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IBM

IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved 322

Posted by CowboyNeal from the tiny-storage dept.
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.
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IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved More

IBM's "Pixie Dust" Drives Improved

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  • Yeah, but what's the reliability? 330 hours uptime? :-P

  • How Much? (Score:3, Funny)

    by pbinmt ( 604040 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:46PM (#4614165)
    So, how much porn do you need to cary on a business trip anyway?

  • Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)

    by geek ( 5680 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:46PM (#4614166)
    The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years. I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs, and they are few and far between.

    What we need is faster drives. I'm personally sick of how slow ATA drives are. Every other aspect of computers has made leaps and bounds in speed, with this one exception. Why? A fast hard drive makes all the difference in system speed.

    • Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)

      by JohnZed ( 20191 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:53PM (#4614207)
      If you read the article, you would care, because you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops. Finally!

      • I did (Score:2)

        by geek ( 5680 )
        but 7,200 RPM's just doesn't do it for me, not since I had a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive 5 YEARS AGO!

        • Speed (Score:4, Insightful)

          by hackwrench ( 573697 ) <hackwrench@hotmail.com> on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:05PM (#4614283) Homepage Journal
          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:Speed (Score:5, Interesting)

            by AJWM ( 19027 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:22PM (#4614374) Homepage
            But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities

            Faster at transfer rate, yes.

            Faster at track-to-track seek time, very likely (tracks being closer together).

            But faster in rotational latency, which is the major bottleneck, no fscking way.

        • Re:I did (Score:2, Interesting)

          by FuegoFuerte ( 247200 )
          Think for a second... 10,000 RPM SCSI drive 5 years ago... how big was it? What was the areal density? I'm not going to bother to do the math right now, but a 40 GB, 4200 rpm laptop drive may very well have the same I/O speeds (or a lot better) as a 2.1GB, 10,000 rpm scsi drive from 5 years ago would've had. As areal density increases, I/O speed increases when linear velocity remains constant. Think about it, and don't hurt yourself. :).

      • Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)

        by Hadlock ( 143607 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:37PM (#4614433) Homepage Journal
        yeah, but a 7200 rpm drive eats roughly double the power (and produces more heat, too) than a 4800 rpm laptop drive. there's a reason drive makers prefer 4800 rpm drives for battery life...

        • Re:Who cares (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Tower ( 37395 )
          Ah, but the IBM drives can speed throttle, so you can run at full speed while on AC power, and run at reduced speed on battery... The best of both worlds (aside from the heat issues).

      • Re:Who cares (Score:4, Funny)

        by Metrol ( 147060 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:56PM (#4614497) Homepage
        ...you'd see that IBM is also introducing the first 7200 RPM drives for laptops.

        Which has the additional benefit of acting as an in-flight gyroscope. Never have an unlevel lap again!
    • I don't know anyone that uses more than 60 gigs,

      My porn collection is more than that...I need all the storage i can get (Can't leave CDs of it laying around since they tend to get noticed by significant others)

    • Get a raid card or raid-supporting mobo. Run striped. I have a two way striped raid at work that is very, very fast, constructed from IDE drives. It benches favorably against single high-speed SCSI drives for a small fraction of the price. I am unsure of 4-way striping is available on IDE drives, but would improve things even more.

      Stuck on the notebooks though. Solution there is to put as much ram as possible in them so you don't have to hit the disk much.

      • I hope you keep good backups, because that two ATA drive plex is more than twice as likely to fail as the a single high-speed SCSI drive. Your MTBF is much shorter now since loosing either drive will be fatal.
        • I get rid of drives after a year, or put them doing something not that important. My drives are properly cooled. I have never had a hard drive fail in 10 years of computing with them, although the 4 years before I got a HD kinda sucked.

          What's the big deal with backup? I have all my data online in two places. Work files get dumped to CVS, which is backed up, and as I decomission drives, I use them for redundant copies of media.

          No worries about backup or MTBF here. If it bothers you, get 4 drives and run a stripe/mirror configuration on them, and use a regimen as above. Really, there isn't a problem that I can see.

          This whole MTBF thing is blown way out of proportion IMHO.

        • Re:Old solution. It's called raid (Score:5, Informative)

          by Uller-RM ( 65231 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:25PM (#4614395) Homepage
          Four-channel ATA-100 RAID-5 cards can be had for under $200 today. Even if you only used one drive per channel and four 70GB drives that's still 210GB of space that can recover from a single drive failure, with solid read speeds and acceptable write speeds. (To recover from two or more drives failing at once means moving to P+Q redundancy, aka RAID-6, and you start moving into price ranges beyond the reach of the average hobbyist.)

    • Re:Who cares (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rtaylor ( 70602 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:18PM (#4614358) Homepage
      The only way to speed up harddrives is to pass more bits infront of the drive head in a set amount of time.

      Add more platters and/or readheads, spin them faster, or compress the bits so that more pass per revolution as more fit in the same space.

      Since anything faster than 10k seems to heat up in a hurry you won't find them in a home system soon. Nor will you find 'large sized' drives soon. Good chance platters could become thinner, and put more into the housing but thats an expensive proposition. Data compression (physical, not mathematical) like IBM is doing is a very effective method of complying with your request.

    • I've posted [slashdot.org] about it before.

      I simply noticed how many CDs I had sitting around, and got sick of it -- so I plunked down around $1500 for 9 Western Digital 120GB hard drives a few months ago.

      I have 140GB of OGGs and MP3s, 500GB of DivXs and VCDs (including porn), 100GB of installed games, 6 different OSes, and all kinds of other crap. I also have about 150GB free, still, that gets used for various tasks.

      But if you don't need the memory, run Linux off of flash memory or one of those pocket USB drives, or some other form of solid state memory. However, the prices for it are still exorbitant.

    • Re:Who cares (Score:3, Informative)

      by Graspee_Leemoor ( 302316 )
      *You* may need more speed from your drives and not see a need for more storage space but a lot of other people, myself included, are crying out for my hard drive space.

      Here are some of the reasons: (NB some already mentioned)

      * movies, other AVIs like anime (one series of anime is typically about 4-5 Gig).
      * CDs (especially take up more space in .flac format)
      * video editing - you can have loads of 10G + files all over the place.
      * scanned photo collections (hires takes a lot of space)
      * games - a > 2Gig install is normal these days.
      * ISOs for playstation emulator (These really add up)
      * P2P download: if you have a decent amount of things downloading you need AT LEAST 40G just for your temp directory, and another 20G for the incoming folder.

      So, I hope you were in fact trolling because your comment really looks like the modern version of "640K should be more than enough for anybody" (whether the Billster said that or not).

      graspee

      • P2P download: if you have a decent amount of things downloading you need AT LEAST 40G just for your temp directory, and another 20G for the incoming folder.

        You, my friend, have too much money.

    • Re:Who cares (Score:2, Informative)

      by 19Buck ( 517176 )
      "What we need is faster drives."

      This is already being addressed, and it's coming soon.

      http://www.serialata.org/

      As it is, current ATA specs rival that of SCSI( though in real world performance, SCSI is stil of course faster, primarily due to queueing.), but ATA is quite a bit more economical for the home user. There is simply no reason for Joe Shmoe sitting at home playing Sims/Unreal/Quake/etc to blow so much money on SCSI since the full potential of it will never be realized.

      First generation performance estimates of Serial ATA really aren't all that impressive, but looking forward, serial ATA is going to scale very nicely, providing plenty of performance, without burning a huge hole in your pocket either.

      BTW, rotational speed is really indicative of nothing. Average seek speed is a much more important performance indicator.

      Granted, typically faster rotation ~SHOULD~ translate into lower seek times, but that's not always true.

      Aside from the above URL, I ~could~ cite about a billion different "previews" and discussion articles from various HW news/review sites, but that's pointless. you know how to use www.google.com, have at it if you want more information.

    • Um, I don't really know what kind of people you know, but I know lot's of people who push near 100 GB. My 30 GB laptop drive was barely enough for Windows XP and a few games, and I'm not even much of a gamer. In Linux, my base system (bare-bones GNOME install, full KDE install, including KOffice) takes up 4 GB. Add in a relatively small number of MP3s (6GB) and some videos, etc, and my 30 GB drive is getting cramped, and I barely do anything! I've got one friend who's nearly filled his 100 GB HD with free bluegrass music! Imagine how much HD space a heavy gamer/MP3er uses!

    • Re:Who cares (Score:5, Informative)

      by JebusIsLord ( 566856 ) on Thursday November 07, 2002 @12:53AM (#4614793)
      Actually as areal density increases so does read (but not seek) speed. This is because by packing more bits into one concentric ring, one spin of the drive reads more data even at the same speed (7200rpm usually for a good IDE drive). If you look at the performance of IDE drives they have been increasing steadily for years despite staying at 7200. This is why they keep having to bump the DMA mode, UDMA/33 was fast enough a few years ago on a 7200rpm'er, but slows down modern drives.
    • rant mode: on.

      The storage capacity we have now is adaquate for at least another few years.

      God I hate people with attitudes like yours. Doing an ok job is not enough. We went to the moon because it was there, and we make our hard drives bigger because we can Being *able* to increase the storage capacity of a HD is all the reason enough to do it. This is how *progress* is made.

      The 30 meg hard drive I had in the late 80's was *huge*. It was big enuf for dos, word perfect, and a videogame. Then a couple years later Wing Commander II came out and I couldn't play it. Why? it required ~30 megs of free HD space. Why was that possible? Because even though 30 megs *seemed* like alot of space whoever made the HD's back then knew we'd want more. What I'm trying to get at is as storage reachs ceartin milestones, different applications become possible. MP3 was invented in 1991 but HD's didnt become a practical storage medium till the mid 90's because HD space was far more valuable than music. HD's have become large enough that you can now comfortably edit audio, and soon they'll be large enough to comfortabaly edit video ... And that my friend is the point of making them larger now.

  • If these laptops are at college... (Score:3, Funny)

    by grungebox ( 578982 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:46PM (#4614168) Homepage
    ...then the extra space is being used for three things (all during class):
    1)pr0n
    2)AIM
    3)Anime

    The score is now IBM: 1, Education: 0 (unless you're in a class about sending anime porn to your friends via IM)

    • AIM? I happen to be in a highschool were students have laptops, and are connected to the internet via 802.11b. I'm also an "assistant admin" (whatever you want to call it) and from the amount of bandwidth that is being sucked up, and from what i see in class, most people are downloading mp3s. Anime or video of any sort isn't so much of a problem because someone can't download that in one sitting.

  • Aereal Density measured in bits not bytes (Score:5, Informative)

    by SirDaShadow ( 603846 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:46PM (#4614169)
    FYI when they say an area of 70gb they mean 70gigabits per square inch not bytes...

    • Teach a man to fish (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sporty ( 27564 )
      Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.
      • Thus the lowercase letter b. if it were gigabyte, it'd be GB, like gameboy.

        So laptops can now fit 80 gameboys on your hard drive?

        I think the guy you're replying to was simply correcting the person that posted the story, who clearly doesn't know the difference. To wit:

        "The areal density has improved to 70gb per square inch! Apparently that means 80gb drives for laptops."

        Yee haw! Laptops will finally get 10GB drives!!

        Oh.

  • Aren't they getting out? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Faizdog ( 243703 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:47PM (#4614174)
    Isn't IBM leaving the Harddrive market? [slashdot.org] I'm glad they're working on this though. IBM has recently been on the cutting edge of personal computing devices with being the driving force beyond harddrive research and technoligies such as MRAM.

  • Mind in the Gutter (Score:5, Funny)

    by Angstrom91 ( 607084 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:48PM (#4614178)
    When i read the post, i misread "Areal" as "Areola". Imagine the wonders of having nipples that carry 70gb/sq. in! Think of the porn applications! Now if i could only talk my girlfriend into getting a firewire hookup installed.....

  • What about heat/reliability/power usage? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bronster ( 13157 ) <slashdot@brong.net> on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:49PM (#4614185) Homepage
    While it's cool to see such big numbers making it into notebook computers, the flip side is probably going to be more power consumption and more waste heat.

    I have an IBM 75Gb 7200RPM drive, and I wouldn't dream of running it without a fan any more (after the first one died from overheating). Sure it's nice, but you don't really need 80Gb of pr0n and MP3s (sorry OGGs for those politically correct types) with you all the time. That's what the SAN you keep under the desk at home is for.
    • I'd have thought most of the heat and power caused/used by the drive goes on physically moving it about. I don't see why having a higher density coating on the platters would make the situation worse. I'd have thought you'd have the choice of either getting more capacity running at current heat/power levels or maintain current capacity and have physically smaller drives with subsequent heat/power savings.

  • Warranty anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by T-Kir ( 597145 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:49PM (#4614189) Homepage

    Storage space just keeps increasing

    Yeah, and the Warranty durations are a shrinking (1 year now for most new drives?)... how long before the end is nigh for magnetic storage? Any progress on more solid state media (so I don't have to worry about accidents involving magnets!).

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by Nept ( 21497 )
    I thought IBM sold their hard drive division?
    Or is this just the R&D department?

  • more pr0n (Score:2, Funny)

    by Patik ( 584959 )
    (Insert obligatory "more space for pr0n" joke here)

    (Insert obligatory "Who needs that kind of space?" remark here)

    Well, that about sums up this discussion.

  • BIG NEWS! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:52PM (#4614201) Journal
    It was just announced today that computer manufacturer IBM has made yet another incremental improvement in computer technology, continuing a trend in force for 40 years.

    "I wasn't sure if we could do it", says research director Ima Workaholic. "Making incremental change is difficult, and, um, I had to work to achieve it!".

    When asked, technology consultant Will Swindle, of technology firm "Swindle, Crouch, and Run", said, "I'm sure this is going to change our lives forever, but I'm not quite sure how. I'd suggest buying it immediately just to find out!".

    In other news, SUVs have gotten bigger, burn more gas, and roll more readily than ever before.

  • Backup (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:52PM (#4614204)
    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.

    • Re:Backup (Score:5, Insightful)

      by coryboehne ( 244614 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:12PM (#4614329)
      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.......
      • "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"

        I have approx 630GB of disk storage and less than 100GB free. Backups are not an option, however thanks to File Scavenger [quetek.com], I'm at least able to run JBOD arrays without worrying about losing data. I just went through a clean install as my system partition became completely corrupted. Bought this product to try it out, and voila, everything recovered nicely. (Sorry kiddies, I'm pretty sure it only works on NTFS) Suddenly, I'm not nearly so worried about backups. (yes, I'll plug software that TRULY impresses me) I was considering tape backups, but I can see something going wrong on tape 15 or something. I could buy more hard drives, but I end up needing the space anyway. Video editing and database work tends to eat up HUGE amounts of space. :/

        If anyone has a reasonable suggestion for backups, be my guest. I've considered DVD-r's, DVD-RW's, CD-R/W's, Tapes, and more hard drives, but nothing seems to really offer a solution.

        P.S. Before the trolls/kids start with their "that's a lot of pr0n d00dz!", I have a small amount of porn, only a few gigs, so chill.

      • Re:Backup (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Akumapwr ( 532413 )
        You can find a DVD burner for less than $199 if you shop around well. Also DVD-R media is less than $1 from ebay or some online sites. So let's do the math..

        $199 for a DVD burner
        50x $1 disks

        250$ for 50 x 4.5gb = 225gb (dvd aren't 4.7gb that's a marketing trick).

        So for $250 bucks you got yourself a dvd that can be used in anyone's dvd drive and is good for 100 years in the storage box.

        Not to mention you have a DVD burner too =)

        • Re:Backup (Score:4, Interesting)

          by addaon ( 41825 ) <addaon+slashdot@gma i l .com> on Thursday November 07, 2002 @12:42AM (#4614747)
          Where's that 100 years number from? I generally assume (based on experience) that CDs are good for 10-15 years in the box; I have no sense of the lifetime of DVDs, but I'd be surprised if it's that much higher. Never mind that $1 DVDs from ebay are almost certainly the cheapest and lowest quality possible; I'd be very reluctant to assume more than 5 years for such a disc. Any source?

      • Re:Backup (Score:3, Interesting)

        by karnal ( 22275 )
        Heck, try using tape sometime. Zip disks are expensive (and a little unreliable, the last time I used them anyways...)

        I've got a DDS3 drive that was donated to me (ahem) and has worked perfectly since the installation. However, I almost balked at the current retail price of tapes. I believe Microcenter wants 10-12$ PER TAPE, of which, if you're storing MP3's, you only get about 11gig out of a tape. (The hardware compression is not good on decently compressed files, and actually ends up eating more space than the raw data would.....)

        So, for 80 gigs (estimation), you need 8 tapes. Minimum 10$/tape, that is 80$. May as well buy another drive; let alone the speed of backup / restore and the tape change duties.

        I've won 2 bids on ebay and now have 30+ tapes, brand new, for around 60$ total investment. Now I've got enough tapes to do 2 full backups of my server, and have some spares for incrementals and "oddball" machines. But sometimes, the time invested makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get a removable rack + a few 120gig drives........ and sell the tape drive....
      • 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)
    • It'd be cheaper to get another hard drive.

      My company is run out of the house next to mine, and we have a cat5 cable running under the driveway to connect the two. This allows me to have a backup server at home that provides automatic offsite backup. I put together a machine that includes a 2ghz Athlon and two 120 gig 7200 RPM drives in a RAID array for backup. The box runs Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org] and uses BackupPC [sourceforge.net] for automatic unattended backups.

      Of course, most people don't have the extra cash for that lying around (I had the business credit card, hehehe) but it is certainly easier and more cost effective than tape.

      BTW, the backup server backs up around 10 machines (mix of Linux and Windows) with around 120 gig of data. It keeps up to two weeks of backups at a time (two full backups and twelve incremental backups). Current HD usage is about 33% due to compression.

  • smaller form factors (Score:4, Insightful)

    by inepom01 ( 525367 ) <inepom01@@@hotmail...com> on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:53PM (#4614213)
    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.
    • What, like the IBM microdrive? You can put that in a PDA. Same for the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive the iPod uses.
    • They've already introduced a smaller form facter, the 1" microdrive [ibm.com]. They currently only go up to 1 gig, but presumably that will increase over time.
    • Size is not the factor in traditional hard drives when putting it in a PDA. Power consumption is.
    • The smaller form factors are PCMCIA and CompactFlash. Toshiba makes a laptop with a 20GB PCMCIA drive (the same one that's in the iPod).

    • Re:smaller form factors (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ottffssent ( 18387 ) on Thursday November 07, 2002 @02:27AM (#4615053)
      Check out Toshiba's 1.8" hard drives. They're found (surprise) in Toshiba's ultra-portables, as well as the Apple iPod, and other devices.

      While the reduction from 2.5" to 1.8" doesn't seem like much (about 25%), it's actually enormous in terms of platter area. A 2.5" diameter platter has almost 10 square inches of surface area, whereas a 1.8" diameter platter has just over half that. The situation becomes even more pronounced when you account for a drive motor in the center. That's why Tosh's drive tops out at 20G whereas IBM's talking about an 80G drive in the 2.5" form factor.

  • What to use this space for. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FuzzyDaddy ( 584528 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @10:58PM (#4614247) Journal
    I like to think of it as a challenge. I just bought a new hard drive, and I can save all my photographs on them. (Not that I don't need to back up to CD-ROM...)

    What to do with 10 times as much storage? I could start keeping home videos on there. Or store all the network traffic that comes on and off my computer indefinitely. Or keep track of the voltage waveform coming in off the power lines, and post processing it after a year to look for frequency shifts.

    But this talk of "no-one but video pirates would need this" is silly. Just give it to me, I'll think of something.

  • Why don't them make the next enhancement to the name?

  • Simple Sandwich (Score:5, Funny)

    by mdechene ( 607874 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:12PM (#4614330)
    It involves sandwiching a three-atom-thick layer of the precious metal ruthenium between two magnetic layers. That seemingly simple step allowed researchers to increase the areal storage density.

    I'm pretty sure that making a 3 atom sandwich doesn't seem simple to me.
  • The only problem is how reliable these things will be. Its one thing to be able to pack shit-loads of data onto a tiny little spot - but its another thing to pack that same data on a spot thats going to hold it reliably without going bad or corrupting it.

    This new hard drive enhancement has a precedence of being faulty after launch.

  • Enough with storage space! I don't care about having a 480GB drive. I want a drive that doesn't have any moving parts. A 100% solid state harddrive for the cost of a regular IDE. I'd even pay twice or three times as much to have 40-60-80GB worth of solid state goodness.

    My computer sits here beside me and the only mechanical part that will destroy it if it fails is the spinning disk inside the drive. Sure there are still fans but my computer will quickly notice that and shutdown. However if the drive fails, you're toast.

    I know we still need storage but can't some of these cycles be put into getting us off the old pre-space age magnetic disc technology and get us into something that doesn't need moving parts!

    Come on IBM, where's my Holographic or Memory Based solid state storage. I don't care if it's twice the size of my current drive either, I just don't want any more moving parts!

    Syn Ack
    • Heck with that! Memory has MBTF's as well....I want an interface to my brain, so I can keep all important data with me at all times....

      And if it ever fails, I won't care, since it'd probably be because I am dead... :)
    • However if the drive fails, you're toast.
      >>>>>>>>
      Heh heh, all my data is stored 650 miles away in a nice safe server. I've been in my dorm room for 2 months now, and I've already got two spare HDDs sitting in my desk drawer. I figure that if my main HD dies, I'll be up and running again, with all my data, within an hour.

  • Library of Congress (Score:4, Funny)

    by CatWrangler ( 622292 ) on Wednesday November 06, 2002 @11:26PM (#4614397) Journal
    How many of these laptops will fit inside of the Library of Congress? Maybe I asked the question backwards.

  • The funny thing is that as these drives become mainstream, users in my company will think they need 80 GB of space on their laptops. They can't fathom how many word documents would fit on it, but they're convinced anything less would be inadequate.

    I'm still amazed when I set up servers that do a lot of logging (firewall, web, ids, etc...) and I give a big /var partition (10+ GB) how little is filled up after several months. I suppose it differs with traffic, but 10 GB alone is tons of space!

  • The SD slot on my Zaurus is about that size, and I've been refusing to pay 200$ for 256mb of memory, when I can see that technology be put to use to give me a 200$ 20GB drive for my Zaurus? What's that? Never? Fuck you.

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