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Terabyte Drive to Debut Later this Year

Posted by Zonk on Tue Aug 15, 2006 02:04 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, @02:11PM (#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.

  • Sure, It's Big... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Steendor (917855)
    ...but at not quite 0.91 TiB [google.com], I couldn't help feeling gypped if I bought one of these.

  • Terabyte? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by another_fanboy (987962)
    Are they referring to a terabyte as 1000 or 1024 gigabytes?

    • Re:Terabyte? (Score:2, Funny)

      by jo42 (227475)
      This is in marketing Terabytes, so 999.99 gigabytes.


    • The formal Metric definition of Tera is 1,000,000,000,000 - or 10^12

      Please ignore the "artistic license" that computer scientists have taken with regard to 1,000 almost equals 1,024.

      • Please ignore the "artistic license" that computer scientists have taken with regard to 1,000 almost equals 1,024.

        It's not artistic license. It's about even powers of two and not wasting any bits/having anything which has a logically valid ID but no physi

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

    by eebra82 (907996) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @02:26PM (#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?

    • Re:TB is fine but.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by stienman (51024)
      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

  • RPM more important (Score:3, Interesting)

    by onlyjoking (536550) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @02:54PM (#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, @03:00PM (#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.

      [ Parent ]

  • 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 r

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

        by jabuzz (182671) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @03:13PM (#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.
        [ Parent ]

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

    by darthservo (942083) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @03:21PM (#15912377) Homepage
    With hard drives getting this much capacity, which term would most accurately describe them - a truck or a series of pipes?

    • Re:Gezzz. (Score:2, Funny)

      by GigsVT (208848)
      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, @02:20PM (#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.
        [ Parent ]

        • 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

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

            by Amouth (879122) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @03:34PM (#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.
            [ Parent ]
      • 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.
        • 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.

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

      by WuphonsReach (684551)
      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 l

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

        by Mattintosh (758112) on Tuesday August 15 2006, @05:00PM (#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.
        [ Parent ]
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