'em ample resources, and the kids in Redmond will run out of them.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
MP3 archive? Everyone will have one.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Movies, Babylon 5 episodes, Hogan's Heroes episodes, etc. If you're like me, you have a bunch of videotapes. Point and click is easier than finding and loading a tape. Random access is nifty too. Think of all the neato things that could be done with a database and an index into a collection. Type "Schultz tunnel collapse" and click on "I'm feeling lucky" -- a second later computer starts playing clip of him walking in the compound and suddenly falling into a hole created by a collapsed tunnel. Run a voice recognition scanner to build text database of everything said. Now you can do dialog searches or view a montage of clips comprising every single time that Klink was threatened with being sent to the Russian front. Oh, to have them all at my fingertips with instant random access! That would be wonderful!
Alas, since hard disks aren't forever, I would of course have to back that stuff up, so the tape manufacturers are necessarily out of business...
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Fear of death?!? The bloat (or rather, the economy of scale created by the bloat) is absolutely joyous to exploit! If Win2004 uses 200 Gig, then that means millions of people will need 200 Gig hard disks. That means they will eventually get cheap. You'll be able to buy storage at a dollar per Gig whether you run a bloated system or an efficient one.
My Amiga isn't complaining about her huge, fast, and inexpensive disks. :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Most of your comments (cluster waste, frag, scandisk/fsck, formatting) are addressable by using/inventing better filesystems. But as for the seek time, I have a goofy idea: Use an "old style" fast hard disk as a cache (itself cached by RAM). ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The idea of using optics to place magnetic heads isn't new. Sometime around 1991 there was a drive called the floptical for sale. It used optics to place magnetic heads on special floppy disks. Hardly a new concept, so I wonder what kept it from being used in hard drives for so long, especially since there was a working drive using the technology on the market about 8 years ago.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
ok not for w2000 but for w3000 (just a few years later of course) ?
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
While it's cool that storage technology is getting so much better, it still doesn't completely help when that sea data has to pass through a straw. I'm hoping that advances in bus technology and communications will jump ahead in the near future to meet the requirements for pushing such data.
Ultra-high speed backbone technologies... CPUs too fast for most common tasks... ADSL... Now super-duper-humongous harddrives...
I expect that within 2 years, we will have computers more powerful than we know what to do with -- most of our current programs simply do not use the available CPU resources already, and the same will happen with the storage and bandwidth. At that point, some totally new paragidm will spring up -- for nature abhors a vacuum. We will foigure out a Totally New Thing to do with our computers.
What will it be, that will be able to tax all of those resources? True VR? Totally wired environment, with the computers as the master controllers? We have those things already... Heck, I wish I knew what it will be! (I'd probably become very rich if I did). One thing I am fairly certain of -- we are at the edge of a paradigm shift in computing.
The New Thing (tm) is coming! The New Thing (tm) is coming!
--
--
Victor Danilchenko
I think there is a cruicial difference: Always before, the technology was playing catch-up with demand. We always needed MORE space, memory, speed! The technology has now overtaken popular demand (not the specialized computer needs, of course).
Let me tell you this: Since I got 11G drive a few months ago (in addition to my old 6G) -- rather cheaply, too! -- for the first time in my life, I have actually had free storage. LOTS of it. I have the content of a half-dozen CDs on my disks, a bunch of programs, some CD-games with full installation (you know, the kind which installd 500M straight onto the harddrive) -- and I still have space left. I am now trying to INVENT new uses for that space, whereas before, I was always trying to invent new ways to reduce my space usage.
My point? The existing computer paradigm has nearly exhausted itself. We will need to figure out something radically new to do with our computers, in order to actually use all the power we are getting.
--
--
Victor Danilchenko
Can anybody explain to me what the average user needs with such a large hard disk? I realize it's probably most beneficial to video editing and large databases. It seems that lately, though, the size of hard disks is vastly outpacing the application bloat revolution that has taken place recently.
:)
Not to specifically target Microsoft, but Windows is perhaps the largest application that immediately jumps to mind that a consumer might run. In the *worst case* scenario, Windows and commonly bundled applications might take up 2G of space. Yet the average drive size today appears to be 10G to 12G.
It gets even more absurd when you consider alternative operating systems. I have BeOS installed with all the applications I need, and it takes up about 500M total. I have an 8.4G drive. I've installed Linux (Slack 3.6; 4.0's in the mail) in the not-too-distant past, and the installation indicated that even a complete full install would only hit ~370M.
216G is an awful lot of space, but I can't seriously imagine that most of the "commoners" need anywhere near that. Can anybody provide me with a legitimate example where Joe Blow is going to need even half that space? (Beyond archiving MP3s and pornography, that is.
Programs that don't use all the CPU??? C'mon, even the fastest Xeon won't run Quake3 smoothly enough to make the average gamer happy. We'll use all this great technoogy to make better video games. Easy.
Blar.
Exactly my thought. Using a Media 100, 15 minutes of high-quality digitized video eats up 2.5 GB. That's 10 GB/hour, and when you're editing video you're going to have lots of duplicate and useless clips lying around. We just bought a 144 GB hard drive array and we're still feeling cramped!!
:-(
However, with the new hard drives that are currently available (18 GB or so), digital VCR's are starting to look very promising. I would really love to be able to tell the VCR to simply record certain shows at preset times, after which I could leisurely watch whatever shows I like in whatever order. Zero hassle, except of course if you don't have a good antenna.
20 meg hard disk running Windows 286 and had a ton of program on it and didn't know what to do with a whole 20 meg.. Now I have a 1.2g and a 2.4 gig and I feel to cramped.. I need to install my new 10gig once I get the chance.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
2.5G of data stored in the human brain?? Boggle. This is so far removed from reality it's not even funny. Humans store a great deal of visual information, which is heavy of bit usage. Besides, there are experiments which seem to indicate that people never forget anything they saw/heard. If you electrically stimulate the right spot in the brain, the experience will come back, very vivid and perfectly remembered.
And top speed of storing data?? 100bps??? Close your eyes. Do you remember what you've just seen? How many bits per second is that? Aw, geez...
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
You don't remember an entire picture - you remember things about the picture
Well, I don't know about you, but I have a reasonably good visual memory and frequently remember things by visualizing in my mind a picture of what I need and then scanning it for the specific detail/item I want. Lossy compression -- sure, but the quality is not as bad as you make it. There is *huge* amount of visual information stored in the brain, the problem is retrieving it. If I briefly think about my last vacation, for example, I can remember some stuff, but not all that much. But if I stop and really think about it, immersing myself into that experience, so much stuff that I actually remember pops up...
And didn't say anything about the methodolody -- measuring the brain's storage capacity by checking how many yes/no questions you need to guess what an average moron thinks about? Gimme a break.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I have no idea what I would do with over 200GB of storage. Mind you, that's what we think whenever a new high-capacity technology appears. Within a few years, it's the standard size and we all wonder how we coped with our old "tiny" drives.
It's a fact of computing life that software expands to fill the available space. What did that Gates chappie say about 640KB again? :-)
I had a 48KB Sinclair Spectrum+ and a tape recorder. Wonder how many C90 tapes you'd need to store 216GB? :-)
>maybe Seagate's current drives have 6 platters in them?
Duh, that's it, of course. ( 36 x 6 = 216 )
So that assumes the existing drive configurations with this new density. Seems more likely you'll see different configurations at smaller capacities, at least in the near-term. There seems like a natural barrier to this being competitive with 14-25 gig drives for individual users until something over 50 gig is needed on a wide basis (read: by your average 3d gamer, not your 3d graphics designers).
I wonder at what price/gig this new type of HD becomes practical for non-commercial applications, and an attractive and/or only alternative two 25+ gig drives?
I've re-read the press release a few times and don't see this number mentioned, only the density and "36 gigabytes on a single, two-sided disc or an equivalent of 25 Gbits/square inch, if applied to conventional drive technology".
Was this number derived by extrapolating current platter sizes and density? Someone questioned what we would ever do with 200+ gigs in a consumer device, but I wonder if the real potential of this might be to make smaller drives with very large capacity that might go into other devices besides multi-purpose home computers? Devices where even a half-height, 3.5" are too big (portable digital audio/video devices, little electronic dogs, etc?)
Suddenly those terabyte servers of the big guys don't seem that big anymore. Just get four of these suckers on an EIDE board and you're just about there.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
That and jandrese's comment give me a better model for it (possibly).
So what you're saying is Seagate shoudl concentrate more on expanding the "gate" and less on the "Sea"?
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Didn't start with the trash 80 but wanted one.
...
At our school we started with one Apple II with a tape drive - programmed in machine language for fun but I'd just type in the hex each time. It was faster than loading from a tape. Later came the Commodore PETs - 8k and 16k I believe - with tape recorders.
I remember the suspense of waiting a few minutes to see if our programs would finish loading up okay.
oh yeah, and the sound of FFing, REWing and listening to the tapes to find where to start loading if you had a bunch of programs on the same tape! Nowadays I gues I listen to 56k modem connect sounds instead.
The more things change
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
I could use that space when I get
a cable modem.
I want to automate my web research.
I'll need a cable modem so I can be connected
24/7 and disk space to hold the information
I collect.
Like yesterday, I read speculation about why
we bombed the crap out of Serbia. I started running searches for background material. Would
love to automate that kind of thing.
Someday.
Anybody else start life with
a TRS 80 and a tape recorder?
Oh, hooray, and how long will it take to move the data from that drive to the other? A week? With platter->bus transfer speeds not changing markedly, you get huge problems with data transfer speeds on multiuser system where you have random access to data on the device. 4 2 GB SCSI disks give 4 times the performance of 1 8 GB disk. Instead of larger but constantly slower disks due to more data per disk, it would be nice with cheaper or faster disks instead...
1. If FAT16 is wasteful on a 2+ gig drive, and FAT32 is wasteful on a 20+ gig drive, imagine how wasteful it would be on a 216 gig drive. (1mb clusters anyone?)
2. Seek Time? Random Read Time? Not mentioned...
I really don't want something in my computer spinning at 200k rpm
3. Defrag??? It takes me the better part of a weekend to defrag my 4 hd's. (~30 gigs). There goes February.
4. Scandisk. Fstab. Imagine accidently shutting the computer down instead of a proper one. Say goodbye to the work day.
5. Formatting?
You get the idea...
RB
Wadda you me "They"
I did that with 5 meg PC HDs - Just call me an OLD Geek
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
OOPS!!
Forgot to carry the 0.
It was a rant, that's all.
Would have used CALC.EXE if
I were serious.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Cheers
With a 216 GB hardrive.
About 4,236 MP3's.
I'm thinking about 3684 hours of music!!
You can start a playlist and listen for
153 straight days!
MP3 has taken over sex as the #1 search in search engines.
Imagine the sex that can be stored.
All those pics.
Let's say you store in JPEG format.
Let's say at the high end, they average 200k each.
(All us pervs know this is definitely high.)
Over a million JPEGS!
Imagine that slideshow!
Man would you get hair on your palms and go blind.
I had enough ranting.
Cheers
As people find uses that actually store original/modified data on their drives, what will that do to those online backup companies? ;)
Geeky modern art T-shirts
You know, you are probably right on this one...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have two words - digital video. A little bird sung in my ear that Star Wars, in 320x200 window, takes 1.2 gb of space. How much would the whole movie occupy? - How _many_ 200 gB hard drives would one need to store one's favourite movies online?
With digital movie distribution we're beyond needing 200 gB hard drives already! (Hell, a digital VCR could probably do with a bit more....)...
Ehhhh... Did anyone say HDTV???? --- Ahhhh!!!! A 400 gB HD wouldn't be enough....
Greetings from London
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Thats a big mumma gigantic huge massive amazingly big woppa of a hard drive. my only question, how long does it take to do a surface scan?
This is cool. I wonder if they will make this in a removeable drive? Bye Bye Zip!
"Who actually needs 200+ Gb?"
This puts the fear of death into me. If you recall, major releases of M$ Windows seem to be initiated AFTER someone goes, "Holy shit, what am I going to do with all this hard drive space?!" Windows 3.1 et al came along as people were bathing in the luxury of DOS with an "excessive" 100 MB or so. And a few years later, as 800 MB drives were becoming commonplace, here comes Windows 95 to chew up an eighth or so of that.
I can see all the M$ engineers scrambling furiously for their (overclocked???) PalmPilots to call meetings together to figure out how to devise a Windows that'll eat up 50 gigabytes or so of hard drive space.
The thing that scares me most of all is that I think, if they were really motivated to, they could probably find a way to do it, too.
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Every time a bigger hard drive appears, M$ must be thankful, since the size of their OS's are rising so fast that storage technology has a hard time keeping up. Will the new win2000 install disk have to be a DVD rather than a CD?
Who would have realized that bugs and blue screens take up so much room?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain