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Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 10, 2008 03:07 PM
from the they-had-to-count-them-all- dept.
Data Storage Upgrades
MojoKid writes "Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the 'industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives.' The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that is capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed."
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Submission: Seagate's Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive by MojoKid (1002251)
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  • that's a lot (Score:4, Funny)

    by jgarra23 (1109651) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:09PM (#24141831)
    of pr0n!

  • great (Score:4, Funny)

    by Adult film producer (866485) <van@i2pmail.org> on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:09PM (#24141837)
    more storage for nerds to steal and archive the work I produced. Damn them.

  • Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)

    by thatskinnyguy (1129515) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:10PM (#24141851)
    1.5TB... Who will ever need more than that?

        • Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by NotBornYesterday (1093817) * on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:58PM (#24142951) Journal
          Sure. I got a 1 gig drive in 1995 that I thought would be all the digital storage I would ever need. Funny how that didn't work out the way I intended. Digital storage needs have been expanding rapidly for a long time. I don't see a slowdown anytime soon.

                • Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)

                  by RulerOf (975607) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:46PM (#24143843)

                  Yes, obsessive video hoarders will use big hard drives just as you describe. Everybody else will pay Netflix or Comcast $20 a month for hassle free access to 10,000 times the content.

                  I went with the hard drives. I find the seek times on Netflix to be unacceptable.

        • Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by vidarh (309115) <vidar@hokstad.com> on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:19PM (#24143369) Homepage Journal
          My wife just filled up 10GB in one day just by emptying some sd-cards for her camera after a couple of parties.. Stills, not video.

          So, yeah, people will need that much space.

          Consider HD video, photos at ridiculous resolution and tons of music.

            • Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)

              by demonbug (309515) on Thursday July 10 2008, @05:48PM (#24144779) Journal

              I always thought this was true as well, but in practice it is not. If I'm out taking photos of landscapes or whatnot, then yes, I get rid of all of the photos except the really good ones. When it comes to photos taken at parties and such, I find I usually hang on to most of them. Not because they are necessarily all that good, but because they capture a moment or an action (or blackmail content...) that I don't want to lose in spite of the imperfections. I find I really only delete the ones that are completely out of focus, blurred, or otherwise trashed beyond use.

              I don't take a whole lot of photos, but I do have probably 90-100 gigs of photos from the last two or three years.

  • Flash video (Score:5, Funny)

    by bigstrat2003 (1058574) * on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:11PM (#24141879)

    For some reason, I can't stop thinking of this Flash cartoon I saw once about perpendicular hard drive recording, with cartoon dudes singing, "Get perpendicular! (Get perpendicular!)".

    ...I need a life.

  • Sounds killer! (Score:4, Funny)

    by DanWS6 (1248650) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:12PM (#24141903)
    I can't wait to try out ReiserFS on it.

  • yawn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bravecanadian (638315) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:16PM (#24141995)
    Hard drives are getting bigger? Wow.. what news.. that hardly ever happens.

  • What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chordonblue (585047) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:19PM (#24142055) Homepage Journal

    How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.

    Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

    • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bigstrat2003 (1058574) * on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:22PM (#24142121)

      Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

      /.: the only place where one gets a broken heart from a hard drive instead of the opposite sex.

    • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:28PM (#24142273)

      So you're saying it's not how big it is, but it's how long it will last?

    • Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.

      How does more assurance of your data integrity obviate the need for backups? In other words, how does your behavior change even with those assurances?

      Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...

      Yeah, it'd be nice not to have hard drive failures, but don't blame the drive manufacturers for your lack of backups. There is no data solution so good that it doesn't need redundancy in some manner.

      • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Chordonblue (585047) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:10PM (#24143167) Homepage Journal

        And what backup solutions exist for 1.5TBs today? Anything affordable, or just more RAID solutions (again, hard drives)?

        You can talk about backups all day long, but you know that when HP pushes out their latest consumer desktop with this drive, a home user is essentially buying a ticking time bomb.

    • Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Informative)

      by CopaceticOpus (965603) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:39PM (#24142531)

      Any data you truly care about needs to be on at least three devices, which are in at least two different buildings. Increasing the reliability of current drives won't be as helpful as bringing down prices so that multiple copies are more affordable. No amount of reliability will account for theft, fire, and human error.

      I use a set of three hard drives. One internal drive is in primary use. I back that up to an external drive frequently. Every couple weeks or so, I take that external drive to my remote location and swap it with another external drive, which then becomes my local backup.

      All copying is done with rsync to minimize drive wear and copy times. I just plug in the drive and run a batch file.

      • get yourself some RAID and that won't be an issue.

        RAID is not a substitute for backups!

        All hard disks, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one.

        Crucial corollaries:

        1) All file systems, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will be propagated to your RAID array.

        AND: 2) All RAID controllers, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will hose your RAID array.

        And let's not get into fires, theft, lightning / voltage spikes ...

        • Re:What I really want... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hey! (33014) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:43PM (#24143809) Homepage Journal

          RAID is not a substitute for backups!

          Nor are backups a substitute for reliable operation.

          I don't even want to think about restoring 1TB to a consumer hard drive, even if I had dropped the thousands of dollars on tape drives and media to back it up.

          The thing that bothers me about the backup technologies available to consumers, apart from the fact you need to spend two orders of magnitude on drive and tape more than you spent on the disks you're backing up, is that there are so many technologies to choose from. In ancient days, there was just 9 track, and everybody could read it. Later there was DDS, DLT, or for suckers, Travan and for real suckers anything from Iomega. Now I look at dropping a thousand bucks on a flavor-of-the-month drive, and it gives me a queasy feeling.

          And in a world where a 160GB tape cartidge and a 160 GB hard disk SATA hard disk can both be bought for about $40, I'm open to spending a bit more to get the convenience of a standard interface hard disk, provided that it has enhanced reliability. It can be slower on transfer than tape, the convenience of random access probably more than makes up for it.

  • Are the increases slowing down? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Orange Crush (934731) * on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:28PM (#24142257)
    This could be a factor of my faulty memory, but a quick bit of googling didn't turn up anything useful. Is it just me, or has the rate at which storage capacity increases been slowing in recent years? It seems like we had a very rapid run-up to the 300gig mark (in a 3.5inch drive) then a much slower crawl to a terabyte and beyond.

    • Storage doubles every 14 months (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Muerte23 (178626) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:17PM (#24143297) Journal

      In kind of a weird corollary to Moore's law, the storage capacity of "affordable" consumer hard drives has doubled about every 14 months since at least 1991.

      In the summer 1991 a 40 MB drive was "good", and in the summer of 2008 a 1 TB drive is "good". That's a doubling period of almost exactly 14 months. I don't have the data to back up the dates in between, but I remember doing this calculation several years ago and getting the same number.

      If Moore's law continues to hold true, and processing power doubles every 18 months, yet storage capacity doubles every 14 months, at some point we will have so much storage that our processors will not have the capacity to ever utilize it all.

  • I'd love to turn you on (Score:5, Funny)

    by HTH NE1 (675604) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:32PM (#24143605)

    from the they-had-to-count-them-all- dept.

    So now they know how many bits it takes to fill the Albert Hall?

    • Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zymergy (803632) * on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:26PM (#24142219)
      When you start ripping your Blue-Ray HD Movies to store on a disk-less HDD share (at about 25GB to 50GB a pop) and then you conveniently convert them into mountable ISO images, you will then know why you bought that 1.5TB HDD.

      I have a buddy that does this and he uses a 1TB HDD to store the ripped & converted ISO HD movie images. He then mounts them over his wireless N network on his Multimedia PC attached to his living room's 60" HDTV or he mounts the images on his HD laptop anywhere he feels like round his home. Very cool, and he NEVER scratches or loses one of his Blue-Ray disks... (Thank You SlySoft and Elby)

      • Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jherek Carnelian (831679) on Thursday July 10 2008, @04:04PM (#24143049)

        When you start ripping your Blue-Ray HD Movies to store on a disk-less HDD share (at about 25GB to 50GB a pop) and then you conveniently convert them into mountable ISO images, you will then know why you bought that 1.5TB HDD.

        What a waste. If he spent a little more time and remuxed them down to just the movies he could easily shave off half of that space. For example, the "I am Legend" blu-ray contains two complete copies of the movie, one of the theatrical cut and one of the director's cut - no seamless branching, two full copies that are 99% identical. Toss the theatrical cut, and all of the other junk and that disc which was nearly the full 50GB is down to ~18GB.

        Another common space-wasting practice on blu-ray is to include multiple uncompressed (lpcm, not even truehd or dts master audio) soundtracks, good for 5-6GB each, all of which can be tossed except the native track and then you can losslessly compress that down to 1-2GB. And then, of course, there is all the supplements which you watch, maybe once, if that. Throw those out the window, if you ever really want to watch them you can still pull the original disk out of storage.

        Another benefit to remuxing is that you can easily play the movie in any variety of free and semi-free players. Sometimes that can be extremely difficult with the original iso -- like animated movies where they actually render the scenes differently depending on the language track in order to localize things like signs and to keep the mouth movements in sync, typically seamless branching is used for these things, but the net effect is 30-40 different snippet files for each specific language that are not necessarily in any obvious order.

          • Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:4, Informative)

            by Jherek Carnelian (831679) on Thursday July 10 2008, @05:13PM (#24144299)

            Do you have a favorite piece(s) of software for doing all this?

            eac3to + various filters (some commercial, it comes with the Free ones) to take it apart and
            mkvmerge to put it together as a matroska file (mkvmerge is part of mkvtoolnix)
            one caveat is that mkvmerge can not handle dts files more complex than the regular DTS format on dvds, but it can do truehd. I always recompress to flac anyway, tends to be more efficient than either truehd or dts master audio and eac3to can do the recompression automatically.

            If you want to keep it in m2ts format than TsRemuxer is pretty good it will allow you to remux to either a single m2ts file or to a bare-bones blu-ray directory format.

            All above mentioned tools are easy to find in google.

    • Re:Without increasing rotational speed & seek (Score:4, Informative)

      by crow (16139) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:33PM (#24142369) Homepage Journal

      Seek time and rotational speed are mostly independent.

      Seek time is the time that it takes to move the head to the desired track (including time for the vibrations from the movement to settle down). This is mostly independent of how fast the disk is spinning.

      Rotational speed determines how long you have to wait, on average, for the data you want to read to show up under the head.

      So a random read will take one seek, plus half a rotation, before the drive can read the data.

    • Warranty (Score:4, Informative)

      by Dracker (1323355) on Thursday July 10 2008, @03:39PM (#24142527)
      Actually, Seagate offers a 5-year warranty on their hard drives. It's a major reason why I usually buy from Seagate instead of going to Western Digital or Samsung, which usually only a offer 3-year warranty. Still, it's always best to keep backups. How nice the company is about replacements says nothing about how likely the drive is to fail.

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