That was actually a very unique form of advertising. I'm curious how many people know about perpendicular because of that effort. The question is, what will the marketers come up with for future forms of storage?
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday April 20 2006, @10:47PM (#15170587)
I see how it works! A magical disco ball is allowed to emit it's soooper groovy radiation over the surface of the disc, which liberates the bits to stand up and boogie! It's so obvious!
Of course, you have to thicken up the dance floor, but that's elementary.
Still, I can't believe that there wasn't a single black bit there at the Super-Para-Magnetic Disco...
They really should make more cartoons like that. We complain that nobody knows anything about technology, or how computers work, but then we don't try to teach them at a level they can understand. I think people would learn a lot more if they had advertisements like this on during commercial breaks instead of the usual low level crap.
Oddly enough, the reason it's good these fancy huge hard drives come out is not just to use them, but rather to drive the price of the reasonable drives down. $60 250 gigs here I come.
So true.
One bad thing is that the growth of large drives seems to have slowed down dramtically in the last few years and as a consequence the improvment in bang per buck of "normal" drives has also slowed down.
Wow, and here we thought that 640k is enough for everybody!
Each time the capacity of hard drives goes up a few gigs, I think back to the day in the mid 90's when I got my first "gig" hard drive for $500. Wow, it was the most incredible thing to be one of the first people in my neighborhood to have so much storage... I didn't think I'd ever run out of that much space. And today, the OS won't even fit into such a thing.
But let's put this huge capacity into perspective: Having once had to reverse engineer an obsolete 3.5" floppy drive to repair an obsolete piece of industrial machinery that was down (the customer couldn't afford to replace the whole machine because of a failed floppy drive, and the OS loads from floppy of all things), I learned that this contraption, which was on the market in the 80's, was really incredible, if you take a step back and think about it for a minute. Then, all it takes is a moment to realize that hard disk drives are several orders of magnitude more complex. First, the density of a floppy drive is nothing compared to that of a hard disk even from a decade ago, and secondly, the linear motion of the reading head on a floppy is controlled by a simple stepper motor, whereas the round motion of the reading heads on a hard drive is controlled by servo. I mean, just stop to think about it for a moment. All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
They don't even use servo's anymore (though, servo's and stepper-motors are the same thing). Current hard drive technology (well, for the past 10 years or so) use voice-coils, much in the same way a speaker is moved. Servo drives often required a low-level format to recalibrate the tracks to the current position of the heads, since time/heat could position themselves outside the track boundry. The voice-coil system can do this all on the fly. (And yes, the clicking heard by today's drive is from the heads moving fast enough like a speaker to produce sounds).
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday April 21 2006, @07:33AM (#15172053)
Servo motors and stepper motors are *not* the same thing. The first one uses a closed loop system, meaning that it has a sensor to detect how far the motor has moved and adjusts the signal accordingly. Stepper motors are open loop, and while they are just as precise as servo motors in laboratory conditions, there is no way to know if the motor moved the amount that the signal was supposed to move it.
Example:
Assume both motors move 360 degrees for every 360 pulses. If the servo motor does not reach the 360 degrees, it adjusts the number of pulses accordingly. With a stepper motor, the control sends the 360 pulses and hopes that the motor rotates 360 degrees. Most of the time it does, but if there is something wrong with the system (motor, mechanical drive, etc) you run into trouble.
No kidding. I literally just mentioned to my wife that I remember being thrilled to pieces over getting a 1.2 Gb hard drive (which replaced a 540 Mb drive), and that these new Seagate drives make that old one look "like tablets of baked clay."
I used to keep track of how cheap hard disks were getting in terms of megabytes per dollar. Well, we've long since hit and blown through the gigabyte-per-dollar mark; for my next upgrade, I'm considering 250 Gb SATA drives, which are already up at close to 3 Gb/dollar (and, if another commenter has the right of it, may well blast through that mark by the time I have the money to buy them).
Obviously, at this point, it's inevitable that we will see a 1 Tb drive in 2007 if not earlier; that prediction is like predicting an egg will break when you see it fall off the counter and head for the floor. I just wonder what the upper limit is. Will we crack the terabyte-per-dollar mark? Within ten years? Five? And what will that involve, nanoscale-density recording? Gonna be interesting to find out.
Yes 60MB disks were shiped when 750 MB drives were new to the market. It happened in 1994. Actually, it seems 1.4 Gig drives were shiping concurrently with 40 MB drives
It's wishful thinking, admittedly, but the trend seems to point that way.
I don't think so. The more capacity to store data, the more data we seem to create (or save at least), don't t you think? I mean sure, it's possible that we might be able to each have our own copy of the library of congress or some other limited section of information, but I would bet my life that you will never be able to have a complete snapshot of the internet.
The cheaper storage space gets the more information will be stored. There's information that's thrown away today because it doesn't seem valuable enough to justify the cost of storage -- as the price of storage drops, it becomes worth it to store it. Take for example webserver logs, on many servers logs are periodically deleted because old logs take up space and the older logs are, the less worth they hold (how likely is it that you're going to need to check out something from your server's logs in 1998?). If the amount of space server logs take up becomes a trivial portion of the available space, then nobody will bother to have them periodically deleted. Similarly, an administrator might also/instead choose to make their logs more detailed. Maybe before they didn't log certain certain things because they seemed trivial and added size to their logs -- as the price of space decreases, the question of "why save it?" becomes "why not save it?".
Everyones using USB disks for backups now rather than tapes. So many benefits there. Thats why Lacie and Maxtor are making a killing on selling drive + MCU + USB + casing packages. How many small and medium sized companies have total data exceeding 750GB?
Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter. A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later. Sure I understand Moores law and how 10MB was huge back then. But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it. Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there. Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that. Our humans senses will cease to notice any further difference. Games might require 2 blue-ray DVDs but will not require say 32 blue-ray DVDs in the next 10 years. What will you PUT on it?
Maybe this will mean I'll finally have as much space in hotmail as I have in gmail.
"A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later."
I'm sorry, but I really think you're mistaken. I and those in my field are caught in a seemingly unending storage excalation war. We provide 500 megabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 50 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 500 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. Sure, they're wasting A LOT of space, and we could slow down the rate of growth by running scripts to delete MP3s or whatever every night, but that's a stopgap measure, and in the end is probably more expensive in terms of costly technician time than the cost of just slapping more drives in our Promise array. Currently we're backing up all of our servers to a 6.5 TB array via rsync -- and it's getting full. Give me a petabyte disk, please!
Clearly, you do not make up the 90% of the market to which I was refering. It would be nice if there were a lot more people that valued lossless music like you.
Even so, if your colletion makes up only 500 albums then your storage requirements are 45 gigs of mp3's plus about 200 gigs of flac.
I stand by comment that music is no longer a driver for hard drive growth.
But video, thats a different story.
Expect a massive migration away from compressed formats, for example - JPEGs going to PNGs and TIFFs.
Your music collection of MP3/OGG/AAC may be re-sold to you in 32-bit (regular CDs use 16-bit, which was always just barely acceptable to critics of the format).
That's just dumb. We won't throw out compression just because we have big drives.
I mean if I install a 750GB drive does that make my network any faster?
And besides, 16-bit is 96dB of dynamic range. Anyone who says that's not enough is just an ass. They're the sort who claim they can see noise at 200fps and the like [especially on 75Hz monitors]...
One good use for this is a relatively cheap huge store. 4x750 in RAID-6 gets you 1.3TiB of storage for $2700 [with tax]. It allows upto any two drives to die simulatenously without losing data. If you're a software shop who needs to have access to large amounts of data and code at once without fear of it dying one day this is an idea solution.
For my personal use I got 3x250GB last year for about $600. It gets me ~465GiB of usable space [RAID-5] and any one drive can die and I won't lose my data. Typically if drives do die they don't die all at once. So for personal use it's an acceptable risk. Currently I have ~50GB of music and 200GB of movies on it. As well a 20GB Windows virtual drive [for QEMU] and copies of my CVS [archived]. Suprisingly it's 62% used considering when I bought it I thought I would never go over 10% use.
Anyways, I can see these being used for small to medium businesses which need large file stores for cheap.
That's right up there with the Monster cable displays...
Yeah cuz you need 2000dB of S/N to listen to a movie soundtrack... Oh but come on, 30$ per foot of copper is worth it!
Some people are just highly stupid.
At best I can see the drive for 20-bits [and 24 just because it's a nicer multiple of 8] but 32-bits would imply 192 dB of dynamic range which is FAR FAR FAR beyond the average hearing range. Given that the "noise polution" in the average house sits at a constant 30dB or so... the finer range isn't noticeable even with the best ears.
Just like pixels the human eye fuzzes out around 10 to 12-bits per channel [depending on the eye and channel, for instance most people are more sensitive to green than red or blue]. Just like the audio case there are masking effects with light. After 12-bits or so of range it's just academic.
You just said that 64megs of memory ought to be enough for anyone, in so many words.
Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that
Right. Tell that to any gamer running @ 1280x1024. Higher resolutions will always be in demand. Games will continue to have better and better textures, more units, bigger and more maps. I wouldn't be supprised to see 1TB games in the next 10 years. You make a good point, but just don't put finite limits on things which are likely to change quickly.
When you're feeling blue, you don't know what to do, sitting all alone, waiting by the phone... The world seems so unfair, no one seems to care. When your worlds are ripped and torn you've got a friend in porn.
Thank you for the porn! Though other folks may scorn the constant mindless sex and the crude special effects, it gets you through the day whether bi or straight or gay. When you wish you were never born, you've got a friend in porn.
When the night is long, everything is wrong. Your heart is on a shelf, you have to touch yourself. Reach for your old friend. The pleasures never end, and I think you'll find it's a friend you can rewind!
Thank you for the porn! porny porny porn porny porny porn porny porny porn
porny porno porni porniddly niddly new pornography for you, pornography for me,
You've got a friend in porn You've got a friend in porn You've got a friend in pooooooorn!
But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it.
Trust me, if your "relevant data" includes pornography, you will NEVER run out of data to put on it. Call that "Gabriel's Law" if you will. ^_^
Sorry to burst your bubble, but pictures already go to almost 40 Megapixels. Kodak just made a CCD that is like 39MP, Hasselblad uses it for one of their 30 thousand dollar camera backs. Here's a link to one [calumetphoto.com]
Actually, I don't think there is. A quick Googlin' turned up this site [hdforindies.com] which informs us that uncompressed 1920x1080 video at 24 frames/second takes up space at around 400 GB/hour. So, one of these new 750GB drives maps to about one uncompressed high-definition movie, and it can't even be two hours in length (the site also tells us that this drive wouldn't even be capable of playing back such a movie - not enough bandwidth). Now, yes, we may not "need" to see uncompressed movies, but it could easily be argued that we don't "need" quality better than good old NTSC, either.
In 20 years, we'll be watching all our movies in digital form with no compression applied and/or the resolution/frame rate will be so high that we really won't be able to tell the difference between looking at the screen and looking out the window.:)
Because I've experienced data loss before. That's a lot of valuable stuff (at least in my case) in a very small space with little to back it up with except for more of the same. It scares the bejesus out of me.
But I remember saying that about them huge 9GB drives when they came out when I was 12 (or so.)
750 (hard drive manufacturer GB) = 698.49 (real GB or GiB, depending on how anal you are).
As these sizes keep getting bigger the need to settle on one method of calculating GB, for both OSes and hard drive manufacturers, keeps getting painfully clearer.
Because "GiB" is stupid. GB means 2^30 bytes, and that's just the way it is.
Pound the table all you want, but it simply isn't "just the way it is". Keep in mind that the http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/large.html [slashdot.org] predate computers by decades or centuries (depending on your precise definition of "computer"). According to the metric system:
1 kilometer = 1000 meters
1 kilowatt = 1000 watts
1 kilogram = 1000 grams
1 kilojoule = 1000 joules
1 kiloXXX = 1000 XXXs
1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes
The only way you could say that 1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes is to make a special exception to the metric system's prefix rules, and the whole point of the metric system is to have a system of measurement without silly exceptions like that. If they had wanted a system where you had to memorize different rules for different units, they would have stuck with the imperial system.
So to sum up: some computer geeks thought it would be convenient for them to redefine the metric system to work using powers of two rather than powers of ten. This was fine as long as they were only interacting with other computer geeks. When computers spilled over into the world at large, however, this little shortcut conflicted with the way the terms were/are used by everyone else. Since the traditional (powers of ten) definition has both seniority and wider usage, it is now winning out, and rightly so.
Come on, there is no way that a 7,200RPM drive will have an average latency of 4.16ms, that's the pure physical latency of the platter! The transfer rate is similarly bogus, it's the burst transfer rate of the interface, not even the outer track transfer speed. Guess we have to wait for someone like storagereview to throw iometer at this beast and get some real info.
Even if you could fabricate the head assembly, you still have a major problem. Modern track densities require closed-loop head positioning. If you could shrink yourself to the size of the head gap, you would see the head constantly moving laterally to keep itself positioned over the track. At this scale, the platter is no longer an ideal rigid disk.
The higher your data density, the higher your transfer rate will be even if the RPM rate stays constant.
Outstanding.
Doesn't have anything really to do with latency, but I've seen several comments from folks who worship at the altar of rotational speed when the true factors that determine a hard drive's speed are aa combination of rotational speed, track-to-track latency and data density. You can spin an old 10mb drive at 200,000 rpm and it still won't transfer data faster than a modern hard drive.
As sector density increases so does data throughput for a given rotational speed. If all other things are equal when you double the sector per track density you *almost* double the drive's throughput. I say almost because in order to double throughput you'd have to cut seek times in half as well.
But - fast drives have dense platters, not just fast spindles.
the 750 GB hd is really only about 700 GB due to the manufacturers counting 1,000 instead of 1,024..
Anyway, lets look at how much space that really is, and how easy it is to fill up.
DVD Movies range from 4gb to 9gb depending on film length and extras, lets settle on an easy middle number, 7GB average.
That is around 100 DVD's you could store on your hard drive (My room mate owns over 150 DVDs, so while it might be a large number to some, it is not so large to others)
That is not including TV series, if someone were to store 1 season of the show 24 on their media center pc it would take 45GB of space.
Also concider that HD movies are going to be around 30GB each
Video games are getting increasingly large, Recent games like
The Godfather (4.5gb installed)
LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II (5gb installed)
TES: Oblivion (6.3gb installed)
World of Warcraft (5.3gb installed)
Tomg Raider: Legends ( 7.3gb installed)
Games are only going to get larger too.
This is not even counting people who dabble with video editing or anything like that, work-wise that consumes monsterous ammounts of HD space..
The author of the article mis-interpreted Seagate's latency figure. Seagate means: "Average rotational latency". This can be calculated from: 60 seconds/minute / 7200 RPM / 2 = 0.00416 s = 4.16ms.
Oficially you should add in the controller overhead, and most likely the time to read a sector (it's unlikely they pass-through the sector: in theory you can start to send the sector to the host before you've read it completely, but this complicates things as when the CRC doesn't match, you have to cancel the data sent to the host!), but if you do the math, these are negligable compared to the 4.16 ms.
I don't expect anything "special" to happen in the "seek times" area. They will be within 10% from the slightly older drives. Either up to 10% better because they did find a way to improve seek times a bit. Or up to 10% worse because the higher density requires a longer settling time, but this is less likely than a small improvement.
Sorry, I can't get overly excited about a hard drive maker increasing storage space. That is all they have been doing for the last 10 years, certainly hard drive performance hasn't been driving the industry.
Hard drives are the single biggest bottleneck on today's systems. With multi-core technology and cheap gigabytes of ram all with gigabyte transfer rates, a hard drive plodding along with a 100 - 200mb/s transfer just doesn't cut it. Why should my system seem to hang with only 10% CPU utilization because of intense hard drive activity. I can't even bring up another task that doesn't use the hard drive because the system is too busy with hard drive transfers.
Either a new I/O standard needs to be invented, something that doesn't tax your system when excessive hard drive transfers are made, or the frigging hard drives just need to start getting up to gigabyte transfer rates.
In any case, I could care less about hard drives doubling or tripling in size, until they show significant improvements in performance, or move to solid state, then I am apathetic about the whole industry.
They're becoming IO-bound far faster than cache-bound. It takes literally hours to read an entire 500gb hard drive at this point. The cache, on the other hand, is staying roughly on par with the IO speed, which seems like a more natural combination.
It's getting to the point where you want to keep your OS and core applications in Flash memory and things that are less important on hard drives. I just bought a 512 MB usb key for $25. Scaling up, you could get a multi-GB flash drive for a couple hundred bucks.
Some companies have multi-tiered storage solutions (e.g. fast SCSI RAID, cheap EIDE RAID, optical, etc.). Some of those ideas may make their way into desktop devices. You'd boot off of flash memory nearly instantly (it would cache your OS and core applications), then you'd play your MP3s, surf the web, or whatever on your relatively slow hard drive.
Flash drives are already much faster at random I/O because they don't have to seek. And they can be made to provide much higher throughputs if there's enough demand. Those little thumb drives are slow because they're cheap and USB isn't very fast anyways. HDD speeds can only be increased by adding more heads, increasing rpm, increasing density, reducing head seek times, or making a RAID.
I have friends who have multi-TB raids at their homes using a mix of IDE/Sata/USB in one RAID...
While hardware RAID support in Linux is a bit hit or miss the software kernel support works properly and is fairly quick. Certainly the bottleneck for most setups will always be the drives themselves.
Yes, it should considering that according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org] states that the maximum volume size for an NTFS volume is 16EiB. One exibyte is 1,152,921,504,606,846,976 bytes, so 16 exibytes = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes. Since a 750GB hard drive should hold approximately 750,170,112,000 bytes, an NTFS volume should be able to handle 24,590,081 of those 750GB hard drives in a RAID array. Now assuming a RAID array can handle that many of these drives, and that this new 750GB hard drive merely takes the price spot of Seagate's current finest offering of a 500GB hard drive (priced on newegg as $295 each) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 [newegg.com] E16822148108 [newegg.com] rather than debuting at a higher price point, which it probably will, that many hard drives would cost about $6,147,520,250 before tax, and not including any of the massive discounts one might expect to recieve for such a massive purchase. On top of that, at a sales tax rate of 7.75%, the tax on those drives would cost you $476,432,819.38. So I don't know about you, but I doubt this is going to be a problem for either XP or Vista for a long, long time (assuming you use NTFS partitions).
On Seagate's product page: (Score:4, Informative)
Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Just look at how fast the Earth's population shot up since the Get Horizontal ad campaign.
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course, you have to thicken up the dance floor, but that's elementary.
Still, I can't believe that there wasn't a single black bit there at the Super-Para-Magnetic Disco...
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Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Now that's just overkill. (Score:4, Funny)
How do I back it up? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do I back it up? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How do I back it up? (Score:5, Interesting)
One bad thing is that the growth of large drives seems to have slowed down dramtically in the last few years and as a consequence the improvment in bang per buck of "normal" drives has also slowed down.
I've been studying this for a while now. You can see the trend for youself at my site, http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.htm
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wow (Score:5, Funny)
Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Each time the capacity of hard drives goes up a few gigs, I think back to the day in the mid 90's when I got my first "gig" hard drive for $500. Wow, it was the most incredible thing to be one of the first people in my neighborhood to have so much storage... I didn't think I'd ever run out of that much space. And today, the OS won't even fit into such a thing.
But let's put this huge capacity into perspective: Having once had to reverse engineer an obsolete 3.5" floppy drive to repair an obsolete piece of industrial machinery that was down (the customer couldn't afford to replace the whole machine because of a failed floppy drive, and the OS loads from floppy of all things), I learned that this contraption, which was on the market in the 80's, was really incredible, if you take a step back and think about it for a minute. Then, all it takes is a moment to realize that hard disk drives are several orders of magnitude more complex. First, the density of a floppy drive is nothing compared to that of a hard disk even from a decade ago, and secondly, the linear motion of the reading head on a floppy is controlled by a simple stepper motor, whereas the round motion of the reading heads on a hard drive is controlled by servo. I mean, just stop to think about it for a moment. All those gigs of MP3s, videos, and pr0n on someone's hard drive, and what an incredible piece of engineering behind them.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)
Example:
Assume both motors move 360 degrees for every 360 pulses. If the servo motor does not reach the 360 degrees, it adjusts the number of pulses accordingly. With a stepper motor, the control sends the 360 pulses and hopes that the motor rotates 360 degrees. Most of the time it does, but if there is something wrong with the system (motor, mechanical drive, etc) you run into trouble.
Parent
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to keep track of how cheap hard disks were getting in terms of megabytes per dollar. Well, we've long since hit and blown through the gigabyte-per-dollar mark; for my next upgrade, I'm considering 250 Gb SATA drives, which are already up at close to 3 Gb/dollar (and, if another commenter has the right of it, may well blast through that mark by the time I have the money to buy them).
Obviously, at this point, it's inevitable that we will see a 1 Tb drive in 2007 if not earlier; that prediction is like predicting an egg will break when you see it fall off the counter and head for the floor. I just wonder what the upper limit is. Will we crack the terabyte-per-dollar mark? Within ten years? Five? And what will that involve, nanoscale-density recording? Gonna be interesting to find out.
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
Source, my site, here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.h
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
The cheaper storage space gets the more information will be stored. There's information that's thrown away today because it doesn't seem valuable enough to justify the cost of storage -- as the price of storage drops, it becomes worth it to store it. Take for example webserver logs, on many servers logs are periodically deleted because old logs take up space and the older logs are, the less worth they hold (how likely is it that you're going to need to check out something from your server's logs in 1998?). If the amount of space server logs take up becomes a trivial portion of the available space, then nobody will bother to have them periodically deleted. Similarly, an administrator might also/instead choose to make their logs more detailed. Maybe before they didn't log certain certain things because they seemed trivial and added size to their logs -- as the price of space decreases, the question of "why save it?" becomes "why not save it?".
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
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Great for backups (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter. A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later. Sure I understand Moores law and how 10MB was huge back then. But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it. Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there. Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that. Our humans senses will cease to notice any further difference. Games might require 2 blue-ray DVDs but will not require say 32 blue-ray DVDs in the next 10 years. What will you PUT on it?
Maybe this will mean I'll finally have as much space in hotmail as I have in gmail.
Re:Great for backups (Score:5, Funny)
(from a co-worker)
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Re:Great for backups (Score:4, Funny)
When you write "musical creativity", does that mean it won't come loaded with country and hip hop?
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Re:Great for backups (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I really think you're mistaken. I and those in my field are caught in a seemingly unending storage excalation war. We provide 500 megabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 50 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. We provide 500 gigabytes -- the users fill it up and demand more. Sure, they're wasting A LOT of space, and we could slow down the rate of growth by running scripts to delete MP3s or whatever every night, but that's a stopgap measure, and in the end is probably more expensive in terms of costly technician time than the cost of just slapping more drives in our Promise array. Currently we're backing up all of our servers to a 6.5 TB array via rsync -- and it's getting full. Give me a petabyte disk, please!
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Re:Great for backups (Score:4, Insightful)
Even so, if your colletion makes up only 500 albums then your storage requirements are 45 gigs of mp3's plus about 200 gigs of flac.
I stand by comment that music is no longer a driver for hard drive growth.
But video, thats a different story.
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Re:Great for backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Expect a massive migration away from compressed formats, for example - JPEGs going to PNGs and TIFFs.
Your music collection of MP3/OGG/AAC may be re-sold to you in 32-bit (regular CDs use 16-bit, which was always just barely acceptable to critics of the format).
Re:Great for backups (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean if I install a 750GB drive does that make my network any faster?
And besides, 16-bit is 96dB of dynamic range. Anyone who says that's not enough is just an ass. They're the sort who claim they can see noise at 200fps and the like [especially on 75Hz monitors]...
One good use for this is a relatively cheap huge store. 4x750 in RAID-6 gets you 1.3TiB of storage for $2700 [with tax]. It allows upto any two drives to die simulatenously without losing data. If you're a software shop who needs to have access to large amounts of data and code at once without fear of it dying one day this is an idea solution.
For my personal use I got 3x250GB last year for about $600. It gets me ~465GiB of usable space [RAID-5] and any one drive can die and I won't lose my data. Typically if drives do die they don't die all at once. So for personal use it's an acceptable risk. Currently I have ~50GB of music and 200GB of movies on it. As well a 20GB Windows virtual drive [for QEMU] and copies of my CVS [archived]. Suprisingly it's 62% used considering when I bought it I thought I would never go over 10% use.
Anyways, I can see these being used for small to medium businesses which need large file stores for cheap.
Tom
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Re:Great for backups (Score:5, Funny)
You must not use Maxtors.
Good man.
Parent
Re:Great for backups (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah cuz you need 2000dB of S/N to listen to a movie soundtrack... Oh but come on, 30$ per foot of copper is worth it!
Some people are just highly stupid.
At best I can see the drive for 20-bits [and 24 just because it's a nicer multiple of 8] but 32-bits would imply 192 dB of dynamic range which is FAR FAR FAR beyond the average hearing range. Given that the "noise polution" in the average house sits at a constant 30dB or so
Just like pixels the human eye fuzzes out around 10 to 12-bits per channel [depending on the eye and channel, for instance most people are more sensitive to green than red or blue]. Just like the audio case there are masking effects with light. After 12-bits or so of range it's just academic.
Tom
Parent
you don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that
Right. Tell that to any gamer running @ 1280x1024. Higher resolutions will always be in demand. Games will continue to have better and better textures, more units, bigger and more maps. I wouldn't be supprised to see 1TB games in the next 10 years.
You make a good point, but just don't put finite limits on things which are likely to change quickly.
Parent
Re:Great for backups (Score:5, Insightful)
A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
1996:
A gibabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
1986:
20 megabytes is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later.
Parent
Re:Great for backups (Score:5, Funny)
Haven't you seen Blade Runner [imdb.com]?
What will you PUT on it? But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it.
Trust me, if your "relevant data" includes pornography, you will NEVER run out of data to put on it. Call that "Gabriel's Law" if you will. ^_^
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Re:Great for backups (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Great for backups (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I don't think there is. A quick Googlin' turned up this site [hdforindies.com] which informs us that uncompressed 1920x1080 video at 24 frames/second takes up space at around 400 GB/hour. So, one of these new 750GB drives maps to about one uncompressed high-definition movie, and it can't even be two hours in length (the site also tells us that this drive wouldn't even be capable of playing back such a movie - not enough bandwidth). Now, yes, we may not "need" to see uncompressed movies, but it could easily be argued that we don't "need" quality better than good old NTSC, either.
In 20 years, we'll be watching all our movies in digital form with no compression applied and/or the resolution/frame rate will be so high that we really won't be able to tell the difference between looking at the screen and looking out the window.
Parent
I know I'm just paranoid (Score:3, Interesting)
But I remember saying that about them huge 9GB drives when they came out when I was 12 (or so.)
Keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
750 (hard drive manufacturer GB) = 698.49 (real GB or GiB, depending on how anal you are).
As these sizes keep getting bigger the need to settle on one method of calculating GB, for both OSes and hard drive manufacturers, keeps getting painfully clearer.
Re:That's right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pound the table all you want, but it simply isn't "just the way it is". Keep in mind that the http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/large.html [slashdot.org] predate computers by decades or centuries (depending on your precise definition of "computer"). According to the metric system:
The only way you could say that 1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes is to make a special exception to the metric system's prefix rules, and the whole point of the metric system is to have a system of measurement without silly exceptions like that. If they had wanted a system where you had to memorize different rules for different units, they would have stuck with the imperial system.
So to sum up: some computer geeks thought it would be convenient for them to redefine the metric system to work using powers of two rather than powers of ten. This was fine as long as they were only interacting with other computer geeks. When computers spilled over into the world at large, however, this little shortcut conflicted with the way the terms were/are used by everyone else. Since the traditional (powers of ten) definition has both seniority and wider usage, it is now winning out, and rightly so.
Parent
As usual wait for the real reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why are we still moving heads back and forth? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Mod parent up! (Score:4, Informative)
Outstanding.
Doesn't have anything really to do with latency, but I've seen several comments from folks who worship at the altar of rotational speed when the true factors that determine a hard drive's speed are aa combination of rotational speed, track-to-track latency and data density. You can spin an old 10mb drive at 200,000 rpm and it still won't transfer data faster than a modern hard drive.
As sector density increases so does data throughput for a given rotational speed. If all other things are equal when you double the sector per track density you *almost* double the drive's throughput. I say almost because in order to double throughput you'd have to cut seek times in half as well.
But - fast drives have dense platters, not just fast spindles.
Parent
To those saying it is too much space... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyway, lets look at how much space that really is, and how easy it is to fill up.
DVD Movies range from 4gb to 9gb depending on film length and extras, lets settle on an easy middle number, 7GB average.
That is around 100 DVD's you could store on your hard drive (My room mate owns over 150 DVDs, so while it might be a large number to some, it is not so large to others)
That is not including TV series, if someone were to store 1 season of the show 24 on their media center pc it would take 45GB of space.
Also concider that HD movies are going to be around 30GB each
Video games are getting increasingly large, Recent games like
The Godfather (4.5gb installed)
LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth II (5gb installed)
TES: Oblivion (6.3gb installed)
World of Warcraft (5.3gb installed)
Tomg Raider: Legends ( 7.3gb installed)
Games are only going to get larger too.
This is not even counting people who dabble with video editing or anything like that, work-wise that consumes monsterous ammounts of HD space..
error in the article. (Score:4, Informative)
Oficially you should add in the controller overhead, and most likely the time to read a sector (it's unlikely they pass-through the sector: in theory you can start to send the sector to the host before you've read it completely, but this complicates things as when the CRC doesn't match, you have to cancel the data sent to the host!), but if you do the math, these are negligable compared to the 4.16 ms.
I don't expect anything "special" to happen in the "seek times" area. They will be within 10% from the slightly older drives. Either up to 10% better because they did find a way to improve seek times a bit. Or up to 10% worse because the higher density requires a longer settling time, but this is less likely than a small improvement.
Prefer faster higher quality storage then more (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard drives are the single biggest bottleneck on today's systems. With multi-core technology and cheap gigabytes of ram all with gigabyte transfer rates, a hard drive plodding along with a 100 - 200mb/s transfer just doesn't cut it. Why should my system seem to hang with only 10% CPU utilization because of intense hard drive activity. I can't even bring up another task that doesn't use the hard drive because the system is too busy with hard drive transfers.
Either a new I/O standard needs to be invented, something that doesn't tax your system when excessive hard drive transfers are made, or the frigging hard drives just need to start getting up to gigabyte transfer rates.
In any case, I could care less about hard drives doubling or tripling in size, until they show significant improvements in performance, or move to solid state, then I am apathetic about the whole industry.
Re:EVERY NERD DANCE (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thats a lot of pr0n (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:16MB of Cache? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Flash memory prices dropping (Score:5, Interesting)
Some companies have multi-tiered storage solutions (e.g. fast SCSI RAID, cheap EIDE RAID, optical, etc.). Some of those ideas may make their way into desktop devices. You'd boot off of flash memory nearly instantly (it would cache your OS and core applications), then you'd play your MP3s, surf the web, or whatever on your relatively slow hard drive.
Parent
Re:Flash memory prices dropping (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:But what about... (Score:4, Informative)
I have friends who have multi-TB raids at their homes using a mix of IDE/Sata/USB in one RAID
While hardware RAID support in Linux is a bit hit or miss the software kernel support works properly and is fairly quick. Certainly the bottleneck for most setups will always be the drives themselves.
Tom
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Re:But what about... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Format this Red Hat! (Score:5, Informative)
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