Hitachi Announces 400GB Hard Drive 476
jkcity writes "Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has announced their new 400GB 3.5-inch ATA hard drive, which they claim makes them the new capacity king. Specs on the drive are also available."
deskstar (Score:5, Funny)
Re:deskstar (Score:2)
Re:deskstar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:deskstar (Score:2)
Re:deskstar (Score:4, Funny)
Just got a phone call from phrasebook. His travelstar blew up. Murphy's Law and all.
Re:deskstar (Score:4, Informative)
The fluid bearings would eventually leak (oil), which would make it's way across the disk platter thanks the centrifugal force. Disks spin fast, heads hover just over the disk (extremely close, as in, much closer than the thickness of a human hair) due to the airflow created by the spinning, a droplet of oil on the disk impacts into a head that's not designed to take direct impact of that magnitude. Especially not a huge impact like that from oil attached to a very fast spinning disk, with lots of inertia. BANG! Something that is at the mercy of extremely microscopically tight tolerances gets belted right where those tolerances matter the most! Your data might still be on the disk, but one or more of the heads are now useless.
Loosing oil out of your fluid bearings can't be great either, since it is the oil that is the actual bearing itself.
PS, I worked in gyro compass/stabilizers in a military role during the 80's. I heard that the F-16's gyro bearings were actually individual air molecules! The sleeve and shaft were built to such incredibly high tolerances that there was just enough space between them to use air as the bearings! I thought this was incredible, until they were replaced with fully solid state gyros based on lasers (measuring slight changes in 3 laser beams comprising 3 axis as the aircraft would move around)!
Then IBM issued a firmware upgrade; some suspected the upgrade kept heads moving during idle time to keep them from colliding into each other. Who knows?
Heads coliding into each other? Highly unlikely. Ever pulled an old broken HDD apart? They are practically fused together on an offset arm that allows them to "clamp" one or more platters. One arm moves them all. There might be some drives with more than one set of heads/arms, but I don't know of one yet and if it did exist, shirley they would not be able to hit each other. Be great to reduce latency and access times. Especially if they each only serviced a half of the disk each. SCSI TCQ would love that.
--
There's no reason to become alarmed, and we hope you enjoy the rest of your flight. By the way, is there anyone on board who knows how to fly a plane?
Re:deskstar (Score:5, Informative)
Because of the "deathstar problem" they are outsourcing inspection and final testing of the drives to a different company [whiteflyer.com] now.
Re:deskstar (Score:5, Funny)
I found that with my IBM drives if I keep the temp down (fan/vent/air flow/whatever) they were a lot more stable.
As for the capacity of this thing, think of it in other terms... 27.75 days of Spice Channel in VCD format.
I hereby propose a new measurement standard...
We have Volkswagens for mass
foolball fields for distance
and VCD Days for storage.
Re:deskstar (Score:3, Funny)
Whatever happened to the good old LOC (Libraries of Congress)?
Re:deskstar (Score:3, Funny)
Hell, I'd walk naked in the snow for fifty football fields if it meant not having to use the metric system. Yup, I'm proud to be an American.
Re:deskstar (Score:4, Funny)
We have Volkswagens for mass
foolball fields for distance
and VCD Days for storage.
My friends and I like to use dead bodies as a measurement for trunk/cargo space on vehicles. You should see some of the looks we've gotten from salesmen when we start to talk about how many dead bodies would fit in the trunk of this car he's showing us.
Re: 27.75 days of Spice Channel (Score:4, Funny)
Don't worry.. (Score:5, Funny)
Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course I own all the DVD's so if the drive breaks its merely a pain to copy them back on. However, for the majority of users, 400GB of kazza'ed movies and music is a lot of time and bandwidth wasted.
People who do lots
Bigger is better, I mean for video disks. (Score:3, Informative)
However on hte low end, my home, this won't happen for awhile. What I want to know is when and if these drives will force the price of 200GB drives down? I mroe space, dangit! Truly high end systems won't touch this drive, but a lot of work gets done on less than first line equipment. This could be useful in a few years to uss low cl
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:3, Informative)
AFAIK the acronym RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. And I guess at the moment such a drive is not what I would call "inexpensive". YMMV.
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Hooray for marketing!
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's a much better name.
Relative cost (Inexpensive) has nothing to do with RAID, while Independent spindles has everything to do with it -- nobody would use any kind of RAID on different partitions on the same spindle for any reason I can think of. If it's a marketing name, they got it right this time.
Not always (Score:3, Informative)
The whole point of RAID is that the disks are closly dependednt on each other
Really? What about RAID 1? Mirrored disks are in no way dependent on each other. You can do a little learnin' here [arstechnica.com].
RAID 5 is independent too. (Score:4, Informative)
You can read here [recoverdata.com] to find out about RAID levels 2 thru 4 (they aren't used much because RAID 5 is superior). RAID 10 is a combination of striping (RAID 0) and mirroring (RAID 1). Because of the mirroring, RAID 10 can lose a disk without losing data. You'll also find mentions of RAID 50, 51, and 15. These are combinations of RAID 5 with striping or mirroring. It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine disk independence.
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:2)
Umm, no, it doesn't. It stands for "Independent".
You will find some people who think it's "inexpensive" but that's just rubbish...
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Informative)
>Umm, no, it doesn't. It stands for "Independent".
I believe you are BOTH right. As I recall, the "I" in RAID *originally* stood for "inexpensive" back in the days when the rapidly dropping price of 5.25" and 3.5" drives were making them very attractive "inexpensive" replacements for larger, *very* expensive mass storage systems. But time passed and the success of RAID arrays made them the primary method for providing high performance data storage and retrival as well as data redundancy. They became the new standard for comparison, so the term "inexpensive" was no longer relevant and was replaced with the word "independent," a term that better describes them. As I was typing this I found this link that seems to agree with my recollection [ic.ac.uk].
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, "Inexpensive" still applies and then some. It's much, much cheaper to assemble an array of disks adding up to more than a few hundred GB than to try building a single drive.
Secondly, there is nothing "independant" about the disks in a RAID. The closest you come is in straight mirroring configurations (which are highly unusual for an array of any significant size), and they still don't operate independantly.
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:3, Informative)
See http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:4, Informative)
OR you could do RAID 5, have striping and rotating parity, have 300GB of available space and be protected against a single drive failure. Of course, always match your RAID configuration to your specific data requirements, as each RAID configuration offers different trade-offs between usable storage space, read/write performance, data security and cost. YMMV.
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:2, Informative)
You need something like 3x200GB drives to make a RAID-4 or RAID-5 array of 400GB, which can withstand a single drive failure.
Re:Good for RAIDs (Score:5, Funny)
I probably shouldn't reply again to the same post, but how can you talk about the cost of something for comparison and leave out a main component? "This is cheaper if you don't include taxes and shipping and other hidden costs." That's just ridiculous.
Reminds me of my mom asking me to drive her to a store an hour away so she can save 39 cents on some groceries. Yeah, it's cheaper if you don't include the costs for gas and my time!
sorry about the rant, but mothers can be so stubborn...
PS: no I don't live in the basement. I live on a college campus. I do return to live my parents this summer though. And I'm unemployed. And I don't have a girlfriend. Oh damn, I'm a typical Slashdotter :(
Technical Details (Score:5, Funny)
Finally enough place... (Score:3, Funny)
How big is it? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:How big is it? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if every clown represented one GB, it would roughly take one hour for all the clowns to get out of the volkswagon (9 sec per clown).
Re:How big is it? (Score:3, Informative)
If you read the article, you'd notice it says: 45 hours of HDTV broadcast
In case you still don't get it, that's 45 hours of HIGH QUALITY PORN. I mean, that's almost as good as the real thing, right?
Re:How big is it? (Score:3, Funny)
very nice (Score:3, Funny)
Trickle down (Score:4, Insightful)
Yah, I know, it's a different environment. But have you noticed how more and more people aren't even using their desktops anymore?
We've got SATA for desktops. Still stuck with really old tech for laptops. MASSIVE disk sizes for desktops, relatively small for laptops.
C'mon. If we can get 2GB CF working properly, where in the hell is my 200GB laptop HD??
Seriously, HD capacity is the ONLY reason I fire my desktop up at ALL these days.
Well...'till HL2 ships of course...but that's another rant entirely.
Re:Trickle down (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Trickle down (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I couldn't stand using a laptop all the time. I find a desktop is better ergonomically (hate laptop keyboards, nasty LCD monitors, nasty tinny speakers) and financially (all that miniturization isn't free). Yeah I know you can plug larger peripherals into a laptop to alleviate some of these problems but you're getting closer and closer to turning it into a desktop then.
Why some people actually prefer to use a laptop (Score:5, Interesting)
'I don't know why anyone uses a laptop' appears to be a very common opinion on Slashdot. So, as a laptop user for over seven years, let me fill you in with why I prefer a laptop:
I much prefer the digitally-connected LCD monitor, which is a lot sharper and less tiring than any CRT I've used. I have an external monitor also (LCD, naturally) and find the added desktop space invaluable for serious work. Cleartype on a digital LCD is very nice, too. I know you can do all this on a desktop now, but laptops had digitally-connected LCDs and second monitor ports long before DVI and dual-head graphics cards were a common option. I love the fact that I can carry it around and from room to room easily, and still be internet-connected through WiFi. I love that my stuff and environment is always there whether at work, home, or away on business. I love that it is completely silent - this was in fact why I started with a laptop in the first place; I simply could not stand desktop noise when researching/writing. I like being able to put it away in a drawer when I'm not using it.
The laptop percentage of the market relative to desktops has been steadily increasing over the last few years, so it appears that many people agree with me. I personally could never use a desktop as my primary machine, although I recognise that people have different priorities and that for many a desktop is a better choice (cost & power being the key issues.) I did recently get a Shuttle home server solely for storage (670gb) and PVR purposes. Apart from the TV connection for watching programmes, it is accessed through terminal services over WiFi - from my laptop.
Re:Trickle down (Score:3, Informative)
What for? (Score:2, Insightful)
What for?-My what a big hard drive you have. (Score:3, Funny)
Plan on running Longhorn.
Re:What for? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well I imagine I'm in the minority here, but I'm a 3D artist rendering animations on my machine. My 120 gig drive's starting to get full of lightly compressed (.png) images and mesh files etc. I can work within the 120 gig by doing backups etc, but a 400gb drive is definitely tempting.
So what about average Joes? DV video anybody? $500 buys you a DV camcorder. Just plug it into your firewire port and you've got 13 gigs an hour chugging along into it. Somebody who takes lots of vids of their kids would want lots and lots of gigs so they don't have to recompress. Etc.
I should point out, though, that there is a huge difference between needing the storage and being able to use it.
Re:What for? (Score:3, Informative)
What guys are you doing with so huge hard drivers?
Me? Two words : digital video.
The mini-dv cartridges I use hold 1 hour of high quality footage and only cost $10 or so. That is unfortunately 13GB when imported into my laptop. When I finish a project, I dump to an external Maxtor 250GB drive I bought six months ago for about $300.
These capacities make home movies more affordable than ever, it's great.
Re:What for? (Score:2)
Re:What for? (Score:2)
HD recording of standard TV today takes about 2GB per hour, so 200 hours or about 70 tapes worth of video could be stored on a disk.
Re:What for? (Score:2)
Re:What for? (Score:2)
glass platters (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:glass platters (Score:3, Funny)
from what I heard hitachi/ibm fixed there death stars by getting rid of the glass platters
They moved over to bubblegum.
Size doesn't matter (Score:3, Insightful)
What they really should be concentrating on is reliability.
I mean, the Hitachi HDD division(sp?) is the old IBM HDD division. And they haven't that good of a track record (even though I owned a few IBM's and had 0 problems)
ATA-100 only ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ATA-100 only ? (Score:5, Informative)
A standard 7200 RPM drive generally maxes at a little over 66MB/s (ATA100s just barly needed) (and cause its parallel, it can't share bandwidth).
Note that WD and seagate don't use it.
The hype about SATA is not 150MB/s, but that its serial and doesn't ahve any master/slave nonsense
Re:ATA-100 only ? (Score:5, Interesting)
According to the specs it is a 7200rpm which will not benefit from ATA-133 over ATA-100
Re:ATA-100 only ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The low-end server that arrived at work yesterday has two 10kRPM drives that each read 66 MB/s sustained. Datarates are improving all the time.
Re:ATA-100 only ? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:ATA-100 only ? (Score:3, Informative)
Yah, ATA-100 is just so much faster than ATA-133. In fact if you're only using one drive you can get away with only ATA-66 and interface still isn't a bottleneck. A big on-drive cache is to maximize the throughput of the drive
They should sell them in pairs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They should sell them in pairs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:They should sell them in pairs (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, gigabit switches are basically unheard of outside of very large networks, so unless you're using crossover cable you're still limited to 100Mbps, which practice gives you about 10MB/s (due to overhead). And many of us are on wireless networks, which will give you even less throughput.
Networking technology still has a ways to go before the disk will really be the
Re:They should sell them in pairs (Score:4, Informative)
Um, check your rearview mirror more often...
8-port, workgroup gigabit switches can be had for $150-$200. I just bought a 3com 8-port OfficeConnect switch this week for $150 from CDW.
The prices have dropped a lot in the past 6 months. Gigabit cards as cheap as $25 (probably 32-bit PCI, which is another bottleneck) and 3com server NICs are only $120 or so. Unmanaged switches are down to $1400 for a 24-port.
We're in the process of putting all of our servers onto a central 24-port gigabit switch. The older 24-port 10/100 switches will be star-topologied off of that to connect up the employee's computers. Back when gigabit was thousands / tens-of-thousands of bucks for the cards plus the switch, it wasn't affordable.
damn and just as free music is under atack (Score:4, Funny)
I do imagine that this is more for the server market or for, as they put it, applications where tape back up would be used... I can't think of any reason to have that much information in one place, until the next version of windows comes out and youneed two of these things.
Pre Installed data? (Score:2, Interesting)
5 platters (Score:5, Informative)
Re:5 platters (Score:2)
When there is a fixed failure chance per platter, one can expect the device failure rate to go up with the number of platters.
Re:5 platters (Score:2, Informative)
Re:5 platters (Score:5, Interesting)
Another trick I use is to buy from a manufacturer that had problems the year BEFORE. I'm buying IBM/Hitachi exclusively, because the bad PR from years ago is still pushing their QA to high levels. The Deskstar 180GXP is an awesome drive, I've installed over ten of them for people and not one failure yet.
I guess now we know.. (Score:5, Funny)
Fabulous! (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing like a bigger-better-faster-harder product to make the rest nice and cheap.
Those are the pre-Microsoft numbers (Score:5, Funny)
400 hours of standard TV programming
45 hours of HDTV programming
More than 6,500 hours of high quality digital music"
"or, after you install Windows and Office XP...:
13 minutes of standard TV programming
4 minutes of HDTV programming
More than 6,500 seconds of high quality digital music"
You forgot... (Score:2)
.. sixty seasons of Red Vs Blue.
Old (Score:5, Funny)
7200rpm is not worth the mention? (Score:4, Insightful)
(i say only, because I hope nobody is using those terrible 4200rpm bigfoot drives these days)
Specs out of whack (Score:5, Insightful)
"45 hours of HDTV broadcast, or
4,000 high-resolution x-rays, or
40,000 typical library books, or
10,000 high-quality, 4 minute MP3 recordings"
Wow... I never knew that a typical library book took up 10MB (more like 100k). What are they doing, scanning all the pages in? And what kind of bitrate are they using for a 4 minute MP3 recording to take up 40MB?
Re:Specs out of whack (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Specs out of whack (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, this is still way under their inflated figures, but a book is hardly 100k.
Capacity king (Score:2)
iTunes (Score:2)
Will we ever have enough storage (Score:4, Interesting)
Noe, 400GB seems vast. More than enough to be going on with, but I know this would fill up as well. So will the 4TB drive I'll eventually have. I wonder if we'll ever have "enough" space. I also wonder what I'll actually fill all this space with.
Re:Will we ever have enough storage (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not that old (only 31), but I've been using computers since 1982, and on a serious, regular basis since 1990. Along the way I've noticed the "price factor" has always remained relatively the same, in regards to hard drives, and total system breakpoint sales prices.
Back in 1988 I was lucky to play with a laptop that had a whopping 20megs in it, and 4mb of ram. I thought I was in heaven. Then I got my own computer a few years later that had a 500mb drive.
I never thought I could fill that much space, considering that at the time the largest filesize I was playing with were zipfiles downloaded via bbs latenite that were half a meg or so. I remember one nite downloading a new version of Remote BBS, and knowing it would take only 45 minutes on dialup (2400 baud modem, fast!
And I thought that was FAST. Did I mention speedy? 1K every 4 seconds... Couldn't believe it.
What does this have to do with hard drive spaces? Well... I'll get to that.
A few years pass. I'm finally playing with a pentium and upgrade to a whopping 3 gigs! This was -just- before the time when mp3 was hitting the scene on this "new" web thing... I wish I knew how powerful the concepts were then, as I know now, but I digress... hindsight is perfect, and all that.
So, before napster came out, it was the thing to search personal webpages for mp3, and whoa! download them straight from the website...
There wasn't any real traffic issues in the day. Everyone was using fast 14.4k or if you were lucky bleeding-edge 28.8k modems, but the webservers were on T1's, and could easily handle the hundred thousand or so people actively getting mp3. It was a strange time. Exhilirating and always full of "what should we look for today" events while combing this new territory.
The growth of the internet and the growth of hard disk capacity have been in lockstep since the early nineties, I'd dare say that they each are compelling the other, but that's a story for another time.
So Napster hits the scene. People go apeshit and download/upload like crazy. Time to upgrade that hard drive to a whopping 8 GIGS! Get two of em'. And I still didn't think I would ever fill that much space inside of a year. Oh, how naive we are...
Now its about 1998 or so... Hard drive capacity is exceeding 10 gigs for the new drives, and steadily every month some new announcement comes out that pushes the standards. By this point I was ripping CD's from friends, from the library, from business associates, and having a great time all the while.
Divx movies? Not yet.. we'll get to that.
By the end of 1998 I had gone from perhaps 2 gigs of mp3 (when I first started seriously collecting via dialup) to over 50.
Again, the needs, requirements, passions, desires, consequences and usage of hard drives were changing upwards all the while. Hard drive manufacturers knew what was really pushing their sales, and they worked that much harder to fill the "need for space".
Divx movies. By this time I was downloading 2 movies a day, easily, via napster and my friends on BeShare. Getting a whopping 100k/sec in 1999 ROCKED, and I had amassed over 300 GIGS of just media (mp3 and movies only) within six months on disc.
No, I didn't store all of it on hard drive. I was a frequent purchaser of CDR at the local office supplies store, and got very good discounts.
Its amazing. I don't see an immediate end to the cycle yet. As for violations of the MPAA/RIAA... Fuck 'em. They're a monopoly, they don't deserve any money for the next 1000 years, and should wake up to the open nature of the internet. I feel absolutely no shame for collecting, burning, sharing, distributing and using thousands of GIGS worth of data over my short c
power consumption SATA vs. PATA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:power consumption SATA vs. PATA (Score:3, Informative)
-Adam
MTBF (Score:4, Insightful)
Rus
Re:MTBF (Score:3, Informative)
Hard drive death (Score:5, Interesting)
Meanwhile, the 340 megger in my 486 firewall chugs away, having turned ~11 years old this year.
I remain skeptical that "bigger is better" in the hard drive world. Before they advertise size and speed, give me a hard drive with vastly improved quality and longevity, and *then* I'll become interested.
Two heads are better than one? (Score:4, Interesting)
For desktop use, there are so many open drive bays in a PC that I think I prefer two drives to one monster.
Drives 137 gigs (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Drives 137 gigs (Score:4, Interesting)
how to use all that space? someone has to say it. (Score:4, Funny)
Auto-Spin Disabler Jumper (Score:4, Informative)
remember the GXP's (Score:3, Informative)
What ticks me off the most was that IBM's tech support denied and denied and I got stuck with dead drives that were at the time under warranty.
Although, I would like to see some hardware review site put the Hitachi drives under MASSIVE long-term stress tests (not just one drive but several 10s of 'em or so).
For Hitachi, it's a major uphill battle. They'll have to somehow prove their worthiness again. For one, maybe they shouldn't use the name "Deskstar" as it is synonymous to "Deathstar." Distancing themselves from IBM's flaws would be best for them. It's like how auto-makers make a sub-brand of themselves to distant themselves from the typical stereotypes and so they can sell for more and look classy too (Lexus, Acura, Infiniti, etc.).
Re:400GB = 800GB (Score:2, Funny)
Top 5 uses for a 400GB HD (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Worth it? (Score:2)
And i can centainly see the usefullness, for example in large storage raids. If you have 9 Slot raid array, now you can do a 2.8TB Raid 5 with hot spare.
With the Maxtors 300GB (that are only 5400rpm) it would be only 2.1, with the normal 250Gbs even less.
Sure, not everyone needs the biggest available HD in desktop right now, but its good that if you need them, you could buy them.
Re:What I'd like. (Score:2)
As everyone knows, hard disks are similar to women hand bags: the bigger they are, the more cluttered they are
Re:What I'd like. (Score:2)
He said "in [his] pocket", not backpack
Re:What I'd like. (Score:3, Insightful)
Except of course we're talking about HDD's and not real space. Like it or not the term KB, MB and GB when used in conjunction with HDD specs refers to 10^3, 10^6 and 10^9 respectively. A terrabyte hard drive would mean 10^12 unfortunately, or a thousand of what they call a 'Gigabyte' even if it is just 931 real Gigabytes.
Re:370GB! (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember, Giga meant 10^9 a long, long time before computers came along and tried to redefine it as 2^30. Giga was just a handy phrase, it's only through misuse that it came to be thought of as 2^30.
I waffled on this a lot myself, but now I think the SI people are right.