IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved

jeffroe writes "Infoworld has an article stating that IBM has enhanced it's 'Pixie Dust' technology yet again. The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops." IBM's also predicted hard drives to have 100gb per square inch by 2003. Storage space just keeps increasing.

Re:p0rn

[jimmy_dean]

Porn is pretty disgusting if you ask me. Though you're probably not too far off by saying porn does drive the hard disk industry. Where else can you find as many videos and pictures that take up a ton of space?

Backup

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Wake me up when they come out with 100GB backup drives.

Looks like the only hard drive backup solution these days is another hard drive.

smaller form factors

[inepom01]

The article mentions how they are cramming more space into existing form factors. I am guessing the 2.5" laptop HD standard. I would like to see them introduce new smaller form factors for ultra-portables.

Maybe they can finally cram an HD into a PDA? A 20 gig HD coupled with a Crusoe would make for a nifty phone/computer.

Re:IBM seems to have a good track record

[STREMF]

When you have such a good track record, its a really big deal when things go wrong

IBM DeskStar 75GXP Hard Drive Failures? [slashdot.org]

Speed

[hackwrench]

But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities, and a 10000 RPM drive would be very fast indeed.

Re:Backup

[coryboehne]

Of course the backup tech is actually getting more expensive than the hard drives are.... Consider trying to backup an 80 gig HDD onto 250meg zip disks...... that would really suck, or even onto 650-700 MB CD-Roms, that would still take 115 disks... at a cost of 50c each that's still 50 bucks, and when you consider the weeks time needed to make the back up... you see my point, the hard drives are cheaper backup storage than most other solutions.... Maybe this is a good thing though, consider, 1 small hard drive for backups, or,,,, a library of other media... I'll take the hard drive please.......

Teach a man to fish

[sporty]

Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.

Re:what about heat

[be-fan]

laptop HDs are still 4800 rpm. They don't put out much heat at all. What really puts out heat are those mobile P4s. I can feel mine through my 3/4" wooden desk. You *definately* don't want to use P4 laptops on your lap, not if you ever want to have children anyway. That'd be a funny statistic to know. Are P4 laptop owners less fertile than the population as a whole? What is it, 50% drop in sperm count for each 10 degrees over normal temp?

This is how I backup....

[zardie]

I've got a DLT80 drive here. It stores around 40GB/tape of raw data (80GB with hardware compression) but unfortunately a lot of my data is already compressed in some shape or form.

It averaged around 5MB/sec across over 340MB of data I store on my ATA RAID array + a few other disks in the machine. It took up a total of ten tapes and took endless hours to do (plus I need to be around to switch tapes - audoloaders are hardly accessible to home users).

I find the ATA RAID1 solution more elegant. The only issue that bites is that you can't do historical backups or pull data off the drive you deleted two months ago but now decide you need (it's happened to me). But disk mirroring is realtime and provides an easy way to cut over to the other disk (as opposed to reformat, reinstall, restore with tapes)

Re:don't people learn English anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the author actually meant gigabits, in which case "Gb" would have been the correct notation.

It's this laziness that leads to a lack of understanding. Is it really so hard to be precise and use "b" when bit is intended and "B" when byte is intended?

Re:p0rn

[Fweeky]

is there any other legitimate reason for Joe User to have so much disk space?

For a start, generally you want to have plenty of free space around to limit fragmentation. Cut about 30% from usable capacity there: 75GB usable -> 52GB you'd want to use.

Now, let's install a few games:

UT2k3 is 2.4GB, more if you have some custom maps. Except UT2k3 also wants the CD; you don't want to constantly swap in originals, so you rip the play CD and mount in daemon tools. That's over 3GB for one game.

NOLF 2 is ~1.6GB, plus easily 50MB+ of savegames, so let's say 1.7GB, plus daemontooled CD, that's 2.4GB.

Ditto for Battlefield 1942, which also needs the CD: 0.9GB + 0.7GB.

That's 3 games, eating a grand total of 7.1GB, or nearly 15% of our available disk space Addons can easily push this higher pretty easily, and savegames soon pile up to sizes that make Word .doc's look lean. I have a lot more than 3 games installed.

Email: I recieve a tonne of it, and I keep all of it, too. This year I chalked up 1.3GB.

Windows: 1.8GB here. Oh, and another 1GB of swap.

Backups: I mirror my ~/ and various other dirs to my Windows machine, that's another 1-2GB of junk, easily.

Logs: I log a lot. IRC, SSH sessions, email, firewall hits, all sorts. If I want to keep a few years worth, I want to be able to, because, damnit, it might be useful! One day I *will* make a nice graph using rrdtool of [whatever I logged].

Music: I'll admit I don't own much, and the RIAA probably would be rather irriated at my collection, but what I do own, I rip; the CD's barely get taken out once, purely because my computer is my sound system, and OGG's are the most useful format for me. 50-100MB per CD, multiplied by however many CD's I might own. 100 CD's isn't uncommon; 5-10GB, assuming I use OGG and not FLAC or another lossless codec. 20GB+ if I go lossless.

Movies: Ditto for MP3's; although legitimate use is probably closer to "If I want to make my own edit of I want the space to do it in". 10-15GB, easy. Plus maybe I want to keep those 6GB VOB's on my HD so I don't have to hunt for the DVD's and risk damaging/exploding them :)

8 DVD's * 6GB = 48GB. Oops. A friend of mine owns over 150 DVD's, I'm sure he'd love a couple of TB to store them in rather than hunt around his shelf for them.

TV: Let's not forget TiVo and friends. Hands up who wants multi-TB HD's for their PVR?

Alternate OS's: When I want to try out RH 8 or FreeBSD-CURRENT, I want the disk space to try it out. 5GB (at least) for the spare partitions.

Cache: 3 browsers, each with 200MB+ cache dirs. 600MB of tiny files that probably bloat to 800MB easily. I might like to give squid half a gig or more.

Source code repositories: I have 1.2GB of tarballs and source direcories, most aren't even full CVS repositories.

Versioning: I dream of a time when my filesystem is one big version controled repository. I want to keep every modification I make to my HD, at least in certain directories. Multiply current requirements by about 100.

That's about 55GB there, and I've not even got onto applications or central storage for all my digital data, or filesystem version control, and my requirements are only going to get bigger while I'm allowed to purchase permanent licenses for data.

Conclusion: Relatively average users could quite happily make use of multiple TB's of quiet, reliable, backupable, rollbackable and relatively portable storage.

Now, which of these count for laptops might be questionable, but then, how many people have a laptop as their primary machine because their £2000 machine cost them their entire tech budget? How many laptops come with DVD's? Wouldn't you like to have all your data at your fingertips wherever you are?

If not, well, you're not geeky enough for SlashDot. Get out ;)