IBM 75G Hard Drive Ready 275
Thomas Holme writes, "The Deskstar 75GXP sets a new standard in disk drive performance with a maximum media data rate of 444 megabits per second (Mb/s) and 8.5 milliseconds (ms) average seek time, delivering optimal multimedia performance and video playback." You can read more about it at IBM's
hard drive page. I can't believe I bought a 40g just two weeks ago! Bah. Course 75 gigs is like 1500 hours worth of MP3s, but for some reason going two months without listening to the same song twice seems like an admirable goal.
Large Capacity HD. (Score:1)
Re:I need five (Score:1)
HAHAHA! ROTFL!
Has it occurred to you that that's the same argument the BIOS designers made, way back when?
And remember, too, Gates' Law: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
--synaptik
If you want to flame me, do so here [slashdot.org].
Re:1500 Gigs of MP3s? Isn't this getting old? (Score:1)
DVDs are max 10Mb/s, usually arounf 6Mb/s. So these 75GB, that's ~28H of film. Not _that_ much if you think computerized VCR.
OG.
Re: 2800 g acceleration? Off by a bit, I think... (Score:1)
I'm getting 580 g -- if I'm remembering the dimensional stuff correctly -- gotta convert w to radians and r to meters, right?:
Re: 2800 g acceleration? Ye're right! (Score:1)
Re:Disk Slashbox (Score:1)
Re:Two disks don't cover many possibilities (Score:1)
oops (Score:1)
Re:Glass Platters - How do they make them strong e (Score:1)
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:1)
http://www.discover.com/oct_99/physics.html
The quick answer is that glass isn't a liquid, or even a solid, it's a distinct type of matter in it's own right. If you want to find out why then follow the link...
Rob
Re:More disk we can't afford to back up. (Score:1)
country who has DSL or a cable modem.
Save human jobs, boycott space alien tech (Score:1)
Use 2 (Score:1)
-P
Re:A Mutual Online Storage Network (Score:1)
David E. Weekly [weekly.org]
Re:I need five (Score:1)
--
Re:IBM hard drives. (Score:1)
I have some jazz cd's that I had to do at 190 ... the piano would sound like shit at 128kbs.
Most all of my rock cds sound just fine at 128 .
Re:New challenge for Microsoft. (Score:1)
Jordan
Re:Glass is not a liquid (Score:1)
Thanks,
Re:On v/s Off surface parking (Score:1)
Access is a two way street (Score:1)
Yeah, and how many hours of downloading and ripping to get the content onto the disk? It's one thing to have the content available on a preloaded media (like a CD/DVD) but it's totally another to spend the amount of time needed to load all that music (and verify it) so you can not hear the same song for 10 weeks. Not to mention the backup and single failure issues.
Re:I know who's going to hate this... (Score:1)
Note to parents with young children - can you imagine how many childrens movies you could dump into a TiVo/Replay box and never have to worry about getting a peanut butter sandwich inside the VCR!?
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:1)
The reason that old glass looks funky has to do with the manufacturing process. Old glass used to be made by hand. The glass blower would blow a ball of glass into a cylindrical mold. After the glass was cold, it would be removed from the mold, and scored lengthwise. After another heating, the cylinder of glass would be broken along the score line and unrolled to form a flat sheet. That flat sheet would be "ironed" smooth, and you could get an acceptable window pane that way.
New glass is made by floating a layer of glass on top of molten tin. The glass solidifies on top of the tin and is very very flat.
There are companies that still make glass the old way, because some people like the flawed appearance. They expect to have windows like that on their old victorian houses. The White House made a large order recently to one of those companies. They replaced a large number of their old windows with glass that looks antique.
Re:Should we really be glad? (Score:1)
I edit digial videos at home ( I need this hard drive now !) and a real pain for me is that Win98 has a 4 Gig file size limit that doesn't let me record more than 18 minutes of DV !!!
I wish Linux had good DV + firewire support
Re:But what do you back this up with? (Score:1)
Affordable back-ups (Score:1)
Re:I need five (Score:1)
Because it's resistant to damage -- compared to aluminum, the alternative.
I will never buy something like this with the potential to store massive ammounts of my previous data when the next passing small earthquake,large truck, or thunder storm could destory it.
Check the shock rating: 6000g. Then put all of your most important data on the drive and destroy the original copies. Then mount this drive in a decently strong aluminum box -- without shock protection. Then smash the aluminum box for 60 seconds straight as hard as you can with a large sledgehammer. Remove the drive and check to see that your data is all right. It will be.
Quick Tip (Score:2)
You partition your disk in this manner:
Maybe you already new that, but I thought I would pass along the tip to anyone who didn't.
Re:The Nature of Glass (Score:2)
(In addition to what the AC said about the quality of old glass) When they made those old cathedrals they put the widest edge down.
So, yes glass flows (I think anouther person estimated it at 200 microns for some large quanity of time), but the quality of glass back then was not that great therefore any measurments made to old glass are inconclusive.
Re:huh? (Score:2)
How many serious companies do you know claim that their base technologies came from aliens?
They also claim that the fabrication plants are refusing to manufacture their chips or couch for their technology because it would make their other clients obsolete! Smells a bit fishy to me, really...
David E. Weekly [weekly.org]
So When / Where Can I Get It? How Much $? (Score:2)
All the same, it would be nice if they actually said when and where we could buy these and how much they will cost. I mean, if it's going to be $1000 for a 75Gb HDD, and they're going to be on sale in Korea in five months, then it's not such an exciting announcment, neh? On the other hand if they're on sale later today at Fry's, Egghead, and Buy.com for $150 each, this is one of the most kickass revolutions in storage history. I'm guessing that the truth is somewhere inbetween those two extremes; I'd just like to know where.
David E. Weekly [weekly.org]
Re:this'll get me flamed... (Score:2)
I'd be hard pressed to find *2* gigs of DECENT porn.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:Glass Platters - How do they make them strong e (Score:2)
Doctor: "Don't bend your arm that way."
------
Consumer: "Whenever I drop my hard drive, the glass platter breaks."
Corporation: "Don't drop the hard drive."
Seriously, I've never dropped a hard drive (save the one that I threw across the driveway), so what kind of conditions do you have that this would actually be a problem? Are you actually that clumsy that you have to buy ruggedized equipment just to make sure it survives?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
Re:I need five (Score:2)
Note 1: this drive despite the antishock stuff uses a glass plate so dragging it around is very unwise.
Note 2: most bioses will choke on such a beast for quite a while anyway. So unless you have a hardware IDE raid with recent firmware it does not worth using in selfassembled stuff at least for now.
Re:Bigger drives, slower software (Score:2)
Re:There is a Moore's law for harddrives (Score:2)
Of course if it's true that either storage or CPU power is growing exponentially, and the groth is also growing exponentially, what happens when the groth is a straight vertical line? Infinate storage and CPU power? Do we hit a glass ceiling defined by such laws as the speed of light? Hummm...
Re:two issues (Score:2)
But then again, I'm not expecting quality in an MP3, so I don't mind hearing them through my cheap $15 speakers.
Plus, I don't listen to CD's on the computer, because I have a stereo and Mission 701s sitting in the same room: why eat bread when you can have steak?
I think a lot of the problems stems from over-expectations of a generation that grew up listening only to tapes and CDs. You wouldn't have believed the bitching on alt.fan.bjork when her "Post" album came out: one of the tracks had added vinyl surface noise and "skipped" at the end, and people were angry that their CD wasn't 100% noise-free and perfect! Some people...
Pope
two issues (Score:2)
b) you comment on sound cards introducing too much noise into a system; score +1 for a Mac: built in 4 channel 44.1KHz/16 bit audio since the 68040 days. Nowadays, you can mix even more channels, it is only dependant on how much memory is free for the System.
I've often heard PC folk complain that one reason against getting a Mac is that "you can't upgrade the soundcard." "Upgrade" to what?
As for MP3, come join the bitrate discussions/flame wars in alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.d on Mondays. You wouldn't believe the crap that gets posted in the name of "Quality," the most amusing I can recall was Nine Inch Nails albums encoded in 320kbs in Joint Stereo! Jeez, talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
If you're after quality, don't use MP3. But if you do it *correctly* 128 VBR/HQ or 160 VBR/HQ will do for 99% of the music out there. Anything higher is a waste of drive/NNTP server space.
Pope
Re:There are more immediate problems than warping. (Score:2)
Have you seen this done/done it yourself, or merely read about it? I've read about this phenomenon (National Geographic had an article on glass a while back), and I understood that it would actually shatter. Based on that, I don't think that holding it in your hand would be a good idea...
And that, my son, is why you would never want to live in a world without glass.
Glass is SiO2. Life without SiO2 means a shortage of either Si or O2. Shortage of O2 => death. Shortage of Si => no computers. That horible decision is why I would never want to live in a world without glass.
Re:Glass Platters - How do they make them strong e (Score:2)
-B
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:2)
Re:The Nature of Glass (Score:2)
My guess would be that it is sufficiently reinforced, probably a plexiglass of some sort, but I honestly couldn't say for sure. But over the period of time in which such structural failure would happen it is likely that you could back up the 75 GB on a disk the size of a pin head.
Next step is SerialATA (Score:2)
The spec includes a four-wire interface, meaning we can finally say goodbye to filling our cases with cables, lower voltages (= less power drain since ATA requires 5V while SerialATA doesn't.) Plus, of course, plenty of transfer oomph. The first version is 1.5Gbps, scaling up to 6Gbps. Of course, it still doesn't try to replace SCSI. It never will.
(This has been discussed [slashdot.org] on slashdot before.)
1500 Gigs of MP3s? Isn't this getting old? (Score:2)
Can we not just admire the wonderful size of the drive without resorting to the same ol', same ol' cheese factor of X hours of MP3s. You know what? I don't honestly think I could find 1500 hours of MP3s that I all like. Hell, I'm surprised when the 15k RPM drives came out there wasn't a post about how fast you could copy your MP3s. Let's get a more useful benchmark.
Re:Glass Platters - How do they make them strong e (Score:2)
Even a single molecule of water sitting in a microfracture can sit in the leading edge of the crack and help "catalyze" the development of a macroscopic crack. Work is going on to develop self-healing coatings that will flow into nicks and scrapes and displace water, which will eventually allow the use of glass in applications requiring high structural strength.
Since the inside of the hard disk is probably pretty dry, the glass platters probably highly polished (few places for cracks to start) and coated, I suppose that glass is plenty strong enough.
Re:Moore's law for harddrives? (Score:2)
We would need some type of distributed computing client to do the defrag. It would take the time of the universes existence to defrag that thing with a 7th generation x86 CISC CPU.
Re:What about error rates? (Score:2)
Re:two issues (Score:2)
Gotta say that sound cards have come a long way from my Pro-Audio Spectrum and Gravis Ultrasound... and the PC Speaker on my XT running Civilization 8^)
Re:benchmarks? (Score:2)
7,200 rpm, six capacities: 75/60/45/30/20/15 GB, 1 to 5 glass diskplatters, 11.2 billion bits areal density, 8.5 ms average seek time, 444 Mb/s maximum media data rate, up to 100 MB/s host data rate, 2 MB buffer, 3.0 to 3.6 Bels, giant magnetoresistive (GMR) recording heads, load/unload technology.
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:2)
Re:More disk we can't afford to back up. (Score:2)
Re:Why even bother with MP3? (Score:2)
And speaking from an audiophile perspective, the quality of computer soundcards / speakers (even the *nice* ones) causes far more loss than the mp3 compression (the best codecs, anyway). If you want halfway decent sound from your computer, you need an outboard DAC - computer sound cards are all very noisy, even the SB Live Value/X-Gamer/Platinum/Dilithium (which so many seem to love). You have to get the data stream out of the box with the noisy power supply and the millions upon millions of switching transistors (and especially hard drives - you can hear most drives seeking in most sound cards without even trying too hard).
Of course, with all of the crap background noise in Quake, etc you hardly notice it, but somehow a quality recording just doesn't come across as well...
Re:More disk we can't afford to back up. (Score:2)
Re:two issues (Score:2)
My C-64 had/s three channel sound - I thought that was pretty killer compared to the Apple ][s of the day...
The real problem (as I see it) is having the sound card running on the same power supply as the rest of the system - not always the sound card introducing noise itself. The Macs fall into the same camp here, there's still a lot of switchin noise...
I suppose the 1337 d00dz have to have the newest, best, most artifical multi-channel setup available for games (I do like 4-channel for some games, myself), but I've still got my Ensoniq Soundscape (from 1995) in my box, and it still has as good/better MIDI than the SB Live Value I have... not a lot of improvement in this area by most cards (see similar rant on 2D graphic speeds on hte Matrox G400 story).
I agree, people go a little crazy on the MP3s (high bitrate + joint stereo = why?), and I think that most people don't/can't hear (don't care about) the differences in a lot of the higher bitrate stuff. Compare 44.1/16 to 96/24, and most people can't tell much of a difference (especially on cheap equipment) for home audio stuff, and the higher encoding rates on MP3s get lost on the crappy equipment. If you are running an outboard Mark Levinson (or NAD, Rotel, Parasound, Adcom, etc) DAC hooked to a nice amp (maybe not quite a Krell or McIntosh) running to a decent set of speakers (Vandersteen, Theil, B&W, etc.), then you might hear a difference, but Joe Blow with a soundcard output driver runing into the speaker that "came with my computer" or an Aiwa bookshelf unit is going to lose all of the better information anyway, so yes, it is pointless...
NIN does have a lot of high frequency stuff (random noisy clanks and such) that don't sound quite the same in lower bitrates, but I won't argure your point on that 8^)
Re:Not an urban myth (Score:2)
On v/s Off surface parking (Score:2)
IBM's new drive doesn't let the heads ever touch the surface (if it's working properly). This should help it's shock resistance since nothing should ever be bumping into the platters. This is new, and should be posted under the 'why didn't they think of that earlier' topic. :)
Re:New challenge for Microsoft. (Score:2)
Re:New challenge for Microsoft. (Score:2)
Wow... (Score:2)
Back in the mid 80's I had a 40mb SCSI hard drive (it still works too, believe it or not)
A couple of years later I had an 50mb drive, then a 120mb drive, then a 340mb drive. That was on my old atari =).
At some point I bought a PC with a 4.3gb drive, added a 6.4gb drive, and now I've got a 27gb drive.
It's kind of funny looking at the curve there...it seems.....exponential.
(Right now, I'm using about 32gb of the 37gb available...)
Re:Disk Slashbox (Score:2)
Back to your idea: What about a 'dicksize war' Slashbox containing not only the tops in hard drives, but processors, ram technology, and video cards? It would make for an interesting perspective on the escalation of aggression going on in commodity hardware these days..
Re:There are more immediate problems than warping. (Score:2)
I read about the shattering-teardrop effect. But "they" said that holding it in your hand is harmless, because it doesn't break into shards, it turns into very fine sand. It doesn't really explode... just "poof" it's sand! Obviously it's better to try it in somebody else's hand, and not your own.
There are more immediate problems than warping... (Score:2)
I wonder how long it would take for the glass to flow towards the outside of the disc.
Probably a few hundred thousand years. Old windows are "warped" due to the manufacturing method... let me see if I can remember this correctly, but back in those days, the molten glass sheet was wrapped around a wooden cylinder, then cut on one side and rolled out flat. The sheet was usually thicker in the middle (I think) and then cut down the middle again, so that you'd have panes with one end of greater thickness. The panes were installed with the thicker, heavier end down for stability reasons.
Glass is an amorphous solid with a strange viscosity/temperature curve. In fact, the shape of the curve depends on the rate of cooling.
At room temperature (or hard drive temperature), glass still technically will flow since it's not crystalline, but it flows on a geological time scale. Before the platters on a hard drive warp, you'd probably have to worry about protecting your data center against pesky occasional ice ages.
As a slight off-topic aside, glass is some really Amazing Stuff. You can drop a teardrop-shaped blob of glass into some water to cool. If it hardens without cracking, you'll have this solid blob of glass with a very long, thin tail. It has enormous amounts of internal stress due to the fast cooling.
You can hit the big blob end hard with a hammer and it won't break. But if you take your fingers and snap the very tip of the tail off, the entire structure will instantly POP and disentigrate into a pile of sand! And that, my son, is why you would never want to live in a world without glass.
Re:I need five (Score:2)
Why would anyone put glass in something that is supposed to be resistant to damage? Will this ever change? I will never buy something like this with the potential to store massive ammounts of my previous data when the next passing small earthquake, large truck, or thunder storm could destory it.
Note 2: most bioses will choke on such a beast for quite a while anyway. So unless you have a hardware IDE raid with recent firmware it does not worth using in selfassembled stuff at least for now.
They are still doing that little dance again? I thought I had it bad with my 486 that won't accept any of the new hd's. What logical reason do bios chips have for limiting drive size? Why not define say a max size of 999TB or something. Maybe I am an idiot but why the arbitrary limitations?
Plan 9's backup system is unequalled (Score:2)
Plan 9 from Bell Labs had an interesting backup system that I've never seen elsewhere. They backed up to a CDRW-farm every night that had storage capacity for 3 years of nightly backups. It didn't use as much space as one would think since they employed a custom backup filesystem that reused storage when a file hadn't changed from one night to the next. The beauty of this system was its ease of perusual and restoration of files. The nightly backup was an exact image that one could cd into, just like for a normal disk based filesystem. Everything, of course, was read-only, even if the write-permission bit was set.
Re:Moore's law for harddrives? (Score:2)
The Nature of Glass (Score:2)
Also, isn't glass fairly unstable on a geological time scale? I realize that it would make very little difference in a device that isn't designed to last forever, but doesn't glass deform (albeit very very slowly)?
I wish they had said what kind of glass they were using.
Corresponding Press Release from MS... (Score:2)
Yes, but you all missed the press release this morning from MS...
Redmond, WA MicroSoft announced today the formation of the Windows 2003 team. Bill Gates said "Windows 2003 will be the best release of Windows ever." He also claimed that "Windows 2003 will use 40 gigabytes of Hard Disk space in order to give the users more of what they want, which as we all know, are pictures of all those Babe-Watch chicks!" As a concession to the Linux community, Mr Gates also stated "We will also be including a selection of Natalie Portman Pictures as well, ".
CSG_SurferDude
Re: 2800 g acceleration? Yep! :-) (Score:2)
I'm getting 580 g -- if I'm remembering the dimensional stuff correctly -- gotta convert w to radians and r to meters, right?:
I had the disc diameter as 10cm, so radius r = 0.05m, not 0.01m as you have in your calculation. So I get 580 * 5 = 2900 g (I just let g = 10 m/s^2 for simplicity, hence the rounding error). Of course, I don't know the actual diameter of the disc - I just took an order of magnitude guess :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:Just one huge problem (Score:2)
Re:That's 150,000 hours. (Score:2)
I too used to smoke bad crack before posting to slashdot. Never a pretty sight tho.
What about error rates? (Score:2)
I seem to remember reading an article in a magazine saying that data error rates depend more upon physical disk size than anything else, and that as information density increases, the mean time between errors decreases drastically. Thus, bigger hard drives = more hard drive crashes.
Does anyone else have information on this, or remember where the article was?
Re:New challenge for Microsoft. (Score:2)
kwsNI
Whoo, DVD is getting sillier and sillier (Score:2)
Normal HD's had a maximum capacity of a few hunderd megs and cd's could store such huge amounts of data.
Those 6 gigs of dvd space is getting really old really quick now. Wonder how long it will take for someone to release a new media with capacity that really makes a difference (like HDTV)?
If this continues it will start making sense storing movies on hd's. When that day comes we can kiss DVD goodbye
Re:Tape is DEAD (Score:2)
What about the 75G UltraStar? (Score:3)
The IBM Ultrastar 72ZX and Ultrastar 36LZX drives offer high capacity and superior performance for demanding server environments. As the fourth generation of the IBM Ultrastar 10,000 RPM disk drive family, these drives offer storage capacities up to 73.4 GB, average seek times of 4.9 ms, giant magnetorisistive (GMR) advanced head technology, and the latest technological advances, such as more powerful actuator motors, active damping, and leading-edge interfaces. The new Ultra160+ SCSI interface with packetization and quick arbitration select (QAS), as well as 2 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel speeds (data transfer rate), provides the fastest interface technology.
Re:I need five (Score:3)
Glass is very strong. Worry about the heads smashing pits in the surface media.
I work in the manufacturing industry where we use encoders of a high density glass disk to accurately measure the speed of large DC and AC motors up to 400 vibrating and earthshaking horsepower. These encoders are directly bolted to the motor's iron frame. The encoder's metal body often suffers from physical damage from hammers and other mechanic's tools. Yet the glass disk will not shatter unless the shaft is hammered to slide through the bearings.
A Mutual Online Storage Network (Score:3)
There are, of course, a number of issues that would need to be worked out. A lot of people might try and cheat the system, for instance, so we'd have to figure out a way to implement some sort of trust/verification network. But all-in-all I think that this would make for a fabulously useful product for all of mankind. Most people end up losing their data because frankly off-site backups are quite difficult and/or expensive. We should make the process easy for folks.
There might exist the possibility of combining this technology with a project like Freenet...distributed storage and distributed serving of information aren't that far off from each other in the grand scheme of things...
David E. Weekly [weekly.org]
Moore's law for harddrives? (Score:3)
Re:Tape is DEAD (Score:3)
huh? (Score:3)
Re:What about error rates? (Score:3)
Re:huh? (Score:3)
Re:Glass Platters - How do they make them strong e (Score:3)
One issue is that for the larger servers (read: psycho RAID setups), the advantages are gained by having the most arms (physical drives), so all of the seek times are lowered, and transfer rates can be maxed out. Many people reluctantly started moving to 9GB and 18GB arms for their RAID systems - more capacity, but for heavy database usage, you want more arm for the same capacity point - the gain in performance is more important than the rise in price in many cases. You could trow together a pretty massive tower with 40s or 75s, and the transfer rates are really good, but again, the performance of the system as a whole is important. If you are building a 2TB db, would you rather have your data spread across ~60 drives (40GB) or ~265 (9GB). Data safety and performace both call for smaller individual arms here.
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:3)
Anyone know about glass flow that can confirm/deny this?
It's not a COMPLETE myth, but Glass won't flow at room temperature. My father used to do construction and demolition and renovations and such. I was helping him out at the site of a fire in an older house, and the windows were visibly melted, they LOOKED as if they were flowing liquid. So I imagine that's where some of the myths about glass being a liquid comes from. People see older burned out houses with melted glass and don't think about the fire having melted it.
Kintanon
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:3)
Anyone know about glass flow that can confirm/deny this?
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
Re:New challenge for Microsoft. (Score:3)
Weezer video.
Watch; Billy boy will call down to R+D and ask them for a statically compiled version of Windows2000 / IIS5 / Office 2000. That ought to kill 60G. What will they do with the rest of the space??
Weezer video.
'Buddy Holly' at 1600x1200x32 30fps sounds about right.
Should we really be glad? (Score:3)
Take a look at Windows; back in the old days it was big (I crammed 1.0 onto 2 5.25" disks which made it a 'smaller' (not needed) menu) but when storage capacity increased so did the Windows environment as did other software.
20Mb should be more then enough. Heck; if you want to use a NT workstation with some developing environments & graphical applications 1Gb can be a very small space.
But did all this extra capacity really made the software better then it was before? I doubt it. Therefor I think it will be really interesting to see when the datacapacity-expansion is coming to an end.
getting mighty close to the IDE limit (Score:3)
Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:3)
How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar?
It doesn't need strengthening - glass has a greater tensile strength than aluminium. What glas s does suffer though is brittle fracture, so I suspect that there is some interesting method for checking the surface for minor cracks which might later propagate through the platter.
What I wonder about is what happens to the platters after a long period of use. Glass is a viscous liquid after all - 400 year old glass windows are measurably thicker at the bottom than at the top because of this flow. If you consider that the centripetal force required to keep the disc together is much higher than gravity, I wonder how long it would take for the glass to flow towards the outside of the disc.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:The Nature of Glass (Score:3)
Glass does not "flow".
Really, you could look it up if you wanted, but the usual citation against the slow flow of glass is old ground and polished lenses. Accuracy of these lenses is measured in fractions of a light wave front, so if a 500 year old window shows visually perceptable flow, certainly it would show up in a 100-200 year old lens?
It hasn't happened yet.
See the FAQ [urbanlegends.com] for more details.
Lumps (Score:3)
As a small side issue, compare the image of IBM against Microsoft in say 1992.
Compare the images of the two today. Both large corporations, one has developed with the times, the other is Microsoft.
Bill Goats blows gates or something like that.
Sooooo much space . . . . (Score:4)
Take, for example, the other day. Drives 4, 7 and 18 were corrupted (I always thought tang was good for computers. Sigh. If that's what it does to a hard drive, I wonder what it's doing to ME?!?!), so I needed to hop a bus down to the local CompUSA (the finest in computer supplies) and replace them. Fortunately, no data was lost, god bless redundancy. It took me three months to find all of those Menudo
However, as that I was distracted, I missed my intended stop. Rather than wait for another bus, I decided to walk (it was really only about six blocks away). It was a nice enough day, but I wasn't too excited about the walk; I knew I'd have to cross the bridge. The last time I tried to cross the bridge, I was molested by seven punk trolls. Let me tell you, THAT was an experience I'd prefer to just forget. But I was wasting time that I could be downloading with, so I couldn't wait for the next bus. I swallowed my pride and started walking.
The bridge shone in the afternoon sun, the water below twinkling in a very pleasing manner. Broad daylight, of course! Trolls can't come out in the day, for they'd be turned to stone!!! I proceeded with confidence to walk across the bridge, when I was approached by a man in a trenchcoat whistling ("Earth Died Screaming" by Tom Waits, but don't quote me on that. The batteries on my Rio had died, so I couldn't check). I tried to keep walking, but he kept blocking my path (with tires, and toaster ovens, and I can't remember what else).
"excuse me" I said, trying to be polite, but holding back my rage. I was missing a file trade appointment. "oh," he said, "were you trying to get by?" and suddenly he whips out this wheel of cheese and starts beating me over the head with it! Goddamn trolls!!! "shouldn't you be stone" I cried inbetween strikes (it was a particularly mild cheddar, and didn't hurt much, other than my pride).
"no" he grinned "since our true saviour Natalie Portman has been petrified, the Nostrils have been appeased, and no troll needs to be turned to stone ever again" He couldn't mask his unadultered glee. everything a troll could ever want was his. He laughed and ran away, ending his assault just as randomly as it had begun.
All of this because I didn't have enough storage space. Thank you IBM that I may never have to endure this again. thankyoutheend
Re:Tape is DEAD (Score:4)
The disk method is fine for home users with 10GB of mp3z and such, but if you have tons of important data you will still need tape or something like it.
Disk Slashbox (Score:4)
Glass Platters - How do they make them strong enuf (Score:4)
Since these are soon-to-be available (right now, limited quant. / OEM only) in sizes of a more normal variety* the next hard drive you buy may have glass instead of aluminum holding the data.
That raises a question I hope someone knows the answer to: How do they make the glass strong enough? Is it somehow reinforced with strengthening fibers or similar? That seems logical, but at the thinness of hard drive platters, wouldn't that make them impractically thick? I'd just hate to drop the box with a new IBM drive in it and hear "CRASH! tinkle, tinkle"
timothy
*Though still
Re:The Nature of Glass (Score:4)
When the drive is off, the R/W heads are parked away from the platters, and the spindle is shock-absorbed, as to offset the glass breakage factor. Normally the R/W heads are parked somewhere on the platter, and vibration/impact can cause contact between the heads and the platters. This is supposed to reduce those problems rather drastically. I've been told that the glass platters can be used in laptops, but I don't kow what kind of glass it is...
Glass is not a liquid (Score:4)
The Physics of ... Glass [discover.com]
Re:Glass Platters are strong but they are liquid! (Score:4)
There's quite a lot of information at http://www.urbanlegends.com/science /glass .flow/ that suggests glass flow is indeed a myth.
Interesting. Having actually stood looking at one of the examples of 'glass flow' in a Cathedral (which one escapes me) where there was a thin piece of glass surrounding a hole and much thicker glass at the bottom, the above information makes interesting reading. To summarize the findings of the urbanlegends site, pure glass has next to no chance of flowing at room temperature. Glass carefully laced with particular additives, such as lead crystal or borosilicate glasses, can have further altered properties. Several interesting things do spring to notice though. Firstly, the presence of imperfections in the glass can have a macro effect on the properties of the glass, changing it's maximum tensile strength and possibly the conditions for plastic deformation (which is after all what we are talking about) so with ancient glass the distinctly impure nature of the glass may have an impact. The other point which caught my interest was the part about temperature-dependant plastic flow - the quoted critical figure (for infinite time) here is 270'C. Now I would be worried about my hard drive if it got to that temperature ... :-) Still, a platter spinning at 7200rpm with a diameter of 10cm would experience an acceleration of 2800 g at the edge if I've done my sums correctly (w^2 r for those who are interested, where w is the angular velocity and r is the radius). Of course, its a while since I did my physics degree so I may have got the equation wrong... :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
New challenge for Microsoft. (Score:4)
From: kwsNI
Dear Bill,
I wanted to officially challenge you to make and operating system large enough to fill this HDD up. Here are my official rules:
So, if you're up to the challenge, let's fill this bad boy up.
Sincerely,
kwsNI
More disk we can't afford to back up. (Score:5)
Contemporary Cybernetics is actually proud that it costs $1.63 USD
Backup costs have barely come down in price in the last 7-10 years (only about 40%). While disk space has become about a thousand times more affordable.
Can someone please come up with a more affordable solution?
Re:Glass Platters - How do they make them strong e (Score:5)
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