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Hitachi Promises 4-TB Hard Drives By 2011
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Oct 15, 2007 02:34 AM
from the behind-your-gmr-let-there-be-found-your-gmr dept.
from the behind-your-gmr-let-there-be-found-your-gmr dept.
zhang1983 writes "Hitachi says its researchers have successfully shrunken read heads in hard drives to the range of 30-50 nanometers. This will pave the way for quadrupling today's storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011." Update: 10/15 10:39 GMT by KD : News.com has put up a writeup and a diagram of Hitachi's CPP-GMR head.
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Waiting for... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Waiting for... (Score:4, Insightful)
Even my none geek friends and family are starting to feel the pain as working with video and Bit Torrent becomes more common. Multiple TB usage won't be that uncommon I think. What we really need now though is RAID-5 for the average Joe.
Re:Waiting for... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, my sickened mind went a completely different direction... remember when we were going to have 8 Ghz Pentium 4s with 6 GB of RAM to run Windows Vista?
Heck, it's still common to see computers sold with 256 MB of RAM, which wasn't a particularly large amount 5 years ago... that it's even salable today speaks volumes. I have an "end of life" Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz that I picked up this w/e for like $50. 20 GB HDD, 512 DDR RAM, CD, Sound, etc.
Other than the small-ish HD and the CD instead of the DVD, this system is not significantly different than a low-end new system. And, when it was first sold 3-4 years ago, its specs weren't particularly exciting.
Point being, there's a "we don't talk about it" stagnation going on in the Computer industry. I honestly think that most of the new purchases are based on the expectation of EOL and the spread of viruses. It's gotten to where it's actually cheaper to buy a new computer than it is to reload your old one. Part of that is the fact that it takes a full business day of rebooting the computer to update Windows from whatever came on the CD.
This part just floors me. I have the original install disk for the aforementioned $50 Dell 2.4 Ghz system, and am reloading from scratch so it's all clean. It takes ALL FREAKIN DAY simply to update Windows to the latest release, with a 1.5 Mb Internet connection. (not high end, but still no particular slouch)
Yet it takes about an hour and just ONE short line to update CentOS (RHEL) to current:
My point to all this?
The computer industry has (finally) reached a stable point. Performance increases are flat-lining to incremental, rather than exponential, and there's little incentive to change this, since a 4-year-old computer still does most anything anybody needs a computer to do. There will always be a high-performance niche, but it's a niche. The money has moved from computing power to connectivity.
People no longer pay for processing power, they pay for connections. Thus the Intarweb...
The small thing yaou neglected (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, indeed, we've reached the point where any computer, even if 4 years old, is good enough to do most day-to-day activities (hanging around on the web, wrting some stuff in a word processor, e-mails, and ROFL/LMAOing on AIM/MSN/GMail/Facebook or whatever is the social norm du jour).
Case in point, my current home PC is still Intel Tualatin / 440BX based.
*BUT*...
As you said (and that's something I can confirm here around too), Joe 6 pack buy a new computer every other year, just because his current machine is crawling under viruses and is running too slow (and spitting pop-ups by the dozen). He either pay wads of cash to some repair service that may or may not fix his problems, may or may not lose his data in the process, and he'll have to wait without a machine for a couple of days. Or he gets a new machine. And...
Those outrageous configuration never showed up. Never the less, it seems like Vista was still designed with those in mind.
So in the end the new machine Joe Six pack *WILL* have to be better/faster/stronger, simply because the latest Windows-du-jour has tripled its hardware requirement for no apparant reason.
OS maker will continue to make new versions on a regular basis, mostly because that's their business and they have to keep the cash flow in. Also, there are security issues to fix (by adding additionnal layers of garbage over something that was initially broken by design), legal stuff (add whatever new DRM / Trusted Computing stupidy is latest requirement voted the **AA lobby), add a lot of dubious feature that still 0.1% of the user base will need (built-in tools to sort / upload photos, built-in tool to edit home-made movies, or whatever. Modern OS tend to get confused with distributions and go the Emacs-way of bloat).
All this will result in newer OS that take twice the horsepower to perform the exact same task as older.
And thus, each time Joe 6 pack changes his computer, he gets a newer one, which will obviously have the latest OS on it, and thus will *need* to have 4x the computing power. Just to continue hanging on some IM, sending e-mail, writing things, and browsing porn
Re:Waiting for... (Score:5, Interesting)
Regarding the second part (reinstalling XP) - you should really look at Acronis True Image - it's what we use.
Basically, you install WinXP+patches and whatever programs you need once, make an image and store it on a DVD, network or on a hidden partition on HDD. At boot, you can press F11 to start Acronis instead of Windows from the hidden partition (it's a lightweight Linus distro) and you can restore your image in 5-10 minutes. Even if the image is 6 months old, you still need to download just a few patches and software updates (e.g. update from FF 2.0.0.0 to 2.0.0.7).
Actually, that's the scary part (Score:5, Insightful)
I started my programming experience almost directly with assembly. Well, I had about a year of BASIC on my parents' ZX-81 first. But that was a damn slow machine (80% or so of the CPU was busy just doing the screen refresh) and Sinclair BASIC was one of the slowest BASICS too. So with that and 1K RAM (you read that right: one kilobyte), you just couldn't do much, you know. So my dad took the Sink-Or-Swim approach and gave me a stack of Intel and Zilog manuals. Anyway, you had to be particularly thrifty on that machine, because your budget of CPU cycles and bytes makes your average wristwatch or fridge nowadays look like a supercomputer.
I say that only to contrast it to the first time I saw a stacktrace (Java, obviously) of an exception in a particularly bloated Cocoon application running in WebSphere. If you printed it, it would run over more than two pages. There were layers upon layers upon layers that the flow had to go through, just to call a method which, here's the best part, didn't even do much. That nested call and all the extra code for reusability sake, and checks, and some reflection thrown in for good measure, obviously took more time than the method code itself needed.
It hurt. Looking at that stacktrace was enough to cause physical pain.
Now I'm not necessarily saying you should throw Cocoon and J2EE away, obviously there are better ways to do that even with them. Like, for a start, make sure your EJB calls are coarse granularity so you don't go back and forth over RMI/IIOP just to check 1 flag.
But how many people do?
The second instance when it caused me pain is when I was testing a particularly bloated XML-based framework, and it took 1.1 seconds on a 2.26 GHz Pentium 4 just for a call to a method that did nothing at all. It just logged the call and returned. That's it. That's 2.5 _billion_ CPU cycles wasted just for a method call. That's more than 30 years worth of Moore's law. Worse yet, someone had used it between methods in the same program, because apparently going through XML layers is so much cooler than plain old method calls. A whole 30 years worth of Moore's Law wasted for the sake of a buzzword. The realization hurt. Literally.
Again, I'm not saying throw XML away generally, though I would say: "bloody use it for what it was meant, not as a buzzword, and not internally between classes in the same program and indeed the same module." It just isn't a replacement for data objects (what Java calls "beans"), nor for a database, nor as just a buzzword to have on the resume.
Each iteration of Moore's Law is taken as yet another invitation to write crappier code, with less skilled monkeys, and don't bother optimizing... or even designing it well in the first place. Why bother? The next generation of CPUs will run it anyway.
And the same applies to RAM and HDD, more or less. I've seen more than one web application which had ballooned to several tens of megabytes (zipped!) by linking every framework in sight. One had 3 different versions of Xerces inside, and some classloader magic, just because it beat sorting out which module needs which version. Better yet, they were mostly just the GUI to an EJB-based application. They didn't actually _do_ more than display the results and accept the input in some forms. Tens of MB just for that.
So now look on your hard drive, especially if you have Vista, and take a wild guess whether those huge executables and DLLs were absolutely needed, or are there mostly because RAM and HDD space are cheap?
At this rate and given 4TB HDDs, how long until you'll install a word processor or spreadsheet off a full HD DVD?
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Base 2 or Base 10? (Score:3, Funny)
I have a need right now... (Score:5, Interesting)
A simple SATA RAID controller interfaced with 4 such drives can give me 12TB of cheap, fast, storage. At 1TB per year, should be good enough for my needs. H/w vendors currently recommend expensive SAN boxes; which I don't like... no useful value for the application at hand.
Re:I have a need right now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I sincerely hope you do backups anyway. RAID is simply there to allow you to continue running a service under some specific failure conditions that would otherwise cause the service to be down whilst hardware is replaced and backups restored - it is not a substitute for backups, RAID and backups accomplish different jobs.
Some examples of failure conditions where RAID won't save you but backups will:
- Some monkey does rm -rf / (or some rogue bit of software buggers the file system).
- The power supply blows up and sends a power spike to all the hard drives in your array (I've personally seen this happen to a business who didn't take backups because they believed RAID did the same job - they lost everything since all the drives in the array blew up).
- The building bursts into flames and guts your server room.
In all these conditions, having a regular off-site backup would save you whereas just using a RAID will not.
Will we even use magnetic HDs in laptops in 2011? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thats a lot of porn! (Score:5, Funny)
I don't want more space... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I don't want more space... (Score:4, Interesting)
I see comments like this all the time, and really don't understand them.
I have personally bought an average of one HDD per six months over the past decade, and, except for ones outright DOA, I have only had one fail, ever (and that after it had served for a good many years). And I include both DiamondMaxes and the legendary DeathStars in that list, both considered some of the most prone-to-failure out there.
Considering my work environment, I can expand that sample to most like 100+ HDDs; Of those, only two have failed, both laptop drives.
I have to suspect the people experiencing the flakyness of HDDs either fail to adequately cool them (I put ALL my HDDs loosely-packed in 5.25 bays with a front-mounted 120mm low-RPM fan cooling them) or somehow subject them to mechanical stresses not intended (car PC? portable gaming rig? screws tight agains the drive's board?).
What happened to PMR? (Score:5, Interesting)
Prior to the rise of perpendicular recording [wikipedia.org], we had cheap and plentiful 200-400GB HDDs using plain ol' longitudinal recording. Suddenly PMR hits the market, promising 10x the storage density at up to 1Tb/in^2 (which Seagate claims they actually achieve), and two years later we have only two real models (with a few variations for SATA/PATA) of 1TB drives available.
Call me crazy, but a few really trivial calculations show that at 6.25in^2 *of usable area) per platter surface, times two surfaces per platter, times three platters, we should have, using today's technology, 4.5TB (note the change in case of the "B", no confusing units here) 3.5" HDDs.
So forgive me for not wetting my pants in excitement about an "announcement" that something realistically available today, we won't have for another half of a decade.
The bigger problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, there are some cases where 4TB truly isn't enough without the problem being poor data management (large datacenter, huge DVD-quality media collection, etc). But far too often we see the reason for more space being poorly managed mail servers, tons of WIP that has not been properly archived or disposed of, huge amounts of unhandled spam, work-related casual conversations that really don't need to be stored after the work they relate to has been completed, outdated and obsolete software not being uninstalled, inflated registry (or any other overhead data) that keeps being backed up and restored without any cleanup involved...
A lot of people, when challenged with the problem of this vast array of useless junk data will just respond "well we have space, and if we run out we can always buy more, and the purchase price is way cheaper than the manhours needed to clean up this mess, so why bother". Another common excuse is "it doesn't bother me, so why not keep it just in the potential case I'll ever need it again, even if the chance is extremely small".
It does not occur to these people that proper data management is extremely important procedure, and must be ingrained in the business process. Much the same way you clean up physical garbage, remove obsolete physical equipment, empty the contents of that blue recycle bin under your desk, and do it all on a regular basis to keep the garbage from getting out of hand. Trash not worth keeping in real life does not become valuable when stored online, even if it can be stored for free or cheaper than the disposal price.
Properly disposing data as a business process will take time, but this time will be saved many times over when people don't have to dig up through junk to find what they need, when important things are not buried in crap, when all data worth storing is clean and polished and free of rust, when your OS is not clobbered up by crap processes or temporary files, when your DBE doesn't have to go through zillions of crap stored in the database to find a single row, when you do the cleanup as-you-go, rather than waiting for things to be completely out of hand and then doing a half-assed job because by that point it is really hard to tell apart the good from the junk.
The problem is spiraling - the longer people don't properly clean up data, the harder it is to clean it, especially as files grow larger and more complex as hardware and applications evolve. In turn, it motivates people to just invest in extra drive space, processing power, memory, etc, because by that time it's cheaper than the cleanup. And of course, once the resources have been invested into, they are filled with even more crap until they are full too.
But the biggest problem of poor data management is actually not technical, it's business-related. As we are faced with an increasing information overload, it is very easy to make poor decisions based on data that is not necessarily wrong, but is outdated, matched with incompatible other data, or just not put in the right perspective. The whole "data warehousing" principle absolutely REQUIRES proper and timely maintenance and cleanup of data. This is so important that (and this has been proven over and over again) large corporations with proper data management gain a substantial strategic advantage over those who don't.
It's not just about a little slower response time, or some more work to find what you need on the server. It's about right business decisions vs. wrong business decisions. And it's also about not being taken advantage of - contractors and business partners can easily manipulate data to present it in the light favorable to them, and if you are a private business, this kind of crap can make you bankrupt. Of course, it happens day after day in the government with the taxpayers footing the bill, but that's another story altog
Re:The bigger problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one am getting sick of having to navigate between endless stacks of DVD-spindles every time I'm in a house!
Re:The bigger problem (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but this is just fantasy world 101. I almost never have to look through old mail, but when I do it's because some clients are trying to dredge up something that just not how it happened. Often when I do, it's important that I have all the "useless" mails as well, so you can say with confidence that "No, you just brougth this up two months before the project deadline and it wasn't in any of the workshop summaries [which are in project directories, not mail] before that either."
When I do, it's far more efficient to search up what I need rather than going over old junk - what you're saying is something which would imply that the Internet is useless since it's full of so much redundant, unorganized information. It's quite simply not true, and even though you should extract vital bits to organized systems, keeping the primary source around is very useful.
Extracting experience from current communication to improve business systems (or for that matter, technical routines) should be an ongoing process - it's vital going forward. Going back to old junk to try to figure out what's deletable just to run a "clean ship" is just a big timesink and waste of money. Maybe you'd have an argument if there was a good system not being used because it's all kept as unorganized mailboxes. In my expererience, usually the prolem is there's no such system and doing a clean-up would do nothing to change that.
So where is the speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine some of you out there, like myself, are starting to see problems with data integrity as the mountain of data you are sitting on climbs in to the petabytes. All I can say is: bit flips suck! Do you KNOW your data is intact? Do you REALLY believe your dozens of 750GB-1TB SATA drives are keeping your data safe? Do you think your RAID card knows what to do if your parity doesn't match on read - does it even CHECK? I hope your backup didn't copy over the silent corruption. I further hope you have the several days it will take to copy your data back over to your super big - super slow - hard drive.
Is anyone thinking optical? Or how about just straight flash? I have a whole stack of 2GB USB flash drives - should I put them in a RAID array?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:4 Terabytes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sound nuts? Yes... but they do. Large clusters of many inexpensive machines set up in a redundant manner...
Re:4 Terabytes? (Score:4, Funny)
i very rarely use the preview button; there's a good chance i know about my typos, don't bother pointing them out.
(I couldn't help it, the Devnul made me do it!)
Re:Man (Score:5, Funny)