Seagate Ships Billionth Hard Drive 245
Lucas123 writes "Seagate's first drive, shipped in 1979 was the ST506, which had a capacity of 5MB and cost a cool $1,500 — or $300 per megabyte. Today, a typical Seagate holds 1TB and cost just 1/5000th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte. Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs." Update: 04/23 14:56 GMT by CT : The quoted fraction is wrong. Someone complain to ComputerWorld. Update: 04/23 15:13 GMT by CT : TY. The site is corrected to say "just 1/50th of a cent ($0.0002) per megabyte." The universal equation is once again balanced.
Bad Sector (Score:5, Informative)
My first hard drive was a 20MB Seagate that went into my 8Mhz 8088 Sanyo PC, which was originally bought with two 360KB floppies and no hard drive. I remember feeling very lucky at the time, because while I was saving up for the hard drive (which cost ~$400 in ~1985 as I recall) the 10MB model (which I was going to get) was replaced by the 20MB model at the same price.
Same as it ever was. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny how it always seems as if the next drive we purchase offers virtually limitless and impossible to use storage space but is never really enough [slashdot.org].
Re:Same as it ever was. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ugh. 20MB, 540MB, 5GB, soon 500GB all filled with binary crap over 25 years of use but free software changed all of that. I remember when 20MB seemed impossible to fill up. It was hard to do with nothing but text files but indeed adding a few games, AOL and a hand held scanner to a IBM XT clone cramped me for space. Then I remember when the 540 MB hard drive seemed like a vast space for text and images on a 486 box. It easily fit my old DOS stuff but then came Windows 95 and finally someone did me the "favor" of loaning me a copy of M$ Office so I could work with them and two 540MB drives was not enough. The same kind of cycle repeated itself with the next computer and a 5GB drive. Sooner than later it was filled with binary crap, starting with Windows 98. XP would have been impossible to run on the hardware and that's where I got off the treadmill. The same equipment has lasted to this day and was only replaced when I felt like having real hardware upgrades. Some of it, like a ten year old thinkpad, is still useful. It's also true that free software network storage has made it easier to get to the things I care about and drastically reduced my overall storage needs that way. Today, 500GB is way more than I need for my music and movies and I'll be able to buy a deeply discounted multi TB drive in a year or two when I feel pinched again.
It's easier to ride the backside of the upgrade wave than to be pushed and crushed in front of it.
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...Then I remember when the 540 MB hard drive seemed like a vast space for text and images on a 486 box. ...
Ah yes. I remember being insanely jealous when my girlfriend's father [now father-in-law] had TWO [yes TWO!] 540MB HDs installed in his computer. This was in 1994, so I'm sure it was quite expensive. I remember thinking at the time, "Wow! He's got a whole Gigabyte of storage!"
At the time, I was running on 2 x 40MB MFM HDs, venerable ST-251's in a 286 box. I ran those up to the time when I had a Pentium 90Mhz in around 1997.
A few months ago, I got a 2GB micro-SD card which is the same size as the fingernai
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Then came MythTV. You have no idea the levels of storage you can utilize for video recording if you're not that discriminating (and hey, all those companies saying content is valuable, it's like storing money! Well, ok, I just have issues with throwing stuff away... you never know...).
Then we got MultiRec in Myth which allows you to record all channels on the same multiplex. 6 DVB tuners and you can record every channel transmitted... Imagine the archive! No need
Law of computing (Score:2)
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I used to have an uber-expanded 8088 computer of about the same vintage: a Zenith Z150 with passive backplane, ethernet, 1.5MB of RAM, 3.5" floppy, Hercules graphics --- and *two* 20MB Seagate MFM drives. Those things were awesome. Not only was the revving-jet-engine noise as they spun up seriously cool, but when the machine was turned on I didn't need any heaters on in the room...
I slightly miss those old MFM drives. While modern ones are far more sophisticated and generally better in every way, the old
Re:Bad Sector (Score:4, Funny)
Oh YES! My Z150 r0Qd! Mine had a off-brand "hard card" which, for all you punks who were born in the Clinton administration, was a unbranded Seagate MFM hard drive mounted on an IDE expansion card. I forget why.
Oh, and it was 30 megs!! Awesome! Actually, it was a 20 meg drive but there was some trick they did with the old MFM drives to make 20 meg drives hold 30 megs. I forget what it was.
That machine was mondo kewel. Had CGA graphics too! I forget what happened to it.
Let me tell you some more about the old days.
Where are you going?
Get back here!
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And it had the passive backplane (which meant that the processor was on an ISA card and plugged into one slot, and the RAM was on another ISA card and plugged into another slot)!
And the full-length HDD/FDD/serial port card (WTF?) had not just one but *two* monster ribbon cables connecting to the hard drives in order to achieve the staggering data throughput of, nearly, a megabyte a second! Beat that, SATA!
Mine ended up getting skipped. I wish I'd known how much in demand they are now, I'd have kept it..
Re:Bad Sector (Score:4, Informative)
Makes me nostalgic too (Score:5, Funny)
I remember the first time I put the whole Library of Congress on a hard drive. It brought tears to my eyes, as I felt so lucky. Of course, this was in 2007, so I still had a few hundred more gigs to fill up with wares and music. Still it was an important experience.
Hackable too! (Score:2)
Don't get me started on Perstor controllers... Those things were voodoo...
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God, why do I still remember that??
Re:Hackable too! (Score:5, Funny)
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I think what you really mean is you ran out of clever ideas.
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...let's not forget the brief period after that where Real Men learned that early IDE drives did NOT like a low-level formatting...
Only took one drive to learn that lesson...
Re:Makes me nostalgic too (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, though, I don't understand why people feel the need to simplify things in slashdot submissions. Why would you write "79 million terabytes" when the proper way is both more understandable and more concise. Just say 79 exabytes or even just 79 EB. News for nerds, ok? We didn't smoke our way through high school.
Similarly, it would be more useful to define a quality level for some well known video codec and estimate how many hours that would be instead of just giving us a semirandom number. Not that even that is necessary, since the real news is Seagate's achievement.
The submitter shouldn't feel like I'm targeting him specifically. I just wish more people would take advantage of the fact that people on this site should have a basic understanding of things like SI prefixes. It would just be a nice touch to make things that small bit more readable.
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Speak for yourself.
Seriously, I don't think it's a bad thing, just a conversational approach that seeks to engage the reader.
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The networking world, and the storage manufacturers, actually comply with a standard, namely SI prefixes being EXPLICITYLY defined as base-10.
Standards compliance, pure and simple
Change of Logo (Score:5, Funny)
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They outsourced the math to Verizon [verizonmath.com].
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$0.0002 is 1/50th of a cent, not 1/5000th.
I'd also like to nitpick about the general notation of fractions. I've learned that 1/50 is pronounced "one fiftieth", or perhaps "one over fifty".
Thus, 1/50th means "one over fiftieth" or 1/(1/50) = 50, not quite what was intended.
Maybe this is one of those things I'll never understand as a non-native English speaker, like the cases where a double negative means single negative. Writing "1/50th of a cent" is likewise redundant, if you mean "1/50 of a cent".
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Not if you work for Verizon:
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html [blogspot.com]
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actually... verizon would think it was 2 cents per MB...
capacity (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory Simpsons quote (Score:5, Funny)
To which the answer is a resounding, YES!
Wrong photo! (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, maybe you have to be over forty to know the difference...
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The article has a photo of a drive that's supposed to be the ST506. It looks more like an ST225, as the ST506 was full height.
The article pictures what looks like a 40MB 5.25" (half-height) drive, the ST412.
As you say, the ST506 [pcworld.com] is a full height drive, twice the height (and weight) of the drive pictured.
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But it ain't a 506. My old boss had a 506 and an ST312 on his desk. I told him they were collector's items in 1994. Well, anyways.
Remember the old MFM interface was called the '506/412' interface? Remember bad sector maps? Delivering new PCs to customers and running HDTest to see how many sectors went bad during the car trip and the potholes? never carrying a spare drive cause it would either die after a few th
The most important unit of measurement (Score:5, Informative)
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That's also roughly 4 million Libraries of Congress.
Something I've always wondered... when measuring a Library of Congress, are we talking about the text data from the books, or each page of the book as perhaps an image? I'd imagine that for many of those books, there is a good deal of relevant information that is not in the book's text, such as the condition of the book, etc. Not to mention the many historical documents I am sure are in the Library; the information contained within them is richer than just their text. Has this been taken into account in yo
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Clearly what we need is the ISO standardizing the LoC into a proper unit.
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or 18 million years of porn.
1tb = typical? (Score:2)
Either way, congrats to Seagate, it is a very remarkable milestone.
Re:1tb = typical? (Score:5, Funny)
Customer: "I want one of those congress library storing things for the computing machine I bought for my kid".
A: "What capacity? 1 Tb is the typical size. Less than that and you risk your kid turning gay overnight. And die."
Its all relative (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, we as consumers don't need to worry about how to
Re:Its all relative (Score:5, Interesting)
It's relatively not *too* bad if you're working with large files that can stream. A system I bought in 1994 had a 420 MB disk, which was state of the art at the time. Its bandwidth was on the order of 1 MB/sec. In contrast, the 500 MB disks I'm using now get about 60 MB/sec (internal SATA, at any rate -- USB disks are still limited to 20 MB/sec). That's about 1200x the storage with 60x the transfer rate, so the relative transfer performance (a word I just made up) is about 5% of what it was then.
Latency's another matter altogether. Both seek time and rotational latency are about half what they were then (rotational latency based on 7200 RPM today vs. 3600 RPM in the mid 1990's). So if you're latency-bound, you're really in tough shape. If you're streaming ogg files or what have you, you don't have this problem, but if you're paging to disk (or use applications that create a lot of small files, or scan directories containing lots o'files) you're really in a world of hurt.
Enterprise SAS disks tend to be a lot lower in capacity (74 and 150 GB are common sizes), but rotate at 15000 RPM. So you're spreading out your data over a lot more disks, improving your net throughput, and you're suffering much less from latency. If your application's multi-threaded, with plenty of threads performing queued I/O and plenty of workers, you can make progress even while you're waiting for other I/O ops to complete.
Seagate: Over 1 Billion Sold (Score:2, Funny)
Best not to brag (Score:5, Funny)
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
Capacity references elude me. (Score:3, Funny)
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Yet more fudged Seagate arithmetic (Score:4, Informative)
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Units? (Score:5, Funny)
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Imagine that... (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds a like long time, but it really isn't.
FDISK, PART, FORMAT /S (Score:2, Funny)
They forgot one capacity statistic (Score:2)
hay! how much is that in... (Score:5, Funny)
How about a beowulf clus.... no... no makes no sense.
Heh, I, for one, welcome our large-capacity-cheap-per-megabyte-storage.... argh
ok fine - no one wants to hear it!
DOES IT FUCKING RUN LINUX?
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I'm amazed (Score:2, Interesting)
OK for music? (Score:3, Interesting)
Their lawyers must work out the royalties, but consumers get a very nice copyright exemption. [cornell.edu] Dunno about P2P, but it might also be covered.
a still cant find last week's email (Score:3, Funny)
I'd really like to know... (Score:2)
Milestones (Score:5, Funny)
Wasteful (Score:2, Insightful)
Why single out hard drives? (Score:3, Insightful)
AFAIK, hard drives don't use any more toxic materials than any other consumer electronics, and in many cases outlast the computers they are installed in. They also perform a useful function better and more economically than any other alternative at present.
If you want to talk about wasteful consumer electronics, crap like remote controls for car stereos, USB-powered electric pencil sharpeners, or LED-studded kid's shoes seem to beat hard drives hands down.
Redundant data (Score:3, Interesting)
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142 Million Wind Chimes! (Score:3, Funny)
Now, I'm trying to figure out how to coat my bike tank in that coloration.
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Its called Ferric Oxide, Fe2O3, or RUST!
Too bad transfer times haven't kept up (Score:2)
Potrzebie? (Score:2)
It's the only one I understand any more...
that's how many shipped, how many were RMA's? (Score:2)
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Far fewer than all the other brands, I'd imagine. We've tried just about everything over the last 15 years, and always come back to Seagate for reliability.
Of course, we don't buy server drives from anybody but our SAN vendor these days. "Rolling your own" storage just isn't possible anymore when you need high-end SAN featuers. Crack open one of their hot-swap carriers, though, and it says Seagate on the mechanism. I imagine our SAN vendor, which sells millions of drives, has taken a hard look at reliabilit
Inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in my day... (Score:5, Interesting)
... we called a 5.25 hard drive a "mini-winnie" since the established 8 inch hard drive at that time was called a Winchester .
Back then the two CP/M Z-80 "micro computers" at university lab where I did my class work used 8 inch floppies. Real floppy disk Users dismissed mini floppies not only because of it's paltry storage capacity but because some pinhead decided to reduce the disk rotation speed of the mini floppy by one half thus reducing its data transmission rate. At least that's how I remember it.
Some other graybeard is gonna have to take over for me now cuz I gotta go chase some kids off my lawn...
Useless analogies (Score:3, Funny)
Seagate, which claims to be the first company to ship a billion drives, says all those drives amounted to 79 million terabytes of capacity, enough for 158 billion hours of digital video or 1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs."
How many libraries of congress per VW Beetle is that?
ST506? That goes way back !! (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty cool shit, push bytes into a couple of registers to make the damned thing seek to a given track. Service the interrupt. Push in a couple of other bytes to cause a sector read. Service the interrupt. It didn't get any lower-level than that.
We specifically avoided the Linux code at the time since we didn't want to GPL our code or use their implementation.
Writing my own low-level device driver for accessing hard-drives was pretty cool. Before long, I had written a bunch of the simple UNIX command-tools for DOS -- ls, rm, cat, cp. Boot out the DOS handler, read the raw FAT data off the HD, format it, and interpret it.
*sigh* Anyway, this is apropos to nothing. Just waxing nostalgic about a university project 20 odd years ago. It's all been downhill from then.
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You must be new here. :P
My first hard drive was a Seagate. All 20MB of it. For $500.
It was for my Mac SE. You were supposed to remove one of the 800K floppies to install it but I left both floppy drives in and still managed to squeeze the drive into place. I remember thinking that it was a pretty neat hack. Then I promptly partitioned the drive into two 10MB chunks and copied ALL of my floppies at the time onto ONE of the partiti
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Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude
Re:mp3s (Score:5, Funny)
With statutory damages of $150,000 per CD, it looks like the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue. No wonder the music industry is hurting.
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1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs
the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue
To put that into perspective, that is $180,000 Trillion Dollars, or approximately 100 times larger than the annual budget of the United States ($2-3 Trillion) ref [warresisters.org].
To put it in a different perspective, each of the Internet's approximately Three Billion users (based on estimates I have seen that ~50% of the world is connected) would only have to illegally download 400 songs to serve up that type of damage.
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Also, as others have quite succinctly pointed out, you've obviously never properly filled up a hard drive if you really think Windows takes any appreciable percentage of your space.
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This is a page for bashing seagate.
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Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, they only buy the secret black market drives that were forged with the blood of a newborn goat and never fail, but smell faintly like souls burning whenever they spin up.
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Noob.
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It's called RAID5 [wikipedia.org].
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Careful now. Oklahoma used to be where they were made.
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