Seagate Announces First 1.5TB Desktop Hard Drive 383
MojoKid writes "Seagate announced three new consumer-level hard drives today, which it claims are the 'industry's first 1.5-terabyte desktop and half-terabyte notebook hard drives.' The company claims that it is able to greatly increase the areal density of its drive substrates by utilizing perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology that is capable of delivering more than triple the storage density of traditional longitudinal recording. Seagate's latest desktop-class hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.11, will be available in a 1.5TB capacity starting in August. The 3.5-inch drive is made up of four 375GB platters and has a 7,200-rpm rotational speed."
yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
Re:Obligatory... (Score:3, Insightful)
Me. I already have 2TB across 4 drives here.
Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
/.: the only place where one gets a broken heart from a hard drive instead of the opposite sex.
Re:4 platters (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
How does more assurance of your data integrity obviate the need for backups? In other words, how does your behavior change even with those assurances?
Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
Yeah, it'd be nice not to have hard drive failures, but don't blame the drive manufacturers for your lack of backups. There is no data solution so good that it doesn't need redundancy in some manner.
Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Insightful)
get yourself some RAID and that won't be an issue.
RAID is not a substitute for backups!
All hard disks, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one.
Crucial corollaries:
1) All file systems, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will be propagated to your RAID array.
AND: 2) All RAID controllers, no matter how well-made they are, will fuck up one day. All of them. Every single one. And that fuck up will hose your RAID array.
And let's not get into fires, theft, lightning / voltage spikes ...
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:that's a lot (Score:2, Insightful)
The lack of laughter on my part threw me off.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, yeah, people will need that much space.
Consider HD video, photos at ridiculous resolution and tons of music.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:3, Insightful)
How big is an HD movie? How big is a library of your favorite 300 movies? That's no at all an unreasonable thing to want in a small, quiet computer that sits next to your TV, and is a couple of doublings past 1.5 TB. And that's not even counting the porn!
Re:What I really want... (Score:3, Insightful)
RAID isn't a backup. It only protects against disk failures, not OS or application faults or user error. To have a backup you need at least one copy of the data as it was at some point in the past, in addition to the most current version.
RAID reduces downtime by allowing the system to continue to function after a disk failure. That's often important, but you still need proper backups. The home user doesn't need 99.999% uptime, but does care about preserving their data; the redundant HDDs required for a RAID setup would be better utilized storing independent snapshots.
Re:What I really want... (Score:4, Insightful)
RAID is not a substitute for backups!
Nor are backups a substitute for reliable operation.
I don't even want to think about restoring 1TB to a consumer hard drive, even if I had dropped the thousands of dollars on tape drives and media to back it up.
The thing that bothers me about the backup technologies available to consumers, apart from the fact you need to spend two orders of magnitude on drive and tape more than you spent on the disks you're backing up, is that there are so many technologies to choose from. In ancient days, there was just 9 track, and everybody could read it. Later there was DDS, DLT, or for suckers, Travan and for real suckers anything from Iomega. Now I look at dropping a thousand bucks on a flavor-of-the-month drive, and it gives me a queasy feeling.
And in a world where a 160GB tape cartidge and a 160 GB hard disk SATA hard disk can both be bought for about $40, I'm open to spending a bit more to get the convenience of a standard interface hard disk, provided that it has enhanced reliability. It can be slower on transfer than tape, the convenience of random access probably more than makes up for it.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
I always thought this was true as well, but in practice it is not. If I'm out taking photos of landscapes or whatnot, then yes, I get rid of all of the photos except the really good ones. When it comes to photos taken at parties and such, I find I usually hang on to most of them. Not because they are necessarily all that good, but because they capture a moment or an action (or blackmail content...) that I don't want to lose in spite of the imperfections. I find I really only delete the ones that are completely out of focus, blurred, or otherwise trashed beyond use.
I don't take a whole lot of photos, but I do have probably 90-100 gigs of photos from the last two or three years.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a persistent worry for me. I recently started considering again what I was backing up, and realized that a full backup of just the data that is either impossible or very difficult to replace takes up about seven DVDs. Then there's the stuff that's just really, really annoying to replace, and that's more than half a terabyte.
And then when I settle on a solution (recently including Taiyo-Yuden DVD+R media stored in a fireproof lockbox), I wonder about whether it will survive an EMP blast. I worried that I obsessed over too-trivial things, and then I read this xkcd [xkcd.com], and realized that yes, I do obsess over too-trivial things, but I am not alone.
Re:4 platters (Score:3, Insightful)
You're off by an order of magnitude. The formula is:
Which simplified to:
Reduced further:
Then rounded up a smidgen:
Someone else posted this in scientific notation as (capacity * 10^12 / 2^40). Which agrees with my computations.
Re:What I really want... (Score:3, Insightful)
How about a drive that advertises longevity instead of storage density. Seriously, I'd take half that storage if there was more assurance of my data integrity.
What you want is an SSD, then, though they're not available in even half this capacity as yet (wait a year or two, though). With wear-leveling, a modern SSD, from what I've read, tends to fail on a write attempt, leaving it still capable of being read (depending on what the filesystem does on a write failure). Thus, as an SSD gets older, instead of dying entirely like a spinning disk, it simply loses excess capacity, leaving the data already written available to be read (again, depending on filesystem behaviour).
My only concern with this is security - disposing of old SSDs with sensitive data on them, if they can't be erased (because they can't be written to), may be problematic. While a filesystem may mark those off as unwritable, and perhaps even unreadable, to the OS, a data recovery tool would certainly be capable of being created to read those old unwritable data cells with data still in them.
With SSDs being silicon transistor based and subject to Moore's Law, the density of these things should double roughly every 18 months or so (if not sooner since the industry is running hot and heavy right now). Already 256GiB models are being announced (maybe more; I haven't been paying attention that closely due to the costs of the higher capacity models), so a 750GiB model (half your 1.5'TB' requirement) shouldn't be too far out - probably 18-24 months at most.
OCZ's recent announcement of their Core SATA II SSD line with VERY reasonable prices (something like $170 or $180 for a 32GiB model, and going up to 128GiB) bodes quite well for the price dropping like a rock on these things in the very near future (much faster than I had been expecting, really).
The concerns over the SLC vs MLC debate will work themselves out soon, I'm sure. I'd really like OCZ to come out with ATA models of these things to retrofit an older laptop (like my ThinkPad T40) to bring new life to older machines. For now, I'll pop one in my old Mac Mini and hook it up to a NAS for big storage.
Yay for the future!
Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:3, Insightful)
Anime compresses EXTREMELY well due to cell shading, so a regular movie is gonna be about 1gb/hour for regular dvds.
Anime looks like shit when it compresses due to what you call cell shading, and what the rest of the world calls cel painting (aside from computer-generated animation, where it is called "cel shading") unless you use an encoder specifically designed for the purpose. I do believe that both DivX and XviD have options for this however, as do other encoders.
I have consumed plenty of MPEG4-encoded fansubbed anime, though, and lots of it was high-bitrate and still looked like dookie.
Needs are changing (Score:4, Insightful)
As the amount of data stored grows and gets cheaper per GB, the amount of marginal data increases to fill it. It's a form of long-tail economics [wikipedia.org] - you keep more and more data worth less and less as the price of storage drops.
When a large drive was 80 MB, I didn't keep music in my computer, and I kept a few low-rez, carefully trimmed/cropped/scaled down personal pics in the computer. When a large drive was 800 MB, I kept a few of my favorite songs as MP3s, and dozens of pictures. When a large drive was 8 GB, I had a modest collection of music and a few hundred pics, at 80 GB, I had all my CDs saved as MP3s along with thousands of pics, at 800 GB (now) I have thousands of MP3s, pics from every source I can imagine, as well as many videos from my digital camera.
As the value of each bit goes down, the total value of the machine goes up, even as the value of each bit goes down. What's funny (for me) is that the same P3 that started with 8 GB now has almost a TB of space, and still serves all my files. Storage/bandwidth has value, processing power is not so much.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only 100 years ago we had wax cylinders and player-piano analog rolls. Today the ability to read those resources is very limited - where bills printed in ink on Vellum (sheepskin) & Papyrus or engraved into stone - are viewable (even if the languages are arcane) without technology.
It is a real problem - magnetic domains will fail and even if the Al substrate in an optical disk remains intact - nothing says that the plastic around the data-carrying substrate will remain optically stable...
ALA is correct - data must have a storage upgrade pathway and continuity evaluation as an ongoing part of the archive process.