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IBMs 73Gig Drive
goon wrote in to point us to this bit at news.com about the new
UltraStar 72ZX which has a 4.9ms seek time, is an inch thick, and can store a comfortable 73 gigs. Its supposed to be available in 2000, and will make porn webmasters and MP3 addicts alike very happy.
You could get Windows 2000 AND Office 2000 on the SAME drive!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I'd say we're about three weeks away from conspiracy theorists deciding that Magnetoresistative technology was Alien Derived.
IBM is pretty much owning price/performance and raw storage curves--it's insane how fast storage expectancies have dropped. $10/GB is the magic number now, and I'm pretty sure we have IBM to thank for that.
64MB of RAM now costs more than a 12GB IDE drive. The mind boggles.
I believe this is the same technology jump, incidentally, that means 2GB on a one inch Microdrive platter. Personally, I'd prefer a third party reverse engineering of MiniDisc, but a 2GB swappable drive would also work fine.
I must say, I'm enjoying the storage (r?)evolution. The media server we're building into our stereo cabinet will store more music than we'll know what to do with...;-) And yes, the code will be nice and GPL.
Here's to mindless abuse of technology...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Heh.. 69GB ? .. this thing really IS a drive for porn ... :>
Delphis
CDDB the online CD database claims
"still the world's largest CD database with over 390,000 titles and 4,500,000 audio tracks".
Estimate an audio track to be on average 3MB, and you are looking at 12 terabytes
of music right there. From my experiences CDDB has pretty good coverage of english
music, but it's lacking some foreign titles. So add 10-20% more to the estimate. They are
currently working on a version with international character sets, so it might be a lot higher
if they don't have any Asain titles. Also you add maybe another few TBs for new
bands and old bands that are not available in CD form.
I wonder how many years it will be before 16TB is easily affordable? Less than 10 if moore's
law holds for storage. hmm.. it would take you ~64 years to listen to it all though. course
there is very little of that which you actually *want* to listen to. that's where group filtering comes in.
Anyhow, my prediction is that within 10 years an ordinary person will have a complete collection of the world's published music in their home. Legal issues aside, I think this is pretty exciting.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Don't forget, this drive is "only" 69.6 Gibibytes.
Those funny marketing people.
-TomK
Ok, for 256kbit mp3s, it's approx 2 megs per minute...that means 512 minutes per gig. So 512 minutes * 73 gigs means approx. 37376 minutes, or just under 623 hours, which is just under 26 days, a few days short of a month.
Now if we're talking 128kbit mp3's, well then you're good for a few months.
Not that anyone would *EVER* hoard that much copyrighted material, oh no, not us, that would be wrong...
i'm always bugged when a press release garners more attention than real products. seagate makes 50G drives today. you can get them today here .(also they have some drives which are slightly less than $10/G) or read the specs on the 50G here .
cool -- large, but cool.