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.
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].
Its all relative (Score:2, Interesting)
In short, we as consumers don't need to worry about how to use this multitude of ever expanding space; software and media companies will do it for us.
Re:Wrong photo! (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine that... (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds a like long time, but it really isn't.
Re:Having purchased a few Seagate products... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:mp3s (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that HD content is out, we need the capacities to go up another order of magnitude so that storing HD is as easy*/cheap as SD.
*I buy discs, but download the rips. My setup is only 720p, so it's easier to get someone else's recode at 720p than do it myself, and it takes less space on my server. With 2TB in DVDs and recorded content off TiVo/OTA, I'm always worried about bumping into the limit on my unRaid box and having to buy more drives.
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.
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.
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.
Redundant data (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Bad Sector (Score:1, Interesting)
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...
Re:Bad Sector (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Same as it ever was. (Score:3, Interesting)
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 to even mark what to record anymore; just record it all and sort it out later. No checking what's on TV, no checking what the PVR has recorded, simply check what's been broadcast. Ever.
So I no longer think storage lasts a fair while. I can see high utilization levels for my storage for at least several orders of magnitude. At least until copyright is reformed so one no longer needs to archive it all on ones own.
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.