Seagate Announces 750GB Hard Drives 532
Hack Jandy writes "Seagate documents have leaked out the two 750GB 7200.10 Barracuda hard drives. The drives are the first desktop hard drives to use perpendicular recording, feature a 16MB cache and 7200RPM spindle."
I know I'm just paranoid (Score:3, Interesting)
But I remember saying that about them huge 9GB drives when they came out when I was 12 (or so.)
Re:Great for backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Expect a massive migration away from compressed formats, for example - JPEGs going to PNGs and TIFFs.
Your music collection of MP3/OGG/AAC may be re-sold to you in 32-bit (regular CDs use 16-bit, which was always just barely acceptable to critics of the format).
Re:Great for backups (Score:3, Interesting)
possibly envision and where it ends.
So, let's consider movies. Now, we will assume that people in the future
watch movies on large screens. Let us assume drive-in size 300" diag.
Also let us assume that 300 dpi is enough and 16:9 screen ratio.
That is 3.5e9 pixels. You assume 100 fps. OK, then we get 2.5e11 pixels.
Three channels for color give us roughly 1e12 bytes. Per second.
Of course no future snob will watch compressed movies so we will
assume that this is a fair estimate. Now there are 3e7 seconds in
a year and we will assume average person lives 100 years. So to get
enough movies that you cannot watch them in a lifetime we would
need 3e7x100x1e12 = 3e21 bytes. Let us increase that estimate a bit
since people collect more than they need. We get that an Avogadro
bumber of bytes ought to be enough for anyone for the foreseeable
future until 3D media becomes available.
Flash memory prices dropping (Score:5, Interesting)
Some companies have multi-tiered storage solutions (e.g. fast SCSI RAID, cheap EIDE RAID, optical, etc.). Some of those ideas may make their way into desktop devices. You'd boot off of flash memory nearly instantly (it would cache your OS and core applications), then you'd play your MP3s, surf the web, or whatever on your relatively slow hard drive.
Re:Flash memory prices dropping (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
The cheaper storage space gets the more information will be stored. There's information that's thrown away today because it doesn't seem valuable enough to justify the cost of storage -- as the price of storage drops, it becomes worth it to store it. Take for example webserver logs, on many servers logs are periodically deleted because old logs take up space and the older logs are, the less worth they hold (how likely is it that you're going to need to check out something from your server's logs in 1998?). If the amount of space server logs take up becomes a trivial portion of the available space, then nobody will bother to have them periodically deleted. Similarly, an administrator might also/instead choose to make their logs more detailed. Maybe before they didn't log certain certain things because they seemed trivial and added size to their logs -- as the price of space decreases, the question of "why save it?" becomes "why not save it?".
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
Source, my site, here: http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddiskdata.h
Re:Great for backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Even more interesting is who will release the first terabyte drive and (this is what I'm interested in) who will be the first to put one terabyte on a single platter. A terabyte is a lot. It will be a lot 5 years later, and quite a lot even 10 years later. Sure I understand Moores law and how 10MB was huge back then. But there comes a time after which we actually run out of relevant data to put on it. Pictures will go upto 10 megapixels but it will stop there. Video might go upto 1024x768x32-bitx100FPS but will not exceed that. Our humans senses will cease to notice any further difference. Games might require 2 blue-ray DVDs but will not require say 32 blue-ray DVDs in the next 10 years. What will you PUT on it?
Bloat.
Here's an experiment for you: Open up Microsoft Word, the later the version, the better. Now, type in a SINGLE LETTER, and save it to disk. Then, use Explorer to find out how bit it is.
I ran this test with OpenOffice 1.1.3 on my Fedora Core 3 laptop. My single letter "k", with no style attributes or anything, came to 5,181k!
So, we have 5,180 "characters" (bytes) of data being stored just so that my single, solitary letter "k" can be rendered with the right font, size, paragraph, and whatever else attributes to be added.
Similarly, pictures today usually use JPEG compression, which leaves terrible artifacts, particularly noticable around solid color contrasts. It shows up as a sort of "wavy" artifact surrounding the contrasting border.
In the near future, these kinds of artifacts will be less and less acceptable, and people will tend towards lower compression ratios (and better compression algorithms) to avoid them.
I've already switched from 128kbps for all my MP3 encoding to 192kbps. How long before I decide that
I heard for years that 24-bit color was "better than the human eye could discern" yet 32-bit color video cards are commonplace nowadays. What about 48 bit? 64 bit? 128 bit?
When I was a kid, the idea of a Star Trek "communicator" was just fantastic. Now, I wear one at my hip (the cell phone) and wish it gave me unmetered Internet Access. When I get that unmetered access, I'll wish it was faster, and with less latency.
Yep. The grass is ALWAYS greener on the other side of the fence, and that fence is the leading edge of technology.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
"We'll see how Moore's Law pans out... but there is a limit, eventually, with our data (although not for a while) and our ability to fill drives."
Moores law for hard disks is called Kryders law [wikipedia.org] and Kryders Law, is already broken [mattscomputertrends.com].
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why are we still moving heads back and forth? (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea here is that you might be able to make a monolithic head using MOS techniques and cheap-up the manufacturing process. The surface area of a 2.5" HDD is so small, we're not talking about a huge acreage of silicon. And the magnetic coils you would need are just little round circuits, aren't they? I'd have thought that would be amenable to some form of photo etch fab process. If you had to go 3D you might even use a fabber (3D printer, see http://www.ennex.com/ [ennex.com] ) for much of it.
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to keep track of how cheap hard disks were getting in terms of megabytes per dollar. Well, we've long since hit and blown through the gigabyte-per-dollar mark; for my next upgrade, I'm considering 250 Gb SATA drives, which are already up at close to 3 Gb/dollar (and, if another commenter has the right of it, may well blast through that mark by the time I have the money to buy them).
Obviously, at this point, it's inevitable that we will see a 1 Tb drive in 2007 if not earlier; that prediction is like predicting an egg will break when you see it fall off the counter and head for the floor. I just wonder what the upper limit is. Will we crack the terabyte-per-dollar mark? Within ten years? Five? And what will that involve, nanoscale-density recording? Gonna be interesting to find out.
Re:Great! (Getting Perpendicular!) (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone needs to give the guys who thought that up, a bonus.
Re:How do I back it up? (Score:5, Interesting)
One bad thing is that the growth of large drives seems to have slowed down dramtically in the last few years and as a consequence the improvment in bang per buck of "normal" drives has also slowed down.
I've been studying this for a while now. You can see the trend for youself at my site, http://www.mattscomputertrends.com/harddrives.htm
Prefer faster higher quality storage then more (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard drives are the single biggest bottleneck on today's systems. With multi-core technology and cheap gigabytes of ram all with gigabyte transfer rates, a hard drive plodding along with a 100 - 200mb/s transfer just doesn't cut it. Why should my system seem to hang with only 10% CPU utilization because of intense hard drive activity. I can't even bring up another task that doesn't use the hard drive because the system is too busy with hard drive transfers.
Either a new I/O standard needs to be invented, something that doesn't tax your system when excessive hard drive transfers are made, or the frigging hard drives just need to start getting up to gigabyte transfer rates.
In any case, I could care less about hard drives doubling or tripling in size, until they show significant improvements in performance, or move to solid state, then I am apathetic about the whole industry.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Interesting)