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."
Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a buddy that does this and he uses a 1TB HDD to store the ripped & converted ISO HD movie images. He then mounts them over his wireless N network on his Multimedia PC attached to his living room's 60" HDTV or he mounts the images on his HD laptop anywhere he feels like round his home. Very cool, and he NEVER scratches or loses one of his Blue-Ray disks... (Thank You SlySoft and Elby)
Are the increases slowing down? (Score:5, Interesting)
Home Movies (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think HD movies and the like are the main reason. A ripped Blueray movie for instance is really huge, but you just need enough work space to rip and compress it down to something usable.
Home movies is a legit use. I recently converted all of my home movies to digital, from Hi-8 through a capture card. The raw, uncompressed data is really huge. My once "massive" 500GB drive is about full.
Plus you need more disk space to edit the movies, and a way to back it up (compressed), but it's much easier to work on uncompressed video.
I'm still recording on mini-dv. Now imagine the space you need for HD home movies.
Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:5, Interesting)
When you start ripping your Blue-Ray HD Movies to store on a disk-less HDD share (at about 25GB to 50GB a pop) and then you conveniently convert them into mountable ISO images, you will then know why you bought that 1.5TB HDD.
What a waste. If he spent a little more time and remuxed them down to just the movies he could easily shave off half of that space. For example, the "I am Legend" blu-ray contains two complete copies of the movie, one of the theatrical cut and one of the director's cut - no seamless branching, two full copies that are 99% identical. Toss the theatrical cut, and all of the other junk and that disc which was nearly the full 50GB is down to ~18GB.
Another common space-wasting practice on blu-ray is to include multiple uncompressed (lpcm, not even truehd or dts master audio) soundtracks, good for 5-6GB each, all of which can be tossed except the native track and then you can losslessly compress that down to 1-2GB. And then, of course, there is all the supplements which you watch, maybe once, if that. Throw those out the window, if you ever really want to watch them you can still pull the original disk out of storage.
Another benefit to remuxing is that you can easily play the movie in any variety of free and semi-free players. Sometimes that can be extremely difficult with the original iso -- like animated movies where they actually render the scenes differently depending on the language track in order to localize things like signs and to keep the mouth movements in sync, typically seamless branching is used for these things, but the net effect is 30-40 different snippet files for each specific language that are not necessarily in any obvious order.
Slow drives (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the way things are going, hard drives have moved and are moving into a market that used to belong to tape. Slow, but huge capacity. We need a fast general purpose storage device, and I'm not yet convinced that flash can fill that role completely.
Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Interesting)
And what backup solutions exist for 1.5TBs today? Anything affordable, or just more RAID solutions (again, hard drives)?
You can talk about backups all day long, but you know that when HP pushes out their latest consumer desktop with this drive, a home user is essentially buying a ticking time bomb.
Storage doubles every 14 months (Score:4, Interesting)
In kind of a weird corollary to Moore's law, the storage capacity of "affordable" consumer hard drives has doubled about every 14 months since at least 1991.
In the summer 1991 a 40 MB drive was "good", and in the summer of 2008 a 1 TB drive is "good". That's a doubling period of almost exactly 14 months. I don't have the data to back up the dates in between, but I remember doing this calculation several years ago and getting the same number.
If Moore's law continues to hold true, and processing power doubles every 18 months, yet storage capacity doubles every 14 months, at some point we will have so much storage that our processors will not have the capacity to ever utilize it all.
Re:What I really want... (Score:2, Interesting)
RAID isn't a "backup", but if your RAID array is large enough (say 1.5T * 3 Drives = 3T space), you can backup your data simply by copying files. A scripted rsync or tar will protect against corruption and user error.
The only thing you need to worry about then is mucking with the filesystem or losing two+ drives at once.
External media backups are still a good idea. But backing up onto the raid array itself will buy you time between external backups.
Re:I need one! (Score:3, Interesting)
You have Power Controls from On Track?
http://www.ontrackpowercontrols.co.uk/ [ontrackpow...rols.co.uk]
It cann open the EDB, open mailboxes, search and export to PST or exchange mailboxes without an exchange server.. Way cool tool.
Re:great (Score:3, Interesting)
Porn is one of those funny movie genres - it all comes down to the actress and possibly actor -- scenery, plot, dialogue are all utterly irrevelent.
Therefore, I suspect porn in the future will be hi-def realtime CGI with actresses (and actors) you can choose/customize, actions you can dictate down to the size of the moneyshot and it will all look real.
It will also be small files for everthing (actors, scenery, possibly utilizing fractals) with favorite "movies" just stored in a script language to be generated on the fly.
Once this becomes fact within 15 years, porn (movies) will cease to be the driving factor behind increasing hard drive capacities.
We may see the death of an entire industry (models will be cheap to generate, movies will be cheap to make with fake actresses) and perhaps a segment of the tech industry will be downsized permanently.
Re:Slow drives (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds a lot like your SATA/RAID controller may suck. I'd set up a pair of Seagate 7200.11 500GB 32MB cache drives last week with a fairly cheap Promise TX4 controller (heard about issues with the RAID supporting models available at my local computer stores). Used software mirroring (RAID 1) in Windows 2003, and did a quick HDTach test to see how they fared against the old 10K RPM 73GB SCSI U320 drives they replaced.
Turns out that aside from a poorer average seek time (12ms vs 7ms), they beat the hell out of the SCSIs (which topped at around 60MB/s). Read throughputs for the Seagates topped at around 115MB/s for the first 100GB, and were poorest at 60MB/s (and only really dropped low in the last 100GB). The system felt quite a bit more responsive (especially upon enabling NCQ). And I'd even forgotten to pull out the jumper that disables SATA2 mode.