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Data Storage Hardware Technology

Seagate Plans 37.5TB HDD Within Matter of Years 395

Posted by Zonk from the lot-of-pr0n dept.
Ralph_19 writes "Wired visited Seagate's R&D labs and learned we can expect 3.5-inch 300-terabit hard drives within a matter of years. Currently Seagate is using perpendicular recording but in the next decade we can expect heat-assisted magnetic recording (HARM), which will boost storage densities to as much as 50 terabits per square inch. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum." In the meantime, Hitachi is shipping a 1 TB HDD sometime this year. It is expected to retail for $399.
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Seagate Plans 37.5TB HDD Within Matter of Years More

Seagate Plans 37.5TB HDD Within Matter of Years

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  • Terabits??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05, 2007 @10:34AM (#17472926)
    It's bad enough that hard drive manufacturers are dead set on confusing people with 1,000,000,000-byte GBs. Do they really need to start throwing around figures in Terabits? Seriously, enough is enough...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Yvan256 ( 722131 )
      The kilo/mega/tera/etc comes from metric, not the computing industry. A kilometer is 1000 meters, not 1024 meters.

      I do agree on the "bit vs byte" part, though.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by lewscroo ( 695355 )
        Yeah, the HD industry really needs to stop doing this. I mean, with Terabit drives, you are going to be loosing huge percentages due to that stupid 1000 = 1024 logic they have. 1000 GB is going to end up really being closer to 930 GB

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by qazsedcft ( 911254 )
          It's the OS manufacturers that need to get up to speed. The definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes. You're thinking of GiB. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alioth ( 221270 )
        We should deprecate all the 1000-based metric suffixes dammit. Life would be so much easier if we all counted in hexdecimal - I was writing an asm routine for an 8 bit embedded machine to convert decimal to a short the other day, and if we only counted in hex, the routine would have been about quarter of the instructions that it came to!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by foamrotreturns ( 977576 )
      It's not that any of them are dead set on it. It's a cold war. For example, if Seagate decided that it needed to get right with its consumers and started labeling its disks accurately, then Maxtor, WD, etc would have the competitive advantage because their drives of identical capacity would be labeled as having more space. Ultimately, it's the consumer's fault for not reading the fine print on the boxes he buys. If Seagate (or any other manufacturer) could trust its consumers to be informed enough not to bu

  • Backup Solution? (Score:5, Funny)

    by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @10:34AM (#17472940)
    I want to see the tape drive for that thing, Bitches.
    • Easy. Delegate the backups to your worst enemy.

      At $399, you could buy a bunch of them and use them in a rotating backup, periodically sending one offsite. Or use it as the destination for nearline backups of everything else on your network.

      • Re:Backup Solution? (Score:5, Funny)

        by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @10:59AM (#17473304)
        I swear to God this is true. I had a client ask me to create two partitions on a 500G drive, which was loaded with 200G of medical insurance claims. When I asked why, he said that although he didnt want to buy another drive, he understood the importance of having a backup for his data.

        I sprained a rib, choking back a laugh.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by cdrudge ( 68377 )
          It depends on what the "backup" is for. If it's for disaster recovery, then you are right. But if it was a on-line backup in case of an "Oh shit I didn't mean to delete that" type of thing, then dual partitions can make sense.
          • No, the dude was planning to schedule backups from the Microsoft applet to the other partition every night, thinking that if the first partition failed.......

            I kid you not.

        • That's not entirely spurious.

          It is at least better in some ways than those people who think that a RAID array is an excuse not to have a backup.

          Hardware failure is not the sole cause of data loss - in fact, I'd be prepared to believe that data loss down to "software" failure is more common, be it a human being who accidentally bangs "delete", or a virus, or bad software corrupting the records, etc..

          I'm not saying it IS more common, but it's certainly plausible.

          However, the attitude here displayed by someone

        • When I asked why, he said that although he didnt want to buy another drive, he understood the importance of having a backup for his data.
          Well, obviously he's not going to be protected from a failure of the drive mechanism. But his strategy isn't totally useless. By copying to a seperate partition he's protected himself from accidental erasure, and corruption of the data (though software that either corrupts it, or from a power failure).

          It's really a poor mans archival mechanism. I'd argue that data corru

      • Re:Backup Solution? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by segfaultcoredump ( 226031 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @12:27PM (#17474796)
        Ok, so you are spending $399 for a 1TB drive. Compare this to a 400G (uncompressed) LTO-3 tape @ $50 per tape (price is good as of yesterday when I ordered another 100 LTO-3 tapes). Your drive is about 3x as expensive.

        The tape is still cheaper. It also takes up less space on my shelf and I can drop it and not worry about loosing anything.

        I am looking at these drives for the front end disk array that I use in my d2d2t setup (disk -> disk -> tape). Given about 40 of them I can keep 2-3 weeks of backups online in the disk and then destage to tape for the offsite vault and archive backups. This way restores of recent data is almost instant (no need to mount and seek to the spot in the tape), but the old archives cost me less and I save on power and cooling (the tape library expansion modules take no additional power. its just a shelf with tape slots).

        Its not an either/or choice. Most folks with any real amount of data to backup use both.
    • Backup tape density grows as well. LTO 2, which my company uses can store 200N/400C GB per cart. The truth is, our source code is so easily compressed that we get 500N/1000+C GB per cart when dealing with it. LTO4 should be out soon. I can only assume that in 5yrs tapes will be easily dealing in 20TB uncompressed.

    • Coming Soon: The LTO-48! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:16AM (#17473572) Journal
      ...the tape will be in a cartridge that holds a spool 65cm in diameter, holds approximately 600TB (1200TB w/ compression) and will require an autoloader that eats at least one rack for the entry-level 8-tape kit. /dev/nst0 will weigh in at 38kg, and cleaning will require a tape w/ 6000-grit sandpaper in place of media.

      All BS aside: you do bring up an excellent point. I'm a guy who has to do backup/recovery, and I've found that even a fully compressed LTO-3 will barely --just barely-- hold up to 1.2TB if you rig it right (by combining hardware/software compression, and the love that Bacula gives it (though admittedly sparse file handling most likely has inflated the reported amount of stuff).

      Anyrate, that boils down to --maybe-- two full HDD's if the two are 500GB SATAs.

      The good news is, after you pare down the crap you really don't need to backup, it usually isn't all that much for most companies. You can safely exclude out most of the OS itself for starters... w/ kickstart on RHEL and a .ks file that replicates what you've got on a given server (partitions, packages, etc), you can cut a LOT out.

      Even more good news - if you get up a monster RAID array of similar drives (full SAN kitting or just attached to a big ol' server, no biggie), you can use it instead of tapes for most of your day-to-day backup. Then latch your tape drive or autoloader onto it and only commit to tape the reallly vital stuff that requires a long retention period. Most backup software suites (even Bacula) support writing to file as well as tape, so this shouldn't be too big of a problem for a sysadmin if s/he knows what s/he's doing.

      Adaptation and all that.

      But then, most of the servers in my care consist of a pile of RAID5'ed SCSI drives that range 36-140GB in size... and I doubt that most of them will get much bigger before it's time to replace the servers themselves. Just because you can get monster capacity on a single drive, doesn't mean that you need to or even want to.

      Now if I already had a monster robotic multi-drive tape library running 24/7 now, and the boss wants to up the HDD capacity on a given pile of servers because he pretty much has to? Yeah. That would require a lot more thought and planning, and at that stage of the game a disk backup solution similar to what's been outlined above would be big and ugly, but would pretty much be what you're stuck with having to do.

      ...at least until they come out with the LTO-48 ;)

    • Funny you mention that. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lethyos ( 408045 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:21AM (#17473664) Journal

      The cost, longevity, performance, and capacity is completely inferior to making backups of disks onto other disks, and has been for quite some time. I have no idea why people ever stick with tape at all these days other than for nostalgia. Does it feel good to have a cartridge using a remarkably old fashion approach to data storage or are people just ill-informed?

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Penguinisto ( 415985 )
        "I have no idea why people ever stick with tape at all these days other than for nostalgia."

        ...because it's easier (and far less nerve-wracking) to hand over a case full of tapes to the offsite storage courier, knowing full well that he's prolly going to just (literally) throw the thing into the back of his truck and hurry off to the next client?

        True disaster recovery planning involves offsite storage of data IMHO, and tape is hella easier to transport than HDDs. Also, you don't have to worry about what

      • Re:Funny you mention that. (Score:4, Informative)

        by clydemaxwell ( 935315 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @12:33PM (#17474874)
        Who the hell modded you up? You have obviously never been involved in a large-scale backup solution.
        Disks DIE. Tapes rarely do (comparatively). Tapes, although slow and linear, are incredibly durable.

        HDDs aren't exactly volatile, but they are a heck of a lot more susceptible to corruption and failure due to the fact that you have both a magnetic storage medium AND the circuitry to power and control it on one device. And if one dies, you're pretty much fucked. A tape is only one of these, and is simpler and more reliable.

        So why do we do things the old-fashioned way? Because it FSCKING WORKS!!

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mlts ( 1038732 )
        There is one big reason: Sysadmins won't have a heart attack if a tape clatters to the floor.

        Tape has been engineered for decades for reliability. A tape cartridge doesn't have much in the way of moving parts compared to a hard disk that can go out of whack, and modern tapes like DLTs, it will take more than a clatter to the floor to make the tape unreadable.

        Hard disks are great, but way too fragile for serious backups. However, I wish tape drives and tapes would come down in price like hard drives... th
    • Here you go.

      http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/C2/C 2 .html [sun.com]
      http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/L8/L8 .html [sun.com]

      Now, whether or not the home user will be able to afford one of the damned things is another issue :) but one of these bad boys fully loaded will back up that drive.

      Although you were being a smart ass -- and I can appreciate that :) -- you do bring up an interesting question. With drives increasing so rapidly and for such inexpensive prices, you'd think that the tape drive
      • Of course, it doesn't help that I was thinking about the new $399, 1 TB hard drive that was also annouced today when I typed up my response to you, only to look up at the thread title (after submitting) and realize that you were talking about the 37.5 TB drive.

        This day can't end quickly enough. :/
      • I wasnt being a smart ass. Tape Backups have taken years from my life expectancy. Any new drive announcement triggers me to think about backing that bitch up. My clients always want the latest new hardware, with no thought as how to protect their data. If I had a time machine, I would go back and find the person who came up with the idea for DLT drives, and kill them in their crib.
        • :) Well, that's DLT. No wonder you're upset.

          We've had incredibly good results with LTO. The one that we got (the StorEdge L8) is six times faster than DLT IV on a single tape drive and has had no media reliability problems. I really would love to get my hands on a used StorEdge L8 for home, even if it's LTO-1.
        • "Any new drive announcement triggers me to think about backing that bitch up."

          I've found that counting the amount of actual data the customer/client needs stored, as opposed to the drive capacity, keeps the blood pressure nice and low. :)

          "My clients always want the latest new hardware, with no thought as how to protect their data."

          Part of being a sysadmin is to help guide them back into reality :) I'm kinda fortunate in that most corporate folks that I know give me the opposite problem - they want it

          • But I am not a sysadmin. I am a consultant, usually brought in after things are too fucked up to fix on the cheap. I would love to guide clients through the build out of their data centers, but I can make a LOT more money fixing the screwups of others. When things are in the dumper, I can charge almost anything I want.

            Am I greedy? Fuckin-a!

            Once I am aboard, I do guide clients through most purchases, but since I work with mostly Doctors and Lawyers offices, there is always some smart guy who fancies them

  • That's great. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aladrin ( 926209 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @10:39AM (#17472998)
    That's a great amount of storage and a great price, but what about some REAL information: Speed, heat, power consumption. If for the same price I can run 4 250gb drives and save on heat and increase speed, this doesn't make sense to do. If I can run 6 and RAID them, and gain security, it really doesn't make sense.

    The largest drive in the world isn't any use to me if it's slower than a 3.5" floppy or I can use it to replace my space heater.

    • Re:That's great. (Score:5, Informative)

      by ImdatS ( 958642 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @10:45AM (#17473106) Homepage
      Just quickly, the specs I found for the Hitachi Drive:

      - 5 discs, two heads each, rotating at 7200 RPM
      - 1070Mbps transfer rate
      - 8,7ms avg seek time
      - 4,17ms avg latency
      - around 9 watts power consumption while in "inactive-mode" (NOT reading or writing)

      Hope this helps

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Achoi77 ( 669484 )
      That's a great amount of storage and a great price, but what about some REAL information: Speed, heat, power consumption.

      I don't think marketers will even care about all that, their only benefit will be the low cost, high density factor. Why?

      Because SSD are coming. And HDD manufacturers know this. SSD are such a humongous threat to their business, HDD are going to be obsolete tech the moment SSDs come out, so that is why manufacturers are playing their last trump card: the fact that they can hold gobs and

  • Well, I like my pasta primevera on heated plates but I am not so sure I would put 37 TB of my data on platters that get heated repeatedly, till some independant testing shows the durability of the data.
    • HARM uses highly localized and short-term heating. I doubt the platters as a whole are noticeably affected.

  • Unit of measure (Score:2, Informative)

    by sphealey ( 2855 )
    If this is to be a tera_BIT_ drive then I believe the headline should read "Tb" rather than "TB".

    sPh

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Cctoide ( 923843 )
      37.5TB = 300Tb. TB is a "rounder" unit and as such is more suitable to a headline, although it's still a bit confusing.

  • OS/BIOS (Score:2, Interesting)

    by s31523 ( 926314 )
    I hope OS and BIOS manufacturers are listening... I'd hate to drop 400+ on a hard drive to have it seen as 1/3 of the actual size by either BIOS or the OS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )
      No sane OS has paid the remotest bit of attention to what the BIOS thinks the disk is in years.
      • No sane OS has paid the remotest bit of attention to what the BIOS thinks the disk is in years.

        That's very true; this is why I had to use a disk extender with Windows XP on a computer I set up for someone - it wouldn't properly detect the size of the disk.

  • product looking for a market (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cliffski ( 65094 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @10:56AM (#17473272) Homepage
    Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these? In my experience, PC hard disks are already way too big. A friend of mine uses his 100 gig drive for some emailing, websurfing, playing a few games, and music playback. Last time I checked his PC it was over 85% empty. And most of the space that was consumed was the O/S.
    All a bigger drive gives joe average is a longer defrag time, and longer search time. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of current domestic end-user drive space is currently empty.
    Sure, many slashdotters will have filled their disks with all manner of stuff. I'm a developer, and the obj files alone for games stretching back 10 years certainly take a up a huge chunk of my disk, but we aren't average joes.
    I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:

    Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK)
    Seek Time
    Cost

    Why innovate on capacity? it's the one major metric that most people have stopped caring about. I'm not being a luddite, for a long time disk capacity *was* a major issue, and we regularly ran out of space. I think that time is over.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by lonechicken ( 1046406 )
      I've got two 300GB hard drives on one of my computers. There's "only" 85 Gigs left on one drive and 5 Gigs remaining on the other. And I regularly clean out games I don't play anymore, and have a separate computer for testing out MSDN stuff. So, yeah we're always going to need more.

    • Re:product looking for a market (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Prof.Phreak ( 584152 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:02AM (#17473356) Homepage
      Data centers spend millions (literally) on storage. Try pricing a few hundred terabyte solutions, and you'll see.

      Besides, if you could store all of music/movies/images that where -ever- created on your home drive (not just those copies of libraries of congress), why not? I'd certainly wouldn't mind having all that storage---cheaply.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ivan256 ( 17499 )
        Datacenters don't necessarily want larger disks. Frequently, they are performance oriented and are more interested in spreading their dataset across a larger number of spindles for increased performance. They end up using terabytes of capacity for gigabytes of data. Seagate in particular has shifted their roadmap from capacity to performance in their enterprise and business class products. High capacity is reserved mostly for end users.

    • Re:product looking for a market (Score:5, Funny)

      by William_Lee ( 834197 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:04AM (#17473396)
      Two words... p0rn and piracy...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )
        Nah. Monster drives just make up for the fact that DVD jukebox technology is overpriced and primitive.

        Plus, once data is divorced from physical media it becomes much easier to do interesting things with it.

    • Re:product looking for a market (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zenaku ( 821866 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:15AM (#17473546)
      It's still a major issue for me. You're right, I'm not an average joe when it comes to storage needs, but does that mean that nobody should produce a product that fills my need? My 1.2 Terabyte RAID array is full, and I am currently wondering how the hell to add more storage and migrate the data without simply building a whole new machine.

      The innovation in capacity and density is driven by the needs of enterprise users, and atypical users like me. The advances that come of it are then incorporated into lower-end drives as well. The reason that you start to see 100GB drives being the lowest capacity you can find is not because nobody could get by on less, it is because it would cost more to keep producing drives using the older technology -- each leap forward in drive technology has to be accompanied by retooling of manufacturing equipment and process, and it doesn't make a lot of fiscal sense to keep producing lower capacity drives if they cost as much or more to make as a newer one with higher capacity.

    • Does anyone really need these?

      At work, I'm building a 200 TB storage system for a particle accelerator. It is a small part of a much larger grid that will eventually need about 3 - 5 petabytes of online disk space, and about twice that much on tape for backups.

      I see myself buying a lot of these when the enterprise version comes out. Heck, with current systems taken into account, I'd only need about 3 SATAbeasts (48-disk enclosure) with these suckers in it.

      Rule of thumb in computing: There is *alw

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NSIM ( 953498 )
      Depends on what you need to store, I've already got around 2TB of storage scattered around my house, and I seem to be like most corporates in that it's doubling every year. I have no doubt that I'll be looking at 1TB drives real soon and that larger drives are going to become increasingly attractive for me. I daresay much the same arguments were made about 10MB, 100MB drives, 1GB drives, 100GB and so on yet markets for these emerged pretty quickly.
    • Consumers will want significant capacity once media-center PCs with downloaded video become common, and this day is coming very soon. People want a la carte TV, and Netflix and iTunes and amazon and whoever else are gearing up to deliver it. Your children's equivalent of your DVD collection is going on those disks.

    • I could use two.
      So yes, they're needed. Just because you might not need one doesn't mean there isn't any one who needs them.
      (My multimedia friends would just about sell their souls to get one of those. Imagine all that high quality video you could store on them!)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Alioth ( 221270 )
      The same technology (which fundamentally is increasing the density of the data on the platters) can be used for making physically smaller, less power consuming drives. For example, a Microdrive sized disk with the capacity of current drives in desktop systems. This could go into a device like a HD camcorder, and have space for plenty of full quality uncompressed video.
    • I think the market is right around the corner: high-definition TV.

      The PVR market has been crippled in recent years because of market confusion, and compatibility problems (will my TiVO work with my cable box, etc.), plus competition for consumers' money by HDTVs themselves.

      Once people get done buying their HDTV and paying off their credit cards, they're going to start looking at PVRs. I think that's a market that's probably going to explode in the next 5-10 years, even more than it has already. I also think you're going to see PVR functionality being built into the 'standard' cableco boxes, rather than as an upgrade. (Not that it will be free, they'll just charge everyone for it.)

      High-def TV takes up a lot of space. That means if you want to have significant PVR functionality, you need to have a lot of local storage. 37.5TB, or 300Tb (aka 300,000,000Mb, if we use the 'marketing department' definitions) would be about 4,340 hours (180 days) of 19.2Mb/s HDTV. While that seems impossibly huge, I could imagine a future PVR using it as local cache: constantly downloading and storing programming based on your preferences. Add in a big HD movie library (say the contents of your local Blockbuster) and you can give the customer the impression of many simultaneous channels, even if they only have a relatively narrow pipe. (Narrow being 1 HD channel at a time, or a 20Mb pipe -- fat by today's standards, granted.)

      Content always expands out to fill the available capacity. I remember when I first heard about the development of DVDs, back in the early 1990s. They seemed pretty ridiculously big then, too. Now I have stuff that I can't back up to DVDs, because it would be impractical to split it among so many discs as would be required. (Apple's Aperture doesn't even try to have a backup-to-DVD option, it's designed strictly to work with removable hard discs as backup 'Vaults.')

      There was a time when people thought 20MB removable media was more than a single person would ever need, though we might look back and laugh. There's going to be a time in the future when 40TB looks the same way.
      • I just bought a dedicated 750GB hard drive for my PVR uses. I have my Mac record over-the-air HDTV. A single HD movie might take 10-20GB.

        It's probably more than I really need, and I've gotten into the practice of culling stuff that I'll never watch again, but I like to keep plenty around. I also store video editing work, and that eats hard drive space quicker, 13GB an hour just for the source media, then there's the renders and ancillary files.

        In all, I have just over 2GB in my computer right now. I'd r
    • You're a luddite because your complaint is senseless:
      1. As long as someone needs the space and is willing to pay for it, increasing space is good regardless of whether the majority needs it.
      2. Companies are working very hard on your needs as well, so you aren't being neglected.

      In addition, you're also ignorant, because consumers are already buying HDTV video cameras. As long as people keep breeding, there will be massive amounts of new footage - and yes, for completely normal people.
    • I presently have 2 300GB drives in my media server, 500GB of which is given over to DVB-T (television) streams and compressed videos. They cost me about $150 (£75) apiece.

      Capacity is important to me, therefore, as that partition is perpetually about 98% full (although I suspect that it also be full if it was three times the size, I'd just keep more of the good stuff for longer).

      But yes, price is also important. The drives I bought were in the "sweet spot" where the cost per GB was low. The higher dens
    • Actually a larger hard disk can only help with defrag times and won't effect search times (assuming the same amount of data)

      But your point on Why Innovate on capacity is a good one--moreover why innovate only on capacity.

      How about a hard-drive with built in RAID? Spread writes across all platters so that if one glitches you get the others. Still, this is not optimal because you can't replace a platter--but still, can we work on using that extra space to improve reliability?
  • Gigantic hard drives are great and all, but I'm especially wary of anything Seagate releases that's new.

    My first large hard drive was a Seagate 120GB 7200.7 that still works to this day. It's one of my favorite drives and has never let me down.

    I needed more space so I buy the then top-of-the-line Seagate 300GB 7200.8. I believe this was the first to use Perpendicular Recording Technology. I backed up all of my precious data on there and went about my business, only to realize that after 8 short months, the

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by afidel ( 530433 )
      The 7200.8 does appear to have issues. The Storagereview reliability database has it ranked in the 31st percentile reliability-wise, although the limited number of entries (only 220) might be skewing the results a bit. The 7200.7 on the other hand is in the 89th percentile with nearly 800 entries. The majority of Segate products listed in the database with a statistically significant number of entries are ranked in the 90+ percentile for reliability. Personally I have installed about 300 Segate HDD's in ser
  • He said that it should be possible in the near future to contain the entirety of a human brain on hard drives and be able to download your 'self' to them. Maybe we're close.
    • Storage space wise we seem to be getting there a couple of hd generations even if were not there yet (in terms of affordability). Brain has around 10^11 neurons (one terabyte is 10^12 bytes, SI standard). Each neuron can make connections to thousands or ten thousands other ones. Even with some clever mapping of connections I'm guessing we would need something in the petabyte scale. (Source for number of neurons and connections: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/brain/ d n9969 [newscientist.com])

      Then of course there

  • ANOTHER LIE (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:16AM (#17473562)
    This drive will not be 1TB. It's another scam. Rather than actually be a 1GB drive, as in 1,099,511,627,776 bytes it's a 931.32~ GB drive as in 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yep, 69GB short of a Terabyte. It's just falsely advertised as a 1TB drive.

    Hard drive makers:
    Kilobyte = 1024 bytes
    Megabyte = 1024 kilobytes
    Gigabyte = 1024 megabytes
    Terabyte = 1024 gigabytes

    Label your fscking drives accurately.

    • Eh, close enough. Who's really going to miss that missing 69GB, anyway? That's barely, like a small shelf of DVD movies. A pittance barely worth mentioning. I routinely lose 69GB in the wash. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a guy wearing sneakers and cargo pants with a buttload of flash drives!

    • Re:ANOTHER LIE (Score:5, Informative)

      by Soul-Burn666 ( 574119 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:48AM (#17474170) Journal
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix [wikipedia.org]

      Kilobyte = 1000 bytes
      Megabyte = 1000 kilobytes
      Gigabyte = 1000 megabytes
      Terabyte = 1000 gigabytes
      Kibibyte = 1024 bytes
      Mebibyte = 1024 kibibytes
      Gibibyte = 1024 mebibytes
      Tebibyte = 1024 gibibytes

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Arcaeris ( 311424 )
        While the names may have been officially changed in 1999 and many of us having been working on computers for far longer than that, that's just old habits dying hard - the real problem is one of a perception.

        Windows (and I assume Mac OS?) continues to display file size in terms of base 2, and HD manufacturers have bought into this base 10 thing (to make their hard drives sound larger).

        I don't care either way which one they use, as long as both groups agree on the same thing. This discrepancy between what is

    • Re:ANOTHER LIE (Score:4, Informative)

      by benzapp ( 464105 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @11:50AM (#17474204)
      Is a kilometer 1024 meters?
      Is a kilogram 1024 grams?

      It is the software makers who do not understand these historic terms. Fight the redefining of words!

  • Only a matter of time (Score:2, Interesting)

    by davidwr ( 791652 )
    Here is a Capacity over time [wikipedia.org] chart.

    Just eyeballing the straight line, this chart shows capacity doubling every 21-22 months or so. Lately things have sped up a bit.

    I don't think someone would announce a drive that was 9 years away. It looks like things are moving at a faster clip, faster even than the 18-month "Moores law" that applies to transistors.

    Here is the important question on everyone's mind:

    Which is doubling faster:
    Drive size or the yearly porn production rate?
  • We also expect the sun to turn into a red giant within a matter of years.
    • I was going to post the same thing. "A matter of years" could mean 3, it could mean 100, it could mean 'til the end of Sol, etc. Instead of what? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday January 05, 2007 @12:00PM (#17474346)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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