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."
that's a lot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:that's a lot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:that's a lot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:that's a lot (Score:4, Funny)
+1 Groin
Re:that's a lot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:that's a lot (Score:5, Funny)
Are you thinking of the pedobyte?
Re:that's a lot (Score:4, Informative)
"You must be joking."
Gee, you think?
Re:that's a lot (Score:5, Funny)
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Big deal, Traci Lords started making movies before her own parents were born.
great (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah. Bill Gates once said 500 GB of porn ought to be enough for anybody! Or something like that...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:great (Score:4, Funny)
I hope not. I make my living as a queef foley artist. I can also do the sound of someone stepping on a duck, but there's not much call for that.
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:great (Score:4, Funny)
Sir, I have analysed your film, and must insist that you stop with these lies. There are not 725 different noises. There are merely 25 noises repeated 29 times!
With lies such as these, I am only left to ask: Are you a politician?
Re:great (Score:4, Funny)
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (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 generat
Slow drives (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the way things are going, hard drives have moved and are moving into a marke
poor math (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Slow drives (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slow drives (Score:4, Informative)
Got a source for that? I've just installed two Seagate SATA 750G drives with 16 MB of cache each in a mirrored config, and I get sustained read performance in the neighborhood of 60-65 MB/s. And mirroring should speed up read performance relative to a single drive. Write performance is about 25 MB/s (tested using bonnie++). These numbers are a significant improvement over the PATA 200G and 120G drives that they replaced, but not matching the relative increase in capacity (nearly 4x).
This article [tomshardware.com] is about a year old, but none of the drives listed give you throughput greater than 100 MB/s. And that list includes 10k RPM drives.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Correction: One drive of about a dozen gives 102 MB/s read performance, a WD Velociraptor which is 10k RPM.
Re:Slow drives (Score:5, Informative)
Good Source is Storage Review
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchmark/bench_sort.php [storagereview.com]
The top 34 drives all do at least 54mb/sec MINIMUM and at least ~80MB/sec maximum. The top 15kRPM cheetah doing 82.7-135MB/sec.
If i were to pull a number out of my ass I would say 78-135MB/sec (min/max) on the new 1.5TB drives.
I would say if you have 750gig seagates and you are only getting 25MB/sec you have a bottleneck. Those drives should do a MINIMUM of at least 40MB/sec...
Re: (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 o
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.
Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
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Me. I already have 2TB across 4 drives here.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
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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:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, obsessive video hoarders will use big hard drives just as you describe. Everybody else will pay Netflix or Comcast $20 a month for hassle free access to 10,000 times the content.
I went with the hard drives. I find the seek times on Netflix to be unacceptable.
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: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:5, Funny)
Haha - that's so true. ~/Pictures/JobSecurity/ is up to 2GB by now, and that's just the mobile phone snaps!
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
The question is WHEN do Joe need that much space? Lets talk about this question in a couple of years...
When Windows 7 comes out
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, so they still have at least 5 years left.
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I've still not sure what I'm going to do with 20 copies of "Enterprise" that I've been recording on the SciFi channel though.
Delete them?
and for good measure permanently over-write the bits they were stored on with several hundred million repetitions of "NEVER AGAIN"...
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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.
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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 correc
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You'll need at least that much when Emacs 22.2 is released. That's supposed to boot you right into the Matrix.
Flash video (Score:5, Funny)
For some reason, I can't stop thinking of this Flash cartoon I saw once about perpendicular hard drive recording, with cartoon dudes singing, "Get perpendicular! (Get perpendicular!)".
...I need a life.
Re:Flash video (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
As soon as I saw the headline for this article I thought of the same cartoon. Does anyone know if it's still available on-line anywhere?
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My 2-year old loves it...
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/research/recording_head/pr/PerpendicularAnimation.html [hitachigst.com]
Sounds killer! (Score:4, Funny)
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Too bad it would take first degree murder charges against it to actually find anything.
Re:Sounds killer! (Score:4, Funny)
Let me see what I can dig up on that.
Re:Sounds killer! (Score:5, Funny)
I hope you make backups. A corrputed 1.5 TB HDD with ReiserFS would be a bloody mess!
4 platters (Score:2)
Isn't their current 1TB drive only 3 platters? So this isn't really a big increase in density, just adding a platter with a slight density increase. Regardless, I'm disappointed. I was hoping they would be coming out with 2TB drives this year. At least it's coming out in August, in time for the new TV shows in the fall (I need to upgrade my MythTV). Even if I don't buy one, it will help push down the prices on the 1TB drives.
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>can someone please post the equation to calculate drive space?
fake capacity * (1000/1024) ~= real capacity
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that's only valid for the kilobyte level. for this drive, your result is off by about 100GB high.
correct generic formula would go
fake capacity*(10^3x/2^10x)=real capacity, where x is the unit stepping (1 for KB, 2 for MB, 3 for GB, 4 for TB, etc.)
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1.5*10^12/2^40
So they announced a 1.36TB drive, while the current highest-capacity drives hold 0.909TB (or 931GB).
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actual capacity is 1.364TB
to get that, just take the number of bytes (1.5 trillion for this) and divide by 2^10x, where x is the unit. 1 for KB, 2 for MB, and so on.
Re:4 platters (Score:5, Informative)
Copy the following into your URL bar and press Enter. The code will allow you to compute the real amount.
Re:4 platters (Score:5, Funny)
No such thing exists. However, you can hose your browser nicely if you run the following script:
WARNING! Do not run the following script!
(*ahem* I told you not to run it! :-P)
Re: (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.
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"For good measure, please also add a car analogy."here you go!
Well, it's like those "compact car parking only" [youtube.com]parking spots you see.
Then again, it could depend on the file system you use [youtube.com] as to how much usable space you end up with.(this one may be NSFW-no nudity, just chains and leather bikini-clad gal with sledge hammer)
Or if you use disc compression [youtube.com].
1.5TB Desktop Quality (Score:2)
That burns up just outside of 90 days..
Warranty (Score:4, Informative)
Rip your DVD collection (Score:2)
yawn (Score:5, Insightful)
1.5TB (Score:2)
I need one! (Score:2)
Re: (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.
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: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: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I really want... (Score:4, Funny)
/.: the only place where one gets a broken heart from a hard drive instead of the opposite sex.
Wait! There are places where a hard drive will get you someone of the opposite sex?
Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying it's not how big it is, but it's how long it will last?
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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: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.
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get yourself some RAID
I hope you are thinking of RAID6. If you put five of these disks into a typical RAID5 array, and one fails, it's likely that another will fail before the controller has a chance to read 6 TB from the other drives.
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Losing an 80 GB HD nearly broke my heart, I can't imagine what losing 1.5 TB would do...
Nearly break your balls. Or in some cases, business.
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, 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.
Re: (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
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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.
RAID1. Your prayers are answered.
Re:What I really want... (Score:5, Informative)
Any data you truly care about needs to be on at least three devices, which are in at least two different buildings. Increasing the reliability of current drives won't be as helpful as bringing down prices so that multiple copies are more affordable. No amount of reliability will account for theft, fire, and human error.
I use a set of three hard drives. One internal drive is in primary use. I back that up to an external drive frequently. Every couple weeks or so, I take that external drive to my remote location and swap it with another external drive, which then becomes my local backup.
All copying is done with rsync to minimize drive wear and copy times. I just plug in the drive and run a batch file.
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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 dy
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RAID-5/6 AND good old-fashioned backups, preferably with off-site backups.
Backups are not a replacement for a hot spare (backups take time (often lots of it) to restore) and RAID is not a replacement for larger catastrophic failure (other hardware failure, power surge, fire, hurricane, etc.) or those Oh-fuck-I-deleted-the-wrong-file! moments.
Are the increases slowing down? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I have been studying a variation on this for a while and the answer is yes.
Hard drvie growth has slowed down, or more specifically, hard drive price improvement has slowed down.
You can see on the 1st chart on my page that the last 5 years have been a marked decrease over the previous decade:
http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.html [mattscomputertrends.com]
Interestingly, in just the last 4 months it has speeded up dramatically. Using my standard data sources there has been an 80% price improvement in the last 4 mont
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.
I'd love to turn you on (Score:5, Funny)
from the they-had-to-count-them-all- dept.
So now they know how many bits it takes to fill the Albert Hall?
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Just a minor correction, but you want to increase rotational speed to *decrease* seek times. Small, but important :)
Re:Without increasing rotational speed & seek (Score:4, Informative)
Seek time and rotational speed are mostly independent.
Seek time is the time that it takes to move the head to the desired track (including time for the vibrations from the movement to settle down). This is mostly independent of how fast the disk is spinning.
Rotational speed determines how long you have to wait, on average, for the data you want to read to show up under the head.
So a random read will take one seek, plus half a rotation, before the drive can read the data.
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)
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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.
Re:Moar datas plz! (Score:4, Informative)
Do you have a favorite piece(s) of software for doing all this?
eac3to + various filters (some commercial, it comes with the Free ones) to take it apart and
mkvmerge to put it together as a matroska file (mkvmerge is part of mkvtoolnix)
one caveat is that mkvmerge can not handle dts files more complex than the regular DTS format on dvds, but it can do truehd. I always recompress to flac anyway, tends to be more efficient than either truehd or dts master audio and eac3to can do the recompression automatically.
If you want to keep it in m2ts format than TsRemuxer is pretty good it will allow you to remux to either a single m2ts file or to a bare-bones blu-ray directory format.
All above mentioned tools are easy to find in google.
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Seriously though, how much is one of these things going to cost?
Probably a couple hundred dollars, like high end hard drives usually do.
And what benefit does it have for someone like me who is not an avid PC gamer (more of a console guy), but more of a multimedia buff? I have tons of multimedia, but not 1.5 TB worth.
Well if you have xvids encoded at around 350mb/hr, that's around 4285 hours of media. Sure that seems like a lot, but I already have about 4000 hours of music on my computer and I still hear re
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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.