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IBM sets another disk-drive world record
Anonymous Coward writes "IBM has set a new computer data storage world-record of 35.3 billion data bits per square inch on a magnetic hard disk -- a 75 percent increase over the 20-billion-bit milestone the company achieved less than five months ago. " The press release goes on to talk about that this is expected to lead to drives with three times the storage of today, quite soon. Just think - a MP3 server laptop!
SCSI u2w - 80 megs/sec
SCSI u3w - 160 megs/sec
sure you take a u2w hard drive and you wont get 80 megs/sec, same with a UDMA/66 drive. point is the bus can handle it, so you could have say 4 20 meg/sec u2w drives before the controller becomes a bottleneck.
Also, dont forget the whole 15 devices a u2w card can support, compared to what, 2-4 for UDMA/66?
I wont begin to get into RAID implementations.
Drives with this sort of capacities, coupled with our new lovely broadband connections, could truely mean the start for piracy of movies. Even with the crappy quality VCDs, 1 gigabyte a piece is to much to keep any collection worth noting, even on modern pcs with 24-36 gigs of space.
When I bought my Celeron based PC last year, my old pentium got to move to the bookcase where it became my resident mp3 player (gotta love using crontab as an alarmclock). I know I'm not the only one who has done this.
The logical extension is that when my current computer gets tossed out for a Merce.. I mean Itanium, Opteon, K8 or whatever, my current PC will move into the TV room to feed movies and generally do everything that those TV-cache machines do (only a whole lot better).
With these sort of drives, that would seem very likely.
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You see I'm not in the IT industry anymore, I was for a few years, but to tell you the truth, it kind of sucks, and I stopped enjoying using my computer(s) at home. At the time, I had built a P233 with an Adaptec SCSI controller, a SCSI CD-ROM 4x, and a 2.0 gig SCSI drive. All of this is now dated technology, and it is not upgradeable to my next system. How much did I spend on this fiasco? $150 for the controller (plain 40 Mb/sec SCSI) $200 for the drive, $200 for the CD ROM. That's a total of $550 for a bunch of equipment that is not worth $100 only 2 short years later... Now had I been smart and opted for IDE, I would have spent a lot less, gotten more storage space for my money, and felt a lot less foolish now that I had wasted all that money on equipment that I can not transfer to the new workstation I am now building.
Sure if you're some hot shot WAN admin, you're used to throwing around someone else's cash on a daily basis, and for you buying massive Ultra SCSI 3 RAID arrays is no problem. You know that the whole thing will be upgraded in a year or 2 on the companies dime and written off as a business expense -- money that would have gone to taxes anyway.
But you see, 99.999999999999% of Americans aren't big shot sys admins and therefore we don't have million dollar annual technology budgets. Instead, in this increasingly annoying cycle of hardware obsolescence, we are forced to make wise, cost effective decisions and if you take my example of my experience with SCSI in the previous paragraph, you might come to the same conclusion I did: that SCSI is nice, but not worth the money especially when you can get comparable performance at %300 lower cost. I mean come on, there's really not all that much difference between 66 Mb/sec and 80 Mb/sec.
So no, SCSI won't die tomorrow, but it will get more expensive as more and more average consumers turn away from it to more cost effective alternatives like UDMA 66 (the less units you sell = smaller production cycles = higher unit cost).
You completely lost me in your logic of USB... I don't know anyone of connecting phones, speakers, scanners, etc. to SCSI.
Hrm, let's see what peripheral SCSI devices are on sale today at www.pricewatch.com...
1) SCSI Scanners
2) SCSI JAZZ Drives 1 & 2 gig
3) SCSI Magneto Optical Drives
Then here's a comparable list of USB peripherals on Pricewatch:
1) USB keyboards
2) USB Mouse's
3) USB game controllers (joysticks, wheels, etc)
4) USB hubs
5) USB scanners
6) USB Printers
7) USB digital cameras
8) USB modems
9) USB Network cards
Granted there nobody's buying SCSI peripherals anymore, however this isn't due to the lack of products, because before USB the only peripherial connectors offered were SCSI, Serial & Parallel. So why are there so few peripheral SCSI devices today, hmmm? Because everyone's now buying USB peripherials. You know what's really sad? I went to Pinnacle's web site recently, and tried to click on a link to their MO Jukebox section, and it was a dead link. I mean they can't be selling any MO drives anymore if their web site doesn't even link to one of their core product lines. It's sad, but you know what, I trust the decisions of the market more than any individual. The market likes USB, because it's integrated and you don't need IRQ settings, the speed is negligible as most people are used to slow parallel and serial connected peripherals anyhow.
So what's left? SCSI is only useful now, as you said yourself for hard drives. But what is the wholesale price of a Ultra SCSI 3 drive? How bout a Compaq 34.4 gig SCSI3 drive? $1550. Now why in the hell would I buy one of these when I can buy more storage for $3-400 between two 20 gig UDMA 66 drives? The price difference may be small to a corporation, but to the average Joe, that's a big screen TV. Hence, SCSI is pricing itself out of the marketplace, and will therefore eventually wither and die.
IMHO the coup de gras will delivered to SCSI when solid state RAM drive prices drop to the point where they are a cost effective solution.
SCSI is kind of a pain, and very expensive. A high capacity SCSI drive can often be 4x as expensive as a UDMA/66 drive, not to mention the hugely expensive SCSI2 controllers...
Additionally, USB is rapidly replacing SCSI as the peripherial connector of choice, so IMHO SCSI is a dieing technology.
I'd be interested to see when IBM makes this new technology commerically available, and whether or not the higher density will reduce seek times/rpm significantly.