Seagate Hits 1 Terabit Per Square Inch 224
MrSeb was one of several readers to submit news that drive manufacturer Seagate has announced (and demoed) the first hard drive to squeeze a terabit into each square inch of platter.
"'Initially this will result in 6TB 3.5-inch desktop drives and 2TB 2.5-inch laptop drives, but eventually Seagate is promising up to 60TB and 20TB respectively. To achieve such a huge leap in density, Seagate had to use a technology called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). Basically, the main issue that governs hard drive density is the size of each magnetic 'bit.' These can only be made so small until the magnetism of nearby bits affects them. With HAMR, 'high density' magnetic compounds that can withstand further miniaturization are used. The only problem is that these materials, such as iron platinum alloy, are more stubborn when it comes to writing data — but if you heat it first, that problem goes away. With HAMR, Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head; when it wants to write data, the laser turns on. Reading data is still done conventionally, without the laser. In theory, HAMR should allow for areal densities up to 10 terabits per square inch (magnetic sites that are just 1nm long!), and thus desktop hard drives in the 60TB range."
Wondering (Score:4, Insightful)
Can current motherboards handle that?
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Also wondering, will this set back SSD by 5 years?
No. (Score:3, Insightful)
They are on ultimately diverging paths which may coexist symbiotically forever unless one beats the other out in either cost, reliability, or functionality.
Re:Wondering (Score:5, Informative)
Also wondering, will this set back SSD by 5 years?
Probably not: This advance(while definitely helpful to the HDD, and no doubt some very impressive engineering work from the R&D team) is a reinforcement of exactly the same virtues that HDDs have historically had and of virtually no value in addressing their historical weaknesses:
1. Capacity/dollar: Once the production is tooled up, the cost/gigabyte for HDDs can be expected to continue to decline.
2. Linear read/write speed: Because of their high areal density and fairly swift rotation, HDDs can read or write like a bat out of hell as long as they don't have to do much seeking. Seeky or random I/O tanks them because of the need to physically move the head around and possibly wait the better part of a platter rotation for the spot you want.
It will continue to be the case that HDDs are cheap for the capacity, and fast as hell for nice, linear, streaming operations; but SSDs can churn out the random I/O without breaking a sweat and are available in physically smaller and more shock-resistant packages(the economical range for HDDs is basically defined in multiples of the volume of a 2.5inch HDD, and don't drop them, SSDs start at BGAs the size of your fingernail and scale in multiples of those until your wallet explodes...
Hybrid (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wondering (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't kid yourself, this is the dying breath of the HDDs.
How much is a 60TB SSD, and how many times will I be able to write to it before destroying the disk when you're using a process small enough to pack that 60TB into a box the size of an HDD? Each new process shrink seems to be dramatically reducing the write limit for SSDs.
You go right ahead and wait for 2 fucking hours for your 50 GB Bluray image to be copied/processed on your mechanical toaster; I'm sticking with my 1 minute with complete silence and low power consumption.
Even my 'Green' HDD manages sustained writes at 80-100MB per second, and why would anyone in their right mind be copying a $10 Bluray onto an SSD that costs more than a dollar per gigabyte?
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Taking 2 hours to push around a BD file?
Ethernet manages better transfer rates than that. Never mind direct attached SATA connections.
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Nevermind that some applications will murder an SSD faster than you can say "Fault Tolerant".
I have a scratch disk on my server, it's the landing zone for most network IO that is disk bound as well as a landing zone for uncompressed video that needs to be batched out for compression and for the resulting compressed file.
Performance is secondary to cost in my application, so yes, this all hits a single HDD, but I only support about 4 users anyway.
That drive has been replaced three times now. Each time with
Re:Wondering (Score:5, Informative)
As areal density increases on hard drives, so does the transfer rate. The linear density of a track increases, and the amount of data that passes under the head in one rotation of the disc increases. This is how the 5400rpm discs of today have 120MB/s transfer rates compared to the 10MB/s transfer rates of the same rotation speed ten years ago.
Imagining some system you don't own and benchmarks that exist only in your head is not a practical measure of what consumers will own in the future, and rotational media will continue to occupy the same place it does now for the next several years, as the mainstream consumer PC storage product, and as the main data (blu-ray rip) storage and backup media for enthusiasts with SSD operating system drives.
My next system will have a killer refresh rate with a P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium. RISC architecture is gonna change everything. That's too much machine for you.
Re:Wondering (Score:5, Insightful)
...this is the dying breath of the HDDs.
With 60 TB drives, assuming they will run around the price of current hard drives, not likely. SSDs and hard drives will just co-exist. SDDs for things that need to be fast (OS, software, etc.) and hard drives for everything else (pictures, videos, documents, etc.).
60 TB might seem like a lot now but I am sure that humanity will figure out new ways to fill the capacity. We always do.
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I've got about 6TB of physical storage in my personal machine. Almost half of that is in use.
Years ago, a terabyte was something that sounded like an abstraction. Many business will now have hundreds of terabytes. Gone are the days when a 360K floppy could hold all of your documents.
I suspect the number of people on Slashdot who are into the 10's of terabytes is probably not insignifica
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I collect datasets.
I have a small selection of movies on the server (mostly so disks don't get scratched with 6 and 8 year old hands).
I have 12TB with about 5% free, normally I try to run at close to 20% free, but have not been buying disk since the floods. Soon I won't have a choice, so I welcome these 2TB 2.5" platters. I'm out of mechanical space, but if I replace my 3.5" bays with 2.5" I can go from 5 to 12 disks in the same physical space.
Any way, back to the datasets. I have one that came shipped o
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You go right ahead and wait for 2 fucking hours for your 50 GB Bluray image to be copied/processed on your mechanical toaster; I'm sticking with my 1 minute with complete silence and low power consumption.
Just in case you've been wondering - this is why you are still a virgin.
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Re:Wondering (Score:5, Informative)
That said, there are probably still a large number of motherboards that will be questionably bootable from the greater-than-2-terabyte drives that these platters are presumably intended for(some ghastly MBR thing); but anything new enough for 48-bit LBA and a modern OS should, at least, support perfectly normal OS use of the drive once everything is booted.
Re:Wondering (Score:5, Funny)
Can current motherboards handle that?
Do you mean would PC manufacturers would design in arbitrary limits in their hardware and/or BIOS that would create some kind of "barrier", so that disks that are too big won't work with the system?
That's highly doubtful. Nobody would be that stupid... would they?
Re:Wondering (Score:5, Informative)
The BIOS' handling of block devices dates back to when booting your OS off a floppy wasn't considered deviant behavior, and a 5MB HDD was some pretty serious gear. The details are kind of messy [wikipedia.org]...
Most reasonably contemporary stuff should at least do 48-bit LBA; but there are still a lot of systems in the wild that still need MBR, at least on the boot disk(which limits you to 2TB partitions).
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Yeah, they always claim that "this time, we've fixed the barriers for good!". Then a few years later, you learn about some new barrier.
I had to deal with a subtle version of this just recently when they upped the hardware block size. Lots of fun trying to partition and boot my new disks; LBA didn't save the day there.
After hitting a dozen or so "barriers" over the decades, I doubt that they're ever going to really succeed in future-proofing systems for storage size.
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That's a clever way of trying to avoid admitting that Microsoft was last to the party again.
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Wintel EFI firmwares are lurching toward ubiquity and not-complete-brokenness(albeit defined pretty much exclusively by whether Windows7
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Well, no, not really.
GPT allows for a maximum disk and partition size of 9.4 zettabytes.
After all, 9.4 zettabytes should be enough for anyone [wired.com].
Re:Wondering (Score:5, Informative)
Computers tend to measure things with fixed size binary numbers since these are by far the most efficient format for them to handle and process. When chosing the size of these numbers there is always a compromise between efficiency and future proofing. Usually the margin left by the designers is enough to last a while.
However for long lived standards as the years pass that margin is eaten up. Eventually it reaches the point where all the margin is eaten up and things have to be redesigned . The most recent one we hit was that the conventional MBR partition table has a limit of 2^32 sectors (=2TiB assuming standard size sectors). Making things worse is the fact that MS refuses to support the combination of a GPT partition table on the boot drive with conventional BIOS booting so the motherboard may be able to see and access the large drive but it if doesn't support UEFI you can't use the whole drive as a windows boot drive.
Afaict the next barrier we will hit is the LBA48 limit of 2^48 sectors (=128PiB assuming standard size sectors). So a 60TB drive shouldn't be any more problematic than a 3TB one.
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Do you mean would PC manufacturers would design in arbitrary limits in their hardware and/or BIOS that would create some kind of "barrier", so that disks that are too big won't work with the system?
This rerun from 2002 [slashdot.org] might interest you. A snippet:
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100% shark jokes (Score:5, Funny)
"Seagate has strapped a laser to the hard drive head"
Well, there goes my hopes for an intelligent discussion.
HAMR Time (Score:5, Funny)
HAMR Head Sharks can hold two frickin lasers! (Score:5, Funny)
HAMR Head Sharks can hold two frickin lasers! Take that you great white hater!
Re:100% shark jokes (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, they have strapped a laser to the HAMR head.
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And I wish I had mod points, too. That's great.
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(Disproving your point
Re:100% shark jokes (Score:5, Informative)
This is bad.... (Score:4, Funny)
MPAA says this will cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars every year.
Re:This is bad.... (Score:5, Funny)
MPAA says this will cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars every year.
Trillions of dollars every day! Won't you think of the children of the entertainment company lawyers who may never see thier parent because they are working 24/7 too protect the poor defenseless movie companies and the billions of americans who will loose thier jobs for each of these drives that are sold!
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The result of this is trillions upon trillions stolen from children*!
(*After all, we are somebody's child.)
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the billions of americans who will loose thier jobs for each of these drives that are sold!
Well, I think industry should loose jobs, and lots of them. There are far too many people out of work these days. So yes, loose those jobs NOW! Unemployed people are counting on you to loose those jobs.
Oh, wait, that's not what you meant?
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1. All pirates have a willingness to pay equal to the MSRP for a given MPAA-member copyrighted work.
2. All storage devices not sold filled with an MPAA-approved copyrighted work are intended for use by pirates.
3. (Bonus Axiom of Choice): A content cartel hatchetman may, at his option, choose to replace "MPAA" with "RIAA" in these axioms.
The evils of the back catalog. (Score:2)
Sure. Once you've picked up all of the older classic bits of content from Frys or Walmart for a song, then you can pretty much turn your back on the MPAA.
I have so much stuff that I tend to forget the stuff that I have rented via Netflix. Never mind the cinema.
Why watch the remake when the original is available and cheaper than one trip to the movies?
Some Perspective from their CEO: (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, that's wrong, whether or not he believes it. Examples of massive datastores that are changing the world (for better or worse) are individualized advertising and government big brother systems. The Large Hadron Collider also has over 60 petabytes of disk storage.
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Well, that's wrong, whether or not he believes it. Examples of massive datastores that are changing the world (for better or worse) are individualized advertising and government big brother systems. The Large Hadron Collider also has over 60 petabytes of disk storage.
Considering your examples here lean more towards the "for worse" side of changing the world, it's not helping the argument much. Personally, this is one scenario where hardware capability has FAR exceeded demand, so justification (especially on the consumer side) is questionable at best. Perhaps the (ex) CEO had a point here, regardless of how crass it may have come across.
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I have to disagree with their CEO. I worked at Fermilab on the USCMS Tier-1 team for the CMS detector; we have ~5PB of spinning disk to stage/cache/buffer data between our cluster of data workers (~5K nodes) and our 50-60PB tape storage silos (each being the size of a school bus, and having 2-4 robotic arms racing around moving tapes from storage to drives).
Not changing the world? Get out more and see where your product is in use; we used your drives brah!
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Ex-CEO. That was Bill Watkins, who was replaced in 2009 by Stephen J. Luczo. And for all the candor of that statement "pirate more crap" would probably be even more honest...
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I do not think the average person would want to buy 60 terabytes of anything.
It wasn't that long ago when I was running a 286 with a 40MB hard drive. "No one could fill that" I thought... and it wasn't long until I did.
Upgraded to a 486 with 200GB drive... Then I added an 850MB drive... "no one could fill that" I thought... within a few months it was full.
The list goes on - 1GB, 6GB, 20GB, 40GB, 1TB. Anyone who thinks that people won't want 60TB drives at some point in the future needs to look carefully at the past - in a few years time, they will look as silly as the people who
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Just archive your iTunes video purchases over a number of years.
Given that Apple's model is predominantly a "purchase" model, I am surprised this hasn't really occurred to most people. Do you really want to spend all that money and have nothing to show for it? Sooner or later you are bound to accumulate enough stuff where these larger drives become relevant.
Such drives probably make more sense then expecting the "average consumer" to manage some sort of array.
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Ditto. When I first set up my MythTV backend I thought 1TB would be enough. Then It went to 2TB so it didn't start deleting shows before my girlfriend got around to watching them. Then we got OTA HD and I'm up to 4TB and it's still running out of space.
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Nothing eats drive space like video.
Most people don't fully appreciate that.
Power? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Power? I'm guessing a little over nil if it is focusing on 1nm or smaller areas.
Re:Power? (Score:5, Insightful)
More broadly, Seagate probably knows as well as anybody(although certainly isn't happy about it) that the small-n'-low power market is basically lost for mechanical HDDs. Game over. They'll stick around in cheapie laptops because they are cheap, and in crazed-enthusiast DTR and workstation models because they are huge; but Flash is taking over the good bits.
In those areas where Serious Storage Capacity still counts, the energy cost of having X platters and 2X heads fighting air resistance as they zip around at high speeds really starts to add up. If you increase the areal density of a platter, you increase the storage capacity of a given number of platters, allowing your customers to either reduce platter counts for a constant workload, or maintain constant platter counts under an increased workload.
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My Macbook Air agrees with you; mechanical drives in the small/low power market are dead.
Still will go unused (Score:4, Insightful)
The more space we have, it seems the more we keep. I can see a new show as a spinoff of "Hoarders" showing just what all is in your computers HDD.
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With the recent crackdowns on behalf of the MAFIAA, and the uncertainty of cloud based storage (see the Jotform debacle [wired.com]) I think that the government is doing far more to advance "digital hoarding" than hard drive manufacturers and the ever-increasing size of hdd's.
I have about 4 TB's of external storage, and I've filled about 2.7 TB's of it so far just with stuff that I could stream or re-download but just don't have enough faith that the ability will be there tomorrow. Outside of my personal documents (wh
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Granted most of *us* can find something to fill it but when Dell and other bulk PC makers start including 1TB or 10TB drives in their basic PC's, most of it will still be unused by the general public.
Doesn't take many new games at 30GB a pop to fill up a 1TB hard drive. I thought 750GB would be enough for my laptop, but I've had to delete about a third of the Steam games and compress some of the others.
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Lazyness. Why bother organize, backup and remove dead data when you can just keep throwing it all at that black hole of a hard drive? Even sorting stuff into suitable directories is almost redundant thanks to metadata and searching now, at least for media.
Re:Still will go unused (Score:4, Insightful)
Granted most of *us* can find something to fill it but when Dell and other bulk PC makers start including 1TB or 10TB drives in their basic PC's, most of it will still be unused by the general public.
Ridiculous. That same claim has been made over and over for the last 30 years, and proven wrong each time.
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Shift (Score:3)
I do my work from home some days with a VNC connection to work. It runs about 1.2Mbps when I'm busy (6-meg DSL).
I see almost no reason why a home user should want to have a local hard drive, except perhaps to cache media files until the upload is done (in the background, and seamless working through the cache until the upload is done, of course).
Give it a couple years and Google will offer free computers with free Internet connections in exchange for usage tracking. 70% of the population will take them up
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You can't stream video all the time without hitting bandwidth caps and other nastiness. Especially at HDTV bitrates. What if your Internet is down or otherwise too slow to stream properly?
For now anyway. Maybe some day in the future connectivity will be better but that's probably not going to change much for many years.
Go outside?
Too much storage = too much garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
With Leaps Like this SSD continues to fall behind (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong I love my SSD drives, but that tech needs to to start finding some way to move forward at a faster and a better $/GB..I guess its $/TB now :)
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Look up racetrack memory on Wikipedia. If everything goes as planned, it'll actually out-perform SSDs (and even some DRAM) while having density comparable to hard drives.
While I suspect it'll never scale to mass production at consumer prices, maybe I'll be surprised.
Too bad we are in the post-desktop era (Score:2)
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Look forward to 60TB cellphones!
Meh. I'm just looking forward to when people stop calling them cellphones, since using ones voice to talk into them is rare to find these days.
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I'm sure when phones became popular, people complained that others would write less... now that others write more, people complain that they talk less.
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The media heats and cools in 100-200 picoseconds; the laser turns on and off much faster than that. No addition to latency. Laser lifetime and reliability will be an engineering hurdle, but not a showstopper by the time a production drive is approved for release. The spot size of the laser on the media is much less than 100 x 100 nm (probably less than 50 x 50 nm) so the total heat added to the drive from the laser light itself is quite small. More heat will be added from the electronics, so thermal managem
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What does this do to data integrity? Since the drive needs to be heated to flip a bit, does this mean that the data integrity of the drive will dramatically increase? If the laser goes out, does the drive become read only?
If the drives work like it sounds like they do, even for current densities, this sounds like a boon for backups.
It's heat-assisted (Score:2)
Time-to-market? (Score:2)
I recently did some calculations off Kryder's Law, and happened to keep the results. We would normally expect (based purely off regular continuous improvement) 6TB hard drives as early as next year, and 60TB hard drives around 2018.
So, while this is undoubtedly an improvement, it's not exactly a revolutionary one. WD et al. are probably at similar stages, either with this technology or with some other technique.
Short-stroking (Score:3)
Laser Failure Mode (Score:2)
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How many CD, DVD, etc. drives are disposed of due to laser failure? Small percentage I would think.
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Cost? Reliability? Water Resistance? (Score:3, Interesting)
As much as I love stories about X company being able to stuff Y capacity into storage device, the last few years have proven instructive.
1) How about doing it and producing it in such a way so that it is cheaper, not more expensive than last year?
2) How about making them at least a little bit reliable. I know you just want us to consume more and more of your drives, but lets get back to 5 year warranty's already. This one year BS is BS.
3) Maybe rather than doing the R&D to find a 60TB HD you do the R&D to find a building lot not on a fscking flood plain?
Thanks,
From everyone that bought a HD in the last year or so...
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How about some more speed? At a constant 100Mb/sec write speed (impossible on current consumer grade HDDs) it would take about 40 hours to fill a 10TB HDD.
Re:Cost? Reliability? Water Resistance? (Score:5, Informative)
Speed on spinning disk is a function of density as much as anything else.
The tighter you pack the bits, the more bits pass under the head in a given time frame, which makes it faster.
Will it actually hit the market? (Score:2)
This will probably get modded all to shit since i dont have a referance, but do you think this technology will actually hit the market?
I remember back in the good old days of CD's, there was a company that created a new type of recording information to CD's using fluorescent lighting. They had a working model they presented at a technology expo, and it was all the rave saying how it will blow CD's and DVD's out of the water with the amount of storage capacity (they were able to get close to a hundred layers
FSCK and CHKDISK (Score:2)
Re:How about reliability? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not with RAID you can't. If you don't decrease the unrecoverable error rate as you increase the size of the volume, eventually you get to the point where you're almost certain to hit an unrecoverable error while rebuilding your volume. So the real question is, how is the read error rate on these tightly packed data domains?
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You spread your data chunks across whole clusters of storage systems (i.e. Nimbus.io, Amazon's S3). The important data you really than need are the SHA hashes of the data.
Sure, you lose a ton of data on a drive here or there. You immediately invalidate the drive and the data on it, replication has already brought the number of good chunks of data back to the minimum replica requirement (because, you're smart, and you're keeping 3-5 copies of the same data across your storage platform), and you stream new da
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Only if the drive manufacturer helps you and _transparently_ does the redundancy for you at the level of reliability you want.
Because for single drive systems if you hit many bad sectors even though you have redundant copies on other sectors your throughput is going to drop to impractical rates (assuming you actually care about storing and retrieving TBs of data). The error recovery timeouts are usually in the order of _seconds_.
And if you're going to have multiple redundant drives, capacity might no longer
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Duplicate and Automate.
There's really no great bother to it past setting it up. You can even get suitable and suitably simple software for this task with just about any consumer external disk.
Apple does it. Seagate does it. Western Digital does it.
There's really no good "but it's too hard" excuse here.
If anything, it's the "time is money" mentality that supports the idea of having a robust backup plan. Nothing is going to waste time more than getting caught with your pants down when you have a drive failure
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Be SILENT Welshman or you're getting ye stones a lashing...
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You're absolutely right!!! Why didn't they measure it in meters??? Then I'd have some scale being able to compare it to the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second! I mean, everyone has some idea what that is...
Don't listen to those pointy-headed physicists and their ivory-tower propaganda! The One True Metre is a piece of Platinum/Iridium bar-stock painstakingly stored by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures and roughly the same length as 1/10,000,000th of an incorrect estimate of 1/4 of a terrestrial meridian!
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but do you ask for a 8.89 or 6.35 cm harddrive?
Also note that drive bays were named after the size of the disks that went in the drives that went in the bays. Not after the size of the bays themselves.
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It's heating a minuscule amount of material, I doubt very much energy is put into the heating, certainly not that'll make you notice more heat coming out of a laptop.
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Replace the 60 TB for 60 GB and this comment could have been posted 10 years ago, yet the world hasn't imploded.
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Not to be a nitpicker, but in 2002 hard drives were already pushing into the hundreds of Gigabytes. I remember having to play games to get my Compaq to recognize my larger-than-137GB Maxtor hard drive working due to the mobo limit...
15 years ago, though, and you're spot on. Hard drives were in the single GB's at that point (and I remember being blown away by my first GB sized hard drive back around then, too..."Oh my God I'll never fill this up!!")
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