420 Gigabyte Hard Drives

Zach Garner writes "IBM is introducing a new line of harddrives, code named "Shark", that will start from 420gig and go up to 11 terrabyte." Now thats what I'm talking about. This kinda stuff has got to make the film industry as nervous as the recording industry. But mainly it just makes things like digital audio and video mixing a lot easier. (Update: 07/27 01:32 by CT : Course a few people noted that these things are the size of refrigerators so its not like their gonna be desktop toys any time soon either)

Comments

Re:Not hard drives.

[Tom Christiansen]

It's all memory. All (all) users say "I'm out of memory" when their hard disks are full.

That's severely annoying to almost all of us. But it's common enough here that I did cover it in my geekspeak correspondence table. The sample program there reports: When I say memory, I mean what you would call RAM, but for you memory means what I would call disk space.

When we get enough contest entries, we'll have a nice translator tool that we can all use to talk to the um, regular people. :-) Send me mail with any suggestions or programs. Any language is ok.

Not hard drives.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a storage system, like a raid unit not a hard drive. IBM currently sells something like this, which had the code name "seascape" which basically had an RS/6000 front end and lots of IBM's SSA serial disk on the back. It runs a version of ADSM (IBM's lousy backup program) to a local tape drive. The actual RS/6K is hidden from the user, so their is no actual console you can log in to. This is what IBM is promoting along with SSA as a "SAN" soloution.

Steve Scherbinski

Re:Not hard drives.

[Tom Christiansen]

The geek-to-luser translation table has more than one technical interpretation of what the mundanes means when they say "hard drive":

1. controller = hard drive
2. disk = hard drive
3. disk controller = hard drive
4. disk drive = hard drive
5. drive = hard drive
6. file system = hard drive
7. logical disk = hard drive
8. mount point = hard drive
9. partition = hard drive
10. physical disk = hard drive

As you see, they aren't particularly precise. It's no surprise that this too should end up being called a "hard drive". Nearly everything is. :-)

It's NOT a hard drive!

[Gleef]

It's an external storage device, similar to an external RAID (in fact it probably is a RAID), it's many hard drives, plus I/O, plus a couple processors.

You can't put this in your Pentuim, you have to plug into your external Fibre Channel or Ultra-SCSI port. These sorts of systems have been around for a while, the 430GB part isn't the impressive bit. The impressive bit is it scales up to 11TB, none of them have gotten that big before in one box.

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Slashdot no longer cutting edge

[FascDot Killed My Pr]

It used to be that I heard about things first on /. and then on the radio that night or the next morning.

Then I started hearing things on the mainstream radio news in the morning and seeing them on /. when I got to work.

Then I heard a story on NPR on Friday that I saw on /. on Monday.

I heard about IBM's Shark on yesterday morning from a mainstream Seattle news radio station. A very lame one. Furthermore, that "reporter" got the story right the first time around and didn't need an update to tell us the drives would be big and expensive.

I'm sure this post will be moderated down as a troll or offtopic or something, but before it goes, heed the warning CmdrTaco--the quality of your readership is directly related to the quality of your news site. If you cut corners we cut out.
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Put Hemos through English 101!

One question remains ...

[felicity]

... How the heck do you back these things up? I've got a 400Gb NetApp filer (network raid array), and backing it up is a royal pain. How in the !#$^& do you backup 11Tb?

Apparently at the annual USENIX conference, there was a talk which mentioned the fact that 1Tb disks on the desktop would not be outrageous in the next few years. That's what I'd need. All of the engineers w/ 1Tb of storage space.

Re:One question remains ...

[Ami Ganguli]

Two things:

1. The advantage of the storage subsystem is that you can attach it to multiple hosts with high-speed connections. And I don't mean wimpy SCSI speeds. So you attach your backup server directly to the storage system via fibre channel and back it up to 10 Gig tape cartridges in a tape library (basically a huge jukebox).

2. Those 11 Terabytes are probably a huge database that supports incremental backups. Basically, you NEVER do a full backup. A modern backup manager will reclaim and consolidate pools of incremental backup so you don't have to worry about restoring all the incrementals in some kind of sequence.

By the time you get 1Tb on your desktop tape technology will be available to back it up. It might still take three or four tapes for a full backup, but that's reasonable.

Yet another Article...

[Capt_Troy]

Here's one more from IBM itself. This ones a lot more detailed.

http://www.storage.ibm.com/press/disk/990726.htm


-capt.