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Terabyte Drive to Debut Later this Year

Posted by Zonk on Tue Aug 15, 2006 01:04 PM
from the welcome-to-the-future dept.
Hardware
mytrip writes to mention the news that Hitachi will be releasing a terabyte storage drive this year. "These large drives also will get incorporated into televisions and personal video recorders. Hitachi, among others, already sells TVs with integrated hard drives in Japan and other markets. While large drives start out expensive, the price drops relatively quickly. Computer makers pay something in the 30-cent range for a gigabyte when buying hard drives, Healy said. The price at retail is around 50 cents or less."
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[+] Intel Pledges 80 Core Processor in 5 Years 439 comments
ZonkerWilliam writes "Intel has developed an 80 core processor with claims 'that can perform a trillion floating point operations per second.'" From the article: "CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here on Tuesday. The chips are capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second, Otellini said during a keynote speech. The company hopes to have these chips ready for commercial production within a five-year window."
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  • Idle speculation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer (890720) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @01:11PM (#15911730) Journal
    FTA:
    Drive density effectively doubles every two years and increases steadily over the two-year period; hence, a terabyte drive is on the horizon, Healy said.
    What a waste of space. This is not about a product to be released, it's just a way to fill some space so that maybe someone will click on some ads.

    The only thing of interest in the entire article is at the end, when it mentions that the hard drive is reaching its 50th birthday/anniversary/whatever you want to call it. More interesting might have been a brief timeline showing hard drive advances over that half-century.

  • regardless (Score:2, Insightful)

    by krell (896769)
    Regardless, I know as soon as I get one, I'll have it filled within 8 months.
  • ...but at not quite 0.91 TiB [google.com], I couldn't help feeling gypped if I bought one of these.
    • Why do I care if it's 1TB or 0.91TB? I mean, really I'm going to be comparing it to the 200-300GB drives I've got now and seeing if I can replace them. Hmmm....three 300G drives will easily fit on TB drive. Two 200s and two 300s will fit, too. Why? Because somewhere across those four discs, there's probably going to be 2% of space that's not used. If it were, I'd probably have more than four drives, so I'll need 2 TB drives.

      Of course, this is even less critical when you transfer within orders / 1 GB - 999 G
  • Are they referring to a terabyte as 1000 or 1024 gigabytes?

  • TB is fine but.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eebra82 (907996) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @01:26PM (#15911859) Homepage
    We always hear about AMD and Intel giving out tons of information on roadmaps and what we're expected to see in the near future but hard drive development is a relatively silent business. Does anyone know what we can expect to see in tomorrow's hard drives? What's scheduled for the next two years?

    Measuring the amount of TB in future disks is easy. The capacity doubles every x months and so and that's probably not going to change for some time, so I frankly don't care too much about hard drive space as it has never been an issue to me. What I do care about is the other technology inside of a hard drive. Seek times, write/read speed and throughput. How's that going? Are we eventually going to see some major difference between SATA150 and SATA300? If so, when?

    I am not sure about you guys but I am growing increasingly dependent on fast hard drives rather than a shitload of space. My workstations are usually bundled with a fast Raptor disk combined with a Seagate at some 250 to 500 GB, so I put the big who-cares-about-speed files on the big one while my operating system, applications and games rest on my Raptor.

    So once again, does anyone know what we're going to see in 2007 and 2008?
    • Onboard flash caches and larger ram caches are going into the next generation of hard drives. Other than that, nothing much is going to change in the near future.

      When the OS is aware of the flash and ram caches on the drive, it will instruct the drive as to what to cache so when the computer is started up next time 50% of the boot code is in the flash and starts running very quickly while it loads the rest of the boot code into ram and feeds it out. Beyond that there isn't much the hard drive can do di

  • RPM more important (Score:3, Interesting)

    by onlyjoking (536550) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @01:54PM (#15912112)
    Is anyone else tired of hearing about yet another x00Gb extra storage capacity while the the RPM remains the same as it has for the last 5/6 years, ie. 7200rpm. When are we going to see affordable 10,000rpm disks fer kreissake? The 150Gb WD Raptor at £175 is not what I call competitive pricing. We have more than enough storage. What we need is faster, energy-efficient disks.

    • Re:RPM more important (Score:4, Interesting)

      by timeOday (582209) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @02:00PM (#15912165)
      Higher density does translate to higher transfer rate, since you read more with each revolution. I fired up an old 8.5 GB 7200 rpm drive the other day and was surprised it only pushes 10 MB/s. That would be pathetic nowadays. My laptop drive, which is also 7200 rpm, gives 50 MB/s on the same benchmark.

      Granted, access times probably haven't declined like transfer rates.

      • I wonder if there's something that happens at 10k RPM. The 10k drives I have are a bit louder, though not terribly so, in my opinion. My 10k drives aren't Raptors.

        The 15k drives that I have are very quiet. I'm only rarely more aware of them than my Seagate 7.2k drives, and those are pretty quiet too.

  • proper use (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We're starting to reach the point where hard drives are so large we're not sure what to put on it. Well, lots of people will; they're a boon for people doing video editing and they'll keep you in episodes of the Sopranos for months. But drop one into a regular desktop PC and your typical average user simply won't be able to fill it up; or if they do, they'll already have reached a point where they don't know what 80% of the data on the drive is.

    As a sometime hardware tech, I'd really love to see the manuf
    • IIRC most drive failures are not in the platters but in the controller. Would you duplicate the controller as well? Would disk makers start offering new control boards to fix broken drives?

      • Re:good idea! sadly the faiure point is something (Score:4, Informative)

        by jabuzz (182671) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @02:13PM (#15912305) Homepage
        Not the ones that I have seen. There are basically two main failure modes on a hard disk. Either the bearings on the motor give out, or the reserved area for mapping out bad sectors fills up and you see bad sectors. Controller failer is *much* rarer than either of these two events. If you ask me controller failures are more likely to be down to people not taking proper ESD measures.
        • The primary mode of failure that I've seen is heat death. Which probably means that the controller chips have baked themselves due to inadequate airflow. (All it takes is a minor amount of forced air movement across the surface of a drive to keep it cool.) I'm pretty sure that the platters are not affected by heat or are at least resilient enough to handle temperatures higher then what would kill the controller silicon.

          Do newer FDB drives suffer the same issues as the older ball bearing designs? (Not t
      • When the controller/circuit board is mated to the platter assembly it is programmed for that specific set of platters and any anomolies on those platters. This is why you cannot take a circuitboard/controller from one drive and put it on another one.

  • One thing article left out... (Score:3, Funny)

    by darthservo (942083) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @02:21PM (#15912377)
    With hard drives getting this much capacity, which term would most accurately describe them - a truck or a series of pipes?
  • Right here: http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=101 8 8 [lacie.com]. Sure, it's probably not a real 1TB drive, but it's in an external box and plugs into a USB port, so what's the difference between it and a single-drive solution? For most people, probably none at all.

    Anybody know if a USB 2.0 drive is fast enough to keep up with video playback? If so, then I may have to pick one of these up for the HTPC...
    • USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire 400 (which is generally used for DV content), so I'd say that it is fast enough.

      Of course, it all depends on how fast the data needs to be consumed. I don't know if it would be fast enough for high-definition content.
      • USB 2.0 is faster than FireWire 400 (which is generally used for DV content), so I'd say that it is fast enough.

        That's arguable (and a bit of a holy war). Looking only at the 480Mbits of USB 2 vs Firewire's 400Mbits glosses over the differences in the two protocols. In reality, both are usually constrained by the speed of the disks, which are identical for both implementations.

        But if you're a determined fence sitter, go with a dual-interface external enclosure such as the BYTECC ME-835U2F enclosures.

      • Re:Tomorrow? I can buy a 1TB disk today! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Mattintosh (758112) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @04:00PM (#15913764)
        Correction: USB 2.0 has a theoretical peak higher than Firewire 400. The difference in real speed lies in the isochronous mode that USB lacks.

        Basically, USB allows one device to talk on the wire at a time. So if you have a USB 2.0 HDD and a USB 1.1 mouse on the same bus, they get equal time, but the mouse wastes 99% of the bus for 50% of the time, for an overall loss of about 49%. So you only get half the speed you're supposed to get.

        Firewire's isochronous mode allows devices that use more than their fair share (they max out the bus and beg for more) to "borrow" the unused bandwidth during the time slot belonging to a device that doesn't use the full bandwidth. So while a FW scanner might only use 50Mbps, a HDD on the same bus might be transferring a file and "borrow" the other 350Mbps, even during the scanner's time slot. This is why Firewire outshines USB in raw data transfer in all but the most scripted of Intel's tests (Intel invented USB).

        So, the moral of the story: If the HDD is the ONLY thing connected to that USB bus (that port and probably the one next to it on the PC), then, yes, it might be a bit faster than FW400. If it's sharing a USB bus, it's going to be much slower, and may not be fast enough for video.
    • "Sure, it's probably not a real 1TB drive, but it's in an external box and plugs into a USB port, so what's the difference between it and a single-drive solution? For most people, probably none at all."

      It's twice as likely to fail.
    • SCSI is basically dead. It's just a scam to get more money out of people that are stuck in 1992. Just ignore it and go with modern technology like SATA.

      • Re:Gezzz. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Amouth (879122) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @01:20PM (#15911807)
        not true.. SCSI is still alive an working and will continue for along time..

        SATA is just starting out and will have may years ahead of it - but it will have to prove it's self

        there hasn't been a worth wile SATA disk on the market long enough to prove the reliability of them above scsi.

        on top SATA lacks alot of the higher end functions that SCSI offers.. this is why for large amounts of storage via SATA to data centers you will see the SATA drives in a box that is then connected to the servers via iSCSI and fiber chanel.

        sure for the desktop/workstation/small server market yes scsi is going away but when you use the true abilitys of what makes SCSI great SATA drives have a long way to go.

        • Re:Gezzz. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by GigsVT (208848)
          there hasn't been a worth wile SATA disk on the market long enough to prove the reliability of them above sc

          What? I've got some pretty old SATA disks in some of our ACNC RAIDs. No failures out of 32 disks. Seagate 7200.7, Date code 04-167, 167th day of 2004 I guess. That's over 2 years old.

          The great part about SATA is that since they aren't a complete rip-off like SCSI, you can replace them every 3-4 years instead of running them until they fail and are stupidly small compared to modern disks.


          this is wh

          • Re:Gezzz. (Score:2, Insightful)

            by jabuzz (182671)
            So when I need a disk that spins faster than 7200RPM and has a capacity bigger than 150GB which SATA drive do you suggest that I buy? Or perhaps I need a drive that spins faster than 10K RPM, which SATA drive do you suggest I buy in that scenario?

            You buy a SCSI/SAS drive because you need the spindle speed to support the increased number of I/O's per second that the faster spindle speeds SCSI gives you. Do you need that on the desktop, probably not. Is it essential for large percentage of enterprise loads, a

          • Re:Gezzz. (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Amouth (879122) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @02:34PM (#15912517)
            "That's over 2 years old"

            2 years isn't that long of a time compared to SCSI drives - life span is important, sure SATA drives are cheep compared to SCSI and can be replaced more often but do you account for the man hours and/or loss of production do too having to replace drives at the end of their life cycle.

            give SATA 5-6 years being stable in the market and i am sure that they will evolve and take over - i like the ideas that drive SATA but it has not yet proven it's self over SCSI yet, so when required to put something into production that needs max reliability people still use SCSI and they will.
      • SAS [wikipedia.org] is current gen SCSI's sucessor and actually can use sata discs on a sas backplane (though not the other way around, and sas *is* faster albiet more expensive than sata). It scales up very well and is incredibly fast.

          • I deal with alot of Enterprise hard drives and its intresting to note that if you put a 300gb U320 Segate and a 300gb SAS Segate, they look exactly the same except for the interface.

            That's likely because they are exactly the same except for the interface.

            Now, the reason you haven't seen any higher-capacity SAS drives is because they likely don't bother to make them in 7200 (or even 5400?) RPM versions, like the high-capacity SATA drives are.

              • ...you might as well use SATA drives if you want high capacity (at the cost of performance), even in an otherwise-SCSI setup. Is that what you're getting at?

        • That is your experience. Many people have good experience with SCSI drives. I'm using one right now in my desktop. Its fast and reliable. You either had a bad drive which can happen on any interface or the driver for your controller was not very good. I've seen disk corruption in FreeBSD using an nforce2 nvraid sata controller in 5.3 as well. As soon as I submitted the pci id, it was fixed. My guess is that linux didn't support the controller at the time or as I said before bad disk.

        • I've been using SCSI since before IDE existed, and now everything new that I have is IDE. Why? Because UDMA came along and erased my major objections. The only thing SCSI has going for it over anything else today really is the number of devices you can have per controller. SAS is pretty compelling, simply because you can use these newfangled SATA drives in such a system. (After all, even modern PATA systems have command queueing, and some of the other nifty features.)

          My only sorrow is that firewire has

        • Do you have any good datum suggesting that the electrical interface on the drive was at fault, because that's hardly the likely candidate in that scenario. Especially considering you can find plenty of people running hundreds of SCSI drives without issue.
    • Will there ever be an upper limit to hard drives?
      Of course there is a limit. I has something to do with the number of elemental particles in the universe. Duh!

    • Re:Gezzz. (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > why is it hard to find SCSI drives in these high capacities?

      SCSI/SAS/FC drives typically spin at 10k or 15k RPM, compared to 7.2k RPM for ATA drives. The higher rotational velocity means more work to keep the heads on track, so the data densities aren't quite as high. Higher rotational velocity also causes more aerodynamic turbulence at the platter edges, which can make the platters vibrate. Most enterprise 3.5" disks actually use 2.5" platters in order to keep the disk edges farther away from the c
    • Will there ever be an upper limit to hard drives? I know we just started using perpendicular technology, but there must be some kind of physical limit to the platters. Another question is why is it hard to find SCSI drives in these high capacities? Or at least in newer SAS drives.

      From what I've read over the past year, perpendicular recording supposedly will offer densities somewhere between 2x and 5x over existing longitudinal recording methods. That puts 3.5" SATA/IDE drive somewhere in the range of 1
    • Um, 500GB drives have been available on the market for about 10+ months now [pricescan.com] (maybe a bit longer). They represent the upper end of what longitudinal recording was capable of packing into a 3.5" form factor.

      The advent of perpendicular recording from multiple vendors (Hitachi has been dragging their heels on a 3.5" PR drive) will hopefully drive prices down on the 500GB and 750GB drives. Or at least accellerate the price drops.

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