Hitachi to Release Half TB Drive Soon

samdu writes "Hitachi has announced plans to release a 7200 RPM 3.5 inch 500 GB hard drive in the first quarter of this year." Maybe this one won't require a new motherboard to use. I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.

Well what an interesting article

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but I can't think of a single interesting thing to say about the launch of a new hard-drive whose only claim to fame is it being a bit bigger than the previous biggest.

So... anyone got anything interesting to say?

use for backup

[feenberg]

Am I the only one who likes 5400rmp drives because he thinks they will last 72/54 times as long as 7200 rpm drives? We use large drives for backup, and since the access is all sequential, the high rotation speed isn't that important to us.

Re:Well what an interesting article

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, it's got NCQ, staggered start up and SATA II (300MB/s)?

How many movies, MP3s can one possibly use?

[aquarian]

I wonder what everyone's doing with all these huge drives, other than indulging a compulsive collecting habit. How much music can one listen to, and how many movies can one possibly watch?

Hitachi, feh

[retro128]

I won't touch Hitachis. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the last DeathStar I owned. That's nothing compared to a friend of mine though, who had to turn in his 75GXP 4 times under warranty before he finally figured it wasn't worth the trouble and scrapped the drive. The magnets that came out of it are more useful than that drive ever was.

Yes, I know I was burned by IBM rather than Hitachi, but when I was asking some techs who still work in the tranches about it, saying that they were not big fans of Hitachi drives would be putting it lightly.

Re:How many movies, MP3s can one possibly use?

[Sheetrock]

One potential non-infringing widespread use: this would be a reasonable size for a HDTV PVR unit.

Re:Well what an interesting article

[dsginter]

So... anyone got anything interesting to say?

Seriously... isn't this a wonderful industry?

If you answered "no" to the above question, please exit stage left. Thanks for playing.

I don't consider myself "old", but my first PC was an XT with *dual* 5.25" floppy drives (that required a soldering iron for overclocking when there was no such word as "overclocking"). My second PC was a 386SX with an 80 megabyte hard drive.

As much as I knew it would happen (just looking at the graphs in Byte Magazine was enough to see that), it is still amazing to me. I'm just happy to be working in such a dynamic industry.

Enough nostalgia for now...

Re:use for backup

[bluGill]

At least you backup...

I'm not so sure you are gaining anything though. Your point is correct, and 5.4k drives don't run as hot, two points in your favor.

However, that assumes everything else is the same. If they used higher quality components in the faster drive, it might last longer. It wouldn't surprise me, an extra $.05 on bearings can make a large difference in the price after all the layers of suppliers is gone through, enough to account for the difference in price.

Its all just speculation unless you get MTBF numbers from the manufacture.

Re:Well what an interesting article

[dschuetz]

I don't consider myself "old", but my first PC was an XT with *dual* 5.25" floppy drives

Bah! My first computer used a cassette to load programs (at about 300 baud, I think). Eventually, we got a single floppy for it (single sided, what's that, 180K?)

(and, yes, I guess I do consider myself old. though at least I never used 8" disks.)

What use is this?

[Thunderstruck]

At the risk of sounding like Mr. Gates fabled 640K comment back in the day, how in the world is a user supposed to make use of such a product?

1. My music collection? Nope, DRM prevents me from burning my CD's anymore...

2. Digital movies? Nope, again DRM requires me to buy a seperate copy of each work, even for backup purposes.

3. Software? Nope, that's all subscription based, I just get to pay my $37.50 a month and be happy with what they choose to offer.

So, I'm left with .txt, .sxw, and .doc files to fill up 500 gigs? I better get typing.

Re:A Fairy Tale

[eddy]

No, it's going to go like this:

The ??AA said "The public is evil, they're going to use these devices for theft of our precious "IP"! Since we can't control this, we demand a blanket levy put on these devices, made payable to our puppet umbrella organisation whose purpose it is to "fairly" distribute said levy to ourselves."

The ??AA members could then lie back and enjoy their new "tax", having no more incentive to actually produce anything. "Who would have thought, that taxes could be so much fun?", They said.

The End.

1 terabyte?

[flamechocobo]

Not quite. Remember that 500 GB will not REALLY be 500 GB, being that drive manucaturers don't cound bytes correctly. Plus, 500 full GB plus 500 full GB does not equal 1 TB. 1 TB is still 1024 GB, so you'd need 24 more GB.

Re:What I never understood....

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a lot to be said about backward compatbilty. What you are saying seems to trivialize the man-centuries of work that's gone in to optimizing current technologies. "Starting from scratch" can be nice, but it seems that most performance gains come from optimizing the heck out of whatever is current.

Also, I think hard drive sizes have grown wildly beyond anyone's expectations.

In 1995 could you ever imagine outrunning the limits of 32bit LBA?
"Drives biger than 132 gigs? Are you high!?"

Or for that matter, in 1990 could you imagine pushing the limits of FAT16?
"Drives bigger than 2 gigs? Are you high!?" (Well, DOS let you have 4 partions so maybe this isn't so bad)

400GB

[Macrat]

I guess you've failed to notice the 400GB drives available for the past year?

Re:What I never understood....

[saderax]

This is done specifically for backwards compatibility. If the product was new and revolutionary and had no size bounds.... but it would only work with new hardware X, you'd be equally upset.

500GB on one drive?!

[wh173b0y]

Remember, RAID is your friend
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041006/image s/board-w-cards.jpg [tomshardware.com]
why use one drive when you can use 32...

Re:Not to taco

[NerveGas]

Why don't you try running linux, which will ignore the BIOS and do it's own HDD geometry homework.

Wow. Amazing how Linux can solve hardware problems in software.

As many things as it can do, even Linux won't access an entire drive if your IDE controller isn't capable of 48-bit addressing. Really. If the controller itself doesn't have the capability of addressing the entire drive, you're screwed from the start. Don't believe me? Get an old P2 motherboard, plop a 200-gig drive in, boot up Knoppix (or your favorite distro), and see.

Overall, I'm not even sure why you had to make it an OS issue, seeing as how sufficiently recent versions of Windows have 48-bit addressing capability, and can use all of a large drive as well. Maybe you just couldn't pass up the chance to flame someone, who knows.

steve

Re:I've got a rant.. laptops hard drives

[theskeptic]

3.5 inch hard drives get bigger capacities and are cheaper within a short period of time(6-8 months.) But why isn't this carried over to laptop hard drives(2.5inch?)
Anything over a 40GB still cost a pretty penny and 5400/7200rpm disks are still the exception rather than the norm in laptops.
And good luck finding laptop hard drives above 100GB.

about lossy reencoding.

[kesuki]

It doesn't matter how 'good' DivX encoding is, Mpeg-2 is a lossy format. Since mpeg-2 is a lossy format, conversion to any other lossy format (including mpeg-2) will result in 'further' degredation of the video quality. in the case of DivX since DivX and mpeg-2 throw away different bits of data, the lossy conversion will be worse, than encoding from a lossless codec like HuffYUV.
So to anwser your question, converting to DivX will result in both a generational loss, and some mpeg-4 specific loss of quality. Would DivX be smaller? in the same resolution the space saving is marginal*, you actually need to down scale resolution to achieve 'impressive' down scaling of files. Also, to make the 'best' mpeg-4s you'd need access to a lossless master of the video. Converting mpeg-2 to mpeg-4 is like taking an mp3 and 'converting' it into an ogg vorbis. And Granny Ogg Doesn't approve** of transcoding mp3's to .OGG.

*= Properly compressed MPEG-2 streams are only 10% larger than comperable (read same resolution) MPEG-4 stream, however DVDs don't usually compress the audio at all, and generally don't compress the video as much as it 'could' be. Also, DivX 'scales' better than mpeg-2 making a 200% magnification mpeg-4 'appear' better than a 200% magnification mpeg-2...
**= If you wouldn't like being turned into a toad, you'd better listen [vorbis.com]to Granny Ogg.

Re:I've got a rant.. laptops hard drives

[Riddlefox]

3.5" hard drives often have four platters on which to store data. 2.5" hard drives usually only have one or two. In addition, the 2.5" hard drive platters are (obviously) physically much smaller than the 3.5" hard drive platters. For a given data density, not only do you have half the number of platters, you have much less surface area.

As far as transfer performance, you can transfer the most data where the platter is spinning the fastest - on the outer edge. The 3.5" hard drives' edge spins that much faster than the edge of a 2.5" hard drive, so it's easier to get higher data rates.

Spinning the hard drives faster and faster also builds up much more heat, and consumes more energy than slower drives. Laptops have a harder time coping with heat (it's not like you can just keep adding fans to the chassis), and battery lives are already short enough.

There is also a lack of SATA interfaces for laptops. I don't know why this is, but you are faced with a chicken/egg situation - do you build SATA 2.5" drives if there is no connector for it? Do you build connectors for a hard drive that doesn't exist?

SATA 2.5" drives are supposed to come out sometime early this year. We'll see.

Re:yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are lame.

Re:What I never understood....

[MarcQuadra]

Are you posting from 1995 or something?

LBA is what they SHOULD have done from the start, it abstracts the specific geometry from the amount of space on the drive. Anyone who remembers having to dial-in CHS values knows this, LBA is a godsend. The reason it wasn't implemented from the start was that it would shift processing (sector locating) to the drives themselves, which wasn't cheap to do in the eighties and early nineties. LBA has also been the standard for a LONG while now, and besides a minor bump in addressing size (which was painless as could be) it's an awesome and generous implementation.

As for SATA, they DID get it right, they serialized and simplified the data stream and implemented it as ATAPI or a subset of SCSI for OS compatability. It uses a 48-bit LBA which (IIRC) tops out at 131,072 gibibytes, that's 128 terabytes! The hardware platform is also quite well thought-out, with room to grow, in speed, size, and scalability.

I see LESS jumpers on drives than I used to, except for some brands that include options for backward compatability. Hell, you can just leave your new ATA drive on 'Cable Select' and it'll just work, you couldn't do that too long ago. SATA drives don't (IIRC again) have 'required' jumpers at all.

Here's an idea:

When YOU see a single drive that hits the lba48 limit of 128TB, gimme a call, I'll send you a crisp twenty dollar bill.

Outside the geek community, storage requirements are much more modest, my family has yet to go over the 6GB mark on any of their four machines, my little sister has 'tons of music' on her 30GB iBook (and it's not even half-full), I've got a bunch of music, movies, and run an automated development tinderbox for an entire Linux distribution, and it fits nicely in the 60GB drive it's on. I also do tech support during the day, for about 2,500 computers total, and have yet to meet a user with over 20GB of data (and this includes faculty and student personal machines). Storage requirements WILL continue to rise, but not NEARLY as quickly as they used to, unless we start needing to store holographic video or something.